by Philip Reeve
Nova had seen things like this before. She had unleashed things like this, killing trains on Raven’s orders with tailored computer viruses. But this was bigger, stronger, stranger. This must be the same thing that had deleted Mordaunt 90 from the Tristesse Datasea. This — or something very like it — had killed the poor, unsuspecting Railmaker.
But as it died, the Railmaker had been busy trying to defend itself. It had been writing countermeasures that had almost been enough to keep it safe. They were embedded in the code that its tower was still broadcasting from the Black Light Zone. And because the code was in her mind, and her mind had been changed in ways she still didn’t grasp by her meeting with the tower, it was easy for Nova to see the small remaining weaknesses that had let the virus through, and fix them. When the sickness in the Datasea sensed her and turned toward her, she was already armored against it.
She pinged a copy of the code to the Damask Rose and left the balcony. The room was in darkness except for the light from the volcanoes pouring through the windows, sullen and blood red. She ran to Zen and shook him by his shoulders. “Zen! Zen!”
*
In the gardens of the Guardians, Zen felt her touch and heard her voice, but she could not pull him back into the real world. For strange things were happening in the gardens too. The falling snow had turned red; the hedges were rippling with distortions, sending out complicated new growths that did not look like foliage. Shiguri’s peacock squawked in alarm and exploded in a cloud of feathers, like a burst pillow. Sfax Systema’s butterflies fell from the air; Indri began to jitter like an image on a badly tuned screen; Ombron and Leiki flared with interference patterns and simply blinked out of existence. Mordaunt 90 fell to its knees, clutching its head.
Only the Twins seemed unaffected, still sweetly smiling. But around their smiles their faces were melting and reorganizing themselves: they grew taller, their hair vanished, and they became two men with shaven heads.
“We have a much better idea,” they said, their little-girl voices deepening and hardening as they spoke. “We will destroy the new K-gate. We will say it was unstable, and its collapse proves that new gates cannot be opened. And our interfaces on Khoorsandi will kill everyone who has seen what lies on the other side of it.”
And then Nova tore Zen’s headset off and he was gasping and blinking in the firelit room while she removed Threnody’s headset too. The interface of Mordaunt 90 let go of their hands and stood trembling, looking as lost as he had looked on the Web of Worlds. “The Twins must be insane,” he said. “Their programs are even more powerful than in Desdemor; I cannot fight it this time. I never thought they would dare attack all the Guardians. When the versions of ourselves on other worlds learn what has happened here, they will be punished severely…”
“But by then they’ll have what they want,” said Nova. “We’ll all be dead. There are two men coming for us.”
“They’re not men,” said Threnody. “They’re interfaces of the Twins.”
Zen automatically reached for his headset to check the hotel security feeds.
“No!” warned Nova. “The Twins’ virus is shutting down the whole city. Your headset’s useless — it will just help them to track you. We need to get back to the Damask Rose and off this world…”
Zen put the headset in his pocket. Nova ran to the main door of the suite and opened it a crack. Nilesh Noon had left CoMa on guard down in the hotel’s lobby, but she could not contact them; their headsets must have been as dead as everything else that had been exposed to the Twins’ attack. She tried to force her mind into some of the hotel’s internal cameras, but those were dead too. At least her eyes could pierce the gloom. There was nothing moving in the corridor outside the suite.
Zen ran to knock on the door of Uncle Bug’s room. The Neem came scuttling out, demanding to know what was happening. Threnody shushed him, and they all followed Nova out into the corridor. Beneath the roar of the volcanoes Nova could hear shouts and screams, but while the streets around the hotel must have been full of panicking people, it was impossible to know if any of that panic was being caused by the Mako brothers. Then, as they neared the elevators, they saw that someone was coming up, the yellow numbers above the doors lighting up one by one.
“It’s the Twins,” said Nova. “I don’t think anyone else could get the elevators working.”
They hurried past, found an emergency stairway, and started down. Could it be that easy to evade the Twins? Just taking the stairway while their interfaces took the elevator?
It couldn’t. They barged out into the lobby and found that one of the Mako brothers had waited there for them. He sat casually on one of the big hotel sofas, surrounded by the bodies of the guards who had been stationed there to protect Threnody.
He didn’t try to gloat or explain himself. He was on his feet and shooting as soon as the fugitives appeared. The first two bullets smacked the Mordaunt 90 interface in the chest, and he fell over with a startled grunt. But Uncle Bugs ran up a wall and sprang at the gunman with his legs stretched wide, coming down on him like a falling chandelier.
Zen dove for the gun as it went skittering away across the marble tiles. But Nova ran to kneel over the struggling man, grabbing his shaven head between both hands, staring into his furious eyes. Her mind found his. A massive mind, massively encrypted, but somehow she found her way through its defenses. His eyes widened as he realized what was happening. He looked so surprised that Nova felt almost sorry for him. He wrenched himself free of her and Uncle Bugs, rolled, snatched his gun just as Zen’s hand was about to close on it, and sprang up, pointing it at Nova’s face.
“Nova!” Zen shouted.
In the time between the “No” and the “va!” she wrote a very simple, very destructive program, uploaded it to the gunman’s mind, and stepped aside.
