Consider Phlebas

11. The Command System: Stations

He was being shaken gently.

“Wake up, now. Come on, wake up. Come on, now, up you get…”

He recognised the voice as Xoralundra’s. The old Idiran was trying to get him to wake up. He pretended to stay asleep.

“I know you’re awake. Come on, now, it’s time to get up.”

He opened his eyes with a false weariness. Xoralundra was there, in a bright blue circular room with lots of large couches set into alcoves in the blue material. Above hung a white sky with black clouds. It was very bright in the room. He shielded his eyes and looked at the Idiran.

“What happened to the Command System?” he said, looking around the circular blue room.

“That dream is over now. You did well, passed with flying colours. The Academy and I are very pleased with you.”

He couldn’t help but feel pleased. A warm glow seemed to envelop him, and he couldn’t stop a smile appearing on his face.

“Thanks,” he said. The Querl nodded.

“You did very well as Bora Horza Gobuchul,” Xoralundra said in his rumbling great voice. “Now you should take some time off; go and play with Gierashell.”

He was swinging his feet off the bed, getting ready to jump down to the floor, when Xoralundra said that. He smiled at the old Querl.

“Who?” he laughed.

“Your friend; Gierashell,” the Idiran said.

“You mean Kierachell,” he laughed, shaking his head; Xoralundra must be getting old!

“I mean Gierashell,” the Idiran insisted coldly, stepping back and looking at him strangely. “Who is Kierachell?”

“You mean you don’t know? But how could you get her name wrong?” he said, shaking his head again at the Querl’s foolishness. Or was this still part of some test?

“Just a moment,” Xoralundra said. He looked at something in his hand which threw coloured lights across his broad, gleaming face. Then he slapped his other hand to his mouth, an expression of astonished surprise on his face as he turned to him and said, “Oh! Sorry!” and suddenly reached over and shoved him back into the—

He sat upright. Something whined in his ear.

He sat back down again slowly, looking round in the grainy darkness to see if any of the others had noticed, but they were all still. He told the remote sensor alarm to switch off. The whine in his ear faded. Unaha-Closp’s casing could be seen high on the far gantry.

Horza opened his visor and wiped some sweat from his nose and brows. The drone had no doubt seen him each time he woke up. He wondered what it was thinking now, what it thought of him. Could it see well enough to know that he was having nightmares? Could it see through his visor to his face, or sense the small twitches his body made while his brain constructed its own images from the debris of all his days? He could blank the visor out; he could set the suit to expand and lock rigid.

He thought about how he must look to it: a small, soft naked thing writhing in a hard cocoon, convulsed with illusions in its coma.

He decided to stay awake until the others started to rise.

The night passed, and the Free Company awoke to darkness and the labyrinth. The drone said nothing about seeing him wake up during the night, and he didn’t ask it. He was falsely jolly and hearty, going round the others, laughing and slapping backs, telling them they’d get to station seven today and there they could turn on the lights and get the transit tubes working.

“Tell you what, Wubslin,” he said, grinning at the engineer as he rubbed his eyes, “we’ll see if we can’t get one of those big trains working, just for the hell of it.”

“Well,” Wubslin yawned, “if that’s all right…”

“Why not?” Horza said, spreading his arms out. “I think Mr Adequate’s leaving us to it; he’s turning a blind eye to this whole thing. We’ll get one of those super-trains running, eh?”

Wubslin stretched, smiling and nodding. “Well, yeah, sounds like a good idea to me.” Horza smiled widely, winked at Wubslin and went to release Balveda. It was like going to release a wild animal, he thought, as he shifted the empty cable drum he had used to block the door. He half expected to find Balveda gone, miraculously escaped from her bonds and disappeared from the room without opening the door; but when he looked in, there she was, lying calmly in her warm clothes, the harness making troughs in the fur of the jacket and still attached to the wall Horza had fixed it to.

“Good morning, Perosteck!” he said breezily.

“Horza,” the woman said grumpily, sitting slowly upright, flexing her shoulders and arching her neck, “twenty years at my mother’s side, more than I care to think of as a gay and dashing young blade indulging in all the pleasures the Culture has ever produced, one or two of maturity, seventeen in Contact and four in Special Circumstances have not made me pleasant to know or quick to wake in the mornings. You wouldn’t have some water to drink, would you? I’ve slept too long, I wasn’t comfortable, it’s cold and dark, I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was like at the moment, and… I mentioned water a moment or two ago; did you hear? Or aren’t I allowed any?”

“I’ll get you some,” he said, going back to the door. He stopped there. “You’re right, by the way. You are pretty off-putting in the morning.”

Balveda shook her head in the darkness. She put one finger in her mouth and rubbed it around on one side, as though massaging her gums or cleaning her teeth, then she just sat with her head between her knees, staring at the jet-black nothing of the cold rock floor beneath her, wondering if this was the day she died.

They stood in a huge semi-circular alcove carved out of the rock and looking out over the dark space of station four’s repair and maintenance area. The cavern was three hundred metres or more square, and from the bottom of the scooped gallery they stood on to the floor of the vast cave — littered with machinery and equipment — was a thirty-metre drop.

Great cradle-arms capable of lifting and holding an entire Command System train were suspended from the roof above, another thirty metres up in the gloom. In the mid-distance a suspended gantry lanced out over the cave, from a gallery on one side to the other, bisecting the cavern’s dark bulk.

They were ready to move; Horza gave the order.

Wubslin and Neisin each headed down small side tubes towards the main Command System tunnel and the transit tubeway respectively, using AG. Once in the tunnels they would keep level with the main group. Horza switched on his own AG, rose about a metre from the floor and floated down a branch tunnel of the foot gallery, then started slowly forward, down into the darkness, towards station five, thirty kilometres away. The rest would follow him, also floating. Balveda shared the pallet with the equipment.

He smiled when Balveda sat down on the pallet; she suddenly reminded him of Fwi-Song sitting on his heavy-duty litter, in the space and sunlight of a place now gone. The comparison struck him as wonderfully absurd.

Horza floated along the foot tunnel, stopping to check the side tubes as they appeared and contacting the others whenever he did so. His suit senses were turned as high as they would go; any light, the slightest noise, an alteration in the air flow, even vibrations in the rock around him: all were catered for. Unusual smells would register, too, as would power flowing through the cables buried in the tunnel walls and any sort of broadcast communication.

He’d thought about signalling the Idirans as they went along, but decided not to. He had sent one short signal from station four, without receiving a reply, but to send more on the way would be to give too much away if (as he suspected) the Idirans were not in a mood to listen.

He moved through the darkness as though sitting on an invisible seat, the CREWS cradled in his arms. He heard his heartbeat, his breathing and the quiet slipstreaming of the cold, half-stale air around his suit. The suit registered vague background radiation from the surrounding granite, punctuated by intermittent cosmic rays. On the faceplate of the suit’s helmet, he watched a ghostly radar image of the tunnels as they unwound through the rock.

