Railhead (3 page)

On his way back out he helped himself to a rain cape and a hat from the rack of secondhand clothes near the door. The cape was too small for him and came down barely past his waist, but the hat fit. He pulled the wide brim down to shade his face as he walked quickly back to busier streets, trying to hide in the crowds. He reasoned that the girl and her drone would be following him, told himself he was leading her away from Bridge Street, drawing the danger away from Ma and Myka.

Truth was, he just wanted to be safely out of Cleave. He would hop on an outbound train, change at
Chiba
to the Spiral Line, change again onto the
O Link
at Kishinchand, be half-way across the galaxy before his pursuers knew he’d left town…

But how was he going to do that? The girl might have friends. That drone she had sent after him in Ambersai might be buzzing the streets. She would be watching the station.

He needed a plan. He stopped for a while in a damp, fern-grown cleft in the canyon wall where holo-images of the Guardians billowed like tethered ghosts above a row of data shrines. People kept stepping out of the crowds on the street to stand in front of this shrine or that, uploading electronic prayers. Human beings had always dreamed up gods to guide and guard them, and the Guardians were the last, best gods they had ever invented. Artificial intelligences, created on Old Earth, as immortal and all-knowing as the gods in old stories. It was the Guardians who had opened the K-gates, and helped the cor-porate families lay out the rails and stations of the Great Network. In olden days they had downloaded themselves into cloned bodies and walked among humans. Now they mostly kept themselves to themselves; beings of pure information, spread across the data rafts of every world, busy with thoughts too huge and strange for human brains to hold. Zen was pretty sure they wouldn’t be interested in his troubles.

He decided to call on human help instead. He stole a disposable headset from a vendor’s cart and found a quiet spot among the shrines. The headset was just a cheap plastic one, but it did the job. One terminal fitted snugly behind his ear, transmitting sound through the bones of his skull. The other pressed against his temple, streaming images straight to the visual centers of his brain. As he opened a connection into Cleave’s data raft, a storm of gaudy ads was superimposed over his view of the wet street. He blinked them away and found a messaging site.

He wanted to call Myka, but it was too risky; the girl in red was certain to be watching for messages. So who else could he turn to?

Zen didn’t have friends. He’d left a few behind when he moved from Santheraki, and never bothered making new ones. The trouble with friends was, sooner or later he’d have to tell them about Ma’s troubles and his life on Bridge Street, and those were sadnesses that he preferred to hold close and secret. It fitted the image he had of himself, too—the lone thief, all stray-cat-cool, walking solitary down some midnight street. Oh, he’d talk and joke sometimes with the kids who met up at the Spatterpattern Club, but he couldn’t trust any of them to help him out of trouble this deep.

That just left Flex. Flex was Myka’s friend, really, but maybe she would help him for Myka’s sake. Flex had just the skills he needed.

With quick movements of his eyes he typed her contact details on a virtual keyboard, which folded away into the corner of his field of vision when he was finished. He blinked on the “Audio Only” tag. The “connecting” icon flashed for ages.

At last Flex’s voice said, “Hey?”

“It’s Myka’s brother,” said Zen, afraid to say his name in case anyone was watching for him on Cleave’s communication nets. “I need help.”

“What sort of help?”

“I need to get on a train, but I can’t go through the station.”

“Okay.” Flex didn’t seem to need any explanation. “Meet me here.”

Coordinates pinged into Zen’s headset. Battery Bridge. He thanked her, took off the headset, dropped it down a storm drain as he hurried on.

*

All the way to the bridge he kept wondering if the drone had intercepted his messages, but Flex was the only person waiting for him when he got there. A short, stocky figure, rain hat shining like a wet toadstool. Under the hat was another, with trailing earflaps, and under that a kludged-together headset with a big viewing lens that hid Flex’s right eye.

Zen had never really been sure if Flex was a boy or a girl, but he mostly chose to think of her as “her.” Her plain brown face and shapeless clothes gave no clues, but there was a gruff gentleness about her that reminded him of Myka. She lived rough somewhere in the Stacks, but sometimes the factories called her in to paint their vehicles and the murals over their gates. That was how Myka had met her.

