Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  “They’ve been quite kind to us, these tents,” said Threnody. “We cook the fish on an open fire. They seem edible enough.”

  “They give me the runs,” said Chandni Hansa.

  “I have food,” said Zen, without quite meaning to. “Aboard the Damask Rose. You’d better come and eat and tell me what’s happened. And I’ll tell you… I’ll tell you how to get home.”

  Threnody’s tired face lit with hope. “Then there’s a way? Another gate?”

  “Don’t trust him,” said Chandni. “Remember what he did to your family.”

  “He was working for Raven then,” said Threnody. “Now we need him. Sometimes, to survive, you have to make alliances with people you don’t like.”

  That shut Chandni up. Her mouth went tight and narrow and she kept on glowering at Zen, but she didn’t say any more.

  “So is there a way?” Threnody asked. “A way back to the Network Empire?”

  “Nova thinks there is,” said Zen. He’d been thinking it over on the way from Night’s Edge. He hadn’t liked Nova’s scheme when she’d suggested it, but he needed to offer these newcomers something, because he needed them to help him get her back. The promise of a way home was all he had. But now that he had said it, he found that he suddenly wanted very much for it to be more than a promise. He had missed other human beings; he had not even realized how much. The scent of their sweat, the texture of their skin, the way they stood. He wanted Nova to be right. He wanted there to be a way home.

  “Nova has a plan,” he said.

  “Where is she?” demanded Threnody. “Let’s hear this plan.”

  “She’s not here,” said Zen. “She’s on a place called the Shards of Kharne. If you want her to show you the way home, we’ll have to go and get her.”

  25

  The Shards of Kharne turned out to be the remnants of a shattered planet that had once orbited a small, golden sun. The Shards orbited it still, but now they orbited one another too: moon-sized chunks of what had once been a world, locked in a complicated gravitational ballet. The fact that they had never flown apart or collided with one another, and that they were all encased in one envelope of atmosphere, made Nova wonder if the Railmakers had been at work here long ago. As the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss’s servants carried her from the train, she saw a rugged worldlet tumble slowly across the sky above the station, spurting black smoke from a score of small volcanoes. Could those vents be acting like thrusters to prevent the various world-splinters from colliding?

  She would have liked to stop and watch, but she had no choice now in what she looked at. She was just a head, being carried in the claws of a Kraitt, following three other Kraitt who bore the polished skulls from the Gekh’s private car. Nova assumed the skulls were ancestors, or battle trophies, for they were treated with elaborate care.

  The Kraitt servants went through the shabby, half-derelict station, which was built inside an old Railmaker structure. A dangerous-looking aircraft powered by chemical rockets was taking off from a runway outside, presumably heading for one of the other shards. For a moment Nova was afraid that she was going to have to travel on something like that, but the vehicle that awaited the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss was even more primitive: a carved wooden carriage drawn by two big, horned reptiles.

  The Gekh’s servants set the skulls down carefully on cushions in the carriage’s curtained cabin and put Nova’s head between them. Then the Gekh herself climbed in and settled herself on more cushions, and the carriage set off. Nova sensed her own body nearby, the small sub-brain in her spine sending out plaintive little distress calls. She guessed it was following in a second vehicle. The road from the station was bumpy. Her head fell over on its side, and the teeth of the three skulls chattered constantly.

  “Those are the skulls of my sisters,” said the Gekh.

  “Oh…” Nova’s voice sounded strange to her. Usually she spoke the same way humans did, by taking air into her chest cavity and letting it vibrate structures in her throat on its way back out. Now she had to rely on a backup system of small speakers in the roof of her mouth, and the sound quality was tinny. She could not think of much to say, anyway. What did you say when a dinosaur introduced you to the skulls of her sisters?

