Railhead (16 page)

The
Damask Rose
did not go all the way into Sundarban Station. Zen told her to stop when she was still deep in the tunnels outside the station city.

“Do you want me to come?” asked Flex.

Zen shook his head. “You wait here. If you don’t mind the bugs.”

“I don’t mind them,” said Flex.

He spoke in a whisper, not sure how good Hive Monks’ hearing was. They clustered at the far end of the carriage, rustling. Uncle Bugs and his two friends, who seemed to have no names. If Nova had been there, Zen thought, she would have made up names for them: Buzz and Cricket, something like that. But if Nova had been there, he would never have been caught up in this mad venture.

“Well, keep an eye on them,” he warned. He didn’t trust those bugs. They had come on this trip for their own reasons, and they didn’t care about him. What if they found some way to make the old train listen to them, and persuaded it to move off before he got back?

“I’ll watch them,” said Flex. “And I’ll get busy with the train’s paintwork.”

One of the train’s maintenance spiders led Zen for miles through the tunnels, until he came to an access stairway leading to the surface. He took a deep breath, and began to climb.

*

Sundarban turned out to be the fanciest city he’d ever seen. It was the Noons’ hometown, and they had built it to impress. Proud towers rose into the afternoon haze like fairy-tale rocket ships waiting to leap into orbit. Between them shone the station canopies—a hundred platforms, serving the K-gates, which lay hidden among the surrounding mountains. Wherever he looked, bright trains were moving, crossing bridges above the busy streets, passing through archways in the buildings. Sundarban’s malls seemed open for business as usual, but Motorik work crews were busy removing the giant portraits of Mahalaxmi XXIII from their facades and replacing them with images of Priya I, who looked nervous and uncertain of herself, even in photographs. The public screens were profiling a woman called Rail Marshal Delius, whom they said had arrived in Sundarban to show her support for the young Empress, although the gossip sites that Zen picked up on his headset claimed she was really there to decide whether Priya Noon was worth supporting, or whether Railforce should side with her uncle. In times like these, when there were two or three rivals for the job of Emperor, the one who came out on top would be the one who had the backing of Railforce.

Bluebodies in combat armor patrolled the moving stairways and stood guard outside the entrances to the station platforms. Zen rehearsed a story to tell if anyone asked him who he was, but no one did.

His first plan had been to pose as a salvage hunter and hire a shuttle to take him into orbit. That was before he found out how much hiring a shuttle cost. No wonder
space travel
had never caught on. He wasn’t sure he could afford it. Even if he could, transferring that sort of money through the Sundarban data raft was going to draw him to the attention of all kinds of people.

So he found a quiet booth in a café, put on his headset, and quickly scanned the social nets. Kobi Chen-Tulsi was not hard to find. His smug selfies grinned from a dozen different sites. Zen chose the site that Kobi seemed to use least, and messaged him. “It’s Tallis here. From Jangala. How are the bruises healing?”

*

Threnody was walking beside the stream that wound through the Chen-Tulsis’ gardens when Kobi came to find her. When she first heard his voice calling, “Thren! Thren!” she pretended not to hear, just so she could have a few seconds more by herself, but when he came limping over to where she stood, she put on a smile and turned to meet him. She was surprised to see how worried he looked.

“Something’s happened,” he said. “You remember that cousin of yours, on the train? Tallis?”

She thought,
So they have found him, and he’s dead
. Kobi’s family had been coordinating the salvage efforts, sending up shuttles to gather the larger bits of wreckage. She thought,
They have found Tallis’s body, and Kobi’s come to tell me…

But Kobi said, “He messaged me!”

“He’s alive?” She should have felt happy, but she didn’t. The news made her wary, and she was not sure why. Where had Tallis been, since the crash? And why was he messaging Kobi? Why not her?

“He’s threatening me!” said Kobi.

“
What?
”

“He says I have to do something for him, or he’ll upload his headset recording of the hunt on Jangala to every newsfeed and gossip site on Sundarban. He says he wonders how my parents will react when they see his footage of the… the fight.”