The rest of the time, Flex was a tagger, one of those feral artists who liked sneaking into the rail yards to paint their designs on waiting freight containers, passenger carriages, even on the locos themselves. The trains’ maintenance spiders would usually clean the graffiti off before the paint was dry, but if the work was good enough, some locos let it stay, and wore it with pride as they went on their way through the K-gates. Flex’s stuff was more than good enough. Zen didn’t know much about art, but when he looked at the things Flex painted he could tell that she loved the trains. She never rode the K-bahn herself, but her quick, bright paintings did. Her leaping animals and strange dancing figures were seen by people in all the stations of the Network, mobile murals traveling the galaxy on the flanks of the grateful trains.

More importantly for Zen, the long game of cat and mouse she’d played with the trackside security systems meant that she knew of ways to get to the trains that didn’t involve passing through the station.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Anywhere,” Zen said. “Away.”

Flex grunted. “Myka always said you’d end up in bad trouble.”

“I live for trouble,” said Zen. “Anyway, you paint trains. Does Myka ever lecture you about that?”

“That’s different. And I’m not her little brother.”

“Will you help me?” Zen asked.

Flex nodded. “ ’Course. Myka saved my life once. I owe her.”

They climbed a stepped alleyway that led up beside the plummeting foam of a waterfall. The rumble of passing freight trains came down at them from above. Zen wondered what his sister had done to save Flex’s life, and why she’d never men-tioned it. But the industrial districts were dangerous, everyone knew that. People were probably saving each other’s lives down there all the time…

Halfway up the staircase, Flex stopped. She must have sent a signal from her headset, because a rusty hatch cover slid open in the alley wall. She ushered Zen through it and came after him, switching on a flashlight as the hatch slid shut behind them.

“Used to be a power station round here,” she said. “It served some old rail line that got closed down. This is one of the access passages. It comes out in the freight yards behind Cleave Station.”

It was only a short way, but the passage was narrow and airless. Dark side-passages opened off it, full of the fury of the cascade being squeezed through the sluiceways under the K-bahn. At its end, rungs stuck out of the wall of a vertical shaft, and at the top of the shaft another hatch opened. Zen popped up like a gopher in a dead, weed-grown space between two gleaming K-bahn tracks. The brightly lit platforms were about a half mile away, tucked under the overhang of the canyon wall. The part of the line where Zen had emerged was in darkness, except for a fading Station Angel, hovering like an outsized will-o’-the-wisp in the wake of some train, which had just come through the gate.

“What are you waiting for?” asked Flex, down in the shaft behind him.

“There’s a Station Angel…”

“Angels won’t hurt you.”

“I know that,” said Zen. They were still eerie, though, and he was glad to see that this one was fading—Angels did not last for long this far from a gate. He scrambled out of the hatch and stood for a moment, staring toward the platforms, because he had never seen a K-bahn station from that vantage point before. Then Flex climbed out behind him and they set off across the tracks toward a line of parked freight cars in a siding. Zen was almost starting to enjoy himself now. Somewhere down the line he’d tell this tale in bars or coffee shops to lesser thieves. “They had drones out after me, but I just snuck onto the K-bahn and jumped on an outbound train…”

The waiting cars were ore hoppers, blazoned with the crossed keys logo of the
Prell family
and a lot of graffiti by artists who weren’t as good as Flex. Zen saw her give the tags a quick look and wrinkle her nose at the poor workmanship.

“Do I climb in to one of these?” he asked.

Flex shook her head. “Wait here till a passenger train comes in, jump it, ride into the station, then slip inside when the doors open.”

“Won’t the train notice?”

“It will, but it probably won’t care. I know the locos that come through here. Most of them are all right. The worst that will happen is it’ll send a maintenance spider to look you over. Tell it you’re a friend of mine.”

“Train coming,” Zen said. He could hear a flutter of engine sound, growing louder.

Flex looked up. The light from the station fell across her hard little face. “That’s not a train,” she said.

She was right. The rails weren’t thrumming the way they did when a train approached. Whatever was coming was coming through the air.

“Drone!” Zen said, and at the same moment its searchlights came sweeping across the tracks. Flex vanished, giving him one warning look, then darting into a nook of darkness behind the freight cars. Zen turned to follow, but the light caught him. He saw his shadow pasted over the tags and logos on the side of the nearest car, as crisp as if Flex had sprayed it there in black paint.

He looked back. The drone hung in the air a few feet away. It must have seen him follow Flex into the passage, worked out where they’d emerge, flown up here to wait. Its battery of cameras and instruments was trained on Zen, relaying his image back to the girl in red or whoever else was controlling it.

