by Philip Reeve
“You will stop,” said Ozcelyk, turning the sound on again. “There is a siding half a mile ahead of you. You will stop there until we can find out what the truth is. Submarines of the Toubiti Defense Force are closing in on your position; if you do not comply, they will open fire on you.”
“Ooh, I’m frightened,” sneered the Ghost Wolf. It muted the screen, and Ozcelyk went on talking in silence, opening and closing his mouth like a rather stern fish. The siding shot past.
Threnody said, “Train, can you take us onto the old Dog Star Line?”
“I see it,” said the Ghost Wolf. “It’s not in the updated maps I’m pulling from the local raft, but it’s still in my tactical database. The spur branches off from this line just before the main station…”
The light outside grew brighter and brighter and then suddenly they were in open air, water streaming down the window glass, palm trees and bio-buildings flickering past under an afternoon sky. On the screen, Ozcelyk yelled and waved like someone trapped in a soundproof booth.
“Is it safe — this Dog Star Line?” Chandni asked. “Won’t they have taken up the rails?”
“Nobody takes up rails,” said Threnody. “It’s too difficult. It costs too much.”
“But won’t the K-gate be blocked?”
“That won’t be a problem for me, darling,” bragged the Ghost Wolf.
The sky outside was full of flying things: media drones and maybe gunships too. Light flickered from some of them, but whether it was camera flashes or weapons, Threnody couldn’t tell. If they were shooting at the Ghost Wolf, its armor absorbed the energy of their beams and bullets so efficiently that she didn’t even hear them hit.
“What is this train, Chandni?” she asked. “You spoke as if there’s something wrong with it?”
Chandni looked at her. “It’s a good train,” she said.
“So why were you going to take that little Foss 500 instead?”
“Because this one is a Zodiak,” said Chandni, reluctantly. “You heard of those? The fighting C12s? Thickest armor, biggest engines, best weapons in the business. I didn’t think there were any left. Thought they’d all been broken up long ago. I guess Railforce kept a few mothballed for a rainy day, though it’s hard to imagine a day that rainy…”
“But if they’re so good, why break them up?” asked Threnody. She liked this train: the way it had rescued them, the way it scoffed at the Prells. She thought it was a bit like Chandni herself; they were both common and a little scary, both had been in storage for a long time, and now they were both awake and helping her.
Chandni kept her eyes on the window and spoke very softly, as if she didn’t want the train to overhear. “Zodiak trainworks tried to build the ultimate fighting locos, but there was some glitch in their minds. Most of the C12s turned out to be psychopaths. Killing machines who weren’t that bothered about who they killed.”
“WaHOOO!” said the Ghost Wolf just then, sounding more like a kid than a killer. The cabin rocked from side to side. “Points,” it explained. “We’ve crossed onto the old Dog Star Line. The switching gear had been locked against us but I managed to get into its brain and get it working. I’m trained for cyberwar, I am.”
“Very nice,” said Chandni. “Can you switch those points back? Stop any Prell trains from following us?”
“Already done,” said the train smugly. “Switched the points, killed the switching gear. Nobody’s going to come through there without some serious help from tech support, know what I mean? Guardians alive, they’ve got another tank on the line ahead — do they never give up? If I still had my missile batteries I’d light up their whole crappy city for them…”
There was a bang and more swaying. Bits of something airborne and mostly burning flashed past the windows. Do tanks have human crews? Threnody wondered. Probably not. Hopefully not…
“Tunnel ahead leading to the K-gate,” said the train. “It’s walled up. There’s a forty-five percent risk of heavy damage if I go through.”
“Let’s chance it,” said Chandni. She killed the holoscreen, where Ozcelyk had given up shouting and buried his face in his hands. She looked back at Threnody and grinned. “Hold on tight…”
They hunkered down, grabbing handholds. The Ghost Wolf started to sing. It hit the barrier with such force that, even though she was bracing for the impact, Threnody was flung through the air. She tumbled, landed hard, thought, This is it, we’re derailed, we’re dead… The song of the train swirled up and filled her thoughts, and the light of another K-gate flared outside the windows.
