Railhead Read online

  Across a footbridge, past screens that would once have told the times and destinations of the trains. Dry leaves crunching underfoot. Lights turning on, weedy and power-starved but doing their best as they sensed Zen and Nova’s movements. Below the bridge, Zen saw trains. An old Foss loco, and a couple of others that he couldn’t make out. Dead trains in a dead station…

  No, not all dead. Light came from one, spilling through the gaps in the blinds on the carriage windows, and through shark-gill vents along the loco’s side. Zen heard the faint waiting purr of it as Nova led him down the stairs to the platform. The loco was a streamlined slice of darkness, splashed with mysterious numerals and letters, stitched with rivets, exhaust ports, the housings of powerful drive-wheels. A huge engine idled like a heartbeat deep inside it.

  Behind it were three carriages: double-deckers, massive and elaborate, but old; the type of rolling stock that Zen had only seen in historical threedies.

  “Fox?” said Nova. Her voice echoed up and down the platform. “We have an extra passenger.”

  The train just sat there, but a maintenance spider scrambled out of a hatch on its hull and trained its cameras on Zen. One of the carriage doors slid open, and the wind it made sent more of those small dry leaves whispering and scratching along the platform. Zen was too lost in railhead awe at the strange train to wonder where leaves had come from, down there.

  “This is the Thought Fox,” said Nova. She patted the big loco’s hull with one hand, steering Zen toward the first carriage with the other. He touched the loco too. His fingertips ran lightly over old ceramic, ridged and plated like a tortoise shell.

  “It’s a beauty!”

  The loco made a noise. Just coolant shifting, deep in its engine compartment, but it sounded like a warning growl. Zen took his hand away, and peeked inside the first carriage. He saw luxury and lamplight, like something in an ad. No rows of seats, no luggage racks. This was—what was the word?—a state car. The sort high-ranking members of the corporate families rode around in: a sumptuous interstellar living room on wheels. It looked old: dusty mirrors, tarnished gilt, the leather of the deep seats cracked and faded. Shabby, but shabby in an expensive way; antique shop shabby, not the everyday worthless shabbiness that Zen was used to.

  And sitting in the middle of it, smiling at him, was the man from Malik’s photos. Same hollow face, same old black suit, same long hands and level gaze. The lights of the carriage shining on his pale hair. He was so white and motionless that he still looked like a photo, like someone frozen in the glare of a camera flash.

  “Welcome, Zen,” he said. “I’d hoped to gather you in at Ambersai. I didn’t want Yanvar Malik to find his way to your mother and sister. But don’t worry, he won’t trouble them. Railforce won’t let him pursue his obsession any further now that he has cost them a train.”

  “What’s his obsession?” asked Zen.

  “I am.” Raven steepled his fingers under his chin and smiled. Nova stepped into the carriage and looked back, smiling too, holding out her hand to welcome Zen aboard.

  Some street-bred instinct told Zen to turn and run. He ignored it carefully. Instincts weren’t always right. Raven had defeated Malik. He had taken out that wartrain. He was powerful. Whatever he had going on down here, with this hidden station and this secret train, Zen wanted a piece of it.

  He did not take Nova’s hand—he didn’t like the touch of her, that synthetic flesh that felt so nearly like the real thing. But he stepped aboard, and the Thought Fox closed its doors behind him.

  The carriage had been grown from livewood, with silvery bioluminescent lamps set into knots in the curved roof. It was like being inside an enormous hollow nut. Music came from hidden speakers. Waves of harmony, low voices singing words Zen didn’t know. Old music on an old train. Nova went away, into another carriage or another compartment. She gave Zen the creeps, but he felt sorry she’d gone; Raven was creepier.

  Now Raven rose from his chair. He was long and thin, and he looked wrong somehow, like something carved in cold white stone by a sculptor who didn’t quite understand human bodies. He snapped his fingers and a holographic map appeared in the air in front of him.

  “You know what this is, Zen?”

