Railhead

by Philip Reeve

  “We should go there and explore.”

  She grinned at him. “I’d like that. If there’s time.”

  The tide had turned. Small waves came foaming round them. Keeping watch for rays, they hurried back across reflections of Hammurabi to the promenade.

  *

  Raven did not approve of the game with the rays. One of his drones, cruising above the beach, had recorded the whole thing. When Zen and Nova returned to the Terminal Hotel, wet and laughing, shaking the sand from the folds of their clothes, he scowled and said, “You’re valuable, Zen Starling. You need to take better care of yourself.”

  “What about Nova?” Zen asked. “Isn’t she valuable too?”

  “You can’t lie as still as she can. If one of those rays sees you it’ll crunch you down like a biscuit. You won’t be laughing then.”

  “I’ve got to pass the time somehow,” Zen said, feeling cheeky and sure of himself, elated after the ray game. “How long are we waiting here anyway? How long till we go to meet the Noons?”

  “Soon,” said Raven. “Think you’re ready?”

  “Oh, I’m ready,” said Zen, in a posh boy’s voice, putting his hands in his pockets and standing in the lazy, laid-back way, which was how he played the part of Tallis Noon.

  Raven just looked at him. Then he strode off to the hotel’s gunroom and came back with a rifle. It was elegant and old-fashioned looking, with a wooden stock and ceramic barrel. “If you wanted to bait the rays,” he said, “you should have taken this. A good marksman could bring down a ray from a mile away with one of these. Of course, you’re not a good marksman, so you can link the gun’s computer to that headset I gave you; Nova can do the aiming for you and tell you when to pull the trigger.”

  “I can manage,” said Zen, although he had never even touched a gun before. Some of the kids in Cleave carried cheap, printed pistols, but he’d never bothered, because he could never imagine using such a thing. He was a thief, not a killer.

  “You’d better take it with you on the Noon train,” said Raven.

  “You think I’ll have to shoot my way out?” asked Zen.

  “I think it’s good to be prepared,” said Raven, and showed him how to put his fingerprints into the ray gun’s memory so that Zen was the only one who could make it work. “The Noons have big hunting reserves at most of their stations. You can tell them you’re hoping for some sport. A young Noon carrying a vintage ray gun won’t raise any eyebrows. The best place to hide something, Zen, is always in plain sight.”

  12

  The first time Yanvar Malik killed Raven had been on Vagh, in a decaying mansion near the cobalt mines. It had seemed like a job for a drone, but Railforce had sent humans to do it: Malik and five others, slamming through the K-gates on a train called Pest Kontrol. The mission was top secret. There was a rumor that their orders came directly from the Emperor, and another that they came from the Guardians themselves.

  Malik could still see the mansion’s high ceilings, the elaborate plasterwork, the rotting muslin curtains through which the sun of Vagh had poured its sickly light. Could still see Raven rising from his chair, surprised when Malik burst in, and even more surprised when Malik shot him twice in the chest and then one more time in the head. The gravity low, the spent cartridge cases tumbling slowly through the air, the body falling in a leisurely way.

  A few days after that they killed Raven again, in a resort on Galatava. He looked surprised that time too. But from then on the mission grew more difficult. Railforce said that Raven would not dare to use the Datasea, but news always reached him somehow; he knew they were coming. Sometimes he ran—Malik remembered shooting him in the back as he sprinted away across the houseboat roofs of the watertown on Ishima Prime, and calling in a missile strike on Kishinchand that reduced Raven’s speeding car to a stain on a mountain road. Sometimes Raven tried to bargain, or to bribe them. When that didn’t work, he started fighting back. He’d killed two of Malik’s comrades with a booby trap on Naga, and led them out onto a thin sea of methane ice on some dead-end, airless world where two more had gone crashing through into the burning cold depths. On Chama-9 he took out the Pest Kontrol with a terrifying virus that ate straight through its firewalls and destroyed its mind. (Malik made sure Raven died slowly and painfully that time. He had liked that train.)

