Railhead (7 page)

The first time Yanvar Malik killed Raven had been on Vagh, in a decaying mansion near the cobalt mines. It had seemed like a job for a drone, but Railforce had sent humans to do it: Malik and five others, slamming through the K-gates on a train called
Pest Kontrol
. The mission was top secret. There was a rumor that their orders came directly from the Emperor, and another that they came from the Guardians themselves.

Malik could still see the mansion’s high ceilings, the elaborate plasterwork, the rotting muslin curtains through which the sun of Vagh had poured its sickly light. Could still see Raven rising from his chair, surprised when Malik burst in, and even more surprised when Malik shot him twice in the chest and then one more time in the head. The gravity low, the spent cartridge cases tumbling slowly through the air, the body falling in a leisurely way.

A few days after that they killed Raven again, in a resort on Galatava. He looked surprised that time too. But from then on the mission grew more difficult. Railforce said that Raven would not dare to use the Datasea, but news always reached him somehow; he knew they were coming. Sometimes he ran—Malik remembered shooting him in the back as he sprinted away across the houseboat roofs of the watertown on Ishima Prime, and calling in a missile strike on Kishinchand that reduced Raven’s speeding car to a stain on a mountain road. Sometimes Raven tried to bargain, or to bribe them. When that didn’t work, he started fighting back. He’d killed two of Malik’s comrades with a booby trap on Naga, and led them out onto a thin sea of methane ice on some dead-end, airless world where two more had gone crashing through into the burning cold depths. On Chama-9 he took out the
Pest Kontrol
with a terrifying virus that ate straight through its firewalls and destroyed its mind. (Malik made sure Raven died slowly and painfully that time. He had liked that train.)

It was just a mission, to begin with, but somewhere along the way it became personal. It wasn’t just because Raven killed his comrades, and tried to kill him; lots of people had tried to kill Malik, and he didn’t hate them for it. But to have to keep killing the same man over and over, to see that same face through his gunsight on world after world—it was like being trapped in a nightmare, or some weary, repetitive game.

And there was the feeling, too, that Raven had cheated. Malik was not a young man anymore. He could sense his body aging: wounds healed slower, and hard exercise made his joints ache. His hair was thinning fast. He was starting to realize that you only got one chance at life, and that his was half over. But not Raven. When Raven started to feel age slowing him down, he just discarded that body and cloned another. When Malik realized just how many chances he had had, in how many bodies, it started to be a pleasure to kill him.

“How come all your bodies look the same?” he’d asked Raven on Luna Grande before he shot him. “If it was me, I’d want all my clones to look different. I’d try out being different colors, different sexes.”

Raven said, “I wanted to keep hold of my identity. If I saw a different face each time I looked in the mirror, I might forget who I was.”

“You won’t be anybody, soon,” Malik pointed out, killing him again.

It certainly made his job easier, with only the one face to look for. There was only so much Raven could do with hair dye and e-makeup. Sooner or later, Malik always found him.

“Why didn’t you do something
great
?” he complained, the time he killed Raven at the skid-ship regatta on Frostfall. “You could have made a difference. You just spent all that extra time partying and playing.”

“I
tried
to make a difference,” Raven said, looking ruefully down at the holes Malik’s gun had just made in him. “That’s why the Guardians sent you after me.”

On Ibo, he said, “Whatever the Guardians told your masters about me, whatever they say I did, it’s a lie.”

But nobody had told Malik what Raven had done. They’d just said to kill him.

*

And at last they sent his team to Iskalan, put them on a spaceship, and blasted them way out into the blackness of that lonely system, where whole dark planets of hardware hung unmapped, data centers for the Guardians. There was a hollowed out asteroid there. They landed, and cut their way down through blast doors into a facility where hundreds of bodies lay in glass coffins frosted with flowers of ice.

Malik remembered the sound the ice had made, crackling under his glove as he wiped clear spaces on the coffin lids. Strange how these small details stayed with you. He remembered peering in through the glass, and seeing Raven sleeping there; the same face he had killed so many times. All the coffins were the same: hundreds of sleeping Ravens, filling the racks which covered the chamber’s walls. Or maybe not sleeping, maybe just not yet alive. This was a storeroom, where Raven kept new bodies until he needed them.