The bullet went harmlessly past her, pruning a potted plant and ricocheting away down darkened corridors. The man dropped heavily to his knees, sighed loudly, and fell backward to lie staring up at the ceiling. There was a little tattooed letter E on his forehead. From his ears, thin trickles of smoke uncoiled.
“Is he dead?” asked Uncle Bugs, levering himself the right way up.
Nova nodded. “Threnody was right. He’s an interface. A version of the Twins.”
“How did you stop him?” asked Zen.
“Something must have been wrong with him; I shouldn’t have been able to get through his firewalls like that…” Or maybe something was wrong with her, Nova thought. Linking with the hub machine seemed to have altered her in more ways than she knew.
She turned to look at the elevator. The numbers above the door were counting down as the brother who had gone up to the top floor realized his mistake and came back down to join his twin. She found the elevator controls, the one functioning system in the hotel’s stricken network, and pinged a program into it that made the panel beside the doors blow out in a spray of sparks.
“Quickly,” she said.
Threnody crouched beside the Mordaunt 90 interface. There was a lot of blood. It was coming out of his mouth as well as the holes in his front and back where the bullets had punched through him. He looked more surprised than anything. “I’m dying,” he said. “It’s easier than I thought it would be.”
Threnody knew it didn’t really matter to him, because all his memories had been uploaded to the version of him in the Datasea, and that version would already have sent most of them on to other versions in the Datasea on other worlds, so there would be Mordaunt 90s all over the network who remembered Desdemor and Malik and the adventures he had shared with Threnody upon the Web of Worlds. But this was the version she had known; these were the hands she had held when he was frightened, and this the face from which she had wiped the rust of the ancient train. This was her Mordaunt 90, and it mattered a lot to her.
He took her hand and squeezed it and said, “Don’t let them clos
e the gate…” And then he died, and all she could do was leave him there and go after Nova and Zen and Uncle Bugs, across the lobby, out into the panicked streets.
46
There was a parade for the first night of Fire Festival. There were floats decorated in honor of the Guardians, and musicians, and children holding paper lanterns. It had just reached the piazza in front of the hotel when the data raft went down, and it had gotten tangled up there into a mass of confused and frightened people, lost children, broken-down vehicles. Nobody’s headset was working, nobody knew what to do, and the weather control systems that usually protected the Fire Station from the fallout of the volcano fields seemed to have failed as well: ash was coming down like snow. Fallen lanterns lay sputtering on the sidewalks, casting Uncle Bugs’s nightmare shadow across the faces of the crowd as he scuttled down the hotel steps, adding his own giant-spidery vibe to the general terror.
At least people got out of his way, though. Nova, Zen, and Threnody followed him along the path that opened for him through the shrieking partygoers. They crossed the piazza, found a stairway leading to the station, and ran down it while Nova pinged frantic messages at the Damask Rose.
“I’m all right,” the train said. “I’m not sure what that new Prell train is doing, though; it just unhitched all its cars and it’s heading out onto the main line. I don’t like that train, Nova…”
Nova didn’t like it either. She could sense its mind, but it was hard and shiny and impossible for her to penetrate. A moment later, as they reached the bottom of the stairs and ran into the station, they saw it pass, reversing at speed toward the mainline, shoving its cars behind it. A moment after that they heard its voice as it began to sing.
Only Threnody had heard a song like that before. She knew then what the dying interface had meant when he said, “Don’t let them close the gate.”
“It’s a Railbomb,” she said. “Like the one the Twins used at Desdemor.”
Out of the crowds of frightened passengers who thronged the station concourse a group of shambling, tattered shapes emerged, waving flimsy junkyard hands, sputtering about the Insect Lines through the holes in their paper masks. They were Hive Monks, and at the sight of Uncle Bugs in his shiny crab-suit they collapsed, prostrating themselves and hissing, “Tell us! Tell us of the Insect Lines!”
Uncle Bugs slowed. “I have to stay with them,” he said. “I have to tell them. If the Twins squish me, at least some of them will know about the Neem, the glories of our Nestworlds. Some will survive and carry the news to the rest of our people.”
Zen patted his carapace. “Tell them to tell all the Hive Monks, Uncle B.,” said Nova. “But we have to run.”
“I know!” said Uncle Bugs. His painted face smiled at them, and then he turned away. “Good luck!” he buzzed as he scuttled off to greet the Hive Monks.
The others ran on, through the darkened station, across footbridges, to the outer platform where the Rose was waiting for them with her engines running. Outside the station they could see the Sunbird, a slow-worm shimmer slithering its way onto the line their Worm had made. It had ditched its cars on a siding out there. Without them, it looked like an enormous silver bullet.
“Rose, can you catch it?” shouted Zen, as they piled themselves into her state car.
“I can try,” said the old train. “But it’s fast, that thing. You heard its engines…”
They heard them again, rising in a supercharged scream as it set off down the new line toward the gate they had opened. The Damask Rose was already following, rattling out from under the station canopy into the swirling ash and the long red light of the volcanoes.
“I wish the Ghost Wolf was here to help,” she said.
