by Philip Reeve
At least Threnody’s eyesight was returning. Chandni had treated her eyes with something from the medipak she’d looted, a spray that felt cold against her eyeballs. She could see now without the headset’s help: dim, smeared sight, but enough to make her hope that, if she came through this day alive, she would not be blind. The sunlight stung, but that was another reason to stay under cover of the trees. She followed Chandni and thought about the way her drones had killed the medipak’s owner. Violence like that was something everyone liked to say the human race had long grown out of — the stuff of historical threedies, wars on Old Earth. But it was still there, just beneath life’s settled surface. The Guardians only had to take their eyes off the game for a moment…
Chandni took the headset back and used it to access the Grand Central data rafts. A lot of sites were down, replaced by infomercials telling everyone to stay in their homes and cooperate with the Prell CoMa, who had joined with Railforce to liberate the city. On the newsfeeds Elon Prell delivered a speech about how the Prell family had acted in the interests of the whole Empire, overthrowing the usurper Delius and her Noon puppet. Drone footage showed Lyssa Delius lying dead on the floor of a shot-up office in the Railforce tower. She looked smaller and older and more fragile than she had alive. Prell soldiers posed beside her body like hunters showing off their prey.
Chandni checked a few maps, then took the headset off and threw it into a wallow where some triceratops were enjoying a mud bath. She did not know much about modern headsets, and she was afraid the Prells might be able to track her through it if she used it for too long. The maps were safe in her head, though; she’d always had a good memory for maps.
*
Toward evening, as the twin suns sank redly through the drifts of smoke that still hung over the heart of the city, two young women emerged from the northern end of the Imperial Sauropod Park and looked down into the industrial district of Gallibagh. They wore the shabby clothes of workers or servants. They both had raggedly close-cropped hair, ordinary faces crusted with ordinary dirt.
At the foot of the slope a branch line from the Gallibagh rail yards led to a bunkerlike ceramic building with the Railforce logo glowing on its roof.
“What’s that?” asked Threnody, sitting down in the shadow of some bushes and pulling off her shoes to rub her feet.
“Railforce retirement home,” said Chandni. “It’s where they store some of the old locos they don’t have a use for anymore. I can’t imagine the Prells have much use for them either. Hopefully they won’t be watching this place too closely.”
Threnody followed her quickly downhill through the dying light. High overhead, in the smoky haze that hung above the city, a Prell surveillance drone noticed the movement and zoomed its cameras in. It fed the grainy footage to intelligence systems in the Datasea, which started running it through facial recognition filters.
*
The lines that led in through the big hangar doors of the retirement home were screened by high wire fences. The building itself was an unwelcoming block of gray ceramic dug into a hill.
“How do we get in?” asked Threnody.
Chandni reached inside her tunic and pulled out the gun she had brought from the palace.
“You’re not going to kill anyone, are you?” asked Threnody.
“Hope not. It depends how things work out.”
“But you have, haven’t you? Before, I mean?”
Chandni shrugged her shrug, which had so many meanings. “You heard of Ayaguz? I don’t suppose you ever did an imperial visit to Ayaguz. They wouldn’t wave flags at you there. It’s a deep-ocean waterworld: a bunch of undersea mining habitats, rough as they come. A different gang controls each pressure dome, all looking to expand their territories the whole time. I wound up there after my first time in the freezers — ran with the Deep Six Crew for eight or nine months. So this isn’t my first time in a turf war, Empress.”
Threnody was about to explain that railwar between two great corporate families was nothing at all like a squabble between two gangs of hoodlums in a mining town, but while Chandni was talking they had been creeping along the side of the building, past low scrub and big trash bins, and they had come to a ceramic door, stenciled with warning decals. Chandni hammered on it with the handgrip of her gun, then stuck the barrel into the face of the man who opened the door. She wrenched his headset off with her free hand and tossed it into the bushes behind her.