“I don’t see how he can ever download himself into these,” said Lyssa Delius, the only other surviving member of Malik’s original crew. “He doesn’t exist in the Datasea anymore. What’s to download? These are just meat.”

“Railforce want them taken out anyway,” said Malik. But the truth was,
he
wanted them taken out; he wanted every last one of those handsome, lifeless Ravens gone. They left enough demolition charges in that chamber to vaporize the whole asteroid.

And when they got back to the station at Iskalan, they were told the mission was over. Whatever Raven had done, the Guardians were satisfied that his punishment was now complete. He was finally dead.

So they had a sad little celebration in a station bar, remembering lost comrades and recalling battles that they could never talk about to anyone else. And then they went off to other units, other lives. As far as Malik knew, none of the others had been troubled by nightmares. None of the others had felt that sense of something unfinished, loose ends left hanging. The Guardians had said Raven was dead, so Raven must be dead.

Malik got a promotion. He got himself a husband, a house on Grand Central, a cat. But the feeling wouldn’t fade, and in his dreams he kept on killing Raven. He got a divorce, a posting to a long-range patrol train out on the branch lines. And slowly he started to notice things. A witness to a robbery at a biotech plant on Ashtoreth who described a tall, pale man, and another on the far side of the Network two years later who saw someone who sounded like the same man the night a trainload of construction equipment went missing from the rail yards on Nokomis. Both robberies impossible; the security systems that should have stopped them wiped by viruses that left no trace, the cameras recording no image of the thief.

Raven was still alive. He had convinced Railforce and even the Guardians themselves that he was dead, but one last version of him was still alive.

Malik hated leaving a job unfinished. He started collecting any report that might point to Raven, trying to find evidence that would convince someone. But there was never any evidence: just hints and whispers. Just a drunk on Changurai who claimed to have seen a Moto girl in a red raincoat come out of a blocked-off passageway, which led down to the old Dog Star Line. Just a street thief called Zen Starling who claimed to know nothing about Raven, and then vanished.

Zen Starling is the only lead I have
, he thought.
What does Raven want with a street thief?

The pictures his drone had caught of the kid in Ambersai and Cleave had been lost along with his train, along with the scraps of information poor Nikopol had found. All Malik had to go on were his memories.
Zen has a sister who works in the refineries
. If he could just find out what Raven wanted with the boy, the puzzle might start to make sense. And the only way to do that was the old way: talking to people, piecing things together.

He stared out of the carriage window, taking one last look at the tasteful towers of Grand Central. The train gathered speed, carrying him toward the K-gate that would take him back to Cleave.

The next day was clear and still. Hammurabi so crisp in the morning sky that Zen felt he could reach out and touch it from the balcony of his room. A day to go exploring down that old southern viaduct, he thought, and was surprised at how happy that made him. He ran downstairs to find Nova.

But Raven was waiting in the breakfast room with news. “Zen! It’s time to go! Get your luggage together. We’re leaving for Surt.”

So that was that. Zen’s time in Desdemor was ending just as suddenly as all his other peaceful times. Something fluttered in his stomach like dry leaves as he followed Raven and Nova across the empty station. He knew that feeling. Stage fright.

“What if the real Tallis Noon shows up?” he asked. He had thought of that a few times, but dismissed it because—well, what were the chances? Now the danger seemed quite real. “What if the real Tallis boards the Noon train while I’m there already, pretending to be him? What then?”

Raven waved his words away. “You think I hadn’t thought of that? You think I haven’t mapped out all the twists and turns this thing might take? Tallis was at Przedwiosnie last week, just a few stops up the line from Adeli. He probably did have plans to meet the Noon train. But he got delayed. A girl called Chandni Hansa got on the same train. Very pretty. She and Tallis got talking. They got off at Karavina. Do you know Karavina? It’s romantic. Houses on stilts. Moonlight on the vapor lakes. Chandni will make sure Tallis has a long stay there.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because I paid her to,” said Raven.