*
Chandni crouched in her locked compartment. She had been dozing, dreaming of her past lives, but the movement of the train had brought her instantly awake. “Where are we going?” she shouted, but the Rose didn’t answer her. Vibrations quivered through the compartment floor as the carriage passed over a set of points. Something was wrong. Maybe this was her chance. Chandni groped behind her, feeling for the knife in her waistband.
*
“That Twin interface who shot at us,” Threnody was saying, “he was one of the ones who killed Kobi.”
“He and his brother have been posing as Elon Prell’s servants,” said Nova, who had found all sorts of interesting things in Enki Mako’s brain. “But it’s Elon who serves them, really. The Twins have been using his family all along. If they’d killed us, it would have been the Prells who got the blame.”
“The Twins must be obsessed with keeping the Web of Worlds a secret,” said Threnody, slumping into a seat and looking at her hands, where Mordaunt 90’s blood was drying in brown patterns like henna tattoos. “The other Guardians wanted to keep the secret too, but the Twins will do anything to stop it from getting out…”
“They feel guilty,” said Zen. “The virus they’re using to shut this place down, it’s like the Blackout, isn’t it? I bet they’re the ones who wrote that program, the ones who killed the Railmaker. The other Guardians agreed; maybe they asked the Twins to do it, but the Twins are the ones who bear the guilt.” He thought he knew how they felt. They felt how he felt about wrecking the Noon train. They had told themselves it had to be done, it wasn’t their fault, but the guilt had stayed with them, and its weight had grown heavier with the centuries. He said, “They can’t bear the idea of anyone knowing.”
The Damask Rose rushed out of the station. As she passed under a final footbridge, there was a heavy thud as something landed on the roof of her rear car. It went unheard. The engines were howling and the passengers were listening to the wild, awful song of the Railbomb as it powered away from her down the line to the new gate. For a moment, the surviving Mako brother crouched motionless on the carriage roof with his coat flapping behind him in the hot wind. Then he began to move, running his hands over the smooth ceramic, looking for hatches, hunting for a way inside.
47
On the holoscreens, the gleaming dot that was the Sunbird grew slowly, slowly larger as the Damask Rose raced after it. The shining rails seemed to pour out of it like streams of fire, like twin laser beams trained on the Rose. But in fact it had no weapons. Its blank hull had no turrets or silos where guns or drones could lurk. It had only one purpose and one use, and it ran toward its destiny singing.
“Poor soul,” said the Damask Rose. “It doesn’t seem fair, making a thing like that. I don’t like doing this, but it will be a mercy, really.”
Before anyone had fathomed what she meant, the train had unfolded her guns and opened fire. Neem-built missiles streaked toward the Sunbird. Flowers of smoke and flame bloomed from its armor.
“Stop!” Nova shouted. “You might set it off!”
“That’s all right,” said the Rose. “My armor can handle the blast. Better that it goes off here than in your new K-gate, isn’t it? Or on the other side?”
“Not really,” said Nova. The rails her Worm had made would probably survive the blast, she thought, but landslides would spill across the tracks, which might take days to clear. And it was important that trains began to use the new gate soon, before the Guardians had time to find some other way to shut it or forbid its use.
The Damask Rose gave an irritable snort. “What are we going to do then?” she asked. “Slap its wrists? Give it a speeding ticket?”
“We’re going to talk to it,” said Nova.
“Good luck with that. I’ve tried. It just sings at you.”
Nova had been trying too. The Sunbird’s communications system was set to broadcast only. It probably didn’t even know that she was talking to it. She said, “I need to get its attention. You’ll have to pull up close, so I can get aboard it.”
“You can’t do that!” said Zen, as she started up the stairs to the upper deck. “It’s too dangerous!”
“I have to,” said Nova. “And it’s not — not for me.”
“The Railbomb probably has firewalls and booby traps and—”
“I can disable them,” promised Nova, and she stopped at the top of the stairs and turned and smiled at him. “Zen, the Railmaker machine did something to me.”
“What do you mean? Are you all right?”
“I’m better than all right! The Twins can’t stop me. There is new software in my mind, and they are no match for it.”
“Is that how you killed that interface?”
She nodded, looking proud, elated, a little nervous. “I am as powerful as them,” she said. “Now, help me up.”
The Rose gained speed, edging closer and closer to the Sunbird until her nose bumped against the bomb’s rear buffers. Zen helped Nova up through a hatchway on the state car roof, into the wind and the scouring ash.
“Be careful!” he shouted.
“I’m always careful!” she yelled back.
The Damask Rose closed the hatch behind her, and only then noticed that another hatch was open, on the roof of her rear car. When had that happened? She was going too fast, that was the trouble; her old engines were not built to maintain speeds like this for long, and her systems were beginning to fail. She shut the hatch and hoped that not too much of this awful ash had gotten inside the rear car.
Not much had. Her slipstream had swept it straight over the top of the open hatch. A few flakes did fall to the floor of the rear car, but most of those were being shaken off the coat of Shiv Mako, who had jumped inside when the hatch opened and now waited, braced against the movements of the speeding train, for the moment when he would go striding forward through the other cars to kill her passengers.