Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  *

  Zen ran back down the stairs to look at the holoscreens. Through breaks in the blizzards of ash the new gate was visible far ahead. It stood naked, like the gate on Desdemor, a half circle of colorless light incongruous on the horizon, with the Railbomb rushing at it like a dart at a target. Zen felt suddenly protective of that gate. He had not achieved much in his life, he had never made anything, but now he had made this hole in the sky, and the thought of it being closed again was heartbreaking.

  He pulled from his pocket the headset Nova had told him not to wear.

  “I’m going to talk to the Twins,” he told Threnody. “Come with me.”

  Before she could argue, he had put the headset on and was back in the Guardians’ garden, in the snow.

  *

  Nova crawled forward along the Rose’s hull, creeping between the train’s various turrets and down her nose while the wind tried to tear her hair out and bits of airborne grit and pumice stung her face and bounced off her eyeballs. The song of the Sunbird swirled around her, rising in pitch and tempo, gathering toward its blazing climax. She crouched on the Rose’s prow and jumped, reaching forward, snatching at handholds, working her fingers into a fissure between two sheets of the Sunbird’s armor plate, into a gash the Rose’s guns had made. The beat of the Railbomb’s engines hammered through her, keeping time with its song. She glanced down once at the rails speeding past below, then started climbing, up into the wind again, up onto the curved, slippery, shining top of the bomb.

  *

  The Twins were not used to being frightened, but the little Moto frightened them. What was she? What was she becoming? The mind of a Motorik should never have been able to resist their virus, yet hers could, and she had upgraded the mind of the Damask Rose so that it was immune too.

  But the carriages had separate systems, and a lot of them had been infected and were failing. The interface called Shiv Mako found the one that controlled all the locks and broke it. Warily, unnerved by the loss of his brother, he started walking toward the front of the car.

  *

  Chandni Hansa was busy trying to pry up the floor of her cabinet when she heard the clack of the door unlocking. She sprang backward, crouched against the wall. But the door did not open. Cautiously, she reached for the handle. The door slid open, and there was no one outside. The door into the vestibule at the end of the car was just closing. Wondering who had let her out, she hurried forward and peered through the glass of the door. A tall man stood in the vestibule with his back to her, reaching with one long pale hand for the controls that would open the door into the middle car. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew his bald head. She’d seen it catch the light in just that way, on the video Threnody Noon had shown her the night of the Ice Ball. He was one of those Prell assassins.

  She glanced fearfully behind her for his twin, but the carriage was empty. Anyway, she figured it wasn’t her he’d come for. Threnody and Zen would be his targets. He probably didn’t know or care that Chandni was aboard; he’d just unlocked her door by accident along with all the rest. The train was slowing; when it was slow enough she’d jump off and lose herself, and let the nice man get on with his job.

  She thought that through while she watched him move with cat steps through the second car and start fiddling with the door that would take him into the state car. It looked like that one was still locked.

  It’s none of your business, Chandni Hansa, she told herself. Threnody Noon would just have to look after herself this time.

  *

  Nova clung to the roof of the bomb. She could sense its mind like a great dark block, like a locked box. She ignored the locks and reached inside it. The Sunbird was so busy with its song that it did not notice her until she got into the systems that controlled the hatch lock and switched them from ON to OFF.

  The hatch cover slid open. The Sunbird kept singing, but Nova could sense it starting to panic as it tried to figure out what was happening. Poor thing — it was almost blind, just one external camera, mounted on its front, staring like a cyclops at its target.

  She dropped down inside it, into the metallic heat, the thunder of the engine, the whine of drive-shafts and the urgent beatboxing of pistons. There was a tiny ceramic deck where a human technician was supposed to stand to check the payload and the Railbomb’s systems. Nova stood there and switched on a camera on the instrument panel so that it could see her. She waved and smiled. “Hello!” she said.

  *

  “Hello?” said Zen.

  In the gardens of the Guardians the snow had stopped falling. The flakes hung motionless in midair, glittering like ruby stars. The hedges slid backward as if on rails, rushing away to a great distance so that Zen was left standing on a bare red plain beside the frozen fountain.

  The Twins stood watching him. They had become girls again, black and white, their hair blown out sideways on winds he couldn’t feel.

  “Not dead yet?” asked one.

  “Not long now,” the other promised.

  Threnody’s avatar appeared at his side.

  “I suppose you’ve come to beg for mercy,” said the Twins in unison. “Well, get on with it. It won’t make any difference. Do you honestly imagine we’re going to think twice about deleting you?”

  “We’re not here to beg,” said Zen. “We’re here to bargain.” This is how Raven would have played it, he thought, and he tried to carry himself like Raven, standing taller, looking down his nose at the smirking Twins. “Show them what you found in the Railmaker’s hub, Threnody.”

  Threnody blinked through her headset’s memory store and found the video she had recorded. She opened it, and the images appeared like holos, hanging in the un-air between him and the Guardians. Images of alien architecture, and an old train crumbling into rust, and Mordaunt 90’s interface weeping on the rails in front of it.

  One Twin wailed; the other snarled. The images blinked out, and so did Threnody, her headset killed by a thought from the Twins.

