Consider Phlebas

13. The Command System: Terminus

“One can read too much into one’s own circumstances. I am reminded of one race who set themselves against us — oh, long ago now, before I was even thought of. Their conceit was that the galaxy belonged to them, and they justified this heresy by a blasphemous belief concerning design. They were aquatic, their brain and major organs housed in a large central pod from which several large arms or tentacles protruded. These tentacles were thick at the body, thin at the tips and lined with suckers. Their water god was supposed to have made the galaxy in their image.

“You see? They thought that because they bore a rough physical resemblance to the great lens that is the home of all of us — even taking the analogy as far as comparing their tentacle suckers to globular clusters — it therefore belonged to them. For all the idiocy of this heathen belief, they had prospered and were powerful: quite respectable adversaries, in fact.”

“Hmm,” Aviger said. Without looking up, he asked, “What were they called?”

“Hmm,” Xoxarle rumbled. “Their name…” The Idiran pondered. “…I believe they were called the… the Fanch.”

“Never heard of them,” Aviger said.

“No, you wouldn’t have,” Xoxarle purred. “We annihilated them.”

Yalson saw Horza staring at something on the floor near the doors leading back to the station. She kept watching Balveda, but said, “What have you found?”

Horza shook his head, reached to pick something from the floor, then stopped. “I think it’s an insect,” he said incredulously.

“Wow,” Yalson said, unimpressed. Balveda moved over to have a look, Yalson’s gun still trained on her. Horza shook his head, watching the insect crawl over the tunnel floor.

“What the hell’s that doing down here?” he said. Yalson frowned when he said that, worried at a note of near panic in the man’s voice.

“Probably brought it down ourselves,” Balveda said, rising. “Hitched a ride on the pallet, or somebody’s suit, I’ll bet.”

Horza brought his fist down on the tiny creature, squashing it, grinding it into the dark rock. Balveda looked surprised. Yalson’s frown deepened. Horza stared at the mark left on the tunnel floor, wiped his glove, then looked up, apologetic.

“Sorry,” he told Balveda, as though embarrassed. “…Couldn’t help thinking about that fly in The Ends of Invention… Turned out to be one of your pets, remember?” He got up and walked quickly into the station. Balveda nodded, looking down at the small stain on the floor.

“Well,” she said, arching one eyebrow, “that was one way of proving its innocence.”

Xoxarle watched the male and the two females come back into the station. “Nothing, little one?” he asked.

“Lots of things, Section Leader,” Horza replied, going up to Xoxarle and checking the wires holding him.

Xoxarle grunted. “They’re still somewhat tight, ally.”

“What a shame,” Horza said. “Try breathing out.”

“Ha!” Xoxarle laughed and thought the man might have guessed. But the human turned away and said to the old man who had been guarding him:

“Aviger, we’re going onto the train. Keep our friend company; try not to fall asleep.”

“Fat chance, with him gibbering all the time,” the old man grumbled.

The other three humans entered the train. Xoxarle went on talking.

In one section of the train there were lit map screens which showed how Schar’s World had looked at the time the Command System had been built, the cities and the states shown on the continents, the targets on one state on one continent, the missile grounds, air bases and naval ports belonging to the System’s designers shown on another state, on another continent.

Two small icecaps were shown, but the rest of the planet was steppe, savannah, desert, forest and jungle. Balveda wanted to stay and look at the maps, but Horza pulled her away and through another door, going forward to the nose of the train. He switched off the lights behind the map screens as he went, and the bright surface of blue oceans, green, yellow, brown and orange land, blue rivers and red cities and communication lines faded slowly into grey darkness.

Oh-oh.

There are more on the train. Three, I think. Walking from the rear. Now what?

Xoxarle breathed in, breathed out. He flexed his muscles, and the wires slipped over his keratin plates. He stopped, when the old man wandered over to look at him.

“You are Aviger, aren’t you?”

“That’s what they call me,” the old man said. He stood looking at the Idiran, gazing from Xoxarle’s three feet with their three slab toes and round ankle collars, over his padded-looking knees, the massive girdle of pelvic plates and the flat chest, up to the section leader’s great saddle-head, the broad face tipped and looking down at the human beneath.

“Frightened I’ll escape?” Xoxarle rumbled.

Aviger shrugged and gripped his gun a little tighter. “What do I care?” he said. “I’m a prisoner, too. That madman’s got us all trapped down here. I just want to go back. This isn’t my war.”

“A very sensible attitude,” Xoxarle said. “I wish more humans would realise what is and what is not theirs. Especially regarding wars.”

