Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  But somehow she kept on finding reasons to stay. The food was good, and free, and she told herself she needed fattening up before she hit the streets again. She had a room of her own that was about the size of the house she had grown up in, the one she’d wound up burning. The room was next to Kala Tanaka’s suite, on the floor below the Empress’s quarters. All the things in it were bigger or better or just nicer than anything Chandni had been around before. Even the light looked expensive, filtering through the decorative screen that walled her bed space off from the living area. The bed was circular and as soft as cartoon clouds. She sprawled out in it and slept on her back, snoring. She could have spent all day in that bed, but Kala Tanaka made sure she was always up early and ready to go and do whatever stupid duties needed doing.

  Every time Kala Tanaka woke her up, or ordered her around, Chandni told herself that this was it, she wasn’t a slave, she was going to load up with some portable wealth and slip out of a back entrance that very night. But somehow when Kala came banging on her door the next morning before first sunrise, there she still was. Well, it would be a shame to skip town before the K-bahn Timetable Authority’s banquet; she had never been to an actual banquet before. And if she was staying till then, it would be a shame not to go along for the ride when Threnody made her pilgrimage to Mars…

  Mars was a pointless kind of desert-y planet way off down at the end of the Hydrogen Line, but it had been the first station on the Network, where the Guardians had opened the very first K-gate. So for some reason each new Empress or Emperor had to go there, and be photographed looking thoughtful while they peered through the pressure-dome at Earth itself, which you could see sometimes if there wasn’t a sandstorm raging. Other things you could see from the pressure dome included the remains of some of the spaceships that human beings had ridden in to Mars so they could board the first trains and go through the Mars gate to explore and settle all the other worlds. Threnody stood on the viewing platform and pointed out the sand-covered hulk of the Varanasi, the ship on which the ancestors of the Noons had made the crossing. It gave Chandni a strange feeling, kind of shivery, like she used to get in history lessons when she was little, thinking about how far human beings had come. And there wasn’t a sandstorm blowing, and there was Old Earth, hanging in the Martian sky like a tiny blue star. Chandni thought it would be nice to go there, but there wasn’t time — for some reason the Guardians had never opened a K-gate on Earth itself, and it took months and months to get there by spaceship. The Empress needed to be back on Grand Central in time for her summer party.

  *

  It was on the way back from Mars that Chandni had her first chance to talk to Threnody since that day in the chess garden. Actually, that wasn’t quite true: on most days since then Threnody had said, “How are you settling in, Chandni?” or “Are you happy, Chandni?” but this was the first time that Chandni had felt she wanted a real answer.

  They were riding on the new Noon train. Everybody said it didn’t compare to the old Noon train, but it still seemed pretty fancy to Chandni: sixty carriages, pulled by an enormous old loco called the Crystal Horizon. Threnody’s quarters were in the middle of the train: a carriage for her clothes, and two for herself and her staff, with war drones buzzing along outside the windows and then nipping quickly into hangars in the carriage roofs whenever the train approached a K-gate, since nothing could go through a K-gate unless it was on a train. One night Chandni was trying to sleep, and finding it difficult because the train kept passing across worlds where it was daytime, so she went from her cabin downstairs into the lounge part of the car and found that Threnody was having the same problem. The Empress of the Network, with her halo of little drones, was standing at a window with a glass of hot chocolate in her hand and a little chocolate moustache where she’d been drinking it.

  “So what do you think of this life, Chandni Hansa?” she asked.

  Chandni, who had been about to make an excuse and go back to her cabin, stayed where she was and shrugged. She wanted to say something about the way she’d felt when she stood on Mars and looked up at Old Earth, but she couldn’t find the right sort of words. “It’s like living in an ad,” she said at last.

  Threnody laughed. “You’re right! It is! We are living in an ad. My whole life is just a great, big-budget advertisement, designed to show the people of the Network that everything is under control and all’s well with the worlds. And we’re just actresses, playing our parts.”

  Chandni frowned. “But you’re the Empress…”

  Threnody laughed some more. “Have you not noticed Lyssa Delius?”

