Railhead (21 page)

So bright, that light. So loud, that noise, that for a moment Zen didn’t know if he was alive or dead. Dead, he suspected. As dead as poor Flex. He was surprised that he could still feel the carriage floor under his knees and Nova in his arms. His ears whined and popped, and he found that he was listening to the thrum of the
Damask Rose
’s engines. He blinked away afterimages of the flash and looked around the shattered carriage. Daggers of shrapnel jutted from the seats. Thick scabs of repair foam clogged the windows. Through the scabs, he saw the dim and wavering outlines of tall buildings moving slowly past. Not the spoiled-fruit bio-buildings of the previous world, but slender towers, shining under a green sky.

“The
Rose
was moving too fast to stop,” said Nova. “We came through the K-gate. This is Desdemor.”

“What happened to the
Thought Fox
?”

“Gone,” said the
Damask Rose
, voice slurring a little, like a punch-drunk boxer.

“I got into its mind,” said Nova. “While it was busy talking to Flex, I managed to find a way through its firewalls. I made it open its engine covers.”

The
Rose
said, “I sent my last missile straight into its reactor core.”

“But what about Flex?” said Zen. It had happened so suddenly, that dazzling belch of flames, the black train rushing forward. The blazing bundle it had crushed under its wheels couldn’t really have been Flex, could it? He still half hoped the Motorik had escaped.

But Nova shook her head. “Flex is gone too. Motorik aren’t fireproof. Or train-proof.”

“I tried to catch him,” said the
Rose
. “His mind broadcasted a backup copy of itself as he died. I should have been able to store it, so it could be downloaded into a new body. But my firewalls were up, and by the time I realized Flex was trying to reach me… I caught only a few strands of code. So corrupted, so faint. Poor Flex.”

“Poor Flex,” said Zen. And then realized that their plans had died with him. The train was moving very slowly, curving past the beaches of Desdemor toward the center of the city where the tallest buildings stood, the Terminal Hotel rising above the golden curve of the station canopy.

“We should go back. We need time to think. Without Flex…”

Nova shook her head. “Raven already knows we’re here. His drones have been following us since we came through the K-gate.”

Zen went to a window and peered out through the bottle-glass bubblings of the hasty repairs. They were close to the station now. A drone, twin to the one that had hunted him all those weeks ago in Ambersai, was keeping pace with the train. He imagined Raven watching him through its cameras. Remembered Raven’s parting words, in Cleave: “If you ever try coming after me…”

The mouth of the station swallowed the
Damask Rose
. Dusty platforms and shafts of green-gold light, just like the first time. The
Thought Fox
’s elegant old carriages waiting engineless on the up line. And, just like the first time, Angels. Zen hadn’t noticed them out in the daylight, but here among the slanting shadows he saw that dozens of the strange light forms were blowing along beside the train like ghostly thistledown.

“Psssssccchhhh,” said the
Damask Rose
, coming to a stop.

There on the platform, tall among the fraying Angels, Raven was waiting for them.

Zen stepped out into the familiar seaside smells of Desdemor, and Raven came toward him through the shadows and the light. “Zen,” he said, with no expression. “And Nova.”

Nova came out of the train to stand at Zen’s side. “Zen came back for me,” she said, as if that explained it all. Perhaps it did. Raven’s eyes roved over the old red train, its scars and scorch marks, its scabbed and shattered windows. He raised an eyebrow at the battered gun turret it tried to swing toward him, then lowered it again when he saw that the gun was wrecked.

“This is one of the trains from Cleave, isn’t it?” he said. “That was good thinking, Zen. But how did you get past the
Thought Fox
?”

“The
Thought Fox
is dead,” said Zen.

Raven was still coming closer. Zen pulled out the cheap little pistol he had bought on Sundarban. Raven stopped. “Why did you come, Zen?” he said. “I did tell you not to come looking for me. When I sent you away, I was trying to keep you safe.”

“You don’t care about me!” said Zen. “You don’t care about anyone! You’re not even human!”

“I was once,” said Raven. “And now, perhaps, I am again. I wish you had stayed on Summer’s Lease, Zen. We could have salvaged Nova together, once my work here is complete.”

