Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  “I’m not stupid,” said Chandni. “It means secret.”

  Kala Tanaka smiled at her. “Good. I’m glad you’re not stupid. It is a long haul to Grand Central and it might have been boring, but I can see we’re going to get along very well. Are you hungry yet? I’ll order us something from the dining car. But we’ll eat here, I think. Best if you are seen by as few people as possible.”

  They were outside the city by then. The famous vapor lakes of Karavina went past, and then the mountains. The train was gathering speed, heading toward the K-gate that would take it to Przedwiosnie, thirty thousand light-years away. Chandni thought about food and decided that she liked the idea. She was still confused, though.

  “What does this new Empress want to talk to me about?” she asked.

  “She will tell you that herself,” said Kala Tanaka.

  4

  At the center of the Network lay the planet called Grand Central, a hub-world whose K-gates gave access to all the major lines of the galaxy. A sprawling city had grown up there: a green city, more like a beautifully managed forest with tall buildings rising here and there above the trees. A broad river, dotted with the sails of pleasure boats, wound through it to the ocean. Along the river’s banks were some of the great buildings of the Empire: the K-bahn Timetable Authority, Railforce Tower, the pyramids that housed the shrines of the Guardians. In the hills farther north, where the river began, stood the imperial palace, the greatest of them all.

  Its proper name was the Durga, but that just meant fortress or stronghold or something in one of the Old Earth languages and didn’t really suit it. It had probably started out as a fortress, thousands of years ago, but after so many generations of peace it had grown distinctly palace-y. It was built on, and in, a flat-topped granite mountain. The first humans to arrive on Grand Central, before it even had a breathable atmosphere, had made their homes in the caverns inside it. Later, when things were more stable, they had started to build on the sides and top too, extending it upward in spires of biotech ivory and specially grown bone. Broad decks jutted out, planted with elaborate gardens. On one of the highest of them, the Empress herself sat looking out across her capital.

  No one had ever intended for Threnody Noon to become Empress. Her mother’s marriage to the late Emperor had only been a temporary one, designed to seal some business contract between her mother’s family and the House of Noon. Threnody had grown up knowing that the heir to the throne was her half-sister Priya, who had been destined to rule since before she was born, and who the family geneticists had ensured would look the part: glossy, exquisite Priya, the Empress-to-be. But somehow, in the confusion that had followed her father’s death, Priya had failed to convince Rail Marshal Lyssa Delius that she would be a good Empress. Since Lyssa Delius commanded Railforce, with all its troops and wartrains, her opinion tended to be listened to, and she had decided that she would rather see Threnody rule the rails. Priya had vanished, and Threnody had taken her place upon the Flatcar Throne of the Empire.

  Even now, six months after her coronation, she still felt numb with the strangeness of it all. There were so many parties and functions to attend, so many visiting dignitaries who needed to pay their respects to her, so many official portraits to pose for and new clothes to be fitted for. That was why, whenever she could, she liked to escape from her ladies-in-waiting and hairdressers and makeup advisors and social media strategists and security people and come up here, to the most overgrown and least fashionable of the palace’s many gardens. She was still not technically alone — her cloud of personal security drones, disguised as hummingbirds, hovered around her at all times, while bigger machines cruised above the garden, ready to put a warning laser-bolt across the bows of any paparazzi drone that tried to snatch a photo of her for the gossip sites. But she could feel alone, and that was important. At home on Malapet she’d had whole days to herself, walking on the beach of black sand below the house while her mother worked on paintings of the icebergs that the currents stranded there. She had found solitude boring then; she had longed for something to happen to her. Now it had, and these quiet times in the high garden were one of the few things that kept her sane.

  So she was annoyed at first when Kala Tanaka messaged her headset to say that she was on her way up. And then she wasn’t, because Kala said, “I am bringing the girl.”