  “The tall black lady with the tall white hair? The Rail Marshal?” Chandni had noticed the Rail Marshal all right. And she had only been in the Empress’s service for a few days before the Rail Marshal had noticed her. Chandni had heard her ask Kala Tanaka who the new girl was. Kala Tanaka, who had just magicked Chandni through all the palace employee security checks and had her tracker bracelet removed, had trotted out her friend-of-the-family-charity-job story, but Chandni could tell the Rail Marshal didn’t buy it. She had narrowed her wise old eyes and said, “I trust you know what you’re doing, Kala…”

  “She’s the real ruler of the rails,” said Threnody. “I’m just her puppet. That’s why she chose me. I’m young and I don’t know how things work and I don’t have any ideas of my own. I’m just a Noon doll she can prop up on the Flatcar Throne while she tries to get the senate to pass new laws in my name. If I tried to argue she’d probably do with me whatever she did with my sister Priya, and no one knows what’s become of Priya. Lyssa Delius comes from some horrible industrial world; she grew up poor, and she wants laws that will help other poor people. Banning Motorik labor, and raising wages, and stuff like that. But you can imagine how that goes down with my family and all the other corporate families. They say I’m bringing in dangerous laws and risking instability because I’m young and foolish. But it’s not my fault! I’m just her puppet!”

  Chandni thought she liked the sound of Lyssa Delius and her laws. She wondered if it would be worth asking her to bring in another, so that people couldn’t be frozen for years at a time and end up skipping across the surface of the decades like a skimmed stone. But all she said was, “It’s the Guardians who really run things, isn’t it? Even I know that.”

  Threnody peered into her hot chocolate as if there might be answers there. “The Guardians haven’t said anything about what Lyssa Delius is up to. They stay in the Datasea and don’t share their thoughts with anyone. If they approve, they ought to say so, so everyone would know.”

  “If they don’t approve, they could burn you and Lyssa Delius up with a lightning bolt or something,” said Chandni. She’d never really given a lot of thought to those all-wise AIs who were supposed to watch and guide everybody. It was pretty obvious they didn’t care about her, so why should she care about them? Still, she had a vague idea that if they didn’t like you they would say it with lightning bolts.

  “I met a Guardian once,” said Threnody. “It was an interface of Anais Six. On Sundarban. The night Zen Starling and his Moto girl escaped. The night Lyssa Delius woke me up to tell me I was going to be Empress. That was the last time I saw Kobi.”

  Chandni sat down, sensing that this was going to be a long talk. Her father used to get in this mood at the end, although he’d done it on rice wine, not hot chocolate. The train passed through a K-gate and ran out across a plain of what looked like ice beneath two red suns that appeared to be eating each other. Chandni and Threnody, experienced rail travelers, barely bothered glancing at the view.

  Chandni said, “Who’s Kobi?”

  “He and I were supposed to get married, before I was Empress,” said Threnody. “It was just a business marriage, meant to link the Noons to a Sundarban spacer clan, the Chen-Tulsis. Kobi was an oaf. Well, he used to be an oaf… but just at the end he was quite brave. You know how, when things get bad, you
see people as they really are? And Kobi was all right, really. I think he truly cared about me. But once I was Empress it was all off. The Empress can’t go marrying into some little family nobody’s ever heard of. I’ll have to marry an Albayek or a Ngyuen or somebody…”

  Chandni sat there in the glow of the dying suns and watched tears run down the face of the Empress of the Galaxy, and thought what a strange turn of events this was for a popsicle girl.

  “I wasn’t in love with him or anything,” said Threnody. “I don’t know why I’m crying. I haven’t thought about him much, until tonight. I’m just tired. Kobi Chen-Tulsi! I’m lucky to be rid of him, really. I wonder what he’s doing now?”