“You never cared about her either,” said Zen. He held the gun as steady as he could. “You just used us both. But you’re not going to use us anymore. That’s your last body, isn’t it? When that one goes, you’ll be dead for real, won’t you? So if you want to stay alive, you’ll do what I say.”

He thought he sounded pretty convincing. Channeling tough guys from the threedies and the wilder kids he’d known in Cleave. Clenched jaw, hard eyes, the gun unwavering.

Raven just gave a little sigh, the sort you’d make if you found your train was running late. “What do you
want
, Zen?”

“The Pyxis,” said Zen. “It’s ours by rights. We stole it for you, before we knew what it was, and what it’s worth. Now we need it back.”

Raven smiled. Such an honest, amused, twinkly eyed smile that it was hard to keep the gun trained on him; he looked more human than Zen had ever seen him. “But I need it myself, Zen. I need it here on Tristesse. I am going to use it to open a new K-gate.”

“You can’t open a new gate,” said Zen. “The Guardians say it’s impossible.”

“And Guardians always tell the truth,” said Raven.

“Why would they lie?” asked Nova.

“Because they don’t want us to open another K-gate. Because they think that the Network is big enough, and human beings have enough K-gates, and that we should be good and grateful, shuttling around on these rails they’ve laid for us. But I disagree. I think we need to travel farther. I think we need to
extend
the Network. And I’m sure your fellow passenger agrees…”

His smile went past Zen to the train. In the doorway of the front carriage stood a Hive Monk, faceless, naked, swaying uncertainly on a skeleton cobbled together out of odd splinters of table wood and lengths of window trim blasted free by the
Thought Fox
’s guns. A dwarfish, wobbly, misshapen Hive Monk, barely humanoid without its robe and mask, but intelligent again.

“I’m assuming it was the Monks who led you to this old train?” said Raven. “I should have guessed. They know the Network inside out, the dead stations and the living ones. They’ve been searching so long for their Insect Lines. You’d think by now that they’d have realized the Insect Lines aren’t on
our
Network. Not one of the nine hundred and sixty-four gates leads where they want to go. If they want to get there, we’ll have to open a new gate.”

“Uncle Bugs isn’t listening to you,” said Zen. Actually, he wasn’t sure if this new Monk
was
Uncle Bugs. It was made up of insects from all three Hive Monks. Perhaps it counted as a completely new person. But he guessed it must have some of Uncle’s memories. “It was your drone that smashed him up, back in Cleave.”

“Sorry about that,” said Raven lightly, still looking at the Hive Monk.

The Hive Monk spoke, whispery and uncertain, while the insects that formed it scrambled over each other in excitement. “You know the way onto the Insect Lines?”

Raven nodded.

“He’s lying,” said Nova. “Raven tells lies upon lies. He tells lies
about
lies.”

Raven looked hurt, as if it caused him actual pain that Nova didn’t trust him anymore. He smiled sadly and sweetly at the Hive Monk. “It sounds as if Nova has chosen her side,” he said. “Now you must. Are you going to help Zen, or me? Remember, I’m the man who knows the way to where you want to go.”

Rushing, rustling sounds came from the Monk. The sounds of a million insects arguing among themselves.

“Don’t listen to him, Uncle Bugs!” Zen shouted.

“Zen needed you to get himself a train,” said Raven. “But he can’t give you anything in return. If you help me, I shall show you the way to where you want to go. I know how badly you’ve been longing to get there. Very soon, if Zen will let me, I shall open the new gate. A new bright gate! Help me, and I’ll take you through it with me.”

“Don’t listen to him!” shouted Zen. “You don’t understand…”

Perhaps that was the wrong thing to say. The Hive Monk never had understood human beings. It was tired of trying to understand them. All it had ever wanted was to see the Insect Lines, and now here was a human who claimed to know the way.

With a sound like a small wave breaking, the Hive Monk stepped down from the train. It seemed to come apart as its foot hit the platform, its upper half exploding into a blur of wings, but somehow it kept moving, and it came at Zen. Bugs battered his face as he turned, they clumped on his clothes, they clung to his hands when he tried to brush them away. Thick fingers made of bodies and legs clasped his wrists. He had dropped the gun.