“All right!” he shouted. “What do you want?”

Sparks flew from the drone’s carapace. It spun in the air. Zen heard cracking noises, sharp dings. He looked left and right. People were running and shouting. Spurts of light flashed on gray raincoats. He thought at first these were the drone’s handlers coming to pick him up, then realized that they were shooting at it. The drone tried to steady itself, but something heavy hit it and it flipped over and crashed down on the tracks. There was a blue flash; shards of debris zipping past like bats. Hands caught hold of Zen; flashlights shone in his face. The gray-coats were shouting at him, but the crack of the exploding drone had deafened him. They started to shove him toward the station along a ceramic footpath that ran between the tracks.

The train that had just arrived in Cleave was no ordinary passenger train. It had, for a start, no carriages, only a long, double-ended locomotive, black, still steaming from its passage through the K-gate. The gaggle of trainspotters on the platform end were going wild, and well they might, thought Zen. On any other night he would have been there with them, fighting for a proper look. Because it was like something from the
threedies
, this train. A massive, brutal machine, horned and armored like a dinosaur, its hull barnacled with gun turrets and missile pods and stenciled with the logo of the Network Empire.

What was a wartrain doing in Cleave?

The bulk of the black loco hid Zen from the sightseers on the platform as he was hustled along between the tracks, then bundled up steps and through an open door. He was angry, confused, and secretly a little scared, but the railhead in him still felt excited to be boarding such a train.

Inside there was a white cabin, with screens on the walls where an ordinary carriage would have windows. Most of the screens were on standby, displaying the imperial logo, a zigzag lightning flash sparking across two parallel lines.
So these guys must be from
Railforce
, thought Zen. “Bluebodies,” people called them, because of the blue graphene-composite armor they wore in combat. Only, Railforce didn’t usually bother much about what went on out on the branch lines, unless there was a rebellion or something. They certainly weren’t in the business of hunting down small-time thieves.

“Name?” someone asked him.

“Zen Starling.”

A man stood watching him, bald head gleaming in the light from the screens like a well-worn ebony newel. He had a black splinter of a face, sharp-featured and sour, with a thin scar that twisted one side of his mouth down. You didn’t see scars much—the meanest backstreet body shop could fix up a scar for you. When people kept them, it usually meant they were trouble.

“What do you want with me?” shouted Zen. “I haven’t done anything wrong. I was just—”

“It would be a bad idea to waste my time,” said the Railforce man. “Where is Raven?”

Zen blinked. “Is this about the necklace? That girl—is she one of your people?”

“This is not about a necklace,” the man said. “Where is Raven?”

Zen said defiantly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The man looked past him again. “Maybe he’s not made contact yet. Did you learn anything from the drone?”

“Fried,” said one of the others. “Sorry, Captain Malik. It self-destructed before we could get anything out of it.”

Captain Malik gave a cold smile. “Raven hides his tracks well.”

“Who’s Raven?” Zen asked.

The screens behind Malik filled with pictures of a man’s face. A white face that was all angles. White faces were rare on the Network, where most people came in various shades of brown. Zen would have remembered a face like that.

“I don’t know who that is,” he said.

“Well he knows who you are,” said Malik. “His Motorik contacted you tonight in Ambersai.”

Photos from the Ambersai now, grainy blue images scraped from security footage. They showed Zen moving between the stalls, and behind him, in the crowd, the girl in the red raincoat. It looked as if she had been following him for several minutes before she tried to intercept him at the goldsmith’s stall. That made Zen uneasy, because his instincts usually told him when he was being watched or followed, and he’d sensed nothing. So she’d only been a Moto? For some reason, he felt disappointed.

“I didn’t
talk
to her. She got in my way, that’s all.”

“She helped you escape with that necklace.”

“She didn’t help. She tried to stop me. Isn’t she with you?”

“No,” said Malik. “We tried to track her, but she vanished. So we tracked you, instead, and followed you here to Cleave. What does Raven want with you, Zen Starling?”

Zen shrugged. He didn’t know. Nobody had ever taken much interest in him before tonight. “I told you, I don’t know any Raven.”

“We’ll see,” said Malik. “My data diver’s searching your records.” He glanced at a man who sat beside him, eyes hidden by an elaborate headset. “Mr. Nikopol?”

