by Philip Reeve
Mordaunt 90 leaned in closer to Threnody and said, “The Twins have never been what you’d call a people person.”
“And Mordaunt 90 is a sentimentalist,” the Twins chorused. “Why are you keeping that man Malik alive?”
“Because I’m fond of him,” said the golden man. “He is a tough old soldier, but he has a kind heart.”
“A bit like us then,” said the white Twin, with a fake smile.
“Except with a kind heart,” growled her sister.
“When we agreed that you were to take charge of this moon,” they said together, “we thought that you would undo the damage that ninny Anais Six had caused. We did not realize that you meant to turn the place into a holiday resort for yourself and your human playthings. So we have come to relieve you of your responsibilities. The new gate will be blocked.”
“You can’t block K-gates!”
“There is a way; there has always been a way,” the Twins said. “It is only that our brothers and sisters would not let us use it. But the means exist. We have brought one with us.”
The golden man had a face that was made for smiling or looking handsome in repose. It tried to twist into a look of horror now, but it didn’t quite work. “You’ve brought a Railbomb?”
“The gate will be blocked,” said the white Twin.
“Then the viaduct that leads to the gate will be destroyed,” said the black Twin.
“The humans will be eliminated.”
“The water-moon Tristesse will be sealed off entirely.”
“You can’t,” said Mordaunt 90. “I won’t permit it.”
The Twins smiled their most simpering smiles. “But you are alone here!”
“And there are two of us…”
“And there is only one of you…”
18
Mordaunt 90 started to say something, and suddenly it was gone, vanished out of existence, not even leaving a footprint on the virtual snow. The Twins high-fived each other and turned toward Threnody with triumphant grins, and then she was expelled from the garden too, blinking and gasping on the hotel veranda with Chandni holding her by the arms and saying, “What is it? What did you see?”
Something hit the pavement behind her like a dropped bucket. Bits and pieces of it went skittering away across the flagstones. It was one of Mordaunt 90’s golden drones. Another, which had been circling the hotel, shot off course and punched a hole through the glass wall of a neighboring building. The noise of the falling glass was very clear and sharp in the silent city. The interface of Mordaunt 90 put a hand to his face. “I can’t—” he said, and stumbled sideways, Malik stepping forward to catch him as he fell. “It is the Twins. Something is spreading through the Datasea. I can’t—”
He thrashed wildly in Malik’s arms and weird sounds came from him. “They’re attacking him,” said Threnody, and she remembered something his hologram-centaur version had said the day before — that a war between humans was far less terrible than a fight between two Guardians. “They’re deleting him…”
“Why?” demanded Malik. “What happened in the Datasea?”
“The Twins were there. They were angry. They said they were taking charge, and that we would be eliminated.”
Malik was already moving, easing the half-conscious interface upright. Chandni ran to help him. Threnody followed them back into the hotel, where the Motorik staff all stood around like mannequins, looking up, as if something they had just heard had turned them all to statues. Threnody opened a headset channel to the Ghost Wolf and said, “We have to leave!”
“Make it quick,” came the train’s voice. “Something’s happening in the Datasea. Some kind of virus. Weird stuff. Guardian stuff. It’s busy with Mordaunt 90 at the moment, but it looks like it’s winning. Then I’m guessing it’ll turn its attention to me.”
“Get your firewalls up,” said Threnody.
“They won’t hold out long against something that can take down a Guardian,” said the train. “But yeah. Come quick, little Empress.”
It went silent, hidden behind its firewalls.
They struggled on through the hotel’s elaborate ground floor, through the bars and lounges, the interface stumbling along with one arm around Malik’s shoulders and one around Chandni’s, their progress hampered by the fact that Chandni was so much shorter.
“Are you armed?” asked Malik, as they reached the lobby.
Chandni shook her head. There was no room in her nice new summer clothes to hide a gun; she had left it in the safe in her bedroom. Just thinking about it made her feel sad that she could not go back to that nice, soft bed. Also stupid, for having let herself believe that she and Threnody were out of danger.
