Railhead

by Philip Reeve

  In the middle of the most important job of his life, he seemed to be growing a conscience.

  He said, “Why can’t we just knock out the security in the carriage where the collection is?”

  “The security programs are very old and very expensive and very good. If I took out that one, the Wildfire and the Time of Gifts would notice.”

  “Then you have to find a way to stop them from noticing.”

  “But—”

  Zen reached out and held her by both narrow shoulders. “Listen. Here’s the new plan. We wait until the train goes through the last K-gate from Spindlebridge to Sundarban. Then you’ll open the door to the collection and kill the security systems there, very quietly, not harming the train or anybody else in any way. I’ll take the Pyxis, and get off as soon as we reach the station. Hopefully we’ll be back on the Thought Fox before the Noons even notice it’s gone.”

  “That is a very simple plan,” said Nova.

  “Simple is good. No spaceships, no trainkillers, just swipe it and leave.”

  “Raven must have thought of that. There must be some reason why he decided on Spindlebridge instead—”

  “Raven isn’t here,” said Zen again.

  “Perhaps he knew I could not outwit the train’s security systems—”

  “You can,” Zen said. “We are stopping at Jangala for three days before we head down to Spindlebridge and Sundarban. That gives you three days to come up with a way to get me into the collection. And I know you can do it. You’re better than any security system. You’ll find a way to fool them.”

  She smiled at the compliment. “I’ll try.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  Her face suddenly went bland again, becoming the calm mask of a well-mannered Motorik. Someone was calling Tallis’s name. Zen turned and saw Kobi coming into the carriage. Behind him, in the vestibule between that carriage and the next, Threnody stood waving. She was wearing hunting clothes—a camouflage shimmersuit and kitten-heel combat boots.

  Kobi was smiling, but his eyes darted suspiciously from Zen to Nova.

  “You’re pretty friendly with this wire dolly,” he said. “Don’t you have real girls on Golden Junction?”

  Zen felt his face go hot. In Cleave, if someone hinted that you fancied Motos, you hit them. Even if you weren’t a fighter and they were bigger than you. It was a matter of honor. But there’d be trouble if he broke Kobi’s nose for him, so he just stood his ground and glared.

  “I’m joking, Tallis!” Kobi said. He slapped Zen on the shoulder, slightly too hard to be friendly. “We’re going hunting. Coming? Or are you scared of hunting, too? I heard you didn’t have the stomach for the glass-floored carriage…”

  “Hunting?”

  “In the game reserve.” Kobi jabbed a finger at the glass wall. The Noon train had passed another K-gate while Zen was talking to Nova, and he hadn’t even noticed. Dense greenery was rushing past, falling away now and then to give views over folded, forested hillsides.

  “We are approaching Jangala Station,” said the soft voice of the Wildfire, or perhaps the Time of Gifts.

  Kobi said, “Threnody says you brought a gun with you.”

  Zen turned and snapped his fingers at Nova as if she was a toaster or something, that needed switching on. “Go and fetch my ray gun from the luggage, Nova.”

  Kobi watched her leave the carriage. “There’s something off about that wire dolly. What are those marks on her face?”

  “Those are freckles.”

  “That’s what I thought. You need to get her blanked and rebooted. I suppose you’re too fond of her.”

  “She’s a family heirloom,” Zen said. “So’s the gun. My grandfather used it for hunting reef rays.”

  He had hoped that would sound impressive, but Kobi said, “We aren’t hunting rays today. The Jangala game reserve is stocked with heritage megafauna. All kinds of Old Earth critters re-created by the Noons’ geneticists. It’s the best collection anywhere on the Network.”

  He went to rejoin Threnody. Zen started to follow him, then saw Nova coming back into the carriage with the ray gun in its long case. He waited for her. “I don’t have time for this,” he muttered as she passed the gun to him.

  “It will be all right,” she promised.

  Zen didn’t want to leave her, but he didn’t want to give Kobi any more cause to tease him about her either, so he simply nodded and went after the others. The train was slowing. Among the trackside trees grew the bulbous bio-buildings of Jangala Station.

