Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

35

  The Black Light Express was traveling across the floor of an immense dome. The space above it was crisscrossed by soaring viaducts and networks of thin bridges and walkways. Everything had been built — or grown — from some type of biotech: a frail-looking, beautiful basketwork of pale coral, within which the angular glass shapes of Railmaker structures showed.

  “There is air in here,” said the Damask Rose. “It’s very cold, but not as cold as outside.”

  “There’s heat coming from somewhere too,” added the Ghost Wolf. “And power to make those lamps work.”

  “And I’m detecting K-gates. All around us. Hundreds of them…”

  “Some sort of hub,” said Zen. He tried to count how many lines came into this place, until his breath fogged the window he was staring through.

  They were moving very slowly now. The Damask Rose opened a screen to let Zen and Nova see the view ahead. All the tracks that filled the floor of the dome, and all the bridges and viaducts above it, converged on one titanic central tower. The tracks went into the broad base of the tower through arched openings. Between the openings were platforms. At some of the platforms gray, lightless trains were waiting.

  “They are dead,” said the Rose. “It is not they who have been singing. But there is something here… this place had a mind once, I think. The mind is gone, but something lingers. Subroutines and automated systems. Look, something has set the points for us; it is guiding us into that empty platform.”

  She slowed, the platform sliding slowly past the windows. It was made of Railmaker glass and its surface was covered with a thin layer of snow, untrodden for centuries, blank as new paper.

  “Here we are,” said the Rose. “There may be pockets where the air is thin. Best take a respirator, just in case. And bundle up.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  By the time they were ready, and the carriage doors opened to let them out, the Neem were already stalking cautiously around on the platform, making spider footprints in the snow. Vapor plumed from their suits into the cold, old air. It made a mist around them, like the breath of animals on frosty mornings. “So big!” they said, and the echoes of their voices went dancing away across the white platforms. “So great they were, the Railmakers, our ancestors, the ones that were!”

  Zen gave a wordless shout, and after a while, when he had almost forgotten it, the shout came back at him from the dome’s curving wall, miles away. As it faded, he became aware of another noise: a soft moaning that rose and fell, like trainsong or the voices of ghosts.

  “Only the wind,” said Nova, and turned the collar of her red coat up, as if she felt the cold. “This place is so big it has its own weather systems.”

  They crossed the platform. On the neighboring track a dead morvah waited. It was of a strange design, an old gray thing with the blunt armored head of a prehistoric fish. It was hitched to one long, windowless car, around whose door the Neem technicians were already busy. When it was opened, Nova followed the Neem leader inside, half expecting to find mummified Railmaker commuters still in their seats. But there were no seats; just twin rows of racks from which hung more of the Railmakers’ spider-bots.

  Threnody was looking across the other platforms. “There aren’t many trains here, for such a huge station. Do you think the Railmakers had some warning when the Blackout happened? They evacuated, got their trains out, just left their dead machines behind…”

  “They’re not all dead,” said Nova.

  “You mean the thing Rose and Mordaunt 90 talked about? The singing thing? Can you hear it too?”

  “I have been hearing it since we entered the Zone,” she said. “I heard it on the Shards of Kharne, very faintly, and Night’s Edge before that. It has been singing for a long time, and its song has reached all the way across space… That is what first made me think that we should come here.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” asked Zen.

  “I thought I might be imagining it. I thought you’d say that it might be a trap.”

  “It might be a trap,” he said.

  “It doesn’t feel like a trap.”

  “Well it wouldn’t, would it? Not if it was a good trap.”

  “What’s it saying, this song?” asked Threnody.

  “I can’t explain,” Nova said. “It’s not even a song, not really. Zen, you know how sometimes when you’re sad or in a bad mood and I ask you what’s the matter, and you say you can’t explain, I wouldn’t understand, it’s just a human thing? Well, this is just a machine thing, I think. There’s some code being broadcast from this place, and it’s meant for machines to hear. I think it’s asking me for help.”

