Consider Phlebas

10. The Command System: Batholith

“It’s called a batholith: a granitic intrusion which rose up like a molten bubble into the sedimentary and metamorphic rocks already here a hundred million years ago.

“Eleven thousand years ago the locals built the Command System in it, hoping to use the rock cover as protection from fusion warheads.

“They built nine stations and eight trains. The idea was that the politicos and military chiefs sat in one train, their seconds-in-command and deputies in another, and during a war all eight trains would be shuffled around the tunnels, halting in a station to be linked via hardened communication channels to the transceiver sites on the immediate surface and throughout the state, so they could run the war. The enemy would have a hard time cracking the granite that deep anyway, but hitting something as relatively small as a station would be even more difficult, and they never could be sure there would be a train in it, or that it would be manned, and on top of that they had to knock out the back-up train as well as the main one.

“Germ warfare killed them all off, and some time between then and ten thousand years ago the Dra’Azon moved in, pumping the air out of the tunnels and replacing it with inert gas. Seven thousand years ago a new ice age started, and about four thousand years after that the place got so cold Mr Adequate pumped the argon out and let the planet’s own atmosphere back in; it’s so desiccated, nothing’s rusted in the tunnels for three millennia.

“About three and a half thousand years ago the Dra’Azon came to an agreement with most of the rival Galactic Federations which allowed ships in distress to cross the Quiet Barriers. Politically neutral, relatively powerless species were permitted to set up small bases on most of the Planets of the Dead to provide help for those in distress and — I suppose — to provide a sop to the people who had always wanted to know what the planets were like; certainly on Schar’s World, Mr Adequate let us take a good look at the System every year, and turned a blind eye when we went down unofficially. However nobody’s ever taken unscrambled recordings of any sort out of the tunnels.

“The entrance we’re at is here: at the base of the peninsula, above station four, one of the three main stations — the others are one and seven — where repair and maintenance facilities exist. There are no trains parked in four, three or five. There are two trains in station one, two in seven, one train each in the rest. At least that’s where they ought to be; the Idirans may have moved them, though I doubt it.

“The stations are twenty-five to thirty-five kilometres apart, linked by twin sets of tunnels which only join up at each of the stations. The whole System is buried about five kilometres down.

“We’ll take lasers… and a neural stunner, plus chaff grenades for protection — nothing heavier. Neisin can take his projectile rifle; the bullets he has are only light explosive… But no plasma cannons or micronukes. They’d be dangerous enough in the tunnels anyway, God knows, but they might also bring down Mr Adequate’s wrath, and we don’t want that.

“Wubslin’s rigged up our ship mass anomaly sensor into a portable set, so we can spot the Mind. In addition, I’ve got a mass sensor in my suit, so we shouldn’t have any problem actually finding what we’re after, even if it’s hidden itself—”

“Assuming the Idirans don’t have their own communicators, they’ll be using the Changers’. Our transceivers cover their frequencies and more, so we can listen in on them, but they can’t hear us.

“So those are the tunnels. That Mind is in there somewhere, and so, presumably, are some Idirans and medjel.”

Horza stood in the mess room at the head of the table, under the screen. On the screen a diagram of the tunnels was superimposed over a map of the peninsula. The others looked at him. The empty semi-suit of the medjel he had found lay in the centre of the table.

“You want to take us all in?” the drone Unaha-Closp said.

“Yes.”

“What about the ship?” Neisin said.

“It can take care of itself. I’ll programme its automatics so that it’ll recognise us and defend itself against anybody else.”

“And you’re going to take her?” Yalson asked, nodding at Balveda, who was sitting opposite her.

Horza looked at the Culture woman. “I’d prefer to have Balveda where I can see her,” he said. “I wouldn’t feel safe leaving her here with any of you.”

“I still don’t see why I have to go,” Unaha-Closp said.

“Because,” Horza told it, “I don’t trust you on board here, either. Besides, I want you to carry stuff.”

“What?” The drone sounded angry.

“I don’t know that you’re being completely honest here, Horza,” Aviger said, shaking his head ruefully. “You say that the Idirans and medjel… well, that you’re on their side. But here they are, and they’ve killed four of your own people already, and you think that they’re somewhere inside these tunnels, wandering about… And they’re supposed to be about the best ground-troops in the galaxy. You want to send us up against them?”

“First of all,” Horza sighed, “I am on their side. We’re after the same thing. Secondly, it looks to me as though they don’t have many weapons of their own, otherwise that medjel would certainly have been armed. All they probably have here are the Changers’ weapons. Also it looks, from this medjel suit we’ve got” — he gestured at the webbed apparatus in the middle of the table, which he and Wubslin had been studying since they had brought it on board — “like a lot of their equipment is blown. Only the lights and the heaters on this thing were working. Everything else had fused. My guess is all that happened when they came through the Quiet Barrier. They were all zapped inside the chuy-hirtsi, and their battle gear was fucked up. If the same thing happened to their weapons as happened to their suits, they’re virtually unarmed, and with a lot of problems. With all these fancy new AG harnesses and lasers, we’re much better equipped, even in the unlikely event that it does come to a fight.”

