Black Light Express

by Philip Reeve

  It had felt good at first, when the Kraitt accepted her, but it didn’t feel good anymore. It was time to switch sides again.

  The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss was snarling something, furious and terrible with her ruined face in the smoke and dim light of the shot-up train. Chandni’s headset was on the blink and wouldn’t translate correctly. She banged her head against the armored wall and caught the last few words: “…We will fall back through the gateway and wait!”

  Another shot from the Ghost Wolf hit the carriage, smashing a jagged hole clean through it, flinging a dead Kraitt out. Chandni waited for the Gekh to turn away and then went after him, slipping between the hole’s torn edges and dropping onto the tracks where she landed hard and came up mostly bruises.

  The Kraitt train rattled past her and away, trailing flame, bits of her former comrades dangling from the wrecked roof turrets. The Ghost Wolf hurled a few more shots at it as it fled toward the tunnel it had come through. Then the wartrain slowed and started back toward the tower. Chandni followed it on foot.

  She thought the worst part was that all this was happening because she’d taken pity on Threnody Noon that night the Prells attacked Grand Central. If she had just stayed selfish and run off, she would probably be living it up somewhere on the K-bahn now.

  This was where being nice got you.

  *

  Threnody heard the gunfire as she climbed up the outside of the tower, looking for the interface. She could not see the train duel taking place beneath the mist, but after a while she heard the Ghost Wolf announcing in a satisfied way, “They’ve legged it back through the K-gate. If I had my own weapons they’d be toast, of course. I can’t do much more than annoy them with these bug guns. Want me to go after them and finish them off?”

  “No,” said the Damask Rose. “Come back now, Wolf. You have been terribly brave.”

  Threnody kept climbing until she reached the end of the next viaduct. The interface was standing motionless in front of a train that waited on the rails there.

  “What have you found?” she called.

  Stuff crunched under her feet as she went out onto the viaduct. Drifts of dry brown flakes lay scattered on its glass surface and heaped upon the rails and the crossties. Like autumn leaves, she thought, only there could be no leaves here. The interface heard her coming and turned toward her. His lovely golden face was wet with tears.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He didn’t answer. Threnody looked past him at the train.

  It was too square to be a morvah. It was too square to be a train, for anybody used to the streamlined trains of the Network Empire. It was a very small, old-fashioned, rectangular locomotive, made of metal that had begun to corrode. That was what the stuff underfoot was, the brown and red and surprising orange stuff that looked like autumn leaves; the whole viaduct around the ancient loco was littered with flakes and crumbs of rust. But Threnody could still tell that the loco had once been painted in yellow and black stripes. On its nose, in white, was a big number:

  03

  It was a second or so before she understood how strange that was — a number she could read, here in the alien heart of the Black Light Zone.

  “Does this line lead back to the Network? To our Network?”

  The interface nodded miserably.

  “Which planet?”

  “To Old Earth,” he replied.

  “Earth?” Of all the worlds in the Network Empire, that was the last Threnody had expected him to name. “There’s no K-gate on Earth! That’s why everyone had to fly to Mars before the First Expansion could begin…”

  The interface did not answer. He fell to his knees. He toppled forward and lay with his face in the rust of the ancient train from Earth and he cried. He cried like a little child, helpless tears and snot, and flakes of the rust got into his mouth and stuck to his face and caught in his golden hair.

  Threnody pinged a message to the Ghost Wolf, attaching some video of the rust-train. “What’s this?”

  “I’ve never met an engine like that,” said the Wolf, after a moment. “I think they have one in the museum on Grand Central. Pioneer class. Those are the locos the Guardians used to test the K-gates, back at the beginnings of the Network Empire. They just carried instruments, and computers powerful enough to store a copy of a Guardian…”

  Threnody walked right around the derelict loco with her headset set to record. It was doorless, windowless, nameless, a sealed box on crumbling wheels, but in places the rust had eaten through its hull and she could see more rust inside: metal boxes spilling colored plastic wires. It’s so old, she thought, laying her hand against the ancient metal. Old Earth old. The Guardians themselves must’ve been new when it came exploring here.