  “Of course I do,” said Zen. It was the same rail map that you saw in every K-bahn station, lines intersecting and branching to form a 3-D mass like glowing coral. “It’s the Network.”

  Raven smiled. “When I was a boy, we called it ‘Kilopylae.’ That means ‘the thousand gates’ in one of the languages of Old Earth. That was the ancient name for it, the Guardians’ name. It seems to have fallen out of fashion now.”

  “Because it’s not true,” said Zen. “There aren’t a thousand K-gates. There are nine hundred and sixty-four.” Everyone knew that. Maybe the Guardians had planned to open a thousand gates, but it had turned out that there were only so many holes they could tear in the fabric of space-time before it came apart like an old dishcloth. They had stopped after nine hundred and sixty-four gates, saying that to make another would upset some symmetry and destabilize the whole Network.

  “Yes,” said Raven. “Nine hundred and sixty-four gates. And thirty of those are out of use, because the corporate families decided it isn’t economical to keep those stations open anymore…”

  He enlarged part of the map with a twitch of his thin hand, and among the branching, multicolored lines Zen saw one that he did not recognize. A rose-red line, which began at Sirius and went zigzagging through the center of the Network to a far-off station called Desdemor.

  “You’ve heard of the Dog Star Line?” said Raven. “No? I’m not surprised. It was busy once, but the industrial planets it linked were mined out and all the important worlds it served can be reached more easily now by other lines. The corporate family who ran it went bankrupt, and it was closed down long ago. The rails are still here, though. Fuel, too, at some of the old depots. Enough to keep the Thought Fox running.”

  “So what’s this got to do with me?” asked Zen. He didn’t like Raven lecturing him like he was a kid in school. “Why are the Bluebodies after you? Are you a thief too?”

  Raven grinned. “I prefer to think of myself as a freedom fighter.”

  “You sent that girl after me. That Moto.”

  Raven smiled calmly. Not a man to trust, thought Zen. Nor a man to offend.

  “So what do you want with me?” he asked.

  “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  “The way where?” Zen said, and sat down without meaning to, jolted off his feet as the Thought Fox began to move.

  7

  “Hey!” he shouted as the Thought Fox carried him away through forgotten tunnels. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Away from Cleave,” Raven said calmly. “Railforce will be furious about what we did to their wartrain. If you stay in Cleave, you’ll get the blame. You’ll be much better off with me.”

  That was easy to believe. The seat that Zen had landed in was livewood, and so comfortable that it felt as if it had been grown especially for him. He sat there watching while Raven moved around, untroubled by the train’s movements, opening seamless hatches in the walls, fetching out glasses, bottles. Tunnels rushed by outside the windows, vanishing sometimes to give a glimpse of dimly lit caverns, abandoned freight yards. The music soared dreamily.

  “Is this your train?” Zen asked.

  “Thought Fox is the last of the C12 Zodiaks,” Raven said.

  “Wow!” Zen had heard of those. Some of the fastest, most beautiful locos ever to come out of the Albayek family’s engine shops on Luna Verde. “I didn’t think there were any left…”

  “I found the Fox abandoned on a siding. A derelict, left behind when the line was closed.” Raven poured a whisky for himself, a glass of purple juice for Zen. “Poor Fox. I helped it to repair. Now it consents to carry me to where I want to go.”


  “Its drone shot Uncle Bugs.”

  “Yes. Unfortunate. I’m afraid the Fox has anger management issues; something of an appetite for destruction. Don’t you, Fox?”

  The Thought Fox said nothing, but Zen sensed that it was listening. “I suppose nobody really owns a train,” he said.

  “Exactly.” Raven came back to the table and set the drinks down, then paused as the Thought Fox slammed through a K-gate. The carriage shimmered for a moment in the weird non-light, then they were hurtling across plains of blue-gray mud. Zen leaned forward, eager to see what world this lost line had brought him to. Mountains showed in the distance, and the skeleton shapes of dead buildings.

  “Tashgar,” said Raven.