“Okay,” said Tallis uneasily. So he wasn’t Raven’s only hireling. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. And what did “a long stay” mean? Pretending to be Tallis Noon had made him feel oddly close to the real Tallis Noon, as if they were brothers or something. Was Tallis really enjoying a romantic stopover on Karavina? Or was he lying on the bottom of one of those vapor lakes with a knife in his back? And was that how Zen would end up, too, once he was no more use to Raven?

They had reached the platform. The
Thought Fox
opened its carriage doors for them. Raven turned and laid his thin hand on Zen’s arm. His eyes were kind, his smile precise. “It’s going to work, Zen. We’ll all get what we want. I’ll have the Pyxis, and you’ll be rich.”

“What about Nova?”

“Nova’s just what you’re taking with you instead of burglar’s tools,” said Raven.

But later, when the
Thought Fox
was stitching its way through space-time’s raggedy fabric, Zen saw that Nova already had what she wanted. Her eyes were on the windows, waiting for the glimpses of new worlds that opened up sometimes between the long underground sections as the
Thought Fox
roared through the K-gates. Nebulae setting over deserts of white sand or refuse floating in a derelict canal, she watched it all with a look that was almost hungry. In her own way, she was a railhead too.

*

The Dog Star Line ran deep beneath the other platforms at Surt station. The elevators that had led to it were all de-commissioned, and the stairways that once served it were sealed off and forgotten. Even the tunnel through which the old line ran was blocked by a ferro-ceramic barrier. The
Thought Fox
sensed the obstruction ahead as soon as it came through the K-gate. It did not slow down, just unfolded a big gun from either side of its hull, blasted the barrier into pieces, and shouldered aside the smoking fragments.

It was not a train that said much, or sang for joy as it sped along, the way that other trains did, but after it had smashed that barrier it laughed softly to itself. The deep, unsettling sound gurgled out of the speakers in the carriage ceilings, startling Zen, who sat perched on the edge of his seat, impatient for the journey to be over. The
Fox
’s weapons were still extended when it pulled in at a deserted underground platform a few minutes later.

“I will wait for you on Sundarban,” Raven told his passengers. “You will be alone from here on, Zen, but Nova has everything that you need.”

For a moment he looked almost fatherly. But when they were crossing the dead platform and Zen looked back to see him watching from the carriage door, he had no expression at all. The guns of the
Thought Fox
tracked to and fro, aiming at abandoned snack kiosks and the footbridges that spanned the rails, as if the old train were seeking new targets to destroy.

Threnody Noon was bored. She had been bored for days, but today was the first time she had felt able to admit it to herself. After all, she had been looking forward to this trip for months. She had been tired of living at home, in the quiet coral house beside the lakes on Malapet, where her mother painted flowers and uploaded data-prayers to the Guardians, which the Guardians never bothered answering. She had yearned for the bustle and excitement of life on her father’s train. But once she was aboard it—once she had grown used to the splendor of the carriages and the glamour of the other passengers—she had started to feel discontented almost at once. Her father kept introducing her to people as “my daughter, Threnody,” but anyone could see she wasn’t one of his official daughters. His short marriage to Threnody’s mother had been designed simply to seal a business deal between his family and hers. He would never have invited Threnody aboard his train at all, except that she was almost of marrying age herself now, and he wanted her to seal another business deal, by marrying Kobi Chen-Tulsi, the heir to a Sundarbani asteroid-mining company.

Kobi was also on the Noon train that season, and he bored her too. Sometimes, when she thought about having to marry him, having to live with him for years to come, Threnody wished she’d not been born a Noon at all. It was almost frightening—except that Kobi wasn’t frightening, just dull. Curled up on her bunk in the speeding train, she thought,
I’m still a girl
. She was seventeen, but she didn’t feel any different to how she’d felt when she was twelve.
I don’t want to be engaged
, she thought.
Not to Kobi Chen-Tulsi, not to anyone. I want to see the Network first.

She
was
seeing the Network, of course. The worlds of the Silver River Line rushed by outside her window; K-gates spilled their colorless light over her. Each time the train stopped, excursions were arranged: picnics and fishing trips, ancient fortresses and famous mountains. But somehow, that didn’t seem to count.

