Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  33

  When the sun that shone upon the Shards went behind the airborne Sea of Kharne, the light grew soft and watery and a pleasant coolness filled the desert air. Then Chandni Hansa, who had been suffering in the heat, found a fresh energy and launched a new attack on the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss, swinging her spiked club with such ferocity that she tore off a chunk of the Gekh’s hide shield and drove her backward against the wall of the fighting pit.

  She stepped back, breathing hard, glancing around at the pit’s edges, where an audience of Kraitt males looked on. Some were giving the quick, hissing call that meant something like, “Well fought!” Chandni grinned and waved the club at them. They had only made that noise for their Gekh until now.

  She felt as though she and the Gekh had been fighting for hours. It was a play-fight, designed to prove Chandni’s worth and also to help the Gekh overcome her injuries and get back into shape for real battles. Of course, even a play-fight with a Kraitt matriarch was a serious business for a smallish human, but Chandni wasn’t new to fighting, and she knew she had represented herself well.

  She lifted the club and ran at the Gekh again. This time the Gekh was ready for her; her tail lashed out and caught Chandni in the midriff, hard enough to have ripped her guts out if its tip had not been padded. Chandni was flung backward, landing hard in the dust. She had known that was how the fight would end, and she had let it. She could not afford to do anything silly like winning. She still wasn’t sure why she had not been killed after Threnody and the others escaped — whether she was the Tzeld Gekh’s pet, or her plaything, or whether there was some deeper purpose in keeping her and training her — but she knew she had to watch her step.

  The Tzeld Gekh’s horrible, scarred snout appeared between her and the sky-filling sea, looking down at her. “Well fought, Chandni Hansa,” she said. (Chandni’s headset and translator necklace had survived the blast, Guardians be thanked.) She let the Gekh help her to her feet and dusted herself off while the Gekh said, “You people are not a prey species as we thought. You are hunters like us. This is how Zen Starling was able to outwit us. It was a cunning trap, sending you to distract me while his Neem allies moved in.”

  “I had no idea that he had an arrangement with the Neem,” said Chandni. “He didn’t tell me about it. He’s much smarter than I thought.”

  The Gekh snorted. If a human made that sound it would be a sign of anger and impatience, and Chandni believed it meant the same for Kraitt. “If you had known about his Neem friends, would you still have warned me about him?”

  Chandni hesitated. “I’m not sure. I just wanted me and Threnody to be on the winning side. I was sure that was yours, till the Neem turned up.”

  “Threnody…” said the Gekh. Her reptile voice mangled Threnody’s name even more than it mangled “Chandni Hansa.” It sounded like a small, live mammal being forced slowly through a shredder. “You miss her, your sister?”

  “Yes.” For some reason the Gekh was convinced that she and Threnody were sisters, and Chandni sensed that it would be a bad move to try to correct her.

  The Gekh pulled something from inside her robes and passed it to her. It was a knife, carved from a single claw of a big, dimwitted, bat-winged carnivore that the Kraitt hunted on one of the other shards — a vicious, razor-sharp hook, glossy black and as hard as glass. One end had been shaped into a kind of grip, more suited to Kraitt claws than Chandni’s small hand.

  “This was my sister Shantis’s blade,” said the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss. “It would have gone to the strongest of my daughters, but now that the Neem have killed them, I give it to you. We will revenge ourselves on the Neem and then go after your sister, Threnody. You shall have her back. Then you will use Shantis’s blade to kill Zen Starling.”

  Chandni clutched the knife and looked up at her. “We can’t go after them. I told you where they’re going. Into the Black Light Zone, where your trains won’t follow.”

  The Gekh looked away. Her nostrils widened, sniffing sharply. “I learned much from the Motorik, before he stole her,” she said.

  The sun was emerging from behind the sea. The cheerless landscape blazed with light again, and from the rail yards near the station came a dreadful sound: the immense, appalling screams of a terrified morvah.

  34

  The Ghost Wolf and the Damask Rose stayed on Zzr’zrrt for five of its long days. Neem factories produced fuel cells and ammunition the two locos could use, and new guns for the Ghost Wolf. They hitched a freight car and one of their own windowless carriages on behind the three from Desdemor. Nova worried that all the extra weight might waste fuel, but Zen was just glad he wouldn’t have to share his own carriages with the Neem. And the Rose seemed pleased to have more cars, especially since the Ghost Wolf would help her pull them. She sent her last maintenance spider out with paintsticks to decorate them. First she sprayed her own hull red again. Then she painted images of Hath and Herastec, glowing Night Swimmers and dancing Neem. At the Ghost Wolf’s request she painted a ghostly wolf loping along its black cowling. She thought it was a bit obvious, but the Ghost Wolf seemed pleased with it; it was a simple loco at heart.

  “It needs a name of its own, this train,” the Rose said when she was finished. “Locomotives have names, but sometimes if they are pulling a special train it also has a name of its own, like the Noon train, or the Interstellar Express.”

  So along the carriage sides, in human script that no one else on the Web could read, she sprayed the name BLACK LIGHT EXPRESS.

