Railhead (20 page)

The air above Sundarban Station City was busy with media drones. The newsfeeds were carrying stories of a battle with terrorists, a wrecked space vehicle. Bluebodies in combat gear poured off trains from Grand Central like armored commuters. Others guarded every platform, shooing away the drones that came buzzing around Yanvar Malik as he stepped out of a Railforce train.

By the time he reached the station’s central operations tower, the news sites had identified him. Blurry pictures of him filled the lobby screens, with text scrolling down their sides. “Yanvar Malik, a former Railforce officer, relieved of duty after the mystery loss of an armored train in Cleave…”

He had already been on his slow way to Sundarban when Railforce found him. They had transferred him to a wartrain and brought him across the Network faster than he had ever traveled. He knew that something big had happened, but the officers who had been sent to fetch him could not tell him what.

He was not altogether surprised to find Lyssa Delius waiting for him in the elevator of the operations tower.

“Yanvar,” she said, gripping his hand for a moment. She looked tired. A small frown creased her forehead, right where the old scar used to be. “You’ve been traveling a lot since we last spoke—”

“Looking for that boy,” said Malik. “The one Raven took from Cleave.”

“I’ve found him,” she said.

Their diamondglass elevator rose, gliding up the side of the tower, the golden canopies of the station dropping past them like autumn leaves. She made it go slowly, so that she had time to tell him things.

“Threnody Noon was pulled out of a crashed shuttle last night. She claimed it been hijacked by a boy who fought his way out of the city through a whole squad of Bluebodies ten hours ago. She says he was the one who caused the Spindlebridge disaster. All of which could just be another of the wild rumors that are flying around these days—her sister, Priya, is already blaming the whole thing on Tibor Noon. Except that Threnody says the boy’s name is Zen Starling. When I heard that, I sent for you.”

She pinged some images to Malik’s headset. It was helmet-camera footage, gun-lit and shaky, Zen staring from an open door as an old red train sped by.

“Is that Raven’s thief?” asked Lyssa Delius.

“Yes. He’s all right?”

“As far as we know.”

Malik was surprised how relieved he was. He was starting to grow almost fond of Zen Starling. He’d been a kid from the wrong end of the Network himself. He thought he could guess how Zen must feel, caught between Raven and the Bluebodies.

“Threnody says he was on the Noon train right up to Spindlebridge,” Lyssa Delius told him. “The newsfeeds have put two and two together—they’re calling him ‘Trainkiller.’ He was using the Dog Star Line to move about, just as you said. I should have listened to you.”

Malik shrugged. “Why would you? I had no evidence. Raven’s too good, Starling’s too lucky. Even the Guardians didn’t believe me.”

“Well, they believe you now. Anais Six herself has taken an interest, and it can’t be long before the others start asking questions too.”

A gigantic shadow slid across them, but it was just a pa-trolling Noon gunship, eyeing them with its sensors as it stropped past. Lyssa Delius’s frown deepened. She ushered Malik out of the elevator, still talking softly as they went together along curving corridors.

“It’s chaos here, Yanvar. The new Empress is frightened out of her wits, completely paranoid. Maybe she’s right to be. It’s not just her uncle Tibor who wants her job. The Prells have canceled all leave for their Corporate Marines. I can see the whole Network tipping into war, and not one of the little wars we fought out on the branch lines in the good old days: the real deal. I thought that things would be easier when we announced the Starling boy was in Raven’s pay, but Anais Six will not let us release that news.”

“You have actually
spoken
with Anais Six?”

“Oh, more than spoken. You’d better prepare yourself, Yanvar…”

Up a wide stairway, into the sunlight under a huge glass dome: a penthouse lounge where the Noons came to look out over their city and watch the K-trains rolling in and out. It was crowded now, bustling, a smell in the air of fear and strong coffee. Railforce officers in their neat blue uniforms jostled up against the fancy-dress generals of the Noon CoMa. In the center of it all there was a still space where a tall figure stood, not exactly human.

The strangeness of it made Malik start. Almost ten feet tall, blue skin, masses of red hair, wide golden antlers. It was dressed in a gown made from the feathers of rare, expensive birds, and cut in the style of a century ago. It turned its golden eyes toward Malik as he entered, as if it knew exactly who he was. Which it probably did, because it was a Guardian, or at least the mortal interface of one.

“It arrived an hour ago,” said Lyssa Delius softly by his ear.

The interface came toward him, and the stillness came with it; the people it passed stopped their arguments and discussions, looked up from their data-slates, stood open-mouthed and stared. A servant nervously offered it canapés. An old CoMa general, overcome with awe, got down on his creaky knees. It stood in front of Malik and stared down at him, and he felt the urge to kneel too. He had never expected to actually meet a Guardian, or feel its voice come rippling like music through his headset, into his mind.