  6

  Kobi Chen-Tulsi saw the images from Mars on his headset while a train called Heavy Weather carried him across a series of dull and mostly snowbound industrial worlds way out on the Trans-Chiba branch lines. These were the strongholds of the Prell family, with whom his own family was hoping to do an important business deal. He supposed it would be some sort of consolation after the collapse of the merger with the Noons, but he didn’t like the Prells, he didn’t like their cheerless planets, and he didn’t like his cousin Rolo, who had been sent with him to oversee the signing of the contract. So he closed his eyes and pretended to doze while his headset streamed images from the Empress’s Martian pilgrimage straight to the visual centers of his brain.

  If things had gone according to plan, he and Threnody would have been celebrating their wedding about then. It was only meant to be a business marriage, but Kobi had loved his Thren, he really had. He couldn’t believe his luck when their families’ matchmakers first introduced them. He had done his clumsy best to impress her, and made a fool of himself, and probably failed, but after the Spindlebridge disaster she had needed him, and he had really thought she was starting to like him. And then she’d suddenly been whisked away and elected Empress, and it was thanks but no thanks, Kobi Chen-Tulsi.

  And the worst part was that nobody seemed to understand that his heart was broken. His mother was more worried about the damage to the Chen-Tulsi brand. The family image consultants told her Kobi shouldn’t even be allowed out in public, in case he gave more ammunition to the Sundarbani gossip feeds, which were all having a ball with this, of course. That was why he’d been packed off with Rolo on this trade mission to the Prell Consortium on their frozen, half-finished worlds at the edge of the Network. That was how he came to be slumped on the uncomfortable seats of the Heavy Weather, scrolling through stories about Threnody on his headset, while Rolo ate almond pastries in the seat beside him and wiped his sticky fingers on the armrest.

  *

  No one remembered for sure whether it was the Guardians who had created the corporations, or the corporations that had created the Guardians. One thing was certain: the Guardians had created the K-gates, and when humanity started to travel through them it was the corporations that had built the stations and the trains and rolling stock, and laid some of the rails that linked the gates together. Doing business in those wild times on worlds that might be half a galaxy apart, when laws were always changing, the corporations found they needed more than trust to build their business deals on, so they had started to seal their alliances with marriage, and the corporate families were born.

  During the centuries that followed, some of the families had thrived, while others withered away. The most important these days were the Noons (of course), the Albayeks, the Nguyens, and the Khans. There were thousands of smaller houses too — families like the Chen-Tulsis, with power in a single station or system, and dreams of growing greater. And then there were the Prells, lurking in their cold worlds out on the western branch lines, nursing their old grudges, stubbornly convinced that they deserved more power, more say in things. “We built this Network,” the Prells would grumble, sooner or later, whenever the talk turned to politics. “We were the pioneers, we went where no one else wanted to go, and once we’d built stations there and set about terraforming the worlds we found, some other family would breeze in and take over. Those Noons. Those Albayeks. Noses in the air, acting all ethical, cutting us out, cheating us. Like they’d be anything without us Prells…”

  The Prells had never made their peace with the other great families or intermarried as the others had. They traded, but they stayed aloof. Fifty years ago they had backed the separatist rebels on the Spiral Line and started a nasty little war that almost won them the Empire, until Railforce smashed their armored trains at the Battle of Galaghast.

  Many people had wondered why the Guardians didn’t just give the troublesome Prell-controlled worlds to other, more civilized families and be done with it. Perhaps it was just that nobody but the Prells wanted the bother and hard work of ruling the Trans-Chiba branch lines.

  *

  “Kobi! Wake up, cousin! Straighten yourself up a bit, for the Guardians’ sake. We’re here!”

  Kobi turned off his headset and pretended to wake. Rolo was heaving himself to his feet, scattering crumbs and pastry wrappers. He was older than Kobi by five or six years, but Kobi always thought he looked like an overinflated child, with his plump face and his love of sweets.

  “Do stir yourself, cousin Kobi,” he blustered. “We mustn’t dawdle. We can’t afford to offend the Prells, and the Prells are very easily offended. I know these people, remember. I’ve been working on this deal for years, making friends, making contacts, while you paraded around with that stuck-up Noon girl.”

