Zen kept running long after he knew he could not catch the Kraitt train. He shouted through his headset to the Damask Rose, “They’ve taken Nova! Stop them! Head them off!” But the Kraitt had thrown the whole station into chaos; morvah were maneuvering in every direction and there was no way the Rose could do as he asked.
“It’s all right, Zen,” said Nova’s voice in his headset suddenly. “I’ll find a way to escape. I’ll be back soon. Don’t—” And then a silence that stretched on until he knew that it was permanent.
He turned back. The One Who Remembers the Sea who had helped him was nursing a slashed tentacle and waving the red leather tunic that the Kraitt warrior had left behind when he tore himself free. Others were gathering around to hear what had happened; the paths and sidings were full of bobbing lights. Zen caught the Kraitt tunic as the angry squid threw it aside. It was heavy, perhaps made out of the skin of a Kraitt its owner had defeated. He kept hold of it as if it were a clue and stumbled through the gathering crowd until he met Koth/Atalaí. He started shouting at them, “They took Nova! Where does that line go? Where does that K-gate go to?”
The Herastec shied away, staring at him. They didn’t understand how he was still alive. Their own bond was so strong that if they were ever separated they would both die. They knew that it was different for other species, but it still felt wrong to them, as if Zen were a ghost. And perhaps he was, in a way, because, without Nova, he could not talk to them; his headset translated what they said to him, but his mouth could not make the sounds their language needed. Anyway, they were not listening. They had some news of their own to tell him.
“Another bad/surprising thing has happened,” he read, watching the headset translation scroll across his sightline while Koth/Atalaí tossed their heads uneasily and took turns to whinny at him.
“A train came in from Yaarm shortly before the Kraitt attacked you…”
“The Herastec who were on this new train brought us news. They say your gate on Yaarm is gone. There has been a great disaster there. The mountains sat down upon your gate and buried it…”
“What?” Zen couldn’t take it in, this new bad news.
More Herastec were shambling up, some of the ones who had come from Yaarm perhaps, eager to add more details to the story. “Before the mountains sat down another human morvah came through the gate. It carried three humans, but none of them was like this human’s pair-mate…”
Their voices came at Zen like blows. They left him punch-drunk.
“The new humans on Yaarm know of this human Zen. They say he is not an ambassador at all, he is only a thief and a murderer, no better than Kraitt!”
“They say his pair-mate Nova is not a human at all; they say she is some type of (untranslatable) machine!”
Zen heard Koth/Atalaí’s dung hit the floor and smelled its sweetish scent. Making dung was the ultimate expression of surprise if you were a Herastec. “Is this true, Zen/Nova?” they asked. “This cannot be true! We talked to her, she moved, she was not a thing, she was a living being…”
“The Kraitt do not take living beings,” a Deeka pointed out. “But they do steal things.”
“The humans are more clever with machines than Zen/Nova has been telling us,” said someone else. “We are lucky their gate has been sat on by the mountains and no more of them can come; they might have brought a second Blackout down upon us all!”
“It’s not true,” said Zen, but he wasn’t sure which part he was denying, and they didn’t understand him anyway. He wanted to curl up in a ball and shut his eyes and block it all out. Herastec and Deeka crowded in, all talking at once so that his headset could not translate properly. Hath flapped their speaking membranes at him like faded bunting. He looked around and saw painted angels sliding by. A babble of alien shouts broke out behind him as he turned and ran, and his headset flashed confused translations at him: “Stop him let him go (untranslatable) bad strange/bad (untranslatable) where is he going?”
Zen didn’t know where he was going; only across the tracks to where the Damask Rose was waiting. Only in through the door she opened, into the cluttered little house on wheels that he had shared with Nova for so long. Only to a seat, where he slumped, shaking, while the Rose carried him out of the station.
“We must go after Nova,” he said after a while. He made himself stand up and go back through the train to the rear car, to the locked cabinet where Raven had stored his guns. “There’s a line that leads to the Kraitt worlds,” he said. “Can you tell which one it is? The Kraitt boss said she came from a place called Shards of something…”
“The Shards of Kharne,” said the Damask Rose. “But think, Zen; you are alone, and my weapons are empty. How are we going to tackle a planet full of these Kraitt? How can we rescue Nova on our own?”
Zen didn’t know. He was still shaking with the shock of losing her. He didn’t have a plan. He thought love and anger would be enough.
The Damask Rose sent a maintenance spider scuttling ahead to alter a set of points, then started to gain speed, singing to herself one of the stirring songs she always sang when she was heading for a K-gate. “We are not going after the Kraitt,” she said.
“But what about Nova? Don’t you care about her? They don’t even know what she is; they might damage her somehow…”
“I think they know exactly what she is,” the train said. “I think the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss or whatever she calls herself got word somehow of the news from Yaarm a while before your Herastec friends did. I think they took Nova because they heard she was a machine.”
“Yaarm,” groaned Zen, remembering. “How can there be humans on Yaarm anyway? Who are they?”
“That’s what I think we need to find out,” said the Damask Rose, “before we go and do anything hasty. So that is where we’re going.”