The man was old, with a flop of white hair, a wrinkled brown face, and wet brown eyes that crossed when he looked at the gun and came uncrossed again when he looked past it at Chandni.
“You on your own here?” she asked.
He nodded nervously, half raising his hands. “I am the caretaker. This is just a storage facility…”
“You know who this is?”
“No. Another bad young woman like yourself? Your sister, maybe?”
“Come on, you must have seen her. She has her face on money and buildings and things.”
The caretaker looked again at Threnody. “It can’t be… they are saying on the newsfeeds that she is dead — I don’t want trouble…”
“Nobody wants trouble,” said Chandni. “Trouble just finds us.” She shoved him backward, gesturing with her head for Threnody to follow her inside. The door shut behind them. They stood in a corridor, lit by ceiling panels. The hum of big power units, underground smells. A holoscreen in a cluttered little office showing news footage of Elon Prell. It felt strange to be indoors again. The caretaker kept staring at Threnody as though she were a ghost. He seemed more interested in her than in the gun, which Chandni was now poking into his ribs.
“Take us to the trains,” she said.
13
It was always a problem, what to do with old trains. You couldn’t just scrap them when they became outmoded. Trains were at least as self-aware as people. So you kept them running for as long as possible, upgrading and reconfiguring, rehousing old brains in shiny new bodies. And if there was really no way they could be kept on the rails — if they were hopelessly antiquated or eccentric, or if they were designed for war and there were no wars going on — then you stored them. There were facilities all over the Network where old trains dreamed away their retirement in slow-state sleep, or surfed sections of the Datasea designed to please them: virtual tracks and railway playgrounds, strange chatrooms where the ancient locos could discuss their adventures and grumble about the fancy newfangled models that had replaced them.
The caretaker led Chandni and Threnody down a bit more corridor and peered into a lock beside a door. The lock scanned his retina and the door slid open. For a few seconds there was darkness on the other side, then lights sensed they were needed and came flickering on all across a high roof. They were inside the hill, Threnody realized. The building outside was just a kind of porch. The real facility was this cavernous hangar, its floor covered with rails. On every set of rails at least one train was sleeping. There were de-fanged wartrains with gaping holes in their armor where weapons had been removed, and locos whose whole hulls had been stripped off, baring doughnut-shaped reaction chambers and the boxy housings of their brains. Others looked whole, though most were connected to webs of cabling and ducts that trailed down from the shadows overhead.
“What are you looking for?” asked Threnody, as Chandni forced the poor caretaker ahead of her across the rails, staring at each of the silent trains in turn.
“Something that’ll get us off Grand Central fast, without attracting too much attention.”
Threnody patted the prow of a towering black thing, all sleek armor plate and lidded weapon hatches. “What about this one?”
The caretaker shook his head. “Oh no, Lady Noon, you don’t want that one. That is an unstable train.”
The loco seemed to sense Threnody’s touch. It sort of purred deep down inside itself, and two red lights glowed like fiery eyes up a
mong the complications of its armor.
“It looks fast,” she said.
“It is,” said Chandni, “but we’re not in that much of a hurry, and it’s not exactly inconspicuous.” She went on across the hangar, forcing the old man ahead of her. “What else do you have hidden in here? Come on, the sooner we find something, the sooner we’ll be on our way.”
Threnody looked up at the black loco. She could feel it watching her. The name on its flank was Ghost Wolf.
Chandni had stopped in front of a shabby little Foss 500. It was the sort of train that usually hauled freight — the sort of train nobody looked twice at. “I have some old ammunition cars over on track nine,” the caretaker was saying eagerly. “Give me ten minutes; I’ll soon have it hitched up and fueled.”
The Foss was waking up. “I am pleased to be back in service,” it said. “I am the Courageous Snipe. Where shall we be going?”
“Anywhere,” said Chandni. “The timetables will be all over the place. If anyone complains, you can tell them you’re carrying urgent supplies for the Prell CoMa.”
“Gate two hundred and sixty-five,” said Threnody. “It’s not far from here.”