  20

  The Noons loved their forests. The name of Sundarban, their main planet, meant “beautiful forest’ in one of the ancestral languages, but billions of people lived on Sundarban, so most of that world had to be city and farmland. Jangala, on the other hand, was a pleasure planet, where towns were few, and everything that was not actual sea was covered with a sea of trees.

  The Noon train pulled onto a long siding outside the station, and the passengers climbed down to stretch their legs, sniff the warm air, meet the local representatives, and ignore the crowd of excited trainspotters, which the guards were keeping at a respectful distance. Motorik servants descended from the rear part of the train with picnic tables, covered dishes, and gleaming stacks of crockery. Awnings were erected. Some carriages opened their roofs to reveal air-cars waiting there for any passengers who wanted to see Jangala from the skies. One extended a ramp to the trackside, and down this drove a silvery maglev car. It halted obediently in front of Kobi as he led Threnody and Zen off the train. They piled in, and it drove off with them, through the outskirts of the station city and away into the trees.

  At first the way was wide and well marked, with clusters of smart hunting lodges growing like fruit in the treetops on either side. Then the road came to an end. Zen felt faintly alarmed. He was a city boy; he had never been anywhere like this before. The car went on for a few miles, cruising above maglev trackways laid under the soil. After that there were only footpaths.

  The car parked itself, and a couple of small hound-drones detached from it and whirred around Kobi as he shouldered his pack and his spindly, lightweight gun. Threnody unpacked a similar weapon from one of the baggage lockers and shut her eyes for a moment, synching the rifle’s targeting computer to her headset. Zen slipped a cassette of cartridges into his ray gun, wishing that hunting gear on Tristesse hadn’t tended so much toward the retro. Threnody’s and Kobi’s guns were feeding them information about everything from ammunition levels to wind speed. His gave him nothing but splinters.

  They set off through the mist, which hung in the warm air between the trees. Zen had never seen so many trees, nor so big. The ground between their roots was springy, a thick carpet of moss and leaf litter. Awnings of huge green leaves spread overhead. Peering up through the canopy, trying to glimpse the sun or moons, Zen saw shadows darting by. He thought they were the shadows of flyers, until Kobi raised his gun and shot one. It came crashing down through the branches, and Kobi’s hound-drones went darting to retrieve it. A feathered flying lizard with a mouthful of teeth.

  “Archaeopteryx,” said Nova, who was still watching through Zen’s headset, whispering in his ear.

  “Archaeopteryx,” Zen said, as if he’d known that all along.

  “Specially engineered,” said Threnody. “Our geneticists design them not to leave the borders of the reserve.”

  It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to, designing special birds just so that Kobi could blow holes in them, but Zen didn’t say so. “What else do you hunt in here?” he asked as they moved on.

  “Old Earth animals,” said Threnody. “Some of the classics. Deer. Bears.”

  Zen nodded as if he knew what she was talking about, but those names meant nothing to him. Nobody had ever bothered seeding Old Earth animals on any of the worlds he knew.

  “In this zone there
are supposed to be megafauna,” said Kobi. “You’d like the horns of one of them for your wall, wouldn’t you, Thren?”

  “No,” said Threnody.

  He laughed as if she’d said something funny.

  “These megafauna,” Zen said, “I guess they’re designed to stay in the reserve too?”

  “Oh Guardians, yes!” said Threnody. “The Jangalese wouldn’t want one of those trampling through their station…”

  “So are they designed not to attack human beings?” he asked hopefully. “They’ll just stand there nice and quiet and let us shoot them, will they?”

  Threnody giggled. “You are funny, Tallis! If there’s no danger, there’s no sport!”

  “Just checking,” Zen said.

  “But don’t worry. We aren’t going after megafauna. They’re expensive; only the heads of the family hunt them, and only on special occasions. Kobi’s just trying to impress you.”

  They were going downhill now, the ground sloping toward the river. The roar of a waterfall came through the trees, a homely sound for a boy from Cleave. Zen fell back far enough that the others wouldn’t hear him whispering to his headset.