  Kala Tanaka was another of the things that kept her sane. Everybody seemed to think it must be wonderful to live in the palace, and go out every night to dinners and balls. The rest of her vast family envied Threnody, wishing that Lyssa Delius had picked them for the job. Only her uncle Nilesh seemed to understand that the new Empress might feel frightened and alone. He was Threnody’s favorite uncle — a mild, lazy, completely unambitious man who seemed quite content as Stationmaster on the little end-of-the-line tourist moon Khoorsandi. “And even that would be too much for me,” he had told Threnody at her coronation ball, “if I didn’t have my assistant to take care of me. You should borrow her for a while. Kala has been with me for years and years, and Khoorsandi isn’t to everyone’s taste. I expect she’d enjoy a stay at the palace.”

  Kala Tanaka had come to Grand Central with him, and she stayed on after he left. She was plain and kind and smart and extremely efficient. She was not afraid to tell the highest-ranking members of the family to leave Threnody alone if she thought the Empress was too tired to listen to their latest schemes and proposals. She would even stand up to Rail Marshal Delius when the schedule of official duties grew too frantic. She was the sort of person who could clear time in a busy Empress’s day for a walk in the gardens. She was also the sort of person you could send secretly to Karavina to arrange the early release of petty criminals from freezer prisons.

  Threnody felt a little nervous as she watched Kala and the girl come toward her along the overgrown paths. She’d not had much experience with lower-class people, except for smiling politely at them from the observation car of the imperial train while they stood on station platforms waving tiny flags at her. She had only really ever known one, and that had not turned out too well. This girl, this Chandni Hansa, looked pretty frightening. She was short and wiry. Kala had made her wear a headscarf to hide her shaved head, but her clothes were alarming, all video-fabric and cultured diamonds, the sort of thing you’d see… well, Threnody wasn’t sure where you’d have to go to see clothes like those. And although her face was pretty, it lost its prettiness when she looked at you; her eyes seemed too old for her — bitter and suspicious.

  “Bow,” said Kala Tanaka, bowing herself, and the girl gave a sullen little nod, glaring at Threnody.

  Threnody inclined her own head slightly in response, and said, “Welcome to Grand Central, Miss Hansa. I hope your journey was comfortable?”

  “It would have been more comfortable if she’d told me what you want me here for,” said Chandni Hansa, with a quick, sharp look at Kala Tanaka. “I haven’t done anything.”

  Threnody’s cloud of drones sensed the hostility in the girl’s voice and adopted a defensive formation. Threnody reminded herself that she was the Network Empress and could not be intimidated by people like Chandni Hansa.

  “That’s not true, is it?” she said. “Six months ago you made friends with a young man named Tallis Noon, whom you met on a train at Przedwiosnie. You took him with you to Karavina, and while you were there you robbed him.”

  Chandni Hansa glared past her into the blue parkland beyond the palace, where gene-teched dinosaurs were calling.

  “It’s all right,” said Threnody. “I met Tallis Noon at my coronation. He is very boring, and he probably deserved to be robbed. You probably taught him a valuable lesson. It was wrong of him to demand that you were frozen for such a minor crime.”

  Chandni Hansa looked at her again. She wasn’t used to people in power talking to her like that. She was suspicious. “That why you let me out?”

  “Partly,” said Th
renody.

  There was a stone bench overlooking a chess garden: a checkerboard lawn with topiary chess pieces clipped out of yew. The yew had been spliced with crustacean DNA, and the pieces moved slowly back and forth on crablike roots, laboriously playing out a game of chess. Threnody sat down on the bench and gestured for Chandni to sit beside her. Chandni looked back at Kala Tanaka as if she suspected a trick. Then, reluctantly, she sat down.

