Railhead

Listen…

He was running down Harmony when he heard it. Faint at first, but growing clearer, rising above the noises of the streets. Out in the dark, beyond the city, a siren voice was calling, lonely as the song of whales. It was the sound he had been waiting for. The Interstellar Express was thundering down the line from
Golden Junction
, and singing as it came.

He had an excuse to hurry now. He was not running away from a crime anymore, just running to catch a train. Just Zen Starling, a thin brown kid racing down Harmony Street with trouble in his eyes and stolen jewelry in the pocket of his coat, dancing his way through the random gaps that opened and closed in the crowds. The lines of lanterns strung between the old glass buildings lit his face as he looked back, looked back, checking for the drone that was hunting him.

*

Who’d have thought that the goldsmith would send a drone after him? Zen had come to believe that the merchants of the
Ambersai
Bazar didn’t much mind being robbed, as long as you didn’t steal too often from the same shop. Like maybe they felt a bit of pilfering was a price worth paying for a pitch in the biggest market on the eastern branch lines. For as long as anyone could remember, the Bazar ha
d been a happy hunting ground for people like Zen who were young and daring and dishonest, the low heroes of this infinite city.

Ambersai was a big moon. The dirty yellow disc of its mother-world gazed down upon the busy streets like a watchful eye, but it never seemed to notice Zen when he filched food or bangles from the open-fronted shops. Sometimes the shopkeepers noticed, and chased him, bellowing threats and waving lathi sticks, but they mostly gave up after a street or two, and there were always crowds to hide in. The Bazar was busy day and night. Not just the cafés, bars, and pleasure shops, but the stalls of the craftsmen and metal dealers too. There was a whole district of them, selling stuff that the deep-space mining outfits brought in. Ambersai’s local asteroid belt was as full of precious metals as an expensive necklace.

By coincidence, an expensive necklace was just what Zen had lifted that night. He could feel it in his pocket, swinging against his hip as he went down the greasy stairs toward the station and the approaching train.

He wasn’t usually so ambitious. A couple of anklets or a nose ring was all he usually scooped up on his visits to Ambersai. But when he saw that necklace lying on the goldsmith’s counter, it had seemed like too good a chance to miss. The goldsmith herself was busy talking to the customer who’d just been looking at it, trying to interest him in others, even more expensive. The guard she paid to watch her stuff was watching sportscasts or a threedie instead; he wore a headset and that glass-eyed look that people got when they were streaming video straight to their visual cortex.

Before Zen’s brain knew what his fingers were planning, he had snatched the necklace and slipped it into his coat. Then he was turning away, trying to look casual as he melted back into the crowds.

He hadn’t gone twenty paces when someone blocked his way. Zen had his head down, so all he saw of her at first were her clumpy boots and her red raincoat, the belt knotted around her waist. He raised his eyes and glimpsed the dim outline of her face in the shadow of the raincoat’s hood. A girlish face, he guessed, but he had only that one glance, because the goldsmith had worked out by then that she’d been robbed, and her guard had woken up and skimmed back through the stall’s security footage and seen Zen take the necklace. “Thief!” the goldsmith screamed, and the guard grabbed a lathi and came wading through the crowd toward Zen.

“Come with me!” said the girl.

Zen pushed past her. Her hand shot out and gripped his arm, surprisingly strong, almost pulling him off balance, but he twisted free. Behind him he could hear the lathi boy yelling and shoving shoppers aside. “Zen Starling!” yelled the girl in the red coat—only she couldn’t really have said that, he must have misheard her, because how could she know his name? He ran on, losing himself in the crowds on Harmony Street.

He was just starting to think his luck had held when he heard the flutter-thud of rotors, and looked back to see the drone behind him, hovering like a May bug over the heads of the crowd. It was sleek and serious and military-looking. Neon reflections slithered over its carapace and its laser eyes glowed red. Zen had a nasty feeling that those pods on its underside held weaponry. At the very least, it would be able to flash his image and location to the local data raft when it found him, and that would bring cops or the goldsmith’s thugs down on him.

So he chameleoned his old smartfiber duffel coat from blue to black and pushed on through the crowds, listening out for the sweet sound of trainsong.

*

Ambersai Station: grand and high-fronted like a great theater, with the K-bahn logo hanging over its entrance in letters of blue fire. Booming loudspeaker voices reciting litanies of stations. Moths and Monk bugs swarming under the lamps outside; beggars and street kids too, and buskers, and vendors selling fruit and chai and noodles, and rickshaw captains squabbling as they touted for fares. Through the din and chatter came the sound of the train.

Zen went through the entrance barriers and ran out onto the platform. The Express was just pulling in. First the huge loco, a Helden Hammerhead, its long hull sheathed in shining red-gold scales. Then a line of lit windows and a pair of
Station Angels
flickering along the carriage sides like stray rainbows. Some tourists standing next to Zen pointed at them and snapped pictures that wouldn’t come out. Zen kept his place in the scrum of other K-bahn travelers, itching to look behind him, but knowing that he mustn’t because, if the drone was there, it would be watching for just that: a face turned back, a look of guilt.

The doors slid open. He shoved past disembarking passengers into a carriage. It smelled of something sweet, as if the train had come from some world where it was springtime. Zen found a window seat and sat there looking at his feet, at the ceramic floor, at the patterns on the worn seat coverings, anywhere but out of the window, which was where he most wanted to look. His fellow passengers were commuters and a few
Motorik
couriers with their android brains stuffed full of information for businesses farther down the line. In the seats opposite Zen lounged a couple of rich kids: railheads from K’mbussi or
Galaghast
, pretty as threedie stars, dozing with their arms around each other. Zen thought about taking their bags with him when he got off, but his luck was glitchy tonight and he decided not to risk it.

The train began to move, so smoothly that he barely noticed. Then the lights of Ambersai Station were falling behind, the throb of the engines was rising, the backbeat of the wheels quickening. Zen risked a glance at the window. At first it was hard to make out anything in the confusion of carriage reflections and the city lights sliding by outside. Then he saw the drone again. It was keeping pace with the train, shards of light sliding from its rotor blades as it burred along at window height, aiming a whole spider-cluster of eyes and cameras and who-knew-what at him.

The train rushed into a tunnel, and he could see nothing anymore except his own skinny reflection, wide cheekbones fluttering with the movement of the carriage, eyes big and empty as the eyes on moths’ wings.

The train accelerated. The noise rising, rising, until, with a soundless bang—a kind of
un-bang
—it tore through the
K-gate
, and everything got reassuringly weird. For a timeless moment Zen was outside of the universe. There was a sense of falling, although there was no longer any down to fall to. Something that was not quite light blazed in through the blank windows…

Then another un-bang, and the train was sliding out of another ordinary tunnel, slowing toward another everyday station. It was bright daytime on this world, and the gravity was lower. Zen relaxed into his seat, grinning. He was imagining that drone turning away in defeat from the empty tunnel on Ambersai, a thousand light years away.