It was strange having no headsets. They were both used to dropping into the local data raft in idle moments or scrolling through photos and vids. Of course, there was no Datasea on many of the worlds they were crossing now, but each time they reached a living one, the Ghost Wolf would grumblingly open holoscreens so they could see the local newsfeeds. They heard about the death of the Empress Threnody in an accidental missile strike. They saw the footage of Prell wartrains arriving in all the major stations on the O Link, then in the outlying hubs of Golden Junction and Tusk. On Grand Central, the fighting was already over. On most other worlds it had not begun: the Prells had moved too swiftly. One good piece of news was that Uncle Nilesh had escaped from Grand Central — Threnody felt sure that the redoubtable Kala Tanaka had helped him — and he was back on Khoorsandi, appealing for other corporate families to help the Noons. But none were, and the remaining Noon-controlled worlds could not fight the Prell CoMa and their Railforce allies alone. It had been a neat, quick, almost bloodless little war, and now it was over.
“But things will be different once we get to Sundarban,” said Threnody. “The family will gather there. They won’t give up the throne so easily. When they see that I’m still alive they will rouse people up against the Prells.”
“If anybody cares,” said Chandni. “I never cared who the Emperor was. Most people will just be glad the fighting hasn’t spread and the trains are running again.”
“You’ll see,” said Threnody.
But what they saw when they reached Sundarban was the worst news of all. The Ghost Wolf didn’t have to be cajoled into opening a holoscreen; it picked up the report as soon as it came through the K-gate, and slowed to a stop well outside Sundarban Station City. “You need to see this, little Empress,” it said.
It sounded sorry for her.
Threnody stood in the cabin and stared at the images. They showed her sister Priya standing next to that smug toad Elon Prell while camera flashes lit up her beautiful, haughty face. She wondered why Priya was in the news, and tried to remember some occasion when Elon Prell and Priya would have met. And then, slowly, she started to realize that this was new. The date stamp in the corner of the screen showed that it had been broadcast only yesterday on Grand Central.
“…Prell forces also discovered the secret location where Threnody Noon had been keeping her half-sister Priya under house arrest,” the newscaster was saying. “Priya Noon is the rightful heir to the late Emperor Mahalaxmi XXIII. Now, with the help of the Prell family, she will sit at last on the throne Threnody tried to steal from her…”
“I didn’t!” said Threnody, as if there was some use arguing with a story that was being put out across every media platform in the Empire.
“…but she will not rule alone. Elon Prell has announced that he will be marrying the Lady Priya, and founding a new imperial dynasty, the Prell-Noons.”
Threnody gasped as if the newsreader had just reached through the holoscreen and slapped her. Chandni said, “So Elon Prell gets to claim he’s just done his duty and restored the real Empress, and he still gets to be Emperor himself.” She snorted, almost admiringly. She knew a clever thief when she saw one, but she’d never seen anybody steal an entire empire before.
“What now, Empress?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” said Threnody. “I don’t know.” All the way from Grand Central she had been telling herself that it would be all right when she reached Sundarban. She would be welcomed, and when everyone saw what the Prells had done, her cropped hair and ragged clothes, they would rally to her and drive Elon Prell all the way back to Broken Moon. Now she knew that would not happen. Her family did not need to fight anymore. Elon Prell had given them a way to save face. They could let him have the throne, and there would still be a Noon Empress. The next Emperor would still have Noon blood. The old Noon homeworlds and a few little places like Khoorsandi and Katsebo would stay in the family. The House of Noon would lose a lot of money when Elon rearranged the Empire’s trade rules to favor his own family, but not as much as they would have lost fighting a long, difficult war.
What a fool she had been, to head for Sundarban. She suddenly knew that what she wanted most was to go home to her mother on Malapet. Malapet was a small, quiet world; the Prells would not need it, and perhaps they would let Threnody live there in peace. She would walk on the black sand beach again, and sit in her mother’s studio in the smell of paints, and stroll out to the café on the point on summer evenings to eat skewers of grilled tofu and trilobites baked in their shells…
But before she could ask the Ghost Wolf to turn back and find a way across the Network to Malapet, she felt the train start moving again. Red lights flashed on the cabin walls as it instinctively tried to arm weapons systems it no longer had. It said, “Uh-oh.”
“What?” asked Chandni.
“Something just came through the K-gate behind us. A Prell wartrain, I’m guessing. They must have sent it through from Grand Central. Missile range in another thirty seconds.”
It cursed. Threnody had never heard a train swear before. She felt slightly shocked by it, even while she was figuring out what to do. Surrender? She felt defeated enough, tired enough, hungry enough. Maybe the Prells would feed her if she surrendered. But maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe Chandni was right and they’d just want her dead. And what about Chandni herself? They would kill her too, or put her back in the freezers…
For the first time, she understood that she was responsible for Chandni as well as herself.
“Run,” she said.
The Ghost Wolf was ready. It took off so fast that Threnody would have been thrown off her feet again if Chandni had not caught her.
“Where will we go?”
“Only one place we can go,” said the train. “Keep on down this Dog Star Line…”
A K-gate took it, and then the pale milk-white glow of moonlight on snow was pouring through the windows. On through high, snowy mountains, then curving around the shore of a bay where the waves had frozen white and solid, like meringue ruffled up with a fork.