  “While you were on Karavina with Tallis Noon,” Threnody said, “a young man came aboard the Noon train. He said he was Tallis Noon, and he looked enough like the real Tallis that we believed him. But he turned out to be an imposter. His real name was Zen Starling. He sabotaged the train somehow, on Spindlebridge, killing my father and a lot of other people. Later on, he showed up on Sundarban and caused more trouble there, before he vanished down the derelict Dog Star Line on an old train. And I’ve never been able to find out what it was about or why any of it happened. An actual, living, breathing interface of the Guardian Anais Six took charge of things on Sundarban and went off after Zen Starling down the dead line with a Railforce officer named Malik, and nothing has been heard of either of them since. There’s no mention of any of it in the Datasea, Rail Marshal Delius claims to know nothing about it, and I’m the Empress — you’d think I’d be able to find out the truth about something like that!”

  She realized that her voice had been growing louder and louder, more and more angry. Chandni Hansa looked scared of her now. She calmed herself, and said, “The only thing I was able to find out is that the real Tallis Noon was on Karavina when it all happened, with a girl he’d met on a train, who ended up robbing him. And I thought that seemed like a bit too much of a coincidence. So I thought I’d bring you here, and ask you if you had anything to do with it, and I’m not even going to punish you if you say you did, I just want to know.”

  “I didn’t know anything about sabotaging the Noon train,” said Chandni Hansa.

  “So you just started talking to Tallis Noon because you had a crush on him?” asked Kala Tanaka, who was standing guard a little way off, watching the slow movements of the chess pieces.

  Chandni made a scornful sound. “A crush? On that stuck-up Noon boy? No. I’m not interested in boys. I’m not interested in girls, either, in case you’re getting any ideas. A man paid me to make friends with Tallis Noon and take him to Karavina, that’s all. Said I was to keep him there for a week, but after a few days I was sick of him, so I stole his headset and his cash and took off.”

  “This man who paid you,” Threnody said. “Was it Zen Starling?”

  “I’ve never heard of any Zen Starling,” said Chandni. “He sure didn’t look anything like Tallis Noon. He was old.”

  “How old?”

  “Hard to say. Old and weird. White. With white hair. And skinny. Like someone out of a history show, some duke or something from the Old Earth times. Said his name was Raven.”

  “Do you know where I can find him?”

  Chandni shook her head. “I’d seen him a couple of times on Glorieta. The night he talked to me I ran into him down near the old station, the boarded-up one…”

  “The Dog Star Line station?” asked Threnody.

  “Yes…” said Chandni. “He said he had a job for me. Said he thought I might like to earn a cool thousand and really stick it to the Noon family, and I was up for both of those. He paid in advance too. Said if I didn’t do the job like he told me, he’d know about it and come and find me, but I don’t see how, and I wasn’t scared of him anyway.” She shrugged. “I guess your Zen Starling must have been working for him too.”

  “Anything more you can tell me about this Raven?”

  Chandni thought. Six months in the freezers left holes in your memories. “The night he hired me he was on his own, but once before I saw him with a wire dolly. She was a funny-looking one. Dressed like a real girl, and had, like, freckles on her face, but she was Motorik all right.”

  “Nova,” said Threnody.

  “I never heard him call her anything. They just went past me one night and I thought, ‘they’re an odd pair.’ ”

  Out on the chessboard lawn, the red queen made a surprisingly quick move and landed on a black pawn, crushing the smaller bush to the ground, tearing at it with her crab-claw roots. Threnody would have liked to tear at Zen Starling like that — at him, and this Raven, and the Motorik named Nova. Those three had caused all this, she was sure of it. But they were gone, and talking to Chandni Hansa had given her no answers, only more questions.

  “Why were you so eager to hurt the Noons?” she asked.

  Chandni shrugged again. She was surprised at how much she had told the stuck-up little Empress. It was a change of pace to talk to someone. She didn’t see how it would do much harm to talk some more, before they threw her back onto the streets.

  “My family used to be all right,” she said. “My dad was Stationmaster on a place called Shelan Junction that you’ve probably never heard of. But Shelan Junction was a Noon world, and the Noon Emperor decided to get rid of him so some useless, stuck-up Noon boy could have his job. My dad went downhill after that. Things fell apart pretty fast.”

  Threnody was shocked. “I’m sure my father would never have thrown someone out of a post in that way!”