  She found herself back in the state car, in the shuddering train. It was slowing now. “Sorry,” said the Damask Rose. “I can’t keep up; it’s more than my old engines can take.”

  Threnody looked at Zen. She had assumed he’d been thrown out of the Datasea when she was, but he was still immersed, sitting trancelike in the seat across from her with his eyes unfocused. She wondered if she should pull his headset off. She was just reaching for it when she heard a noise from the far end of the carriage.

  “Train,” she said, “what’s happening back there?”

  “I’m not sure,” admitted the Damask Rose. “I’ve lost contact with the rear cars. I have a nasty suspicion Miss Hansa has managed to release herself…”

  Someone knocked on the connecting door that linked the state car to the second car. It was a heavy livewood door with no window. A man’s voice shouted through it, “Open this door.”

  The gun that Zen had taken from Enki Mako lay on the seat beside him. Threnody snatched it, fumbled with the safety, pointed it at the door, and pulled the trigger. She kept pulling it until the door was full of holes and the gun was empty. Then she walked toward the door trembling, trying to squint through the bullet holes into the vestibule to see if there was a body lying there. She had thought it was a man’s voice she’d heard, but perhaps she had been wrong — perhaps it had been Chandni who’d called out…

  She was hesitating in front of the ruined door, afraid to open it, when it opened anyway. Shiv Mako stood there unharmed, grinning at her. “Nice shooting!” he said. “Now it’s my turn.”

  *

  Zen heard the gunfire, but it seemed far away and unreal, far less important than the empty garden and the two girls with their windblown hair who stood there watching him.

  “Are we supposed to be scared?” they asked. “So your friend took some video of a rusty old train? So what?”

  “What
do you think people will say when they see it?” asked Zen. “We’ll tell them that you and the other Guardians knew thousands of years ago about the Railmaker, and you killed it and claimed you’d invented the K-gates yourselves. Do you think they’ll still want to worship you? Do you think they’ll still do as you say?”

  “They won’t see it, though,” the Twins said. “We just deleted it.”

  “From Threnody’s headset. But she uploaded a copy into Nova’s mind, and you can’t get at Nova, can you?”

  The Twins looked uneasy. One said, “No,” the other, “There is unfamiliar new coding in the Motorik’s firewalls. We have not yet analyzed its weaknesses…”

  “The Motorik will be destroyed in fifty-nine seconds when the Railbomb passes through the new gate and explodes.”

  “You’d better hope not,” said Zen. “Because Nova has already sent a copy to the minds of all the trains that left Khoorsandi since we got here. There must be copies in half the data rafts on the Network by now. She sent it out like a virus. Encrypted, of course; hidden deep, wrapped up in her alien code. If you let us live, she’ll delete it. If you don’t, the encryption will stop working and soon everyone will be able to see the footage from the hub.”

  Which was a lie, of course, but he didn’t think that the Twins could know it was a lie, not without sending word out by train to all the other worlds and having the versions of themselves in those data rafts scan the information tides.

  He watched them hesitate, and wonder.

  *

  Aboard the Damask Rose, Shiv Mako hesitated too, his gun aimed at Threnody as she scrambled backward up the aisle away from him. There was only so far she could go, so he wasn’t worried; there was time to wait while the Twins considered whether Zen Starling’s story was likely to be true. His mind was linked directly to their great minds; he was in the garden with them, listening to their deliberations. He listened so hard to them that he did not hear the barefoot running steps behind him as Chandni Hansa came tearing toward him through the second car. By the time he spun around, she was already lunging at him. By the time he shot her, she had already driven her claw-knife into his heart.

  *

  The Sunbird did not stop its kamikaze song when Nova spoke to it, but it wrenched one part of its mind away from the singing to say, “Get out! This is not your business! This is my big moment! This is what I was built for.”

  “Just to blow up?” asked Nova. “That seems a waste.”

  “Shut up. Go away.”

  “Because there’s all sorts of things on the far side of that K-gate that I’m sure you’d really like. New worlds and new people. New songs. And mysteries, old bomb. Wild, strange things I only glimpsed. I want to go back. I need to go back. That’s why I can’t let you wreck the gate…”

  “Not listening!” shouted the Sunbird.

  Twenty seconds to the gate, thought Nova.

  “It doesn’t matter then,” she said.

  Because her mind was stronger now than the mind of a mere train. She reached down into its operating systems and slammed its brakes on, hard. The Sunbird started to sing faster, louder, and began preparing to detonate itself, but Nova darted into those systems too, and finally down into the deep sublevels of its mind where its personality was written. It was unfair, she knew, to start altering somebody at that level, but the Sunbird had been programmed with only one desire, and since she felt bad about denying it the death it longed for, the least she could do was give it something else to want instead.

  Wheels locked, screaming with rage and grief, the Sunbird went slithering and shuddering toward the K-gate.

  48

  Shiv Mako pitched backward into the state car and Chandni landed on top of him. She pulled the knife out and stuck it in again and kept on doing that over and over, slamming it down with both hands and all her strength, until she realized that some of the blood that was splattering everywhere was coming from her, not him, and she looked down and saw the hole his gun had made in her and then she dropped the knife and her face turned beige and she toppled sideways off him and clung to one of the state car’s fancy seats.