  “Threnody isn’t stuck-up. She’s just shy…”

  “All right, cousin. Don’t bite my head off! Maybe we’ll find you a nice Prell girl, eh? They have hearts of ice, but I’m sure you could melt them…”

  Kobi scowled and reached for his coat and hat.

  Broken Moon was a little larger than most of the Prell stations they had passed through, and the lowering portraits of Elon Prell above the platforms were a little more imposing. A squad of the Prells’ Corporate Marines was waiting to meet them on the platform. A car drove them away through a delta of rail yards and engine sheds and up winding roads into the mountains.

  There, among the crags, crouched Karkatagarh, the family home of the Prells. People called it “Crab Castle” according to Rolo, and it did look a bit like a crab: a long, low bio-building, the main section tucked in under a shell-shaped roof, two crescent guest wings forming its pincers. Across the sky above it were strewn the fragments of the broken moon that gave this world its name. It must have been nearly as big as its mother planet once, but some long-ago impact had shattered it into a permanent, ragged crescent, surrounded by rings of rubble. Its bone-cold light lay on the snow and on the curved crab-shell roof of Karkatagarh.

  A cable car took Kobi and Rolo up to the house. They stepped out into a circular entrance hall walled with black stone and decorated with the heads of gigantic hairy animals — some kind of gene-teched Old Earth prehistorics. “All shot in the family game reserve on the far side of the mountain,” said the young woman who was waiting there. “I’m told you like to hunt?”

  Kobi wondered if she’d heard the stories about him. He had liked to hunt, but he’d done some stupid things in the Noon preserve on Jangala and ended up nearly getting himself killed by one of their game beasts. The sight of all those tusked and glaring heads brought the memory of it back: the terror and the shame. When the young woman said, “I’ll take you out tomorrow, if you like,” he thought he was going to be sick.

  “We’d love to!” said Rolo.

  “I’m Laria Prell,” she said, bowing. She was not much older than Kobi. White-blond hair and pale gray eyes, and the unflattering purple dress uniform of the Prell CoMa, which did nothing for her sturdy figure. Kobi had not met many white people before. It was hard not to stare at her pasty, blotchy face, her long pink nose. But she seemed to be his partner for the evening, so he smiled as gallantly as he could and followed her through into a dining room, where there were more
people to meet: Prells, Prells, Colonel somebody of Railforce, the Stationmaster of somewhere, then more Prells, and finally the old man himself, Elon Prell, as ugly and unwelcoming as his house, his face creased into deep lines by years of scheming.

  The servants were human, not Motorik, and they seemed to come in matching pairs. The man who showed Kobi and Laria to their seats had a doppelganger who came a moment later to pour their drinks. More pairs of identical servants brought in the food: thin soup, then mammoth steaks, served rare and oozing blood. Behind Elon’s chair stood two thugs with identical grim faces and shaved heads.

  “My uncle only employs twins here,” said Laria softly. “Those two behind him are Shiv and Enki Mako, his favorite bodyguards. Whenever twins are born on the Prell worlds, their parents know they can find work with our family. It is to honor the Twins themselves: the great Twins, in the Datasea. The Twins have always been very good to our family.”

  That figured, thought Kobi. Everyone said the Twins were the strangest, most difficult of the Guardians. The Prells were just their kind of people. At least there was only one of Laria…

  After dinner they went into a small conference room, where Rolo turned on a holoprojector and gave a presentation about how much money the Prells and the Chen-Tulsis could make if they worked together, extracting minerals from the various Prell-owned systems. “Don’t imagine that, because we are based on Sundarban, we don’t know what hard work is. The Chen-Tulsi family has built its fortunes in the hardest places there are: asteroid mines, remote moons. My grandmother, our glorious founder, spent most of her life in space, building anti-matter farms in the magnetosphere of the star Vajrapani…” Holographic planets whirled past Kobi’s face. A miniature asteroid belt appeared above the projector like a halo of airborne granola, with threads of orange to show the paths Chen-Tulsi mining ships could take between the larger asteroids.