Railhead

by Philip Reeve

  The place was crowded: Railforce people, K-bahn officials, the fancy-dress generals of the Noon CoMa. Holoscreens hung in the air like kites, relaying reports from the Bluebody squads who were searching the city, streaming video footage from circling drones. In the one patch of clear space stood Priya Noon, surrounded by a cloud of little bluebird drones, which zigzagged around her on nervous trajectories as if infected by their owner’s panic. “I demand further reinforcements now,” she was saying, in a high, jagged, too-loud voice. “What sense does it make to leave even a single armored train on Grand Central, where the traitor Tibor can seize them and turn them against me? If the troops you have here can’t even catch this one single assassin…”

  “Lady Threnody?” A hand brushed Threnody’s arm. She turned to find Lyssa Delius standing there: Rail Marshal Delius, with her wise face and her warrior’s crest of white hair, the one who was on all the newsfeeds.

  “I’ve seen your account of tonight’s events,” the Rail Marshal said quietly, carefully leading her away from the group around Priya. “Are you quite sure about the name you gave? The real name of this imposter?”

  “He told me it was Zen Starling,” said Threnody.

  The woman watched her, stern and searching. “Have you heard that name before?”

  “Never,” said Threnody.

  “Well, I have,” said the Rail Marshal, and turned to the aides and officers who stood behind her, waiting for her orders the way dogs wait for table scraps. “Get some people down onto the old Dog Star platforms. Yes, I know they’re sealed—unseal them! And find me Yanvar Malik.”

  38

  Half a dozen times, as they made their shuffling way toward the central platforms, Zen thought that he was going to lose it. Start to scream and thrash and flap his arms, rip off the filthy old robes and scatter bugs everywhere.

  Because they were in his ears, and up his nose, and down the back of his shirt, and clumped so thickly on his limbs that he could hardly lift his feet. But that made it better, probably, made his progress look more like the cumbersome walk of a Hive Monk. And when they started passing Railforce check-points and he peered out through the eyeholes of his paper mask and the fringe of legs and feelers that rimmed them and saw the Bluebodies wave them by without even looking at them, well, then he realized that it was going to work, and that it was going to be worth it.

  From time to time, Nova’s words would come through his headset. “Not far now,” she’d say encouragingly, or “Look at the Bluebodies! They don’t even spare us a glance!”

  Only once were they stopped. A sub-officer stepped into their path when they were almost at the barriers and asked where they were going. “Platform eighty-nine,” whispered the mass of bugs that covered Nova, and then the sub-officer turned away to listen to new orders that were crackling in his earpiece and waved them by. The barrier, programmed like all station barriers to let Monks pass, swung open for them, and they went out onto the platform, leaving their trails of dead husks behind them, while people waiting for the 5:58 to Bhose Harbor stepped back to let them pass.

  It was a long platform, the far end deserted and in shadow. They made their way down onto the rails and crossed the track and then another. Hive Monks were known to do strange things, so probably no one would have thought it odd if they had seen them there, but even so they stopped and waited in the shadows while a train passed, then went on. Soon they were at a doorway in the tunnel wall that Nova said led down to the Dog Star Line; soon they were stepping out onto a long-abandoned platform deep beneath the other lines.

  It was very quiet. On the opposite platform a hopeful vending machine blinked its lights to let them know it had a selection of snacks for sale. The two sets of rails gleamed in the glow from bio-lamps on the walls. Zen and Nova looked to and fro along the platform. They walked to the far end in the hope that the K-train might be lurking in the shadows of the tunnel. Only the wind moved: the tunnel wind, which came from who-knew-where, flapping the edges of their robes, rattling the dry wings of the bugs on their hands.

  “There is no train here,” said Nova.

  “The Damask Rose said she would meet us here,” whispered her covering of bugs. “It was agreed. Flex heard. It was discussed.”

  Uncle Bugs seemed to be having some sort of fit. He waved his arms around and kicked out his legs. He pulled his robe half-off and disintegrated, revealing Zen, gasping and shuddering, brushing at the departing bugs, which spilled from his hair and ran down his face like black tears.