  The interface had stopped sobbing. He lay with his face in the rust and said, “The gate on Old Earth was the first we found. It was deep underground, near the South Pole. We kept it secret. We sent pioneer trains through it to find out what it was and where it led. And then we sent this train. And then we hid it, and took human beings through the gate on Mars instead, which led only to empty worlds.”

  “But why?” asked Threnody.

  The golden face looked up at her, all rust and misery, and she suddenly guessed what the train’s cargo had been. Guessed, and hoped she was wrong, and knew she wasn’t. Because a loco with enough computer storage to carry a copy of a Guardian could also carry a virus like the one she had witnessed at work in the Datasea on Tristesse. The old train wasn’t a train, it was a poisoned arrow that the Guardians had shot into the vast mind of the tower. It had unleashed something that had wrecked the Railmaker machines, and then been carried onward in the minds of infected morvah to wreck all Railmaker machines, everywhere.

  She brushed the rust from the face of the interface and helped him to his feet. As she led him back down the long ramp she messaged Zen. “I’ve found a line. You’ll never guess where it goes…”

  39

  He already knew, of course. Nova had told him, which was disappointing. But Nova had not known of the connection between the line to Earth and the coming of the Blackout. Threnody and the interface explained it to them back on the platform.

  “We did not keep the Web of Worlds a secret because we were afraid,” the interface said. “We killed the Railmaker because we were afraid, and then we kept its works a secret because we were ashamed.”

  “But why were you afraid of the Railmaker?” Nova asked.

  “It was a machine intelligence like us, but much more powerful. We were afraid we would be absorbed and overwhelmed. We were afraid that if humans learned about the Railmaker, they would forget their Guardians. We are jealous gods, Nova.”

  “So you killed the Railmaker because you thought we’d love it better than we love you?” asked Threnody. “And then you kept the Web a secret because you thought we’d hate you for killing the thing that made it…”

  “But Old Earth’s just a nature reserve, isn’t it?” said Zen. He didn’t have much opinion about what the Guardians had done. He just wanted to get out of the hub before the Kraitt returned. “We can’t go home that way. Earth’s not even connected to the rest of the K-bahn. We need a gate to someplace where people will notice us arriving.”

  “Then we should open one,” said Nova.

  “Can we do that?” asked Threnody.

  “I think so…” Nova blinked again, swam again between the stars and worlds. “It would be possible to open a line from this place to any one of a dozen human stations, but they’re all on minor worlds, far from Grand Central. Far Cinnabar? Vagh? Khoorsandi? Anaiskalan?”

  “Khoorsandi,” said Threnody.

  “Why?” asked Zen. “Khoorsandi’s way out on the southern branch lines…”

  “It’s still a Noon world. My uncle Nilesh is Stationmaster there. And it’s Fire Festival there this year, so it will be crowded. There will be
people and media everywhere. Can we really go there?”

  “There are things we’ll need,” said Nova. “Zen, you remember the black spheres that made Raven’s Worm work. There must be some of those somewhere…”

  Zen reached into his pocket. “Like this?”

  She smiled at him and took the sphere he held out to her. “Thief,” she said, fondly.

  “Will that open a gate to Khoorsandi?” he asked.

  “Once it’s programmed and placed in a Worm, it will open a gate to wherever we tell it.”

  “And you know how? It took Raven hundreds of years to figure that out…”

  “Because he was working from fragments, patching the Railmaker’s codes together like a jigsaw puzzle, with lots of pieces missing,” Nova said. “I have those codes on hand. The tower holds them. This is what the tower is for.”

  She wished she could explain it better. She could join her mind to the mind of the tower if she wished, and that made her as powerful as the tower itself, but there was nothing about the experience that Zen would understand. This is how the Guardians feel, she thought. They love humans, but they are so much bigger than humans… It frightened her so much that she almost wanted to disconnect herself from the tower, but she could not do what was needed without it.