“Which is very likely, considering they won’t have any communicators left,” Balveda said. “You’ll never get close enough to tell them. And even if you did, how are they supposed to know you’re who you say you are? If they’re the same lot you think they are, they came in here just after the Mind did; they won’t even have heard of you. They certainly won’t believe you.” The Culture agent looked round the others. “Your surrogate captain is leading you to your deaths.”

“Balveda,” Horza said, “I’m doing you a courtesy letting you in on all this; don’t annoy me.”

Balveda arched her eyebrows, staying silent.

“How do we know these are the same lot who got here inside this weird animal anyway?” Neisin said. He looked suspiciously at Horza.

“They can’t be anybody else,” Horza said. “They were damn lucky to survive what the Dra’Azon did to them, and even the Idirans wouldn’t risk sending any other forces in after they saw what had happened to this lot.”

“But that means they’ve been here for months,” Dorolow said. “How are we supposed to find something if they’ve been here all this time and haven’t found anything?”

“Perhaps they have,” Horza said, spreading his arms wide and smiling at the woman, a trace of sarcasm in his voice; “but if they haven’t, it’s very possibly because they won’t have any working gear with them. They’d have to search the whole Command System.

“Besides, if that warp animal was as badly damaged as I heard it was, they won’t have had much control over it. Very likely they crash-landed hundreds of kilometres away and had to slog here through the snow. In that case they might have only been here for a few days.”

“I can’t believe the god would let this happen,” Dorolow said, shaking her head and looking at the surface of the table in front of her. “There must be something else to all this. I could feel its power and… and goodness when we came through the Barrier. It wouldn’t let those poor people just be shot down like that.”

Horza rolled his eyes. “Dorolow,” he said to her, leaning forward and planting his knuckles on the table top, “the Dra’Azon are barely aware there’s a war going on. They don’t really give a damn about individuals. They recognise death and decay, but not hope and faith. As long as the Idirans, or we, don’t wreck the Command System or blow the planet away, they won’t give a damn who lives or dies.”

Dorolow sat back, silent but unconvinced. Horza straightened. His words sounded fine; he had the impression the mercenaries would follow him, but inside, deeper than where the words were coming from, he felt no more caring, no more alive than the snow-covered plain outside.

He, Wubslin and Neisin had gone back into the tunnels. They had investigated the accommodation section, and found more evidence of Idiran habitation. It looked as though a very small force — one or two Idirans and maybe half a dozen medjel — had stayed for a while at the Changer base after they had taken it over.

They had apparently taken a lot of freeze-dried emergency food supplies with them, the two laser rifles and the few small pistols the Changer base was allowed, and the four portable communication sets from the store room.

Horza had covered the dead Changers up with the reflector foil they had found in the base, and removed the semi-suit from the dead medjel. They had looked at the flyer, to see if it was serviceable. It wasn’t; its micropile had been partially removed and badly damaged in the process. Like almost everything else in the base, it was without power. Back on board the Clear Air Turbulence, Horza and Wubslin had dissected the medjel’s suit and discovered the subtle but irreparable damage which had been inflicted on it.

All the time, whenever Horza wasn’t worrying about what their chances and their choices were, each moment he stopped concentrating on what he was looking at or supposed to be thinking about, he saw a hard and frozen face, at right angles to the body it was attached to, with frost on the eyelashes.

He tried not to think about her. There was no point; nothing he could do. He had to go on, he had to see this through, even more so now.

He had thought for a long time about what he could do with the rest of the people on the Clear Air Turbulence, and decided he had no real choice but to take them all into the Command System with him.

Balveda was one problem; he wouldn’t feel safe even leaving the whole crew to guard her, and he wanted the best fighters along with him, not stuck on the ship. He could have got round this problem just by killing the Culture agent, but the others had got too used to her, had come to like her just a little too much. If he killed her, he would lose them.

“Well, I think it’s insanity to go down into those tunnels,” Unaha-Closp said. “Why not just wait up here until the Idirans reappear, with or without this precious Mind?”

“First of all,” Horza said, watching the expressions on the others’ faces for any sign of agreement with the drone, “if they don’t find it they probably won’t reappear; these are Idirans, and a carefully chosen crack squad of them at that. They’ll stay down there for ever.” He looked at the tunnel system drawn on the screen, then back at the people and the machine around the table. “They could search for a thousand years in there, especially if the power’s off and they don’t know how to bring it back up, which I’m assuming they don’t.”

“And you do, of course,” the machine said.

“Yes,” Horza said, “I do. We can turn the power on at one of three stations: this one, number seven or number one.”

“It still works?” Wubslin looked sceptical.

“Well, it was working when I left. Deep geothermal, producing electricity. The power shafts are sunk about a hundred kilometres through the crust.