  “They have very nice teeth…”

  “I killed them myself,” said the Gekh. “I did not want to. It is the tragedy of my species. When Kraitt hatchlings reach adolescence, the female siblings start to fight until only one is left. It is what has made our kind so strong. Only the victors go on to breed, and give birth to the next generation of Kraitt. Sometimes sisters make pacts that they will not kill each other, but the instinct is too powerful.” The Gekh caressed the smallest of the skulls with her tail’s tip. “My little sister Shantis… We were such friends, she and I, when we were growing up. Before my time came, she went away, went to live at the far end of the Web. But years later, when my train stopped at Yashtey, she happened to be there too. She caught my scent and could not stop herself. She attacked me on the stairs to the station. It was a legendary battle. There are poems about it. Luckily, I proved the stronger. If not, my skull would be an ornament on her train.”

  This, thought Nova, was not good. No wonder people didn’t like the Kraitt. Presumably all races had a few ancient, savage instincts locked up in their evolutionary closets, but most had learned how to control them by the time they joined the Web. The Railmakers seemed to have taken care only to give K-gates and morvah to species that had managed to control such traits. Perhaps when the Blackout came, something had gone wrong, and the Kraitt had found their way through the K-gates too soon…

  She wondered what Zen was doing. She had told him to wait for her to escape, but if she didn’t return soon she was sure he would set out to look for her. She hoped he would not underestimate the Kraitt. She was afraid that he might come after her and try to rescue her, not understanding how clever and how dangerous her captors were.

  But, at the same time, she wanted him to come. She missed him as much as she missed her own body.

  The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss lifted one of the thick curtains that hung swaying at the carriage window. A hard line of hot sunlight fell across her scaly face, then dimmed and went out as the carriage passed into a tunnel. “So you can see why thinking machines would be a benefit to my people,” she said. “Kraitt females cannot make close friendships with one another — the memories of the deaths of our sisters are too clear. We fear that if we grow too fond of someone, the old instincts may take over and it will end in blood. We have only our males for company, and males are no company at all — they are of use only as servants or warriors. So I must learn your secrets, machine.”

  Not even the Kraitt could bear the gaze of their sun for long. They had built most of their station city underground. Nova tuned her mind to local media networks and had an impression of dim, crowded caverns like an enormous system of burrows. One of these burrows was the villa of the Gekh. There they took Nova’s head to a round, white room and placed it on a table. Kraitt technicians scanned and photographed her from every angle. They clamped the head in a stand to keep it upright, and connected pipes and cables to the ducts that dangled where her neck had been. Some of the cables carried power. One of the pipes was a water supply, which she needed to keep her mouth and eyes moist. The rest just linked her to clunky-looking screens and terminals that stood in other parts of the room, where Kraitt technicians tried to download her operating systems. She felt their crude programs trying to pry her mind open. It was easy to block them out at first, but the Kraitt grew agitated when their programs did not work, so she let them have access to some of her code. She was afraid that, if she didn’t, they might take a more direct approach and pry her actual head apart.

  The Kraitt clustered around their screens, discussing the streams of code that she let them see. Sometimes the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss would come and listen to their reports. Sometimes she would come and
stare at Nova’s head with her unblinking, yellow eyes. Sometimes she would bring her children with her: three young females, already approaching the uneasy age at which their ancient instincts would make one murder the others.

  “Hey,” Nova called out to her, the first time she visited. “Where’s the rest of me? Why don’t you put me back together? I could tell you much more if I was all in one piece…”

  “Ignore it,” the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss told her daughters. “It is just a thing: a device created by one of the prey species. We will soon learn its secrets.”

  “Please?” said Nova.

  But pleading sounded silly, and the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss took no notice anyway.

  26

  On Yaarm, the broadcasters were losing interest in human beings. The newcomers just sat talking in the cars of the Damask Rose, or built pebble towers to amuse the Hath, and the camera teams left them to it and went to film other things on other worlds. The Web was wide and filled with wonders. The humans, who could never bring any more goods or people through their buried gate, had turned out to be far less interesting than everyone had hoped.

