by Philip Reeve
But she found him. Came scrambling like a spider along the carriage side and reached in to him, just as she had done on that other dead train, in Cleave.
“Well, the trainkiller worked then,” he said.
She looked at him with one of those mysterious expressions she had invented for herself. Maybe she had never felt guilt before. Now, with all those miles of loss and ruin around them, she had more to feel guilty about than almost anyone. “I’m glad I used it,” she said, as if she was challenging him to disagree. “The Noons would have killed you.”
“They still will, if they catch me,” said Zen. Portions of his mind kept trying to calculate how many people must be dead and injured, how many trillions of damage done. And he would be the one they’d blame. He had crossed a terrible line. He wasn’t just a thief anymore. He was a saboteur. A murderer. A mass murderer… They’d probably have to invent a whole new name for the crimes he’d be accused of.
So he needed Raven. He needed his protection. And the only way that he could get that was by finishing the job he had been sent to do.
He took Nova’s hand, and she pulled him outside, into the disaster that they had made.
23
A narrow tubeway ran along the side of the Spindlebridge, designed for maintenance Motos and the bolder sightseers. Once they had found their way into that, it was not too hard to pull themselves along by the handholds on the walls. So they made their way down the line, following a map that Nova found in her mind. They went past the wreckage of the great train, past the firefighting vehicles and the gashed factories, through the hooting klaxons and the booming bullhorn voices that told them not to panic, to stay in their carriages and await assistance. The air stank of burnt metal: the smell of cans on a garbage fire.
Halfway down the Spindlebridge was a wider section that rotated slowly. There was a little station there, tourist shops and novelty hotels, a park with bluegrass lawns and clumps of trees (even in space, those Noons had to plant their trees!). Refugees from the disaster were gathering there, glad of the centrifugal force, which provided something that felt like gravity and gave them back the gift of their own weight. The lights were out in that section too, but there were big observation windows that lay like pools on the floor, and up through these shone the kindly light of Sundarban.
Between the window-pools lay shapes that looked like bundles of lost clothes, surrounded by silent or weeping Noons. Still dazed, Zen wasn’t sure what they were, until he went close to one of the groups of mourners, and saw Lady Sufra lying there. Whoever had dragged her from the wreck had laid her out with as much dignity as possible, and lit a little cloud of firefly drones to hang above her head like mourning candles, but they had not been able to disguise the brokenness of her: the way her neck was twisted, her torn and filthy clothes, or the look upon her dead face.
Zen looked, and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes to stop the tears, then looked some more. Telling himself what he’d been telling himself all the way down the bridge, that this was not his fault, not his, not all of it. Knowing that he’d never have the chance now to explain himself to Lady Sufra, or to say that he was sorry.
“Come away,” warned Nova. “Gaeta may be here, or someone else who knows about you.”
The whole station seemed full of weeping. Children howling for their mommies, tough Noon CoMa with tears carving tracks through the soot on their shocked faces. Even the wrecked Time of Gifts had stopped howling and was doing something that was more like sobbing: a desperate, desolate sound. Zen had not known a train could grieve like that. It made him angry, made him use his elbows to jab those stunned, tearful people aside as he followed Nova toward some hatchway she’d discovered from the station plans.
He was afraid whole raggedy crowds of Noons would be making for the spacecraft hangars on the outer hull, but none were. The K-bahn was the backbone of their world, and even as they stumbled out of the wreckage of their carriages, it never occurred to them that another train would not be along soon to take them to Sundarban. There the planet lay, bright outside the windows, but who would think about flying down to it in a spacecraft, when a train would get them there in more comfort and less time?
Well, someone had—the first hangar Nova found was empty. But in the second a dart-shaped shuttle dangled from its launching gear above a space-door made from a single wide disc of diamondglass. Below it lay the continents and seas of Sundarban, ruffs of white cloud gleaming in the raking sunlight.
