Railhead (5 page)

“Desdemor!” announced a loud voice. “Jewel of the western branch lines!” But it was only a big advertising screen, woken by the movement as Zen and Nova emerged from the station entrance. The buildings of the city soared high and slender and abandoned, and empty bridges spanned its calm canals. The screen flashed images of crowded beaches and laughing children across a deserted piazza, welcoming tourists who would never arrive. Overhead shots showed Desdemor to be an island, but Zen had guessed that already; he could not see the ocean yet, but he could hear the boom and rush of it, and smell it in the clean air.

He looked up. Big clouds were sweeping overhead. The greenish-golden light, which shone between them, was not sunlight. It came from the immense gas planet that filled half the sky.

“It must have been lovely here in the old days,” said Nova. “So full of people! Raven is the only one who comes here now.”

“But why?” Zen asked, following her across the piazza. His voice echoed from the glass walls of towering buildings. “Why come here, I mean? Raven must be rich. Rich people live in nice houses. They have friends, and families, and nice stuff. They don’t dance with Station Angels. They don’t live in ruined beach resorts with only wire dollies for company. No offence.”

“None taken,” said Nova.

They walked beside a canal, following it down to the beach. The tide was in. Spray burst high into the air and fell back slowly in the frail gravity. Storms had stripped the shutters from the little shops behind the promenade. Buckets and spades lay half-buried in the drifts of sand inside, like treasures in desert tombs. Far out at sea, where big waves broke over reefs the color of bone, Zen saw a skein of ungainly looking birds flying, black against the face of the gas giant.

“That planet is called Hammurabi,” said Nova. “Tristesse is one of its moons. And those birds aren’t birds, they’re sky-rays. Genetically engineered, based on the big manta rays that used to live in the oceans on Old Earth, you know?”

“Oh, right…” (Zen didn’t know, but he wasn’t going to let her see that.)

“They roost on the offshore reefs. People used to go out in boats, with special guns, to hunt them. And the ocean is called the Sea of Sadness—isn’t that pretty? Like something in a song.”

Another wave burst, towering over them, collapsing across the promenade like a drunken fountain. Zen stepped back, but Nova just stood there, raising her face to the falling spray.

“Is this all right for you?” he shouted, over the snore of the withdrawing wave. “All this water?”

She only laughed, shaking her wet hair. “Think it’ll short-circuit me? I’m not a toaster, Zen! I have skin. Look! It’s waterproof, and it covers me all over.”

“It’s not real skin,” he said.

“No,” she said. “It’s better. I’m a very advanced model.”

“Did Raven make you?” he asked.

“He
started
me, if that’s what you mean.”

“So that makes him, like… your
father
or something?”

She was silent for a while. They moved back, out of reach of the spray. She said, “It was in the storm season. In one of the old ballrooms at the hotel. He’s done it up as a workshop. A laboratory. One minute I wasn’t anything, and the next I was me. I was lying on a metal table and there was rain on the windows.

“He said I was an experiment. Which does nothing for a person’s self-esteem, I can tell you. He said he was trying to build a Motorik that thought it was a human being. Only it didn’t work, because I knew what I was at once. I lay there in the rain-light and watched menus opening in my brain. I could feel all my subroutines coming online. Raven just puttered about watching me, with the shadows of the rain on the windows running down his face, and the lightning flashing from his eyes. I saw an old movie once about a mad scientist, and he looked exactly like Raven did that day. Which makes me his monster, I suppose. That’s not very good for my self-esteem either.”

“Did Raven program you to be this way?”

“To be what way?”

“Well…”

“Nobody programmed me, Zen Starling. I program myself. Raven gave me passwords. He showed me how to open my own menus and rewrite my code.”

“Is that why you have freckles?”

“Yes! It took ages to get the pigmentation just right. Do you like them?”

“Not much.”

“Motorik are meant to look perfect,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard him. “Like dolls. That’s why
stupid
people call us ‘wire dollies,’ I suppose. But I don’t want to look perfect. It’s so boring. I’m working on giving myself some pimples next. I wish I could make myself fat. Why don’t you like the freckles?”

