CHAPTER 2

The object was not quite a moon. It was the shape of a peanut, the size of a biggish mountain, and it was one of the largest of the billion boulders that made up the outermost ring of Galatava’s nearest neighboring planet, the gas giant Vapna.

Now, upon the object’s airless, elephant-gray surface, something untoward was happening. Dust that had not been disturbed for eons stirred, rising in little eddies as if a wind were blowing. Above these dust devils, a glimmer of colorless light appeared, nothing like the sullen sulfur-yellow glow of Vapna. It grew brighter, and out of it came writhing a sort of tentacle. The light spread, and other tentacles emerged. The rock below them was altering, beginning to glow and thickly flow. The tentacles started sculpting it into a shape, a weird wishbone arch. As the arch formed, the light increased. More tentacles reached through it. The nose of something appeared, beaky and massive.

If anyone had been watching, they would have known by now what was happening on the not-quite-moon. It was the same thing that had happened on Khoorsandi the year before. A K-gate was opening—the mouth of a wormhole that would lead through the mysterious dimension called K-space to another gate on some faraway world. But what could be the point of a K-gate on this lonely rock?

The bio-machine that made the gate was called a Worm. Its blind, spiny bulk barely fit through the arch that it had built. It squeezed itself out, trailing strands and streamers of the ghostly light, and crept across the moonlet’s surface, laying crossties and a double pair of shining rails behind it the way some huge bug might lay its eggs.

On another world it would have gone much faster, extending the rails until it could join them to an existing line and link its new gate to the rest of the Network. Here, it had nowhere to go. It crept for half a mile over the moonlet’s steep, stony face, then stopped. Spines and tentacles probed the airless dark, as if the Worm sensed its mistake. Then it reversed at surprising speed and vanished through the curtain of light that hung inside the newly formed arch.

The curtain shifted and rippled for a moment, like the surface of a vertical pool. After a moment something else emerged through it: a knot of light, which drifted with odd dancing motions along the newly laid tracks and then took flight like thistledown, fading into the dull glare of Vapna.

Then the light died, and only the arch was left, skeletal and lonely on the gray rock, as if it had been standing there forever.

CHAPTER 3

The Noon palace was full of sights and smells from other planets. Perfumes and fabrics from the Web of Worlds had become all the rage since the new Khoorsandi gate had opened. As Zen  pushed his way past other partygoers, he caught wafts of alien scent that took him back to worlds he’d walked upon last year with Nova. There were actual aliens present too: Deeka with their internal organs pulsing like jellyfish inside their transparent bodies; a pair of high-horned Herastec diplomats. The human guests crowded around these exotic visitors, but some of them still had time to notice Zen as well. He felt their eyes on him as he moved through the big, crowded rooms. He caught their stagey whispers.

“So that’s Zen Starling? He is not bad looking, for a common railhead.”

“The rumor is that he is some sort of long-lost Noon relative. That is why they tolerate him.”

“Really? I heard that he used to be a street thief on Kalishti.”

“It was Cleave, actually,” Zen said, glancing at the woman who’d spoken, watching her turn away, embarrassed, while her friends leaned in to share more gossip about him. He wondered what they would say if they knew the real story. He wondered how they would look at him if they knew that he had been to blame for the Spindlebridge disaster and the destruction of the Noon train.

At the far side of the room, big windows had folded themselves aside to let people out onto a veranda with views down over the city. There was flute music and the chiming kiss of finger cymbals. Pretty blue dancers with animatronic wings made graceful shapes in the sunlight. The idea behind the ballet was that somewhere on the Web of Worlds the Noons had found a planet where these angels lived, and they had brought some of them back here to dance for their guests. But Zen had traveled the new lines himself, and the only aliens he’d met there who were remotely humanoid had been the Kraitt. There was nothing angelic about the Kraitt . . .

In the crowd around the dancers, Zen spotted Threnody, recognizing her by the cloud of red dragonflies, which hung above her elaborate new hairdo. The dragonflies weren’t just for decoration; they were miniature security drones, programmed to protect her. They swung compound eyes and micro-guns toward Zen as he shoved his way rudely through the crowd. Threnody turned too, greeting him with an uncertain smile. The Noons called Threnody their Chief Executive now, but she still looked like an empress to Zen, in her shimmercloth sari and her headdress of alien coins. He had liked her better the way she had been last year, when she was a fugitive, scruffy and crop-haired and startlingly determined. She looked prettier now, but less confident, as if this soft life on Galatava was proving as bad for her as it was for Zen.

