Railhead Read Online Free Page B

shaft, and at the top of the shaft another hatch opened. Zen popped up like a gopher in a dead, weed-grown space between two gleaming K-bahn tracks. The brightly lit platforms were about a half mile away, tucked under the overhang of the canyon wall. The part of the line where Zen had emerged was in darkness, except for a fading Station Angel, hovering like an outsized will-o’-the-wisp in the wake of some train, which had just come through the gate.
    “What are you waiting for?” asked Flex, down in the shaft behind him.
    “There’s a Station Angel…”
    “Angels won’t hurt you.”
    “I know that,” said Zen. They were still eerie, though, and he was glad to see that this one was fading—Angels did not last for long this far from a gate. He scrambled out of the hatch and stood for a moment, staring toward the platforms, because he had never seen a K-bahn station from that vantage point before. Then Flex climbed out behind him and they set off across the tracks toward a line of parked freight cars in a siding. Zen was almost starting to enjoy himself now. Somewhere down the line he’d tell this tale in bars or coffee shops to lesser thieves. “They had drones out after me, but I just snuck onto the K-bahn and jumped on an outbound train…”
    The waiting cars were ore hoppers, blazoned with the crossed keys logo of the Prell family and a lot of graffiti by artists who weren’t as good as Flex. Zen saw her give the tags a quick look and wrinkle her nose at the poor workmanship.
    “Do I climb in to one of these?” he asked.
    Flex shook her head. “Wait here till a passenger train comes in, jump it, ride into the station, then slip inside when the doors open.”
    “Won’t the train notice?”
    “It will, but it probably won’t care. I know the locos that come through here. Most of them are all right. The worst that will happen is it’ll send a maintenance spider to look you over. Tell it you’re a friend of mine.”
    “Train coming,” Zen said. He could hear a flutter of engine sound, growing louder.
    Flex looked up. The light from the station fell across her hard little face. “That’s not a train,” she said.
    She was right. The rails weren’t thrumming the way they did when a train approached. Whatever was coming was coming through the air.
    “Drone!” Zen said, and at the same moment its searchlights came sweeping across the tracks. Flex vanished, giving him one warning look, then darting into a nook of darkness behind the freight cars. Zen turned to follow, but the light caught him. He saw his shadow pasted over the tags and logos on the side of the nearest car, as crisp as if Flex had sprayed it there in black paint.
    He looked back. The drone hung in the air a few feet away. It must have seen him follow Flex into the passage, worked out where they’d emerge, flown up here to wait. Its battery of cameras and instruments was trained on Zen, relaying his image back to the girl in red or whoever else was controlling it.
    “All right!” he shouted. “What do you want?”
    Sparks flew from the drone’s carapace. It spun in the air. Zen heard cracking noises, sharp dings. He looked left and right. People were running and shouting. Spurts of light flashed on gray raincoats. He thought at first these were the drone’s handlers coming to pick him up, then realized that they were shooting at it. The drone tried to steady itself, but something heavy hit it and it flipped over and crashed down on the tracks. There was a blue flash; shards of debris zipping past like bats. Hands caught hold of Zen; flashlights shone in his face. The gray-coats were shouting at him, but the crack of the exploding drone had deafened him. They started to shove him toward the station along a ceramic footpath that ran between the tracks.
    The train that had just arrived in Cleave was no ordinary passenger train. It had, for a start, no carriages, only a long, double-ended locomotive, black, still steaming from its