Zen felt embarrassed now. He wished he hadn’t called her a wire dolly. He hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings. He hadn’t even realized Motorik
had
feelings. He said, “They make you look like you’re trying to be human.”

“I
am
human,” she said. “I have a processor for a brain instead of a lump of meat, and my body is made of different substances, but I have feelings and dreams and things, like humans do.”

“What do you dream about?”

“That’s my business.”

*

They walked back toward the K-bahn. The station was on the ground floor of a building called the Terminal Hotel, a soaring glass wing whose thousand windows all reflected the storms and rings of Hammurabi. There seemed to be people in the lobby, but when Nova led him inside, Zen saw that they were just more Motorik. One came to meet the new arrivals, bowing. She was gendered female, with a long, wise face, a blue dress, silver hair in a neat chignon.

“Mr. Starling? I am Carlota, the manager. Mr. Raven told us to expect you.”

“Is this where he lives?” Zen asked.

“When he has nowhere better to be,” said Nova. “He got the old place up and running again, woke up all these wire dollies to keep it working.”

“Mr. Raven is a regular guest here at the Terminal,” said Carlota. (If she was offended at being called a wire dolly, she did not let it show.)

“You’d better keep an eye on Mr. Starling, Carlota,” said Nova. “He’s a thief. Count the spoons. Keep the safe locked.”

Carlota’s smile was patient and preprogrammed. “Come, sir,” she said. “I’ll show you to your room.”

At the heart of the Great Network lay
Grand Central
. All the main lines of the galaxy met there, which meant that whichever corporate family controlled Grand Central controlled the whole Network. For the past few generations that had been the
Noons
. Portraits of the Noon Emperors and Empresses beamed down from holoscreens, and the smiling golden sun of Noon flapped on bright banners above a garden city, which covered half the planet, the buildings spread wide apart, diamondglass towers and golden station canopies rising from a sea of trees. The imperial palace, the senate, the K-bahn Timetable Authority, all the dull, complicated departments that kept the Great Network running had their headquarters on Grand Central. The Guardians themselves kept data centers here: deep-buried vaults of computer substrate from which those wise old AIs could keep watch over human affairs. The Imperial College of
Data Divers
was always standing by to pass on their advice and instructions to the Emperor, although the Guardians seemed content these days to let Mahalaxmi XXIII rule without their instructions and advice. The Network ran itself happily enough in these peaceful times.

On Grand Central there were always silvery trains snaking from one K-gate to another across the long viaducts, and the sky was forever busy with drones and air-taxis. At morning and evening these were joined by green parakeets, which rose from the treetops to fly in raucous, swirling flocks between the towers. The buildings used magnetic fields to warn the flocks away, and the birds flowed around them like water around the prows of huge ships.

The shadows of their wings fell upon Captain Malik, who stood at a window high in the Railforce tower, looking out over the parks and lakes and malls of the galactic capital. The peace and luxury of the place unsettled him. He belonged on colder, rougher, dirtier worlds, and he was angry at being ordered back to Grand Central.

“Yanvar!”

He turned from the window as Rail Marshal Delius came into the room. A tall woman, taller than him, very dark skinned, her white hair combed and lacquered into a high arch like the crest of an ancient warrior. Her face was a warrior’s, too: stern and handsome, but lovely when she smiled, which she did when she saw Malik. He let her hug him. A row of medals was pinned across her tunic. They reminded him of the coins that he and Rail Marshal Delius used to leave on the K-bahn rails when they were kids together in the rail yards on Lakshmi’s Lament. They’d creep out to the lines and lay the coins on them like offerings, then hide and wait for a K-train to come by…

Lyssa Delius was one of the very few people Malik thought of as a friend. They had joined Railforce together, and fought side by side against the Empire’s enemies all over the Network. But he doubted her friendship could help him much now. A wrecked wartrain was a serious business. He had whiled away his journey from Cleave by trying to calculate how many millions the armored loco must have cost. The Empire would be looking for someone to blame, and Lyssa did not have the imagination to blame Raven. Like the rest of Railforce Command, she did not even believe that Raven existed.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” she told him. “I’m sorry to have to drag you here, but this is a serious business…”

“It was a trainkiller,” said Malik. “It cut straight through our firewalls, killed my data diver…”

“I read your report.” Delius sat down on a gray sofa and patted the cushion beside her, inviting him to sit down too. Malik stayed standing. She said, “Our technicians went through what was left of your train’s systems. They found no trace of any virus.”

