“Impossible,” the Neem were saying, when Zen and their leader ran back down to platform level. “No morvah can come here!”
“It’s the Kraitt,” said Zen.
“It cannot be,” said Uncle Bugs. “A Kraitt morvah would never enter the Black Light Zone.”
“They’re here, though,” said Zen. “How long before they reach us, Rose?”
“Not long,” said the train. “I can feel them in the rails.”
“They cannot have brought a morvah here,” the Neem were still insisting.
Zen ran back down the ramp to Nova. She lay where he had left her, her eyelids flickering faster now, as if she were lost in some feverish dream. The alien terminal was lit more brightly than before, the panels shining sickly green and flashing with strange symbols that altered too quickly for Zen to see clearly.
He kissed Nova’s forehead and said, “Nova, it’s time to wake up, the Kraitt are here.”
She did not wake, but she started to whisper again, very softly, strange words, and chains of sounds that might have been numbers.
“Zen,” said the Damask Rose. “I can see the lights of the approaching train.”
“Weapons range in ten seconds,” said the Ghost Wolf hopefully.
Zen kissed Nova again and ran back up to the level of the platforms. Outside the tower, the Neem had gathered nervously beside the Black Light Express. In the faint blue, misty twilight under the enormous dome the lights of the new train gleamed like sequins. It was still far off across the plain of rails, doing that thing distant trains do when you cannot quite tell if they are moving or not, or in which direction.
“It’s coming straight toward you,” said Threnody, from her perch way above, and she linked Zen to her headset’s zoomed-in view.
He saw what he had been fearing: a Kraitt morvah, long horns jutting from its metal prow. Lizard warriors were scrambling from its carriage windows and swarming up onto the roofs to man the big guns there.
Uncle Bugs danced nervously, his feet making little ticking sounds on the wet glass platform. “Perhaps when it heard our train had crossed into the Zone, the morvah of the Kraitt was less afraid…”
“It isn’t singing,” Zen said. He had never seen a morvah travel without singing, but this one came on in silence.
“They have done something to it,” said the Damask Rose. “Something bad.”
For a time it seemed certain that the Kraitt train would pull in on the same platform where the Black Light Express was standing, but some unseen switching gear swung it onto another track.
“Want me to shoot them?” asked the Ghost Wolf.
“Let’s see what they want before we start a fight,” said Zen.
“Nothing wrong with starting a fight,” grumbled the Ghost Wolf, unhousing its new Neem guns. “Not if you can win it.”
“We don’t know that we can. The lizards’ train might be better armed than us,” the Damask Rose pointed out.
“It’s not what you’ve got, it’s what you do with it,” the wartrain insisted.
Still silent, the Kraitt morvah drew up on the far side of the neighboring platform. It looked as if it had been damaged and hastily repaired. Crude new components were bolted to its carapace, which was streaked with dried slime. Doors opened in one of its cars and the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss herself stepped out, wearing heavy red robes like leather curtains that glinted with small mirrors. Behind her came Kraitt warriors with guns and axes. At her side stomped a small figure whose knobbly Kraitt jerkin made her look like a Kraitt too, until Zen saw her face and recognized Chandni Hansa.
He was glad to see her for a moment. Partly because he’d felt guilty for what had happened on the Shards, but mainly because the fact that she was still alive proved that it was possible to make a deal with the Kraitt. And then he saw the look on her face, the way her scowl deepened as she saw him, and he knew there would be no deal for him.
The Tzeld Gekh was carrying something over her shoulder. She came forward and flung it down onto the rails that separated her platform from the one where Zen and the Neem stood. It was the scorched and bullet-riddled carapace of a Neem, with one of its hydraulic legs still attached. A few crushed insects were gummed to it by their own juices.
“The Tzeld Gekh says to tell you that we came through your Nestworld like a storm,” shouted Chandni Hansa, her hard little voice very clear in the crisp air. “The Neem tried to stop us from passing, but we burned their buildings and scattered thousands of their hives. You will be scattered too, unless you go back aboard your train and leave this place. Everything that you have found here belongs to the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss.”
The Neem quivered, rustling with horror inside their suits. Some stumbled, as if the hives inside them were too fretful to control their complicated limbs. On the other platform the Gekh was looking around greedily. Her warrior-boys crouched behind her, waiting for the order to start looting the tower.
“How did you get here?” asked Zen. “I thought morvah wouldn’t come into the Black Light Zone?”
Chandni Hansa laughed. “Living morvah won’t, Starling. But the Tzeld Gekh learned a lot from your Moto. She learned enough to build a crude kind of machine brain. She hacked the living brain of this morvah out and stuck the new one in. It goes wherever she tells it now.”
“It’s a zombie train?” said Zen.
“The Tzeld Gekh says that if the Neem get back on their train and move out she will let them live,” said Chandni. “Threnody and the interface won’t be hurt, I’ve seen to that. But they must hand you and your wire dolly over. She really doesn’t like you.”