“Anyway, as I say, there’s too much space down there for those Idirans and medjel to have a hope of searching properly without some sort of detection device. A mass anomaly sensor is the only one that’ll work, and they can’t have one. We have two. That’s why we have to go in.”

“And fight,” Dorolow said.

“Probably not. They’ve taken communicators; I’ll get in touch with them and explain who I am. Naturally I can’t tell you the details, but I know enough about the Idiran military system, about their ships, even some of their personnel, to be able to convince them I am who I say I am. They won’t know me personally, but they were told a Changer would be sent later.”

“Liar,” Balveda said. Her voice was cold. Horza felt the atmosphere in the mess change, become tense. The Culture woman was looking at him, her features set, determined, even resigned.

“Balveda,” he said softly, “I don’t know what you were told, but I was briefed on The Hand of God, and Xoralundra told me the Idiran ground force in the chuy-hirtsi knew I’d been sent for.” He said it calmly. “OK?”

“That wasn’t what I heard,” Balveda said, but he sensed she was not totally sure of herself. She had risked a lot to say that, probably hoping that he would at least threaten her or do something which would turn the others against him. It hadn’t worked.

Horza shrugged. “I can’t help it if the Special Circumstances section can’t brief you accurately, Perosteck,” he said, smiling thinly. The Culture agent’s eyes looked away from the Changer’s face, at the table, then at each of the other people sitting around it, as though testing them to see who they each believed. “Look,” Horza said in his most honest-sounding and reasonable voice, spreading his hands out, “I don’t want to die for the Idirans, and God knows why, but I have come to like you lot. I wouldn’t take you in there on a suicide mission. We’ll be all right. If the worst comes to the worst we can always pull out. We’ll take the CAT back through the Quiet Barrier and head for somewhere neutral. You can have the ship; I’ll have a captured Culture agent.” He looked at Balveda, who was sitting in her seat with her legs crossed, her arms folded and her head down. “But I don’t think it’ll come to that. I think we’ll catch this glorified computer and be well rewarded for it.”

“What if the Culture’s won the battle outside the Barrier and they’re waiting for us when we come out, with or without the Mind?” Yalson asked. She didn’t sound hostile, just interested. She was the only one he felt he could rely on, though he thought Wubslin would follow, too. Horza nodded.

“That’s unlikely. I can’t see the Culture falling back all over this volume but holding out here; but even if they did they’d have to be very lucky indeed to catch us. They can only see into the Barrier in real space, don’t forget, so they’d have no warning of where we’d be coming out. No problem there.”

Yalson sat back, apparently convinced. Horza knew he looked calm, but inside he was tensed up, waiting for the mood of the rest to make itself clear. His last answer had been truthful, but the rest were either not the whole truth, or lies.

He had to convince them. He had to have them on his side. There was no other way he could carry out his mission, and he had come too far, done too much, killed too many people, sunk too much of his own purpose and determination into the task, to back out now. He had to track the Mind down, he had to go down into the Command System, Idirans or no Idirans, and he had to have the rest of what had been Kraiklyn’s Free Company with him. He looked at them: at Yalson, severe and impatient, wanting the talking to stop and the job just to be got on with, her shadow of hair making her look both very young, almost child-like, and hard at the same time; Dorolow, her eyes uncertain, looking at the others, scratching one of her convoluted ears nervously; Wubslin, slumped comfortably in his seat, compressed, his stocky frame radiating relaxation. Wubslin’s face had shown signs of interest when Horza described the Command System, and the Changer guessed the engineer found the whole idea of this gigantic train-set fascinating.

Aviger looked very dubious about the whole venture, but Horza thought that now he had made it clear nobody was going to be allowed to stay on the ship, the old man would accept this rather than go to the trouble of arguing about it. Neisin he wasn’t sure about. He had been drinking as much as ever, been quieter than Horza remembered him, but while he didn’t like being bossed around and told what he could and couldn’t do, he was obviously fed up being stuck on the Clear Air Turbulence, and had already been out for a walk in the snow while Wubslin and Horza were looking at the medjel suit. Boredom would make him follow, if nothing else.

Horza wasn’t worried about the machine Unaha-Closp; it would do as it was told, like machines always did. Only the Culture let them get so fancy they really did seem to have wills of their own.

As for Perosteck Balveda, she was his prisoner; it was as simple as that.

“Easy in, easy out…” Yalson said. She smiled, shrugged and, looking round at the others, said, “What the fuck; it’s something to do, isn’t it?”

Nobody disagreed.

Horza was reprogramming the CAT’s fidelities once more, entering the computer’s new instructions through a worn but still serviceable touchboard, when Yalson came onto the flight deck. She slipped into the co-pilot’s seat and watched the man as he worked; the touch-board’s illuminated display threw the shadows of Marain characters over his face.

After a while she said, looking at the markings on the illuminated board, “Marain, eh?”

Horza shrugged. “It’s the only accurate language I and this antique share.” He tapped some more instructions in. “Hey.” He turned to her. “You shouldn’t be in here when I’m doing this.” He smiled, to show her he wasn’t serious.

