The colorless pulse of the K-gate faded. The Ghost Wolf was on another planet.
“You’ve dropped your speed, train,” Chandni said. “Something wrong?”
“We’re underwater,” said the train.
Threnody looked out through one of the narrow windows. She saw a shifting soup, blue-green, filled with bits of weed or stirred-up sand or something. She remembered Toubit from her lessons now; the K-gate there lay at the bottom of one of the deepest trenches in the planet’s ocean.
“Why would the Guardians have made a K-gate at the bottom of the sea?” Chandni wondered.
“Maybe it wasn’t sea back when the gate was opened,” said Threnody.
“Some bozo wants to talk to you, ladies,” said the train, and opened a bright screen in the air in the middle of the cabin.
“Unknown train?” A man’s face filled the screen, middle-aged and faintly pompous, a few thin hairs bravely clinging on above a bald dome of forehead. It peered into the Ghost Wolf’s cabin like a nosy neighbor spying through a window. “Administrator Ozcelyk of the Toubiti Transit Authority. Please identify yourself.”
“Chandni Hansa,” said Chandni. “Railforce,” she added, unconvincingly. “There’s been an attack on Grand Central by the Prell CoMa. They were repulsed after heavy fighting. We’re here to secure your station city, in case the enemy tries to strike here.”
Administrator Ozcelyk frowned. “But a freight train from Grand Central came in a few hours ago. It told us that the Prells have secured the city. It said Elon Prell is now Emperor…”
“It was wrong,” said Chandni. “The situation is changing very fast. The Prells have been defeated.”
The Administrator blinked helplessly. “I presume your train can provide proof of this? Media updates from the Grand Central data rafts…”
“Not me,” said the Ghost Wolf. “I’m a wartrain, mate. I’ve got better things to do with my brain than store a load of boring updates for your news sites.”
Ozcelyk killed the sound for a moment and talked to someone off-screen. The sea outside was shallowing. Shafts of sunlight shone down through it, lighting up a plain of silvery sand, kelp plantations, and some seafloor settlements under snow-globe domes. Threnody could feel the track rising under the Ghost Wolf’s wheels as it approached the island where Toubit Station City stood.
“You will stop,” said Ozcelyk, turning the sound on again. “There is a siding half a mile ahead of you. You will stop there until we can find out what the truth is. Submarines of the Toubiti Defense Force are closing in on your position; if you do not comply, they will open fire on you.”
“Ooh, I’m frightened,” sneered the Ghost Wolf. It muted the screen, and Ozcelyk went on talking in silence, opening and closing his mouth like a rather stern fish. The siding shot past.
Threnody said, “Train, can you take us onto the old Dog Star Line?”
“I see it,” said the Ghost Wolf. “It’s not in the updated maps I’m pulling from the local raft, but it’s still in my tactical database. The spur branches off from this line just before the main station…”
The light outside grew brighter and brighter and then suddenly they were in open air, water streaming down the window glass, palm trees and bio-buildings flickering past under an afternoon sky. On the screen, Ozcelyk yelled and waved like someone trapped in a soundproof booth.
“Is it safe — this Dog Star Line?” Chandni asked. “Won’t they have taken up the rails?”
“Nobody takes up rails,” said Threnody. “It’s too difficult. It costs too much.”
“But won’t the K-gate be blocked?”
“That won’t be a problem for me, darling,” bragged the Ghost Wolf.
The sky outside was full of flying things: media drones and maybe gunships too. Light flickered from some of them, but whether it was camera flashes or weapons, Threnody couldn’t tell. If they were shooting at the Ghost Wolf, its armor absorbed the energy of their beams and bullets so efficiently that she didn’t even hear them hit.
“What is this train, Chandni?” she asked. “You spoke as if there’s something wrong with it?”
Chandni looked at her. “It’s a good train,” she said.
“So why were you going to take that little Foss 500 instead?”