“Me neither,” said Malik. He looked back at Threnody. “There’s a gun cabinet. Door on the left there…”
Threnody ran to it. The door was unlocked. It wasn’t really a cabinet, more a small room. On the parts of wall that weren’t covered with racks of guns were framed pictures of hunting parties in old-timey clothes, posed grinning with those same guns and the monstrous manta-ray things they must have killed with them. The guns were rifles, very retro-looking, with carved wooden stocks. She slung one by its strap over her shoulder, took another, then started looking for ammunition.
In the lobby, Malik and Chandni reached the door and paused, sitting the interface down on a livewood chair. The golden man looked up at them in confusion. “I can’t stop it,” he whispered. “It gets past every barrier. The blackness…”
Malik knelt beside him. “You’ll be all right.”
“It’s eating my mind, Yanvar Malik.”
“It’s eating the mind of the Mordaunt 90 in the Datasea.” Malik stroked the golden face. “You have your own mind, in here.”
“That’s too small! It can’t hold all of me! I’ll be only a human!”
Malik held him close, and Chandni looked away, embarrassed. Behind the reception desk, one of the frozen Motorik had started to shake. The movement spread to another, then another. There were a dozen Motos in the lobby and within a few seconds all of them were making the same fluttering, quivering movements, like leaves in a gale.
“Malik…” said Chandni.
A Motorik in a bellboy’s uniform leaped at her from behind, wrapping his mechanical fingers tightly around her throat. Chandni yelped in shock, but she’d been jumped like this before and her instincts knew what to do, jerking her body forward and flipping her attacker over her head. He hit the ground hard and lay there, doing his twitching and quivering routine again. The other Motos had turned to stare at Chandni and Malik. As they started to advance, Chandni looked around for a weapon and picked up a chair. Tristesse’s gentle gravity made it light and easy to throw, but it also meant that it didn’t knock down the Moto receptionist it hit, just bounced off her face and made her stagger back a few steps. She came on again with blue gel trickling from her broken nose, clutching a pair of scissors like a dagger.
“The Twins are controlling them,” said Malik.
“You think?” Chandni flung a small slate-topped table at a manicurist and started backing toward the doors. If the Twins had their wits about them they would have taken control of those too, she thought. But perhaps Mordaunt 90 was still in the fight and able to protect the doors’ small brain somehow, because they slid open obediently enough when she got close. “Threnody!” she shouted.
The glass in a nearby window starred suddenly, the crack of a gunshot coming straight afterward. Carlota, the hotel’s manager, was coming down the stairs from the mezzanine level, as dignified as ever in her long blue dress, holding some antique sort of rifle in her hands. A spent cartridge casing tumbled lazily end over end in the air above her head and hit the ground at the same time as she reached the bottom step. “Mr. Malik, Miss Chandni,” she said, “I am so terribly sorry. Some sort of interference…” She raised the gun again,
aiming this time at the Mordaunt 90 interface, slumped in the livewood chair.
Was it the low gravity that made everything seem so slow? Chandni saw it all in intense detail: the spurt of flame at the rifle’s mouth, the way Malik’s eyes widened as he stepped between the golden man and the oncoming bullet. She heard the crunch as it went through his chest. The spurt of blood made pretty red shapes on the air. And as he crumpled, Carlota was already lifting the gun again and swinging it to point at Chandni this time, but then Carlota’s head snapped sideways and a long spray of blue gel flew out of it and she was falling too, her gun shooting pointlessly into the ceiling.
Threnody was running across the lobby, a rifle in her hands and another on her back. She stopped midway to shoot down the other Motorik, the big slugs kicking them backward, gel splattering the carpets and the long livewood curve of the reception desk. She shot them with a cold fury, as if they were Prells, and when they were all down she kept shooting until the old gun clicked emptily.
It was the first sign Chandni had seen that Malik had been telling the truth when he’d talked about Threnody being tough. She ran and took the empty gun, and Threnody tremblingly passed her a cartridge of bullets to reload it with, but no more Motorik came at them. Maybe the Twins had given up on that idea, or maybe Mordaunt 90 had blocked it somehow.
