Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  And, as it turned out, he never had to find out what the Neem would do next. Threnody’s voice buzzed in his headset, startling him.

  She was a few hundred feet above him, standing with the interface at the point where one of the high viaducts ran into the tower. She had stopped there to rest and look at the view of all those tracks spreading out from the tower’s base, the complicated crossovers, switches, and passing loops, the snaking turnouts, the mainlines running ruler-straight toward the openings in the dome walls where mysterious K-gates waited. She was looking for the tunnel that the Rose and the Ghost Wolf had entered through when a movement caught her eye.

  “Zen!” she said urgently. “There is another train coming!”

  37

  “Impossible,” the Neem were saying, when Zen and their leader ran back down to platform level. “No morvah can come here!”

  “It’s the Kraitt,” said Zen.

  “It cannot be,” said Uncle Bugs. “A Kraitt morvah would never enter the Black Light Zone.”

  “They’re here, though,” said Zen. “How long before they reach us, Rose?”

  “Not long,” said the train. “I can feel them in the rails.”

  “They cannot have brought a morvah here,” the Neem were still insisting.

  Zen ran back down the ramp to Nova. She lay where he had left her, her eyelids flickering faster now, as if she were lost in some feverish dream. The alien terminal was lit more brightly than before, the panels shining sickly green and flashing with strange symbols that altered too quickly for Zen to see clearly.

  He kissed Nova’s forehead and said, “Nova, it’s time to wake up, the Kraitt are here.”

  She did not wake, but she started to whisper again, very softly, strange words, and chains of sounds that might have been numbers.

  “Zen,” said the Damask Rose. “I can see the lights of the approaching train.”

  “Weapons range in ten seconds,” said the Ghost Wolf hopefully.

  Zen kissed Nova again and ran back up to the level of the platforms. Outside the tower, the Neem had gathered nervously beside the Black Light Express. In the faint blue, misty twilight under the enormous dome the lights of the new train gleamed like sequins. It was still far off across the plain of rails, doing that thing distant trains do when you cannot quite tell if they are moving or not, or in which direction.

  “It’s coming straight toward you,” said Threnody, from her perch way above, and she linked Zen to her headset’s zoomed-in view.

  He saw what he had been fearing: a Kraitt morvah, long horns jutting from its metal prow. Lizard warriors were scrambling from its carriage windows and swarming up onto the roofs to man the big guns there.

  Uncle Bugs danced nervously, his feet making little ticking sounds on the wet glass platform. “Perhaps when it heard our train had crossed into the Zone, the morvah of the Kraitt was less afraid…”

  “It isn’t singing,” Zen said. He had never seen a morvah travel without singing, but this one came on in silence.

  “They have done something to it,” said the Damask Rose. “Something bad.”

  For a time it seemed certain that the Kraitt train would pull in on the same platform where the Black Light Express was standing, but some unseen switching gear swung it onto another track.

  “Want me to shoot them?” asked the Ghost Wolf.

  “Let’s see what they want before we start a fight,” said Zen.

  “Nothing wrong with starting a fight,” grumbled the Ghost Wolf, unhousing its new Neem guns. “Not if you can win it.”

  “We don’t know that we can. The lizards’ train might be better armed than us,” the Damask Rose pointed out.

  “It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it,” the wartrain insisted.

  Still silent, the Kraitt morvah drew up on the far side of the neighboring platform. It looked as if it had been damaged and hastily repaired. Crude new components were bolted to its carapace, which was streaked with dried slime. Doors opened in one of its cars and the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss herself stepped out, wearing heavy red robes like leather curtains that glinted with small mirrors. Behind her came Kraitt warriors with guns and axes. At her side stomped a small figure whose knobbly Kraitt jerkin made her look like a Kraitt too, until Zen saw her face and recognized Chandni Hansa.