“Because this one is a Zodiak,” said Chandni, reluctantly. “You heard of those? The fighting C12s? Thickest armor, biggest engines, best weapons in the business. I didn’t think there were any left. Thought they’d all been broken up long ago. I guess Railforce kept a few mothballed for a rainy day, though it’s hard to imagine a day that rainy…”
“But if they’re so good, why break them up?” asked Threnody. She liked this train: the way it had rescued them, the way it scoffed at the Prells. She thought it was a bit like Chandni herself; they were both common and a little scary, both had been in storage for a long time, and now they were both awake and helping her.
Chandni kept her eyes on the window and spoke very softly, as if she didn’t want the train to overhear. “Zodiak trainworks tried to build the ultimate fighting locos, but there was some glitch in their minds. Most of the C12s turned out to be psychopaths. Killing machines who weren’t that bothered about who they killed.”
“WaHOOO!” said the Ghost Wolf just then, sounding more like a kid than a killer. The cabin rocked from side to side. “Points,” it explained. “We’ve crossed onto the old Dog Star Line. The switching gear had been locked against us but I managed to get into its brain and get it working. I’m trained for cyberwar, I am.”
“Very nice,” said Chandni. “Can you switch those points back? Stop any Prell trains from following us?”
“Already done,” said the train smugly. “Switched the points, killed the switching gear. Nobody’s going to come through there without some serious help from tech support, know what I mean? Guardians alive, they’ve got another tank on the line ahead — do they never give up? If I still had my missile batteries I’d light up their whole crappy city for them…”
There was a bang and more swaying. Bits of something airborne and mostly burning flashed past the windows. Do tanks have human crews? Threnody wondered. Probably not. Hopefully not…
“Tunnel ahead leading to the K-gate,” said the train. “It’s walled up. There’s a forty-five percent risk of heavy damage if I go through.”
“Let’s chance it,” said Chandni. She killed the holoscreen, where Ozcelyk had given up shouting and buried his face in his hands. She looked back at Threnody and grinned. “Hold on tight…”
They hunkered down, grabbing handholds. The Ghost Wolf started to sing. It hit the barrier with such force that, even though she was bracing for the impact, Threnody was flung through the air. She tumbled, landed hard, thought, This is it, we’re derailed, we’re dead… The song of the train swirled up and filled her thoughts, and the light of another K-gate flared outside the windows.
*
But they were not dead, not yet. The Ghost Wolf ran on, plunging through K-gate after K-gate, world after world. Mostly the Dog Star Line ran underground. When it broke the surface it was usually on stripped-out industrial planets: litter on empty platforms, cold smokestacks on the skylines, faded ads on the station walls for snacks and threedies that Chandni remembered from before she was first frozen. Sometimes the wartrain had to shunt aside a heap of debris or speed up and ram its way through another barrier.
There was a place called Fugazi where it rained gasoline and the line ran on an embankment between lakes of napalm; the Ghost Wolf went through at a crawl, careful not to shed a single spark from its wheels. “I’ll be all right if the atmosphere ignites,” it said cheerfully, “but I can’t promise you two won’t get roasted.”
Threnody watched the brown rain trickling down the windows, but she was too tired to be scared, or maybe she was just beyond fear after all the terrors of the past day. She found a hard bunk in a little cabin just behind the main one and lay down on it to sleep, drifting in and out of strange dreams till Chandni came and looked in on her.
“You all right?”
“All right ish,” said Threnody.
“This is where they put the prisoners,” said Chandni, looking at the narrow cabin with its tiny window. “When the Bluebodies picked me up on Ayaguz I got taken up the line in a train a bit like this. The captain’s cabin is up the other end.”
Threnody couldn’t be bothered to move. Her stomach rumbled, and she realized that one of the unpleasant sensations she was feeling was hunger. She could not remember ever being hungry before. She had never gone for so long without food. She said, “If the Prells catch us, I’ll have to get used to being a prisoner.”
“You should be so lucky,” said Chandni, sitting down on the floor and resting her chin on her knees. “If they wanted you alive they wouldn’t have started their war by chucking missiles at your bedroom window. But don’t worry, we’ll get you safe to Sundarban or wherever.” There was a kind of glee about her, an energy that Threnody had not seen before. Her eyes did not look too old for her anymore. “I’ve never gotten away with a whole train before,” she said.