They went in through the airlock. This outer part of the station seemed unaffected by the failures that were spreading inside. Lights came on obediently, and when Nova transmitted a command to the ship, a ceramic gangplank extended, leading to an airlock in its hull. Orange lamps began to spin and flash around the space-door, and stuff happened up in the tangle of ducts and plumbing overhead: sloshing sounds, which Zen guessed were fuel and coolant gurgling through pipes.
“Will it let us aboard?” he asked. He was wary of the ship and the long drop beneath it. “It’s a Noon ship…”
“You are a Noon, remember?” Nova said. “Anyway, it is a very stupid ship; I have already persuaded it to accept your orders. I’m transmitting a message to Raven, down on Sundarban. He can tell it where to land.”
“That was easy, then,” said Zen.
She smiled at him. A weepy sort of smile. Then she leaned close and he felt the print of her lips on his cheek and the corner of his mouth. When she stepped back she was blushing. Her face was very beautiful, he thought. He hadn’t been sure before, but he was now. The mind that lived behind it made it beautiful, the same way that the flame inside a lantern makes the lantern beautiful.
He was wondering if it would be weird to tell her so when a small red light came wavering across the shuttle’s hull and settled between her eyebrows like a bindi.
He started to shout a warning, but she had already felt the laser’s touch. She threw Zen down, and the bullets whipped over them and struck sparks and shrill noises from the gantry above the yacht.
As the sound of the shots faded, Zen heard the rotors of a drone, and looked up in time to see his old friend the Beetle flying into the hangar. Gaeta Noon must have ordered it to hunt Zen down, and it was obeying single-mindedly, ignoring the disasters around it and the damage it had suffered. It flew like a maimed bird, lopsided, dipping down to scrape the floor every few feet. Zen guessed most of its weaponry had been put out of use. Even the railgun it had just fired was silent now.
“It’s out of ammunition,” Nova said.
“Can you knock it out?”
“It has good firewalls. It will take a moment…”
The Beetle, which was nothing if not persistent, launched itself clumsily toward them, extending a whirling silver blade.
“Get onto the ship,” said Nova. “I’ll open the space-door.”
He started to tell her that she couldn’t, but that bright mind of hers had already flicked a parcel of code into the boathouse’s brain. The flashing lamps turned from orange to red. Klaxons whooped, drowning out Zen’s words. The door beneath the moored ship slid aside, and the boathouse atmosphere started pouring out into space. The Beetle went tumbling after it. Zen nearly followed. He struggled up the gangplank, through the gale. The shuttle shuddered on its gantry and the lights flashed red, red, red. He turned as he reached the shuttle hatch, and there was Nova scrambling up behind him.
But even as it hurtled away into the dark, the Beetle seemed intent on vengeance. Either that or it was making one last, desperate attempt to anchor itself to the Spindlebridge. Zen saw a spark of light out there, but he took it for a reflection flashing from some piece of litter that had vented with the air. A second later, just as Nova reached the top of the gangway, the grapnel that the Beetle had fired punched her in the back and drove through her, exploding from her chest in a spout of blue gel.
Her fierce grin faded. She
looked wide-eyed at Zen. Stuff came out of her mouth, wet and blue, with little deeper blue fragments in it.
He reached for her. His fingers touched hers. For a moment he almost had hold of her. But the Beetle was still tumbling away from the station. The carbon-fiber cable went taut, dragging the grapnel’s barbed head against whatever Nova had in place of a breastbone.
“Zen…” she said, and then the Beetle yanked her after it, away from him, out into space.
And the boathouse was empty of air, and the ship was nagging at Zen to close the outer hatch, and there was nothing he could do but duck inside and let the door hiss shut. He pressed his face to the window while the airlock filled with air. He could not see Nova or the Beetle.
The ship still followed Nova’s instructions. Zen ignored it when it told him to strap himself in. A moment later he was flung against the ceiling as thrusters fired, blasting it away from the Spindlebridge. When the thrust ended, he did not fall, but floated free, weightless again. He shouted Nova’s name, but she did not answer. Only the calm, stupid voice of the ship, telling him that she had set a course for coordinates on Sundarban.