“I need to ask you something,” he said.

Before she could answer, the dancers did something that caused a ripple of applause and drew her attention back to them, and before he could speak to her again, a hand took his arm. “This is not a good time, Zen,” said Kala Tanaka as she steered him firmly away.

“I just wanted to talk to Threnody!”

“You should have sent her a message.”

“I’ve been sending her messages. She never replies. I don’t think they even reach her. You screen them, don’t you? You don’t want her talking to a common railhead.”

“Lady Threnody is extremely busy. She has a company to run.”

“Yes, she does. It’s called Noon-Starling Lines. And I’m Starling; it’s my company too.”

“It’s called the Noon Consortium, Zen. Noon-Starling Lines was a proposal that the family council rejected. And you are a silent partner, with the emphasis very much on silent.”

Kala was Threnody’s assistant, or perhaps her keeper: a small, plain, middle-aged woman who had somehow made herself one of the most powerful people on the Noon worlds. She was polite, efficient, and absolutely determined to keep Threnody as far away as possible from the likes of Zen Starling.

“I heard she’s taking a train through the new Khoorsandi gate tomorrow,” said Zen. “Back to the Hub. I was wondering why I haven’t been invited.”

“It is an official visit.” Kala had this way of smiling as she spoke so that to the other guests it must have looked like she and Zen were friends, but her grip on his arm was steely. There was steel in her voice too. “Lady Threnody is to celebrate our victory over the Kraitt and sign new trade deals with the Deeka and the Herastec.”

“I could help her,” said Zen. “The aliens know me. I was traveling the Web of Worlds for months before Threnody got there. I’m the first human they ever met. They trust me.”

Kala Tanaka sighed. She bowed to a passing acquaintance—a fat, cheerful Stationmaster from one of the Silver River industrial planets—and then turned sharply right, propelling Zen

down some steps into a domed glass building. The building had an airlock, and when Zen stepped through the inner seal, he found himself in a forest of crystalline shrubs and pale alien trees. Circular leaves spun like toy windmills, filling the dome with papery whisperings. The Noons loved plants and had brought back all sorts of exciting new species from the alien worlds, but it was too soon to tell if these wind-trees from Hath were compatible with the plant life humans knew, so they were growing for the time being in enclosed biomes.

“The aliens may trust you, Zen,” said Kala Tanaka, “but we do not. We both know why you really want to go back to the Hub. You are hoping to find Nova again.”

“No,” said Zen, “I’ve forgotten all about Nova, like you said I should.” But she knew he was lying. To lie well you had to half believe in the lie yourself, and Zen did not believe that he would ever forget about Nova. It was almost a year since she had set off without him into the Black Light Zone, but she was still the first thing he thought of when he woke each day and the last thing he thought of before he went to sleep.

They followed a spiral pathway through the plantings to the center of the biome. Kala let go of Zen’s arm and sat down on a bench beside a pool. Zen stayed standing. Alien jellyfish things drifted just beneath the surface of the water like lost lace handkerchiefs.

“We have heard nothing from the Guardians for months,” Kala said, as if she were changing the subject. “After all that fuss when the new gate opened, they seem to have just gone back into the Datasea and forgotten about us.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” said Zen. He’d had more experience than most human beings with those all-wise, allpowerful artificial intelligences, and he knew that life was simpler if you did nothing to attract their attention.

“They haven’t really forgotten us, of course,” said Kala. “Our data divers believe there is a sort of stalemate. Half of the Guardians want Elon Prell to crush the Noon Consortium and shut the Khoorsandi gate, cutting humans off again forever from the Web of Worlds. The others are willing to let us keep dealing with the aliens, as long as we don’t try to pry into the secrets of the Black Light Zone. It is a delicate balance. If you were to go running off after Nova into the depths of the Zone, that might upset things.”

Zen flung a pebble into the pool to startle the handkerchief-things and said, “All right. Let me go the other way then. I still haven’t seen my mom and sister.”

