The volcanoes spoke. They opened their hot red throats and roared. They built towers of smoke and decked them with multicolored lightning. The dry plains west of the Fire Station stretched and yawned, and fans of lava sprayed into the sky.
Nova looked down on it all from the balcony of the suite where Zen and Threnody still stood entranced beside the interface. It was very impressive; she could see why Fire Festival was such a big tourist attraction. But as she scanned the view, watching volcano after volcano bloom, the fiery light shone suddenly on a train that was snaking down the line from Khoorsandi’s original K-gate.
The Damask Rose spoke to her in the same instant. “Nova? A new train has come in; some kind of Prell wartrain I think. It’s a strange one; it won’t talk to me. But I’m getting a message from its commander. She wants to speak with Threnody.”
“Threnody’s busy,” said Nova, glancing back at where Zen and Threnody still stood holding the interface’s hands, like sleepers sharing the same dream. “I’ll talk to her.”
The Rose patched the message through. It was coming from a wall screen in one of the dingy cabins of the Prell train. A large, pale young woman in Prell CoMa uniform said, “Empress?”
“I’m Nova,” said Nova. “I can take a message.”
The young woman looked doubtful. “You’re the Motorik who was with her on that train…”
“Oh, we’re great friends, me and Threnody. We tell each other everything.”
The face on the screen seemed to come to a decision. “Then tell her this, Motorik. I’m Laria Prell; I met Kobi Chen-Tulsi on Broken Moon. The men who killed him are here with me. They are my uncle’s servants, but they don’t act like servants, they act more like… There are two of them, the Mako brothers. They are very… they have already left the train. They are coming to find Threnody Noon, and the Starling boy, and you too, I suppose. They are on their way to kill you.”
“How rude,” said Nova, flinging her mind into the hotel’s security cameras and then into others out in the busy streets. Yes, there were two men coming up the steps from the station, moving purposefully through the festival crowds. Bald heads and brown coats and distinctly unsettling. “Why are you telling us this?” she asked Laria Prell.
The face on the screen reddened. “It is not right,” Laria said. “It isn’t honorable. And Kobi would have wanted me to warn her.”
“Thank you,” said Nova. “You’ve done a good thing. We’ll be ready for them. I don’t think two men can do much harm.”
Laria Prell looked as if she was about to disagree, but her face suddenly froze and crumpled as the holoscreen went out. All the lamps died at the same moment. The cameras Nova had been hacking went out too. She looked into the data raft, then got out fast. Something very strange was spreading through it, shutting down site after site, system after system. It spread quickly, pushing its way through firewalls, leaking out of the raft into the deeper Datasea where the Guardians swam.
Nova had seen things like this before. She had unleashed things like this, killing trains on Raven’s orders with tailored computer viruses. But this was bigger, stronger, stranger. This must be the same thing that had deleted Mordaunt 90 from the Tristesse Datasea. This — or something very like it — had killed the poor, unsuspecting Railmaker.
But as it died, the Railmaker had been busy trying to defend itself. It had been writing countermeasures that had almost been enough to keep it safe. They were embedded in the code that its tower was still broadcasting from the Black Light Zone. And because the code was in her mind, and her mind had been changed in ways she still didn’t grasp by her meeting with the tower, it was easy for Nova to see the small remaining weaknesses that had let the virus through, and fix them. When the sickness in the Datasea sensed her and turned toward her, she was already armored against it.
She pinged a copy of the code to the Damask Rose and left the balcony. The room was in darkness except for the light from the volcanoes pouring through the windows, sullen and blood red. She ran to Zen and shook him by his shoulders. “Zen! Zen!”
*
In the gardens of the Guardians, Zen felt her touch and heard her voice, but she could not pull him back into the real world. For strange things were happening in the gardens too. The falling snow had turned red; the hedges were rippling with distortions, sending out complicated new growths that did not look like foliage. Shiguri’s peacock squawked in alarm and exploded in a cloud of feathers, like a burst pillow. Sfax Systema’s butterflies fell from the air; Indri began to jitter like an image on a badly tuned screen; Ombron and Leiki flared with interference patterns and simply blinked out of existence. Mordaunt 90 fell to its knees, clutching its head.
Only the Twins seemed unaffected, still sweetly smiling. But around their smiles their faces were melting and reorganizing themselves: they grew taller, their hair vanished, and they became two men with shaven heads.
“We have a much better idea,” they said, their little-girl voices deepening and hardening as they spoke. “We will destroy the new K-gate. We will say it was unstable, and its collapse proves that new gates cannot be opened. And our interfaces on Khoorsandi will kill everyone who has seen what lies on the other side of it.”
