by Philip Reeve
Rolo was good at this. He looked less childlike, rattling off figures and statistics in answer to the questions the Prell family executives fired at him. And there was nothing for Kobi to do but sit there sleepily, half watching, slyly calling up images of Threnody on his headset, wondering if he would ever be happy again.
“A few weeks ago you were ready to ally yourselves to the Noons,” grumbled Elon Prell. He pointed a thick finger at Kobi. “He was scheduled to marry the girl they just shoehorned in as Empress. Is that why you’re here? Prells are your second choice, are we?”
“I don’t deny that we were disappointed when the marriage to Threnody Noon fell through,” said Rolo smoothly, before Kobi could think of a reply. “But we’ve decided to look on it as an opportunity. The girl is Empress, but will she stay Empress? Everyone knows she is only Lyssa Delius’s puppet, and no one likes the reforms that Delius is planning. Who knows what might happen? We feel that it might be best to link ourselves to a more adaptable family.”
What that meant exactly, Kobi wasn’t sure, but the Prells seemed pleased. There were murmurs of agreement from around the table. A couple of people even raised their glasses, drinking to Rolo’s health with their sour local wine. Kobi smiled and nodded, trying to look intelligent.
“Well said,” growled Elon Prell, and twin servants stepped forward to fill his glass, and Kobi’s too. “Contracts will be arranged tomorrow, and a formal announcement next week, but I think we’re agreed. An alliance between our two families: the Chen-Tulsis to have exclusive development rights to our off-world possessions, while we gain access to your rail-freight yards and other facilities on Sundarban. The arrangement to be sealed by marriage between Lady Laria Prell and Kobi Chen-Tulsi.”
Which was the first Kobi had heard about it, and, judging by the look of horror on her plain face, the first that Laria Prell had heard too.
*
“I thought you realized!” Rolo kept saying, later. “I thought your mother would have told you that she had found a new match for you!”
“If she had told me, I would never have come to this horrible place!”
“Ah. Well, I expect that’s why she didn’t tell you, then.”
They were in Rolo’s room, which was next door to Kobi’s, on one of the upper floors of Crab Castle. Rolo was sitting on the bed, one shoe off, as if he had been starting to get undressed when Kobi burst in.
“But I don’t want to marry the Prell girl!”
“Do stop calling her the ‘Prell girl.’ Call her Laria. That’s what you will have to call her when you’re married.”
“I…”
“I know, I know. You don’t want to marry her. But that’s the price you pay for being the heir to an up-and-coming family like ours. You are like a counter in a game, dear cousin; your mother must make the best play she can with you.”
“And this is it? Marrying me to that shovel-faced ice princess so we can work our butts off for the Prells?”
“For one thing, Kobi, it pains me to hear you talk about your future wife in that way; she is probably a very lovely girl. Looks aren’t everything, you know. And for another thing, an alliance with the Prell Consortium is the very best hope for our family at the moment. You don’t know everything, cousin of mine. Believe you me, these Prells are going places.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Rolo yawned and shook his head. “I’ve said too much. Now do go to bed, Kobi, dear fellow. It’s very late, we’ve had a long day, and these frosty savages seem intent on taking us hunting in the morning.”
Kobi went and stood at the window. He had a vague idea about climbing out of it and finding his way off this chilly rock, but Mother would be furious, and it was snowing hard outside.
Down in the courtyard Elon Prell himself, in a massive fur coat, was saying goodbye to one of his guests. His twin bodyguards stood behind Elon in the shadows. As the visitor’s flyer took off, the glare from its running lights flashed on their shaven heads, pale and shiny as a pair of matching skulls.
7
By dawn the shattered moon had moved to another part of the sky, but Kobi could still see it hanging there, its gigantic ruin filling the frosty clear air above the distant rail yards. The sun was small and low and gave no warmth. Why on earth did the Prells insist on making their home here? Kobi wondered. Was it plain stubbornness? Or maybe they just liked being uncomfortable. The bed in his big, underheated room had been as hard as a slab of slate.