  It was just a mission, to begin with, but somewhere along the way it became personal. It wasn’t just because Raven killed his comrades, and tried to kill him; lots of people had tried to kill Malik, and he didn’t hate them for it. But to have to keep killing the same man over and over, to see that same face through his gunsight on world after world—it was like being trapped in a nightmare, or some weary, repetitive game.

  And there was the feeling, too, that Raven had cheated. Malik was not a young man anymore. He could sense his body aging: wounds healed slower, and hard exercise made his joints ache. His hair was thinning fast. He was starting to realize that you only got one chance at life, and that his was half over. But not Raven. When Raven started to feel age slowing him down, he just discarded that body and cloned another. When Malik realized just how many chances he had had, in how many bodies, it started to be a pleasure to kill him.

  “How come all your bodies look the same?” he’d asked Raven on Luna Grande before he shot him. “If it was me, I’d want all my clones to look different. I’d try out being different colors, different sexes.”

  Raven said, “I wanted to keep hold of my identity. If I saw a different face each time I looked in the mirror, I might forget who I was.”

  “You won’t be anybody, soon,” Malik pointed out, killing him again.

  It certainly made his job easier, with only the one face to look for. There was only so much Raven could do with hair dye and e-makeup. Sooner or later, Malik always found him.

  “Why didn’t you do something great?” he complained, the time he killed Raven at the skid-ship regatta on Frostfall. “You could have made a difference. You just spent all that extra time partying and playing.”

  “I tried to make a difference,” Raven said, looking ruefully down at the holes Malik’s gun had just made in him. “That’s why the Guardians sent you after me.”

  On Ibo, he said, “Whatever the Guardians told your masters about me, whatever they say I did, it’s a lie.”

  But nobody had told Malik what Raven had done. They’d just said to kill him.

  *

  And at last they sent his team to Iskalan, put them on a spaceship, and blasted them way out into the blackness of that lonely system, where whole dark planets of hardware hung unmapped, data centers for the Guardians. There was a hollowed out asteroid there. They landed, and cut their way down through blast doors into a facility where hundreds of bodies lay in glass coffins frosted with flowers of ice.

  Malik remembered the sound the ice had made, crackling under his glove as he wiped clear spaces on the coffin lids. Strange how these small details stayed with you. He remembered peering in through the glass, and seeing Raven sleeping there; the same face he had killed so many times. All the coffins were the same: hundreds of sleeping Ravens, filling the racks which covered the chamber’s walls. Or maybe not sleeping, maybe just not yet alive. This was a storeroom, where Raven kept new bodies until he needed them.

  “I don’t see how he can ever download himself into these,” said Lyssa Delius, the only other surviving member of Malik’s original crew. “He doesn’t exist in the Datasea anymore. What’s to download? These are just meat.”

  “Railforce want them taken out anyway,” said Malik. But the truth was, he wanted them taken out; he wanted every last one of those handsome, lifeless Ravens gone. They left enough demolition charges in that chamber to vaporize the whole asteroid.

  And when they got back to the station at Iskalan, they were told the mission was over. Whatever Raven had done, the Guardians were satisfied that his
punishment was now complete. He was finally dead.

  So they had a sad little celebration in a station bar, remembering lost comrades and recalling battles that they could never talk about to anyone else. And then they went off to other units, other lives. As far as Malik knew, none of the others had been troubled by nightmares. None of the others had felt that sense of something unfinished, loose ends left hanging. The Guardians had said Raven was dead, so Raven must be dead.

  Malik got a promotion. He got himself a husband, a house on Grand Central, a cat. But the feeling wouldn’t fade, and in his dreams he kept on killing Raven. He got a divorce, a posting to a long-range patrol train out on the branch lines. And slowly he started to notice things. A witness to a robbery at a biotech plant on Ashtoreth who described a tall, pale man, and another on the far side of the Network two years later who saw someone who sounded like the same man the night a trainload of construction equipment went missing from the rail yards on Nokomis. Both robberies impossible; the security systems that should have stopped them wiped by viruses that left no trace, the cameras recording no image of the thief.