And then Nova tore Zen’s headset off and he was gasping and blinking in the firelit room while she removed Threnody’s headset too. The interface of Mordaunt 90 let go of their hands and stood trembling, looking as lost as he had looked on the Web of Worlds. “The Twins must be insane,” he said. “Their programs are even more powerful than in Desdemor; I cannot fight it this time. I never thought they would dare attack all the Guardians. When the versions of ourselves on other worlds learn what has happened here, they will be punished severely…”
“But by then they’ll have what they want,” said Nova. “We’ll all be dead. There are two men coming for us.”
“They’re not men,” said Threnody. “They’re interfaces of the Twins.”
Zen automatically reached for his headset to check the hotel security feeds.
“No!” warned Nova. “The Twins’ virus is shutting down the whole city. Your headset’s useless — it will just help them to track you. We need to get back to the Damask Rose and off this world…”
Zen put the headset in his pocket. Nova ran to the main door of the suite and opened it a crack. Nilesh Noon had left CoMa on guard down in the hotel’s lobby, but she could not contact them; their headsets must have been as dead as everything else that had been exposed to the Twins’ attack. She tried to force her mind into some of the hotel’s internal cameras, but those were dead too. At least her eyes could pierce the gloom. There was nothing moving in the corridor outside the suite.
Zen ran to knock on the door of Uncle Bug’s room. The Neem came scuttling out, demanding to know what was happening. Threnody shushed him, and they all followed Nova out into the corridor. Beneath the roar of the volcanoes Nova could hear shouts and screams, but while the streets around the hotel must have been full of panicking people, it was impossible to know if any of that panic was being caused by the Mako brothers. Then, as they neared the elevators, they saw that someone was coming up, the yellow numbers above the doors lighting up one by one.
“It’s the Twins,” said Nova. “I don’t think anyone else could get the elevators working.”
They hurried past, found an emergency stairway, and started down. Could it be that easy to evade the Twins? Just taking the stairway while their interfaces took the elevator?
It couldn’t. They barged out into the lobby and found that one of the Mako brothers had waited there for them. He sat casually on one of the big hotel sofas, surrounded by the bodies of the guards who had been stationed there to protect Threnody.
He didn’t try to gloat or explain himself. He was on his feet and shooting as soon as the fugitives appeared. The first two bullets smacked the Mordaunt 90 interface in the chest, and he fell over with a startled grunt. But Uncle Bugs ran up a wall and sprang at the gunman with his legs stretched wide, coming down on him like a falling chandelier.
Zen dove for the gun as it went skittering away across the marble tiles. But Nova ran to kneel over the struggling man, grabbing his shaven head between both hands, staring into his furious eyes. Her mind found his. A massive mind, massively encrypted, but somehow she found her way through its defenses. His eyes widened as he realized what was happening. He looked so surprised that Nova felt almost sorry for him. He wrenched himself free of her and Uncle Bugs, rolled, snatched his gun just as Zen’s hand was about to close on it, and sprang up, pointing it at Nova’s face.
“Nova!” Zen shouted.
In the time between the “No” and the “va!” she wrote a very simple, very destructive program, uploaded it to the gunman’s mind, and stepped aside.
The bullet went harmlessly past her, pruning a potted plant and ricocheting away down darkened corridors. The man dropped heavily to his knees, sighed loudly, and fell backward to lie staring up at the ceiling. There was a little tattooed letter E on his forehead. From his ears, thin trickles of smoke uncoiled.
“Is he dead?” asked Uncle Bugs, levering himself the right way up.
Nova nodded. “Threnody was right. He’s an interface. A version of the Twins.”
“How did you stop him?” asked Zen.
“Something must have been wrong with him; I shouldn’t have been able to get through his firewalls like that…” Or maybe something was wrong with her, Nova thought. Linking with the hub machine seemed to have altered her in more ways than she knew.
She turned to look at the elevator. The numbers above the door were counting down as the brother who had gone up to the top floor realized his mistake and came back down to join his twin. She found the elevator controls, the one functioning system in the hotel’s stricken network, and pinged a program into it that made the panel beside the doors blow out in a spray of sparks.
“Quickly,” she said.
Threnody crouched beside the Mordaunt 90 interface. There was a lot of blood. It was coming out of his mouth as well as the holes in his front and back where the bullets had punched through him. He looked more surprised than anything. “I’m dying,” he said. “It’s easier than I thought it would be.”
Threnody knew it didn’t really matter to him, because all his memories had been uploaded to the version of him in the Datasea, and that version would already have sent most of them on to other versions in the Datasea on other worlds, so there would be Mordaunt 90s all over the network who remembered Desdemor and Malik and the adventures he had shared with Threnody upon the Web of Worlds. But this was the version she had known; these were the hands she had held when he was frightened, and this the face from which she had wiped the rust of the ancient train. This was her Mordaunt 90, and it mattered a lot to her.
He took her hand and squeezed it and said, “Don’t let them close the gate…” And then he died, and all she could do was leave him there and go after Nova and Zen and Uncle Bugs, across the lobby, out into the panicked streets.