Railhead (26 page)

Railforce
—

The Empire’s army, tasked with protecting the Emperor and keeping the peace. The headquarters of Railforce is on Grand Central, but it has outposts on most of the important worlds, and its wartrains constantly patrol the Great Network. Railforce is supposed to be independent of the Corporate Families, and its leader, the Rail Marshal, is traditionally an officer of low birth who has risen through the ranks. However, the leaders of Railforce have often thrown their weight behind one candidate or another at times when it was unclear whom the Guardians wished to see as Emperor.

Silver River Line
—

A line linking mostly Noon stations on the western side of the Network. It is famous for its sights—the Slow River on Tuva, the Naked Gate on Burj-al-Badr, the Mists of Adeli, the Noon park-world of Jangala, and the Spindlebridge, which links the line to Sundarban and connects it to Marapur and the O Link.

Space Travel
—

Many of the Network’s worlds have thriving space industries, which maintain weather and communication satellites and mine nearby moons, planets, and asteroids. Many people believe that off-world industries will become more important in the future, as the original industrial worlds of the Network are gradually exhausted. For this reason, many of the great families seek alliances with spacer clans and aerospace engineering houses.

There are also famous houses and hotels in the orbits of many worlds, and of course the Spindlebridge space station at Sundarban. No one has ever bothered trying to send a spaceship from one star system to another, since the journey is so much quicker and cheaper by train. However, the Guardians are believed to have dispatched probes to distant stars.

Spiral Line Rebellion
—

A line running from Chiba to Vagh and linking a number of Noon-controlled industrial stations. In 2926 a number of Spiral Line stations announced that they were splitting away from the Noon family, angered by taxes and new timetables that the Noons had imposed. The situation grew worse in 2928 when the Prell family sided openly with the rebels (whom they had been supporting from the start). The brief, brutal war that followed seemed to threaten the stability of the entire Network, until the Prell wartrains were destroyed in a six day battle with Railforce and the Noon’s Corporate Marines at the Battle of Galaghast.

Station Angels
—

A phenomenon seen at stations on the outer edges of the Network. Strange light-forms sometimes emerge from the K-gates along with trains, and survive for up to thirty minutes before they fade. Their exact nature is uncertain, but they are not dangerous. Theories that they are some form of alien life have been dismissed by the Guardians themselves, and various attempts to capture or communicate with them have failed. They appear to play some role in the religion of the Hive Monks, who sometimes swarm in excitement when a Station Angel appears.

Sundarban
—

The homeworld of the Noon Family, whose parks, farms, and garden cities cover most of its surface. Famous for its Sundarban Station City, and for the orbiting Spindlebridge, a highly unusual pair of orbiting K-gates that links Sundarban with the Silver River Line.

Threedies
—

3-D entertainments, mostly taking the form of stories, which are usually immersive and interactive.

3-D Printing
—

It is possible to print almost anything, either on small home printers or larger industrial ones. This should have put an end to much interplanetary trade, since all you really need to send from one world to another is instructions that the printers can download. In practice, however, people still like the personal touch. Shoppers on Grand Central, for instance, find that a headset or bangle crafted by the metal smiths of Ambersai and shipped half way across the Network is somehow much more chic and desirable than an identical one downloaded from a Datasea blueprint-shop and printed locally.

Trains
—

Technically, of course, a train consists of a locomotive and a number of carriages or freight cars. In everyday, speech, however, it is often used to refer to the locomotive itself. The first intelligent locos were built by the Guardians, and their minds are still based on coding handed down from the Guardians. Many people believe that the great locomotives are more intelligent than human beings, but experts claim they are on a similar mental level as a bright human, although their intelligence is different from that of humans in several ways. Some never bother speaking to their passengers, others like to chat, or sing, and some have formed enduring friendships with individual humans. If properly maintained, they can function for several hundred years. The finest locomotives come from the great engine shops of the Foss and Helden families.

Locomotives choose their names from the deep archives of the Datasea, sometimes borrowing the titles of forgotten songs, poems, or artworks.

Railhead is first published in the United States in 2016
by Switch Press
a Capstone imprint
1710 Roe Crest Drive
North Mankato, Minnesota 56003
www.switchpress.com

Text copyright © Philip Reeve 2015

“Railhead” was originally published in English in 2015. This edition is published by arrangement with Oxford University Press.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reeve, Philip, author.
Railhead / Philip Reeve.
pages cm

Summary: In a world of drones and androids Zen Starling is a human thief, but mostly he just likes to ride the Interstellar Express and the sentient trains that travel through the K-gates from planet to planet, something only the Guardians understand—but now the mysterious Raven wants him to steal the Pyxis, an object that could either open up a new gate, challenging the Guardians, or put the entire gate system, and the universe itself, in danger.

ISBN 978-1-63079-048-6 (jacketed hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-63079-049-3 (ebook pdf)
ISBN 978-1-63079-064-6 (ebook)

1. Interplanetary voyages—Juvenile fiction. 2. Thieves—Juvenile fiction. 3. Artificial intelligence—Juvenile fiction. 4. Androids—Juvenile fiction. 5. Science fiction. 6. Adventure stories. [1. Science fiction. 2. Interplanetary voyages—Fiction. 3. Robbers and outlaws—Fiction. 4. Artificial intelligence--Fiction. 5. Androids—Fiction. 6. Adventure and adventurers—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.R25576Rai 2016
[Fic]—dc23
2015031768

Book design by Kay Fraser
Photo credits: Shutterstock

For Sarah Reeve, as always