So when the train reached Adeli, she pretended to be tired, and stayed behind while all the others went roaring off to hunt and party on the island peaks. She told herself she would have fun on her own. But she was still bored, and when the train announced that it had a message from a young wandering Noon, asking to come aboard, it felt like the first interesting thing that had happened in a thousand light years. Tallis Noon, from Golden Junction. She knew nothing about that branch of the family. She walked through the pillared carriages and met the Motorik manservant whom the train had dispatched to greet the new arrival.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll meet him myself.”

*

Adeli was a world of mists. Life took place on mountaintops, and all around them stretched seas of flickering fog: natural cloud chambers through which passing particles drew their sudden, shining trails. Stilt-walking its way across the fog to the summit-city of Adeli Station came a viaduct, and along the viaduct the Noon train was snaking. Lighted observation domes glowed under the evening sky, and from a hundred extravagant little turrets on the carriage roofs flew the imperial standard and long banners bearing the smiling sun logo of the House of Noon.

Zen had been studying pictures and vids of that train. He had memorized the floor plans of the main carriages, the doors, and access hatches. None of that had prepared him for how beautiful it looked. He stood among trainspotters and excited children on the platform and simply stared as the train pulled in. Those huge twin locos, the
Wildfire
and the
Time of Gifts
, had been in the Noon family for centuries. Their curved and complicated cowlings had been in and out of fashion so many times that they had finally escaped it altogether and were just themselves: grand, ancient, honey-colored things with the worn beauty of old buildings. Behind them were the five huge double-decker carriages that formed the quarters of the Emperor and his inner circle. And behind those, curving away out of the station and across the viaduct, were lesser carriages, all just as beautiful.

“Zen?”
said Nova, in his head. She stood just behind him, ignored by the other sightseers.
“I have sent a message to the Noon train to let them know that you are here, and that you wish to board.”

He looked back at her, but she was playing the part of his meek Motorik servant, and would not meet his eye.

He was playing a part too, of course. The rehearsal was over; the performance was about to begin. He was wearing a short jacket of smart vinyl, currently tuned to default black. A black knitted shirt, cut low enough to bare his collarbones. Narrow trousers. Square-toed boots. Catching his reflection in the Noon train’s windows, he felt pretty confident that he could pass as Tallis. He definitely didn’t look like Zen Starling anymore.

He nodded to show Nova that he had understood, and started to move along the platform. Low-status guests like him would board farther back. Nova followed, carrying his bags. Carved friezes ran along the sides of the train, and children were scrambling up onto them from the platform, stroking the heads of sculpted animals. From the benign way the train’s maintenance spiders watched them, Zen could tell that the
Wildfire
and the
Time of Gifts
didn’t mind, and even welcomed these small visitors. He wondered what would happen to any child who tried using the
Thought Fox
as a plaything …

“Tallis?” said someone nearby.

All the way from Desdemor, Zen had been reminding himself,
My name is Tallis Noon, my name is Tallis Noon
, but the sight of the Noon train had driven it right out of his head. Nova saved him, pinging an alert at him through his headset and saying aloud in a soft, respectful voice, “Tallis?”

He looked round, finally remembering who he was meant to be, and found a young woman at his side, smiling like he was the best thing she’d seen for weeks. A girl, really, he told himself, when he’d stopped being dazzled by that smile. No older than he was, but a lot better turned out. Her hair was short and fashionably turquoise. Her skintight shimmersuit flowed with patterns of peacock’s feathers, and her boots seemed to be coated with gold leaf.

She smiled at Zen some more and said, “I’m Threnody.” She put her hands together and bowed her head. “We’re cousins of some sort, about a zillion times removed…”

He had read a bio of her back in Desdemor. He wondered why she would bother coming down from her fabulous train to meet a random railhead.

“I’m pleased to meet you, cousin Threnody,” he said.

She took his arm and kept smiling as she led him through the cordon of guards and along the platform, past the big, shining wheels of the imperial train. Nova followed, carrying Zen’s bags. “Your message reached us as soon as your train came through the K-gate,” Threnody said. “I’m sorry everyone else is busy. There was a picnic this evening, and a hunt… Dusk is the prettiest time on Adeli, don’t you think?”

Beyond the station, the fog-sea flickered with pale fire. He could see lights on the peaks that rose from it, and heard a tiny crackling, which might have been distant gunshots. Despite all his preparation he was feeling a little dazed; the beauty of the night, the train, the girl—this job was nothing like raiding stalls in Ambersai.

