Railhead

by Philip Reeve

  “No.” She turned from the window and came to sit beside him. “Raven believed… He told me once that the spheres were the seeds of K-gates.”

  Zen laughed again. “What, put them in a pot and water them and up pops a gate?”

  “Not like that. It was a metaphor. I think he meant, the spheres were storage devices that held the secret of making K-gates.”

  “He said something to me about the Guardians keeping secrets,” Zen remembered. “He said that was why they tried to destroy him, because he found out about them. But you can’t make new K-gates. If Raven used this sphere to open another one it would wreck the whole Network. He’d be stuck on Desdemor. Why would he want that? It would be like sawing off the branch he’s sitting on…”

  “Maybe he’s got some other use for the sphere. It must be incredibly powerful. Imagine the math it would take, to open a hole through space-time. Maybe it will do other things too.”

  Zen was considering a simpler bit of math. “He didn’t pay me enough,” he said. “The house on Summer’s Lease and the money in my account, it seemed like a lot. It was a lot, for me. But if the sphere is so powerful… He should have given me more, much more.”

  He imagined Raven, safe on Desdemor, haunting the bars and ballrooms of his dead hotel like a vampire lounge singer. A flame of pure, white anger lit in him. Raven had tricked him and used him and taken him for granted. He had treated Nova like a machine and Zen like a fool. And now, thanks to Raven, here they were, stuck on this dead line, with half of Railforce gearing up to come after them.

  And then he caught sight of a glimmer of hope. One last angle he could work. A mad, risky idea, but as hard to resist as an unwatched necklace on a goldsmith’s stall.

  “What if we had this sphere thing?” he said.

  “But we don’t,” Nova pointed out.

  “We stole it from the Noon train. We could steal it again.”

  “From Raven? It’s too dangerous…”

  “What have we got to lose?” argued Zen. He knew it was dangerous, but it was the only idea he had; if he let her shoot it down, what were they left with? “Do you really think the Noons are just going to let us go? They’re probably moving wartrains onto the Dog Star Line right now. The only way this is going to end is with you shut down and me dead or frozen. Unless we have something to bargain with.”

  “Like the sphere—”

  “Yes! We take it, go to them, say look, we’re sorry, we realized what this thing is, how important it is to the Guardians, and we fetched it back for you. No! We’ll hide it somewhere on one of these dead worlds, and only tell them where if they promise we’ll go free…”

  “That is a rash plan,” said Nova. “It is unlikely to succeed.”

  Zen knew it. “It’s still better than waiting here for the Bluebodies to come and get us,” he said. He went to the window, leaned against the glass. Outside, snowflakes rode the up-drafts, whirling like his thoughts. “They won’t let us go. They’ll come in wartrains, armed to the teeth, with tech that will track us wherever we hide. The Damask Rose hurt their people on Sundarban, killed some probably. They’ll shoot on sight. But Raven’s got no reason to harm us.”

  “Perhaps we have to go,” said Nova, as if she was trying to convince herself. “If we’ve given him all this power and we’re the only ones who know about it, perhaps it’s up to us to stop him, before he uses it for something awful…”

  But Zen didn’t care about that. He wasn’t out to save the day, like some hero in a threedie. He just wanted to save himself and Nova, and this was his one slim chance of doing it. He turned from the window, trying not to let her see how much it scared him, hoping that if he acted like he had a plan, a plan would come to him. “That’s what happens now. That’s what we’ll do. We’ll go to Desdemor, and steal the Pyxis back.”

  41

  The air above Sundarban Station City was busy with media drones. The newsfeeds were carrying stories of a battle with terrorists, a wrecked space vehicle. Bluebodies in combat gear poured off trains from Grand Central like armored commuters. Others guarded every platform, shooing away the drones that came buzzing around Yanvar Malik as he stepped out of a Railforce train.

