Railhead Read online

  In the deepening dusk, white flowers were opening beside the rails. Their scent mingled with the hot, mineral smell of the train.

  “I heard Auntie Sufra talking to my father about you,” said Threnody, speaking very softly, looking very shy. “She was saying that we could use a bright young man like you on the imperial council. She said that perhaps it was time we strengthened our links to the Golden Junction branch of the family.”

  Zen wondered how Tallis Noon would respond to such an offer. He wished this were his real life. For a moment, he thought it could be. He’d forget about Raven and stealing the Pyxis. He’d stay with the Noons. He’d stay with Threnody. He’d make a name for himself on the council with his knowledge of life on the streets…

  But sooner or later, Raven would come looking for him.

  The light was almost gone. A few last Motorik folded a few last, luminous awnings. The big voice of the Time of Gifts (or perhaps it was the Wildfire) said, “Will all passengers return to the train, please? We are departing shortly for Spindlebridge and Sundarban.”

  “What?” said Zen. He thought he’d heard it wrong. “But we’re staying here for two more days…”

  Threnody shook her head. “There’s been a change of plan. Father decided that, since the alliance with the Chen-Tulsis is still important to us, it would be disrespectful to stay here in light of what happened. That’s Kobi for you: even unconscious in a hospital bed he can still mess things up for everybody. We’re taking him home aboard the Noon train. He’ll be on Sundarban in three hours.”

  Zen stared at her. The fuzzy feeling of well-being that the drugs had given him was gone.

  Threnody laughed. “Don’t worry; we can come back to Jangala another time.”

  Zen nodded, found a smile of his own. “I hope so.”

  She went back aboard the train, to a party in one of the garden carriages. Zen hurried to his own compartment and fitted his headset on over his bruises. He needed to talk to Nova.

  22

  He lay in the dark and whispered, and the headset caught his words and sent them whirling down the speeding train to Nova.

  “Can you get me into the collection?”

  “Not yet.”

  “When?”

  “I’m working on it. I think… soon.”

  “Because we’ll be on Sundarban in a couple more hours.”

  They were on Nagaina by then. Zen had felt the train slow as it pulled through the station, showing off to the trainspotters and the crowds of children waving flags. Now it was gathering speed again, heading for the next K-gate, which would take it onto the Spindlebridge.

  “It will take 1.47 hours to cross the Spindlebridge,” said Nova. “Once we pass the second K-gate there, we’ll be about thirty minutes from Sundarban Station City. Is thirty minutes long enough to steal the Pyxis?”

  “I could steal it in thirty seconds if you can just knock out the security in that carriage,” said Zen.

  One of the locos spoke over the compartment speakers. “We are approaching the Spindlebridge. Spindlebridge is a zero gravity environment. Please ensure all loose objects are secured.”

  Zen wished he could feel excited. He had always wanted to see the Spindlebridge. All railheads did. It was one of those places that everyone wanted to visit. Downstairs, people would be crowding to the windows. Motos would be going up and down the train, putting children’s toys away safely, gathering plates and glasses. He wondered if he should go and join them.

  The door of his compartment chimed. He swung himself off the bed and picked up the ray gun. At the same moment, the train punched through the K-gate, and gravity stopped working.

  “Who’s there?” he shouted, bumbling across the ceiling with the gun in his hands.

  No reply; just another soft chime.

  He fitted the gun into a clip on the wall beside the door that was probably meant for coats. When he unlocked the door and opened it, he found Lady Sufra waiting in the corridor outside. She must have been wearing magnetic shoes, because she was standing on the floor, not floating like him. Her weightless hair was a halo of white snakes.

  “Tallis?” she said. “We have to talk… There may be a problem…”

  “Is Kobi all right?”

  “Oh, it’s not about him. We’re on the Spindlebridge.”

  “I know,” said Zen.