“Uncle Bugs!” he shouted, still hoping the swarm had some memory of the strange old shopkeeper who had been a friend of sorts to Zen.

“That is not our name,” the bugs chirred, covering him as thickly as when they’d hidden him on Sundarban. “That is a human name; our name is…” and then only a long rustling, a crumpled-plastic-bag clattering of wings and mandibles, and mixed in with it a sort of chant that went, “The Insect Lines, the Insect Lines…”

Nova ran to him, swiping at the storm of bugs as it wrapped around him, trying to scatter them, but Raven called her name and snapped his fingers and some small clever piece of code slipped from his headset into her brain and switched off her mind like a light. Zen barely noticed. The bugs were all over him now, pouring into his mouth, scuttling down his throat while he gagged and struggled, down on his knees, choking, bug-blind, bug-smothered. They were still whispering to him of the Insect Lines as they suffocated him.

Malik’s wartrain roared through the snows of Winterreise. Its drones flew above it, scanning the line ahead, while its crew prepared their weapons and checked their screens for traces of the
Damask Rose
. But the interface of Anais Six sat in the command carriage staring straight ahead and said, “They are not here. They came this way. They stopped here to repair and take on fuel. They took the spur that leads to Desdemor.”

It must have a brain like a Moto
, thought Malik, watching the flicker of its golden eyes. Inside that perfect blue head something like a computer was linking itself to this chilly planet’s data raft, to the dull minds of the station and the K-bahn signals, checking their histories, pulling up images of the red train. Humans could have hardware like that installed in their brains instead of wearing a headset if they wanted to, but nobody ever did, because it was too much hassle having brain surgery every time a fashionable new gadget was released. For an interface, that didn’t matter. It was disposable, a costume of flesh that Anais Six would wear for a single summer, or perhaps only a single night.

Just like Raven
, he thought.
When you have that many bodies, you never really understand what a body means to us poor souls who only get the one. You’ll never know what getting old means, how the sadness piles up inside our hearts like snow.

“Desdemor, on the water-moon Tristesse,” said the interface. “That is where we will find Raven.”

It spoke to Malik alone, through his headset, as if it did not want the Railforce soldiers around him to hear. He could not think why. They all looked to it for orders, certain that Anais, not Malik, was in charge of this mission. Why would it not tell them who they were hunting?

He sat next to it and said quietly, “Why would you not let Rail Marshal Delius release details about the Starling boy? Isn’t it dangerous, letting the Noons go on thinking he is working for Tibor or the Prells? A war might be starting back there…”

“My brothers and sisters can take care of that,” said Anais Six. “Raven is my business and mine alone.”

It turned suddenly to look at him. “I loved him once. I made him more than he was, almost a Guardian. But he wanted more still, and he had to be deleted. The other Guardians said that I must do it; my punishment for creating him in the first place. So I destroyed the data centers where his programs ran. I ordered your team to hunt down his interfaces. But at the end, when there was just one body left, I thought, let him be. Let him escape. I thought, he is just a human again; what harm can one human do? That’s why I called you off. If my brothers and sisters learn that I let him live, knowing what he knows, they will punish me. They will delete me.”

Malik thought about this. “So what harm
can
he do?” he asked. “Something must have made you change your mind about him.”

The interface did not answer.

“Crashing the Noon train was just a diversion, wasn’t it?” said Malik. “Zen Starling stole something he needed from the Noon’s art collection, but he didn’t need to crash the train. That was just something to make the Guardians and the media and Railforce look left while Raven went right. The Sundarban Shuffle.”

The interface did not answer.

“So what’s his real game?” urged Malik. “What’s he doing, on the water-moon Tristesse?”

The interface did not answer. Malik remembered what Raven had said to him on Ibo. “Whatever the Guardians told your masters about me, whatever they say I did, it’s a lie.” It had never occurred to him before to wonder if that might have been true.

*

Night now on Sundarban. Rain falling on the skylights of the room in the station hotel where Threnody was sleeping.

