Railhead (23 page)

The Railforce train let out an electromagnetic belch as it slammed into Desdemor, knocking out the drones that Raven had left to watch the K-gate. They fell on either side of the track as it sped past. In the cabin, the interface of Anais Six opened its golden eyes and said, “There is no connection to the Datasea on this world. It has been disabled…”

It looked as surprised as if it had just stepped off a cliff. On every world they had passed it had opened a link to the version of itself in the local data raft, updating them, gathering information. Here on Tristesse there was nothing: no data raft, no Guardians. It looked at its blue hands. It was not used to being confined in a single body.

Malik was pleased by its discomfort. It was good for the train’s crew to see that it did not know everything.

He was careful to show no sign of doubt himself as the train screeched into Desdemor. The Motorik whom Raven had left to guard the hotel opened fire from beyond the ticket barriers, but they could not pierce its armored hide. Flights of hound missiles hunted them through the slanting shadows and destroyed them all, quite quickly.

As the echoes of the skirmish faded, Malik stepped out onto the platform. Ahead of him, armored troopers moved through the station. Behind him, cautious as a heron, the Anais Six interface unfolded itself from the doorway of the train.

“Raven is not here,” it said.

“Let’s make sure,” he told it. He sent drones and troopers hurrying across the station, into the hotel.

“He is not here,” said the interface flatly. “We have to find him. We must stop him before…”

“Before what?” asked Malik. “What is he doing that you’re so—” (He wanted to say “frightened of,” but he stopped himself. A godlike data entity could not be
frightened
, could it?)

The interface said, “He is planning to destroy the Network. He has come into possession of technology that will destabilize the K-gates.”

“What do you mean, ‘destroy the Network’?” asked Malik. “You mean all of it? The End of Civilization as We Know It, like something in a cheap threedie? Why would Raven want that?”

“Because I made him a god, and now he is only a man again. This will be his revenge.” The interface crouched down beside one of the defeated Motorik, a chef who had swapped his egg whisk for a rocket launcher. It studied the spilled blue soup of his brain, and its eyes flickered as it gathered faint signals from the dying circuitry.

“Raven left fifty-six minutes ago. He went south. More armed Motorik are with him, also Zen Starling and the Motorik Nova.”

Malik left a squad behind to secure the hotel, and the wartrain roared on, its reflection sliding across the mirrored curtain walls of empty hotels. The gathering speed seemed to excite the interface. It stood up, prowling up and down the cabin with its antlers scraping against the roof. “Give me control of your weapons systems,” it said, and took it without waiting for Malik’s permission. Combat drones popped from hatches on the hull and sped ahead and above as the train raced out onto the viaduct. The green sea widened on either side, and rays came hooting, barbed tails lashing at the windows. One of the drones opened fire, filling the air for a moment with shreds of ripped ray, till Malik said, “Those beasties aren’t our problem, Guardian. Best save our munitions for whatever’s waiting at the end of the line.”

“Captain Malik!” called one of the junior officers. The screens that walled the command carriage were filling with red warning symbols.

“There are drones ahead,” said the interface. “They form a defensive shield around an island at the track’s end. They are an obsolete model; I will defeat them easily.”

“They’re Raven’s,” said Malik. “Don’t underestimate them.” To his crew he shouted, “Check the firewalls! Scan for viruses!”

And they were in a battle. Malik looked at the window and saw the sky around his speeding train fill suddenly with chrysanthemums. They were yellow and red and ginger, and every blossom was the blast of a missile, and the gentle sea was painted with hot reflections and then speckled with white splashes as the wreckage of shattered drones showered down.

“Multiple contacts!” shouted one of Raven’s Motorik, still dressed as a chambermaid, but carrying a heavy machine gun.

Raven still stood with his eyes closed.

“Take them down,” said Carlota calmly.

Zen looked north, where sharp dark shapes screamed over the waves as if delighted to bring such noise and violence to this quiet place. Something big and burning arrived, sliding down the sky on a trail of black smoke to smash into sparks and pieces against the side of the Worm. Just behind it came another, this one still maneuvering. Tracer bullets sprayed from it, looking as harmless as fat fireflies until they tore the Motorik chambermaid to pieces and came cracking across the island’s surface just inches from where Zen stood watching, too scared to move. Nova grabbed him and pulled him down. He lay beside her, listening to bullets thunking against wormshell, then the heavy bark of Carlota’s ray gun as she knelt and tracked the Railforce drone and fired. The drone hit the far side of the island, bounced, bounced, and vanished over the edge like a burning wheel.