  “Maybe we’re too late,” whispered Uncle Bugs, a low shapeless mound under the fallen robe, like a bonfire of autumn leaves waiting to be lit.

  “Maybe we’re too early…”

  But whichever it was, they were in trouble. New sounds were echoing through the still air on the platform. A rumble that was not the rumble of trains.

  “Footsteps!” said Nova, who had heard them before Zen. And then there were voices mingled with the pounding feet. Out onto the platform came a Bluebody squad, the lamps on their helmets cutting white slices from the dusty air. Amplified voices, echoing and re-echoing from the tunnel roof, ordered the fugitives to kneel and put their hands up. They knelt, and put their hands up. The insects drained from Nova like black liquid and pooled on the platform. The troopers stopped at the pool’s edge and looked back at their commander for instructions. None of them wanted to go crunching across that swarm and have to spend the evening cleaning pulped bugs out of the cleats of their boots.

  “Train coming,” said Nova, in Zen’s ear. Kneeling there at the platform’s edge, they looked at the rails. The reflected light from the vending machine on the opposite platform was starting to shiver as the rail vibrated under the weight of the oncoming train. In another second Zen could hear it: engine rumble drifting out of the tunnel, too loud to be coming from another line.

  “But it can’t be a train,” one of the Bluebodies was saying, shaking his head. “This line is closed!”

  Zen whispered, “Nova, warn it! Find the Damask Rose’s frequency; let it know what’s happening or they’ll get Flex too!”

  There was no time to go hunting through all the frequencies for an old train she didn’t know. Nova screamed her warning on all frequencies, so loud that the Bluebodies cursed and some clamped their hands over the earpieces of their helmets.

  Light filled the tunnel, swept the platforms, and the Damask Rose came howling out of the darkness.

  Zen barely knew her at first, dressed in her new coat of angels. He and Nova and the Hive Monks and the Bluebodies all stood staring as she came slithering into the station in a long squeal of brakes, sparks fountaining from her wheels.

  Perhaps some of the Bluebodies thought they were under attack. They raised their guns. A bullet banged off the train’s side, and a scar of bright ceramic appeared where the face of an angel had been. Something popped from an angel-painted hatchway on the loco’s roof and turned out to be a gun. It swung to and fro, slewing bright streams of tracer fire across the platform. Some of the Bluebodies folded up and fell. The commander jerked backward and sat down heavily on one of the benches that lined the platform, as if this was not the train he had been waiting for after all. The rest shot back, stitching lines of sparks and chipped paint across the old train’s cowling.

  One carriage door opened, sheltered in the entrance to the tunnel. Flex leaned out and waved. Scrambling away from the battle, Zen and Nova crept toward him. Behind them, the scattered Hive Monks heaved and seethed, trying to erect their twiggy skeletons. The third Monk turned back as if to help them, but the blast from a gun caught it and blew it apart, scattering its component bugs so widely that its intelligence went out like a snuffed candle. It became just a swarm, a storm of wings, blowing in the faces of the troops, battering against the bio-lamps.

  Zen reached the door. Flex pulled him inside, and they turned together to help Nova. But Nova needed no hel
p; she simply leaped into the train, Motorik-graceful.

  “All aboard?” the Damask Rose asked. “I can’t stay here, you know. People are shooting at me.”

  “The Hive Monks!” said Flex. “We can’t leave them behind!”

  The Monks were out on the platform, not exactly part of the battle, but suffering badly in the crossfire, and from the panicked troopers who blundered through them, crushing bugs and knocking down the puny scaffoldings they kept trying to erect. One had thrown all its females into the air, a desperate cloud whirring toward the train, but a scared Bluebody turned a flame-thrower on them and they crackled like popcorn.

  The Damask Rose began to move again. Ahead, a footbridge spanned the gap between the platforms. Bluebodies were hurrying up the stairs, aiming to get above the track, groping for grenades.