“It wasn’t a fight, Kobi,” said Threnody. She glanced behind her to check that none of the servants or security drones were in earshot. “You knocked him down from behind. You tried to kill him. At least, that’s how it will look…”

“I know!” said Kobi miserably.

Threnody felt sorry for him, and surprised at Tallis. He must be looking for revenge after what Kobi had done. She thought it seemed petty of him, considering everything that had happened since.

“So what does he want you to do?” she asked.

“He says he needs to get into orbit,” said Kobi. “I know—it’s bizarre. But he says he knows my family’s shuttles are making regular flights, and he wants to go up on one.”

“Have you told your family?”

“No! Only you! I shouldn’t even be telling you. Tallis was very clear about that. He said, ‘Tell no one. I’m smarter than you. Do you think I haven’t mapped out all the twists and turns this thing could take? There’s no way out for you that’s any easier than just doing what I ask.’ ”

“That doesn’t sound like the sort of thing Tallis would say,” said Threnody. But what was the sort of thing Tallis would say? If she was honest, she had barely known him, and anyway, her memories of him were all smudged and muddled by the more vivid, physical memories of the train crash. She didn’t know him, and she didn’t know anything about his branch of the family, the Golden Junction Noons. For all she knew, they might be angling for the leadership themselves, or in league with Uncle Tibor. For all she knew—

A terrible thought came to her. What if Tallis had been working for Uncle Tibor from the start? What if he had come aboard the Noon train as a spy? What if the crash had been something to do with him? She remembered how she had welcomed him aboard. How she had waved him through security. This was going to look bad, she thought. If it turned out Tallis had been up to something, then she would be accused of helping him. She hadn’t meant to, of course; she had only done what any of the Noons would do; she had had no reason to suspect him, none at all.

But Priya wouldn’t see it that way. Priya would think that she was part of cousin Tallis’s conspiracy. Priya would have her tried as a traitor to the family, sent to the freezers… Even the thought made Threnody feel cold.

“You were right not to tell anyone,” she told Kobi. “Can you message him back?”

“He said he’d contact me.”

“And is there a shuttle you could take him up on?”

“I suppose. We have a scheduled flight leaving from Launch Pan 50 at twenty-hundred hours.”

“Tell him you’ll meet him there,” said Threnody. “We need to find out what this is really about.”

“Yes,” said Kobi. “Yes, Thren.”

He looked so meek, so defeated, that she felt quite fond of him.

*

Zen had spent that afternoon looking for a weapons shop that accepted cash and asked no questions. It had taken awhile, but he had found one in the end, and they had printed him a little snub-nosed pistol and sold him a cassette of ammunition. He could feel the weight of the gun in his pocket as an air-taxi took him out to Launch Pan 50.

The launch pans were in sandy hills south of the city. Evening by then: the sun going down red behind veils of dust. The ship that waited on Pan 50 was called the
Spacehopper
. It looked pretty from a distance, but when Zen stepped out of the taxi and walked closer, those creamy circles on its yellow wings turned out to be only spotlight beams, and the dark leading edges were just where the ceramic had been scorched and pitted by countless descents through the atmosphere.

Kobi was waiting for him at the foot of the boarding ladder, as he had promised. But he wasn’t alone. He had brought Threnody with him.

Zen had not imagined that Threnody would come anywhere near Kobi, given how she felt about him, and what Lady Sufra had said about their engagement being broken. When he saw her, he almost panicked, almost turned and left, but his taxi had already taken off.

“She’s the only person I told,” Kobi said, hurrying across the pan to meet him. “I had to. We were supposed to be going out this evening; I had to explain…”

He’s telling the truth
, Zen thought.
He hates me, but he dares not cross me.
It was a strange feeling, knowing that Kobi was afraid of him. He liked it.

Threnody leaned against the boarding ladder, watching him. She was not afraid. He could see her trying to work him out. He checked the sky for her family’s drones, but it seemed clear.