  Of all the strange stations of the Network, there was none stranger than the Spindlebridge. Above the planet Sundarban, two naked K-gates hung in orbit. Why the Guardians had chosen to put them in such an inconvenient spot, nobody knew, and the Guardians were not letting on. One led to a gate on Sundarban, several hundred miles below. The other led to Jangala, and all the stations of the Silver River Line. The Noons, seeking to link Sundarban to their other possessions, had built a bridge between the two: a three-hundred-mile tube of ceramic and diamondglass hanging in space with a K-gate at either end. Bulbous clusters of buildings clung to it: factories where the Noons made things that could only be made in zero-g.

  The Noon train was rushing through this tube. Looking past Lady Sufra, Zen could see struts and stanchions flashing past outside, and Sundarban peering in at him through diamondglass panels in the hull, swirls of cloud like cappuccino foam above some coffee-colored mountains.

  Lady Sufra didn’t look as if she’d come to tell him that he was missing the view.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  “I like you, Tallis,” she said. “I liked you from the start, long before you saved Kobi. I thought when we first met that you were the sort of young person we needed on the council. So I asked the Wildfire and the Time of Gifts to find me some details about you from the Datasea, just to be certain you were suitable, and—well, there is something rather strange.”

  Zen had an awful, sick, swirling feeling that had nothing to do with the lack of gravity. As if he’d fallen off a cliff, or been sat on by heritage megafauna.

  “There is a report on a family newsfeed that says you were robbed by a person on Karavina. You had to apply to the family’s embassy there for funds to take you home to Golden Junction. And the strange thing is, this seems to have happened only yesterday…”

  For a moment Zen couldn’t understand. Then he thought—the girl! The girl that Raven had hired to divert Tallis to the vapor lakes. She must have helped herself to Tallis’s wallet or something, and accidentally tugged on a loose thread that was going to unravel all of Raven’s plans.

  “So either the Tallis Noon on Karavina is an imposter,” said Lady Sufra, “or… Well, I’m sure it’s all a mistake, but I did have to mention it to my brother Gaeta. He is on his way with a security detachment. He’ll ask you some questions, clear this up…”

  She was waiting for him to protest, to tell her that yes, it was a mistake. When he didn’t, her face grew very serious. “Tallis, if there is anything you need to tell me, you should speak now…”

  Zen didn’t answer.

  “So it is true?” she said, and for a moment he felt that, no matter what they did to him, the worst thing about getting caught was disappointing her.

  “Why?” she asked.

  He wondered if he should confess everything. Perhaps she would still be grateful to him for saving Kobi, for not stealing the Pyxis, for warning her about Raven. Maybe she could protect him from her family, and from Raven too.

  “Zen!” said Nova, suddenly and urgently in his head. “Security team coming into your carriage…”

  Zen could hear them: men’s voices, down on the lower deck. Something buzzing like a gigantic bee. Lady Sufra stepped back from the doorway and looked behind her as Gaeta Noon came up the stairs, weightless and clumsy, two CoMa officers behind him, a big, ungainly drone hovering above their heads.

  Zen slammed the compartment door. Locked it. Grabbed the gun and somersaulted across the room to the window, but ther
e was no way to open it, no way to break it.

  “The ceiling,” said Nova, sending her mind into the Noon train’s systems, calling up plans. “There’s an access hatch…”

  “I can’t see it,” said Zen above the noise from the door: the pounding fists and shouted threats. He was scrabbling frantically at the smooth plane of livewood that formed the cabin ceiling. Nova delved with her mind into the train’s systems, and a seamless hatch slid open.

  “They know I’m here now,” she said. “The Wildfire and the Time of Gifts. They’re locking me out of their systems…”

  Her voice cut off. He thought for a moment his link to her was severed, but she was just thinking. When she spoke again her voice sounded harder somehow.