In places the tunnel ran straight. If he turned he could see the main group following half a kilometre behind him. In other places the tunnel described a series of shallow curves, cutting down the view provided by the scanning radar to a couple of hundred metres or less, so that he seemed to float alone in the chill blackness.

At station five they found a battleground.

His suit had picked up odd scents; that had been the first sign, organic molecules in the air, carbonised and burnt. He’d told the others to stop, gone on ahead cautiously.

Four dead medjel were laid out near one wall of the dark, deserted cavern, their burned and dismembered bodies echoing the formation of frozen Changer corpses at the surface base. Idiran religious symbols had been burned onto the wall over the fallen.

There had been a fire-fight. The station walls were pocked with small craters and long laser scars. Horza found the remains of one laser rifle, smashed, a small piece of metal embedded in it. The medjel bodies had been torn apart by hundreds more of the same tiny projectiles.

At the far end of the station, behind the half-demolished remains of one set of access ramps, he found the scattered components of some crudely manufactured machine, a kind of gun on wheels, like a miniature armoured car. Its mangled turret still contained some of the projectile ammunition, and more bullets were scattered like wind-seeds about the flame-seared wreck. Horza smiled slightly at the debris, weighing a handful of the unused projectiles in his hand.

“The Mind?” Wubslin said, looking down at what was left of the small vehicle. “It made this thing?” He scratched his head.

“Must have,” Horza said, watching Yalson poke warily at the torn metal of the wreck’s hull with one booted foot, gun ready. “There was nothing like this down here, but you could manufacture it, in one of the workshops; a few of the old machines still work. It’d be difficult, but if the Mind still had some of its fields working, and maybe a drone or two, it could do it. It had the time.”

“Pretty crude,” Wubslin said, turning over a piece of the gun mechanism in his hand. He turned and looked back at the distant corpses of the medjel and added, “Worked well enough, though.”

“No more medjel, by my count,” Horza said.

“Still two Idirans left,” Yalson said sourly, kicking at a small rubber wheel. It rolled a couple of metres across the debris and flopped over again, near Neisin, who was celebrating the discovery of the demised medjel with a drink from his flask.

“You sure these Idirans aren’t still here?” Aviger asked, looking round anxiously. Dorolow peered into the darkness, too, and made the sign of the Circle of Flame.

“Positive,” Horza said. “I checked.” Station five hadn’t been difficult to search; it was an ordinary station, just a set of points, a chicane in the Command System’s double loop and a place for the trains to stop and connect themselves with the communication links to the planet’s surface. There were a few rooms and storage areas off the main cavern, but no power-switching gear, no barracks or control rooms, and no vast repair and maintenance area. Marks in the dust showed where the Idirans had walked away from the station after the battle with the Mind’s crude automaton, heading for station six.

“You think there’ll be a train at the next station?” Wubslin said.

Horza nodded. “Should be.” The engineer nodded, too, staring vacantly at the double sets of steel rails gleaming on the station floor.

Balveda swung herself off the pallet, stretching her legs. Horza still had the suit’s infra-red sensor on, and saw the warmth of the Culture agent’s breath waft from her mouth in a dimly glowing cloud. She clapped her hands and stamped her feet.

“Still not too warm, is it?” she said.

“Don’t worry,” grumbled the drone from underneath the pallet. “I may start to overheat soon; that ought to keep you cosy until I seize up completely.”

Balveda smiled a little and sat back on the pallet, looking at Horza. “Still thinking of trying to convince your tripedal pals you’re all on the same side?” she said.

“Huh!” said the drone.

“We’ll see,” was all Horza would say.

Again his breathing, his heartbeat, the slow wash of stale air.

The tunnels led on into the deep night of the ancient rock like an insidious, circular maze.

“The war won’t end,” Aviger said. “It’ll just die away.” Horza floated along the tunnel, half listening to the others talk over the open channel as they followed behind him. He’d switched his suit’s external mikes from the helmet speakers to a small screen near his cheek; the trace showed silence. Aviger continued, “I don’t think the Culture will give in like everybody thinks it will. I think they’ll keep fighting because they believe in it. The Idirans won’t give in, either; they’ll keep fighting to the last, and they and the Culture will just keep going at each other all the time, all over the galaxy eventually, and their weapons and bombs and rays and things will just keep getting better and better, and in the end the whole galaxy will become a battleground until they’ve blown up all the stars and planets and Orbitals and everything else big enough to stand on, and then they’ll destroy all of each other’s big ships and then the little ships, too, until everybody’ll be living in single suits, blowing each other up with weapons that could destroy a planet… and that’s how it’ll end; probably they’ll invent guns or drones that are even smaller, and there’ll only be a few smaller and smaller machines fighting over whatever’s left of the galaxy, and there’ll be nobody left to know how it all started in the first place.”

“Well,” said Unaha-Closp’s voice, “that sounds like a lot of fun. And what if things go badly?”

“That’s too negative an attitude to battle, Aviger.” Dorolow’s high-pitched voice broke in, “You have to be positive. Contest is formative; battle is a testing, war a part of life and the evolutionary process. In its extremity, we find ourselves.”

“…Usually in the shit,” Yalson said. Horza grinned.

“Yalson,” Dorolow began, “even if you don’t be—”

“Hold it,” Horza said suddenly. The screen near his cheek had flickered. “Wait there. I’m picking up some sound from ahead.” He stopped, sat still in mid-air and put the sound from outside through the helmet speakers.

A low noise, deep and boomy, like heavy surf from a long way off, or a thunderstorm in distant mountains.

“Well, there’s something making a noise up there,” Horza said.

“How far to the next station?” Yalson said.

“About two kilometres.”

“Think it’s them?” Neisin sounded nervous.

“Probably,” Horza said. “OK. I’m going ahead. Yalson, put Balveda in the restrainer harness. Everybody check weapons. No noise. Wubslin, Neisin, go forward slowly. Stop as soon as you can see the station. I’m going to try talking to these guys.”

The noise boomed vaguely on, making him think of a rockslide, heard from a mine deep inside a mountain.

He approached the station. A blast door came into view round a corner. The station would be only another hundred metres beyond. He heard some heavy clunking noises; they came down the dark tunnel, deep and resonant, hardly muffled by the distance, sounding like huge switches being closed, massive chains being fastened. The suit registered organic molecules in the air — Idiran scent. He passed the edge of the blast door and saw the station.

There was light in station six, dim and yellow, as though from a weak torch. He waited for Wubslin and Neisin to tell him they could see the station from their tunnels, then he went closer.

A Command System train stood in station six, its rotund bulk three storeys tall and three hundred metres long, half filling the cylindrical cavern. The light came from the train’s far end, high at the front, where the control deck was. The sounds came from the train, too. He moved across the foot tunnel so he could see the rest of the station.

At the far end of the platform floated the Mind.