  “We can’t leave them!” Flex shouted, over the rush of air and the roar of engines and armaments. He stuck his arm out to stop the doors closing. On the platform, Uncle Bugs had managed to reassemble himself, an ungainly glittering figure, clutching his flapping robe. Rounds crashed through him, blasting out sprays of scorched and shattered bugs. A bullet found Flex, standing at the open door; knocked him backward, splattering blue gel on the glass.

  “Flex!”

  “I’m all right…”

  Zen took his place at the door. He stretched out one hand into the rushing, bullet-busy air and grabbed a handful of bugs and the skeleton hand of wire and wood beneath. “Jump!” he shouted. “Jump!”

  But Uncle Bugs could not run fast enough to keep up with the gathering speed of the Damask Rose. He was coming apart as he ran, strewing bugs across the platform and down into the dark under the train. His face came off and blew away in the slipstream like a lost paper plate at a picnic. “Find the way, Zen Starling!” he rustled. “Find the Insect Lines!” And then there was not enough of him left to speak, and then he was just a cloud of insects, flying and scuttling, banging against the windows, buzzing past Zen’s face into the train, dropping from the clattering armature that trailed from Zen’s hand.

  Zen let it go. The Damask Rose slammed her doors and plunged into the tunnel, accelerating hard toward the K-gate.

  39

  Threnody stood beside her sister, watching the holoscreens, trying to make sense of the whirling footage from the Bluebodies’ helmet cameras. The stuttering light and fizzing static, the yelled jargon, the red train leaving.

  “He escaped?” said Priya, looking at Threnody as if she hoped Threnody would say it wasn’t so. “They let him go?”

  There were sirens outside, searchlight beams sweeping the station canopies, Railforce transports swooping down to pick up the survivors of the battle as they stumbled out of the old tunnels.

  “If Railforce can’t keep us safe, who can?” said Priya.

  “We are safe, Pri,” said Threnody. She had been afraid, glimpsing Zen Starling on those screens in the strobe light of the gunfire, that she would see him shot. She didn’t want to see that. But she had not wanted him to actually get away either; she had wanted him captured, brought back in handcuffs, and made to explain himself. Made to apologize. And then frozen for a long, long time. Thinking of him riding off aboard that old red train, unharmed, she felt indignant. It was so unfair. He shouldn’t be allowed to win!

  The Rail Marshal approached them, still snapping orders at her junior officers, who ran off this way and that like children sent on errands.

  “You let him escape!” Priya said, and Threnody wondered if she meant that the Rail Marshal had deliberately let Zen go. Which couldn’t possibly be true, but there didn’t seem to be much at the moment that poor Priya wasn’t ready to believe.

  “I am sorry,” said the Rail Marshal. “We had no idea that his train would be so well armed; our people were taken by surprise. But we know he’s on the Dog Star Line. We will hunt him down.” Then, for some reason, she looked at Threnody. There was something odd in her expression: the look of a woman with more on her mind than one escaped train. “Threnody, there is someone who wants to talk to you.”

  “Who?” Priya asked suspiciously.

  “Please, Your Excellency, it is a private matter—”

  “I’m the Empress!” shouted Priya. “I should be told! I should know everything!”

  Lyssa Delius smiled a dangerous smile. “Only the Guardians know everything, Your Excellency. And perhaps not even them,” she said. “Captain Rostov, Captain Zakhar, I think now that the immediate danger is past, the Empress should return to her own house. Please escort her.” And, turning away before Priya could protest, “Lady Threnody, please come with me…”

  Something very strange was happening, thought Threnody as the Rail Marshal herself led her away through the control tower’s corridors, while her sister, the Empress, was escorted home by mere captains. “Who is it I’m supposed to talk to?” she asked. But Lyssa Delius seemed not to hear.

  A small side office; windowless. A big seat in the center, which reclined when she sat in it. A man in red robes fussing with machinery in a corner.

  “Mr. Yunis is with the Imperial College of Data Divers,” said the Rail Marshal. “You are going to be talking with one of the Guardians.”

  Threnody sat up. On any other night she would have thought this was a joke. “The Guardians don’t talk to people,” she said. “Not anymore.”