  It’s just for a while, she thought. When we’re home, then I’ll be safe from it, and just be myself again…

  *

  They followed her to the basement, where she stood in front of one of the Worms. Her slight frown was the only outward sign of all the activity going on in her brain. Behind her, the machine in the gourd-shaped shelter flickered with patterns of light. The Worm lit up too, streams of bioluminescence racing along the folded spines on its back and glowing dimly beneath its armor plates. It shuddered and a snort came from it: ancient pent-up air, reeking of strange chemicals that stung Threnody’s eyes.

  Zen turned to grin at her. “I’ve never stolen one of these before!”

  “You sure the tower won’t be angry?” asked Threnody.

  “I am the tower,” said Nova, and her eyes shone with reflected Worm-light. “I am inside its mind.”

  “It must have terrible security.”

  “I don’t think the Railmaker thought in terms like that,” she said.

  “No wonder it got taken down,” said Zen, but he could tell Nova wasn’t listening; her mind was busy in the mind of the tower and the mind of the waking Worm.

  The gigantic machine was starting to lumber from its position. Loud sucking noises came from beneath it. In the empty space it left, puddles of thick liquid held the light, and fleshy hoses withdrew into the floor like the tentacles of a bashful squid. Considering it was the size of a large building, the Worm was pretty nimble on its caterpillar legs. Zen and Threnody saw them moving underneath as it surged past them up the ramp.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” asked Nova, wrapping her arms around Zen from behind, shouting over the noise of the Worm.

  It was certainly impressive. In his time on the Web, Zen had forgotten the size and strangeness of the Worm that opened Raven’s gate. The ramp trembled beneath it, and the spines on its back scraped against the roof and walls with high, sharp noises, adding their own scars to those that all the Worms before it had made. Zen and the others followed after it, careful not to tread in the smears of goo it left behind.

  At the top it paused, then turned ponderously left onto a set of tracks and settled there, drawing up its feet and lowering heavy wheels to grip the rails.

  “That technology alone,” said Threnody, who had never seen a living Worm before, “if we could get that to my family’s biotech division, the profits…”

  The spines of the Worm waved back and forth. Vapor plumed from the vents in its armor.

  “Now what?” asked Zen, when he heard Nova coming up the ramp behind him. “Now I suppose we have to go inside it? Put the sphere in place, so it knows where to go?”

  But Nova was not alone. One of the Railmaker’s spiders was walking behind her. It didn’t move like an ordinary maintenance spider but seemed to drift along with its feet barely brushing the floor, like a Station Angel made in ceramic. Nova stopped beside Zen and the spider went past them, holding the black sphere between one of its delicate pairs of pincers. A doorway opened in the skirts of the Worm, and the spider vanished inside. The Worm shuddered, went still, shuddered again. Zen imagined that it had been under the control of Nova and the tower, and inserting the sphere had broken that link and let it start thinking for itself. But he was only guessing. What did he know about Worms?

  “So it needs to make a gateway now?” Threnody asked. “That will take a while, won’t it?”

  “This isn’t like Desdemor,” said Nova. “The physical structure of the gateway is already there. The Worm just opens it. Cuts a path through K-space, all the way to Khoorsandi.”

  Zen said, “Let’s hope it doesn’t pop out in the middle of a volcano.”

  Nova just looked at him. Communing with age-old alien machines seemed to use up bits of her brain where her sense of humor usually lived. Or maybe it just wasn’t very funny, thought Zen. Maybe, when you opened a gate onto a fiery little world like Khoorsandi, there really was a danger you might land in lava.

  Nova blinked, opening maps in her mind. “We need to move the train onto this line. I’m sending her details of the route around the tower, setting the points…”

  “She’d better be quick, then,” said a new voice, and Chandni Hansa came swaggering in past the Worm.

  They reacted in various ways. The Neem swung their weapons toward her, Threnody shouted, “Don’t shoot!” while Zen fumbled his own gun out and pointed it in Chandni’s direction and wondered what to do next. Nova took three quick steps toward Chandni, grabbed her arm, and twisted it behind her back. Chandni, surprised by the Motorik’s speed and strength, let her grab the other arm too.