He stared at it for a moment, then magnified the image to make sure. It looked genuine; an ellipsoid, maybe fifteen metres long and three in diameter, silvery yellow in the weak light spilling from the train’s control cabin, and floating in the stale air like a dead fish on the surface of a still pond. He checked the suit’s mass sensor. It registered the fuzzy signal of the train’s reactor, but nothing else.

“Yalson,” he said, whispering even though he knew it was unnecessary, “anything on that mass sensor?”

“Just a weak trace; a reactor, I guess.”

“Wubslin,” Horza said, “I can see what looks like the Mind in the station, floating at the far end. But it’s not showing on either sensor. Would its AG make it invisible to the sensors?”

“Shouldn’t,” Wubslin’s puzzled voice came back. “Might fool a passive gravity sensor, but not—”

A loud, metallic breaking noise came from the train. Horza’s suit registered an abrupt increase in local radiation. “Holy shit!” he said.

“What’s happening?” Yalson said. More clicking, snapping noises echoed through the station, and another weak, yellow light appeared, from beneath the reactor car in the middle of the train.

“They’re fucking about with the reactor carriage, that’s what’s happening,” Horza said.

“God,” Wubslin said. “Don’t they know how old all this stuff is?”

“What are they doing that for?” Aviger said.

“Could be trying to get the train to run under its own power,” Horza said. “Crazy bastards.”

“Maybe they’re too lazy to push their prize back to the surface,” the drone suggested.

“These… nuclear reactors, they can’t explode, can they?” Aviger said, just as a blinding blue light burst from under the centre of the train. Horza flinched, his eyes closed. He heard Wubslin shout something. He waited for the blast, the noise, death.

He looked up. The light still flashed and sparkled, under the reactor car. He heard an erratic hissing noise, like static.

“Horza!” Yalson shouted.

“God’s balls!” Wubslin said. “I nearly filled my pants.”

“It’s OK,” Horza said. “I thought they’d blown the damn thing up. What is that, Wubslin?”

“Welding, I think,” Wubslin said. “Electric arc.”

“Right,” Horza said. “Let’s stop these crazies before they blow us all away. Yalson, join me. Dorolow, meet up with Wubslin. Aviger, stay with Balveda.”

It took a few minutes for the others to arrange themselves. Horza watched the bright, flickering blue light as it sizzled away under the centre of the train. Then it stopped. The station was lit only by the two weak lights from the control deck and reactor car. Yalson floated down the foot tunnel and landed gently at Horza’s side.

“Ready,” Dorolow said over the intercom. Then a screen in Horza’s helmet flashed; a speaker beeped in his ear. Something had transmitted a signal near by; not one of their suits, or the drone.

“What was that?” Wubslin said. Then: “Look, there. On the ground. Looks like a communicator.” Horza and Yalson looked at each other. “Horza,” Wubslin said, “there’s a communicator on the floor of the tunnel here; I think it’s on. It must have picked up the noise of Dorolow setting down beside me. That was what transmitted; they’re using it as a bug.”

“Sorry,” Dorolow said.

“Well, don’t touch the thing,” Yalson said quickly. “Could be boobied.”

“So. Now they know we’re here,” Aviger said.

“They were going to know soon anyway,” Horza said. “I’ll try hailing them; everybody ready, in case they don’t want to talk.”

Horza cut his AG and walked to the end of the tunnel, almost onto the level platform of the station. Another communicator lying there transmitted its single pulse. Horza looked at the great, dark train and switched on his suit PA. He drew a breath, ready to speak in Idiran.

Something flashed from a slit-like window near the rear of the train. His head was knocked back inside the helmet, and he fell, stunned, his ears ringing. The noise of the shot echoed through the station. The suit alarm beeped frantically at him. Horza rolled over against the tunnel wall; more shots slammed down on him, flaring against the suit helmet and body.

Yalson ducked and ran. She skidded to the lip of the tunnel and raked fire over the window the shots were coming from, then swivelled, grabbed Horza by one arm and pulled him further into the tunnel. Plasma bolts crashed into the wall he’d been lying against. “Horza?” she shouted, shaking him.

“Command override, level zero,” a small voice chirped in Horza’s buzzing ears. “This suit has sustained system-fatal damage automatically voiding all warranties from this point; immediate total overhaul required. Further use at wearer’s risk. Powering down.”

Horza tried to tell Yalson he was all right, but the communicator was dead. He pointed to his head, to make her understand this. Then more shots, from the nose of the train, came bursting into the foot tunnel. Yalson dived to the floor and started firing back. “Fire!” she yelled to the others. “Get those bastards!”

Horza watched Yalson shooting at the far end of the train. Laser trails flicked out from the left side of their tunnel, tracer shells from the right, as the others joined in. The station filled with a spastic, blazing light; shadows leapt and danced across the walls and ceiling. He lay there, stunned, dull-headed, listening to the muffled cacophony of sound breaking against his suit like surf. He fumbled with his laser rifle, trying to remember how to fire it. He really had to help the others fight the Idirans. His head hurt.

Yalson stopped shooting. The front of the train glowed red where she’d been firing at it. The explosive shells from Neisin’s gun crackled round the window the first shots had come from; short bursts of fire. Wubslin and Dorolow had come out of the main tunnel, past the slab of the train’s rear. They crouched near the wall, firing at the same window as Neisin.

The plasma fire had stopped. The humans stopped shooting, too. The station went dark; the gunfire echoed, faded. Horza tried to stand up, but somebody seemed to have removed the bones from his legs.

“Anybody—” Yalson began.

Fire cascaded around Wubslin and Dorolow, lancing out from the lower deck of the last carriage. Dorolow screamed and fell. Hand spasming, her gun blasted wildly over the cavern roof. Wubslin rolled along the ground, shooting back at the Idirans. Yalson and Neisin joined in. The carriage’s skin buckled and burst under the fusilade. Dorolow lay on the platform, moving spasmodically, moaning.

More shots came from the front of the train, bursting around the tunnel entrances. Then something moved midway up the rear carriage, near the rear access gantry; an Idiran ran from a carriage door and along the middle ramp. He levelled a gun and fired down, first at Dorolow where she lay on the ground, then at Wubslin, lying near the side of the train.

Dorolow’s suit was blown tumbling and burning across the black floor of the station. Wubslin’s gun arm was hit. Then Yalson’s shots found the Idiran, scattering fire across his suit, the structure of the gantry and the side of the train. The ramp supports gave way before the Idiran’s armoured suit; softening and disintegrating under the stream of fire, the gantry tubing sagged and collapsed, sending the top platform of the ramp crashing down, trapping the Idiran warrior underneath the smoking wreckage. Wubslin cursed and shot one-handed at the nose of the train, where the second Idiran was still firing.