“You are Yanvar Malik…”

The golden eyes gazed down at him, flowing with tawny patterns like the mantles of twin suns. He imagined the immense intelligence that lurked behind them, not in the interface’s skull, but in the Datasea. He imagined it plucking facts about him from that storm of information, finding individual threads in a tapestry as wide as the sky.

“You are one of those we sent to destroy Raven’s interfaces.”

“And I did, Guardian,” said Malik, holding that golden gaze with an effort. “All except one.”

“That one must also be destroyed.”

Lyssa Delius said, “I told the Guardian that you would lead this mission, Yanvar. You’re our expert on Raven. A wartrain is being moved onto the old Dog Star Line.”

“There are a lot of stations on that line,” he said.

“We will follow the Starling boy,” said Anais Six. “He will lead us to Raven. I will come with you. This time, I must be certain that nothing of Raven survives.”

It walked past him, making for the door. Malik had the feeling that it would have walked through him if he had not dodged out of its way. He looked at Lyssa Delius, who said, “Go. Eliminate Raven. It’s what the Guardian wants.”

Malik turned to follow the interface, and found Threnody Noon watching him. There were bruises on her face, a freshly healed rip in the sleeve of her coat, a wary look in her eyes. Just behind her stood a young man with hennaed hair, equally bruised and dirty, who put a hand on her elbow as if he wanted to protect her from something but wasn’t quite sure what.

Threnody shrugged herself free of him and stepped in front of Malik. “Who’s Raven?” she asked.

“A ghost,” said Malik.

“The Guardian wants you to kill a ghost?” she asked.

He smiled, nodded, said nothing.

“Well, make sure you bring Zen Starling back,” said Threnody, as he stepped past her. “Bring him to Sundarban, so he can explain why he did what he did to us!”

She looked like a warrior, thought Malik, standing there with her angry eyes and her fading wounds, her hands curling into fists. He saluted her gravely, and, as Lyssa Delius started to lead him away toward his new command he said, “I think the Noons have picked the wrong sister to be Empress.”

The Rail Marshal looked sideways at him. “Threnody’s appearances on the newsfeeds have gone down very well. She showed a lot of poise after that shuttle crash: a lot more than Priya has shown since she became Empress. And now the news has leaked out that she’s been speaking with a Guardian… Her approval ratings with the public are running
very
high. We shall have to do something about her.”

Malik wondered what the something would be. He wished he could help the girl, and knew he couldn’t. Suddenly he felt very glad that he only had Raven to deal with, that he had never risen to Lyssa Delius’s height, where you had to choose which Noon to help onto the throne, and do things about their too-popular relatives to keep them there. Lyssa didn’t mind that stuff. It was like a game to her. He could see that in the thoughtful way she glanced toward the Noon girl. But Lyssa had always been more ambitious than him.

“You’ve turned into quite a politician,” he said.

She thanked him, but he hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

The
Damask Rose
replenished her fuel cells at a depot outside Winterreise Station, and sped on down the Dog Star Line, through rainbow deserts and midnight forests. In her dining car, Zen and Nova built plans as fragile as card houses.

“Raven will be surprised to see us,” Zen said. “He’ll come to the station to see what we want, and we’ll get him talking. We’ll tell him Railforce knows what he’s up to, say we’ve come to warn him—”

“If he’s working on the Pyxis, it will be in his laboratory. I can slip away while you talk to him, go there and search—”

“No,” said Zen, “we must both stay with him, or he’ll suspect. Flex can go and find the Pyxis. He doesn’t know about Flex. We’ll keep him distracted while Flex goes into the hotel. If you’re all right with that, Flex?”

Flex grinned, a bit uncertainly, still getting used to the idea of being a thief. “Yes!” he said. “Of course. It’ll be just like dodging trackside security back home…”

“This is a plan of the hotel,” said Nova. “Here’s what the Pyxis looks like.” She and Flex exchanged a glance, and Zen knew that information was flickering between them. The
Damask Rose
passed through another K-gate. Now they were on a twilight world where abandoned bio-buildings sprawled along the tracksides like deformed and blighted fruit. The brakes came on, pushing Zen against his seat. Nova looked up, sensing the same thing that the train had sensed: another mind, out there in the dusk.

“There is another train,” she said.

“Is it Railforce?” asked Zen.

“It is ahead of us,” said the
Damask Rose
. “And I do not think so.”

“Talk to it,” suggested Flex.

“And put it over your speakers, so we can all hear,” said Zen.

“I am the
Damask Rose
,” said the train.

A slow laugh dripped like liquid from the speakers on the ceiling, and the voice of the other train said, “I am the
Thought Fox.
”

No one spoke for a moment. Then Nova said, “Hello,
Fox
! Is Raven with you?”