“Don’t you trust me?” Yalson said, smiling back.

“You’re the only one I do,” Horza said, turning to the board again. “It doesn’t matter anyway, for these instructions.”

Yalson watched him for a little longer. “Did she mean a lot to you, Horza?”

He didn’t look up, but his hands paused over the touchboard. He stared at the illuminated characters.

“Who?”

“Horza…” Yalson said, gently.

He still didn’t look at her. “We were friends,” he said, as though talking to the touchboard.

“Yeah, well,” she said, after a pause, “I suppose it must be pretty hard anyway, when it’s your own people…”

Horza nodded, still not looking up.

Yalson studied him for a little longer. “Did you love her?”

He didn’t reply immediately; his eyes seemed to inspect each of the precise, compact shapes in front of him, as though one of them concealed the answer. He shrugged. “Maybe,” he said, “once.” He cleared his throat, looked briefly round at Yalson, then leant back to the touchboard. “That was a long time ago.”

Yalson got up then, as he went back to his task, and put her hands on his shoulders. “I’m sorry, Horza.” He nodded again, and placed one hand over hers. “We’ll get them,” she said. “If that’s what you want. You and—”

He shook his head, looked round at her. “No. We go for the Mind, that’s all. If the Idirans do get in the way, I won’t care, but… no, there’s no point in risking more than we have to. Thanks, though.”

She nodded slowly. “That’s all right.” She bent, kissed him briefly, then went out. The man gazed at the closed door for a few moments, then turned back to the board full of alien symbols.

He programmed the ship’s computer to fire warning, then lethal laser shots at anybody or anything approaching it unless they could be identified by the distinctive electromagnetic emission signature of their suit as one of the Free Company. In addition, it required Horza’s — Kraiklyn’s — identity ring to make the CAT’s elevator work and, once on board, to take control of the ship itself. Horza felt safe enough doing this; only the ring would let them take over the ship, and he was confident nobody could take that from him, not without a greater risk to themselves than even a squad of mean and hungry Idirans could provide.

But it was possible that he might be killed, and the others might survive. Especially for Yalson, he wanted them to have some sort of escape route that didn’t depend totally on him.

They took down some of the plastic boarding in the Changer base so that if they did find the Mind they would be able to get it through. Dorolow wanted to bury the dead Changers, but Horza refused. He carried each of them to the tunnel entrance and left them there. He would take them with him when they left; return them to Heibohre. The natural freezer of Schar’s World’s atmosphere would preserve them until then. He looked down at Kierachell’s face for a moment, in the waning light of late afternoon, while a bank of clouds coming in from the frozen sea built over the distant mountains, and the wind freshened.

He would get the Mind. He was determined to, and he felt it in his bones. But if it came to a fire-fight with the ones who had done this, he wouldn’t shrink from it. He might even enjoy it. Perhaps Balveda wouldn’t have understood, but there were Idirans and Idirans. Xoralundra was a friend, and a kind and humane officer — he supposed the old Querl would be considered a moderate — and Horza knew others in the military and diplomatic missions whom he liked. But there were Idirans who were real fanatics, who despised all other species.

Xoralundra would not have murdered the Changers; it would have been unnecessary and inelegant… but then you didn’t send moderates on missions like this. You sent fanatics. Or a Changer.

Horza returned to the others. He got as far as the crippled flyer, now surrounded with the plastic boarding they had removed and facing the hole in the accommodation section as though it was about to enter a garage, when he heard firing.

He ran through the corridor leading to the rear of the section, readying his gun. “What is it?” he said into his helmet mike.

“Laser. Down the tunnel, from the shafts,” Yalson’s voice said. He ran into the open store-room area where the others were. The hole they had opened in the plastic boarding was four or five metres wide. As soon as Horza came through from the corridor, flame splashed from the wall alongside him, and he saw the brief airglows of lasertracks just to one side of his suit, leading back through the gap in the wall and down the tunnel. Obviously whoever was doing the shooting could see him. He rolled to one side and came up by Dorolow and Balveda, who were sheltering by a large portable winch. Holes burst through the wall of plastic boards, burning brightly, then going out. The whoop of laser-fire echoed down the tunnels.

“What happened?” Horza said, looking at Dorolow. He looked around the storage area. The rest were all there, taking cover where they could, apart from Yalson.

“Yalson went—” Dorolow began; then Yalson’s voice cut in:

“I came through the hole in the wall and got shot at. I’m lying on the ground. I’m OK, but I’d like to know if it’s all right to fire back. I won’t damage anything, will I?”

“Fire!” Horza yelled, as another fan of glowing tracks spattered a line of burning craters over the inside wall of the store room. “Fire back!”

“Thanks,” Yalson said. Horza heard the woman’s gun snap, then the dopplered echo of sound produced by superheated air. Explosions crashed from down the tunnel. “Hmm,” Yalson said.

“Think that’s got—” Neisin said from the far side of the storage area. His voice cut off as more fire slammed into the wall behind him. The wall was pockmarked with dark, bubbling holes.