  “Zen,” she told him, “I am uploading Raven’s trainkiller. It’s the only way…”

  He was busy pulling himself up into the crawlspace above the compartment ceiling. He wasn’t sure he’d heard her right. It was a narrow space, barely big enough for him to wriggle through. Intended for small maintenance spiders, he thought—and as he thought it, he saw one, scuttling toward him. At the same moment he heard the bang from below as his door was kicked open, then four more bangs, louder, which was Gaeta Noon or one of his companions or their drone shooting at him through the ceiling. Holes appeared in the floor of the crawlspace all around him, bright stalks of lamplight poking up through them.

  “I’m through the trains’ firewalls,” said Nova in his ear. “I’m—”

  The lamplight vanished. The red light on the front of the maintenance spider went out too, and in the faint light that was left Zen saw it collapse. A klaxon started to howl somewhere, unbearably loud in that small space. He crammed his hands over his ears. It didn’t help much.

  The Noon train shrugged. A weird motion, like nothing he had felt before. Dreadful noises added themselves to the din of the klaxon. Acceleration tugged him in various directions, pressing him to the crawlspace roof, then slamming him against the dead maintenance spider.

  If the spider was dead, did that mean that the train was dead too?

  Nova, in his head, trying to sound calm: “Zen, move toward the back of the carriage. There is a hatch that leads out onto the roof. Don’t forget you’re weightless…”

  “What’s happening?” he asked, looping the strap of the ray gun over his shoulder and worming his way through the dark. He could see the hatch now; she must have opened it; light was flooding in.

  “Bad things,” she said.

  He reached the hatch, struggled over onto his back, and pulled himself up through the roof of the train.

  She was right.

  *

  Later, when he saw that video, which all the newsfeeds kept on showing until it lost all weight and meaning, he would understand how the Wildfire had been blasted off the track by some internal explosion caused by Raven’s trainkiller. How it had dragged the Time of Gifts over with it as it died, derailing the vast carriages behind it too, leaving the rest to fend for themselves.

  All he saw at the time were carriages racing under him and past him. The train was breaking up, couplings detaching at random so that the carriages ran singly or in groups of two or three. Some applied their brakes, some ran on at full speed and crashed loudly against the slower ones ahead. Most stayed on the rails, but a few were rising uncertainly into the air. Doors opened and closed, spilling out people in party clothes, kids in pajamas, flailing and screaming in the train’s slipstream. Far behind, among the luggage vans at the rear end of the train, an auxiliary power car went off like a bomb. And over all the other sounds, that high, shuddering klaxon shriek still going on, like trainsong gone sour. Zen thought at first, as he went groping and scrambling his way through the unfolding wreck, that it was the death cry of the two locos, and then fumblingly understood the truth. The Wildfire was dead, but the Time of Gifts was still alive. That awful bellowing was a cry of grief.

  Nova in his head: “Oh, Zen! It’s worse than I thought—I hoped it would only…”

  Something ripped upward through the roof he clung to. Gaeta’s drone, rotors thrashing the gritty air, soared out through the hole its guns had torn. It was an old-school drone, one of the sort that people called Beetles. Zen had seen a couple of them flying perimeter sweeps around the Noon picnic spots on Jangala and had thought them as absurd as the ceremonial uniforms of the imperial staff. Now, confronted by this one, looking into the black muzzle of its railgun, he felt less inclined to scoff.

  Luckily it seemed disoriented. Perhaps the trainkiller had affected it, too. It wavered, trying to bring its gun to bear on him, and a dining car came through the air side-on, like a bat at a ball, like a windscreen at a bug, like a mother ship spewing white flying-saucer fleets of dinner plates from all its doors. Zen ducked. The dining car swept over his head and slammed into the Beetle, which was flung aside, one rotor dead, the other whining, trailing smoke, lost in the wider chaos as the dining car slammed down onto the forward end of the carriage Zen was clinging to. Flung free, he flailed through the air like a trainee acrobat, grabbed the roof of the next carriage, and clung on tight, staring back at his own carriage as it crumpled under the impact of the dining car.