*
But they were not dead, not yet. The Ghost Wolf ran on, plunging through K-gate after K-gate, world after world. Mostly the Dog Star Line ran underground. When it broke the surface it was usually on stripped-out industrial planets: litter on empty platforms, cold smokestacks on the skylines, faded ads on the station walls for snacks and threedies that Chandni remembered from before she was first frozen. Sometimes the wartrain had to shunt aside a heap of debris or speed up and ram its way through another barrier.
There was a place called Fugazi where it rained gasoline and the line ran on an embankment between lakes of napalm; the Ghost Wolf went through at a crawl, careful not to shed a single spark from its wheels. “I’ll be all right if the atmosphere ignites,” it said cheerfully, “but I can’t promise you two won’t get roasted.”
Threnody watched the brown rain trickling down the windows, but she was too tired to be scared, or maybe she was just beyond fear after all the terrors of the past day. She found a hard bunk in a little cabin just behind the main one and lay down on it to sleep, drifting in and out of strange dreams till Chandni came and looked in on her.
“You all right?”
“All right ish,” said Threnody.
“This is where they put the prisoners,” said Chandni, looking at the narrow cabin with its tiny window. “When the Bluebodies picked me up on Ayaguz I got taken up the line in a train a bit like this. The captain’s cabin is up the other end.”
Threnody couldn’t be bothered to move. Her stomach rumbled, and she realized that one of the unpleasant sensations she was feeling was hunger. She could not remember ever being hungry before. She had never gone for so long without food. She said, “If the Prells catch us, I’ll have to get used to being a prisoner.”
“You should be so lucky,” said Chandni, sitting down on the floor and resting her chin on her knees. “If they wanted you alive they wouldn’t have started their war by chucking missiles at your bedroom window. But don’t worry, we’ll get you safe to Sundarban or wherever.” There was a kind of glee about her, an energy that Threnody had not seen before. Her eyes did not look too old for her anymore. “I’ve never gotten away with a whole train before,” she said.
15
It was strange having no headsets. They were both used to dropping into the local data raft in idle moments or scrolling through photos and vids. Of course, there was no Datasea on many of the worlds they were crossing now, but each time they reached a living one, the Ghost Wolf would grumblingly open holoscreens so they could see the local newsfeeds. They heard about the death of the Empress Threnody in an accidental missile strike. They saw the footage of Prell wartrains arriving in all the major stations on the O Link, then in the outlying hubs of Golden Junction and Tusk. On Grand Central, the fighting was already over. On most other worlds it had not begun: the Prells had moved too swiftly. One good piece of news was that Uncle Nilesh had escaped from Grand Central — Threnody felt sure that the redoubtable Kala Tanaka had helped him — and he was back on Khoorsandi, appealing for other corporate families to help the Noons. But none were, and the remaining Noon-controlled worlds could not fight the Prell CoMa and their Railforce allies alone. It had been a neat, quick, almost bloodless little war, and now it was over.
“But things will be different once we get to Sundarban,” said Threno
dy. “The family will gather there. They won’t give up the throne so easily. When they see that I’m still alive they will rouse people up against the Prells.”
“If anybody cares,” said Chandni. “I never cared who the Emperor was. Most people will just be glad the fighting hasn’t spread and the trains are running again.”
“You’ll see,” said Threnody.
But what they saw when they reached Sundarban was the worst news of all. The Ghost Wolf didn’t have to be cajoled into opening a holoscreen; it picked up the report as soon as it came through the K-gate, and slowed to a stop well outside Sundarban Station City. “You need to see this, little Empress,” it said.
It sounded sorry for her.
Threnody stood in the cabin and stared at the images. They showed her sister Priya standing next to that smug toad Elon Prell while camera flashes lit up her beautiful, haughty face. She wondered why Priya was in the news, and tried to remember some occasion when Elon Prell and Priya would have met. And then, slowly, she started to realize that this was new. The date stamp in the corner of the screen showed that it had been broadcast only yesterday on Grand Central.