Horza lay against the wall, his ears roaring, his skin cold and sweat-slicked. He felt numb, dissociated. He wanted to take his helmet off and gasp at some fresh air but knew he shouldn’t. Even though the helmet was damaged it would still protect him if he was shot again. He compromised by opening the visor. Sound assaulted his ears. Shockwaves thrummed at his chest. Yalson looked back at him, motioned him further back down the tunnel as shots smacked into the floor near him. He stood, but fell, blacking out briefly.

The Idiran at the front of the train stopped firing for a moment, Yalson took the opportunity to look back at Horza again. He lay on the tunnel floor behind her, moving weakly. She looked out to where Dorolow lay, her suit ripped and smouldering. Neisin was almost out of his tunnel, firing long bursts down the station, scattering explosions all over the nose of the train. The air boomed with the rasping noise of his gun, ebbing and flowing through the cavern and accompanied by a pulsing wave of light that seemed to reach back from where the bullets struck and detonated.

Yalson was aware of somebody shouting — a woman’s voice, yelling — but she could hardly hear over the noise of Neisin’s gun. Plasma bolts came singing down the platform from the front of the train again, from high up, near the forward access ramps. She returned fire. Neisin poured shots in the same direction, paused.

“— in! Stop!” the voice shouted in Yalson’s ears. It was Balveda, “There’s something wrong with your gun; it’ll—” The Culture agent’s voice was drowned by the noise of Neisin firing again. “—crash!” Yalson heard Balveda scream despairingly; then a line of light and sound seemed to fill the station from one end to the other, ending at Neisin. The bright stalk of noise and flame blossomed into an explosion Yalson felt through her suit. Bits of Neisin’s gun were scattered across the platform; the man was thrown back against the wall. He fell to the ground and lay still.

“Motherfucker,” Yalson heard herself say, and she started running up the platform, enfilading the front of the train, trying to widen the angle of fire. Shots dipped to meet her, then cut out. There was a pause, while she still ran and fired, then the second Idiran appeared on the top level of the distant access ramp, holding a pistol in both hands. He ignored both her and Wubslin’s fire and shot straight across the breadth of the cavern, at the Mind.

The silvery ellipsoid started to move, heading for the far foot tunnel. The first shot seemed to go right through it, as did a second; a third bolt made it vanish completely, leaving only a tiny puff of smoke where it had been.

The Idiran’s suit glittered as Yalson and Wubslin’s shots struck home. The warrior staggered; he turned as though to start firing down at them again, just as the armoured suit gave way; he was blown back and across the gantry, one arm disappearing in a cloud of flame and smoke; he fell over the edge of the ramp and crashed down to the middle level, the suit burning brightly, one leg snagging over the guard rails on the middle ramp. The plasma pistol was blown from his hand. Other shots tore at the wide helm, fracturing the blackened visor. He hung, limp and burning and pummelled with laser fire, for a few more seconds; then the leg caught on the guard rail gave way, snapping cleanly off and falling to the station floor. The Idiran slid, crumpling, to the deck of the ramp.

Horza listened, his ears still ringing.

After a while it was quiet. Acrid smoke stung his nose: fumes of burned plastic, molten metal, roasted meat.

He had been unconscious, then woken to see Yalson running up the platform. He had tried to give her covering fire, but his hands shook too much, and he hadn’t been able to get the gun to work. Now everybody had stopped firing, and it was very quiet. He got up and walked unsteadily into the station, where smoke rose from the battered train.

Wubslin knelt by Dorolow’s side, trying with one hand to undo one of the woman’s gloves. Her suit still smouldered. The helmet visor was smeared red, covered with blood on the inside, hiding her face.

Horza watched Yalson come back down the station, gun still at the ready. Her suit had taken a couple of plasma bolts to the body; the roughly spiralled marks showed as black scars on the grey surface. She looked up suspiciously at the rear access ramps, where one Idiran lay trapped and unmoving; then she opened her visor. “You all right?” she asked Horza.

“Yes. Bit groggy. Sore head,” he said. Yalson nodded; they went over to where Neisin lay.

Neisin was still just alive. His gun had exploded, riddling his chest, arms and face with shrapnel. Moans bubbled from the crimson ruin of his face. “Fucking hell,” Yalson said. She took a small medipack from her suit and reached through what was left of Neisin’s visor to inject the semi-conscious man’s neck with painkiller.

“What’s happened?” Aviger’s tiny voice came from Yalson’s helmet. “Is it safe yet?” Yalson looked at Horza, who shrugged, then nodded.

“Yeah, it’s safe, Aviger,” Yalson said. “You can come in.”

“I let Balveda use my suit mike; she said she—”

“We heard,” Yalson said.

“Something about a… ‘barrelcrash’? That right…?” Horza heard Balveda’s muffled voice affirming this. “…She thought Neisin’s gun might blow up, or something.”

“Well, it did,” Yalson said. “He looks pretty bad.” She glanced over at Wubslin, who was putting Dorolow’s hand back down. Wubslin shook his head when he saw Yalson looking at him. “…Dorolow got blown away, Aviger,” Yalson said. The old man was silent for a moment, then said:

“And Horza?”

“Took a plasma round on the headbox. Suit damage; no communication. He’ll live,” Yalson paused, sighed. “Looks like we lost the Mind, though; it disappeared.”

Aviger waited another few moments before saying, his voice shaking, “Well, a fine little mess. Easy in, easy out. Another triumph. Our Changer friend taking over where Kraiklyn left off!” His voice finished on a high pitch of anger; he switched his transceiver off.

Yalson looked at Horza, shook her head and said, “Old asshole.”

Wubslin still knelt over Dorolow’s body. They heard him sob a couple of times, before he, too, cut out of the open channel. Neisin’s slowing breath spluttered through a mask of blood and flesh.

Yalson made the Circle of Flame sign over the red haze masking Dorolow’s face, then covered the body with a sheet from the pallet. Horza’s ears stopped ringing, the grogginess cleared. Balveda, freed from the restrainer harness, watched the Changer tend to Neisin. Aviger stood near by with Wubslin, whose arm wound had already been treated. “I heard the noise,” Balveda explained. “…It has a distinctive noise.”

Wubslin had asked why Neisin’s gun had exploded, and how Balveda had known it was going to happen.

“I’d have recognised it, too, if I hadn’t been smacked on the head,” Horza said. He was teasing fragments of visor out of the unconscious man’s face, spraying skin-gel onto the places where blood oozed. Neisin was in shock, probably dying, but they couldn’t even take him out of his suit; too much blood had clotted between the man’s body and the materials of the device he wore. It would plug the many small punctures effectively enough until the suit was removed, but then Neisin would start to bleed in too many places for them to cope with. So they had to leave him in the thing, as though in that mutual wreckage the human and machine had become one fragile organism.

“But what happened?” Wubslin said.

“His gun barrelcrashed,” Horza said. “The projectiles must have been set to explode on too soft an impact, so the shells started to detonate when they hit the blast wave from the bullets in front, not the target. He didn’t stop firing, so the blast front retarded right back into the muzzle of the gun.”