Zen raised his head. Dead Motorik were strewn all around him, some in pieces, some of the pieces still moving. Raven stood unscathed, talking to his drones.

“Stay down, please, Mr. Starling,” said Carlota.

Because something terrible was coming down the track from Desdemor: a blazing wartrain, dragon-armor shining through wreaths of flame as the last of Raven’s drones poured their fire upon it. They should not have been able to harm a train—the shielding that protected trains from the energies of K-space was more than sufficient to stop their missiles—but Raven was directing the drones himself now, and he knew about the weaknesses of shielding. He looked for a hatch in the train’s hull and hammered it hard. Lost three drones in the process, but it didn’t matter because he got what he wanted: the hatch blown open, cover flapping. Then his last drone—a small one, moving faster than the Railforce machines that swerved to cut it off—swung in low and dropped a single charge inside before the scrambling maintenance spiders slammed the cover shut.

And a moment after that the fuel that drove the wartrain’s reactors decided that it didn’t like being cooped up in containment cylinders anymore, and burst out to join the fun, shrugging off big, spinning chunks of semi-molten locomotive.

*

All Malik knew of this was the sudden dying of all the screens, the sudden turning of the air outside into fire. And an abrupt weightlessness, first the ceiling slamming into him, then a seat, then the floor, slashes of light and shadow, fans of white water crashing past the windows as the wartrain cartwheeled over the viaduct’s edge into the sea.

He came to rest against one of the windows. Beyond the diamondglass was a deep-green gloom as endless as the Datasea. It was dark in the carriage—all the lights and screens had died when it took flight—and the darkness was full of moans and whimpers. Malik tuned his headset to infrared and saw the bodies around him, some moving, others not; twisted at impossible angles. Something wet was soaking through his clothes. He thought at first that it was blood.

It wasn’t. It was worse than that.

It was the sea.

Somehow his train had been broken open, either by the explosion or by the force of the crash. The openings were only small, but that just seemed to make the sea even more excited about forcing its way through them. Malik could see three white jets spraying in, and he guessed there must be more. When he pushed himself upright the water was already up to his knees. A body bumped against him, then another, the second alive. It was the interface of Anais, one antler broken off.

Leave it
, he told himself.
Let it drown. It can always get another body made
.

But it looked so
frightened
…

He dragged it through the carriage, toward the doors. “We’ll let the carriage flood,” he shouted, “then swim for it.”

“I do not know how to swim,” said the interface.

When the doors opened, the sea came in, white and boisterous and cold. It picked the survivors up and lifted them until they had to press their faces to the ceiling to sip from the last tiny pocket of air, and then even that was gone. Malik took one look back. The flooded carriage looked like a rock pool, filled with the scrambling crablike forms of the armored troopers, the seaweed waverings of someone’s hair. Then he was swimming, kicking out wildly with both legs in the dark, in the green dark with its streams of silver bubbles, and the shafts of dim light slanting and shimmering, and then suddenly in open air again, the interface whooping uncertainly for breath, Malik striking out through the waves toward the black island at the viaduct’s end.

*

“Zen? Are you hurt?”

Nova stooped over him, helping him up. Zen shook his head. All of him was shaking. He had been, he thought, in far too many battles. But all was quiet on the island now. The fallen Motorik were strewn like toys among the action-painting scrawls and spatters of their spilled blue gel. Carlota was still standing, seeping gel from half a dozen holes. A few others too, dazed android bellboys and receptionists, clutching their unwieldy guns, examining their wounds.

“We did it!” said Raven.

Zen thought he meant, “We’ve won the fight.” Then he looked at the Worm, and saw that its arms had stopped moving. The wet, intestinal noises that had come from it while it was working had fallen silent. Low down near its front end, an opening had appeared in its shell. It couldn’t be battle damage; it was too neat a hole for a missile to have made, and why would Raven look so pleased with it if it was?

“The gate is ready!” said Raven, a bit too loudly, as if his ears had not adjusted yet to the silence. “Now we just need to turn the key.” He reached into his pocket.

He frowned.

He tried the other pocket. Looked sharply at Zen.

Who was backing away fast. He groped in his own pocket as he went, and took out the Pyxis.