The interface had come out of his chair. He knelt over Malik, blood on his golden hands. “Why did you do that?” he was asking him. “There are so many of me, and only one of you! There are versions of Mordaunt 90 in the Datasea on every world…”
Malik couldn’t answer. There was blood in his mouth. There was a red flower on the breast of his white jacket. Chandni said, “He doesn’t care about those others. Only you.”
Malik heard their voices, but he wasn’t really listening. He felt very tired. Strangely, there was not much pain. He had been shot before and it had always hurt a lot. This time there was just a warm, spreading numbness, as if he were falling asleep, but he knew he mustn’t fall asleep, because Mordaunt 90 and the two girls needed him. He could worry about himself once they were all on the train. But when he tried to get up, the girl Chandni Hansa held him gently down and said he shouldn’t move. The interface knelt beside her, looking down at him, as beautiful as sunlight. Like unexpected sunlight at the end of a long, hard day, thought Malik. The interface looked so afraid that Malik wanted to tell him it was going to be all right, but the numbness had reached his mouth by then and made it difficult to speak. I’ll just rest here for a few seconds, he thought, and gather my strength. And he closed his eyes and slipped away.
The interface didn’t understand. He kept shaking Malik, trying to wake him, until Chandni said, “We have to get going. He’d want us to go. Otherwise it was for nothing.”
Threnody helped her pull the interface to his feet again and lead him away from Malik’s body. He seemed to move more easily now, as if he was losing his connection with whatever chaos was going on in the Datasea. They left the hotel and crossed the station concourse, guns held ready in case more Motos came, but none appeared. One of Mordaunt 90’s drones had crashed through the station canopy and lay wrecked near the end of the platform where the Ghost Wolf waited. They crunched over the broken glass and made their way to the old loco, afraid it would be dead or turned against them. But its engines were already running, and it opened its door for them. When they were aboard it said, “I’m glad you made it. What about the other bloke?”
Chandni shook her head. The interface wept. Threnody said, “Just pull us out.”
“That’s going to be tricky,” said the Ghost Wolf, reversing away from the platform, out into the green gas-giant light of a Desdemor afternoon. It opened a holoscreen and showed them a view of the tracks leading back toward the K-gate. There on the rails sat a silver loco. “That thing’s been sitting out on the down-line since it arrived. It won’t talk; it just sits there. If it were an ordinary train I’d say the hell with it and go past it, but I don’t know what this stripy thing is, nor what weapons it’s carrying.”
“If it had weapons you’d think it would have used them by now,” said Chandni, scowling at it.
Threnody said, “Maybe it doesn’t have any weapons. Maybe it is a weapon.”
She was looking at the interface, who had been sitting miserably on one of the Ghost Wolf’s hard little seats, staring at the floor. When Threnody spoke he raised his head and looked at the screen without much interest. “Yes,” he said. “It’s a Railbomb.”
The Ghost Wolf went very slowly back onto the mainline. “And what,” it said, “is a Railbomb?”
“A loco carrying a massive antimatter warhead,” said the interface flatly. “It doesn’t have the same sort of mind you do, train. All it wants is to explode.”
“Nice to have an ambition in life, I suppose,” said the train.
“It is supposed to target a K-gate and detonate itself the instant it passes through. The idea is that, even if the gate itself is not damaged, the tunnel it’s in and the rails will be put out of use. It is something the Twins devised.”
“Why would they want to do that? Who’d want to block a gate?”
“Why is it here?” asked Chandni.
“There’s another gate on this world,” said Threnody. “A new gate that’s been opened somehow. The Twins want to block it, but Mordaunt 90 wants to keep it open. So the Twins are shutting down Mordaunt 90, and when they’re finished they’ll send the bomb to do its stuff.”
“The gate’s south of here,” said the Ghost Wolf. “I picked it up last night, but I thought my sensors must be acting up.”
“Where does it go?” asked Threnody.
The interface shook his head. “We do not know.”
“But the Guardians know everything!”
“Not this. The gate must not be used.”
