Railhead by Philip Reeve Page A

blackness of that lonely system, where whole dark planets of hardware hung unmapped, data centers for the Guardians. There was a hollowed out asteroid there. They landed, and cut their way down through blast doors into a facility where hundreds of bodies lay in glass coffins frosted with flowers of ice.
    Malik remembered the sound the ice had made, crackling under his glove as he wiped clear spaces on the coffin lids. Strange how these small details stayed with you. He remembered peering in through the glass, and seeing Raven sleeping there; the same face he had killed so many times. All the coffins were the same: hundreds of sleeping Ravens, filling the racks which covered the chamber’s walls. Or maybe not sleeping, maybe just not yet alive. This was a storeroom, where Raven kept new bodies until he needed them.
    “I don’t see how he can ever download himself into these,” said Lyssa Delius, the only other surviving member of Malik’s original crew. “He doesn’t exist in the Datasea anymore. What’s to download? These are just meat.”
    “Railforce want them taken out anyway,” said Malik. But the truth was,
he
wanted them taken out; he wanted every last one of those handsome, lifeless Ravens gone. They left enough demolition charges in that chamber to vaporize the whole asteroid.
    And when they got back to the station at Iskalan, they were told the mission was over. Whatever Raven had done, the Guardians were satisfied that his punishment was now complete. He was finally dead.
    So they had a sad little celebration in a station bar, remembering lost comrades and recalling battles that they could never talk about to anyone else. And then they went off to other units, other lives. As far as Malik knew, none of the others had been troubled by nightmares. None of the others had felt that sense of something unfinished, loose ends left hanging. The Guardians had said Raven was dead, so Raven must be dead.
    Malik got a promotion. He got himself a husband, a house on Grand Central, a cat. But the feeling wouldn’t fade, and in his dreams he kept on killing Raven. He got a divorce, a posting to a long-range patrol train out on the branch lines. And slowly he started to notice things. A witness to a robbery at a biotech plant on Ashtoreth who described a tall, pale man, and another on the far side of the Network two years later who saw someone who sounded like the same man the night a trainload of construction equipment went missing from the rail yards on Nokomis. Both robberies impossible; the security systems that should have stopped them wiped by viruses that left no trace, the cameras recording no image of the thief.
    Raven was still alive. He had convinced Railforce and even the Guardians themselves that he was dead, but one last version of him was still alive.
    Malik hated leaving a job unfinished. He started collecting any report that might point to Raven, trying to find evidence that would convince someone. But there was never any evidence: just hints and whispers. Just a drunk on Changurai who claimed to have seen a Moto girl in a red raincoat come out of a blocked-off passageway, which led down to the old Dog Star Line. Just a street thief called Zen Starling who claimed to know nothing about Raven, and then vanished.
    Zen Starling is the only lead I have
, he thought.
What does Raven want with a street thief?
    The pictures his drone had caught of the kid in Ambersai and Cleave had been lost along with his train, along with the scraps of information poor Nikopol had found. All Malik had to go on were his memories.
Zen has a sister who works in the refineries
. If he could just find out what Raven wanted with the boy, the puzzle might start to make sense. And the only way to do that was the old way: talking to people, piecing things together.
    He stared out of the carriage window, taking one last look at the tasteful towers of Grand Central. The train gathered speed, carrying him toward the K-gate that would take