“Bastard!” Yalson said. She fired back, in short, rapid bursts.

“Keep his head down,” Horza told her. “I’m coming forward to the wall. Dorolow, stay here with Balveda.” He got up and ran to the edge of the hole in the plastic boards. Smoking holes in the material showed how little protection it afforded, but he knelt there in its cover anyway. He could see Yalson’s feet a few metres out into the tunnel, spread on the smooth fused floor. He listened to her gun firing, then said, “Right. Stop long enough to let me see where it’s coming from, then hit it again.”

“OK.” Yalson stopped firing. Horza stuck his head out, feeling incredibly vulnerable, saw a couple of tiny sparks far down the tunnel and off to one side. He brought the gun up and fired continually; Yalson’s started again as well. His suit chirped; a screen lit up by his cheek, showing he’d been hit on the thigh. He couldn’t feel anything. The side of the tunnel, far down at the elevator shafts, pulsated with a thousand sparks of light.

Neisin appeared at the other side of the gap in the boards, kneeling like Horza and firing his projectile rifle. The side of the tunnel detonated with flashes and smoke; shock waves blew up the tunnel, shaking the plastic boarding and ringing in Horza’s ears.

“Enough!” he shouted. He stopped firing. Yalson stopped. Neisin put in one final burst, then stopped, too. Horza ran out through the gap, across the dark rock floor of the tunnel outside and over to the side wall. He flattened himself there, getting some cover from the slight protrusion of a blast door’s edge further down the tunnel.

Where their target had been, there was a scatter of dull red shards lying on the tunnel floor, cooling from the yellow heat of the laser fire which had torn them from the wall. On the helmet nightsight, Horza could see a series of rippling waves of warm smoke and gas flowing silently under the roof of the tunnel from the damaged area.

“Yalson, get over here,” he said. Yalson rolled over and over until she bumped into the wall just behind him. She got quickly to her feet and flattened out beside him. “I think we got it,” Horza broadcasted. Neisin, still kneeling at the gap in the boarding, looked out, the rapidfire micro-projectile rifle waving to and fro as though its owner expected a further attack from out of the tunnel walls.

Horza started forward, keeping his back to the wall. He got to the edge of the blast door. Most of its metre-thick bulk was stowed in its recess in the wall, but about half a metre protruded. Horza looked down the tunnel again. The wreckage was still glowing, like hot coals scattered on the tunnel floor. The wave of hot black smoke passed overhead, wafting slowly up the tunnel. Horza looked to his other side. Yalson had followed him. “Stay here,” he said.

He walked down the side of the wall to the first of the elevator shafts. They had been firing at the third and last one, judging by the grouping of the craters and scars all around its open, buckled doors. Horza saw a half-melted laser carbine lying in the middle of the tunnel floor. He poked his head out from the wall, frowning.

Right on the very lip of the elevator shaft, between the scarred and holed doors, surrounded by a sea of dull, red-glowing wreckage, he was sure he could see a pair of hands — gloved, stubby-fingered, injured (one finger was missing from the glove nearer him), but hands without a doubt. It looked like somebody was hanging inside the shaft by the tips of their fingers. He focused the tight beam of his communicator, aiming in the direction he was looking at. “Hello?” he said in Idiran. “Medjel? Medjel in the elevator shaft? Do you hear me? Report at once.”

The hands didn’t move. He edged closer.

“What was it?” Wubslin’s voice came through the speakers.

“Just a moment,” Horza said. He went closer, rifle ready. One of the hands moved slightly, as though trying to get a better grip on the lip of the tunnel floor. Horza’s heart thudded. He went towards the tall open doors, his feet crunching on the warm debris. He saw semi-suited arms as he went closer, then the top of a long, laser-scarred helmet—

With a rasping noise he had heard medjel make when they charged during a battle, a third hand — he knew it was a foot, but it looked like a hand and it was holding a small pistol — flashed up from the elevator shaft at the same time as the medjel’s head looked up and out, straight at him. He started to duck. The pistol cracked, its plasma bolt missing him by only a few centimetres.

Horza shot quickly, ducking and going to one side. Fire blew out all around the lip of the elevator, smashing into the gloves. With a scream the gloved hands vanished. Light flickered briefly in the circular shaft. Horza ran forward, stuck his head between the doors and looked down.

The dim shape of the falling medjel was lit by the guttering fire still burning on its suit gloves. Somehow it still held the plasma pistol; as it fell, screaming, it fired the small weapon, the cracks of its shots and the flashes from the bolts drawing further away as the creature holding it, firing it, whirled, its six limbs flailing, down into the darkness.

“Horza!” Yalson shouted. “Are you all right? What the fuck was that?”

“I’m fine,” he said. The medjel was a tiny, wriggling shape, deep in the shaft’s tunnel of vertical night. Its screams still echoed, the microscopic sparks of its burning hands and the firing plasma pistol still flaring. Horza looked away. A few small thuds recorded the hapless creature’s contact with the sides of the shaft as it dropped.