Chandni looked back at her. “Where does it go?”
“It leads to Toubit,” said Threnody. “At Toubit we could get onto the old Dog Star Line.” The Dog Star zigzagged through the Network’s heart, linking dead stations and dead worlds. “We could use it like Raven did, and maybe get to Sundarban before the Prells do.”
“The Dog Star Line?” Chandni shook her head. “It’ll be blocked off. No, we’ll head for Gosinchand or one of those worlds, get on the Spiderlight Line or the Eastern Doubt. Nobody will think to look for us out there.”
“We should go to Sundarban,” insisted Threnody. “It’s my family’s homeworld. They’ll be organizing a fight-back against this Prell takeover. When they hear how you rescued me, you’ll be rewarded.”
“I’m not doing this for a reward,” said Chandni.
The huge doors at the front of the train store opened with surprising speed, rattling up into the roof like window blinds. The setting sun streamed in so brightly that it dazzled Threnody for a moment. People came running into the facility, their helmet-amplified voices shouting things about surrendering and getting down on the floor. She recognized the purple combat armor of Prell Corporate Marines.
She started to raise her hands, feeling almost relieved that she did not have to run anymore.
What happened next — what started it — she was never sure. Maybe the Prell CoMa were just eager for a chance to shoot someone. At any rate, Chandni shouted something, the old man went running forward, also shouting, there was a stutter of gunfire, bullets pecked at his clothes, and he stumbled and fell. Chandni was running across the tracks, firing her pistol. The Prell troopers scattered into cover. Behind the hard thump of guns and their echoes there was a pretty chinkling sound as spent cartridges hit the rails. A shadow heaved itself across the sunset. Something big was entering the train store. A brutal-looking armored loco with Prell banners fluttering on its nose. As Chandni reached her, Threnody saw its guns swing around to point at her. Then a black wall slid across her view.
The Ghost Wolf had rolled forward, putting itself between the Prells and their prey.
“Get aboard,” it said, in a big, hard voice. A narrow doorway opened in its armored hide.
Something burst on the far side of it, sending a sheet of flame up into the gantries overhead. Chandni thrust Threnody toward the black train. She scrambled up the steps, through the doorway, with the whole loco shaking as more shots from the Prell train slammed into it.
Someone in the Prell squad must have had their wits about them, because the facility doors were starting to close again. The Ghost Wolf gave a contemptuous-sounding snort and shouldered its way out, shearing through the ceramic like a blade through wet cardboard. In its cramped little cabin Threnody clung to seat backs and door pillars, flung from side to side as it went rattling over points outside the facility.
“Where are we going?” asked the train. “The Prells have already sent messages to their forces in the city. I’m picking up two more of their wartrains leaving the central platforms.”
“Gate two-six-five,” shouted Chandni.
“But you said—” Threnody began.
“Two-six-five is the only gate we can hope to reach before those wartrains cut us off.”
Physics tugged them sideways as the Ghost Wolf went too fast around a curve of the track. “There are drones patrolling at gate two-six-five,” it said, with what sounded like dark amusement.
“Can you handle them, train?” asked Chandni.
“Got nothing to handle them with,” said the train, sulkily. “I’m decommissioned. The only reason I’ve got fuel is ’cause I stole it from other stored trains. All my weapons have been removed.”
“Can those drones pierce your armor?”
“I doubt it. Let’s find out, shall we?”
A fiery surf broke over it as a missile hit. The cabin rang like a huge bell, then rang again, the screens glitching for a moment the second time.
“Nah,” said the Ghost Wolf. “They’re rubbish.”
*
Gate two-six-five was under a wooded hill in a quiet northern suburb of the station city. The Prells had not sent a wartrain to guard it, since it led nowhere but Toubit. A small squad of drones was on sentry duty there instead. The ugly, stubby-winged machines circled like sullen bees above the tunnel mouth where the line vanished into the hillside. A few children from the district came to watch them for a while, but they were not very interesting drones, so they soon began to drift away. The war had seemed exciting when it started, but now everyone was saying it was already over. There would be school again tomorrow.