The
Thought Fox
laughed that unnerving laugh again. “No, little one. He is in Desdemor. He asked me to guard the line for him. I have been prowling the rails, looking for someone to harm.”

“We have a message for him,” said Nova. “It’s important. Let us pass. Railforce is after us. If you want to harm someone, harm them.”

“Raven said no one was to pass,” said the
Thought Fox.

“What if we left our train here? Will you take us to Desdemor yourself?”

“Perhaps,” said the
Fox
, in a tone that made Zen think of a sharp-toothed grin. “Come to me, little ones. Come in your old red train to me, and we shall discuss the matter.”

“Pssssccchhhh,” said the
Damask Rose
. “I do not trust it. I have heard of this
Thought Fox.
It is a bad train.”

Zen was at the window. Through the half light, between the nightmare shapes of the overgrown buildings, he looked for the lights of the other train, its sliding blackness. He imagined it out there, stalking the rails with its guns unhoused. Why had he not thought of it before? Of course Raven would be guarding the lines in case anyone came after him.
Do you think I haven’t mapped out all the twists and turns this thing could take?

“It is six miles ahead,” said the
Damask Rose
. “There is an old station. The
Thought Fox
is waiting there on the up line. No carriages, just the locomotive. It is heavily armed.”

“Should we go back?” asked Nova.

“And run into Railforce coming the other way?” said Zen. “Train, can’t we slip past it? Go around the station somehow?”

“There are sidings there, a loop that leads through freight yards. But the
Thought Fox
will be watching us through this world’s satellite grid, just as I am watching it,” said the
Damask
Rose
.

Zen had never heard a train sound afraid before.

“Come and talk,” wheedled the
Thought Fox.

“Take the loop anyway,” said Zen. He didn’t think they could slip by without the
Thought Fox
noticing, but it might buy them some time. “Nova, do you still have a copy of Raven’s virus?”

She looked at him, almost expressionless. “No. But it is possible that the
Fox
will try to use a trainkiller against us.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” said the
Damask Rose
. “A ‘trainkiller’? I hope that is just a figure of speech?”

“No,” said Nova. “It’s not. You must keep your firewalls up; I’ll show you how to upgrade them…”

She closed her eyes, communing silently with the train. They entered the outskirts of the station, a mass of sprawling limbs and tendrils, black against the grainy sky. Some of the buildings sensed the
Damask Rose
coming and turned on their lamps, sickly green bioluminescence glimmering through fleshy openings that had once been windows. The train swayed, gathering speed, rattling over a set of points. The lights of the station dwindled as the
Damask Rose
swerved away from it, out into a broad rail yard that stretched south of the main line, a confusion of tracks shining in the twilight like a frozen sea. Zen cupped his hands around his face and pressed his nose to the window. Warehouses and cankered engine sheds flicked past, sagging scrawls of cable blocked his view, and suddenly through them he saw a low moving blackness away to the north, and the voice of the
Thought Fox
was dripping from the carriage speakers again, mock-disappointed and hungry for blood.

“Oh,
little ones
… Are you trying to
avoid
me?”

“Hold tight!” said the
Damask Rose
, too late for Zen, who was not holding tight enough and went somersaulting over a seat back as she put on speed. But the
Thought Fox
was ready for her; it accelerated too, racing back toward the junction where the
Damask Rose
’s track rejoined the main line. They heard it give a high, fierce cry like a stooping hawk as it swung its weaponry toward them and let fly. Impacts buffeted the
Damask Rose
; sudden splashes of fire like saffron curtains flapped at the carriage windows.

“Don’t worry,” she told her passengers. “Those popguns can’t pierce my shielding.”

Hammer blows along the carriage sides: a random snare-drum stutter laid over the deep baseline of the
Rose
’s own guns, firing back. Trackside buildings came apart in sprays of thick juice. The sparks and spatter touched off memories: of pictures seen and threedies watched, racing wartrains battling it out on the smoke-veiled tracks, boarding parties leaping between the armored carriages, the kind of thing you watched unthinking in a game or a history vid and never expected to be part of yourself. Zen stared at the windows and had to keep reminding himself that they were not just screens. Out there in the speeding dark swayed gaudy streamers of tracer fire, rivers of violent light pouring between the
Thought Fox
and the
Rose
. Gun-light winked off something moving on the wasteland of empty rails that separated the two trains. A glimpse and then gone, and it took Zen a moment to process what he’d seen.

“Maintenance spiders!” he shouted.

They hit the carriage side and scrambled up it; a swift confusion of ceramic angles silhouetted for a moment through the window glass; a scrabbling on the roof. “Maintenance spiders!” he shouted again, remembering how, in Ukotec, the
Thought Fox
had sent its spiders out to slaughter everyone.