He went from the airlock into the main cabin, a livewood bower with huge diamondglass windows. From there he saw the exterior of Spindlebridge for the first time, bone-white and sky-wide. One end of the huge structure was in ruins, blasted open by the explosions at the rear of the Noon train, spewing debris and atmosphere into space.
But Nova and the Beetle were gone, lost in the never-ending deserts of the night.
24
“Well,” said Raven, when Zen came stumbling out of the ship. “That all went very smoothly!”
Night winds chased litter across a patch of scrub country outside Sundarban Station City. Along the horizon the lights glittered in a forest of high buildings. Nearby, a K-bahn line emerged from a tunnel in the side of a rocky hill, weeds growing as tall as people up between the rails. The tunnel had been blocked. Fragments of the shattered barrier lay on either side of the track, and the Thought Fox sat smugly waiting among them, its scarred old hull faintly silvered by Sundarban’s moons.
“You’ve got to tell the ship to go back up,” Zen said. He pointed behind him at the spacecraft, which perched on the sand, its hull ticking and steaming after the journey through the atmosphere. His voice was hoarse from shouting orders at it. Locked on the course that Nova had given it, it had refused to obey him. “Nova’s still up there,” he explained. “We have to rescue her.”
“Nova’s gone,” said Raven. “I lost her signal hours ago.”
“She’s adrift. In orbit!” Zen thought of her up there, falling and falling around the wide, blue world. “She’s Motorik,” he pleaded. “She doesn’t need air, she’s not like a human being, you could repair her…”
Raven looked up at the sky. The Spindlebridge was a bright star, low on the horizon. The sky was streaked with the meteor trails of debris hitting the upper atmosphere. “Sorry, Zen,” he said. “We need to leave. We can’t waste time looking for a broken wire dolly. She’ll burn up in orbit like the rest of the debris. She’ll be a shooting star. It’s what she would have wanted.” He grinned at Zen, and danced a few shuffling steps on the sand. “Now, what about what I want? You have the Pyxis, I presume?”
Zen held out the bag. Raven looked inside, and his face softened. “Good boy! Now we can really get to work.”
“We killed Lady Sufra,” Zen said. “And the Wildfire and the Time of Gifts—and so many people…”
“Best not to think about that,” said Raven kindly. “Give me the box, Zen.”
“What?”
“The Pyxis.”
Zen took it out of the bag. He had not noticed until then how unexpectedly heavy it was.
“What is it?” he said.
“It’s just a box. A container.”
“Lady Sufra told me it was solid.”
“It looks solid when scanned.”
“So—is there something inside it?”
“Open it,” Raven suggested.
Zen looked down at the Pyxis, still clutched in his hand. It still looked solid, but suddenly a crack appeared, and then another, and it folded open. Inside, in a dense nest of metallic foam, lay a shining black ball. Across the ball’s surface, almost too fine to see, there stretched a labyrinth of faint grooves, an infinitely complex pattern, ruled by geometries that Zen didn’t recognize and couldn’t hope to understand: a maze so intricate that, as he looked at it, it seemed to crawl and shift.
“What is it?” he asked. “Is it more art?”
“In a way,” said Raven. He came and took the Pyxis and the sphere from Zen’s hands. “It’s very old,” he said, a sort of reverence in his voice as he ran his fingertip over the strange patterns. He replaced it in its nest, and the Pyxis snapped shut, the secret seams along which it had opened fading away. “It is very old, and it has been hidden for a long time. Thank you for helping me to get it back.”
He tossed the Pyxis into the air, caught it, and darted it into a pocket of his coat. He looked at Zen, and his eyes were kindly. “Come. It’s late, and you’ve been working hard. You want my advice? Forget all this. You’ve done your bit. You get to step off the ride now. It’s time to go home.”