“On Summer’s Lease?” Kala shook her head. “That’s Prell territory, and the Prells would love to pick you up. Interrogate you. Learn your secrets and use them against us. And if they found out that Latika and Myka are your mother and sister, they could threaten them too.”

She talked about Zen’s family as if she knew them, and in a way she did, for her intelligence people had been keeping an eye on them, ferrying secret messages between them and Zen. He had been able to tell Myka that he was all right and hear that she and Ma were well, but that was all. He missed them almost as badly as he missed Nova.

“So I’m a prisoner here?”

Kala fiddled for a while with the Herastec brooch she wore on the shoulder of her black suit. “How old are you, Zen?” she said at last. “Eighteen? Nineteen?”

Zen shrugged. He wasn’t sure. How could he be, growing up on so many different worlds, where years and days had different lengths? “About nineteen standard,” he said.

“Nineteen. And look at you. You’re wealthy! You have an air-car, the best clothes, a house of your own. We are letting you share in the riches of this new trade we are building! All we ask in return is that you stay here quietly on Galatava and enjoy your newfound fortune. We are planning to open negotiations with the Empire soon. In a year or two the situation may settle down. Perhaps then we can reconsider.”

“A year or two?” Zen knew he sounded like an angry child, but that only made him angrier.

“I know how it feels,” said Kala gently. “You miss the trains. I was a railhead just like you when I was young. But I made something of myself. I raised myself up. And do you know how

I did it?”

“By sleeping with Threnody’s uncle Nilesh?”

“By being patient, by doing what the Noons wanted and being prepared to wait for the things I wanted.” She came off the bench and put a hand on his arm again, gently this time, almost motherly. “Zen, I think you may be suffering from culture shock. There’s been a lot of it since the Khoorsandi gate was opened. A year ago nobody knew there were other civilizations in our galaxy; now trains from alien worlds arrive here daily. Human beings haven’t evolved to cope with so much change so suddenly. And you, you were out there on those alien lines for how many months? Before any other human knew they even existed! Stranded, all alone, thinking you would never get back . . . It’s no wonder you feel bad. It’s natural.”

“I wasn’t alone,” said Zen. “I was with Nova.”

“A Motorik is no substitute for human company . . .”

Zen shrugged her hand away and left her there while he went angrily back out onto the terrace. Above the mountains, a rosette of sunbeams poked out from behind high towers of evening clouds. Huge projections were drifting above the city, airborne ships and heraldic dragons. Galatava’s rings stretched from horizon to horizon as a softly glowing pastel arch. The dancing was over. He could not see Threnody among the crowds.

He met some young Noon Consortium execs with whom he had gone clubbing last summer. Some of them had stayed overnight at Zen’s house a few times and been sick on his furniture. They wore holographic party clothes: shifting wrappers of light that only just concealed their painted bodies. They had lips like rose petals and fashionable rainbow eyes. Zen went indoors with them and drank sweet blue smoke from tall glass flutes. It was a drug from the Deeka worlds, and it didn’t seem intoxicating until you had downed about five glasses and suddenly it was night somehow and everything was spinning.

The others treated Zen as a celebrity. They all wanted to hear about the adventures he’d had on the alien worlds. He told them how he’d fought the Kraitt; how he’d walked straight into the burrow of the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss herself to rescue Nova, and how the Neem had helped him out by shooting up the place and blowing it sky-high as they made their getaway . . .

One of the girls said, “This Nova, she was just a wire dolly, wasn’t she? Is it true she was your girlfriend out there? How does that even work, a human and a Moto?”

Zen tried to explain that Nova wasn’t just a wire dolly and that she had understood him better than anyone ever had. After that, all their laughter seemed suddenly aimed at him, and he knew they would take to the gossip sites later to tell their friends, “It’s true. Zen Starling was in love with that machine!”

Zen suddenly hated them all. He wanted to tell them that their own expensive beauty couldn’t dim for a moment his memory of Nova’s cheap, mass-market face. He wanted to tell them that it was he and Nova who had sabotaged the old Emperor’s train and scattered the fashionably dressed corpses of idiots like them all along the Spindlebridge. He tried, but they weren’t listening to him, and the music was a throbbing migraine and the blue smoke drinks had made him sad, and he stood up too fast and knocked a table over and barged into a group of Deeka diplomats who burbled like waterbeds. A servant, very polite and very firm, came to ask if he needed help finding his way out, but he said he didn’t, and sure enough, after only a few wrong turns in the busy rooms, he went stumbling out into the cool, enormous night, trying to remember the code that would call his car to come and fetch him.