  *

  Nova and the interface watched the artwork taking shape. “I have never seen a train make pictures before,” the interface said. “Music, yes. Even poetry. But not images.”

  “That’s Flex,” said Nova, and told him about their lost Motorik friend, who had once been the greatest graffiti artist east of the O Link. “When Flex died he flung his personality at the Rose. (I think he was being a he then. Sometimes he was a she. Flex didn’t like being pinned down.) But a lot of the code just bounced back off the Rose’s firewalls, and the rest got scattered all through her systems. There’s still enough of Flex left in there to make pictures, though.”

  “It should be possible to retrieve the whole personality,” said the interface. “Mordaunt 90 will look into it when we get home. Flex could be downloaded into a new body.”

  “It might not be that simple,” Nova said. “Flex went through a lot in that body. A new one might not be the same.” She touched the line of paler scar tissue around her neck, which was gradually taking on the same tone as the rest of her skin. “I wouldn’t feel like me in any body but this.”

  The interface smiled at her. There had been so many of him, back in the Network Empire. It was strange to think that anyone would be content to live in just one body. “You do know you’re not human?”

  Nova looked at him uneasily. “When Raven first started me, he said he was trying to make a Motorik that thought it was human,” she said. “But I think what he meant was, he was trying to make a Motorik that felt it was human. And I do. That’s why I’ve never stored a backup copy of my personality. This body is me. I couldn’t change it.”

  “But what if it was damaged? Beyond repair?”

  “Then I would die.”

  “And what if you wanted to be in two places at once?” asked the interface, a little wistfully, remembering how Mordaunt 90 was able to be in two thousand places at once.

  “Then I’d have to choose,” said Nova. But she didn’t think choosing would be hard. She would want to be where Zen was.

  *

  On the sixth day, the Rose and the Wolf powered up their engines and the Black Light Express pulled out of Zzr’zrrt. The K-gates flung it onto another Neem Nestworld and then in short hops across a series of small, scruffy planets that felt like autumn, where Railmaker ruins cast their weed-light over wastelands and a few small settlements of Herastec and Chmoii. The Ex
press sped past them and plunged through one last tunnel into winter.

  That tunnel was festooned with warning signs. Signs covered in urgent Herastec hieroglyphs were nailed to trackside trees on the approach to it, and its mouth was screened by flimsy barricades that the Damask Rose shoved patiently aside. (The Ghost Wolf wanted to try out its new weaponry on them, but the Rose wouldn’t allow it. The two locos had only been together for a few days, but they were already bickering like an old married couple.) It looked like the entrance to a dragon’s lair, but the train cruised bravely into it, and there was no dragon inside, just an ordinary looking K-gate.

  And beyond the gate, another tunnel. Zen watched the windows, waiting to shoot out into some unguessable landscape, trying to brace himself for whatever horrors might be waiting here. The walls just kept rushing by, featureless, shining in places with what looked like ice. It was just an underground line like a thousand others he had traveled. His fears faded, but they did not vanish, they were just fleeing ahead of the speeding train. They would be waiting for him again behind the next gate, and the next.

  Threnody felt the same. Not relief, exactly, but a sort of reprieve. “Is this it?” she asked. “Is this really the Black Light Zone?”

  “This is it, little Empress,” said the Ghost Wolf.

  “Any signals?” Zen asked Nova. “Any Railmakers trying to say hello? Any ghosts?”

  “No…” she said, uncertainly. “But…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing…” she said — but the whispering voice of the Zone was clearer here than she had ever heard it.

  “It’s cold here,” said the Damask Rose. “Really cold. There’s no air outside.”

  “I’m detecting some sort of small station ahead,” said the Ghost Wolf.

  The train slowed and stopped. Zen, Threnody, and the interface suited up and climbed out of their carriage onto a platform. The Neem were emerging from their own carriage at the rear of the train. Uncle Bugs still wore his yellow smiley face. The other six were color-coded — three red soldiers, three white scientists or technicians, and a larger, mustard-yellow one who was the leader, part of the Mother-hive. They tiptoed soundlessly in the frost that covered the platform.

  Nova and the humans climbed a long ramp to a door that let them out into a sheltered space between giant snowdrifts. The snow was frozen hard. Zen and Nova scrambled to the top of the highest drift and saw others, all around, like an ocean of white waves. Here and there, the familiar glass shapes of Railmaker buildings rose above the whiteness.

  “How could they have a city here, with no air?” asked Zen.

  Nova knelt and picked up a handful of ice crystals. “There’s plenty of air,” she said, and wadded some into a snowball to throw at him. It burst soundlessly against the faceplate of his helmet. “The whole atmosphere has frozen. The air fell as snow.”

  “Look!” called the interface.

  He was pointing at the sky. All Zen could see at first up there were blackness and the reflection of his own face in the curved glass of his helmet. Then, slowly, he started to make out a small cluster of dim red lights. They were arranged in such a way that you could somehow tell it was a sphere hanging out there, like a big black ball that someone had lit a fire inside, only there were little holes in the ball, so some traces of the light shone through.