“The guns have sensors to stop it happening,” Balveda added, wincing with vicarious pain as Horza drew a long sliver of visor from an eye socket. “I guess his wasn’t working.”

“Told him that gun was too damn cheap when he bought it,” Yalson said, coming over to stand by Horza.

“Poor little bugger,” Wubslin said.

“Two more dead,” Aviger announced. “I hope you’re happy, Mr Horza. I hope you’re so pleased about what your ‘allies’ have—”

“Aviger,” Yalson said calmly, “shut up.” The old man glared at her for a second, then stamped off. He stood looking down at Dorolow.

Unaha-Closp floated down from the rear access ramp. “That Idiran up there,” it said, its voice pitched to betray mild surprise; “he’s alive. Couple of tons of junk on top of him, but he’s still breathing.”

“What about the other one?” Horza said.

“No idea. I didn’t like to go too close; it’s terribly messy up there.”

Horza left Yalson to look after Neisin. He walked over the debris-strewn platform to the wreckage of the rear access gantry.

He was bare-headed. The suit’s helmet was ruined, and the suit itself had lost its AG and motor power, as well as most of its senses. On back-up energy, the lights still worked, as did the small repeater screen set into one wrist. The suit’s mass sensor was damaged; the wrist screen filled with clutter when linked to the sensor, barely registering the train’s reactor at all.

His rifle was still working, for whatever that was worth now.

He stood at the bottom of the ramps and felt the dregs of heat seeping from the metal support legs, where laser fire had struck. He took a deep breath and climbed up the ramp to where the Idiran lay, his massive head sticking out of the wreckage, sandwiched between the two levels of ramp. The Idiran turned slowly to look at him, and one arm tensed against the wreckage, which creaked and moved. Then the warrior brought his arm out from beneath the press of metal and unfastened the scarred battle-helm; he let it fall to the floor. The great saddle-face looked up at the Changer.

“The greetings of the battle-day,” Horza said in careful Idiran.

“Ho,” boomed the Idiran, “the little one speaks our tongue.”

“I’m even on your side, though I don’t expect you to believe it. I belong to the intelligence section of the First Marine Dominate under the Querl Xoralundra.” Horza sat down on the ramp, almost level with the Idiran’s face. “I was sent in here to try to get the Mind,” he continued.

“Really?” the Idiran said. “Pity; I believe my comrade just destroyed it.”

“So I hear,” Horza said, levelling the laser rifle at the big face viced between the twisted metal planking. “You also “destroyed” the Changers back up at the base. I am a Changer; that’s why our mutual masters sent me in here. Why did you have to kill my people?”

“What else could we do, human?” the Idiran said impatiently. “They were an obstacle. We needed their weaponry. They would have tried to stop us. We were too few to guard them.” The creature’s voice was laboured as it fought the weight of ramp crushing its torso and rib cylinder. Horza aimed the rifle straight at the Idiran’s face.

“You vicious bastard, I ought to blow your fucking head off right now.”

“By all means, midget,” the Idiran smiled, the double set of hard lips spreading. “My comrade has already fallen bravely; Quayanorl has started his long journey through the Upper World. I am captured and victorious at once, and you offer me the solace of the gun. I shall not close my eyes, human.”

“You don’t have to,” Horza said, letting the gun down. He looked over, through the darkness of the station, at Dorolow’s body, then into the dim, smoke-hazed light in the distance, where the nose and control deck of the train glowed faintly, illuminating an empty patch of floor where the Mind had been. He turned back to the Idiran. “I’m taking you back. I believe there are still units of the Ninety-Third Fleet out beyond the Quiet Barrier; I have to report my failure and deliver a female Culture agent to the Fleet Inquisitor. I’m going to report you for exceeding your orders in killing those Changers; not that I expect it’ll do any good.”

“Your story bores me, little one.” The Idiran looked away and strained once more at the press of twisted metal covering him, but to no avail. “Kill me now; you do smell so, and your speech grates. Ours is not a tongue for animals.”

“What’s your name?” Horza said. The saddle-head turned to him again; the eyes blinked slowly.

“Xoxarle, human. Now you’ll sully it by trying to pronounce it, no doubt.”

“Well, you just rest there, Xoxarle. Like I said, we’ll take you with us. First I want to check on the Mind you destroyed. A thought has just occurred to me.” Horza got to his feet. His head hurt abominably where the helmet had slammed into it, but he ignored the pounding in his skull and started back down the ramp, limping a little.

“Your soul is shit,” the Idiran called Xoxarle boomed after him. “Your mother should have been strangled the moment she came on heat. We were going to eat the Changers we killed; but they smelled like filth!”

“Save your breath, Xoxarle,” Horza said, not looking at the Idiran. “I’m not going to shoot you.”

Horza met Yalson at the bottom of the ramp. The drone had agreed to look after Neisin. Horza looked to the far end of the station. “I want to see where the Mind was.”

“What do you think happened to it?” Yalson asked, falling into step beside him. He shrugged. Yalson went on, “Maybe it did the trick it did earlier; went into hyperspace again. Maybe it reappeared somewhere else in the tunnels.”

“Maybe,” Horza said. He stopped by Wubslin, taking the man’s elbow and turning him round from Dorolow’s body. The engineer had been crying. “Wubslin,” Horza said, “guard that bastard. He might try and get you to shoot him, but don’t. That’s what he wants. I’m going to take the son of a bitch back to the fleet so they can courtmartial him. Dirtying his name is a punishment; killing him would be doing him a favour; understand?”

Wubslin nodded. Still rubbing the bruised side of his head, Horza went off down the platform with Yalson.

They came to where the Mind had been. Horza turned the lights on his suit up and looked over the floor. He picked up a small, burned-looking thing near the mouth of the foot tunnel leading to station seven.

“What’s that?” Yalson said, turning away from the body of the Idiran on the other access gantry.

“I think,” Horza said, turning the still warm machine over in his hand, “it’s a remote drone.”

“The Mind left it behind?” Yalson came over to look at it. It was just a blackened slab of material, some tubes and filaments showing through the lumpy, irregular surface where it had been hit by plasma fire.

“It’s the Mind’s, all right,” Horza said. He looked at Yalson. “What exactly happened when they shot the Mind?”

“When he eventually hit it, it vanished. It had started to move, but it couldn’t have accelerated that fast; I’d have felt the shock wave. It just vanished.”

“It was like somebody turning off a projection?” Horza said.

Yalson nodded. “Yes. And there was a bit of smoke. Not much. Do you mean to—”

“He got it eventually; what do you mean?”

“I mean,” Yalson said, putting one hand on her hip and looking at Horza with an impatient expression on her face, “that it took three or four shots. The first few went straight through it. Are you saying it was a projection?”

Horza nodded and held up the machine in his hand. “It was this: a remote drone producing a hologram of the Mind. Must have had a weak force field as well so that it could be touched and pushed as though it was a solid object, but all there was inside was this.” He smiled faintly at the wrecked machine. “No wonder the damn thing didn’t show up on our mass sensors.”