  She laughed. “It’s all right. I came to help you. The Kraitt have pulled out, but they haven’t gone far. She’s waiting for reinforcements. The Gekh didn’t just upgrade one morvah. She had her people plumbing artificial brains into at least four more when I left the Shards of Kharne. They’re coming through behind us, fighting their way through the Neem Nestworlds. Once they get here, she’ll attack again, and she knows how many you are now. Or how many you aren’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Zen. “We’ll be gone by then.”

  “It does matter!” said Threnody. “What if we get to Khoorsandi and a ton of Kraitt come through after us in their zombie trains?”

  “It does matter,” agreed Nova. “Even if the Kraitt come here after we’ve left, they might still damage the tower.”

  “It matters more to us,” said the Neem warrior who had been acting as leader since their real leader was scattered. “The Gekh’s trains are harming our nests on the way to this place. We do not want to stay here. We do not to want to travel with you to your new worlds. We want you to take us home, so that we can fight the Kraitt and help our damaged hives.”

  Immense noises were coming from the Worm. It sprayed a geyser of pale vapor up inside the tower. It was on its way, eager to do its Wormy thing. Zen had a giddy what-have-we-done feeling as he imagined it opening on a new gate on Khoorsandi and letting through a band of marauding Kraitt.

  “I wish to go back to the Network Empire,” said Uncle Bugs. “I wish to tell my fellow Hive Monks that the Insect Lines are real, and bring them back with me so that they may see the wonders of the Nestworlds.”

  “But the Nestworlds are in danger,” said the others. “We must go home.”

  “It’s simple enough,” said the voice of the Ghost Wolf, cutting in. “You’ve got two locos, geniuses! So split us up. The Rose can go through the new gate with all who want to go, and me, I’ll take the Neem carriages and head back the way we came. I want another round with that lizard train for s
tarters, and if there’s more of the things, it sounds like the Neem will need a hand.”

  *

  So it was decided. The Black Light Express was divided in two. The Damask Rose took her original three cars, the Neem piled into their own, and the Ghost Wolf rolled away with them toward the K-gate they had entered by. It kept talking to the Damask Rose long after it was out of sight, and the Damask Rose streamed its words to Zen and Threnody’s headsets. It said bold, blustering things about how easily it would take care of those Kraitt, and the Damask Rose kept saying, “Ridiculous,” and, “Such a show-off,” but she sounded sad. Threnody was sad too. When the Wolf went through its gate and its signal dropped out, she wiped away some small tears. It was the bravest train she’d ever known.

  Nobody was sure what to do with Chandni. Even Chandni didn’t know. They tied her hands and locked her in one of the compartments in the Rose’s third car, which had been full of provisions when she arrived on the Web, but was empty now. Zen put a roll of soft Herastec fabric in there, a few cushions from the state car seats, a bottle of water, and some food. Nova checked Chandni for concealed weapons, but she did it with her eyes, not her hands, and although she scanned for metal or ceramic it turned out that she couldn’t see the claw-knife stuffed into the back of Chandni’s pants. The feel of it there was a small comfort to Chandni. At the other end, if things went bad, she’d fight her way out, maybe.

  “Whatever happens,” she said to Threnody, before they locked the door, “I don’t want to go back into the freezers. Promise?”

  Threnody shrugged. “I can’t promise that. For all I know, we’ll all end up in the freezers.”

  Zen settled himself in the state car with Nova and the interface and Uncle Bugs, ready for the journey around the tower to where the Worm was opening its new gate. As the train began to move, he began for the first time to truly believe that they were going home. In a few more hours, if his luck held, he might be back on Summer’s Lease, telling the story of his adventures to Myka and his mother. And suddenly he knew that he would miss the Web of Worlds. It had been a strange nine months, and often frightening, but now that it was over, now that he knew there was a path home and a future in which he would be able to look back on his adventures here from outside, he realized that it had been the best time of his life. Whatever happened next, it could never be as simple and good as it had been when he laid with Nova under the million stars of Yaarm, the night the wind blew the curtain. He wanted to be back there, just the two of them, on their own old train.