Railhead Read Online Free PDF

your records.” He glanced at a man who sat beside him, eyes hidden by an elaborate headset. “Mr. Nikopol?”
    The man smiled; a small, neat man, proud of his work. Divers were a special caste, not afraid to log out of the safe, fire-walled data rafts and surf the tides of information in the deep Datasea . You could find anything down there, as long as you were clever enough to deal with the things that lived there. “Zen has a sister who works in the refineries,” he said. “Mother with mental health problems. Father not recorded. Station of birth not recorded. Current address not recorded. Before they lived in this dump the Starlings lived in Santheraki, which is also a dump. Before that—”
    Malik held up a hand for quiet. “I don’t get it, Zen. You’re no different from a million other sneak-thieves up and down this line. Why is Raven interested in a punk like you?”
    Zen started to say that he didn’t know. Then his anger got the better of him. “You’ve got no right to drag me in here! If it’s Raven and his Moto you’re after, why aren’t you out looking for them? She’s here, in Cleave! Her drone shot Uncle Bugs!”
    “Impossible,” said Nikopol. “There’s been no train from Ambersai since the one the kid came in on, and she wasn’t on that.”
    Malik didn’t look as if he thought it was impossible. He looked as if he thought it was interesting.
    “Where?” he asked. “Where did you see her?”
    Zen started to say, “She was at my apartment,” but stopped. He didn’t want these Bluebodies barging in on Ma and Myka with their questions and their drones. Ma would think all her nightmares had become real.
    Malik grew tired of waiting for an answer. He said to a woman, “Faisa, stow him in the back. Dose him. I’ll question him again when the drugs kick in.”
    He meant Truth drugs. Zen had heard of them. One shot was enough to make you spill everything. He struggled, but Faisa and her comrades were strong. They wrestled him past Malik, down a narrow corridor, into a blue cupboard of a cabin with a shelf for a bed. He struggled some more. He could feel the train stirring, engines coming on. There was a tiny, dirty window in the cabin wall and through that he saw the pillars of the station canopy idling past, and the flicker of headset flashes as trainspotters took final snapshots of the mystery train.
    “Where are we going?” he shouted.
    One of Malik’s men said, “Back up the line. No point staying. Raven won’t show his face here now.”
    The woman called Faisa was opening a plastic box. The train gathered speed and the window went black; they were in a tunnel, heading for Cleave’s K-gate. Faisa fitted a tube of some clear fluid into an injector. “This will help you to concentrate on finding the answers Captain Malik needs.”
    The lights went out. The sound of the engines stopped too. The train was slowing. It couldn’t be deliberate, because trains were supposed to speed up on the approach to a K-gate. The man holding Zen said, “Oh great Guardians!”
    “What’s happening?” asked Faisa.
    Zen didn’t know, but he knew an opportunity when he saw one. He lashed out with his feet at the black shapes in the blackness around him. One boot crunched into a body. There was a curse. Strong hands turned and twisted him. The man the hands belonged to shouted, “Dose him!” his mouth close to Zen’s face, breath smelling of Ambersai beer. There was more scuffling, the cobra hiss of the injector, a scream.
    “Not
me
!”
    “Sorry! Sorry!”
    “Where is he?”
    A tangle of bodies, hands. Someone falling. Zen writhed in darkness past the others, groping for the doorway, finding it, stumbling out into the corridor as emergency lighting came on, dim and red. He heaved the door shut before his captors realized he was not among them anymore. There was smoke in the air. The train’s engines whined and hiccupped, as if they were trying and trying to come back on line and something