“Cousin Tallis,” she said. “Where have you been, since the crash?”

He shrugged. “Here and there.”

“I was worried about you. I checked. There was no record of you coming down from Spindlebridge.”

“Well, in all the confusion after—”

“Why didn’t you let me know you were safe?”

“I thought—”

“Why have you come back?” she asked, and he knew she suspected something.

“I’m glad you’re all right,” he said.

“Oh, I’m all right,” she replied. “My father is dead, and half my uncles and aunts and cousins. Fat Uncle Tibor is challenging my sister for the throne. The newsfeeds are saying that Elon Prell is going to declare himself Emperor as well, which will mean we’ll be at war with the Prell family. And now my cousin Tallis is blackmailing my fiancé. But I’m
all right,
Tallis. Do you really have footage from Jangala?”

Zen nodded. “I recorded the whole thing,” he promised. He sent a copy to her headset. Three wobbly seconds of Kobi, gun in his hands and eyes full of spite.

“Is that all?”

“That’s a sample,” Zen lied. “I recorded the whole thing.”

Threnody started to say something, but Kobi interrupted her. “The ship is ready. We’re scheduled to launch at twenty-hundred hours. My family thinks it’s a routine salvage run.”

Zen felt edgy. He looked up the ladder at the ship’s open hatch.

“Is there a crew?”

“I’m the crew,” Kobi said. “But don’t worry, the ship flies herself, really. We send her up on her own most trips.”

The old Kobi wouldn’t have admitted that, thought Zen. He would have bragged about what a hot pilot he was. Maybe he really had changed. He said, “Could I fly her?”

“No!” said Kobi. “I mean, not without clearance from my family. You’ll need me aboard, or the ship will ask questions…”

Zen nodded, then looked at Threnody, wishing again that she hadn’t come. He thought he could control Kobi, but not both of them. Yet he couldn’t leave her on the ground, in case she raised the alarm. She was cleverer than Kobi, and she might not care so much about the recording getting out. She could have half the Noon CoMa waiting for him when he landed.

“You’re coming too,” he said.

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss it,” said Threnody.

He held out his hand. “Give me your headset.”

“Why?” she asked, but he just stood there with his hand out, and a look on his face that made her wish she had not deactivated the security drones that were supposed to go with her whenever she left the Chen-Tulsi estate. But the drones would have reported all this to her family, and she did not want that. So she unclipped the headset from behind her ear and passed it to Tallis, watching as he stamped it into the spaceport dust.

“You’re worried I’m going to tell someone about you?” she said, as bravely as she could. “What have you
done
, exactly, Tallis? What do you want Kobi’s ship for?”

“I left something behind,” he said. “Up there.”

She looked up. Above the
Spacehopper
’s battered nose-cone, Spindlebridge was pinned to the twilit sky like a cheap brooch.

“I’ve got friends,” he warned.

“I can’t think what they see in you,” she said.

Zen ignored her. “I’ve got friends here on Sundarban. If I don’t come back, they’ll upload the recording. Just get me up there and back down with the thing I need and I’ll never trouble you or Kobi again.”

He was more annoying than dangerous, Threnody decided. Even so, she was glad of the spare headset hidden in the cuff of her suit. She would wait to see what exactly he was up to, then contact her family. If she captured him herself, no one could accuse her of being his partner in crime.

Going up was worse than coming down. They lay on their backs in the vinyl chairs in the shuttle’s command center while the engines tried to deafen them and gravity piled lead weights on their chests and their faces. But at last it was over, and they were floating free in the grubby little room, shock-haired and weightless, with the lantern of Sundarban shining in through the windows.

“Spaceships are so unromantic,” complained Threnody. “And there’s never a dining car. Why can’t your family—”

“What are we looking for?” asked Kobi.

He would not have cut across her like that before, thought Zen. And she would not have let him. Something had shifted between them. Before, it had been an honor for Kobi to be marrying into the House of Noon; now the Noons were in such trouble that Kobi was doing Threnody a favor by not breaking the engagement.