CHAPTER 4

Seventy-five million miles away, an actual, honest-to-goodness spaceship was streaking toward the gas giant Vapna. It had pointy parts at the front end and a bank of glowing exhaust

cones at the back, and in between it was covered in random fins and turrets and hatches and hundreds of little lighted windows. It had been launched a few hours earlier from a base on one of Vapna’s moons to investigate a strange burst of exotic particles, almost hidden in the electromagnetic blare of the gas giant.

The ship had no crew—which was lucky, since it was traveling at the sort of speeds that would turn anyone on board to purée. It existed only to carry a copy of the mind of the Guardian Mordaunt 90 Network. In a way, the ship was Mordaunt 90. A simple probe could have done the same job, but Mordaunt 90 was a fan of ancient sci-fi movies, and it thought a proper spaceship was more fun. He—Mordaunt 90 always thought of itself as “he” these days—was very pleased with it. He enjoyed inhabiting that pointlessly streamlined hull as much as he enjoyed the beautiful bodies he had sometimes cloned for himself in the past. He launched a couple of little drones to take selfies as the ship began maneuvering into an orbit around Vapna, because it just looked so cool.

The ship’s searchlights swept the gloomy, elephant-gray surface of the largest boulder in the gas giant’s outer ring. A croquet-hoop shadow swung across the dust. The weird, new arch stood bony and alone. The searchlight tracked along shining rails that stretched out from it for half a mile and then ended abruptly.

“Oh cobblers,” said Mordaunt 90. It was not looking forward one bit to telling the other Guardians about this.

*

Millennia before, back when all the human beings in the galaxy were crammed together on one small planet called Old Earth, the Guardians had discovered the Web of Worlds, a railway system that tied the galaxy together. They had made contact with the data-entity called the Railmaker, who was busy building the rails, and, fearing its power, they had killed it. Then they sealed their local sections of the Web off from all the rest, and let humans believe that they had created it themselves. They had kept the existence of the Railmaker a secret until

Zen Starling and the Motorik Nova had stumbled upon one of the Railmaker’s hub-worlds. Nova had been affected there by some of the Railmaker’s technology, and had begun to change.

Change how and into what, the Guardians were not quite sure. Some of them had wanted to study her, others had simply wanted her destroyed, but before they could do either, she had

fled into the Black Light Zone, the mysterious region at the Web’s heart, a warren of wormholes through which they had not yet managed to track her.

For a while they had all been very afraid. What if the Railmaker was not quite as dead as they had all thought? What if Nova’s meddling managed to revive it? But weeks went by,

and then months, and nothing happened, and slowly they began to hope that nothing ever would happen. The Black Light Zone was an unknown region full of unknown dangers. The more

optimistic of the Guardians believed that Nova had died out there beneath the black suns.

Now, suddenly, there was a new gate. But why here, on this lonely rock? And why had it opened and then simply closed again? Was the Railmaker reviving and testing its powers? Or had Nova learned its secrets and started trying to use those powers herself ? What was the point of using all that energy to make a gate that only stayed open for seconds? Unless . . .

With a deepening sense of alarm, Mordaunt 90 trained his instruments upon the gate again and detected faint, fading traces of something that had come through it while it was open.

It was a fundamental rule of the Network that only trains could pass through K-gates—if you tried to drive a truck or shoot a bullet through, it would just bounce off the energy curtain. But the light-forms that humans called Station Angels broke that rule. They were spindly, shimmering knots of energy that appeared around the gates sometimes, like glowing burps

seeping out of K-space. The Guardians suspected they were spam, sent out by automated systems somewhere on the Web of Worlds, semaphoring messages from the long-dead Railmaker, which no one understood. But perhaps the Angel that had emerged at Vapna had been a new sort, with a different purpose. Mordaunt 90 imagined it drifting in its gossamer, crane-fly way above the rails. Who had sent it? What message had it carried? And how had it planned to deliver it?