  “Not your father, Empress,” said Kala Tanaka. “This would have been the Emperor before him: your great uncle. He was notoriously corrupt.”

  “But Chandni Hansa can’t be old enough to have been alive when he was on the throne!”

  “You don’t age in the freezers,” said Chandni Hansa, with a kind of bleak pride. She pulled her headscarf back and Threnody saw the prison barcodes tattooed on her scalp.

  “Chandni has been in the freezers a lot,” said Kala Tanaka. “The first spell was the longest — fifty years for burning down the Stationmaster’s villa at Shelan Junction. Since then it’s been five years for this, ten years for that. She’s about nineteen years old if you just count actual life, but she was born ninety-six years ago.”

  Chandni shrugged again, an odd, somehow aggressive little movement. “It’s hard to fit back in once you’ve been in the freezers,” she said. “I got out the first time and everything was different, everybody I knew had moved on. I couldn’t even talk right; people who used the slang I used were all grandparents. So I got in trouble again, because that’s the only thing I’m any good at. After a few tries, it’s kind of a relief to go back in the fridge.”

  On the chessboard, the red queen had almost finished destroying the pawn. Torn leaves blew across the garden. The first of Grand Central’s twin suns was sinking into the bank of low cloud that lay along the horizon. Chandni Hansa stood up, and Threnody’s drones buzzed angrily, tracking her movements. “So do I make my own way out?” she asked.

  “No!” said Threnody. She wasn’t sure what she was doing, only that she could not let this damaged girl go back out into the world, back into her life of crime and another spell on ice. She turned to Kala Tanaka. “How did you get her into the palace without anyone knowing?”

  “If anyone inquires,” said Kala, “they will find that Miss Hansa is a friend of a friend whom you were considering for a job here, Empress. An act of charity.”

  “I don’t need Noon charity!” said Chandni angrily.

  “Quiet,” Kala told her. “You didn’t say that when I bought you dinner on the train.”

  “Then I shall offer her a job,” said Threnody, quite softly, but loud enough to silence them both. She smiled to herself. When she became Empress she had acquired ladies-in-waiting: a lot of daughters of distant Noon cousins and other minor families, whose job it was to help her dress and keep her company. Most of them were much more posh and sophisticated than Threnody. They scared and annoyed her, but she was pretty sure that Chandni Hansa could cope with them, just as Kala Tanaka could cope with Chandni Hansa.

  “Chand
ni will be my new lady-in-waiting,” she said. “Madhur Noon can go home to Golden Junction; she is always bragging about that boyfriend she has there, and how she misses him. Chandni will take her place.” She felt quite commanding for a moment, then spoiled it by looking at Kala Tanaka. “I can do that, can’t I?”

  Kala Tanaka bowed. “You are the Empress of the Galaxy, Empress. You can do whatever you want.”

  5

  So Chandni became a kind of glorified servant. The palace staff and the Motorik and the security guards all called her “Lady Chandni,” but a servant was what she was. “Bring the Empress’s coat, Lady Chandni,” “Wake the Empress for her breakfast with the Stationmaster of Vagh, Lady Chandni,” “You will accompany the Empress on her pilgrimage to Mars, Lady Chandni.” The other ladies-in-waiting were all horrified by her — she had known they would be, and she thought Threnody had known it too. She didn’t know what to say to them and they didn’t know what to say to her, so they quickly reached an arrangement where she didn’t speak to them at all, and that was fine by her.

  She wasn’t planning to stay long, anyway. The imperial palace was no place for a girl who’d run with zip gangs in the submarine slums on Ayaguz. She didn’t like being Threnody Noon’s little charity project. As she followed the Empress through the bewildering maze of the palace — the Jade Room, the Mirrored Ballroom, the Waterfall Room — she sized up the valuables. Pretty much everything here was valuable; even the stuff that looked like junk turned out to be priceless antiques from Old Earth. Chandni hoped that if she took a few good pieces with her when she left, Threnody might be too kind or too embarrassed to send Railforce after her.