  “Get her into the sick bay! Quickly!” said the Damask Rose, and Threnody, who had just been staring in horror, realized that she had to do something. She ran to Chandni and heaved her through the door the Rose opened into the tiny, white, antiseptic-smelling medical bay. A bed slid out of the wall and she got Chandni onto it and pulled her clothes open. The wound was in the side of her chest, a bruised hole where blood welled redly out each time Threnody tried to wipe it away. The Damask Rose was issuing calm instructions.

  Chandni said in a vague, drunk-sounding voice, “I killed him, didn’t I?”

  “You had to. If you hadn’t…”

  “I’ve never killed anyone before.”

  “Not even in that awful underwater place you’re always going on about?”

  “I was just trying to impress you. I was in plenty of fights, but I’ve never actually killed a person.”

  “He wasn’t a person, Chandni. He was an interface.”

  “That’s worse, isn’t it? Killing a Guardian. They’ll put me back in the freezers forever now…” Her face crumpled and she started to cry.

  “No,” said Threnody, baring Chandni’s arm so that the Damask Rose could lower a long white arm of her own from the medical bay ceiling and inject her with a dose of something. “They won’t put you back in the freezers; I won’t allow it.”

  Chandni’s eyes were clouding over as the drugs took effect. The Rose was readying other arms, with probes and swabs and medical sealant. Chandni sighed and said, “I couldn’t just leave you to look after yourself.”

  Then she was asleep, but Threnody still waited there, watching the Rose’s white arms at work until she started to feel sick and dizzy because of all the blood, and the train told her to go and check on Zen. So she stumbled forward — the train was still slowly moving — and found him where she’d left him, sitting with his headset on, staring straight through her.

  “Zen?” she said. “Zen?” She wondered if he had to be woken with a kiss, like a sleeping princess in a fairy tale, but immediately thought better of it and slapped his face instead, as hard as she could. It was rather satisfying. He came awake with a shout, her red handprint fading on his cheek.

  “What did you do that for? Ow!”

  “I thought you were trapped in that place, with the Twins.”

  “I wasn’t trapped, I was negotiating.”

  “They listened to you?”

  “I think so. The same deal we offered them earlier, before all this kicked off. We get to run trains through the new gate, and in return we never tell anyone about what they did to the Railmaker. We’ll let the Guardians spread whatever stories they want about the Web of Worlds and where it all came from.”

  “Don’t you think people ought to know the truth? It’s not right if the Guardians can go on acting like loving gods, after what they did to the poor Railmaker…”

  Zen shrugged. Lots of things weren’t right, but he had never seen it as any business of his to sort them out. He just wanted to stay alive, and make a little money, and ride the rails with Nova and the Rose.

  “Where is Nova?” he asked.

  Outside the Rose’s windows, the ash was still falling. She was almost stationary now. She opened a door for Zen and he jumped down and walked a little way from the track so that he could see past her.

  The rails ran empty all the way to the new K-gate.

  “Where’s the Railbomb?” he shouted.

  “It must have gone through,” said Threnody. “I expect it had to. At the speed it was going, I don’t think it could stop.”

  He went a little way toward the gate, hoping that Nova had jumped clear and was waiting for him by the line. She wasn’t. The ground trembled, and the ash flurried down. Far away, red rivers
of lava were crawling down the flanks of brand-new mountains. Around the gate a few faint Station Angels danced.

  “Did it go off?” he asked, but his headset was dead and the Rose couldn’t hear him. He had to trudge back through the ash-drifts to the state car and climb aboard and ask again. “Did the bomb go off, on the other side?”

  “There is no way of knowing,” said the train, “but I don’t think so. It was slowing when it hit the gate. I think Nova had disarmed it.”

  “We have to go after it.”

  “We have to get Chandni to a hospital,” said Threnody. “I need to talk to my uncle and tell him about this deal. We need to make sure Khoorsandi stays a Noon world; we may need to bring in more Noon CoMa from somewhere before the Prells try anything…”

  “Nova is more important than any of that!”

  “She’ll be fine in the hub! She can wait. She’s only a Moto.”

  “Psssscchhhh,” said the Damask Rose. “I will take us all back to the Fire Station. We can drop off Lady Threnody and Miss Hansa and ditch those useless carriages. And then we will go and find Nova.”

  49

  It was raining in the hub. The thawing frost on the inside of the dome was falling like gray tears, lit by the shining coral of the tower.

  Zen had not expected to be back so soon, and all alone. As he came through the K-gate he was half afraid that he would find the place crawling with Kraitt, or his way into it blocked where the Railbomb had exploded. But there were no Kraitt, and when the Damask Rose sent up a drone, it showed him the Sunbird sitting peacefully on a track at the far side of the dome.

  “Nova?” he asked his headset. “Are you there?”

  There was a moment of waiting and then her voice in his head. “I am.”

  “You’re all right! What happened? Why didn’t you come back to Khoorsandi? It’s been hours and hours. I was afraid the bomb…”