So many changes, big and small, all spreading out from that first moment when Zen agreed to take the Pyxis.

“It’s a drone,” he said. “A Noon security Beetle, badly damaged. It was jettisoned from Spindlebridge soon after the incident.”

“It should answer to one of the Noon activation codes, then,” said Kobi. “We’ve fished a lot of Noon tech out of the black that way.” He blinked some instructions to the ship, and it started calculating the drone’s likely coordinates and broadcasting codes into space.

“Why do you want this drone?” asked Threnody, after a few hours. “Has it stored a recording of you?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Maybe it’s carrying footage of you that you don’t want my branch of the family to know about. You were up to something on our train, weren’t you? All those questions, and the way you made yourself so friendly with Auntie Sufra—we all thought that was quick work…”

“I didn’t hurt your train,” he said.

“I don’t believe you. Maybe if our security people questioned you, they’d find you’ve been working for Uncle Tibor all along.”

“Leave it, Threnody,” said Kobi. “He has that recording, remember?”

“He
says
he has,” said Threnody. “Have you actually seen it? All of it? Why won’t he show us the whole thing?”

“Of course I have it,” said Zen.

“Quiet!” said Kobi. He wasn’t listening to them anymore. He was listening to a frail, crackly note that was seeping from the ship’s speakers. “It’s a drone’s flight recorder! Responding to the activation burst. The drone is very badly damaged… Dead, basically… There’s another piece of wreckage tangled up with it…”

Zen put on his headset while the shuttle aimed herself at the source of the signal. “Nova?” he whispered while Kobi and Threnody were busy talking.

There was no reply. The signal from the drone had stopped, but the ship had visual contact now. He pressed his face against the thick port and stared out at all the black. Ahead, something caught the light, tumbling. A glint of drone armor, a limp figure glimpsed for a moment against one of Sundarban’s moons. Drowned and drifting, Zen thought. He wondered what he would do if he had come all this way and Myka was wrong, and Nova could not be saved.

*

For a long time up there, she had not been sure of anything. She was not even sure what she was. Something broken, trying to repair. Warnings and damage reports kept interrupting her mixed-up dreams. Start-up menus trickled down the screens of her mind like rain down a window, reminding her of her birth, on Raven’s table back in Desdemor.

At last she regained visual functions, and enough of her memory to know that she was Nova, that she was adrift in the orbit of Sundarban, and that she was still attached to the drone.

Carefully, tumbling there in the hard light of the Sundarbani sun, she had managed to work the hooked grapnel back through her body, taking care not to let go of the microfilament cable that attached it to the drone. She wrapped the end of the cable around her waist and pulled herself along it, till she was close enough to the drone to tell that it was completely dead. Then she tied herself to it, like a shipwrecked sailor lashing himself to a drifting piece of wreckage, and waited.

She waited for a long time. She was not sure how long, because at first her connection to the Datasea would not work, and when it repaired, she was afraid to use it. She and Zen had committed a terrible crime. Who knew what watchbots and spy programs would be waiting in the Datasea to trap her?

So she hung there, part of the cloud of debris that had been vented from the stricken Spindlebridge. Sometimes another fragment would come close to her, moving so fast that she would remember she was moving too. Sometimes she had to use the drone’s thrusters to push herself out of the path of some shard that would have sliced her in half. Sometimes she was aware of ships passing. They were gathering the larger pieces of wreckage, but none came within a thousand miles of her. Maybe there was no salvage value in a broken Motorik.

The Spindlebridge itself was visible at first, surrounded by shuttles and repair vehicles, but as time passed, she parted company from it, and it sank out of sight behind the curve of the planet.

Sometimes she amused herself by watching the way the sun shone through the hole the drone had made in her. A shaft of sunlight poked out of her chest, lighting the flakes of frost and debris that hung nearby. But slowly the shaft grew narrower, and one day it vanished altogether. Her body had harvested enough energy from the light to heal itself.