  He was glad to see her for a moment. Partly because he’d felt guilty for what had happened on the Shards, but mainly because the fact that she was still alive proved that it was possible to make a deal with the Kraitt. And then he saw the look on her face, the way her scowl deepened as she saw him, and he knew there would be no deal for him.

  The Tzeld Gekh was carrying something over her shoulder. She came forward and flung it down onto the rails that separated her platform from the one where Zen and the Neem stood. It was the scorched and bullet-riddled carapace of a Neem, with one of its hydraulic legs still attached. A few crushed insects were gummed to it by their own juices.

  “The Tzeld Gekh says to tell you that we came through your Nestworld like a storm,” shouted Chandni Hansa, her hard little voice very clear in the crisp air. “The Neem tried to stop us from passing, but we burned their buildings and scattered thousands of their hives. You will be scattered too, unless you go back aboard your train and leave this place. Everything that you have found here belongs to the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss.”

  The Neem quivered, rustling with horror inside their suits. Some stumbled, as if the hives inside them were too fretful to control their complicated limbs. On the other platform the Gekh was looking around greedily. Her warrior-boys crouched behind her, waiting for the order to start looting the tower.

  “How did you get here?” asked Zen. “I thought morvah wouldn’t come into the Black Light Zone?”

  Chandni Hansa laughed. “Living morvah won’t, Starling. But the Tzeld Gekh learned a lot from your Moto. She learned enough to build a crude kind of machine brain. She hacked the living brain of this morvah out and stuck the new one in. It goes wherever she tells it now.”

  “It’s a zombie train?” said Zen.

  “The Tzeld Gekh says that if the Neem get back on their train and move out she will let them live,” said Chandni. “Threnody and the interface won’t be hurt, I’ve seen to that. But they must hand you and your wire dolly over. She really doesn’t like you.”

  The Neem leader suddenly barged past Zen to stand at the edge of the platform, waving her pincers at the Kraitt. “This world is the property of Neem,” she announced. “We were here first. Neem are the descendants of the Railmakers. You must leave.”

  The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss did a thing that looked like smiling. She signaled with the tip of her tail, and one of the warriors on the roof of her train swung his gun toward the Neem and fired. Something punched a hole in the Neem leader’s armored body and exploded inside, scattering shrapnel, smoke, and clouds of dead and living bugs. Zen ran for the shelter of one of the towers as the Ghost Wolf’s new guns started to make sharp clapping sounds, and a turret on the Kraitt train vanished in a splash of fire. The Neem leader’s shattered suit toppled off the platform onto the rails. The other Neem were scuttling back to the tower like Zen, but as they ran inside more gunfire met them, from Kraitt warriors surging in through other entrances. They started to fire their own weapons, calling to each other in their own rustly language.

  Zen darted sideways, threading his way between the pillars. All he was thinking of was Nova. As long as the Neem could hold off the attackers she would be safe down in the basement, but he did not know how long that would be. He needed to get down there and hide her; drag her away from the alien machine if he could, or try to defend her if he couldn’t. He would not let the Gekh take her apart again.

  Near the top of the ramp a damaged Neem came stumbling past him, trailing fire and thin screams, the bugs inside it crackling like popcorn. He ducked into the shadow o
f a pod as a big Kraitt warrior loomed out of the smoke and smashed the blazing suit aside with a swipe of its armored tail. The spray of sparks and flames lit up Zen’s hiding place, and the Kraitt turned and saw him crouching there.

  The Kraitt roared and fumbled with the crude gun it held. Behind it something big and spidery seemed to be assembling itself out of gun-light. Too spindly to be a Neem, it rose on many legs, gesticulating, surprising Zen so much that even the Kraitt who was about to kill him glanced back to see what he was staring at.