“The gate’s going to have to be used,” said the Ghost Wolf, “because in a few more minutes the Twins are going to get tired of ripping Mordaunt 90 to little bits in the Datasea and come after me.”
It was moving south through the silent city, out onto a viaduct that stretched away toward the horizon. Big shapes swooped past the windows, making Threnody fear a drone attack, but it was just some of those ray things, flapping like ungainly bats out of their lairs in the arches of the viaduct.
“We mustn’t,” said the interface.
“It’s that or die,” said Chandni. “It’s worth a chance, isn’t it?”
“What’s on the other side,” said the interface miserably, “might be worse than dying…”
“Here comes trouble,” said the Ghost Wolf.
Behind them, the Railbomb had begun to move. The rear-view cameras showed it nosing its way out onto the viaduct. The Ghost Wolf cursed. “I thought it was creepy the way it didn’t talk or sing, but it’s singing now, and I wish it had stayed quiet. Listen…”
The voice of the Railbomb came over the speakers and filled the cabin. It wasn’t singing words — trains never did — but its meaning was clear. It was singing of death, and speed, and the splendid light it would make, and the crater it would leave behind. It was singing of its pity for lesser trains, who would never know such glory.
“It’s coming fast,” said Chandni.
“It’s got powerful engines,” said the Ghost Wolf. “But it’s heavy. I bet I can stay ahead of it…” It put on speed, shouldering aside great waves that were bursting over the viaduct out there in mid-ocean. It opened another holoscreen to show its passengers the view ahead. Something was coming into view there, far away still, vague behind the veils of sea spray.
“There is an island,” said the interface. “I think that was where Raven built his Worm. Where the gate was opened.”
“Did Raven and Zen Starling go through that gate?” asked Threnody. “Is that what happened to them?”
“Malik told me that Raven died,” the inte
rface said. “But Zen Starling, yes. He has already gone through.”
“But you must have some idea where it leads?”
The interface looked up at her with wide, scared, tearful eyes. Mordaunt 90, the great mind for which he had just been a sort of terminal, was gone from Tristesse now; the Twins’ virus had left nothing but a few strands of corrupted code looping mindlessly in the Datasea. All the knowledge the interface had once been able to call on was erased. “I am just a fragment,” he said. “There is not room in my head for a millionth part of what I was. I am mortal, and I am going to die…”
Threnody took his hand in hers, trying to comfort him. The Ghost Wolf said, “Nobody’s dying, not if I can help it,” and did something with its engines that drove it to a screaming new level of speed. It was singing its own song now, excited in spite of itself by the wind and spray that slammed against its nose. The island drew closer. Chandni and Threnody saw for the first time the gate, a bony archway standing naked under the green sky. Gaunt, skeletal machines littered the island, and two mobile guns stood like sentinels on either side of the gate, not aimed at the Ghost Wolf but at the gate itself. They had been stationed there to destroy something coming through from the other side, Threnody thought, but their minds had been linked to Mordaunt 90. They stood motionless as the Ghost Wolf tore past, trailing litter and salt spray in its slipstream, and plunged through the billowing curtain of light that filled the archway.
“Death!” sang the Railbomb, speeding down the viaduct behind it. “Death!” it wailed as it crossed the island its weird voice rebounding from the armor of the silent guns. “Death!” it shrieked, and vanished through the gate after the Ghost Wolf.
And Desdemor was quiet again, except for the wash of the waves, and the wingbeats of the rays as they circled above the empty island.
But in the tunnel on the far side of the gate there was sudden thunder as the Ghost Wolf emerged from K-space and hurled itself at the tiny circle of daylight far ahead. It was still running at unfeasible speeds as it burst out into the low, raking light of the alien sun. Something broke, down underneath it, the noise lost in trainsong and engine roar. Clouds of sparks spewed out between its speeding wheels, then red flame, black smoke. Smoke filled the cabin too, lit by the red flicker of emergency warning lights that made everything look like cheap animation. Threnody and the interface choked. Chandni choked too, but found an extinguisher while she was doing it and sprayed foam at the places the smoke was coming from. “Stop!” she shouted at the train.