The man smiled; a small, neat man, proud of his work. Divers were a special caste, not afraid to log out of the safe, fire-walled data rafts and surf the tides of information in the deep
Datasea
. You could find anything down there, as long as you were clever enough to deal with the things that lived there. “Zen has a sister who works in the refineries,” he said. “Mother with mental health problems. Father not recorded. Station of birth not recorded. Current address not recorded. Before they lived in this dump the Starlings lived in Santheraki, which is also a dump. Before that—”

Malik held up a hand for quiet. “I don’t get it, Zen. You’re no different from a million other sneak-thieves up and down this line. Why is Raven interested in a punk like you?”

Zen started to say that he didn’t know. Then his anger got the better of him. “You’ve got no right to drag me in here! If it’s Raven and his Moto you’re after, why aren’t you out looking for them? She’s here, in Cleave! Her drone shot Uncle Bugs!”

“Impossible,” said Nikopol. “There’s been no train from Ambersai since the one the kid came in on, and she wasn’t on that.”

Malik didn’t look as if he thought it was impossible. He looked as if he thought it was interesting.

“Where?” he asked. “Where did you see her?”

Zen started to say, “She was at my apartment,” but stopped. He didn’t want these Bluebodies barging in on Ma and Myka with their questions and their drones. Ma would think all her nightmares had become real.

Malik grew tired of waiting for an answer. He said to a woman, “Faisa, stow him in the back. Dose him. I’ll question him again when the drugs kick in.”

He meant Truth drugs. Zen had heard of them. One shot was enough to make you spill everything. He struggled, but Faisa and her comrades were strong. They wrestled him past Malik, down a narrow corridor, into a blue cupboard of a cabin with a shelf for a bed. He struggled some more. He could feel the train stirring, engines coming on. There was a tiny, dirty window in the cabin wall and through that he saw the pillars of the station canopy idling past, and the flicker of headset flashes as trainspotters took final snapshots of the mystery train.

“Where are we going?” he shouted.

One of Malik’s men said, “Back up the line. No point staying. Raven won’t show his face here now.”

The woman called Faisa was opening a plastic box. The train gathered speed and the window went black; they were in a tunnel, heading for Cleave’s K-gate. Faisa fitted a tube of some clear fluid into an injector. “This will help you to concentrate on finding the answers Captain Malik needs.”

The lights went out. The sound of the engines stopped too. The train was slowing. It couldn’t be deliberate, because trains were supposed to speed up on the approach to a K-gate. The man holding Zen said, “Oh great Guardians!”

“What’s happening?” asked Faisa.

Zen didn’t know, but he knew an opportunity when he saw one. He lashed out with his feet at the black shapes in the blackness around him. One boot crunched into a body. There was a curse. Strong hands turned and twisted him. The man the hands belonged to shouted, “Dose him!” his mouth close to Zen’s face, breath smelling of Ambersai beer. There was more scuffling, the cobra hiss of the injector, a scream.

“Not
me
!”

“Sorry! Sorry!”

“Where is he?”

A tangle of bodies, hands. Someone falling. Zen writhed in darkness past the others, groping for the doorway, finding it, stumbling out into the corridor as emergency lighting came on, dim and red. He heaved the door shut before his captors realized he was not among them anymore. There was smoke in the air. The train’s engines whined and hiccupped, as if they were trying and trying to come back on line and something was stopping them. The door that led back into Malik’s control cabin was opening and closing with exasperated hissing sounds. Looking through it, Zen saw the screens flaring with static. By their pale light, Malik was wrestling with Nikopol, who thrashed in his seat, blood bubbling from his nostrils. Malik sensed Zen standing there. He looked up, but before he could say anything the door gave one last hiss and shut tight, locking itself.

Zen turned the other way. At the far end of the corridor was a hatchway marked with fire exit symbols. He hurried toward it, hoping that wasn’t locked too.

It wasn’t. Just as his hand reached for the lever, the hatch opened.

“Zen Starling?”

The girl in the red coat was standing on the tracks. She had thrown back the hood of her coat and he could see that Malik had been right, she wasn’t a real girl at all, just a Motorik—a wire dolly—an android.

She tilted her head to one side and smiled at him.

“Well, this is exciting!” she said. “I hope you’re not going to run away again. There’s no need. I’m on your side. My name is Nova.”

While Zen was still trying to work out if she was a hallucination, she reached through the hatch, took his hand, and pulled him out of Malik’s train into the chill darkness of the tunnel.