“What’s that noise?” Dorolow said.

“The medjel was still alive. It shot at me, but I got it,” Horza told them, walking away from the open elevator doors. “It fell — it’s still falling — down the elevator shaft.”

“Shit!” breathed Neisin, still listening to the faint, fading, echoing screams. “How deep is that?”

“Ten kilometres, if none of the blast doors are shut,” Horza said. He looked at the external controls for the other two lifts and the transit capsule entrance. They had escaped more or less undamaged. The doors leading to the transit tubes were open. They had been closed when Horza inspected the area earlier.

Yalson shouldered her gun and walked down the tunnel towards Horza. “Well,” she said, “let’s get this op on the road.”

“Yeah,” Neisin said. “What the hell! These guys aren’t so tough after all. That’s one down already.”

“Yeah, deep down,” Yalson said.

Horza inspected the damage to his suit while the others came down the tunnel. There was a burn on the right thigh, a millimetre deep and a couple of finger-breadths wide. Save for the unlikely chance of another shot falling on the same place, it hadn’t harmed the suit.

“A fine start, if you ask me,” the drone muttered as it started down the tunnels with the others.

Horza went back to the tall, buckled, pitted doors of the lift shaft and looked down. With the magnifier up full he could just make out a tiny sparkling, deep, deep below. The helmet’s external mikes picked up a noise, but from so far away and so full of echoes, it sounded like nothing more than the wind starting to moan through a fence.

They clustered in front of the opened doors of an elevator shaft, not the one the medjel had fallen down. The doors were twice the height of anyone of them, dwarfing them all, as though they were children. Horza had opened those doors, taken a good look, floated down on the suit’s AG a little way, then come back up. It all looked safe.

“I’ll go first,” he told the assembled group. “If we hit any trouble, let off a couple of chaff grenades and get back up here. We’re going to the main system level, about five kilometres down. Once we get through the doors that’s us more or less in station four. From there we’ll be able to turn on the power, something the Idirans haven’t been able to do. After that we’ll have transport in the form of transit-tube capsules.”

“What about the trains?” Wubslin asked.

“The transit tubes are faster,” Horza said. “We might have to start a train up if we capture the Mind; depends exactly how big it is. Besides, unless they’ve moved them since I was here, the nearest trains will be at station two or station six, not here. But there is a spiral tunnel at station one we could bring a System train up.”

“What about the transit tube up here?” Yalson said. “If that’s the way that medjel suddenly appeared, what’s to stop another one hiking up the tunnel?”

Horza shrugged. “Nothing. I don’t want to fuse the doors closed in case we want to come back that way once we have the Mind, but if one of them does come up that way, so what? It’ll be one less down there for us to worry about. Anyway, somebody can stay up here until we’re all safely down the lift shaft, then follow us. But I don’t think there will be another one so close behind that one.”

“Yes, that one you didn’t manage to talk into believing you were both on the same side,” the drone said testily.

Horza squatted down on his haunches to look at the drone; it was invisible from above because of the pellet of equipment it was carrying.

“That one,” he said, “didn’t have a communicator, did it? Whereas any Idirans down there certainly will have the ones they took from the base, won’t they? And medjel do as Idirans tell them to, right?” He waited for the machine to reply and when it didn’t he repeated, “Right?”

Horza had the impression that, had the drone been human, it would have spat.

“Whatever you say, sir,” the drone said.

“And what do I do, Horza?” Balveda said, standing in her fabric jumpsuit, wearing a fur jacket on top. “Do you intend to throw me down the shaft and say you forgot I didn’t have any AG, or do I have to walk down the transit tunnel?”

“You’ll come with me.”

“And if we hit trouble, you’ll… what?” Balveda asked.

“I don’t think we’ll hit any trouble,” Horza said.

“You’re sure there were no AG harnesses in the base?” Aviger said.

Horza nodded. “If there had been, don’t you think one of the medjel we’ve encountered so far would have had them on?”

“Maybe the Idirans are using them.”

“They’re too heavy.”

“They could use two,” Aviger insisted.

“There were no harnesses,” Horza said through his teeth. “We were never allowed any. We weren’t supposed to go into the Command System apart from yearly inspections, when we could power everything up. We did go in; we walked down the spiral to station four, like that medjel must have slogged up, but we weren’t supposed to, and we weren’t allowed gravity harnesses. They’d have made getting down there too easy.”

“Dammit, let’s get down there,” Yalson said impatiently, looking at the others. Aviger shrugged.

“If my AG fails with all this rubbish I’m carrying—” the drone began, its voice muffled by the pallet over its top surface.

“You drop any of that stuff down that shaft and you’d be as well to follow it, machine,” Horza said. “Now just save your energy for floating, not talking. You’ll follow me; keep five or six hundred metres up. Yalson, will you stay up here till we get the doors open?” Yalson nodded. “The rest of you,” he looked round them, “come after the drone. Don’t bunch up too much but don’t get separated. Wubslin, stay at the same level as the machine, and have chaff grenades ready.” Horza held his hand out to Balveda. “Madam?”

