Zen hugged her. “You missed all the excitement! The Kraitt are here, with Chandni Hansa. There was a fight — I thought they were going to overrun us, but the place suddenly filled up with Station Angels…”
She was still smiling at him.
“You knew about that?”
“I saw it all, Zen. I watched it through the eyes of the tower.”
“And the Angels? Did they have something to do with you? Did you tell the tower to make them help us?”
“They were me,” said Nova. “The tower can generate them. They are messengers — no, that’s wrong — they are messages. I can’t really control them yet. I’d need to practice…”
“It worked,” Zen said. “You scared the Kraitt away.”
“The Kraitt are superstitious,” she said. “They thought we’d awoken the ghosts of this place. Maybe we have, in a way. Oh, Zen, the tower’s mind is like a great library. It’s been terribly damaged, and it’s been waiting so long. The librarian who used to be in charge of it has died or gone away, and parts of it are in ruins, and the rest is all jumbled up…”
“And what about the Railmakers?” asked Uncle Bugs, coming jauntily down the ramp to join in the conversation, as if he’d been invited. He had come through the battle without a scratch. Now he stood in front of Nova, eager to know what she had learned. “Did the old machine show you anything about our clever ancestors?”
Nova shook her head. “The Neem aren’t related to the Railmakers. In fact there never were any Railmakers. There were only spider-drones, like we found in the ice at that first station, and the Station Angels, which are like holographic images of them. They were never alive.”
Uncle Bugs tottered backward. He looked downcast despite his painted smile.
“There was just one being,” said Nova. “One entity. Call it Railmaker, if you like. It opened the gates and laid out the web of rails for all the sentient species of the galaxy to use. But then the Blackout happened, and the Web was left incomplete. There must be lots of other sections that were cut off, like ours, and are home to species that have never made contact with their neighbors…”
“So what was the Blackout?” asked Zen.
“I still don’t know. It certainly wasn’t caused by those structures around the suns. The Railmaker built those. The suns supplied the power it needed to open the K-gates and keep them open. The Blackout was something else, something the Railmaker didn’t expect, and didn’t know how to defend against. It must have been like a computer virus, which started here and burned very quickly through all the Railmaker’s homeworlds. The tower’s memories end the moment before it hit. So many memories, though — it would take me years to read them all.”
“How about finding our way home?” asked Zen. “There are a lot of lines going out of this place. Will any of them get us back to our own network?”
Nova shut her eyes again. Zen barely noticed — it was just an extra-long blink to him. But it gave her time to access a map stored in the mind of the tower. She hung in space above the pinwheel swirl of the galaxy. She saw the webs the Railmaker had woven drawn between the stars like shining threads, and the pale ghost lines that would have been threads if the Railmaker had not been interrupted in its work. All of it turning, changing, the threads stretching and shortening as the worlds they linked moved farther apart or closer together in time to the great, slow clockwork of creation. She soared nearer, slaloming between blazing suns, and saw the individual worlds the threads led to.
She opened her eyes again. “There is one…”
*
The Kraitt had lost ten warriors in the fight, and the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss had killed two more as punishment for their cowardice. She used a claw-knife like the one she had given Chandni, and shouted, “Moving lights! Tricks to scare children!” as she ripped them open and their hot insides flopped out steaming on the deck. The rest smeared their faces with the blood, working themselves up into a fighting fury for the next assault.
Chandni scrambled up into one of the smashed gun-nests on the top of the train and did her best to keep out of the way. She had the uneasy feeling that the Kraitt had bitten off more than they could chew. She hated being on the losing side. But chunks of ice as big as freezer prisons kept falling down through the mist from the ceiling of the dome, reminding her that she always ended up on the wrong side in the end.
A movement caught her eye, behind the mist and the spun-coral legs of one of the viaducts. Something low and black and moving fast, angling its way across the complicated points. She turned, shouting to the Kraitt in the gun emplacement on top of the next carriage, “Wartrain!” But the Ghost Wolf’s guns were already speaking; the emplacement vanished and the Kraitt with it, somersaulting off the train’s top in a spray of blood and wreckage. Chandni dived back through her hatch as the bullet stream came feeling for her, ricochets chirruping off the train’s armor.
The train was moving again. Up at the front, its handlers were working the crude levers that controlled its new brain, forcing it forward to meet the threat. Something tore through the car wall, blasting aside a few more warrior-boys. Through the hole it left Chandni saw the Ghost Wolf race past singing, with Kraitt gunfire spattering harmlessly against its armor. The mist eddied in its slipstream, and she glimpsed the tower beyond it and thought, There’s a gate there that leads home, if Starling and his wire dolly were right. And they’re going to go through it, and I’ll be left here with these animals…
It had felt good at first, when the Kraitt accepted her, but it didn’t feel good anymore. It was time to switch sides again.