Hunting was uncomfortable too. No snow boats or hound-drones for the Prells. They hunted with real hounds, and they did it on the backs of actual horses. It was years since Kobi had ridden one, but he wasn’t going to let his new future in-laws see how scared he was, so he scrambled up somehow into the big beast’s saddle and tried to look as if he knew what he was doing. The horses were artificial, with a twist of zebra in their DNA. Their coats matched the chameleon ponchos that the riders wore, the black and white stripes camouflaging them against the snow-slashed screes of Broken Moon.
Long before they’d crossed the ridge into the hunting reserve, Kobi’s thighs were aching and his face was numb from the icy wind. Still, he seemed to be handling the horse all right, cantering along with the rest of the party. And the game they were after was not as big or as fierce as he’d feared: just a troop of lanky, white-furred monkeys that lived on the tops of the mountains.
They turned up a steep-sided valley, following the clamor of the dogs and the distant, echoing howls of the monkeys. Kobi found himself riding beside Laria Prell, who said stiffly, “I wasn’t expecting that announcement last night.”
“Me neither,” said Kobi. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. I don’t want to marry you, either.”
That startled him a bit. Why not? he thought.
“I don’t want to marry anybody,” she said. “Maybe one day, but not yet. I’ve been with the family marine corps for a couple of years. I’m enjoying it. I want to command a wartrain one day.”
“I suppose you could be married and still be a soldier,” said Kobi. He thought her white face made sense out here in the cold. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose had turned red, which sort of suited her, and on horseback she had a kind of big-boned grace. He supposed it didn’t matter who he was engaged to, now that he had lost Threnody. Why not Laria Prell?
But she had already ridden on ahead. He lost sight of her in the blur of identical striped horses and striped ponchos and hoof-scattered powder snow. Then guns started going off far up the valley and the field broke up, pursuing individual monkeys as the troop scattered across the slopes. Ten minutes later he caught a glimpse of Laria again, standing up in her saddle, taking aim with her carbine at a big male that was whooping and jabbering at her from a claw of rock. He turned his horse uphill toward her, but it plunged through a crust of new snow into a hollow and he was thrown over its head.
He landed hard. By the time he had floundered out of the snowdrift his horse was gone, heading for home with its stirrups flying. Kobi dropped back almost gratefully into the snow, waiting for the Prells’ drones to spot him and their servants to bring a bike or flyer and fetch him home. But slowly, as the sounds of the hunt faded over the ridge above him, he started to realize that wasn’t going to happen. These stupid Prells with their love of hardship probably didn’t have any drones on watch, or any rescue flyers waiting to ferry fallen riders home. He tried his headset, but a damping field blocked all connection to the local data raft; there was just an emergency site where serious injuries could be reported.
Kobi checked himself over. He wasn’t injured. He was about to log in and ask for a flyer to come and fetch him anyway when he suddenly wondered if the Prells were testing him. Maybe this ordeal was designed to see if he had what it took to be a proper Prell. He didn’t want to confirm their prejudices about soft Sundarbanis. And he didn’t want to have to go home
and face his mother with the tale of another failure, another disastrous hunting trip.
So he was going to have to walk back to Crab Castle.
Great.
*
It was a long walk, and a lonely one, and Kobi was not used to long walks or loneliness. For the first hour or so he played the music that was stored in his headset, but he didn’t much like music really, and he grew bored with it. When he turned it off the mountains were silent except for the squeak and crunch of his boots on the snow. He had changed the chameleon settings on his poncho so that it was bright orange, in the hope that someone would spot him trudging across the snowfields. But if the hunt was still out, they had moved far away from him. He thought he caught the baying of the hounds at one point, but it might have been only the wind moaning through the crags.