  “What?”

  “This place. It’s called Tashgar. A former industrial world, much like Cleave, stripped out centuries ago. Most of the stations on the Dog Star Line are like this. It still runs through living places, too—Ambersai and Cleave, as you know, and Sundarban, and a few others, but the Dog Star stations are buried deep on those worlds.”

  They entered another tunnel, another gate. Roared through another dead station.

  “Why were you looking for me?” Zen asked.

  “You’re of use to me,” said Raven.

  “What sort of use?”

  “I need a thief. You’re going to steal something for me.”

  Zen liked the sound of that. So Raven was a thief like him. And with access to this secret K-bahn, they could go anywhere, steal anything, get away clean. But he didn’t want to sound too eager, so he just said, “Okay,” like he was thinking it over.

  “Don’t worry,” said Raven, as Zen had hoped he would. “I pay well. I’ll make you rich. Once the job’s done you can have a new life. Anything you need. Fine house, new name. Treatment for your mother. They could fix what’s wrong with her easily enough, you know, if she wasn’t living in a rathole like Cleave. Yes, I could arrange that. And all you have to do is one small job.”

  That sounded too good to be true. Zen sensed he was being played. Either the reward wouldn’t be as big as promised, or the job would turn out to be bigger. But, as when he first decided to follow Nova, he didn’t see he had much choice. And whatever the downsides were, to work for a man like this would be a step up out of his old life, wouldn’t it?

  “Okay,” he said again.

  Raven grinned, as if that sealed the bargain, and the Thought Fox passed through another gate into another world, and then another. And although he was on edge, high on the railhead thrill of riding the old line and excited by this new turn his luck was taking, Zen started to feel sleepy. He couldn’t remember how many hours it had been since he rode the K-bahn out of Ambersai, thinking his adventures were at an end. He was starting to get seriously train-lagged.

  He rested his head against the sculpted chair back and watched the view go by as the Thought Fox rushed on through those strange, enormous landscapes. Nighttime on a world in some nebula where the sky was a peacock’s tail of huge stars blazing. Dawn over seas of methane under a shattered moon. Un-bang. Un-bang. Un-bang. The music and the soft, familiar motion of the swaying carriage easing him into sleep.

  *

  When he awoke, the train had stopped. Greenish-golden daylight slanted into the carriage. The door was open. Raven had gone, but Zen could hear a sound like the slow breathing of some huge, sleepy animal.

  He jumped up from his seat, and almost hit the ceiling. The gravity here was less than he was used to. The empty glass that he had just knocked from the armrest of his seat fell so slowly that he had time to catch it before it reached the floor.

  The breathing was the distant sound of waves on a shore.

  He stepped off the train into a big old station. The green-gold light came down through a glass roof. He walked along the platform and through open barriers onto the station concourse. Raven was there. He stood between the pillars, where the shafts of light came and went. He was doing—what? Exercises of some sort, Zen thought at first. Balancing on one foot and then the other, jerking like a marionette, twisting his spindly black-clad body into shapes Zen wouldn’t have thought were possible.

  And then the light shafts coming through the canopy faded, and as the concourse filled with shadow again, he saw that Raven was not alone. Two Station Angels flickered there, many-limbed wisps of light that knotted and writhed.

  Station Angels were a sort of harmless energy that flickered sometimes in the wake of trains. They might look a bit like the ghosts of gigantic praying mantises, but everyone knew that was just the way human brains interpreted some sort of interference that got dragged through into the normal universe when a K-gate opened. But these Angels, rather than just wandering and fading as an Angel should, seemed to be echoing Raven’s movements somehow, as if all three of them were dancing to the same music.

  There wasn’t any music, though. There was only the wind moaning, and the light tracking across dusty platforms, and Zen’s heart going thud, thud, thud, as a fear he didn’t under-stand rose up in him.

  A cool hand closed around his wrist. Nova drew him backward into the shelter of a derelict food stall.