“
Rose
, what’s happening?” shouted Nova, but the train did not reply. She was too busy to answer, thought Zen, too busy sending her own spiders out to do battle with the spiders the
Fox
had sent. The track curved past a bio-building walled with organic glass, and in the reflections he saw them scuttling and wrestling on the carriage roofs. The
Fox
’s spiders were concentrating their attack on the
Rose
’s weapons, and as he watched, one of the gun turrets tore free and came tumbling past his window, strewing sparks and sprays of oil.

“My guns are offline,” said the
Rose
. “I have one missile left.”

“It won’t get through the
Fox
’s armor,” Nova said.

The two trains were close now. The
Rose
slowed. The
Fox
stood motionless at the junction where the tracks from the freight yards rejoined the mainline, a hunched black blade under the toxic sky. A quarter-mile beyond it yawned a tunnel mouth, leading to the K-gate, and Desdemor. But to reach it, the
Damask Rose
would have to pass within a few feet of the other train and its batteries of silent, waiting weapons.

She drew to a halt, defeated.

“What pretty paintings,” said the
Thought Fox
.

It sounded like it meant it, but the
Rose
did not reply.

“I did them,” said Flex.

“And who are you?”

“I am Flex,” said Flex. He came to stand beside Zen at the window, looking out curiously at the
Thought Fox
. “You’re a Zodiak, aren’t you?”

“I am the last of the fighting C12s,” said the
Thought Fox
proudly. Still it did not fire. It seemed to be savoring the moment, enjoying the fear it could hear in the voices of its victims. It was not like a machine at all, thought Zen. It was as cruel as a human being.

But Flex, who loved all trains despite their flaws, still seemed happy to chat to it. “I could paint you too,” he said, “if you like.”

“What are you doing?” whispered Zen.

“If fighting doesn’t work, we have to try talking to it,” Flex explained.

“But it’s psychotic!”

“It’s lonely,” said Flex.

And the
Thought Fox
did seem to be considering Flex’s offer. “Some taggers tried to write their names on me once,” it said. “In Karaghand, a hundred years ago. I wore their skins for a while, as warnings to the rest.”

“I don’t want to write my name on you,” said Flex. “Just pictures. Not too many. You are beautiful already.”

“Do you think so?” asked the
Thought Fox
, and Zen almost laughed, wondering if there was any train Flex could not charm. “Tell me more,” it said.

“I’d have to look at you properly,” said Flex.

“Then come and look.”

Flex glanced at Nova, and something passed between them, Moto to Moto, wordless. Then he picked up his bag of paints and went to the door on the far side of the carriage from the
Thought Fox
. It opened quickly for him, and the sharp fumes of the rotting buildings stung Zen’s eyes as Flex slipped out, scrambled between the carriages, and walked toward the black train.

It really was beautiful, with a grim, spiny beauty that Flex had never seen before. An echo of old wars. The vapors of its engines wrapped around it, and two lamps shone red high on its black prow. The open covers of its weapons bays were wings.

“You are not a fox,” he said. “You are a dragon.”

“Ooh,” said the
Thought Fox
, as if it liked that idea.

“I’ll give you scales, and eyes,” said Flex. “I’ll give you teeth. I’ll give you the best paint job a train ever had. But you must let my friends go. That’s fair, isn’t it? Just let the
Damask Rose
go by, and then I’ll paint you.”

The
Thought Fox
thought. It huffed out another cloud of vapor and its lamps cast spiky shadows. Hull cameras looked down at the Motorik who stood in front of it, spreading his hands to show he meant no harm.

“Nah,” said the
Thought Fox
.

Flex saw fire burst from the flamethrowers on its prow. He flung up his hands to protect himself, but that did no good. He turned in the white-hot rush of the flames, stumbling, trying to find his way back to the
Damask Rose
, but his eyes had melted and the ceramic bones of his legs shattered in the heat with a sound like fresh twigs snapping. He crumpled across the rails. The
Thought Fox
rolled carefully forward, and crushed the last black scraps of him beneath its wheels.

And aboard the
Damask Rose,
Zen’s shout of horror was drowned in thunder as the
Fox
’s weapons went to work again, pounding the red train, targeting the spots on her shielding that its spiders had weakened. Nova dragged Zen onto the carriage floor as their unbreakable diamondglass windows flew apart in impossible ice storms, whirling daggers freeze-framed in the sharp slanting light of the guns. The afterimage of Flex burning had seared itself onto Zen’s eyeballs. It glowed through his tears, a flame in the shape of a person. He and Nova clung together, trying to shield each other, crouching in the frail shelter of the tables while the guns thundered above them, and her voice in his head said,
“It’s going to be all right, I think, as long as—”

And then there was only light.