“…Prell forces also discovered the secret location where Threnody Noon had been keeping her half-sister Priya under house arrest,” the newscaster was saying. “Priya Noon is the rightful heir to the late Emperor Mahalaxmi XXIII. Now, with the help of the Prell family, she will sit at last on the throne Threnody tried to steal from her…”
“I didn’t!” said Threnody, as if there was some use arguing with a story that was being put out across every media platform in the Empire.
“…but she will not rule alone. Elon Prell has announced that he will be marrying the Lady Priya, and founding a new imperial dynasty, the Prell-Noons.”
Threnody gasped as if the newsreader had just reached through the holoscreen and slapped her. Chandni said, “So Elon Prell gets to claim he’s just done his duty and restored the real Empress, and he still gets to be Emperor himself.” She snorted, almost admiringly. She knew a clever thief when she saw one, but she’d never seen anybody steal an entire empire before.
“What now, Empress?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Threnody. “I don’t know.” All the way from Grand Central she had been telling herself that it would be all right when she reached Sundarban. She would be welcomed, and when everyone saw what the Prells had done, her cropped hair and ragged clothes, they would rally to her and drive Elon Prell all the way back to Broken Moon. Now she knew that would not happen. Her family did not need to fight anymore. Elon Prell had given them a way to save face. They could let him have the throne, and there would still be a Noon Empress. The next Emperor would still have Noon blood. The old Noon homeworlds and a few little places like Khoorsandi and Katsebo would stay in the family. The House of Noon would lose a lot of money when Elon rearranged the Empire’s trade rules to favor his own family, but not as much as they would have lost fighting a long, difficult war.
What a fool she had been, to head for Sundarban. She suddenly knew that what she wanted most was to go home to her mother on Malapet. Malapet was a small, quiet world; the Prells would not need it, and perhaps they would let Threnody live there in peace. She would walk on the black sand beach again, and sit in her mother’s studio in the smell of paints, and stroll out to the café on the point on summer evenings to eat skewers of grilled tofu and trilobites baked in their shells…
But before she could ask the Ghost Wolf to turn back and find a way across the Network to Malapet, she felt the train start moving again. Red lights flashed on the cabin walls as it instinctively tried to arm weapons systems it no longer had. It said, “Uh-oh.”
“What?” asked Chandni.
“Something just came through the K-gate behind us. A Prell wartrain, I’m guessing. They must have sent it through from Grand Central. Missile range in another thirty seconds.”
It cursed. Threnody had never heard a train swear before. She felt slightly shocked by it, even while she was figuring out what to do. Surrender? She felt defeated enough, tired enough, hungry enough. Maybe the Prells would feed her if she surrendered. But maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe Chandni was right and they’d just want her dead. And what about Chandni herself? They would kill her too, or put her back in the freezers…
For the first time, she understood that she was responsible for Chandni as well as herself.
“Run,” she said.
The Ghost Wolf was ready. It took off so fast that Threnody would have been thrown off her feet again if Chandni had not caught her.
“Where will we go?”
“Only one place we can go,” said the train. “Keep on down this Dog Star Line…”
A K-gate took it, and then the pale milk-white glow of moonlight on snow was pouring through the windows. On through high, snowy mountains, then curving around the shore of a bay where the waves had frozen white and solid, like meringue ruffled up with a fork.
On the next world the rails had been almost swallowed by the forests crowding in on either side. Among the trees was a crumbling station complex where the Ghost Wolf stopped. It had picked up the beacon belonging to a refueling facility that still had some fuel cells in stock. The train had no maintenance spiders, though, so it had to send Threnody and Chandni out into the cold, resinous air to fetch them. The cells were the size of coffins, and their handles were designed for spiders’ clamps, not human hands. Somehow they struggled two of them onto the train. Threnody had never thought much about how trains were powered before; everything happened automatically — they just went. Now she had a quick lesson in their mysterious undersides, loading the fuel cells into a silo where an automatic conveyor would carry them into the fusion chamber.