  “What’s that?” asked Threnody.

  “It’s a sun,” said Nova. “Or it was…”

  The dead sun gave off radiation on wavelengths that human eyes could not detect, but Nova’s could. Not much, though. Not much of anything. And to her too it looked as if the sun had been trapped inside a vast, dark sphere, like a candle in a shuttered lantern.

  “It’s not dead,” she said. “Something has been built around it. A shell light-minutes across. It’s gathering almost all the energy the sun puts out…”

  “Why?” asked Threnody.

  Nova was more interested in how. “It would take millions of years to make something like that,” she said. “But all the stories say the Blackout happened fast…”

  “Stories are sometimes wrong,” said Zen. “There are no people around, no frozen bodies. No trains on the lines. It’s like the Railmakers had time to put everything away before they died.”

  Then, on an open channel, the eager voice of Uncle Bugs. “Humans! Come quickly! We found something!”

  They went back into the station. Dim blue lamps had come on up in the roof, as if some ancient system had sensed the explorers’ movements and wanted to welcome them. The Neem were busy at the far end of the platform. Something had leaked there — leaked and frozen to leave a shining pillar of solid ice. Within the ice was a mantis silhouette, frozen in a many-legged dance.

  “A Railmaker!” cooed the Neem.

  Tools hacked at the ice. Cutting torches flashed it into steam. Zen and Threnody hung back nervously, half afraid that, when they freed it, the frozen creature would thaw and spring to life. But Nova went closer, frowning as the first joints of the long, silvery legs emerged, running her hands over the small central body as the meltwater dripped from it.

  “It was never alive,” she said softly, and then, over the disapproving hisses of the Neem, she forced open a hatch on the curved central shell. There were no insects inside, just a dense nest of wires and frail silvery components iced into a frozen mass of gel. “It was a machine,” she said. “It was a lot like the Rose’s maintenance spiders. Maybe machines like this served the trains that used this station.”

  “So the Railmakers built machines in their own image to serve them,” said Uncle Bugs. “Just as the humans build machines like you to be their servants.”

  “Maybe…”

  They hauled it out of the ice anyway, and the Neem dragged it back to their carriage to study.

  “No great secrets in the Black Light Zone so far,” said Zen, as they reboarded the train. “Just a dead maintenance spider in a frozen station.”

  “And a whole hidden sun,” Nova reminded him.

  “I think they are all part of one great secret,” said the interface. His golden eyes peered out earnestly at them from the fishbowl of his helmet. “But I have forgotten the key to it.”

  *

  The next world was the same, and the next, and the one after that. Dead stations, dead planets, shuttered suns. Nova printed a drone powered by a simple chemical rocket and launched it into the sky on one of those worlds. The Damask Rose analyzed the data it sent back as it soared into space. As far as she could tell, there were no other planets in that system: no moons, no asteroids, no comets. Just that one lifeless rock endlessly circling the immense shell that had been built around its sun.

  On the sixth world, Threnody said, “There’s no point going on. There’s nothing at any of these stations, just those broken spider things, and they don’t look much more advanced than the Rose’s spiders. There’s no technology here the Neem can use, and no sign of a way home for us. We should go back.”

  Nova ran her fingers over the stems of the creepers that grew down the station walls. They grew differently in the Black Light Zone: thicker branches, fewer leaves. She said, “What if there is technology, but we don’t know it’s technology?”

  Zen shrugged. “Then it’s not much use to anyone.”

  Nova wished she could tell him about the signal she could sense. On each of the frozen worlds it seemed nearer. She could tune it out when she needed to, but when she listened for it, it was always there. But what if Zen was angry that she had not told him sooner? What if he decided that it was a trap? She did not think it was a trap, but she could not be sure. She just knew that something immensely powerful lay ahead of them, deeper in the Zone.

  “One more gate,” she said. “Just one more. The Neem want to keep going, and they’re in charge of this expedition, technically.”

  So the Black Light Express rolled on and
passed through one more K-gate. The new world felt different instantly: bigger, a stronger gravity pulling down on them. The tunnel walls were transparent in places, but whatever views they might once have commanded were blotted out by feet-deep drifts of frozen atmosphere. The Damask Rose and the Ghost Wolf sang quiet duets, sad songs to suit a long-dead world. They were singing still when the walls of the tunnel suddenly disappeared.

  “Whoa!” said Nova.

  Zen, standing at the window, thought for a moment that the train had shot out into open air, until he remembered that the air around here was laid in snowdrifts too deep for any train to cut through. The light from the windows showed no drifts, just rails shining, more tracks running parallel to the track the Black Light Express was running on. Overhead, glimmers of reflected train-light trickled over complicated shapes like the branches of a frozen forest.

  “It feels big out there…”

  “Rose, are you picking up anything?” asked Nova.

  “There is something,” said the Damask Rose. “A sort of — well, almost a song… I thought I heard it before, but I wasn’t sure. It is loud here.”

  “I hear it too,” said the interface.

  “So who’s singing it?” asked Threnody nervously.

  And then, all around the speeding train, the lights started to come on.