  That should give Gaeta and Lady Sufra something else to think about, he thought, then wondered guiltily if he should go back and see if they needed help. But he could not think what help he could give, or why Gaeta and his men shouldn’t just start shooting at him again. So he started moving up the train, grabbing at finials and ventilators on the carriage roofs, ducking the fragments that hissed by like bullets, until there in front of him was a gap, a dozen carriages torn out of the train, and beyond it the carriage that held the collection, still on the rails, still attached front and rear to its neighbors, rattling down the Spindlebridge.

  Nova again. “Zen, here’s what we’ll do: get into the collection, grab hold of the Pyxis, then get off the train, get right off the train…”

  “I am off it!” he shouted, air-swimming, and then the carriage in front of the collection caught him in the midriff, a glancing blow, which knocked all the breath out of his lungs. Fish from the train’s aquarium flew by, each sleeved in its own silvery coat of water.

  The top half of a broken Motorik went tumbling past, torn synthiflesh and jutting ceramic bones, spraying gobs of blue gel, telling him, “Dinner may be a little late this evening, sir…”

  Zen clung to the carvings on the edge of the carriage roof while a storm of luggage hurtled past. A lost red shoe kicked him in the side of the head. A cotton bag flapped into his face. He dragged it off, but did not let it go. Looping the strap over his neck, he started to crawl his way along the carriage. Everything was slowing; these carriages had their brakes full on, spraying long fans of sparks from under their wheels. That must be something Nova was doing.

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I’ll find you. We’ll go back to Raven’s plan, find a spaceship, get away.”

  Looking down-line to make sure that the Beetle was not still tailing him, Zen saw an airborne garden carriage slam through the side of one of those spherical factory units, carriage and factory both coming apart in sprays of shrapnel. The lights were going out, section by section, all the way along the Spindlebridge, as if Raven’s trainkiller had hitched a ride for itself on the Time of Gifts’s distress calls and infected the bridge’s systems too.

  He groped his way down the outside of the carriage, and the doors parted to let him in. The corridor was empty. He pulled himself along it, through the juddering concertina coupling and then through another open door into the carriage that housed the collection. Shrill little alarms were wailing inside, but the Time of Gifts was still bellowing its mourning cry, so he didn’t think anyone would take much notice. The lights were off, but Quinta Karanath’s holopaintings lit his way as he passed through the first gallery, batting drifting
vases and sculptures aside with the butt of the ray gun. From deeper in the carriage he could see the glow of the old holographs, a beacon guiding him toward the chamber where the Pyxis waited.

  It wasn’t easy, swimming through the air, scrambling like a climber along the walls, using picture frames as handholds. The bag he had rescued kept floating up and bumping against his face; the ray gun tugged him endlessly off-balance. His nose was plugging up, and he had a sharp headache, a taste in his mouth like salt and metal. Kicking off from the doorway of the inner chamber, he flailed through the hanging holographs and bashed into the cone that housed the Pyxis. It was still on its plinth inside.

  Zen swung the gun at the glass, but it rebounded. He turned it round and pulled the trigger, and the recoil drove him backward and slammed him against the carriage wall.

  The diamondglass held, but part of the cone had a frosted look where the impact of his shot had damaged it. He aimed at that place, firing again and again, filling the Noon collection with a thunder that he hoped would go unheard in the louder thunder outside.

  At the fifth shot, or perhaps the sixth, the glass gave way. The fragments did not fall, just scattered slowly in every direction. Zen swam through them to where the Pyxis waited for him. He didn’t know what had held it to its plinth; it came away easily enough. He stuffed it into his bag as quickly as he could, fought his way back through the weightless carriage to the door.

  The carriage was barely moving now, just lurching forward from time to time as the carriages behind bashed into one another. The only light came from fires, which had started farther down the line, a reddish and uncertain light that cast long shadows from the clouds of wreckage hanging in the air around the train.

  For a moment then he felt complete despair. How was he supposed to move through that soup of debris? How was he supposed to find his way to these spacecraft hangars that Nova had talked about so blithely? How was he supposed to find Nova?