“It’s a pity you didn’t send word ahead with an earlier train,” Threnody was saying. “The family would have arranged a proper welcoming committee.”

“I didn’t want to make any fuss,” he said. “I didn’t know I was coming here anyway. Not for sure, I mean. I’ve been traveling, looking around…”

“Careful with the accent,”
said Nova, in his head.
“You’re starting to sound like a comedian playing posh in the threedies…”

Threnody Noon said, “You’ve really changed!” Which made Zen’s heart stop beating for a moment, because Raven had promised him that nobody on the Noon train knew Tallis Noon. Then she went on, “The last time we met we were both just babies. At the fire festivals on Khoorsandi? I’ve seen pictures. You were as fat as a dumpling.”

Zen laughed as lightly as he could, and said that he didn’t remember, which of course he didn’t.

“So you’re from Golden Junction?” asked Threnody, and, without leaving time for him to answer, “I’ve never visited the eastern branch lines, it must be so interesting. Do you have Station Angels out there? We don’t get them in the central Network; I’d love to see one—is it true they look like actual angels?”

She was steering him toward a carriage a little way down the train, and one of those white boarding stairs where uniformed Motorik waited. They were stupid-looking security goons, but behind those masklike faces their minds would be linked to whole carriages full of hardware. If Zen’s face or the way that he walked didn’t match whatever records of Tallis Noon that hardware held, his visit would end here. The gun drones circling the station could probably laser him off the platform like a splodge of chewing gum.

But Threnody Noon didn’t even give the Motos a chance to scan him. “Family guest,” she called, adding some command in a corporate code, and the nearest of the goons saluted and stepped aside so that she could lead Zen aboard the train.

“Don’t they want to check me?” he asked, surprised.

“Anyone can see you’re a Noon, Tallis,” she said, laughing. “We can always bend the rules for family.”

Zen shrugged, and laughed with her. So far, this imposter business mainly seemed to consist of laughing to order, which he felt he could cope with. He had a nasty moment a few seconds later, when he looked back from the top of the stairs and saw the security goons stop Nova, but Threnody told him that they were just scanning his bags and checking his Motorik’s mind for viruses.

They didn’t find any. Nova had made sure her upgrades and personality tweaks were well hidden. As for the bags, there was nothing in most of them but crumpled clothes, and a few items that Raven had added to make it seem like they’d come from Golden Junction. The only one the goons bothered opening was the long leather case that held the ray gun.

“I was hoping to find time for some shooting,” said Zen.

“That’s a pretty old-fashioned gun, isn’t it?” asked Threnody.

“It was my grandfather’s. It’s a ray gun.”

“We’ll be stopping at Jangala soon. I don’t know if there are any rays there, but there’ll be all sorts of other things to shoot in the hunting reserve…”

The goons closed the gun case. Nova picked it up along with the rest of the bags, and came up the stairs to join Zen and Threnody on the open balcony at the rear of the carriage.

“What’s wrong with your Motorik’s face?” Threnody asked.

“They’re meant to be freckles,” Zen said. “She thinks they make her look more human.”

“She sounds glitchy. Would you like a new one?”

“Oh, I’m used to Nova,” he said.

She gave him a smile that meant “suit yourself,” and turned to go into the carriage. The door had no handle, only a gilded, smiling sun mounted in its center. Threnody tapped the sun lightly between its eyebrows and the door opened so suddenly and so silently that it was as if it had simply vanished. Zen smelled the perfumed air of the Noon train. He looked past Threnody into the pillared carriage.

“It’s beautiful!”
said Nova, in his head.

“It’s beautiful,” he agreed, aloud. At first he was not sure why he felt sad and then he knew. Just for a moment, he had believed that he was really Tallis Noon, and that this beautiful girl was really welcoming him aboard this beautiful train. That would have suited him pretty well. It was the life he’d have had if his mother had never stolen him from the Noons.

But there was no point feeling sorry for himself. No one was going to hand him riches on a silver plate. He was going to have to take them for himself. He was good at that. He was going to rob these people, and get away clean.

He stepped into the train.