  They walked along the platform. The tower was so wide that the wall seemed straight if you looked directly at it. It was only when you turned your head and saw it curving away out of sight that you understood it was the base of a massive cylinder. At the end of the platform was a triangular doorway. There was no door, but thick coral tendrils twined across it like bars.

  “It’s some kind of bio-alloy,” Nova said, reaching out to run her fingers over the stems. “The creepers at all the other Railmaker sites must be descendants of this stuff. They lost their strength, but they still remember the shapes they’re supposed to make. The memory is fading, though; the farther you go from the center, the less clearly they remember how to grow into these patterns…”

  “It’s like a hedge of thorns in a story,” said Threnody.

  “Except there’s a way through this hedge,” said Nova.

  The tendrils had detected her. They unlaced themselves and drew aside to make an opening. The opening was about the size of a human being, but it wasn’t the shape of a human being. Zen was not sure what it was the shape of.

  A passage led through the thick, thick wall, and they went cautiously along it and emerged inside the tower. Lights came on: a dim, golden glow that slowly grew until they could see structures around them. A broad, smooth floor shone faintly, like a frozen lake. A forest of fat pillars rose from it, and between the pillars were clusters of large, podlike chambers. In the tower’s center, a ramp like the exit ramp of a highway went spiraling up through the ceiling.

  “The ramp gives access to the higher platforms,” Nova said.

  “They built all this and they couldn’t build an elevator?” asked Threnody.

  “I have seen this before,” murmured the interface of Mordaunt 90. “I have been here before.”

  “When?”

  He looked at them, eyes wide and scared. “I don’t know. I don’t remember. In a dream, maybe.”

  “Do Guardians dream?” asked Threnody.

  “I don’t remember that, either.”

  The Neem had found something. They were shining their lights into one of the pods, which all had wide openings on one side. The beams played over something that looked like the husk of a giant insect. In fact, Zen knew, it was just another machine; he had seen those strange spinneret structures before, much larger, on the Worm that had opened Raven’s gate.

  “I think it’s a kind of 3-D printer,” said Nova. “There’s one in each of these pods.”

  “Maybe the Railmakers didn’t like carrying luggage,” said Zen. “Maybe they printed what they needed when they got to the station.”

  “Or maybe this is a building site,” said Nova. “Maybe it was still under construction when they abandoned it.”

  “How do I remember this place?” asked the interface.

  Threnody took him by his golden hand. “Come on,” she said. “It’s spooking you. Let’s go outside.” The tower was spooking her too; she was glad to have an excuse to escape its alien shadows.

  Zen and Nova left the Neem fussing over the printer and walked through the forest of pillars until they reached the central ramp. When Zen shone his flashlight across its surface, he saw faint scratch marks there, as if heavy objects had bee
n dragged up it. Or dragged down it, for as well as spiraling up, the ramp led down through an opening in the floor. On the lower level were the rails, coming in through the archways in the tower’s base to end without ceremony, sinking into the shining floor. On one or two stood a long-dead morvah. In the center of this level too, there was an opening. The ramp went down through it into darkness.

  “There’s a basement,” he said.

  “A cellar,” said Nova. “I wonder what they kept down there?”

  “Should we look?”

  The ramp was as wide as a big road. The smooth surface looked slippery, but it wasn’t. Zen could feel the scratch marks through the soles of his boots as he started to follow Nova down it. Where it tunneled down through the floor, there were scratches on the walls and ceiling too. It descended into a space that felt even larger than the room above.

  “What’s down there?” asked the Damask Rose, watching through Zen’s headset. “I can’t see.”

  “Nor can I,” said Nova. “It’s cold and it’s pitch black, but…”

  Lamps had sensed them. The light increased slowly as before. Zen went cautiously to the ramp’s edge and looked over.

  “Look! It’s full of Worms!”

