Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  “You all right, friend?” asked a man, leaning down to touch his shoulder. Kobi stood up hastily, nodding, but the man followed him down the carriage and into the vestibule, where the other passengers were lining up to leave. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “I’m just visiting,” said Kobi. “Doing some work for my family.”

  “Sundarbani, are you?” asked the man, recognizing Kobi’s accent. A couple of others turned to look at him. “Bet you find it cold out here!”

  The doors had opened. Everyone was shuffling out. In the hard white light under the station canopy, Kobi saw another train waiting on the neighboring platform, and heard the station’s automated announcement booming, “All passengers for the zero forty-five to Golden Junction, stopping at Frostfall, PityMe, Lifthrasir, Chiba, and Golden Junction…”

  “My train,” he said, breaking free of his new friend, shoving a woman out of the way. “Excuse me…”

  He sprinted across the platform and jumped aboard the express just as the doors sighed shut. One of the train’s subroutines opened a window into his headset and asked for his travel credit. He pinged it the number of his family’s account without thinking, and sat down. There was a slight delay — the doors closed, then opened again — and Kobi spent the time wishing he had been smart enough to buy some basic credit before he boarded. He was not cut out for this sort of adventure; he did not think fast enough. But it was all right; the train was finally pulling out of the station, leaving the city behind.

  He pushed his way through the sticky sliding doors that led from the vestibule into the main part of the train car. He sat down in an empty seat, and looked out of the window for a last glimpse of Broken Moon’s broken moon as the loco began to sing, accelerating hard into a tunnel and down the long straight to the K-gate.

  A door slid open at the far end of the car and Elon Prell’s twin bodyguards came through, making their way forward from the back of the train. They were moving slowly, looking into each bay of seats, glancing quickly at the face of every passenger. When they passed under the lamps set in the car ceiling, the light bounced from their shaved scalps.

  I’ll bluff it out, Kobi told himself. I’ll tell them I’m going down to Golden Junction to meet a girl. They’ll understand that… I’m a Chen-Tulsi — they won’t do anything to me…

  The twins were closer now. They moved in unison, but their heads turned in different directions, one checking the passengers on the left of the car, the other those on the right.

  I’ll pretend I’m asleep, thought Kobi. I’ll put my head down and close my eyes, and they won’t even notice me.

  But he knew they would.

  He felt the rhythm of the wheels change suddenly, and knew the train was hurtling into a gate. As the un-light of K-space shone through the windows he started to move, pulling himself out of the seat in the weird slow-motion timeless instant when his carriage was passing through the gate. By the time the train was across the threshold and racketing out of a tunnel on some minor moon, he was on his feet, moving toward the dining car at the front end.

  He knew it would be a mistake to look back, but he looked back anyway. One of the Mako brothers saw him. Kobi pushed his way out of the car, through the swaying concertina coupling, into the next. Passengers in the seats he passed glanced up at him, and he was sure they could tell that he was scared. Through another door, another vestibule, another roaring coupling. Past stacked-up suitcases in a baggage car. The Motorik attendant there looked at him expectantly, but he shoved it out of his way and went on into the next car, and the next, and then turned sideways into a bathroom, hoping the Makos would go past.

  After a moment he heard their voices outside. Something that sounded harder than a fist knocked on the door. “Sir?”

  “Just a minute…” Kobi backed against the window. Lights were flashing past outside, but the glass was frosted so that he couldn’t see out. Up through the drain from the sink in the corner came the thin, throbbing hiss of the wheels on the tracks, like music seeping from a cheap headset. The knocking on the door started again. It was loud and confident sounding — the knocking of men who were used to the doors they knocked on being opened.

  Kobi messaged Rolo, who answered almost instantly. His image appeared, streamed by the headset into Kobi’s visual cortex, so that Rolo’s face seemed to hang in the air between him and the bathroom wall. He looked frazzled and angry. “Kobi? Where are you? What do you think you’re—?”