*
Back through all the K-gates, through the un-light and the roaring tunnels, back down the Dog Star Line. Zen barely saw the worlds that flashed past outside the windows, nor the food that Raven put in front of him. Ukotec, Ukotec, Ukotec, said the wheels on the tracks, reminding him of the pictures he’d found in the Noon train’s archives, the Thought Fox rolling through passageways built from the crumpled bodies of the people it had murdered. The white noise of the engines reflecting from tunnel walls blended with the roar of the train crash, which still seemed to be going on somewhere inside him, as if echoes of the disaster were rumbling through the marrow of his bones.
There were sleeping compartments on the Fox’s upper decks. He dozed for a while, dreamed of Threnody, and woke again wondering if she was dead too, and knowing that, if she was, then it was he who’d got her that way.
Sufra Noon was in his memories too. And, more than either of them, Nova. He had never dreamed the breaking of a Motorik could hit him so hard. He missed her more than anything, her voice in his ear and her not-quite-human kindness. It was all very well for Raven to tell him he should forget it all, but how could he? How was he ever going to forget any of it?
*
He slept again. When he woke, Raven was sitting beside his bunk. The train was rattling through a long tunnel between K-gates, and the light from lamps on the tunnel walls came through the blinds and flashed across Raven’s face. He started to talk, and it reminded Zen of times when he’d been ill as a small child, when Myka or even his mother had sat beside his bed and told him stories.
But as he woke up and started to listen, he realized that what Raven was telling him was not a story. Not the made-up sort, at any rate.
*
“There was once a boy very much like you, Zen Starling. He lived hundreds of years ago, on a world way off down the Orion Line. Like you, he was a little too clever, not bad-looking, eager not to live the life his parents lived, but not sure how to change things. And then something happened that changed things for him. I’ve never been sure if his luck turned good or bad.
“What happened was this. The Guardians used to move among human beings much more often and more openly in those days. Sometimes they would download themselves into cloned bodies just to attend a party or take a walk in the evening air on some particular world. Interfaces, we called those bodies. The boy—his name was Dhravid—had seen them often, because his parents were minor officials, and they tended to go to the sort of parties and ceremonies that the Guardians liked to attend. He had met the Shiguri Monad, which wore the body of a golden man, and Sfax Systema, which appeared as a cloud of blue
butterflies. He had seen the Mordaunt 90 Network, whose favorite interface was a centaur, truly exquisite, a triumph of biotech. And one day he met a Guardian who called itself Anais Six.
“It was at a summer party on the terraces beside the Amber River. Moonlight on the vineyards across the water, and the music of the songflowers. The body that Anais Six wore was sexless, blue-skinned, with golden eyes and high golden antlers. Dhravid could tell that it had not used interfaces as much as the other Guardians: it seemed clumsy and uncertain of itself. It kept looking at its hands, or running the tips of its fingers over its face. The boy found it charming. As he was watching it, thinking how strange and beautiful it was, it tripped on a stairway. He put out a hand to stop it falling.
“That was how they met. And, to cut the story short, it fell in love with him. And he fell in love with it. In the years that followed, Anais came to him again and again. Sometimes its interface was female, sometimes male. Sometimes it was neither. Different bodies, different faces, but he always knew it. Through all those eyes he felt the same immense intelligence watching him. It was flattering to be loved by something so great. And there were practical rewards, too; someone who has won the love of a Guardian does not want for much in this life.
“But this life is short. Anais began to worry. It knew that Dhravid would one day die, and it could not have that. So it stored a copy of his personality. He became data. Can you imagine it, Zen? Perhaps nobody can who has not experienced it for themselves. To become data in the Datasea: living in the information streams, but part of them, too. Dhravid became, not quite a Guardian himself, but a thing with many of the same powers. He put copies of his mind into probes and sent them to the far stars. He had interfaces of his own now: cloned bodies, all with the same face, his own face, so that he still had some tie to the person he used to be. He lived a thousand lives on a thousand worlds. He swam down into the data-deeps. He started to understand the very origins of the Datasea, and of the Great Network itself.