  There were more than twenty of the great machines down there in the shadows, silent and still, their spines and antennae folded flat along their segmented bodies. They formed a circle with their noses pointing inward toward a low, gourdlike building at the foot of the ramp.

  Zen wanted to hang back now. Human beings have instincts that make them wary of large creatures, and the Worms were as much creatures as they were machines. But Nova said, “It’s all right, they’re dormant, can’t you see?” She almost ran down the final few feet of the ramp.

  By the time he caught up with her, she was already inside the gourd building. It was open-fronted, like the ones above, and it housed some new type of machinery, which was linked to the floor with thick fleshy roots and tendrils as if it had grown there. Panels of glasslike stuff gleamed sleepily through coats of dust. Clusters of warts and dimples were arranged in patterns that could not be accidental.

  “It’s a terminal,” said Nova, glancing at him as he came in behind her. “Linked to the tower, to the tower’s mind, maybe…”

  “Is it dead? Like the Worms?”

  “Who said the Worms were dead?”

  Zen glanced nervously over his shoulder at the looming, silent shapes. When he looked at Nova again, she had reached out and set her hand on the front of the thing. A faint light woke behind its panels.

  “Be careful,” said Zen.

  “I’m always careful, Zen Starling,” she said, but she wasn’t looking at him; her eyes darted quickly around, scanning something that he couldn’t see. “There’s code,” she said. “It’s very strange, but not completely… I think I can link to it… Ooh!”

  “Nova?”

  She swayed for a second, then pitched forward against the machine and slid down it to the floor. By the time Zen reached her, her eyes were shut, but behind the closed lids he could still see them tracking back and forth. Her hands twitched, and her lips moved, forming strings of sounds that weren’t quite words.

  “Nova!”

  She did not answer, because she was suddenly in space, or in a darkness so total that it seemed like space. Except it was not empty. There was something here with her. She sensed it as a pyramid of silver light, hanging point downward in the void above her head. She had no sense of its scale — it might have been the size of a pinhead or the size of a planet — but she sensed its power. It was the mind of this place. It had sung to her in its long sleep, broadcasting across the gulfs of space a call that no one on the Web of Worlds had been able to hear till she arrived. Now it was struggling to wake. Nova knew somehow that it was part of something much larger, or that it had been, once. It was just an outpost of a much greater mind, which had been shattered and destroyed. What was left was not truly intelligent, but it sensed Nova’s intelligence, and it poured information into her, so fast that she could barely process it.

  “You’ve come at last,” it said.

  36

  The great station was growing warmer. The air was still chilly, but mist was rising from the snow that lay on the tracks and platforms. Threnody watched a piece of ice the size of a cathedral detach itself from the distant roof and tumble slowly, end over end, down through the drifting haze to shatter on the rails. A second later the sound reached her, a deep boom rolling and echoing around the enormous dome.

  It could get dangerous out there if a true thaw set in, she thought. But she still preferred it to the darkness inside the tower. The interface definitely seemed happier, although he still kept looking around him in a puzzled way.

  They followed a walkway that led around the base of the tower linking all the platforms, bridging the rails that stretched between them. Sometimes the way was blocked by overgrown clumps of the coral creeper stuff hanging from out-juttings of the wall, but each time they reached one, it drew aside and let them pass. Eventually they came to a place where a ramp branched off, sloping up the side of the tower.

  “It probably spirals all the way up, like a curly slide,” said Threnody. “But the tower is so wide that it doesn’t need to be very steep. I don’t think the Railmakers had stairs or elevators. It’s all just ramps. Seems a bit basic for an alien master race.”

  The interface raised his golden eyes toward the roof. The mist was thickening, hiding the heights of the dome, swirling around the high-level viaducts that sprouted from the tower’s flank many hundreds of feet above. He tugged at Threnody’s hand. “It is up here.”

  “What is?” she asked.

  “Something important. I don’t remember.”