  “They’re after me!” Kobi whimpered. “I’m on a train, and there are these two—”

  “Of course they’re after you!” shouted Rolo. “They think you’re a spy! What the hell… Where are you?”

  “Sir?” said one of the men outside the door.

  “On a train… I don’t know,” said Kobi. “There are these two thugs, the Mako brothers…”

  “Elon Prell’s personal enforcers,” said Rolo. “What did you expect? Did you think you could just sneak out, knowing what you know? Did you think they wouldn’t be watching you?” He shook his head. “There’s nothing I can do for you, you poor fool. When I think of all the work I put into this alliance—”

  Kobi cut the connection. Stood there trembling, staring at his own stunned face in the mirror above the tiny sink. There’s nothing I can do. They were going to kill him. It didn’t feel real. It couldn’t end here. Not in a bathroom…

  “Please come out, sir,” said the voice outside the door.

  Kobi talked to his headset, getting into the train’s systems. The loco was called Decision Trees, an old AG-90 from the Foss trainworks on Kalina B. He did not know if he could trust it, but it had not locked any doors in his face on his way down the train, or unlocked this one yet, so he sent it a desperate message. “Train, tell Threnody Noon the Prells are going to attack Grand Central, tell her I—”

  A sudden weightless feeling took hold of him. Beyond the frosted glass the light had changed to the unknown color of K-space. The train poured itself through another gateway, and in the timeless instant when it was between two worlds, there was a loud bang and the bathroom door burst open. One of the men stayed outside, keeping watch. The other came halfway in, pointing a chunky silver gun at Kobi.

  “I am Kobi Chen-Tulsi!” shouted Kobi, brandishing his family’s name like a weapon. It had always worked for him before, when he had been in minor trouble with the police on Sundarban, or wanted a table for his friends in a crowded restaurant. He shouted it half to the train, in the hope that it was listening, and half to the gunman. “I’m important!”

  But the train did not answer, and the gunman shot him anyway.

  10

  Sometimes Chandni worried that if she went on living with rich people she would end up acting like a rich person, and caring about the things rich people cared about: poetry and curtains and stuff. Sometimes she thought that might not be such a bad idea, because the people at the palace seemed a lot happier and healthier than the low heroes she had mixed with in the past. But each time she started to enjoy her new life, something would happen to jolt her out of it.

  The midsummer ball was like that. Chandni had been looking forward to it. The Empress’s own dressmakers had made her a new gown for the occasion. Her hair had grown back just enough that she no longer had to wear a wig or headscarf. As she made her way downstairs to the Azure Room with all the other ladies, she kept catching glimpses of her reflection in mirrors and polished wall panels and thinking that she had come a long way since the freezers. But when she entered the massive room, her heart hardened again. No one had bothered telling her that the ball was ice-themed.

  It was a rich people idea of a joke, she guessed: marking the longest day of Grand Central’s long summer in a room full of icebergs. The floor had been covered with black sand, and the icebergs were so big that she imagined the room must have been demolished to let them in, then rebuilt around them.
Some had been hollowed out and musicians were playing inside them, strange bing-bongy music on those modern instruments whose names Chandni could never remember. Some had spiral staircases carved up their flanks, and partygoers were gathering on their summits, reaching up to touch the painted ceiling. On a long central dais stood icy sculptures of birds and animals, and a centerpiece in the form of the smiling sun symbol of the Noons, which was hollow, and appeared to be full of red and gold butterflies. On ice-carved tables stood blocks of ice in which delicious-looking snacks had been embedded. They were designed to melt during the first few dances, so that people could reward themselves with some refreshment when they came off the dance floor.