  So, few people noticed when the two trains moved off. Even the Hath had learned the tower-building trick for themselves by then, and were too busy making their own towers to do more than flutter a quick goodbye when the interface of Mordaunt 90 climbed into the Damask Rose’s car. A radio message from Yaarm station warned the Rose that she was not scheduled to leave, but the Rose replied that they were heading back to Night’s Edge, and the Yaarm authorities decided not to interfere. The humans were a disappointment — so few of them, and nothing to trade. Yaarm would be better off without them.

  The next world was jungle mostly: hot, steaming hills covered in gigantic ferns, with bald patches and spoil heaps where Chmoii miners were working. As the two trains made their way through empty valleys, the Damask Rose sent out her maintenance spiders with paint sticks full of pigment she had made from Yaarmish soil. As quickly as they could, the bots painted over the beautiful, fading pictures on her hull, until she was as black as the Ghost Wolf.

  Zen was sad to see those pictures go. His Motorik friend Flex had painted those, and Flex was dead. But a few scraps of Flex’s personality had been saved to the Rose’s memory, so perhaps she had inherited enough talent to repaint the original images one day.

  “We don’t want the Kraitt to recognize the Damask Rose,” he explained to the others, sitting in the messy and suddenly too-small state car at the front of the train. “We’re going to be a new train, with locos front and rear. Not many people trade with the Kraitt, so I’m hoping they haven’t heard any more news from Yaarm since the night they left Night’s Edge with Nova. They know more humans have arrived, and something happened to the gate, but maybe they don’t yet know it’s blocked permanently. We’ll tell them it was just a temporary fault, and now human trains are ready to roll through, and eager to do business with them.”

  “What if they don’t believe us?” asked Threnody.

  “That’s your job, to make them believe.”

  The interface of Mordaunt 90 shook his head and said, “There are so many things that could go wrong with this plan.”

  “I know,” said Zen. “But if we thought like that, we wouldn’t try anything. Nova would never get rescued, and you’d never go home. You want to go home, don’t you?”

  The interface looked wistful. “I want to reconnect to the Mordaunt 90 personality. It is frightening to live like this, in one body, all alone. This body will die one day, and then what will happen to all its memories of the unique things it has experienced? What about my memories of Malik? Someone should remember him, and how brave he was. I need to return to the Network Empire so that I can add these new experiences to Mordaunt 90’s memories.”

  “Then it’s settled,” said Zen, and he left the table, heading back down the train.

  It really did feel crowded with four on board. He didn’t see why they couldn’t have stayed in the Ghost Wolf’s little cabins; it wasn’t like they’d brought lots of stuff with them. But Chandni Hansa had insisted that Threnody was an Empress and should have Zen’s bed — the only bed — which she and Chandni now took turns to sleep in, because it seemed that one of them always had to be awake to keep an eye on Zen. Zen slept on the bunk in the sickbay, knowing that he had only agreed because he still felt guilty about what he had done to Threnody and her family.

  (As for the interface of Mordaunt 90, he was still surprised to find that he needed sleep at all. He tended to nod off without warning, sitting at a table or on one of the state-car chairs, and wake up with a start a few hours later, complaining of strange dreams.)

  Even in the store car at the back of the train, Zen still couldn’t get any peace. He started emptying out the big plastic crates that were part of his plan for retrieving Nova, but he hadn’t gotten far before the door sighed open and Chandni Hansa came through, scowling at him as usual.

  “I don’t know why the Empress believes you,” she said. “You’ve tricked her before; you’d think she’d be smarter. I’m not sure I believe you.”

  “About what?” asked Zen.

  “Going home. You say this wire dolly of yours knows a way home…”

  “I said she thinks there’s a way,” Zen corrected her. “It was a hunch. But Nova’s smarter than either of us. Her hunches are right, pretty often. I didn’t think this one sounded like too good an idea because it would rely on finding a gate to somewhere where we could explain ourselves before the Guardians just stomped us. But you have an interface of Mordaunt 90 with you, so that changes everything — they’ll have to listen to him.”