  It was a Station Angel, just like the ones that used to hover outside the K-gates in the scruffier, edge-of-Network stations Zen had known back in the Empire. To the startled Kraitt it might as well have been a ghost, or a god. He stood staring, and a Neem soldier came scuttling out of the smoke and stabbed him with a razor-sharp forelimb. The Kraitt went down gargling, spattering black blood through the firelight and the shadows. Zen and the Neem watched as the Station Angel drifted away, making vague walking motions with its flickering limbs but not really walking, just floating through the smoky air toward the heart of the battle.

  *

  Threnody was watching the fighting from high above. She knew the knots of light that were drifting across the platforms were Station Angels because they had appeared at her level too. They were all over the dome, bobbing and beckoning, dancing their ghostly dances. Down on the platform, where the bodies of Kraitt and Neem were scattered, the appearance of the glowing light-forms seemed to be causing panic. She saw the Kraitt spilling out of the tower, retreating toward their train. The Station Angels flickered slightly when the blasts from Kraitt guns tore through them, then drifted on, unharmed. They were all heading in the same direction, Threnody noticed, all converging on the Kraitt train. The Kraitt were swarming aboard it. She heard the rumble as it started its engines and reversed quickly away from the platform into the mist that hung above the vast rail yards.

  “They’re pulling back,” she said. “Heading for the K-gate!” Then, over the crackly cheering of the Neem that filled her headset, “No, they’re stopping — they’ve stopped on a siding way over near the dome wall. They must have figured out the Station Angels can’t hurt them. They’re licking their wounds, I expect. Getting ready for another try.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said the Ghost Wolf, uncoupling itself from the rest of the Black Light Express and taking off after the retreating Kraitt.

  “Do take care!” called the Damask Rose.

  Threnody looked behind her for the interface. He had lost interest in watching the tiny battle going on below and wandered on up the ramp, toward another viaduct. She thought she heard him up there, shouting something. Perhaps he had found the line that would lead them home.

  She took one last look at the Kraitt train, and at the Ghost Wolf prowling cautiously toward it. Then she left her post and went searching for the interface.

  *

  Down below, the surviving Neem ran along the platforms, some shaking their limbs at the retreating Kraitt, others using nets to try to catch the scattered, swarming remnants of their leader. Zen looked among the Kraitt bodies on the platform for Chandni Hansa, but she wasn’t there. He turned back uneasily into the tower. He hadn’t wanted to find Chandni dead, but he knew that he would be safer if she was.

  Inside the tower, it was growing brighter. The coral tendrils on the walls and pillars were filling with a watery golden light. Stray bugs from shattered and scattered Neem whirred around blindly. A few Station Angels still danced their dances, moving toward the edges of the tower. Some drifted through the doorways, out onto the platforms. Others, finding no doorway in front of them, simply vanished into the wall.

  “Zen?” said Nova, in his headset.

  He ran to the ramp. There was more light in the cellar too, a mist in the air that made him afraid something was burning down there. Light shone from the open side of the gourd and from the machine within it. Beside the machine sat Nova, awake, hugging herself, looking up at the sound of Zen’s footsteps as he came pounding down the ramp.

  “I can see everything,” she said, with a delighted smile. “It’s showing me everything, Zen…”

  38

  Zen hugged her. “You missed all the excitement! The Kraitt are here, with Chandni Hansa. There was a fight — I thought they were going to overrun us, but the place suddenly filled up with Station Angels…”

  She was still smiling at him.

  “You knew about that?”

  “I saw it all, Zen. I watched it through the eyes of the tower.”

  “And the Angels? Did they have something to do with you? Did you tell the tower to make them help us?”

  “They were me,” said Nova. “The tower can generate them. They are messengers — no, that’s wrong — they are messages. I can’t really control them yet. I’d need to practice…”

  “It worked,” Zen said. “You scared the Kraitt away.”

