Railhead by Philip Reeve

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