  “Nova, can you see where I am?”

  “Sort of. I’m watching you through a weather satellite.”

  “Any animals around here? Big animals?”

  “It’s hard to see through all the trees.”

  Zen knew what she meant. He hated the woods. He liked buildings around him and a sidewalk under his feet. Trees gave him the creeps. And all he could see were trees: big trees and small, leaves like spiked fans, leaves like corrugated green roofing sheets, knobbed and spined and warted trunks. All he could hear was the river, and the rustle of unseen beasts in the undergrowth.

  “Tallis?” Kobi was calling to him, pointing down a path that opened off the track they had been following. “We’re coming to the river. There’s a footbridge somewhere. Check down that way, will you? We’ll try the other.”

  “Can’t your drones sniff it out?” Zen asked, watching the machines circle him.

  “That would be cheating.”

  Zen went down the path. It was a green tunnel, walled with trees whose buttressed roots looked like the fins of rocket ships. Lianas and trailing curtains of moss hung from the branches, brushing his face. In the shadows on either side hung huge pale flowers, giving off a sickly scent that was attracting clouds of bees: little black bees, each with the smiling sun logo of the Noons marked in the fur on its back.

  The path led down into a misty clearing filled with slanting sunbeams and the roar of the river. A thick, musky odor hung in the air.

  “Can you see a bridge?” he asked his headset.

  “Not near where you are,” said Nova. And then, “Oh, Zen, watch out—I think—”

  He started to turn, and something hit him so hard on the left side of his head that he lost his footing and rolled, cursing, down into the dell. Kobi followed, holding his gun by the barrel as if it were a bat.

  “Think you can come breezing onto the Emperor’s train and take my girl, railhead?” Kobi said. He was flushed and panting and his eyes were bright.

  Zen didn’t answer. He was on his knees in the moss, throwing up the Noons’ expensive breakfast, which looked pretty much like any other breakfast when it came back out. Kobi started to circle him. Zen wondered why he didn’t shoot, then guessed those fancy hunting guns were probably fail-safed not to fire on human targets. Anyway, Zen thought, he’s bright enough not to leave a bullet in me. He just plans to smash my skull and leave me to be eaten by some animal.

  “And I suppose you think you’re impressing Auntie Sufra too?” Kobi was saying while he walked around and around Zen, working up the nerve to hit him again. “You think she’ll fix you up with a job, and a good marriage? Is that it?”

  Zen shook his head, and regretted it. His headset had fallen on the ground. He picked it up and put it on. It was still working. Nova’s voice buzzed in his skull. He caught the words, “… sixty feet…”

  And looked up just as the beast burst from the trees behind Kobi.

  He never did find out what sort of animal it was. “Megafauna,” Kobi and Threnody had called them, but that was a word for all the big beasts of the reserve. What breed this was, and whether it was an ancestral animal from Old Earth or the figment of some gene-tech designer’s imaginings, he couldn’t say. It was big, that was what he would mostly remember of it. Big and hot-smelling, with armored plates on its back and ginger fur bristling up between them. It had lowered its head as it came charging out of the trees, so its face was hidden at first by the rack of huge horns, which it wore like a clumsy crown.

  One of those horns caught Kobi as he turned, too late, to aim his gun at it. The beast flung him across the clearing with a twitch of its head, then, with another, smashed down the hound-drone that darted in to try to lure it away. The drone distracted it for a moment, sparking and flapping on the ground. The beast stamped it flat. It lowered its head and sniffed the wreckage, then looked up, straight at Zen. It had a horny beak and small, red, angry eyes, and it hated Zen for trespassing on its territory. It reminded him a bit of Kobi.

  He wasn’t used to big animals. Rats were all he usually saw in Cleave. He sat there with his head stuffed with pain, stunned by the size of this thing, by its hot and angry presence. If it had charged at him then, it would have killed him, and he would have been too dazed to care. But Kobi let out a groan, over on the far edge of the clearing where he had been thrown. The beast swung its blunt head toward him and snorted.