“So the Mind’s still around somewhere?” Yalson said, looking at the drone in Horza’s hand. The Changer nodded.

Balveda watched Horza and Yalson walk into the darkness at the far end of the station. She went over to where the drone floated above Neisin, monitoring his vital functions and sorting out some vials of medicine in the medkit. Wubslin kept his gun pointed at the trapped Idiran, but watched Balveda from the corner of his eye at the same time; the Culture woman sat down cross-legged near the stretcher.

“Before you ask,” the drone said, “no, there’s nothing you can do.”

“I had guessed that, Unaha-Closp,” Balveda said.

“Hmm. Then you have ghoulish tendencies?”

“No, I wanted to talk to you.”

“Really.” The drone continued to sort the medicines.

“Yes…” She sat forward, elbow on her knee, chin cupped in her hand. She lowered her voice a little. “Are you biding your time, or what?”

The drone turned its front to her; an unnecessary gesture, they both knew, but one it was used to making. “Biding my time?”

“You’ve let him use you so far. I just wondered: how much longer?”

The drone turned away again, hovering over the dying man. “Perhaps you hadn’t noticed, Ms Balveda, but my choices in this matter are almost as limited as yours.”

“I’ve only got arms and legs, and I’m locked away at night, trussed up. You’re not.”

“I have to keep watch. He has a movement sensor which he leaves switched on, anyway, so he would know if I tried to escape. And besides, where would I go?”

“The ship,” Balveda suggested, smiling. She looked back up the dark station, where the lights on their suits showed Yalson and the Changer picking something up from the ground.

“I would need his ring. Do you want to take it from him?”

“You must have an effector. Couldn’t you fool the ship’s circuits? Or even just that motion sensor?”

“Ms Balveda—”

“Call me Perosteck.”

“Perosteck, I am a general-purpose drone, a civilian. I have light fields; the equivalent of many fingers, but not major limbs. I can produce a cutting field, but only a few centimetres in depth, and not capable of taking on armour. I can interface with other electronic systems, but I cannot interfere with the hardened circuits of military equipment. I possess an internal forcefield which lets me float, regardless of gravity, but apart from using my own mass as a weapon, that is not really of much use, either. In fact, I am not particularly strong; when I needed to be, for my job, there were attachments available for my use. Unfortunately, I was not employing them when I was abducted. Had I been, I probably wouldn’t be here now.”

“Damn,” Balveda said into the shadows. “No aces up your sleeve?”

“No sleeves, Perosteck.”

Balveda took in a deep breath and stared glumly at the dark floor. “Oh dear,” she said.

“Our leader approaches,” Unaha-Closp said, affecting weariness in its voice. It turned and nodded its front towards Yalson and Horza, returning from the far end of the cavern. The Changer was smiling. Balveda rose smoothly to her feet as Horza beckoned to her.

“Perosteck Balveda,” Horza said, standing with the others at the bottom of the rear access gantry and holding out one hand towards the Idiran trapped in the wreckage above, “meet Xoxarle.”

“This is the female you claim is a Culture agent, human?” the Idiran said, turning his head awkwardly to look down at the group of people below him.

“Pleased to meet you,” Balveda muttered, arching one eyebrow as she gazed up at the trapped Idiran.

Horza walked up the ramp, passing Wubslin, who was training his gun on the trapped being. Horza still held the remote drone. He came to the second level ramp and looked down at the Idiran’s face.

“See this, Xoxarle?” He held the drone up. It glinted in the lights of his suit.

Xoxarle nodded slowly. “It is a small piece of damaged equipment.” The deep, heavy voice betrayed signs of strain, and Horza could see a trickle of dark purple blood on the floor of the ramp Xoxarle lay squashed upon.

“It’s what you two proud warriors had when you thought you’d captured the Mind. This is all there was. A remote drone casting a weak soligram. If you’d taken this back to the fleet they’d have thrown you into the nearest black hole and wiped your name from the records. You’re damn lucky I came along when I did.”

The Idiran looked thoughtfully at the wrecked drone for a short while.

“You,” Xoxarle said slowly, “are lower than vermin, human. Your pathetic tricks and lies would make a yearling laugh. There must be more fat inside your thick skull than there is even on your skinny bones. You aren’t fit to be thrown up.”

Horza stepped onto the ramp which had fallen on top of the Idiran. He heard the being’s breath suck in harshly through taut lips as he walked slowly over to where Xoxarle’s face stuck out beneath the wreckage. “And you, you goddamn fanatic, aren’t fit to wear that uniform. I’m going to find the Mind you thought you had, and then I’m going to take you back to the fleet, where if they’ve any sense they’ll let the Inquisitor try you for gross stupidity.”

“Fuck…” the Idiran gasped painfully, “…your animal soul.”

Horza used the neural stunner on Xoxarle. Then he and Yalson and the drone Unaha-Closp levered the ramp off the Idiran’s body and sent it crashing down to the station floor. They cut the armour from the giant’s body, then hobbled his legs with wire and tied down his arms to his sides. Xoxarle had no broken limbs, but the keratin on one side of his body was cracked and oozed blood, while another wound, between his collar scale and right shoulder plate, had closed up once the pressure was taken off him. He was big, even for an Idiran; over three and a half metres, and not thin. Horza was glad the tall male — a section leader according to the insignia on the armour he had been wearing — was probably injured internally and going to be in pain. It would make him less of a problem to guard once he had woken up; he was too big for the restrainer harness.

Yalson sat, eating a rationfood bar, her gun balanced on one knee and pointing straight at the unconscious Idiran, while Horza sat at the bottom of the ramp and tried to repair his helmet. Unaha-Closp watched over Neisin, as powerless as the rest of them to do anything to help the wounded man.

Wubslin sat on the pallet making some adjustments to the mass sensor. He had already taken a look round the Command System train, but what he really wanted was to see a working one, in better light and without radiation stopping him looking through the reactor car.

Aviger stood by Dorolow’s body for a while. Then he went to the far access ramp, where the body of the other Idiran, the one Xoxarle had called Quayanorl, lay, holed and battered, limbs missing. Aviger looked around and thought nobody was watching, but both Horza, looking up from the wrecked helmet, and Balveda, walking round and stamping and shaking her feet in an attempt to keep warm, saw the old man swing his foot at the still body lying on the ramp, kicking the helmed head as hard as he could. The helmet fell off; Aviger kicked the naked head. Balveda looked at Horza, shook her head, then went on pacing up and down.

“You’re sure we’ve accounted for all the Idirans?” Unaha-Closp asked Horza. It had floated about the station and through the train, accompanying Wubslin. Now it was facing the Changer.

“That’s the lot,” Horza said, looking not at the drone but at the mess of fractured optic fibres lying bloated and fused together inside the outer skin of his helmet. “You saw the tracks.”

“Hmm,” the machine said.