On the next world the rails had been almost swallowed by the forests crowding in on either side. Among the trees was a crumbling station complex where the Ghost Wolf stopped. It had picked up the beacon belonging to a refueling facility that still had some fuel cells in stock. The train had no maintenance spiders, though, so it had to send Threnody and Chandni out into the cold, resinous air to fetch them. The cells were the size of coffins, and their handles were designed for spiders’ clamps, not human hands. Somehow they struggled two of them onto the train. Threnody had never thought much about how trains were powered before; everything happened automatically — they just went. Now she had a quick lesson in their mysterious undersides, loading the fuel cells into a silo where an automatic conveyor would carry them into the fusion chamber.
“That Prell train just came through behind us again,” said the Ghost Wolf, as they scrambled back into its cabin. “It’s not fast, but it’s persistent.”
They went on. Beyond the next gate lay a vegetable nightmare of overgrown bio-buildings where the fermented air pressed moistly against the window glass. “Interesting,” said the Ghost Wolf as it shot through what had once been a station, “there’s been fighting here; train on train by the look of it, and not that long ago. Something strange in the Datasea here too. Something really strange…”
Threnody looked out of the window, but they were moving too fast to see much. Then, abruptly, the Ghost Wolf braked.
“Flippin’ hell,” it said.
When they asked it what the problem was, it didn’t seem able to explain. It opened a holoscreen instead and showed them the view from its nose camera. The line led up a long slope toward the tunnel mouth that must lead to the next K-gate. In front of the tunnel stood a huge mobile gun, two mechanical legs on each side of the line, and its muzzle aimed straight at the Ghost Wolf.
Then the screen went out, and a figure in golden armor appeared like a flame in the middle of the cabin. It was a hologram, but so perfect that it seemed someone really was standing there; there were even reflections of Chandni’s and Threnody’s startled faces in its burnished breastplate. The only thing that made it unreal was the fact that it seemed lit by sunlight instead of the dim glow of the Ghost Wolf’s lamps.
“This is a closed world,” it said sternly. Its face was invisible behind its visor, but its rich, kindly voice filled the cabin. “The gate ahead is barred. Reverse, and return to your permitted lines.”
It was a Guardian, or the holographic interface of one. Chandni, who had always talked so cynically about the Guardians and never seen one, dropped to her knees in front of it, went down on her face on the hard floor, trembling. Threnody stayed on her feet. She was awed, but she had talked with an interface before, and she felt almost glad to meet this one. Perhaps it could explain why the Guardians had let everything turn so bad.
“We cannot go back,” she said. “We are being chased by another train. It is a Prell wartrain, and if it catches us, it will kill us.”
“Hmmm,” said the hologram. “You are the former Empress, Threnody Noon. You have done something to your hair. It does not suit you.”
It wavered and changed shape. It was still golden, still flame-bright, but now it had the head, arms, and torso of a young man, and the legs and body of a horse. Threnody knew it now. That centaur was the avatar that it displayed above its data shrines.
“You are the Mordaunt 90 Network!” she whispered.
The centaur’s beautiful face looked sadly down at her. “I am. I have known your family a long time, Threnody Noon. I watched over your many-times-great grandfathers in the pioneer camps when the Network was young…”
“Then why…”
“Other Guardians have their favorites too. My sisters the Twins felt that the time had come to allow the Prell family a turn in the sun. I tried to prevent it, but many of the other Guardians agreed with them, and in the end a small war between humans is far less terrible than a fight between two Guardians would be.”
Threnody found that she was weeping. The tears trickled saltily into the corners of her mouth and dripped off her chin. She said, “But it was terrible for us. They killed Kobi, and Lyssa Delius, and the old man at the train store. And they will kill me if they catch me…”
The Ghost Wolf spoke, quite softly, with none of its usual swagger. “The Prell train has just come through behind us. Missile range in fifty seconds.”
Another tear ran down the side of Threnody’s nose. In the time it took to make the journey, Mordaunt 90 considered the situation. It noticed that the oncoming train was the Prell CoMa’s light rail cruiser Ambush Predator, armed with the new PlanWrecker 5000 train-to-train missile system, capable of punching through even the Ghost Wolf’s armor. It called up details of the Predator’s ten-person crew. It considered how angry the other Guardians would be if it destroyed a Prell train, and weighed that against how angry they would be if it took a different course of action. It made a wistful journey in its memory back down Threnody’s enormous family tree, remembering all the Noons it had known, all the way back to Surita Noon, a barefoot stowaway stepping off the Varanasi onto the sands of Mars.
The tear reached the end of Threnody’s nose, thought about hiding in her nostril, then fell with the faintest sound onto her tunic.
“Go through the next gate,” said Mordaunt 90. “You will be safe there.”
The centaur vanished, like a flame blown out. On the tracks ahead the mobile gun stirred like a waking dinosaur, swung its massive turret away from the Ghost Wolf, and stepped with surprising daintiness off the line. The Ghost Wolf moved forward, gathering speed, a few of the Guardian’s drones flying alongside as it ran toward the K-gate.
“What is the next world, train?” asked Threnody. “Where is the Guardian sending us?”
“End of the line,” said the Ghost Wolf. “A world called Tristesse. A station called Desdemor.”
When it had passed, the monstrous gun squatted over the rails again. Through its sights, Mordaunt 90 watched the Prell wartrain approach, slowing as it came in visual range. It projected its armored sentry hologram into the crew compartment and said, “This is a closed world. The gate ahead is barred to you. Reverse, and return to your permitted lines, or you will be destroyed…”