  Kobi was dragging himself across the ground there like a broken Motorik, while the surviving hound-drone fluttered above him, shrilling out distress calls. Muscles tightened like hawsers under the beast’s hide as it shuffled around, aiming itself toward him. Its breath smoldered in the sunbeams. It pawed the leaf litter with a three-toed hoof.

  Zen scrabbled sideways across the slope and found the gun he’d dropped when Kobi hit him. He aimed without thinking, and was surprised how hard the stock kicked his shoulder when he pulled the trigger. Splinters of bone flew off the beastie’s antlers, but that didn’t bother it much. It drew its attention away from Kobi, though. Its mad little eyes considered Zen again, while Nova did something to his headset that dropped targeting cross hairs into his field of view. He pointed the gun again, lined up the crosshairs on the center of the thing’s forehead. Again the recoil kicked him. The beastie bellowed. There was a hole through its horny faceplate. It threw back its head and roared, and blood fountained up into the splayed sunbeams.

  Zen fired again. It went down on its knees, then collapsed slowly, like a demolished building. It quivered for a bit, farted gigantically, and died. Threnody came running down into the clearing with her own gun ready. Kobi blubbered and cursed. Zen stood shaking, and the sunbeams danced in downdrafts as the drones and flyers of the House of Noon came down all around them.

  21

  Zen had never understood before why rich people went hunting. It had seemed just part of the cruelty of them. They enjoyed lording it over other people, and they enjoyed harming animals, just like the urchins who tortured stray dogs in the Ambersai Bazar. But as the flyer carried him back to the K-bahn that day, he barely saw the passing view. His head was full of the way that huge, hot beast had crumpled. It had been so big and beautiful, and he had killed it. He knew how the first hunters must have felt, back in the first forests on Old Earth, when they matched themselves against such monsters, and defeated them. A silvery light seemed to hang above the passing treetops, and he barely heard the voices around him: the family medics shouting urgently, Threnody telling everyone how brave he’d been.

  Back on the Noon train, the imperial doctors checked him over, treated him for mild concussion, sealed the cut behind his ear. They gave him drugs that numbed his headache. They all assumed that the beast had done that to him, and he
did not bother to put them right. Kobi was going to live, they said. The Emperor himself arrived, shook Zen’s hand, and thanked him for saving the young man’s life.

  Zen mumbled something in reply. The silver light had faded by then. He wanted to crawl into bed and sleep for a thousand years.

  He did sleep for a bit. Sometime later, he walked along beside the track in the lilac evening, watching the Motorik fold awnings and tables away. Threnody found him there.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Zen shrugged. He had been better. The long shadows and the rising mists combined with the drugs the doctors had given him to make everything feel like a dream.

  “Everyone’s talking about you,” she said. “Father is very grateful to you. We all are. And the family knows what a fool Kobi was. Uncle Gaeta’s security people retrieved recordings from one of the hound-drones. Kobi had been planning to delete them, I suppose. I suppose you must have a recording of your own. Your headset…”

  Zen had taken the headset off. The wound on his scalp made it too painful to wear. He said, “I can’t remember.”

  “If such a recording was ever to be made public…” said Threnody. “Can you imagine the scandal? Kobi’s family are valued allies of the Emperor. Our enemies would be sure to use this against us. ‘Look how these spoiled young people behave,’ they’ll say. ‘If the Emperor lets his own daughter be engaged to a murderous lout like this, how can the Network be safe in his hands?’ ”

  So that was why she had come looking for him, thought Zen. He could imagine her father or her uncle or Lady Sufra telling her what to ask him, knowing he would be more likely to listen to her.

  “I don’t want a scandal,” he said.

  “Of course you don’t!” She seemed to think she was winning him over. “We are all Noons. We manage these things privately. Kobi will be punished severely, you can be sure of that. Apart from anything else, that monster you killed was one of the best specimens in the reserve. The Chen-Tulsis will have to pay for that. And don’t think I’ll be marrying him anymore. That’s completely not going to happen. The family will just have to find a new match for me…”