  “You mustn’t disturb him,” she said, turning the volume of her voice down so low that he could barely hear it. “He is busy. He is talking to the Angels.”

  Zen looked at her. “You can’t talk to Station Angels! That’s like talking to marsh gas, or rainbows. They’re not alive.”

  “Who says so?”

  “Everybody. Experts. They’ve done tests.”

  “Oh,” said Nova. “Well, I’m not alive either, not in your way. But Raven talks to me.”

  Zen watched the dancers. “It’s a trick, isn’t it? It’s just magnetism or static electricity or something…”

  And then the Angels weren’t there anymore. Zen thought for a moment it was another change in the light that had hidden them, but they had simply gone.

  Raven stood for a moment smoothing his hair. He squared his shoulders, straightened his jacket. Then he walked along the platform and went back aboard the Thought Fox. A moment later Zen heard the K-train’s engines powering up.

  “He’s leaving!” he said. “He’s leaving me here!” He started to run back toward the train, but Nova caught his arm again.

  “It’s all right. It’s part of the plan.”

  “What plan?”

  “Raven’s plan. He told me to take you to the hotel, but I didn’t want to wake you. We’re to wait here for him.”

  “What is this place?”

  “The city of Desdemor, on the water-moon Tristesse.”

  The end of the line. The far end of the Network from Zen’s home.

  “Is this world abandoned too?” he asked.

  “There are some people at the hotel,” said Nova, “but they’re only Motorik.”

  He was surprised how scornful she sounded. “You do know that you’re a Motorik too?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “I am nothing like them. They’re just puppets of their programming. I do as I like.”

  The Thought Fox’s engines rumbled, pushing the train backward out of the station, accelerating toward the tunnel mouth behind it, where the K-gate waited.

  “Where’s Raven going?” asked Zen.

  Nova shrugged, looking as if she had personally invented shrugging and hadn’t quite sorted out the fine details yet.

  “Who is he?”

  “He is just Raven,” she said.

  “Why does he want me? Why did he choose me?”

  “I can’t imagine,” she said, looking him up and down. “Maybe it’s the name. Starling and Raven. They’re both the names of birds, from Old Earth. That’s the sort of thing he thinks is funny.”

  8

  “Desdemor!” announced a loud voice. “Jewel of the western branch lines!” But it was only a big advertising scr
een, woken by the movement as Zen and Nova emerged from the station entrance. The buildings of the city soared high and slender and abandoned, and empty bridges spanned its calm canals. The screen flashed images of crowded beaches and laughing children across a deserted piazza, welcoming tourists who would never arrive. Overhead shots showed Desdemor to be an island, but Zen had guessed that already; he could not see the ocean yet, but he could hear the boom and rush of it, and smell it in the clean air.

  He looked up. Big clouds were sweeping overhead. The greenish-golden light, which shone between them, was not sunlight. It came from the immense gas planet that filled half the sky.

  “It must have been lovely here in the old days,” said Nova. “So full of people! Raven is the only one who comes here now.”

  “But why?” Zen asked, following her across the piazza. His voice echoed from the glass walls of towering buildings. “Why come here, I mean? Raven must be rich. Rich people live in nice houses. They have friends, and families, and nice stuff. They don’t dance with Station Angels. They don’t live in ruined beach resorts with only wire dollies for company. No offence.”

  “None taken,” said Nova.

  They walked beside a canal, following it down to the beach. The tide was in. Spray burst high into the air and fell back slowly in the frail gravity. Storms had stripped the shutters from the little shops behind the promenade. Buckets and spades lay half-buried in the drifts of sand inside, like treasures in desert tombs. Far out at sea, where big waves broke over reefs the color of bone, Zen saw a skein of ungainly looking birds flying, black against the face of the gas giant.

  “That planet is called Hammurabi,” said Nova. “Tristesse is one of its moons. And those birds aren’t birds, they’re sky-rays. Genetically engineered, based on the big manta rays that used to live in the oceans on Old Earth, you know?”