The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss was snarling something, furious and terrible with her ruined face in the smoke and dim light of the shot-up train. Chandni’s headset was on the blink and wouldn’t translate correctly. She banged her head against the armored wall and caught the last few words: “…We will fall back through the gateway and wait!”
Another shot from the Ghost Wolf hit the carriage, smashing a jagged hole clean through it, flinging a dead Kraitt out. Chandni waited for the Gekh to turn away and then went after him, slipping between the hole’s torn edges and dropping onto the tracks where she landed hard and came up mostly bruises.
The Kraitt train rattled past her and away, trailing flame, bits of her former comrades dangling from the wrecked roof turrets. The Ghost Wolf hurled a few more shots at it as it fled toward the tunnel it had come through. Then the wartrain slowed and started back toward the tower. Chandni followed it on foot.
She thought the worst part was that all this was happening because she’d taken pity on Threnody Noon that night the Prells attacked Grand Central. If she had just stayed selfish and run off, she would probably be living it up somewhere on the K-bahn now.
This was where being nice got you.
*
Threnody heard the gunfire as she climbed up the outside of the tower, looking for the interface. She could not see the train duel taking place beneath the mist, but after a while she heard the Ghost Wolf announcing in a satisfied way, “They’ve legged it back through the K-gate. If I had my own weapons they’d be toast, of course. I can’t do much more than annoy them with these bug guns. Want me to go after them and finish them off?”
“No,” said the Damask Rose. “Come back now, Wolf. You have been terribly brave.”
Threnody kept climbing until she reached the end of the next viaduct. The interface was standing motionless in front of a train that waited on the rails there.
“What have you found?” she called.
Stuff crunched under her feet as she went out onto the viaduct. Drifts of dry brown flakes lay scattered on its glass surface and heaped upon the rails and the crossties. Like autumn leaves, she thought, only there could be no leaves here. The interface heard her coming and turned toward her. His lovely golden face was wet with tears.
“What’s wrong?”
He didn’t answer. Threnody looked past him at the train.
It was too square to be a morvah. It was too square to be a train, for anybody used to the streamlined trains of the Network Empire. It was a very small, old-fashioned, rectangular locomotive, made of metal that had begun to corrode. That was what the stuff underfoot was, the brown and red and surprising orange stuff that looked like autumn leaves; the whole viaduct around the ancient loco was littered with flakes and crumbs of rust. But Threnody could still tell that the loco had once been painted in yellow and black stripes. On its nose, in white, was a big number:
03
It was a second or so before she understood how strange that was — a number she could read, here in the alien heart of the Black Light Zone.
“Does this line lead back to the Network? To our Network?”
The interface nodded miserably.
“Which planet?”
“To Old Earth,” he replied.
“Earth?” Of all the worlds in the Network Empire, that was the last Threnody had expected him to name. “There’s no K-gate on Earth! That’s why everyone had to fly to Mars before the First Expansion could begin…”
The interface did not answer. He fell to his knees. He toppled forward and lay with his face in the rust of the ancient train from Earth and he cried. He cried like a little child, helpless tears and snot, and flakes of the rust got into his mouth and stuck to his face and caught in his golden hair.
Threnody pinged a message to the Ghost Wolf, attaching some video of the rust-train. “What’s this?”
“I’ve never met an engine like that,” said the Wolf, after a moment. “I think they have one in the museum on Grand Central. Pioneer class. Those are the locos the Guardians used to test the K-gates, back at the beginnings of the Network Empire. They just carried instruments, and computers powerful enough to store a copy of a Guardian…”
Threnody walked right around the derelict loco with her headset set to record. It was doorless, windowless, nameless, a sealed box on crumbling wheels, but in places the rust had eaten through its hull and she could see more rust inside: metal boxes spilling colored plastic wires. It’s so old, she thought, laying her hand against the ancient metal. Old Earth old. The Guardians themselves must’ve been new when it came exploring here.
The interface had stopped sobbing. He lay with his face in the rust and said, “The gate on Old Earth was the first we found. It was deep underground, near the South Pole. We kept it secret. We sent pioneer trains through it to find out what it was and where it led. And then we sent this train. And then we hid it, and took human beings through the gate on Mars instead, which led only to empty worlds.”
“But why?” asked Threnody.
The golden face looked up at her, all rust and misery, and she suddenly guessed what the train’s cargo had been. Guessed, and hoped she was wrong, and knew she wasn’t. Because a loco with enough computer storage to carry a copy of a Guardian could also carry a virus like the one she had witnessed at work in the Datasea on Tristesse. The old train wasn’t a train, it was a poisoned arrow that the Guardians had shot into the vast mind of the tower. It had unleashed something that had wrecked the Railmaker machines, and then been carried onward in the minds of infected morvah to wreck all Railmaker machines, everywhere.
She brushed the rust from the face of the interface and helped him to his feet. As she led him back down the long ramp she messaged Zen. “I’ve found a line. You’ll never guess where it goes…”