  For a moment Chandni stood in the doorway as if she had been flash-frozen again. She was wondering if it was all some cruel, elaborate joke about her past. But it wasn’t. The only people who knew about her time on ice were Kala Tanaka and the Empress herself. Kala Tanaka was dancing with Threnody’s uncle Nilesh, who had arrived from Khoorsandi that afternoon. There was a silly smile on her plain old face, and she looked as if she had forgotten that Chandni Hansa even existed. Threnody was dancing too, more formally, with Lyssa Delius. She wore a silvery dress cut low behind, and intricate white frost patterns had been stenciled on the brown of her shoulders and her back. She must have sat for hours while someone sprayed those on her, Chandni thought, and it had never once crossed her mind that for a girl from the freezer prisons, all this ice might bring back chilly memories.

  “Do you like the music?” asked a young officer in Railforce uniform, nerving himself to ask Chandni for a dance.

  “It’s music?”

  “Yes! That’s Lufthansa Terminal — you must have heard of them? And I hear Cranberry Morpheme will be playing later…”

  “I prefer real bands,” she shouted, over the music. “Like The Radical Daylight…” But The Radical Daylight had split up because of artistic differences while Chandni had been doing her first stint in the freezers, and she could tell from the uncertain look in the young man’s eyes that nobody under fifty had even heard of them.

  She turned and left. The palace corridors were empty except for patrolling security drones, but Chandni pinged them her clearance code and they did not bother her. She helped herself to a priceless little Old Earth artifact from a niche beside the entrance to the Waterfall Room. Outside the windows, fireworks were rising above the city, silver and white, drawing enormous snowflakes on the sky.

  *

  Threnody was not enjoying the party either. It had seemed like a good idea to decorate the ballroom in the style of her mother’s iceberg portraits, but they just made her homesick for the black sand beaches of Malapet, and her mother had preferred to stay at home and paint — she did not like parties. Of course, an Empress could not storm off to her room, so Threnody stayed, and danced, and smiled, and said all the usual pointless things to all the usual pointless people. But she was glad when the partygoers started making for their cars and flyers and the guest rooms on the lower floors, leaving the palace staff to start melting the icebergs with hot air blowers and sweeping up tons of wet sand.

  She sent her ladies-in-waiting to bed, wondered vaguely what had become of Chandni Hansa, and took the elevator to her own quarters on the top floor. A message pinged into her headset on the way. She waited until all her servants and her security team had left before she threw herself down on one of her enormous sofas and checked to see who it was from. Blissful alone time, much better than parties. She was a little drunk. Her room spun around her, not unpleasantly. The message was from the Crystal Horizon, the train that had taken her to Mars. It must have been given her private channel while she was a passenger. It was a nice old train, but she wondered why it would ping messages at her in the middle of the night.

  Empress Threnody — please contact me.

  Threnody slipped her shoes off and flexed her toes, which had been trodden on by many important people during the dancing. (Not enough people for Lyssa Delius’s liking; a lot of the corporate families had stayed away, unhappy about the new laws that the Rail Marshal had pushed through the senate while the media was busy covering the Mars trip.)

  Threnody pinged a reply to the Crystal Horizon. The waiting signal flashed for a moment in the corner of her eye, then a still image of the old train appeared and its voice said, “Empress Threnody! I am sorry to interrupt you. I have returned to normal service, as you know, and I am just leaving Grand Central. I am the three twenty express to Coalsack Junction…”

  “Three twenty?” Threnody yawned. “Is it really that late? I mean, that early?”

  “I can’t talk for long, Empress Threnody; I’ll be going through the gate in a minute. But I heard something very odd in Chiba yesterday. A loco called Decision Trees told me that one of its passengers got shot. Two Prell security people came aboard, told the Trees this young fellow was a terrorist. Well, after what happened to the Wildfire and the Time of Gifts we’re all a bit on edge about that sort of thing, so the Trees let them carry on. It thought they were going to arrest him. But they shot him! Dead!”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, just before it happened, the young man talked to it. He said his name was Kobi Chen-Tulsi. He said, ‘Tell Threnody Noon that the Prells are going to attack Grand Central.’ ”

  Threnody, who had only half been concentrating, sat up and opened her eyes. She stood and crossed her suite, the windows folding back automatically as she went out onto the wide balcony. The lights of the city sprawled across the deep blue night; road surfaces glowing gently with the sunlight they had stored during the day, and the moving chains of amber lights that were the windows of trains.