“We’ve won, drone,” Horza said, still not looking at it. “We’ll get the power on in station seven and then it won’t take us long to track the Mind down.”

“Your ‘Mr Adequate’ seems remarkably unconcerned about the liberties we’re taking with his train-set,” the drone observed.

Horza looked round at the wreckage and debris scattered near the train, then shrugged and went back to tinkering with the helmet. “Maybe he’s indifferent,” he said.

“Or could it be he’s enjoying all this?” Unaha-Closp said. Horza looked at it. The drone went on, “This place is a monument to death, after all. A sacred place. Perhaps it is as much an altar as a monument, and we are merely carrying out a service of sacrifice for the gods.”

Horza shook his head. “I think they left the fuse out of your imagination circuits, machine,” he said, and looked back at the helmet.

Unaha-Closp made a hissing noise and went to watch Wubslin, poking around inside the mass sensor.

“What have you got against machines, Horza?” Balveda said, interrupting her pacing to come and stand near by. She rubbed her hands on her nose and ears now and again. Horza sighed and put down the helmet.

“Nothing, Balveda, as long as they stay in their place.”

Balveda made a snorting noise at that, then went on pacing. Yalson spoke from further up the ramp:

“Did you say something funny?”

“I said machines ought to stay in their place. Not the sort of remark that goes down well with the Culture.”

“Yeah,” Yalson said, still watching the Idiran. Then she looked down, at the scarred area on the front of her suit where it had been hit by a plasma bolt. “Horza?” she said. “Can we talk somewhere? Not here.”

Horza looked up at her. “Of course,” he said, puzzled. Wubslin replaced Yalson on the ramp. Yalson walked to where Unaha-Closp floated over Neisin, its lights dim; it held an injector in one hazy field extension.

“How is he?” she asked the machine. It turned its lights up.

“How does he look?” it said. Yalson and Horza said nothing. The drone let its lights fade again. “He might last a few more hours.”

Yalson shook her head and headed for the tunnel entrance which led to the transit tube, followed by Horza. She stopped inside, just out of sight of the others, and turned to face the Changer. She seemed to search for words but could not find them; she shook her head again and took off her helmet, leaning back against the curved tunnel wall.

“What’s the problem, Yalson?” he asked her. He tried to take her hand, but she crossed her arms. “You having second thoughts about going on with this?”

She shook her head. “No; I’m going on. I want to see this goddamned super-brain. I don’t care who gets it, or if it gets blown up, but I want to find it.”

“I didn’t think you regarded it as that important.”

“It’s become important.” She looked away, then back again, smiling uncertainly. “Hell, I’d come along anyway — just to try and keep you out of trouble.”

“I thought maybe you’d gone off me a little lately,” he said.

“Yeah,” Yalson said. “Well, I haven’t been… ah…” she sighed heavily. “What the hell.”

“What?” Horza said. He saw her shrug. The small, shaved head dropped again, silhouetted against the distant light.

She shook her head. “Oh, Horza,” she said, and gave a small, grunting laugh. “You’re not going to believe this.”

“Believe what?”

“I don’t know that I should tell.”

“Tell me,” he said.

“I don’t expect you to believe me; and if you do, I don’t expect you to like it. Not all of it. I’m serious. Maybe I just shouldn’t…” She sounded genuinely troubled. He laughed lightly.

“Come on, Yalson,” he said. “You’ve said too much to stop now; you just said you weren’t one for turning back. What is it?”

“I’m pregnant.”

He thought he’d misheard at first, and was going to make a joke about what he thought he’d just heard, but some part of his brain played the sounds her voice had made back, double-checking, and he knew that that was exactly what she’d said. She was right. He didn’t believe it. He couldn’t.

“Don’t ask me if I’m sure,” Yalson said. She was looking down again, fiddling with her fingers and staring at them or the floor beyond in the darkness, her ungloved hands protruding nakedly from the suit arms and pressing against each other. “I’m sure.” She looked at him, though he couldn’t see her eyes, and she wouldn’t be able to see his. “I was right, wasn’t I? You don’t believe me, do you? I mean, it is by you. That’s why I’m telling you. I wouldn’t say anything if it… if you weren’t… if I just happened to be.” She shrugged. “…I thought maybe you’d guess when I asked about how much radiation we’d all absorbed… But now you’re wondering how, aren’t you?”

“Well,” Horza said, clearing his throat and shaking his head, “it certainly shouldn’t be possible. We’re both… but we’re from different species; it ought not to be possible.”

“Well, there is an explanation,” Yalson sighed, still looking at her fingers as they picked and kneaded at each other, “but I don’t think you’ll like that, either.”

“Try me.”

“It’s… it’s like this. My mother… my mother lived on a Rock. A travelling Rock, just one of the many, you know. One of the oldest; it had been… just tramping around the galaxy for maybe eight or nine thousand years, and—”

“Wait a minute,” Horza said, “one of whose oldest?”

“…My dad was some… some man from a place, a planet the Rock stopped off at one time. My mother said she’d be back some time, but she never did go back. I told her I’d go back some time just to see him, if he’s still alive… Pure sentimentalism, I guess, but I said I would and I will some time; if I live through this lot.” She gave that same small half-laugh, half-grunt, and turned away from her picking fingers for a second to glance round the dark spaces of the station. Then her face again turned to the Changer, and her voice was suddenly urgent, almost pleading. “I’m only half Culture, by birth, Horza. I left the Rock soon as I was old enough to aim a gun properly; I knew the Culture wasn’t the place for me. That’s how I inherited the genofixing for trans-species mating. I never thought about it before. It’s supposed to be deliberate, or at least you’ve got to stop thinking yourself into not getting pregnant, but it didn’t work this time. Maybe I let my guard slip somehow. It wasn’t deliberate, Horza, it really wasn’t; it never occurred to me. It just happened. I—”

“How long have you known?” Horza asked quietly.

“Since on the CAT. We were still a few days out from this place. I can’t remember exactly. I didn’t believe it at first. I know it’s true, though. Look” — she leaned closer to him, and the note of pleading was in her voice again — “I can abort it. Just by thinking about it I can get rid of it, if you want. Maybe I’d have done that already, but I know you’ve told me about not having any family, nobody to carry on your name, and I thought… well, I don’t care about my name… I just thought you—” She broke off and suddenly put her head back and ran her fingers through her short hair.

“It’s a nice thought, Yalson,” he said. Yalson nodded silently and went back to picking her fingers again.

“Well, I’m giving you the choice, Horza,” she said without looking at him. “I can keep it. I can let it grow. I can keep it at the stage it’s at now… It’s up to you. Maybe I just don’t want to have to make the decision; I mean, maybe I’m not being all noble and self-sacrificing, but there it is. You decide. Fuck knows what sort of weird cross-breed I might have inside me, but I thought you ought to know. Because I like you, and… because… I don’t know — because it was about time I did something for somebody else for a change.” She shook her head again, and her voice was confused, apologetic, resigned, all at once. “Or maybe because I want to do something to please myself, as usual. Oh…”

He had started to put his arms out to her and edge closer. She suddenly came towards him, wrapping her arms tight round him. Their suits made the embrace cumbersome, and his back felt tight and strained, but he held her to him, and rocked her gently backwards and forwards.