He held Balveda to him; she rested her feet on his boots, facing away from him; then Horza stepped into the shaft, and they descended together into the night-dark depths.

“See you at the bottom,” Neisin said in the helmet speakers.

“We’re not going to the bottom, Neisin,” Horza sighed, shifting his arm slightly round Balveda’s waist. “We’re going to the main system level. I’ll see you there.”

“Yeah, OK; wherever.”

They fell on AG without incident, and Horza forced open the doors at the system level five kilometres below in the rock.

There had been only one exchange with Balveda on the way down, a minute or so after they had started out:

“Horza?”

“What?”

“If any shooting starts… from down there, or anything happens and you have to let go… I mean, drop me…”

“What, Balveda?”

“Kill me. I’m serious. Shoot me; I’d rather that than fall all that way.”

“Nothing,” Horza said after a moment’s thought, “would give me greater pleasure.”

They dropped into the chill stone silence of the tunnel’s black throat, clasped like lovers.

“Goddamn it,” Horza said softly.

He and Wubslin stood in a room just off the dark, echoing vault that was station four. The others were waiting outside. The lights on Horza and Wubslin’s suits illuminated a space packed with electric switching gear; the walls were covered with screens and controls. Thick cables snaked over the ceiling and along the walls, and metal floor-plates covered conduits filled with more electrical equipment.

There was a smell of burning in the room. A long black sooty scar had printed itself onto one wall, above charred and melted cabling.

They had noticed the smell on their walk through the connecting tunnels from the shaft to the station. Horza had smelt it and felt gall rise in his throat; the odour was faint and could not have turned the most sensitive of stomachs, but Horza had known what it meant.

“Think we can mend it?” Wubslin asked. Horza shook his head.

“Probably not. This happened once on a yearly test when I was here before. We powered up in the wrong sequence and blew that same cable-run; if they’ve done what we did there’ll be worse damage further down, in the deeper levels. Took us weeks to repair it.” Horza shook his head. “Damn,” he said.

“I guess it was pretty smart of those Idirans to figure out as much as they did,” Wubslin said, opening his visor to reach in and scratch his head awkwardly. “I mean, to get this far.”

“Yes,” Horza said, kicking a large transformer. “Too goddamn smart.”

They made a brief search of the station complex, then gathered again in the main cavern and crowded round the jury-rigged mass sensor Wubslin had removed from the Clear Air Turbulence. Wires and light-fibres were tangled about it, and attached to the top of the machine was a cannibalised screen from the ship’s bridge, now plugged directly into the sensor.

The screen lit up. Wubslin fiddled with its controls. The screen hologram showed a diagrammatic representation of a sphere, with three axes shown in perspective.

“That’s about four kilometres,” Wubslin said. He seemed to be talking to the mass sensor, not the people around it. “Let’s try eight…” He touched the controls again. The number of lines on the axes doubled. One very faint smudge of light blinked near the edge of the display.

“Is that it?” Dorolow said. “Is that where it is?”

“No,” Wubslin said, fiddling with the controls again, trying to get the little patch of light to become clearer. “Not dense enough.” Wubslin doubled the range twice more, but only the single trace remained, submerged in clutter.

Horza looked round, orienting himself with the grid pattern shown on the screen. “Would that thing be fooled by a pile of uranium?”

“Oh yeah,” Wubslin said, nodding. “The power we’re putting through it, any radiation will upset it a bit. That’s why we’re down to roughly thirty kilometres maximum anyway, see? Just because of all this granite. Yeah, if there’s a reactor, even an old one, it’ll show up when the sensor’s reader waves get to it. But just like this, as a patch. If this Mind’s only fifteen metres long and weighs ten thousand tonnes, it’ll be really bright. Like a star on the screen.”

“OK,” Horza said. “That’s probably just the reactor down at the deepest service level.”

“Oh,” Wubslin said. “They had reactors, too?”

“Back-up,” Horza said. “That one was for ventilation fans if the natural circulation couldn’t cope with smoke or gas. The trains have reactors, too, in case the geothermal failed.” Horza checked the reading on the screen with the built-in mass sensor in his suit, but the faint trace of the back-up reactor was out of its range.

“Should we investigate this one?” Wubslin asked, his face lit by the glowing screen.

Horza straightened up, shaking his head. “No,” he said wearily. “Not for now.”

They sat in the station and had something to eat. The station was over three hundred metres long and twice the width of the main tunnels. The metal rails the Command System trains ran on stretched across the level floor of fused rock in double tracks, appearing from one wall through an inverted U and disappearing through another, towards the repair and maintenance area. At either end of the station there were sets of gantries and ramps which rose almost to the roof. Those provided access to the two upper floors of the trains when they were in the station, Horza explained when Neisin asked about them.

“I can’t wait to see these trains,” Wubslin mumbled, mouth full.