  By the time he reached the station’s central operations tower, the news sites had identified him. Blurry pictures of him filled the lobby screens, with text scrolling down their sides. “Yanvar Malik, a former Railforce officer, relieved of duty after the mystery loss of an armored train in Cleave…”

  He had already been on his slow way to Sundarban when Railforce found him. They had transferred him to a wartrain and brought him across the Network faster than he had ever traveled. He knew that something big had happened, but the officers who had been sent to fetch him could not tell him what.

  He was not altogether surprised to find Lyssa Delius waiting for him in the elevator of the operations tower.

  “Yanvar,” she said, gripping his hand for a moment. She looked tired. A small frown creased her forehead, right where the old scar used to be. “You’ve been traveling a lot since we last spoke—”

  “Looking for that boy,” said Malik. “The one Raven took from Cleave.”

  “I’ve found him,” she said.

  Their diamondglass elevator rose, gliding up the side of the tower, the golden canopies of the station dropping past them like autumn leaves. She made it go slowly, so that she had time to tell him things.

  “Threnody Noon was pulled out of a crashed shuttle last night. She claimed it been hijacked by a boy who fought his way out of the city through a whole squad of Bluebodies ten hours ago. She says he was the one who caused the Spindlebridge disaster. All of which could just be another of the wild rumors that are flying around these days—her sister, Priya, is already blaming the whole thing on Tibor Noon. Except that Threnody says the boy’s name is Zen Starling. When I heard that, I sent for you.”

  She pinged some images to Malik’s headset. It was helmet-camera footage, gun-lit and shaky, Zen staring from an open door as an old red train sped by.

  “Is that Raven’s thief?” asked Lyssa Delius.

  “Yes. He’s all right?”

  “As far as we know.”

  Malik was surprised how relieved he was. He was starting to grow almost fond of Zen Starling. He’d been a kid from the wrong end of the Network himself. He thought he could guess how Zen must feel, caught between Raven and the Bluebodies.

  “Threnody says he was on the Noon train right up to Spindlebridge,” Lyssa Delius told him. “The newsfeeds have put two and two together—they’re calling him ‘Trainkiller.’ He was using the Dog Star Line to move about, just as you said. I should have listened to you.”

  Malik shrugged. “Why would you? I had no evidence. Raven’s too good, Starling’s too lucky. Even the Guardians didn’t believe me.”

  “Well, they believe you now. Anais Six herself has taken an interest, and it can’t be long before the others start asking questions too.”

  A gigantic shadow slid across them, but it was just a pa-trolling Noon gunship, eyeing them with its sensors as it stropped past. Lyssa Delius’s frown deepened. She ushered Malik out of the elevator, still talking softly as they went together along curving corridors.

  “It’s chaos here, Yanvar. The new Empress is frightened out of her wits, completely paranoid. Maybe she’s right to be. It’s not just her uncle Tibor who wants her job. The Prells have canceled all leave for their Corporate Marines. I can see the whole Network tipping into war, and not one of the little wars we fought out on the branch lines in the good old days: the real deal. I thought that things would be easier when we announced the Starling boy was in Raven’s pay, but Anais Six will not let us release that news.”

  “You have actually spoken with Anais Six?”

  “Oh, more than spoken. You’d better prepare yourself, Yanvar…”

  Up a wide stairwa
y, into the sunlight under a huge glass dome: a penthouse lounge where the Noons came to look out over their city and watch the K-trains rolling in and out. It was crowded now, bustling, a smell in the air of fear and strong coffee. Railforce officers in their neat blue uniforms jostled up against the fancy-dress generals of the Noon CoMa. In the center of it all there was a still space where a tall figure stood, not exactly human.

  The strangeness of it made Malik start. Almost ten feet tall, blue skin, masses of red hair, wide golden antlers. It was dressed in a gown made from the feathers of rare, expensive birds, and cut in the style of a century ago. It turned its golden eyes toward Malik as he entered, as if it knew exactly who he was. Which it probably did, because it was a Guardian, or at least the mortal interface of one.

  “It arrived an hour ago,” said Lyssa Delius softly by his ear.

