The Noons and their guests were gathering near the front of the train for a recital by a group of musicians called The Mandlebröt Set. The band was setting up its instruments in one of the forward carriages, which had a glass floor. It was unnerving to look down between your feet at nothing but the wheels and axles and the track blurring by. There were always a few passengers who were afraid to set foot in that part of the train.
Zen pretended to be one of them. He was in no mood for music. He made his way back down the train, through lounges where elderly Noons sat reading holoslates, through buffet cars full of chatter and a recreation carriage where a rowdy game of train-quoits was in progress, until he reached the biggest and most densely planted of the garden carriages. There were no formal beds here, just a path of ceramic paving slabs winding over moss, through whispery groves of bamboo. If you ignored the glimpses of an industrial world rushing past outside, it looked almost real.
So did Nova, who stood waiting for him there.
“Meeting is dangerous,” she said. “We should talk over the headset.”
“Why?” he asked. “You’re my Moto, aren’t you? I can talk to you if I like.” He was angry, and he needed to talk face to face. She was the only person he could talk to honestly on this train.
“You saw that holo Lady Sufra showed me?” he said. “It was Raven, wasn’t it?”
She looked away. Nodded.
“Sufra said he was a Guardian…”
“He’s not. Not exactly.”
“… or something like a Guardian, some sort of…” Zen made grabbing gestures, trying to snatch the words he needed from the air. “He lived for hundreds of years. Dozens of cloned bodies. And all the time the real Raven was a program running in the Datasea…”
“The Guardians tried to destroy him,” said Nova. “They deleted every copy of him, and they had the Emperor send an assassination squad to kill his clones, and then they deleted every reference to him, so that it would be as if he had never existed.”
That explained why Zen’s swift search of the local data raft had thrown up almost no mention of Raven. “But they didn’t delete references to that train of his,” he said. “The history sites say that during the Spiral Line Rebellion, Railforce sent armored trains to seize stations that supported the rebels. The Thought Fox bombed the station city at Ukotec into dust, and sent its drones and maintenance spiders out into the ruins to slaughter the survivors. It even murdered its own crew when they tried to stop it. That’s why it ended up abandoned—because it was mad, and it didn’t care who it killed. Did you know that?”
Nova wouldn’t even look at him. She said, “The Thought Fox respects Raven. He has it under control.”
“Barely! Don’t you remember in Cleave, how it shot up Uncle Bugs for no reason at all? If even his train is a war criminal, what does that make Raven?”
Nova was always surprising him. She surprised him now: her wide eyes, the almost-human way she flinched from the anger in him. “You mustn’t wonder about Raven,” she said. “Don’t ask about him—”
“Why are you so loyal to him? He’s programmed you to be loyal, I suppose?”
“I’m afraid,” she said. “I’m afraid of what he’d do to you, if you let him down. He needs the Pyxis. You have to get it for him. That’s all you should be thinking about.”
The music from the glass-floored carriage came faintly through speakers somewhere: slow washes of sound that built and wavered and faded. The scurrying patter of small drums. Kotos, and soft gongs. The locos were singing along. Zen thought how nice it would have been to be alone in that garden with a real girl, Threnody maybe, instead of with a Motorik, discussing an impossible burglary.
He said, “I thought the Pyxis was just going to be sitting on a shelf. But it’s stuck under a diamondglass cone. I’ll have to smash it to get the thing out!”
“It’s all right,” said Nova. “There is a plan. Raven planned for this.”
“Okay. Tell me Raven’s plan.”
She spoke flatly, as if she were reading something, as if she were just a machine, reciting a message it didn’t understand. “Before it gets to Sundarban, the train must pass through the Spindlebridge. Spindlebridge is a space habitat built between two K-gates in—”
“I know what the Spindlebridge is.”
“While it is there, you will go to the collection, and I will upload a powerful virus into the train’s systems. It will disable all alarms, door locks, everything. You will take the Pyxis and leave the train. The Spindlebridge is in orbit around Sundarban. There are spacecraft—shuttles—housed in hangars on Spindlebridge’s hull. We will take one, fly to the surface, and meet Raven.”
Zen just looked at her. “That’s Raven’s plan?”
“Yes.”
“And he didn’t see fit to tell me before?”
“He told me, and now I’m telling you. He said not to discuss it until you were here. He didn’t want you to worry about it. He said he didn’t want to distract you from your performance.”
“He thought it might me worry me, did he? He thought I might be a bit nervous about stealing a spaceship?”
“I’m sorry, Zen—”
“Can you fly a spaceship?”
“They fly themselves, mostly.”
“This virus he wants you to use,” he said. “Is that like the one that he hit Malik’s train with, back in Cleave?”
In a very small, reluctant voice, she said, “It’s called a trainkiller.”