“That Prell train just came through behind us again,” said the Ghost Wolf, as they scrambled back into its cabin. “It’s not fast, but it’s persistent.”
They went on. Beyond the next gate lay a vegetable nightmare of overgrown bio-buildings where the fermented air pressed moistly against the window glass. “Interesting,” said the Ghost Wolf as it shot through what had once been a station, “there’s been fighting here; train on train by the look of it, and not that long ago. Something strange in the Datasea here too. Something really strange…”
Threnody looked out of the window, but they were moving too fast to see much. Then, abruptly, the Ghost Wolf braked.
“Flippin’ hell,” it said.
When they asked it what the problem was, it didn’t seem able to explain. It opened a holoscreen instead and showed them the view from its nose camera. The line led up a long slope toward the tunnel mouth that must lead to the next K-gate. In front of the tunnel stood a huge mobile gun, two mechanical legs on each side of the line, and its muzzle aimed straight at the Ghost Wolf.
Then the screen went out, and a figure in golden armor appeared like a flame in the middle of the cabin. It was a hologram, but so perfect that it seemed someone really was standing there; there were even reflections of Chandni’s and Threnody’s startled faces in its burnished breastplate. The only thing that made it unreal was the fact that it seemed lit by sunlight instead of the dim glow of the Ghost Wolf’s lamps.
“This is a closed world,” it said sternly. Its face was invisible behind its visor, but its rich, kindly voice filled the cabin. “The gate ahead is barred. Reverse, and return to your permitted lines.”
It was a Guardian, or the holographic interface of one. Chandni, who had always talked so cynically about the Guardians and never seen one, dropped to her knees in front of it, went down on her face on the hard floor, trembling. Threnody stayed on her feet. She was awed, but she had talked with an interface before, and she felt almost glad to meet this one. Perhaps it could explain why the Guardians had let everything turn so bad.
“We cannot go back,” she said. “We are being chased by another train. It is a Prell wartrain, and
if it catches us, it will kill us.”
“Hmmm,” said the hologram. “You are the former Empress, Threnody Noon. You have done something to your hair. It does not suit you.”
It wavered and changed shape. It was still golden, still flame-bright, but now it had the head, arms, and torso of a young man, and the legs and body of a horse. Threnody knew it now. That centaur was the avatar that it displayed above its data shrines.
“You are the Mordaunt 90 Network!” she whispered.
The centaur’s beautiful face looked sadly down at her. “I am. I have known your family a long time, Threnody Noon. I watched over your many-times-great grandfathers in the pioneer camps when the Network was young…”
“Then why…”
“Other Guardians have their favorites too. My sisters the Twins felt that the time had come to allow the Prell family a turn in the sun. I tried to prevent it, but many of the other Guardians agreed with them, and in the end a small war between humans is far less terrible than a fight between two Guardians would be.”
Threnody found that she was weeping. The tears trickled saltily into the corners of her mouth and dripped off her chin. She said, “But it was terrible for us. They killed Kobi, and Lyssa Delius, and the old man at the train store. And they will kill me if they catch me…”
The Ghost Wolf spoke, quite softly, with none of its usual swagger. “The Prell train has just come through behind us. Missile range in fifty seconds.”
Another tear ran down the side of Threnody’s nose. In the time it took to make the journey, Mordaunt 90 considered the situation. It noticed that the oncoming train was the Prell CoMa’s light rail cruiser Ambush Predator, armed with the new PlanWrecker 5000 train-to-train missile system, capable of punching through even the Ghost Wolf’s armor. It called up details of the Predator’s ten-person crew. It considered how angry the other Guardians would be if it destroyed a Prell train, and weighed that against how angry they would be if it took a different course of action. It made a wistful journey in its memory back down Threnody’s enormous family tree, remembering all the Noons it had known, all the way back to Surita Noon, a barefoot stowaway stepping off the Varanasi onto the sands of Mars.