By dawn the shattered moon had moved to another part of the sky, but Kobi could still see it hanging there, its gigantic ruin filling the frosty clear air above the distant rail yards. The sun was small and low and gave no warmth. Why on earth did the Prells insist on making their home here? Kobi wondered. Was it plain stubbornness? Or maybe they just liked being uncomfortable. The bed in his big, underheated room had been as hard as a slab of slate.
Hunting was uncomfortable too. No snow boats or hound-drones for the Prells. They hunted with real hounds, and they did it on the backs of actual horses. It was years since Kobi had ridden one, but he wasn’t going to let his new future in-laws see how scared he was, so he scrambled up somehow into the big beast’s saddle and tried to look as if he knew what he was doing. The horses were artificial, with a twist of zebra in their DNA. Their coats matched the chameleon ponchos that the riders wore, the black and white stripes camouflaging them against the snow-slashed screes of Broken Moon.
Long before they’d crossed the ridge into the hunting reserve, Kobi’s thighs were aching and his face was numb from the icy wind. Still, he seemed to be handling the horse all right, cantering along with the rest of the party. And the game they were after was not as big or as fierce as he’d feared: just a troop of lanky, white-furred monkeys that lived on the tops of the mountains.
They turned up a steep-sided valley, following the clamor of the dogs and the distant, echoing howls of the monkeys. Kobi found himself riding beside Laria Prell, who said stiffly, “I wasn’t expecting that announcement last night.”
“Me neither,” said Kobi. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right. I don’t want to marry you, either.”
That startled him a bit. Why not? he thought.
“I don’t want to marry anybody,” she said. “Maybe one day, but not yet. I’ve been with the family marine corps for a couple of years. I’m enjoying it. I want to command a wartrain one day.”
“I suppose you could be married and still be a soldier,” said Kobi. He thought her white face made sense out here in the cold. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose had turned red, which sort of suited her, and on horseback she had a kind of big-boned grace. He supposed it didn’t matter who he was engaged to, now that he had lost Threnody. Why not Laria Prell?
But she had already ridden on ahead. He lost sight of her in the blur of identical striped horses and striped ponchos and hoof-scattered powder snow. Then guns started going off far up the valley and the field broke up, pursuing individual monkeys as the troop scattered across the slopes. Ten minutes later he caught a glimpse of Laria again, standing up in her saddle, taking aim with her carbine at a big male that was whooping and jabbering at her from a claw of rock. He turned his horse uphill toward her, but it plunged through a crust of new snow into a hollow and he was thrown over its head.
He landed hard. By the time he had floundered out of the snowdrift his horse was gone, heading for home with its stirrups flying. Kobi dropped back almost gratefully into the snow, waiting for the Prells’ drones to spot him and their servants to bring a bike or flyer and fetch him home. But slowly, as the sounds of the hunt faded over the ridge above him, he started to realize that wasn’t going to happen. These stupid Prells with their love of hardship probably didn’t have any drones on watch, or any rescue flyers waiting to ferry fallen riders home. He tried his headset, but a damping field blocked all connection to the local data raft; there was just an emergency site where serious injuries could be reported.
Kobi checked himself over. He wasn’t injured. He was about to log in and ask for a flyer to come and fetch him anyway when he suddenly wondered if the Prells were testing him. Maybe this ordeal was designed to see if he had what it took to be a proper Prell. He didn’t want to confirm their prejudices about soft Sundarbanis. And he didn’t want to have to go home and face his mother with the tale of another failure, another disastrous hunting trip.
So he was going to have to walk back to Crab Castle.
Great.
*
It was a long walk, and a lonely one, and Kobi was not used to long walks or loneliness. For the first hour or so he played the music that was stored in his headset, but he didn’t much like music really, and he grew bored with it. When he turned it off the mountains were silent except for the squeak and crunch of his boots on the snow. He had changed the chameleon settings on his poncho so that it was bright orange, in the hope that someone would spot him trudging across the snowfields. But if the hunt was still out, they had moved far away from him. He thought he caught the baying of the hounds at one point, but it might have been only the wind moaning through the crags.
The low sun sank lower still. Blue shadows crept across the snowfields, and the ruined moon toppled across the sky. It was like living under a permanently collapsing tower, thought Kobi, glaring up at it. No wonder the Prells were all half crazy.
When the last of the daylight faded, he finally admitted to himself that he was lost. He was considering pinging the emergency site again when a familiar sound came echoing over the ridge ahead of him: the squeal of train brakes and the dull clash of couplings. He stumbled up the ridge and looked down onto a rail yard, patched with light from tall gantries. There were stacked freight containers and a dozen tracks vanishing into an opening in the mountainside. It was a strange place for a freight terminal, but Broken Moon was a strange world. Maybe there were mines in there. There would be people, at least, or machines that would be able to connect him to Crab Castle. He bounded down the slope toward the tracks in a cloud of powder snow.
But at the foot of the slope, between him and the tracks, there was a fence. Chain link, many feet high, topped off with razor wire. He’d never seen security like it. What were the Prells afraid of, out here in the mountains? Maybe the monkeys were a problem?
Angrily, he started to trudge along beside the fence, following the rails toward the place where they went into the mountain. He could see lights in there, and movement: big lifters piling things onto flatcars. He turned on his headset, but there was still nothing. Thought about shouting, but the underground loading bays were still too far away, and too loud for anyone inside to hear him.
Then the nearest set of rails began to thrum, the way rails did when a train was coming. He looked over his shoulder and saw it approaching up the line with its lights out, moving slowly. He turned to face it, and was about to wave his arms and shout when something made him think better of it.
Why would it not have its lights on?
He stood in the shadows and watched as it rumbled past. It was a wartrain, small but heavily armed, and towing a long line of armored carriages and flatcars. On every flatcar squatted a tank, or a gun, or an assault hovercraft. Kobi had never seen so much military equipment outside an action threedie. And there was more inside the mountain; he turned his headset on and zoomed in on the loading bays, and in each one there was a Prell wartrain.
So this was what Rolo had meant when he said the Prells were going places. They were getting ready to go to war.
Light blazed down on him from the sky. He looked up at the descending belly of a flyer. He must have triggered some trackside security system. The Prells were happy enough to take him off their mountain now.