So there were only three children left when the black loco came tearing up the line. They heard it coming and ran to the trackside fences, twining grubby fingers through the chain-linked wire. The train was moving faster than any train they’d ever seen. It was moving so fast that when they described it to their friends the next day they would not be believed. The Prell drones fired actual missiles at it, but the black wartrain did not want to stop, and the missiles didn’t seem to do much harm; they just started a few fires on the surface of its black armor, which only made it look even cooler.
As the train came past the place where the children were standing, a drone swung itself in to try a close shot, and the train, as if it knew it had an audience, flipped open the hatch cover on one of its weapon bays. The bay was empty, but the edge of the hatch cover was as good as a blade at that speed: it sliced the drone in half. One half went tumbling away in the train’s slipstream while the other spun upward, making that whiffling, chirruping sound doomed drones always made in games. The children looked up, round-eyed, as it spun helplessly into another drone, and both slid sideways across the sky and hit the cliffs above the tunnel mouth with a very satisfying explosion. A few rather big rocks came tumbling down, rebounding from the black train’s armor. As it went into the tunnel mouth, the cliff face above it seemed to shrug and sag. Trees up there began to glide downhill, upright and dignified at first, then tilting and tumbling as the ground beneath them broke up and collapsed in rubble across the tracks.
Bits of debris from the wrecked drones pattered through the leaves of the trackside trees. The children scampered to collect the fragments. They clutched the hot shards in their hands and watched in awe as the dust settled. More trains were coming — Prell wartrains — that slowed, and stopped, and sent out fresh drones to buzz furiously above the blocked line.
14
The colorless pulse of the K-gate faded. The Ghost Wolf was on another planet.
“You’ve dropped your speed, train,” Chandni said. “Something wrong?”
“We’re underwater,” said the train.
Threnody l
ooked out through one of the narrow windows. She saw a shifting soup, blue-green, filled with bits of weed or stirred-up sand or something. She remembered Toubit from her lessons now; the K-gate there lay at the bottom of one of the deepest trenches in the planet’s ocean.
“Why would the Guardians have made a K-gate at the bottom of the sea?” Chandni wondered.
“Maybe it wasn’t sea back when the gate was opened,” said Threnody.
“Some bozo wants to talk to you, ladies,” said the train, and opened a bright screen in the air in the middle of the cabin.
“Unknown train?” A man’s face filled the screen, middle-aged and faintly pompous, a few thin hairs bravely clinging on above a bald dome of forehead. It peered into the Ghost Wolf’s cabin like a nosy neighbor spying through a window. “Administrator Ozcelyk of the Toubiti Transit Authority. Please identify yourself.”
“Chandni Hansa,” said Chandni. “Railforce,” she added, unconvincingly. “There’s been an attack on Grand Central by the Prell CoMa. They were repulsed after heavy fighting. We’re here to secure your station city, in case the enemy tries to strike here.”
Administrator Ozcelyk frowned. “But a freight train from Grand Central came in a few hours ago. It told us that the Prells have secured the city. It said Elon Prell is now Emperor…”
“It was wrong,” said Chandni. “The situation is changing very fast. The Prells have been defeated.”
The Administrator blinked helplessly. “I presume your train can provide proof of this? Media updates from the Grand Central data rafts…”
“Not me,” said the Ghost Wolf. “I’m a wartrain, mate. I’ve got better things to do with my brain than store a load of boring updates for your news sites.”
Ozcelyk killed the sound for a moment and talked to someone off-screen. The sea outside was shallowing. Shafts of sunlight shone down through it, lighting up a plain of silvery sand, kelp plantations, and some seafloor settlements under snow-globe domes. Threnody could feel the track rising under the Ghost Wolf’s wheels as it approached the island where Toubit Station City stood.