And then the drone woke up, broadcasting its location on an emergency frequency, and over the limb of Sundarban a bright new star appeared and swelled till it became an ugly, sulfur-yellow ship…

*

Zen felt acceleration tugging him gently back and forth as the ship maneuvered. Heard the hum and clang as her cargo bay doors opened and the manipulator arms reached out, but still saw nothing, only the harsh sun of space dazzling in at him. Then more clangs, more hums.

“Target acquired,” said the ship.

“Is that it?” asked Zen. “Is she aboard?”

“She?” Kobi looked round at him. Then he nodded and grinned and said, “That’s it. We’ve got it.”

Zen started running, and remembered that it wasn’t much use in zero-g. He grabbed at the ceramic bulkheads and pulled himself out of the command center and along vinyl-padded floatways to the lock that led into the cargo hold. It was still repressurizing, the lights on the door flashing red. He slammed his palm against them as if that might hurry things along. Squinted through the tiny window into the hold, where Nova’s body drifted in midair, snared in ravelings of cable as fine and shiny as angel hair.

The door opened. He flew across the hold to her. Her eyes stared blindly at him through a crust of frost. Her lips were blue. Splattery stains surrounded the hole in her tunic.

“A broken Beetle and a dead girl?” said Kobi, watching from the doorway with Threnody. “That’s what he dragged us up here for?”

“It’s not a girl,” said Threnody. “That’s his wire dolly. The weird one.”

“He came all this way for a broken wire dolly? Maybe you’re right; maybe there’s something in its brain, something he needs…”

Threnody didn’t answer. She was pulling something out of her cuff, turning her face so that, if Zen looked round, he would not see her press it to her temple.

But Zen did not look round. Even if he had, he could not have seen much through the film of weightless tears that filled his eyes. Nova was dead. She had been dead all this time, and his whole journey here had been a waste.

And then, as he tried to rub the tears away (they clung to his face, his fingers) he noticed how, beneath the hole that the grapnel had torn in the chest of her tunic, Nova’s synthetic flesh was healing in a thick, ugly plaque of scar tissue. The grapnel was no longer sticking through her. She had pulled it free, and tied its line neatly around her waist.

“Nova?” he said again.

Nova blinked.

“You’re all right?” he asked her.

Her face twitched, trying to smile. The frost was melting, shining on her cheeks. Space dust had gouged small scars and pockmarks from her face, but that made her look more human, somehow, not less. Zen wanted to hug her, but it was impossible with Threnody and Kobi there.

“Zen!” Nova was smiling at him. “You came back for me?”

“Yes!”

“Well, that was stupid,” she said. “And very nice of you.”

Zen was still crying, but laughing, too. He had found a way, like Myka said he would. He had come here and found Nova, and she was alive. But, as he went to help her untangle herself from the drone, something made him look back. Threnody was watching from the doorway with a mocking, triumphant look, as if, in some way that he did not yet understand, she had outwitted him.

*

By the time Nova was disentangled, the shuttle was reentering the atmosphere, jolting like a speedboat bouncing over choppy water. Flecks of plasma blew like fireflies past the command center windows as Zen strapped himself into his chair.

Nova was talking to him privately through his headset. Talking and talking, as if to make up for all the time she’d missed. “… when the drone woke up and started signaling, I thought some salvage ship was coming for me, I thought I’d be scrapped, or wiped and restarted, and all my memories lost. That’s why I played dead, and when I heard your voice and realized you’d come back for me…”

Zen smiled at her. He had missed that voice so much. But he couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. He was still thinking about the way Threnody had looked at him. What had it meant, that look?

The buffeting was soon over. They flew into clear, quiet air. Below them, moonlight silvered Sundarban’s oceans.

“Change course,” said Zen suddenly.

Kobi looked round. “We’re on the right course. Thirty minutes will bring us down at the docking pans.”

“No,” said Zen. “They’ll be waiting for us. Threnody has already sold us out. She probably sent a message to her family while we were searching for the drone.”