  He was already leading her up the ramp.

  *

  “Help!” Zen shouted. Echoes boomed between the silent Worms and bumbled from the roof above. He heard the skittering of Neem claws on the ramp, and Uncle Bugs’s voice on the open channel asking what was wrong. The Neem explorers crowded around. Their lamps found Nova’s face like spotlights. Zen touched her, but she did not stir. She lay amid that crowd of friendly monsters like a spellbound princess.

  “What’s happening to her, train?” asked Zen, hoping the Damask Rose was still watching his headset feed.

  “As far as I can tell,” said the train, “she is linked somehow to that machine. I believe she is communicating with it.”

  Zen looked behind him at the Neem. “We should get her back aboard the Rose,” he said.

  One of the Neem technicians stepped carefully over him and stood studying the machine. The lighted patches seemed brighter now, like small, oddly shaped screens. “This object may be a Railmaker computer,” said the Neem. “If Miss Nova is linked with it, we could learn their secrets. Moving her would risk disturbing the link.”

  “I don’t care about that,” said Zen, but then found that he did. Because what if the link was broken and some part of Nova’s mind stayed behind, entangled in the alien machine? What was left might not be Nova, not his Nova anyway. He had not rescued her from the Kraitt only to lose her to this machine. He could not bear to be left alone again. He knelt beside her and watched the faint, mechanical movements behind her eyelids, wishing she could tell him how to help her.

  The Neem watched with him for a while, then started to drift away, rustling in excitement as they studied the vast waiting Worms. They seemed giddy with the size and grandeur of everything, intoxicated by the idea that their own ancestors could have made anything so big.

  After thirty minutes, Zen went after them. He told himself that there must be something in the tower that would help Nova. Maybe he would find a way to talk to it himself and ask it to release her.

  He climbed back up the ramp to the platform level, and then higher, shining his flashlight into the clusters of pod chambers on the story abov
e. Most of them were empty, but one or two held machines as mysterious as the ones downstairs. In one of the pods he found an alcove where a triangular metal plate rested. There were three circular dimples in the surface of the plate like the tray for eggs in a refrigerator, and in each dimple sat a black sphere just like the one he had stolen for Raven.

  Zen stood looking at the spheres for a while, ambushed by bad memories. He had wrecked a train and a lot of lives, including his own, in order to get one of those spheres. When Raven installed it in a Worm it had opened a new K-gate, but long before he had known what it would do, Zen had been able to sense that it was unique and powerful. Perhaps it had been the most valuable thing in the whole Network Empire. Now he was looking at three more just like it. They had the same odd weight when he lifted them from their tray. Their surfaces were etched with the same intricate labyrinths, almost too fine to see.

  He pocketed them and went to search for more. Hurrying from pod to pod, he soon found more trays. Some were empty, but most still held spheres. The one he had stolen for Raven had been a treasure worth breaking Empires for. Now he had nine of them… twelve… They rattled in his pockets like marbles.

  “Zen Starling?”

  A beam of light poked into his face as he came out of a pod. The Neem leader was at the top of the ramp. She bustled toward him, asking, “Have you found anything of interest on this level?”

  Zen held up his empty hands and said, “Just more dead machines.”

  The Neem seemed suspicious. “What is that noise?”

  “What noise?” asked Zen.

  From his pocket came a tiny click-click-click as the spheres jostled together.

  “There is some new sound in the cloth pouches inside your coat,” said the Neem.

  “They’re called pockets. I have all kinds of stuff in there—”

  “Empty the cloth pouches inside your coat!” ordered the Neem.

  “No,” said Zen, wondering if she would make him, and what she would do if she discovered what he had been hiding from her. But he wanted those spheres for himself. If he found a way home from here, he wanted to make sure he was useful to Threnody and her family, in case she was tempted to go back on her promise. What could be more useful than someone who had the keys to open brand-new K-gates?