The low sun sank lower still. Blue shadows crept across the snowfields, and the ruined moon toppled across the sky. It was like living under a permanently collapsing tower, thought Kobi, glaring up at it. No wonder the Prells were all half crazy.
When the last of the daylight faded, he finally admitted to himself that he was lost. He was considering pinging the emergency site again when a familiar sound came echoing over the ridge ahead of him: the squeal of train brakes and the dull clash of couplings. He stumbled up the ridge and looked down onto a rail yard, patched with light from tall gantries. There were stacked freight containers and a dozen tracks vanishing into an opening in the mountainside. It was a strange place for a freight terminal, but Broken Moon was a strange world. Maybe there were mines in there. There would be people, at least, or machines that would be able to connect him to Crab Castle. He bounded down the slope toward the tracks in a cloud of powder snow.
But at the foot of the slope, between him and the tracks, there was a fence. Chain link, many feet high, topped off with razor wire. He’d never seen security like it. What were the Prells afraid of, out here in the mountains? Maybe the monkeys were a problem?
Angrily, he started to trudge along beside the fence, following the rails toward the place where they went into the mountain. He could see lights in there, and movement: big lifters piling things onto flatcars. He turned on his headset, but there was still nothing. Thought about shouting, but the underground loading bays were still too far away, and too loud for anyone inside to hear him.
Then the nearest set of rails began to thrum, the way rails did when a train was coming. He looked over his shoulder and saw it approaching up the line with its lights out, moving slowly. He turned to face it, and was about to wave his arms and shout when something made him think better of it.
Why would it not have its lights on?
He stood in the shadows and watched as it rumbled past. It was a wartrain, small but heavily armed, and towing a long line of armored carriages and flatcars. On every flatcar squatted a tank, or a gun, or an assault hovercraft. Kobi had never seen so much military equipment outside an action threedie. And there was more inside the mountain; he turned his headset on and zoomed in on the loading bays, and in each one there was a Prell wartrain.
So this was what Rolo had meant when he said the Prells were going places. They were getting ready to go to war.
Light blazed down on him from the sky. He looked up at the descending belly of a flyer. He must have triggered some trackside security system. The Prells were happy enough to take him off their mountain now.
8
Back in Crab Castle, after he’d eaten and been checked over by the Prells’ medics, Kobi talked to Rolo — lowly and urgently in his room, knowing the heavy carvings on the walls might hide spy cams and microphones that would feed every word straight into the Prells’ security net.
“They have wartrains, Rolo! Dozens of them. They’re getting ready for something…”
Rolo was sulky, angry at him for getting lost, annoyed at being dragged away from the drinks and food downstairs. “Well of course they’re getting ready for something, dear cousin. Why do you think we want this alliance? Everything’s changed: the Noons have been weakened, and it’s time for someone else to seize power. That someone will be the Prell Consortium. They’ve been waiting a generation for this. Your future father-in-law knows he’ll never get a better chance.”
“Don’t call him that!”
“Why not? You seemed to be getting along all right with Lady Laria at the hunt today, before you fell off.”
“This isn’t about Laria. It’s about Threnody. What’s going to happen to her, if the Prells take over?”
“She’ll be killed, I expect. Or sent into exile. Why do you care? That stuck-up Noon cow…”
“She isn’t stuck-up.”
“She dumped you fast enough when a better chance came along.”
“They made her the Empress! She didn’t want it! They made her break the engagement! They had to! Our family isn’t big enough to marry into the imperial household!”
“But we will be!” said Rolo. “Don’t you see? By the time your marriage to Laria Prell goes through, her uncle Elon will be sitting on the Flatcar Throne. That’s what this is all about, Kobi. Getting our feet under the table at the dawn of a new dynasty. We’re going to be one of the great families of this new era.”
Kobi sat down on the bed. He picked miserably at the embroidered covers. “I don’t see how they can expect to get away with it,” he said. “All those wartrains and troop movements. The Guardians will notice.”