  The interface came toward him, and the stillness came with it; the people it passed stopped their arguments and discussions, looked up from their data-slates, stood open-mouthed and stared. A servant nervously offered it canapés. An old CoMa general, overcome with awe, got down on his creaky knees. It stood in front of Malik and stared down at him, and he felt the urge to kneel too. He had never expected to actually meet a Guardian, or feel its voice come rippling like music through his headset, into his mind.

  “You are Yanvar Malik…”

  The golden eyes gazed down at him, flowing with tawny patterns like the mantles of twin suns. He imagined the immense intelligence that lurked behind them, not in the interface’s skull, but in the Datasea. He imagined it plucking facts about him from that storm of information, finding individual threads in a tapestry as wide as the sky.

  “You are one of those we sent to destroy Raven’s interfaces.”

  “And I did, Guardian,” said Malik, holding that golden gaze with an effort. “All except one.”

  “That one must also be destroyed.”

  Lyssa Delius said, “I told the Guardian that you would lead this mission, Yanvar. You’re our expert on Raven. A wartrain is being moved onto the old Dog Star Line.”

  “There are a lot of stations on that line,” he said.

  “We will follow the Starling boy,” said Anais Six. “He will lead us to Raven. I will come with you. This time, I must be certain that nothing of Raven survives.”

  It walked past him, making for the door. Malik had the feeling that it would have walked through him if he had not dodged out of its way. He looked at Lyssa Delius, who said, “Go. Eliminate Raven. It’s what the Guardian wants.”

  Malik turned to follow the interface, and found Threnody Noon watching him. There were bruises on her face, a freshly healed rip in the sleeve of her coat, a wary look in her eyes. Just behind her stood a young man with hennaed hair, equally bruised and dirty, who put a hand on her elbow as if he wanted to protect her from something but wasn’t quite sure what.

  Threnody shrugged herself free of him and stepped in front of Malik. “Who’s Raven?” she asked.

  “A ghost,” said Malik.

  “The Guardian wants you to kill a ghost?” she asked.

  He smiled, nodded, said nothing.

  “Well, make sure you bring Zen Starling back,” said Threnody, as he stepped past her. “Bring him to Sundarban, so he can explain why he did what he did to us!”

  She looked like a warrior, thought Malik, standing there with her angry eyes and her fading wounds, her hands curling into fists. He saluted her gravely, and, as Lyssa Delius started to lead him away toward his new command he said, “I think the Noons have picked the wrong sister to be Empress.”

  The Rail Marshal looked sideways at him. “Threnody’s appearances on the newsfeeds have gone down very well. She showed a lot of poise after that shuttle crash: a lot more than Priya has shown since she became Empress. And now the news has leaked out that she’s been speaking with a Guardian… Her approval ratings with the public are running very high. We shall have to do something about her.”

  Malik wondered what the something would be. He wished he could help the girl, and knew he couldn’t. Suddenly he felt very glad that he only had Raven to deal with, that he had never risen to Lyssa Delius’s height, where you had to choose which Noon to help onto the throne, and do things about their too-popular relatives to keep them there. Lyssa didn’t mind that stuff. It was like a game to her. He could see that in the thoughtful way she glanced toward the Noon girl. But Lyssa had always been more ambitious than him.

  “You’ve turned into quite a politician,” he said.

  She thanked him, but he hadn’t meant it as a compliment.

  42

  The Damask Rose replenished her fuel cells at a depot outside Winterreise Station, and sped on down the Dog Star Line, through rainbow deserts and midnight forests. In her dining car, Zen and Nova built plans as fragile as card houses.

  “Raven will be surprised to see us,” Zen said. “He’ll come to the station to see what we want, and we’ll get him talking. We’ll tell him Railforce knows what he’s up to, say we’ve come to warn him—”

  “If he’s working on the Pyxis, it will be in his laboratory. I can slip away while you talk to him, go there and search—”

  “No,” said Zen, “we must both stay with him, or he’ll suspect. Flex can go and find the Pyxis. He doesn’t know about Flex. We’ll keep him distracted while Flex goes into the hotel. If you’re all right with that, Flex?”