  Chandni watched him while he spoke, eyes narrowed, scanning for lies. Then she sighed and sat down with her back against the door of the fuel store. “But why do you want to go home? I don’t want to go home. I’m glad I’m rid of it. First time in my life I’m free of rich people and Guardians and all the rest of it.”

  “I miss my mom and my sister,” said Zen. “I miss other people. Don’t you have anyone you miss?”

  Chandni shook her head.

  “Well, anyway, it’s not just about going home…” He had been thinking about this while he tried to get to sleep in the sickbay the night before. “If we can find another K-gate between the Network Empire and the Web of Worlds, think of the trade that will start. And we’ll be there at the beginning of it; we’ll be the merchants people here will trust. We’ll bring trainloads of stuff and swap it for trainloads of rare stuff from the Web that we can sell for a fortune on Sundarban or somewhere. We’ll be rich!”

  Chandni Hansa laughed. “Oh, Zen Starling. Listen to you. You really believe all that stuff? If trade ever starts up, the corporate families will grab all the profits for themselves, just like they grabbed everything else. They have ways of stopping people like us from getting a share.”

  “So there’s no point trying? We’re beaten before we begin?”

  “When you’ve been beaten as often as I have, you start to realize that the whole game’s rigged.”

  “You’d like my sister,” said Zen. “She talks like you.”

  “I don’t like anybody.”

  “What about the Empress? You like her, don’t you?”

  “I don’t like her,” said Chandni. “I just don’t want to see her get killed. It’s not the same thing.”

  She looked at Zen, who had gone back to emptying out those big plastic trunks, the size of freezer coffins. She had thought when he showed up that she and he would click together like magnets, two low heroes from the streets with so many experiences in common. The little-girl Chandni who still lived locked up in her heart with all her silly little-girl hopes had even thought it might be like a threedie — love at first sight and stuff. But it hadn’t worked like that at all. Zen had spent so long thinking of himself as a rich kid or a master criminal or an ambassador that he’d start
ed believing it. The last person he wanted to meet was someone just like he used to be, who could see right through him to the grubby little thief he really was.

  “The next world will be Night’s Edge,” announced the Damask Rose. “That’s if this Chmoii ore-train in front of us ever goes through the K-gate. Do you want to stop on Night’s Edge?”

  “No,” said Zen. “Signal Koth/Atalaí when we pass the station, see if they have any fresh news of the Kraitt. If they don’t, keep going, straight for the Shards of Kharne.”

  27

  It was really boring, being just a head. At night, when the Kraitt technicians left her alone, there was nothing for Nova to do but surf the Shards’ primitive broadcasting networks, which consisted of dismal music, vicious gladiatorial battles, and programs where the captains of Kraitt trains bragged of the raids they had carried out and showed off the loot and trophies they had brought home. A few hours before midnight even that shut down, and Nova was left listening to the scritch and scratch of insects in the air ducts above the ceiling.

  It was then that she heard again, very faintly, the signal from the Black Light Zone that she had picked up on Night’s Edge. So either the Shards of Kharne were also close to the Zone, or the signal was powerful enough that it could be detected everywhere, once you knew what to listen for. Or was it that the signal had crept inside her somehow, inserted some strange code of its own into her programming, so that it could keep on singing to her of the Zone?

  That thought made her worry that she was losing her mind, so she pushed it away and distracted herself with memories of times with Zen or screened movies for herself. Sometimes the memories and the movies intertwined, because they were the same movies she had watched aboard the Damask Rose when Zen was asleep in her arms and she wanted to make-believe that she was sleeping too. Sometimes, watching her favorites, she could imagine that she had a body again, and that Zen was curled up next to it, with his face against that rippled scar-patch on her chest that had never fully repaired.