“If he can design a virus like that,” said Malik, “he can design it to leave no trace.”

“Mmm,” said the Rail Marshal, with a half smile, but he knew that she didn’t believe him. He noticed that she’d had her scar fixed the half-moon scar on her forehead from that firefight on
Bandarpet
.
A pity
, he thought.
Old soldiers should wear their scars with pride.

“You were supposed to be on a routine patrol of the trans-Chiba branch lines—” she started to say.

“I was. I was in Ambersai when I detected Raven’s Motorik, trailing a kid in the Bazar.”

“Yes…” Lyssa Delius was embarrassed. Her smile looked like pain. “Yanvar, this theory of yours, that Raven is still at large—”

“It’s more than a theory.”

The Rail Marshal sighed. “Our data divers have spoken to the Guardians. They know nothing of Raven.”

“They told you that?”

“Not in so many words—you know how they are—but if he was still out there, they would tell us.”

“Raven knows how to evade them,” said Malik. “They think that because he does not operate in the Datasea anymore, he is no danger. But he is.”

“Oh, Yanvar,” said the Rail Marshal gently. “If you would report in more often, go to the right parties, meet people, you would probably be
General
Malik by now. Railforce needs good people like you, here on Grand Central. But you’re always out on the branch lines, chasing this… this…
ghost
. Raven is dead. We killed him, Yanvar. Twenty years ago.”

“Raven is no ghost. He’s planning something. He made contact with this kid from Cleave, a small-time thief named Zen Starling. I brought the boy aboard the train for questioning. That’s when the trainkiller hit.”

“And where is this boy now?”

“He escaped,” said Malik.

“You have searched Cleave?”

“He’s not in Cleave.”

“Then how did he leave? Bearing in mind that your train was blocking the tunnel that leads to Cleave’s only K-gate?”

“There is a second K-gate there. Cleave-B, on the old Dog Star Line. That’s how Raven moves. That’s where he hides.”

“And do you have any actual—”

“There is no
evidence
, Lyssa. But I know it’s true. If you give me another train, and let me take it onto the Dog Star Line…”

She looked away, sighing. When they were kids she would wait in the shadows with Malik, simmering with giggles, until the K-train passed. Then they would scurry back to the rails and find the coins they’d balanced there transformed: crushed thin as leaves by the weight of the wheels, and scoured to a high shine. Some similar change had come over Lyssa Delius in the forty years since then. She was no longer the girl he had grown up with. They were not alike anymore, he realized. Age and ambition had smoothed the hard edges off her; she was happy here in this civilized city, playing politicians’ games. But Malik was made of hard edges: a violent, vengeful man. He wanted to hurt people, and he needed a war to let him do it. He needed a train.

“Let me hunt Raven down.”

Lyssa Delius looked at him, and he knew what she would say before she said it. “I’m sorry, Yanvar. No more ghost hunting. Your team has already been reassigned. If it wasn’t for me—if I hadn’t put in a good word for you—you would be facing serious punishment. As it is, you will take six months’ leave, and report for psychological evaluation.”

She stopped in surprise as a sudden clattering sound filled the room like gunfire. Malik looked behind him. One of those wheeling flocks of parakeets had mistaken the window of the Rail Marshal’s office for empty sky and flown straight into the diamondglass.

“Our magnetic field must be on the blink again,” said Lyssa Delius. “You see, Yanvar? That’s the trouble with peacetime. The Emperor keeps cutting our funding. We can’t even afford bird repellers, let alone to keep you out there, wrecking K-trains, following this
hunch
…”

Malik went to the window. Dead birds were tumbling toward the treetops, leaving the glass smeared with blood and feathers. He took the Railforce badge from the breast of his jacket and set it carefully on the sill.

“I’ll find Raven on my own,” he said.

Lyssa Delius called his name as he walked to the elevator. He did not look back.