The Neem leader suddenly barged past Zen to stand at the edge of the platform, waving her pincers at the Kraitt. “This world is the property of Neem,” she announced. “We were here first. Neem are the descendants of the Railmakers. You must leave.”
The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss did a thing that looked like smiling. She signaled with the tip of her tail, and one of the warriors on the roof of her train swung his gun toward the Neem and fired. Something punched a hole in the Neem leader’s armored body and exploded inside, scattering shrapnel, smoke, and clouds of dead and living bugs. Zen ran for the shelter of one of the towers as the Ghost Wolf’s new guns started to make sharp clapping sounds, and a turret on the Kraitt train vanished in a splash of fire. The Neem leader’s shattered suit toppled off the platform onto the rails. The other Neem were scuttling back to the tower like Zen, but as they ran inside more gunfire met them, from Kraitt warriors surging in through other entrances. They started to fire their own weapons, calling to each other in their own rustly language.
Zen darted sideways, threading his way between the pillars. All he was thinking of was Nova. As long as the Neem could hold off the attackers she would be safe down in the basement, but he did not know how long that would be. He needed to get down there and hide her; drag her away from the alien machine if he could, or try to defend her if he couldn’t. He would not let the Gekh take her apart again.
Near the top of the ramp a damaged Neem came stumbling past him, trailing fire and thin screams, the bugs inside it crackling like popcorn. He ducked into the shadow of a pod as a big Kraitt warrior loomed out of the smoke and smashed the blazing suit aside with a swipe of its armored tail. The spray of sparks and flames lit up Zen’s hiding place, and the Kraitt turned and saw him crouching there.
The Kraitt roared and fumbled with the crude gun it held. Behind it something big and spidery seemed to be assembling itself out of gun-light. Too spindly to be a Neem, it rose on many legs, gesticulating, surprising Zen so much that even the Kraitt who was about to kill him glanced back to see what he was staring at.
It was a Station Angel, just like the ones that used to hover outside the K-gates in the scruffier, edge-of-Network stations Zen had known back in the Empire. To the startled Kraitt it might as well have been a ghost, or a god. He stood staring, and a Neem soldier came scuttling out of the smoke and stabbed him with a razor-sharp forelimb. The Kraitt went down gargling, spattering black blood through the firelight and the shadows. Zen and the Neem watched as the Station Angel drifted away, making vague walking motions with its flickering limbs but not really walking, just floating through the smoky air toward the heart of the battle.
*
Threnody was watching the fighting from high above. She knew the knots of light that were drifting across the platforms were Station Angels because they had appeared at her level too. They were all over the dome, bobbing and beckoning, dancing their ghostly dances. Down on the platform, where the bodies of Kraitt and Neem were scattered, the appearance of the glowing light-forms seemed to be causing panic. She saw the Kraitt spilling out of the tower, retreating toward their train. The Station Angels flickered slightly when the blasts from Kraitt guns tore through them, then drifted on, unharmed. They were all heading in the same direction, Threnody noticed, all converging on the Kraitt train. The Kraitt were swarming aboard it. She heard the rumble as it started its engines and reversed quickly away from the platform into the mist that hung above the vast rail yards.
“They’re pulling back,” she said. “Heading for the K-gate!” Then, over the crackly cheering of the Neem that filled her headset, “No, they’re stopping — they’ve stopped on a siding way over near the dome wall. They must have figured out the Station Angels can’t hurt them. They’re licking their wounds, I expect. Getting ready for another try.”
“We’ll see about that,” said the Ghost Wolf, uncoupling itself from the rest of the Black Light Express and taking off after the retreating Kraitt.
“Do take care!” called the Damask Rose.
Threnody looked behind her for the interface. He had lost interest in watching the tiny battle going on below and wandered on up the ramp, toward another viaduct. She thought she heard him up there, shouting something. Perhaps he had found the line that would lead them home.
She took one last look at the Kraitt train, and at the Ghost Wolf prowling cautiously toward it. Then she left her post and went searching for the interface.
*
Down below, the surviving Neem ran along the platforms, some shaking their limbs at the retreating Kraitt, others using nets to try to catch the scattered, swarming remnants of their leader. Zen looked among the Kraitt bodies on the platform for Chandni Hansa, but she wasn’t there. He turned back uneasily into the tower. He hadn’t wanted to find Chandni dead, but he knew that he would be safer if she was.
Inside the tower, it was growing brighter. The coral tendrils on the walls and pillars were filling with a watery golden light. Stray bugs from shattered and scattered Neem whirred around blindly. A few Station Angels still danced their dances, moving toward the edges of the tower. Some drifted through the doorways, out onto the platforms. Others, finding no doorway in front of them, simply vanished into the wall.
“Zen?” said Nova, in his headset.
He ran to the ramp. There was more light in the cellar too, a mist in the air that made him afraid something was burning down there. Light shone from the open side of the gourd and from the machine within it. Beside the machine sat Nova, awake, hugging herself, looking up at the sound of Zen’s footsteps as he came pounding down the ramp.
“I can see everything,” she said, with a delighted smile. “It’s showing me everything, Zen…”