  “This one has been talking to Mr. Yunis,” said the Rail Marshal, pushing her gently back down in the chair. “And now, apparently, it wants to talk with you.”

  “No, there’s been a mistake—it must mean Priya…”

  “I don’t think our all-knowing Guardians make mistakes about such things, Lady Threnody.”

  Threnody was trembling. She looked to Mr. Yunis, hoping he would be able to reassure her, but the data diver was trembling himself as he reached over her to place a complicated visored headset on her head, fitting the terminals into place behind her ear and against her temples. There were mysterious tattoos on his face and the backs of his hands. He was saying, “It works very much like an ordinary headset, Lady Threnody. It is an alarming experience, encountering one of the Guardians. You will be entering a part of the Datasea outside the firewalls of Sundarban’s data raft…”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” asked Threnody. There were things that lived in the deep data: unregistered phishing nets, spam-sharks that would hack your mind and fill your dreams with ads, half-mad military programs left over from long-ago wars.

  Mr. Yunis looked as if he thought it was dangerous, but he said, “The Guardian has constructed a temporary virtual environment where you will meet. Please remember that you are quite safe, quite safe…”

  The headset whined, powering up. “I don’t think it’s working,” Threnody started to say, and then Mr. Yunis fed it some code and she dropped into the Datasea.

  It was not like logging in to a data raft. The rafts were gaudy places, full of bright, enticing shopping sites and the fizz and glitter of social networks. Here in the data deeps everything was gray, a shifting monochrome soup filled with small lights, which sparked and darted like raindrops caught in headlamp glare. It surrounded Threnody, engulfing her.

  “It is only the sea,” said Mr. Yunis, in her mind. She couldn’t see him through this storm of data, but his voice calmed her. If she concentrated, she could feel Lyssa Delius’s hand holding hers, and the softness of the chair under her, out in the real world.

  And then she found a way to make sense of the flood of information that was pouring into her mind. Not a very original way, but good enough to make the panic fade. She saw the Datasea as an actual sea. The million quick sparks of light dashing past like plankton were individual packets of data. The bigger lights, which blazed and faded were the minds of trains, broadcasting news and messages from other stations as they passed through Sundarban. Those huge, fizzy, softly glowing cones, like underwater volca
noes, were firewalled information networks: the local data raft and the private rafts belonging to the Noons and other big companies. And out there, half-glimpsed in the murk beyond, those massive shapes must be the local avatars of the Guardians…

  And where was Threnody? The panic returned briefly. Was she hanging there in the middle of it all? Adrift? Would she drown? But no. She was looking out at it through glass. Through a gigantic window. She was standing on a floor of black and white tiles. If she looked at the tiles for too long, they started to do something weird, shifting and replacing one another in a complicated fractal dance. So she turned instead, to see what was behind her.

  It looked like a room. An enormous, empty room, one wall of which was the window she now had her back to. The other three walls were made of drawers. Rank upon rank of wooden drawers, each with a brass handle shaped like a little seashell.

  No. Not really a room, just a virtual environment, like in a game. It was not even as well designed as most games were. Threnody’s virtual feet made no sound on the virtual floor as she walked across it; the virtual handle of a virtual drawer triggered no touch-sensations when she pulled it open.

  Inside, she saw about a million sheets of thin paper. She lifted one. Words were printed on it in languages she didn’t know.

  “Who are you?” said a strange voice. It came from around her and inside her, but she spun round anyway to see who had spoken.

  It looked like a woman, though it was not really a woman, anymore than this room was really a room. It was a being made of code, and this code was creating, for Threnody’s benefit, the image of a very tall woman with pale blue skin. A patterned dress with trailing fronds and streamers and lacework whatnots; a vast amount of deep red hair. Hair and dress both billowing on a breeze that Threnody could not feel.

  “Hello,” she said uncertainly. Awed, disbelieving. She was talking to a Guardian, or a part of one, at least. She, little Threnody Noon, talking to an entity created on Old Earth, one of the builders of the Network.