The great station was growing warmer. The air was still chilly, but mist was rising from the snow that lay on the tracks and platforms. Threnody watched a piece of ice the size of a cathedral detach itself from the distant roof and tumble slowly, end over end, down through the drifting haze to shatter on the rails. A second later the sound reached her, a deep boom rolling and echoing around the enormous dome.
It could get dangerous out there if a true thaw set in, she thought. But she still preferred it to the darkness inside the tower. The interface definitely seemed happier, although he still kept looking around him in a puzzled way.
They followed a walkway that led around the base of the tower linking all the platforms, bridging the rails that stretched between them. Sometimes the way was blocked by overgrown clumps of the coral creeper stuff hanging from out-juttings of the wall, but each time they reached one, it drew aside and let them pass. Eventually they came to a place where a ramp branched off, sloping up the side of the tower.
“It probably spirals all the way up, like a curly slide,” said Threnody. “But the tower is so wide that it doesn’t need to be very steep. I don’t think the Railmakers had stairs or elevators. It’s all just ramps. Seems a bit basic for an alien master race.”
The interface raised his golden eyes toward the roof. The mist was thickening, hiding the heights of the dome, swirling around the high-level viaducts that sprouted from the tower’s flank many hundreds of feet above. He tugged at Threnody’s hand. “It is up here.”
“What is?” she asked.
“Something important. I don’t remember.”
He was already leading her up the ramp.
*
“Help!” Zen shouted. Echoes boomed between the silent Worms and bumbled from the roof above. He heard the skittering of Neem claws on the ramp, and Uncle Bugs’s voice on the open channel asking what was wrong. The Neem explorers crowded around. Their lamps found Nova’s face like spotlights. Zen touched her, but she did not stir. She lay amid that crowd of friendly monsters like a spellbound princess.
“What’s happening to her, train?” asked Zen, hoping the Damask Rose was still watching his headset feed.
“As far as I can tell,” said the train, “she is linked somehow to that machine. I believe she is communicating with it.”
Zen looked behind him at the Neem. “We should get her back aboard the Rose,” he said.
One of the Neem technicians stepped carefully over him and stood studying the machine. The lighted patches seemed brighter now, like small, oddly shaped screens. “This object may be a Railmaker computer,” said the Neem. “If Miss Nova is linked with it, we could learn their secrets. Moving her would risk disturbing the link.”
“I don’t care about that,” said Zen, but then found that he did. Because what if the link was broken and some part of Nova’s mind stayed behind, entangled in the alien machine? What was left might not be Nova, not his Nova anyway. He had not rescued her from the Kraitt only to lose her to this machine. He could not bear to be left alone again. He knelt beside her and watched the faint, mechanical movements behind her eyelids, wishing she could tell him how to help her.
The Neem watched with him for a while, then started to drift away, rustling in excitement as they studied the vast waiting Worms. They seemed giddy with the size and grandeur of everything, intoxicated by the idea that their own ancestors could have made anything so big.
After thirty minutes, Zen went after them. He told himself that there must be something in the tower that would help Nova. Maybe he would find a way to talk to it himself and ask it to release her.
He climbed back up the ramp to the platform level, and then higher, shining his flashlight into the clusters of pod chambers on the story above. Most of them were empty, but one or two held machines as mysterious as the ones downstairs. In one of the pods he found an alcove where a triangular metal plate rested. There were three circular dimples in the surface of the plate like the tray for eggs in a refrigerator, and in each dimple sat a black sphere just like the one he had stolen for Raven.
Zen stood looking at the spheres for a while, ambushed by bad memories. He had wrecked a train and a lot of lives, including his own, in order to get one of those spheres. When Raven installed it in a Worm it had opened a new K-gate, but long before he had known what it would do, Zen had been able to sense that it was unique and powerful. Perhaps it had been the most valuable thing in the whole Network Empire. Now he was looking at three more just like it. They had the same odd weight when he lifted them from their tray. Their surfaces were etched with the same intricate labyrinths, almost too fine to see.
He pocketed them and went to search for more. Hurrying from pod to pod, he soon found more trays. Some were empty, but most still held spheres. The one he had stolen for Raven had been a treasure worth breaking Empires for. Now he had nine of them… twelve… They rattled in his pockets like marbles.
“Zen Starling?”
A beam of light poked into his face as he came out of a pod. The Neem leader was at the top of the ramp. She bustled toward him, asking, “Have you found anything of interest on this level?”
Zen held up his empty hands and said, “Just more dead machines.”
The Neem seemed suspicious. “What is that noise?”
“What noise?” asked Zen.
From his pocket came a tiny click-click-click as the spheres jostled together.
“There is some new sound in the cloth pouches inside your coat,” said the Neem.
“They’re called pockets. I have all kinds of stuff in there—”
“Empty the cloth pouches inside your coat!” ordered the Neem.
“No,” said Zen, wondering if she would make him, and what she would do if she discovered what he had been hiding from her. But he wanted those spheres for himself. If he found a way home from here, he wanted to make sure he was useful to Threnody and her family, in case she was tempted to go back on her promise. What could be more useful than someone who had the keys to open brand-new K-gates?
And, as it turned out, he never had to find out what the Neem would do next. Threnody’s voice buzzed in his headset, startling him.
She was a few hundred feet above him, standing with the interface at the point where one of the high viaducts ran into the tower. She had stopped there to rest and look at the view of all those tracks spreading out from the tower’s base, the complicated crossovers, switches, and passing loops, the snaking turnouts, the mainlines running ruler-straight toward the openings in the dome walls where mysterious K-gates waited. She was looking for the tunnel that the Rose and the Ghost Wolf had entered through when a movement caught her eye.
“Zen!” she said urgently. “There is another train coming!”