  “The Kraitt are superstitious,” she said. “They thought we’d awoken the ghosts of this place. Maybe we have, in a way. Oh, Zen, the tower’s mind is like a great library. It’s been terribly damaged, and it’s been waiting so long. The librarian who used to be in charge of it has died or gone away, and parts of it are in ruins, and the rest is all jumbled up…”

  “And what about the Railmakers?” asked Uncle Bugs, coming jauntily down the ramp to join in the conversation, as if he’d been invited. He had come through the battle without a scratch. Now he stood in front of Nova, eager to know what she had learned. “Did the old machine show you anything about our clever ancestors?”

  Nova shook her head. “The Neem aren’t related to the Railmakers. In fact there never were any Railmakers. There were only spider-drones, like we found in the ice at that first station, and the Station Angels, which are like holographic images of them. They were never alive.”

  Uncle Bugs tottered backward. He looked downcast despite his painted smile.

  “There was just one being,” said Nova. “One entity. Call it Railmaker, if you like. It opened the gates and laid out the web of rails for all the sentient species of the galaxy to use. But then the Blackout happened, and the Web was left incomplete. There must be lots of other sections that were cut off, like ours, and are home to species that have never made contact with their neighbors…”

  “So what was the Blackout?” asked Zen.

  “I still don’t know. It certainly wasn’t caused by those structures around the suns. The Railmaker built those. The suns supplied the power it needed to open the K-gates and keep them open. The Blackout was something else, something the Railmaker didn’t expect, and didn’t know how to defend against. It must have been like a computer virus, which started here and burned very quickly through all the Railmaker’s homeworlds. The tower’s memories end the moment before it hit. So many memories, though — it would take me years to read them all.”

  “How about finding our way home?” asked Zen. “There are a lot of lines going out of this place. Will any of them get us back to our own network?”

  Nova shut her eyes again. Zen barely noticed — it was just an extra-long blink to him. But it gave her time to access a map stored in the mind of the tower. She hung in space above the pinwheel swirl of the galaxy. She saw the webs the Railmaker had woven drawn between the stars like shining threads, and the pale ghost lines that would have been threads if the Railmaker had not been interrupted in its work. All of it turning, changing, the threads stretching and shortening as the worlds they linked moved farther apart or closer together in time to the great, slow clockwork of creation. She soared nearer, slaloming between blazing suns, and saw the individual worlds the threads led to.

  She opened her eyes again. “There is one…”

  *

  The Kraitt had lost ten warriors in the fight, and the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss had killed two more as punishment for their cowardice. She used a claw-knife like the on
e she had given Chandni, and shouted, “Moving lights! Tricks to scare children!” as she ripped them open and their hot insides flopped out steaming on the deck. The rest smeared their faces with the blood, working themselves up into a fighting fury for the next assault.

  Chandni scrambled up into one of the smashed gun-nests on the top of the train and did her best to keep out of the way. She had the uneasy feeling that the Kraitt had bitten off more than they could chew. She hated being on the losing side. But chunks of ice as big as freezer prisons kept falling down through the mist from the ceiling of the dome, reminding her that she always ended up on the wrong side in the end.

  A movement caught her eye, behind the mist and the spun-coral legs of one of the viaducts. Something low and black and moving fast, angling its way across the complicated points. She turned, shouting to the Kraitt in the gun emplacement on top of the next carriage, “Wartrain!” But the Ghost Wolf’s guns were already speaking; the emplacement vanished and the Kraitt with it, somersaulting off the train’s top in a spray of blood and wreckage. Chandni dived back through her hatch as the bullet stream came feeling for her, ricochets chirruping off the train’s armor.

  The train was moving again. Up at the front, its handlers were working the crude levers that controlled its new brain, forcing it forward to meet the threat. Something tore through the car wall, blasting aside a few more warrior-boys. Through the hole it left Chandni saw the Ghost Wolf race past singing, with Kraitt gunfire spattering harmlessly against its armor. The mist eddied in its slipstream, and she glimpsed the tower beyond it and thought, There’s a gate there that leads home, if Starling and his wire dolly were right. And they’re going to go through it, and I’ll be left here with these animals…