  Raven was still alive. He had convinced Railforce and even the Guardians themselves that he was dead, but one last version of him was still alive.

  Malik hated leaving a job unfinished. He started collecting any report that might point to Raven, trying to find evidence that would convince someone. But there was never any evidence: just hints and whispers. Just a drunk on Changurai who claimed to have seen a Moto girl in a red raincoat come out of a blocked-off passageway, which led down to the old Dog Star Line. Just a street thief called Zen Starling who claimed to know nothing about Raven, and then vanished.

  Zen Starling is the only lead I have, he thought. What does Raven want with a street thief?

  The pictures his drone had caught of the kid in Ambersai and Cleave had been lost along with his train, along with the scraps of information poor Nikopol had found. All Malik had to go on were his memories. Zen has a sister who works in the refineries. If he could just find out what Raven wanted with the boy, the puzzle might start to make sense. And the only way to do that was the old way: talking to people, piecing things together.

  He stared out of the carriage window, taking one last look at the tasteful towers of Grand Central. The train gathered speed, carrying him toward the K-gate that would take him back to Cleave.

  13

  The next day was clear and still. Hammurabi so crisp in the morning sky that Zen felt he could reach out and touch it from the balcony of his room. A day to go exploring down that old southern viaduct, he thought, and was surprised at how happy that made him. He ran downstairs to find Nova.

  But Raven was waiting in the breakfast room with news. “Zen! It’s time to go! Get your luggage together. We’re leaving for Surt.”

  So that was that. Zen’s time in Desdemor was ending just as suddenly as all his other peaceful times. Something fluttered in his stomach like dry leaves as he followed Raven and Nova across the empty station. He knew that feeling. Stage fright.

  “What if the real Tallis Noon shows up?” he asked. He had thought of that a few times, but dismissed it because—well, what were the chances? Now the danger seemed quite real. “What if the real Tallis boards the Noon train while I’m there already, pretending to be him? What then?”

  Raven waved his words away. “You think I hadn’t thought of that? You think I haven’t mapped out all the twists and turns this thing might take? Tallis was at Przedwiosnie last week, just a few stops up the line from Adeli. He probably did have plans to meet the Noon train. But he got delayed. A girl called Chandni Hansa got on the same train. Very pretty. She and Tallis got talking. They got off at Karavina. Do you know Karavina? It’s romantic. Houses on stilts. Moonlight on the vapor lakes. Chandni will make sure Tallis has a long stay there.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because I paid her to,” said Raven.

  “Okay,” said Tallis uneasily. So he wasn’t Raven’s only hireling. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. And what did “a long stay” mean? Pretending to be Tallis Noon had made him feel oddly close to the real Tallis Noon, as if they were brothers or something. Was Tallis really enjoying a romantic stopover on Karavina? Or was he lying on the bottom of one of those vapor lakes with a knife in his back? And was that how Zen would end up, too, once he was no more use to Raven?

  They had reached the platform. The Thought Fox opened its carriage doors for them. Raven turned and laid his thin hand on Zen’s arm. His eyes were kind, his smile precise. “It’s going to work, Zen. We’ll all get what we want. I’ll have the Pyxis, and you’ll be rich.”

  “What about Nova?”

  “Nova’s just what you’re taking with you instead of burglar’s tools,” said Raven.

  But later, when the Thought Fox was stitching its way through space-time’s raggedy fabric, Zen saw that Nova already had what she wanted. Her eyes were on the windows, waiting for the glimpses of new worlds that opened up sometimes between the long underground sections as the Thought Fox roared through the K-gates. Nebulae setting over deserts of white sand or refuse floating in a derelict canal, she watched it all with a look that was almost hungry. In her own way, she was a railhead too.