Or trying to sleep. She thought at first it was the rain that had woken her. Then shook sleep away and heard voices, low and urgent, just outside the door. The dull pain in her head reminded her of the things she’d been through, the shuttle crash and Anais, the strange dramas of the day. And at the end of it they hadn’t even let her go home; they’d sent Kobi home, but made some excuse when she wanted to go with him, and found her this room in the hotel instead.

She felt angry, and then suddenly afraid. She wished more than anything that she was back on Malapet. If she ever made it back there, to her mother’s house, she would never complain about being bored again…

The door was opening, expensively silent. She sat up in bed, pulling the covers around her. Two Railforce officers, both women, asking her politely to get dressed and come with them.

“Where?”

“Rail Marshal Delius wishes to speak with you.”

“Why?”

“Rail Marshal Delius will explain.”

A covered bridge led from the hotel to the tower where the Rail Marshal had made her headquarters, the nighttime city a blur of colored lights beyond the wet glass walls. One of the officers went ahead of Threnody and one followed behind. Each kept one hand on the pistols that they wore on their belts. They steered her through quiet corridors to a room where Rail Marshal Delius was waiting, a few other officers with her, and Mr. Yunis, and a woman from the K-bahn Timetable Authority. They watched Threnody solemnly.

“Threnody,” said the Rail Marshal, as solemn as the rest of them. “I’m sorry to wake you, but things are moving quickly. Railforce has decided that the matter of the succession cannot be allowed to go undecided any longer. Your uncle Tibor has a good claim to the throne, your sister, Priya, is the official heir…”

They have decided to support Tibor
, thought Threnody.
They are going to kill me and Priya so that we can’t make trouble for him. Or maybe
—remembering the look that Priya had sent her way earlier—
they are supporting Priya, and it is Priya who wants me dead.
She felt herself sort of curling up inside, already tensing herself for the bullet, though she knew that would not come here, but outside somewhere, on some windy rail yard or the edge of a quarry, without all these witnesses.

“… but we have decided to support you.”

The Rail Marshal was smiling at her. It was a kind and motherly smile, and Threnody wondered what sort of person would smile a smile like that at someone she was about to have killed, and that made her think back and realize what had just been said.

“But I’m not—”

“You are a Noon,” said the Rail Marshal. “And, unlike your uncle or your sister, you have the support of the people of the Great Network, and the approval of the Guardians. I have already sent word through to Grand Central. My colleagues there have placed Tibor Noon under arrest.”

“And Priya?” asked Threnody.

“Priya has been persuaded to step aside in your favor,” said Lyssa Delius, with another smile, and only the faintest little hesitation before “persuaded.” “It is for the good of the Network. And now, Empress Threnody, you must come with me to Grand Central, as quickly as possible, and let the people see their new Empress take her place upon the throne. Come; there is a train waiting for you.”

And she was numb, floating, not believing any of it. “Is Kobi here?” she said. “Is he coming too?”

“I think not,” said Lyssa Delius. “Not until the contract with the Chen-Tulsis has been renegotiated.”

Threnody knew that she would miss him. That surprised her almost as much as the rest of it. It turned out that Kobi was just the person you wanted with you when you were woken in the middle of the night and told you were the new ruler of the galaxy.

And then it was just her and the Rail Marshal, in an elevator, dropping toward the mainline platforms. Threnody staring at her reflection in the glass, where the city lights made diadems above her face. Saying, “But I’m not—I don’t know how to be Empress, that’s Priya’s job. I’m just a minor daughter; I don’t know how to…”

“Oh, of course, you will need guidance,” said the Rail Marshal. She took Threnody’s arm. Her touch was like her voice: comforting, gentle, but very firm, and Threnody understood. She saw the future suddenly, saw just how it was going to be: young Empress Threnody I ruling the rails, getting that startled-looking face of hers on banknotes and the sides of buildings—and at her shoulder always, whispering wise advice, wielding the real power, Lyssa Delius.

“I’m not ready,” she said.

But the elevator had reached ground level. The doors opened straight onto the station concourse. She could see the Railforce train waiting to take her to Grand Central. And between herself and the train, Noon Corporate Marines and Railforce Bluebodies, lined up in neat ranks, which rippled as she stepped out of the elevator, all the assembled men and women falling on one knee, shouting, “Long live the Empress! Long live Empress Threnody the First!”