Rolo smiled. It was the rather self-satisfied smile of someone who knows a secret. He sat down beside Kobi on the bed and said, “Cousin dearest, you must know that some of the Guardians have always had a soft spot for our chilly friends out here in Trans-Chiba. The Twins are protecting them, making sure they can prepare in secret for their move against the Noons. Which, when it comes, will be swift and ruthless. The other Guardians will grumble, but Guardians value stability above everything else. Once the smoke clears, Elon Prell will be Emperor, and as long as he doesn’t try to rule too brutally, the Guardians will accept him. It doesn’t make too much difference to them who sits on the Flatcar Throne, so long as someone does.”
Kobi thought of Threnody. How pretty she had looked in those portraits from Mars. Did she know what the Prells were cooking up? Surely her Railforce guards would be ready for it? But if even the Guardians didn’t know…
“You see?” said Rolo, springing up, as if he was too excited to sit still for long. “You see? Poor old cousin Rolo, banished to the Winter Stars to talk to savages, but I’ve been getting to know these people. I’ve been building bridges, making deals. As soon as the old Emperor died I went straight to your mother and said, ‘This is our chance, forget those old Noons, the Prells are the people to back.’ You see?”
“Yes,” said Kobi meekly.
“And you’re going to thank me for finding you such a bride?”
“Thank you, Rolo.”
“Don’t mention it! Now, I don’t know about you, but I could do with another drink tonight, so I am going to go back downstairs. Coming? Just keep what I’ve told you to yourself.”
Kobi grinned. “All right. You continue down; I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
He waited until his cousin had had time to walk along the corridor to the elevators, then started to change. He pulled on his traveling clothes. Over the top he put the camouflage hunting poncho. When he left, he went out through the window onto the balcony and down an outside staircase, heading for the cable car.
9
He told himself there was nothing to be afraid of. He was a guest in the Prells’ home, and an important guest at that. If he wanted to take an evening stroll alone (despite the cold, despite how tired he was), then no one could object. All the same, as the cable car let him off at the small station below Crab Castle, he pulled up his hood and chameleoned his poncho to the same dull gray as those of the workers who were waiting there for a connection to the station c
ity.
He stood in the shadows and wondered what his plan was. He hadn’t had much experience with making plans. He had never needed to. When you were the son of a corporate family you did what you wanted, and left others to clean up the mess.
Well, now he wanted to warn Threnody, and give her a chance to get away from Grand Central before whatever it was that the Prells were planning happened. He didn’t have to actually go there himself. There was a Railforce post on Broken Moon; he’d tell the commander what he knew, then get a train back to Crab Castle before morning, and explain at breakfast that he had been too tired to rejoin the party.
It felt good to have that sorted out in his mind.
The train arrived and he shuffled into it, trying not to look too shocked at the shabbiness of the standard-class carriages. He had never traveled in standard class before. There were no compartments, just rows and rows of seats. Keeping his hood up, he sat in a corner one with his face turned to the window, looking out at snowfields and dark buildings while he used his headset to search the local data raft for the Railforce office. He wasn’t going to risk messaging them, but he needed to know where to go and who to talk to so that he could deliver his warning in person.
There it was. A bland black block in the business district, not far from the station platforms. The local Railforce commander was a Colonel Bairam — a good Sundarbani name. Kobi called up a bio of him, and his plan fell apart.
He recognized the colonel’s photo instantly. He was the same old, white-haired soldier who had been at the Prells’ dinner.
“Broken Moon Station City,” the train said, slowing. The other passengers all started pulling on coats and picking up bags, but Kobi stayed staring out of the window, watching the trackside clutter go by. Of course the Prells would have made sure that the local Railforce officers were in their pocket. Of course Colonel Bairam was a welcome guest at Crab Castle, a friend of the family. His junior officers too, most likely. Kobi groaned. How could he have been so stupid?