Zen imagined it nested there behind her worried eyes, chains of dangerous code curled in her brain like sleeping snakes. He shook his head. “No. We can’t do that. Not to the Wildfire and the Time of Gifts—”
“I don’t want to do it,” said Nova. “But that’s what Raven—”
“Well Raven isn’t here!” shouted Zen. “I’m running this thing, and I say we have to find another way!”
He had never stolen from anyone he knew before. The Ambersai shopkeepers he had robbed had been strangers; they’d had more stuff than him, so he’d never felt bad about taking some of it. Well, the Noons had more stuff than him too—more stuff than all the shopkeepers in Ambersai together. A few days ago he would have said that they deserved to be robbed. But he liked Lady Sufra. He liked Threnody. He liked this beautiful train, those old locos. He didn’t want to do any of them more harm than he had to.
In the middle of the most important job of his life, he seemed to be growing a conscience.
He said, “Why can’t we just knock out the security in the carriage where the collection is?”
“The security programs are very old and very expensive and very good. If I took out that one, the Wildfire and the Time of Gifts would notice.”
“Then you have to find a way to stop them from noticing.”
“But—”
Zen reached out and held her by both narrow shoulders. “Listen. Here’s the new plan. We wait until the train goes through the last K-gate from Spindlebridge to Sundarban. Then you’ll open the door to the collection and kill the security systems there, very quietly, not harming the train or anybody else in any way. I’ll take the Pyxis, and get off as soon as we reach the station. Hopefully we’ll be back on the Thought Fox before the Noons even notice it’s gone.”
“That is a very simple plan,” said Nova.
“Simple is good. No spaceships, no trainkillers, just swipe it and leave.”
“Raven must have thought of that. There must be some reason why he decided on Spindlebridge instead—”
“Raven isn’t here,” said Zen again.
“Perhaps he knew I could not outwit the train’s security systems—”
“You can,” Zen said. “We are stopping at Jangala for three days before we head down to Spindlebridge and Sundarban. That gives you three days to come up with a way to get me into the collection. And I know you can do it. You’re better than any security system. You’ll find a way to fool them.”
She smiled at the compliment. “I’ll try.”
“Good. Thank you.”
Her face suddenly went bland again, becoming the calm mask of a well-mannered Motorik. Someone was calling Tallis’s name. Zen turned and saw Kobi coming into the carriage. Behind him, in the vestibule between that carriage and the next, Threnody stood waving. She was wearing hunting clothes—a camouflage shimmersuit and kitten-heel combat boots.
Kobi was smiling, but his eyes darted suspiciously from Zen to Nova.
“You’re pretty friendly with this wire dolly,” he said. “Don’t you have real girls on Golden Junction?”
Zen felt his face go hot. In Cleave, if someone hinted that you fancied Motos, you hit them. Even if you weren’t a fighter and they were bigger than you. It was a matter of honor. But there’d be trouble if he broke Kobi’s nose for him, so he just stood his ground and glared.
“I’m joking, Tallis!” Kobi said. He slapped Zen on the shoulder, slightly too hard to be friendly. “We’re going hunting. Coming? Or are you scared of hunting, too? I heard you didn’t have the stomach for the glass-floored carriage…”
“Hunting?”
“In the game reserve.” Kobi jabbed a finger at the glass wall. The Noon train had passed another K-gate while Zen was talking to Nova, and he hadn’t even noticed. Dense greenery was rushing past, falling away now and then to give views over folded, forested hillsides.
“We are approaching Jangala Station,” said the soft voice of the Wildfire, or perhaps the Time of Gifts.
Kobi said, “Threnody says you brought a gun with you.”
Zen turned and snapped his fingers at Nova as if she was a toaster or something, that needed switching on. “Go and fetch my ray gun from the luggage, Nova.”
Kobi watched her leave the carriage. “There’s something off about that wire dolly. What are those marks on her face?”
“Those are freckles.”
“That’s what I thought. You need to get her blanked and rebooted. I suppose you’re too fond of her.”
“She’s a family heirloom,” Zen said. “So’s the gun. My grandfather used it for hunting reef rays.”
He had hoped that would sound impressive, but Kobi said, “We aren’t hunting rays today. The Jangala game reserve is stocked with heritage megafauna. All kinds of Old Earth critters re-created by the Noons’ geneticists. It’s the best collection anywhere on the Network.”
He went to rejoin Threnody. Zen started to follow him, then saw Nova coming back into the carriage with the ray gun in its long case. He waited for her. “I don’t have time for this,” he muttered as she passed the gun to him.
“It will be all right,” she promised.
Zen didn’t want to leave her, but he didn’t want to give Kobi any more cause to tease him about her either, so he simply nodded and went after the others. The train was slowing. Among the trackside trees grew the bulbous bio-buildings of Jangala Station.