“It would only be a quarter Culture, Horza, if you want. I’m sorry to leave it to you. But if you don’t want to know, OK; I’ll think again and make my own decision. It’s still part of me, so maybe I don’t have any right to ask you. I don’t really want to…” She sighed mightily. “Oh God, I don’t know, Horza, I really don’t.”

“Yalson,” he said, having thought about what he was going to say, “I don’t give a damn your mother was from the Culture. I don’t give a damn why what has happened has happened. If you want to go through with it, that’s fine by me. I don’t give a damn about any cross-breeding either.” He pushed her away slightly and looked into the darkness that was her face. “I’m flattered, Yalson, and I’m grateful, too. It’s a good idea; like you would say: what the hell?”

He laughed then, and she laughed with him, and they hugged each other tightly. He felt tears in his eyes, though he wanted to laugh at the incongruity of it all. Yalson’s face was on the hard surface of his suit shoulder, near a laser burn. Her body shook gently inside her own suit.

Behind them, in the station, the dying man stirred slightly and moaned in the cold and darkness, without an echo.

He held her for a little while. Then she pushed away, to look into his eyes again. “Don’t tell the others.”

“Of course not, if that’s what you want.”

“Please,” she said. In the dimmed glow of their suit lights, the down on her face and the hair on her head seemed to shine, like a hazy atmosphere round a planet seen from space. He hugged her again, unsure what to say. Surprise, partly, no doubt… but in addition there was the fact that this revelation made whatever existed between them that much more important, and so he was more anxious than ever not to say the wrong thing, not to make a mistake. He could not let it mean too much, not yet. She had paid him perhaps the greatest compliment he had ever had, but the very value of it frightened him, distracted him. He felt that whatever continuity of his name or clan the woman was offering him, he could not yet build his hopes upon it; the glimmer of that potential succession seemed too weak, and somehow also too temptingly defenceless, to face the continuous frozen midnight of the tunnels.

“Thanks, Yalson. Let’s get this over with, down here, then we’ll have a better idea what we want to do. But even if you change your mind later, thank you.”

It was all he could say.

They returned to the station’s dark cavern just as the drone pulled a light sheet over Neisin’s still form. “Oh, there you are,” it said. “I didn’t see any point in contacting you.” Its voice was hushed. “There wasn’t anything you could have done.”

“Satisfied?” Aviger asked Horza, after they had put Neisin’s body with Dorolow’s. They stood near the access gantry, where Yalson had resumed guard duty on the unconscious Idiran.

“I’m sorry about Neisin, and Dorolow,” Horza told the old man. “I liked them, too; I can understand you being upset. You don’t have to stay here now; if you want, go back to the surface. It’s safe now. We’ve accounted for them all.”

“You’ve accounted for most of us, too, haven’t you?” Aviger said bitterly. “You’re no better than Kraiklyn.”

“Shut up, Aviger,” Yalson said, from the gantry. “You’re still alive.”

“And you haven’t done too badly, either, have you, young lady?” Aviger said to her. “You and your friend here.”

Yalson was quiet for a moment, then said, “You’re braver than I thought, Aviger. Just remember it doesn’t bother me a bit you’re older and smaller than me. You want me to kick your balls in…” she nodded and pursed her lips, still staring at the limp body of the Idiran officer lying in front of her, “…I’ll do it for you, old boy.”

Balveda came up to Aviger and slipped her arm through his, starting to lead him away as she walked by. “Aviger,” she said, “let me tell you about the time—” But Aviger shrugged her away and went off by himself, to sit with his back to the station wall, opposite the reactor car.

Horza looked down the platform to where the old man sat. “He’d better watch his radiation meter,” he said to Yalson. “It’s pretty hot down there near the reactor car.”

Yalson gnawed at another ration bar. “Let the old bastard fry,” she said.

Xoxarle woke up. Yalson watched him regain consciousness, then waved the gun at him. “Tell the big creep to head on down the ramp, will you Horza?” she said.

Xoxarle looked down at Horza and struggled awkwardly to his feet. “Don’t bother,” he said in Marain, “I can bark as well as you in this miserable excuse for a language.” He turned to Yalson. “After you, my man.”

“I am a female,” Yalson growled, and waved the gun down the ramp, “now get your trefoil ass down there.”

Horza’s suit AG was finished. Unaha-Closp couldn’t have taken Xoxarle’s weight anyway, so they would have to walk. Aviger could float; so could Wubslin and Yalson, but Balveda and Horza would have to take turns riding on the pallet; and Xoxarle would need to foot-slog the whole twenty-seven kilometres to station seven.

They left the two human bodies near the doors to the transit tubes, where they could collect them later. Horza threw the useless lump of the Mind’s remote drone to the station floor, then blasted it with his laser.

“Did that make you feel better?” Aviger said. Horza looked at the old man, floating in his suit, ready to head up the tunnel with the rest of them.

“Tell you what, Aviger. If you want to do something useful, why don’t you float up to that access ramp and put a few shots through the head of Xoxarle’s comrade up there, just to make sure he’s properly dead?”

“Yes, Captain,” Aviger said, and gave a mock salute. He moved through the air to the ramp where the Idiran’s body lay.

“OK,” Horza said to the rest; “let’s go.”

They entered the foot tunnel as Aviger landed on the middle level of the access ramp.

Aviger looked down at the Idiran. The armoured suit was covered with burn marks and holes. The creature had one arm and one leg missing; there was blood, dried black, all over the place. The Idiran’s head was charred on one side, and where he had kicked it earlier Aviger could see the cracked keratin just below the left eye socket. The eye, dead, jammed open, stared at him; it looked loose in its bone hemisphere, and some sort of pus had oozed out of it. Aviger pointed his gun at the head, setting the weapon to single shot. The first pulse blew the injured eye off; the second punched a hole in the creature’s face under what might have been its nose. A jet of green liquid splashed out of the hole and landed on Aviger’s suit chest. He splashed some water from his flask over the mess and let it dribble off.

“Filth,” he muttered to himself, shouldering his gun, “all of it… filth.”

“Look!”

They were less than fifty metres into the tunnel. Aviger had just entered it and started floating towards them, when Wubslin shouted. They stopped, looking into the screen of the mass sensor.

Almost at the centre of the close-packed green lines there was a grey smudge; the reactor trace they were used to seeing, the sensor being fooled by the nuclear pile in the train behind them.

Right at the very edge of the screen, straight ahead and over twenty-six kilometres away, there was another echo. It was no grey patch, no false trace. It was a harsh, bright pinpoint of light, like a star on the screen.