“I’ve done no such thing!” said Threnody, all posh and outraged, as if he had accused her of cheating at train-quoits. “You broke my headset, remember?”

“You’ve got another,” Zen said. “Or you used the ship’s systems to call Noon security.”

“Threnody wouldn’t do that,” said Kobi loyally. “She knows I’d be finished if you put that recording out.”

“There isn’t any recording,” said Threnody.

Zen got the pistol out. He didn’t exactly point it at Kobi, but he held it as if he was thinking about pointing it. He said. “Put us down on the north side of Sundarban City.”

Kobi looked at Threnody. “Is it true? You talked to your family?”

“Someone had to,” said Threnody. “Kobi, we’ve captured the person who’s responsible for the Spindlebridge catastrophe, and the Motorik that helped him. I don’t believe he’s even who he says he is! I heard the Moto when he started it up—it called him ‘Zen.’ He’s an imposter. You think anyone will care about a recording of you once that story hits the feeds? They’ll be glad you hit him!”

“Change course!” shouted Zen.

Threnody looked at the gun in Zen’s hand. “What will you do if we don’t, Tallis, or ‘Zen,’ or whatever you’re called? Kill us?”

Zen knew he should. It was what Raven would do, he thought. Kill them both, throw the bodies out over the ocean. The people on the ground wouldn’t know him or Nova. Without Threnody and Kobi to identify him, perhaps he could talk his way out somehow, tell them there had been an accident up in space…

But Nova would know. She was watching, turning her face from him to Threnody as they spoke.

He put his gun away. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, very quietly.

He wasn’t Raven, nor anything like Raven. But he wished he was.

“You’re not a Noon at all, are you?” asked Threnody.

“My name is Zen Starling,” he said. He could have tried to bluff it out, but he felt he owed her something, and the truth was all that he could spare.

“I always thought there was something strange about him,” Threnody told Kobi. “I never understood why poor Auntie Sufra took such a liking to him.”

The
Spacehopper
crossed a coastline. She swooped over forests, which looked like moonlit broccoli from that height, over towns and tea plantations and a looping river. Her airspeed was slowing. Through the viewports Zen saw roads and railway lines converging on the station city. Kobi kept talking to the ship. Threnody glared. On the plains ahead, the gantries of the commercial spaceport appeared. Zen thought he could already see the rotors of gun-drones catching the moonlight as they patrolled the sky above Kobi’s pan.

And then, without warning, Kobi said, “Change course, ship. Set down outside the city.”

The shuttle banked, veering away from the spaceport. “Kobi, what are you doing?” screamed Threnody. The horizon whirled. Air screamed over the stubby wings, 
the engines howled. Something hit the hull with a startling bang. There was a tumbling weightless darkness, lit by sprays of sparks. Then a crash, a lurch, a long, slithering rush, parts of the ceiling coming down, dirt and vegetation breaking over the viewports.

And silence.

“Were they shooting at us?” asked Threnody. “Was that shooting? Did they shoot us down?” Her voice sounded blurred and trembly. “Kobi, why did you change course?”

Kobi looked at Zen across the shattered command center. It was a look of pride. It said,
See? We’re even now. We had our arguments, but you saved my life once, and now I am saving yours.
He seemed to think they were noble warriors in a threedie, and this was the way noble warriors behaved. He would want to shake hands in a moment. But Threnody moaned—some piece of the roof had hit her head as they landed—and he turned away, bending over her.

“Are you coming with us?” Zen asked him. “If you stay here, you’ll be in trouble with the Noons. We have a train. We can get you away.”

Kobi shook his head without looking up. “No thanks, Tallis, or whatever you said your name is. I’m staying here.” He found a first-aid kit from somewhere and started dabbing nervously at Threnody’s wound. Then he did look up, just for a moment. “I know you think I’m just a spoiled rich boy. I know you think this engagement between me and Thren is just a business alliance. That’s what Thren thinks too. But I do care about her. I’m not going to leave her.”