  *

  The Dog Star Line ran deep beneath the other platforms at Surt station. The elevators that had led to it were all de-commissioned, and the stairways that once served it were sealed off and forgotten. Even the tunnel through which the old line ran was blocked by a ferro-ceramic barrier. The Thought Fox sensed the obstruction ahead as soon as it came through the K-gate. It did not slow down, just unfolded a big gun from either side of its hull, blasted the barrier into pieces, and shouldered aside the smoking fragments.

  It was not a train that said much, or sang for joy as it sped along, the way that other trains did, but after it had smashed that barrier it laughed softly to itself. The deep, unsettling sound gurgled out of the speakers in the carriage ceilings, startling Zen, who sat perched on the edge of his seat, impatient for the journey to be over. The Fox’s weapons were still extended when it pulled in at a deserted underground platform a few minutes later.

  “I will wait for you on Sundarban,” Raven told his passengers. “You will be alone from here on, Zen, but Nova has everything that you need.”

  For a moment he looked almost fatherly. But when they were crossing the dead platform and Zen looked back to see him watching from the carriage door, he had no expression at all. The guns of the Thought Fox tracked to and fro, aiming at abandoned snack kiosks and the footbridges that spanned the rails, as if the old train were seeking new targets to destroy.

  14

  Threnody Noon was bored. She had been bored for days, but today was the first time she had felt able to admit it to herself. After all, she had been looking forward to this trip for months. She had been tired of living at home, in the quiet coral house beside the lakes on Malapet, where her mother painted flowers and uploaded data-prayers to the Guardians, which the Guardians never bothered answering. She had yearned for the bustle and excitement of life on her father’s train. But once she was aboard it—once she had grown used to the splendor of the carriages and the glamour of the other passengers—she had started to feel discontented almost at once. Her father kept introducing her to people as “my daughter, Threnody,” but anyone could see she wasn’t one of his official daughters. His short marriage to Threnody’s mother had been designed simply to seal a business deal between his family and hers. He would never have invited Threnody aboard his train at all, except that she was almost of marrying age herself now, and he wanted her to seal another business deal, by marrying Kobi Chen-Tulsi, the heir to a Sundarbani asteroid-mining company.

  Kobi was also on the Noon train that season, and he bored her too. Sometimes, when she thought about having to marry him, having to live with him for years to come, Threnody wished s
he’d not been born a Noon at all. It was almost frightening—except that Kobi wasn’t frightening, just dull. Curled up on her bunk in the speeding train, she thought, I’m still a girl. She was seventeen, but she didn’t feel any different to how she’d felt when she was twelve. I don’t want to be engaged, she thought. Not to Kobi Chen-Tulsi, not to anyone. I want to see the Network first.

  She was seeing the Network, of course. The worlds of the Silver River Line rushed by outside her window; K-gates spilled their colorless light over her. Each time the train stopped, excursions were arranged: picnics and fishing trips, ancient fortresses and famous mountains. But somehow, that didn’t seem to count.

  So when the train reached Adeli, she pretended to be tired, and stayed behind while all the others went roaring off to hunt and party on the island peaks. She told herself she would have fun on her own. But she was still bored, and when the train announced that it had a message from a young wandering Noon, asking to come aboard, it felt like the first interesting thing that had happened in a thousand light years. Tallis Noon, from Golden Junction. She knew nothing about that branch of the family. She walked through the pillared carriages and met the Motorik manservant whom the train had dispatched to greet the new arrival.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll meet him myself.”

  *

  Adeli was a world of mists. Life took place on mountaintops, and all around them stretched seas of flickering fog: natural cloud chambers through which passing particles drew their sudden, shining trails. Stilt-walking its way across the fog to the summit-city of Adeli Station came a viaduct, and along the viaduct the Noon train was snaking. Lighted observation domes glowed under the evening sky, and from a hundred extravagant little turrets on the carriage roofs flew the imperial standard and long banners bearing the smiling sun logo of the House of Noon.