It was all thanks to Flex, really. The discovery that Flex was still alive in some way inside the
Damask Rose
had lifted Zen’s spirits and got him scheming again. He had been considering his options all the way from Desdemor. When they stepped off the train and he stumbled against Raven, he had taken the Pyxis.

He ran to the island’s edge. The waves were breaking there, shifting the crab-shell beach about with shattered crockery sounds, white spray flying. He held the Pyxis high. “If you want it, you’ll have to promise we’ll be safe, me and Nova—”

“Zen!” Raven strode toward him. “There isn’t time for this! That wartrain was just the advance guard. Half of Railforce will be coming to Desdemor…”

A shocking screech echoed off the ceramic. A shadow flashed over them. Nova screamed a warning. A barbed meathook tail lashed down, speared Raven, and hauled him into the sky.

The rays had come.

The rays had been circling and circling the island while the battle raged. The movement had drawn them, but the drones had made them keep their distance, uncertain of these noisy new monsters that had come to share their sky. Now the drones were gone, and in their place was something that the rays recognized as prey: frantic shapes struggling in the water. The boldest of them swooped toward the place where the survivors from the sunken train had surfaced. The rest followed, hooting and shrieking. The stragglers, sensing that there would be no one left in the waves for them, soared on toward the island.

The magnetic field, which had always kept them away before, was gone, collapsed during the fighting.

The first of them caught Raven. The second swerved after it, trying to snatch him. The third dived at Zen, but by that time Carlota had realized what was happening. A blast from her rifle tore through it, and another Motorik brought down the two that were squabbling over Raven.

And then the rays were everywhere, and the Motorik were shooting at them while Nova went running across the island, down onto the white beach where Raven had fallen. “Leave him!” yelled Zen, but she wouldn’t, and he couldn’t blame her—Raven had made her, after all. He went after her, jumping down the island’s side onto the beach. Bleached crab shells crunched and splintered under his boots like delicate tea sets. A dying ray thrashed in the surf. Blood had sprayed in cartoonish scarlet splats over the shore. Zen couldn’t tell how much of it came from the ray and how much from Raven, who lay twisted in a hollow of the beach, his white face whiter than ever. He looked as surprised as Nova had when that harpoon went through her on the Spindlebridge, but the stuff coming out of the hole in him was not blue but red.

“Do you have any idea how much these things
cost
?” he asked as Nova and Zen reached him. He plucked at his ruined shirt. It seemed a strange time to be worrying about shirts. It was only later that Zen would realize he had been talking about bodies.

Farther down the beach, another voice yelled, “Help!”

There in the reddening waves, some soggy survivor of the wartrain was fighting his way through the surf.

Zen couldn’t ignore him. Not even when he saw that it was Malik. There were only two sides at that moment, rays and people. “Get Raven under cover!” he shouted at Nova, and scrambled along the shore. A wave threw Malik down among the shifting shells, but Zen grabbed his arm and hauled him upright. A ray’s tail had slashed his scalp, but beneath all the blood Zen did not think the wound was bad. He started telling him how you could trick the rays by staying still, but Malik was too shocked to listen, and shuddering too much to stay still anyway.

“We have to get into shelter!” Zen shouted, over the surf’s boom.

Malik looked behind him. Rays still trailed their screams over the waves, but he could see no one else swimming, only a few patches of burning oil. He had been the only one to reach the shore. Out beyond the breakers, something that might have been an antler broke the surface for a moment, but when he looked again, it was gone.

The rays were concentrating on the island’s summit, diving at the muzzle-flash from the guns, and at the thrashing wings and tails of their wounded comrades. They snatched Motorik into the air, dropped them disgustedly into the sea when they worked out they were not edible, and circled back for more.

Zen helped the castaway back up the island’s side, and caught up with Nova, who was dragging Raven. The
Damask Rose
was too far away, so they struggled through the shadows of diving rays toward the Worm. Carlota was already there. The other Motorik were all gone: snatched by the rays, or damaged so badly that they had shut down.

Nova and Zen dragged Raven inside, blood on the threshold like a red carpet. Malik followed them in, then Carlota. As she scrambled through the opening, something wet and frantic blotted out the light behind her. Zen shouted a warning, thinking it was a ray, but it was a human figure, or human-ish. The interface of Anais Six squeezed itself inside, and the opening closed behind it with a sigh, shutting out the angry hooting of the rays.