“You won’t be able to see them if there’s no light,” Aviger told him.

“I think it’s intolerable that I have to go on carrying all that junk,” the drone said. It had set the equipment-loaded pallet down. “And now I’m told I have to carry even more weight!”

“I’m not that heavy, Unaha-Closp,” said Balveda.

“You’ll manage,” Horza told the machine. With no power the only thing they could do was use their suits’ AG to float along to the next station; it would be slower than the transit tube, but quicker than walking. Balveda would have to be carried by the drone.

“Horza… I was wondering,” Yalson said.

“What?”

“How much radiation have we all soaked up recently?”

“Not much.” Horza checked the small screen inside his helmet. The radiation level wasn’t dangerous; the granite around them gave off a little; but even if they hadn’t been suited up, they’d have been in no real danger. “Why?”

“Nothing.” Yalson shrugged. “Just with all these reactors, and this granite, and that blast when the bomb went off in the gear you vac’d from the CAT… well, I thought we might have taken a dose. Being on the Megaship when Lamm tried to blow it apart didn’t help, either. But if you say we’re OK, we’re OK.”

“Unless somebody’s particularly sensitive to it, we haven’t got much to worry about.”

Yalson nodded.

Horza was wondering whether they should split up. Should they all go together, or should they go in two groups, one down each of the foot tunnels which accompanied the main line and the transit tube? They could even split up further and have somebody go down each of the six tunnels which led from station to station; that was going too far, but it showed how many possibilities there were. Split up, they might be better placed for a flanking attack if one group encountered the Idirans, though they wouldn’t initially have the same firepower. They wouldn’t be increasing their chances of finding the Mind, not if the mass sensor was working properly, but they would be increasing their chances of stumbling into the Idirans in the first place. Staying together, though, in the one tunnel, gave Horza a feeling of claustrophobic foreboding. One grenade would wipe them out; a single fan of heavy laser-fire would kill or disable all of them.

It was like being set a cunning but unlikely problem in one of the Heibohre Military Academy’s term exams.

He couldn’t even decide which way to head. When they’d searched the station, Yalson had seen marks in the thin layer of dust on the foot-tunnel floor leading to station five, which suggested the Idirans had gone that way. But ought they to follow, or should they go in the opposite direction? If they followed, and he couldn’t convince the Idirans he was on their side, they’d have to fight.

But if they went in the other direction and turned the electricity on at station one, they’d be giving power to the Idirans as well. There was no way of restricting the energy to one part of the Command System. Each station could isolate its section of track from the supply loop, but the circuitry had been designed so that no single traitor — or incompetent — could cut off the whole System. So the Idirans, too, would have use of the transit tubes, the trains themselves and the engineering workshops… Better to find them and try to parley; settle the issue one way or the other.

Horza shook his head. This whole thing was too complicated. The Command System, with its tunnels and caverns, its levels and shafts, its sidings and loops and cross-overs and points, seemed like some infernal closed-circuit flow chart for his thoughts.

He would sleep on it. He needed sleep now, like the rest of them. He could sense it in them. The machine might get run down but it didn’t need sleep, and Balveda still seemed alert enough, but all the rest were showing signs of needing a deeper rest than just sitting down. According to their body clocks it was time to sleep; he would be foolish to try to push them further.

He had a restrainer harness on the pallet. That should keep Balveda secure. The machine could stand guard, and he would use the remote sensor on his suit to watch for movement in the immediate area where they slept; they ought to be safe enough.

They finished their meal. Nobody disagreed with the idea of turning in. Balveda was trussed in the restrainer harness and barricaded in one of the empty store rooms off the platform. Unaha-Closp was told to sit itself up on one of the tall gantries and stay still unless it heard or saw anything untoward. Horza set his remote sensor near where he would sleep, on one of the lower girders of a hoist mechanism. He had wanted a word with Yalson, but by the time he had finished making all these arrangements several of the others, including Yalson, had fallen asleep already, lying back against the wall or laid out on the ground, their visors blanked or their heads turned away from the weak lights of the others’ suits.

Horza watched Wubslin wander around the station for a bit, then the engineer, too, lay down, and everything was still. Horza switched the remote sensor on, primed to alarm if it sensed anything above a certain low level of movement.

He slept fitfully; his dreams woke him.

Ghosts chased him in echoing docks and silent, deserted ships, and when he turned to face them, their eyes were always waiting, like targets, like mouths; and the mouths swallowed him, so that he fell into the eye’s black mouth, past ice rimming it, dead ice rimming the cold, swallowing eye; and then he wasn’t falling but running, running with a leaden, pitch-like slowness, through the bone cavities in his own skull, which was slowly disintegrating; a cold planet riddled with tunnels, crashing and crumpling against a never-ending wall of ice, until the wreckage caught him and he fell, burning, into the cold eye tunnel again, and as he fell, a noise came, from the throat of the cold ice-eye and from his own mouth and chilled him more than ice, and the noise said:

“EEEeee…”