  “Kobi? Kobi Chen-Tulsi? He… what?”

  “He said, ‘Tell Threnody Noon that the Prells are going to attack Grand Central.’ And then they shot him. The Decision Trees pinged me a recording. It’s somewhat graphic…”

  “Show me,” said Threnody.

  *

  Chandni was really leaving this time. Her ball gown lay over the back of a chair like a sloughed-off skin, and she had changed into black pants and a black tunic. Not that she was planning to sneak out of the palace. She would just borrow one of the cars from the staff garage and tell it to drop her at the nearest K-bahn platform. But the black clothes looked good on her, and they would attract no attention on whichever world she decided to alight.

  She was not taking much with her. The Old Earth artifact she had picked up at random in the corridor was a little golden figurine that fitted snugly in her tunic pocket — she would sell it at Ambersai or K’mbussi. She had packed a bag with spare clothes: rolled underwear and balled-up socks. It was only a small bag, but it was more than she had owned for a long time. Now she was waiting for 3:30 a.m., when she figured the last party guests would finally have cleared off.

  When the knocking started, she jumped right out of her chair. It took her a second or two to figure out that nobody was knocking at her door — they were pounding on the door of Kala Tanaka’s suite, just down the corridor. Pounding and shouting. “Kala! Kala!” Pounding and shouting and sobbing.

  There was no way Chandni could pretend to have slept through it all. She went to her door and opened it. The Empress Threnody herself stood in the corridor, barefoot but still in her ball gown, fist raised to punish Kala’s door some more. She turned to Chandni a face streaked with mascara and twisted in some kind of misery. Her drones tried to get between her and Chandni and she swatted them irritably aside. “Where’s Kala?” she sobbed.

  Chandni thought fast, looking for some excuse that would save her from getting entangled in whatever rich person craziness was going down. There wasn’t one, not that she could see. She said, “I think she’s probably spending the night with your uncle Nilesh in his guest suite. They seemed pretty happy to see each other at the party. You’ve tried her headset?”

  “Kobi’s dead!” said Threnody. “A tr
ain sent me footage! They murdered him! He said the Prells are planning an attack…”

  “Maybe this is something you should be telling security? You know, all those security people and drones and things you keep?”

  “But I don’t know if it’s true! It might be a hoax or something; I don’t want to start a whole alert, not about the Prells — it’ll cause an incident, and if it isn’t true… but it can’t be true… he can’t really be dead, can he?”

  “Show me,” said Chandni. She opened her door wider and let Threnody into her room. The bag lay on the floor where she had left it. She kicked it into the corner, hoping Threnody wouldn’t notice.

  As she did so, the video file pinged from Threnody’s headset into her own. It showed grainy snatches of footage from ceiling cameras in a train vestibule. A young man came running through, two more men close behind. The pursuers had shaved pale heads. Then the view switched to a narrow bathroom. The young man was staring up at the camera. “Train, tell Threnody Noon the Prells are going to attack Grand Central, tell her I—” Then a bang — a gunshot — the kid shouting, panicky, “I am Kobi Chen-Tulsi! I’m important!” Another shot, kicking him backward against the window. A smear on the starred glass as he fell sideways, out of sight.

  Chandni cursed. “Where’s the train who sent you this?”

  “Gone offworld. It has to be a hoax, doesn’t it? Kala can always spot these things — she’ll know…”

  Chandni let her babble on. She opened a K-bahn timetable in her headset. Arrival data for all the platforms on Grand Central popped up. Next to one was a red flag: the 3:44 from Chiba was delayed. That wasn’t in itself unusual. A long-ago biotech screw-up on Chiba meant that most of the planet was covered by one enormous plant, the Weltkraut. Trains were sometimes delayed there by a leaf on the line. But this particular morning it seemed somehow sinister, because Chiba was the hub that linked the Prell worlds to the rest of the Network.