  Flex grinned, a bit uncertainly, still getting used to the idea of being a thief. “Yes!” he said. “Of course. It’ll be just like dodging trackside security back home…”

  “This is a plan of the hotel,” said Nova. “Here’s what the Pyxis looks like.” She and Flex exchanged a glance, and Zen knew that information was flickering between them. The Damask Rose passed through another K-gate. Now they were on a twilight world where abandoned bio-buildings sprawled along the tracksides like deformed and blighted fruit. The brakes came on, pushing Zen against his seat. Nova looked up, sensing the same thing that the train had sensed: another mind, out there in the dusk.

  “There is another train,” she said.

  “Is it Railforce?” asked Zen.

  “It is ahead of us,” said the Damask Rose. “And I do not think so.”

  “Talk to it,” suggested Flex.

  “And put it over your speakers, so we can all hear,” said Zen.

  “I am the Damask Rose,” said the train.

  A slow laugh dripped like liquid from the speakers on the ceiling, and the voice of the other train said, “I am the Thought Fox.”

  No one spoke for a moment. Then Nova said, “Hello, Fox! Is Raven with you?”

  The Thought Fox laughed that unnerving laugh again. “No, little one. He is in Desdemor. He asked me to guard the line for him. I have been prowling the rails, looking for someone to harm.”

  “We have a message for him,” said Nova. “It’s important. Let us pass. Railforce is after us. If you want to harm someone, harm them.”

  “Raven said no one was to pass,” said the Thought Fox.

  “What if we left our train here? Will you take us to Desdemor yourself?”

  “Perhaps,” said the Fox, in a tone that made Zen think of a sharp-toothed grin. “Come to me, little ones. Come in your old red train to me, and we shall discuss the matter.”

  “Pssssccchhhh,” said the Damask Rose. “I do not trust it. I have heard of this Thought Fox. It is a bad train.”

  Zen was at the window. Through the half light, between the nightmare shapes of the overgrown buildings, he looked for the lights of the other train, its sliding blackness. He imagined it out there, stalking the rails with its guns unhoused. Why had he not thought of it before? Of course Raven would be guarding the lines in case anyone came after him. Do you think I haven’t mapped out all the twists and turns this thing could take?

  “It is six miles
ahead,” said the Damask Rose. “There is an old station. The Thought Fox is waiting there on the up line. No carriages, just the locomotive. It is heavily armed.”

  “Should we go back?” asked Nova.

  “And run into Railforce coming the other way?” said Zen. “Train, can’t we slip past it? Go around the station somehow?”

  “There are sidings there, a loop that leads through freight yards. But the Thought Fox will be watching us through this world’s satellite grid, just as I am watching it,” said the Damask Rose.

  Zen had never heard a train sound afraid before.

  “Come and talk,” wheedled the Thought Fox.

  “Take the loop anyway,” said Zen. He didn’t think they could slip by without the Thought Fox noticing, but it might buy them some time. “Nova, do you still have a copy of Raven’s virus?”

  She looked at him, almost expressionless. “No. But it is possible that the Fox will try to use a trainkiller against us.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that,” said the Damask Rose. “A ‘trainkiller’? I hope that is just a figure of speech?”

  “No,” said Nova. “It’s not. You must keep your firewalls up; I’ll show you how to upgrade them…”

  She closed her eyes, communing silently with the train. They entered the outskirts of the station, a mass of sprawling limbs and tendrils, black against the grainy sky. Some of the buildings sensed the Damask Rose coming and turned on their lamps, sickly green bioluminescence glimmering through fleshy openings that had once been windows. The train swayed, gathering speed, rattling over a set of points. The lights of the station dwindled as the Damask Rose swerved away from it, out into a broad rail yard that stretched south of the main line, a confusion of tracks shining in the twilight like a frozen sea. Zen cupped his hands around his face and pressed his nose to the window. Warehouses and cankered engine sheds flicked past, sagging scrawls of cable blocked his view, and suddenly through them he saw a low moving blackness away to the north, and the voice of the Thought Fox was dripping from the carriage speakers again, mock-disappointed and hungry for blood.