They sat down in the soft dark on what seemed to be stairs, made of what seemed to be bone or cartilage, trying to grow used to the strange wet whooshing noises, the purring hums, the dim glow from the walls and ceiling of the Worm. Zen stared at the interface, fascinated by the impossible blue slenderness of it, while it examined the gashes the rays had left on its arms and hands. One of its antlers had snapped off short; the broken part snagged like driftwood in its sodden hair. It trembled steadily. It had lived in many bodies, but most of them had spent their time at concerts and cocktail parties; it had never really known fear, or pain, or danger.

Zen kept looking at it. It was the sort of thing you couldn’t take your eyes off. He kept thinking,
It’s a Guardian, an actual Guardian
, and almost laughing, because he could hear Myka in his head, saying in that worlds-weary voice of hers, “The Guardians aren’t interested in the likes of us.”
But they are
, he thought,
they are
now.
I’ve done something that’s woken one up, made it download itself for the first time in years, and now it’s sitting here next to me, Myka—what do you think of that?

And then the Guardian seemed to feel his gaze, and looked up at him, and there was something in those golden eyes that made him remember that it wasn’t always a good thing to wake the interest of a Guardian.

Malik was saying, over and over, that there must have been other survivors, and Zen looked at Nova, and Nova gave her head a little shake, and Carlota put her hand on Malik’s shoulder and said, “They’re all dead.”

Malik shrugged the hand away. He looked past her to where Raven lay, a broken scarecrow at the center of a satiny red pool that spread and dribbled down the stairs. He seemed to be wondering what to do. He took out his gun and pointed it at Raven, as he had pointed so many guns, so many times before. But Raven was way past shooting. He looked pathetic, lying there, not like a former god at all. His eyes were unfocused, his face slack, but when Nova leaned over him he managed a faint smile.

“The new gate…” he said.

The interface stood up, huge under the low roof. It turned to Raven with a look too strange and ancient for Zen to read, but which seemed a lot like sorrow. It said, “There will be no new gate, Raven.”

“Anais,” said Raven. “Are you going to let Malik kill me again? It’s getting to be a bad habit with him. It won’t do you any good, you know. In a short while this gate will be active, and all the lies of the Guardians will be exposed.”

Who would talk to a Guardian like that? So light and mocking, as if it were his equal. Only Raven. Perhaps that was what had first drawn Anais Six to him, Zen thought, on the banks of the Amber River, where the songflowers bloomed. It moved closer and looked down on him. Tears filled its eyes, making it blink in surprise.

“Railforce will be here soon,” said Malik. “Experts, Scientists. They’ll dismantle everything you’ve built, Raven.”

Raven’s smile faded. He looked at Zen. “So whose side are you on, Zen Starling?” he whispered. “Are you with Malik? Railforce? The Guardians? I thought you were a thief, like me.”

“I’m not on any side,” said Zen. “Just my own.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” said Raven. Blood in his mouth; a cough clawing its way painfully out of him. “Comes a point, Zen, when you have to decide.”

Zen shook his head. He made himself remember all the bad things Raven had done to him, in case he started crying too. “You know I’ll choose the winning side. That’s what people like me do. I’ll choose the winning side, if I have to choose. That’s them, not you.”

“Is it?” Raven looked right at him, into his eyes. “The new gate is a beginning, not an end,” he promised.

“It’s the end for you, Raven,” said the interface, quite gently.

Malik didn’t need to use his gun. He just stood watching. They all stood watching. After half a minute more Raven was dead.

“I always wondered how it would feel when it was over,” said Malik eventually. “Turns out it doesn’t feel like anything much.”

“It isn’t over,” said the interface. “This thing he has made must be destroyed.” It squatted down beside Raven’s body on its too-long legs. It laid its long blue hand for one moment against his dead face, then started searching his clothes. Zen watched it. He felt in his pocket. He closed his fingers around the Pyxis. He was thinking of Lady Rishi Noon, who had spirited the sphere away from the Guardians all those years ago, and Raven, who had kept it hidden in plain sight for so long. They had stolen the secret of making K-gates from the Guardians themselves. It was like fire stolen from Heaven, and now it was nestling in Zen’s pocket.

Whose side are you on, Zen Starling? I thought you were a thief…

“The Marapur sphere is not here,” said the interface, abandoning its search of Raven’s body.

“Raven must have dropped it on the beach,” said Nova.

“I do not believe you, Motorik.” The interface stood upright again. Its golden eyes flared down at Nova for a moment, then past her, looking for Zen. “Where is the boy?” it asked.