“Huh, I don’t suppose your lot are any better.”

“Let us say different, then.”

“Say what you like.” Aviger looked over the Idiran’s body again, addressing Xoxarle’s chest. “I just wish everybody would mind their own business. I see no change, though; it’ll all end in tears.”

“I don’t think you really belong here, Aviger.” Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly.

Aviger shrugged, and did not raise his eyes. “I don’t think any of us do.”

“The brave belong where they decide.” Some harshness entered the Idiran’s voice.

Aviger looked at the broad, dark face above him. “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” He turned away and walked back towards the pallet. Xoxarle watched, and vibrated his chest quickly, tensing his muscles, then releasing. The wires on him slipped a little further. Behind his back, he felt the bonds around one wrist slacken fractionally.

The train gathered speed. The controls and screens looked dim to him, so he watched the lights on the tunnel walls outside. They had slid by gently at first, passing the side windows of the broad control deck more slowly than the quiet tide of his breathing.

Now there were two or three lights running by for each time he breathed. The train was pushing him gently in the back, drawing him towards the rear of the seat and anchoring him there. Blood — a little of it, not much — had dried under him, sticking him there. His course, he felt, was set. There was only one thing left to do. He searched the console, cursing the darkness gathering behind his eye.

Before he found the circuit breaker on the collision brake, he found the lights. It was like a little present from God; the tunnel ahead flashed with bright reflections as the train’s nose headlights clicked on. The double set of rails glinted, and in the distance he could see more shadows and reflections in the tunnel walls, where access tubes slanted in from the foot tunnels, and blast doors ribbed the black rock walls.

His sight was still going, but he felt a little better for being able to see outside. At first he worried, in a distant, theoretical way, that the lights might give too much warning, should he be lucky enough to catch the humans still in the station. But it made little difference. The air pushed in front of the train would warn them soon enough. He raised a panel near the power-control lever and peered at it.

His head was light; he felt very cold. He looked at the circuit breaker and then bent down, jamming himself between the rear of the seat — cracking the blood seal beneath him and starting to bleed again — and the edge of the console. He shoved his face against the edge of the power-control lever, then took his hand away and gripped the collision brake fail-safe. He moved his hand so that it would not slip out, then just lay there.

His one eye was high enough off the console to see the tunnel ahead. The lights were coming faster now. The train rocked gently, lulling him. The roaring was fading from his ears, like the sight dimming, like the station behind slipping away and vanishing, like the seemingly steady, slow-quickening stream of lights flowing by on either side.

He could not estimate how far he had to go. He had started it off; he had done his best. No more — finally — could be asked of him.

He closed his eye, just to rest.

The train rocked him.

“It’s great,” Wubslin grinned when Horza, Yalson and Balveda walked onto the control deck. “It’s all ready to roll. All systems go!”

“Well, don’t wet your pants,” Yalson told him, watching Balveda sit down in a seat, then sitting in another herself. “We might have to use the transit tubes to get around.”

Horza pressed a few buttons, watching the readouts on the train’s systems. It all looked as Wubslin had said: ready to go.

“Where’s that damn drone?” Horza said to Yalson.

“Drone? Unaha-Closp?” Yalson said into her helmet mike.

“What is it now?” Unaha-Closp said.

“Where are you?”

“I’m taking a good look through this antiquated collection of rolling stock. I do believe these trains may actually be older than your ship.”

“Tell it to get back here,” Horza said. He looked at Wubslin. “Did you check this whole train?”

Yalson ordered the drone back as Wubslin nodded and said, “All of it except the reactor car; couldn’t get into bits of it. Which are the door controls?”

Horza looked around for a moment, recalling the layout of the train controls. “That lot.” He pointed at one of the banks of buttons and light panels to one side of Wubslin. The engineer studied them.

Ordered back. Told to return. Like it was a slave, one of the Idirans’ medjel; as though it was a machine. Let them wait a little.

Unaha-Closp had also found the map screens, in the train just down the tunnel. It floated in the air in front of the coloured expanses of back-lit plastic. It used its manipulating fields to work the controls, turning on small sets of lights which indicated the targets on both sides, the major cities and military installations.

All of it dust now, all of their precious humanoid civilisation ground to junk under glaciers or weathered away by wind and spray and rain and frozen in ice — all of it. Only this pathetic maze-tomb left.

So much for their humanity, or whatever they chose to call it, thought Unaha-Closp. Only their machines remained. But would any of the others learn? Would they see this for what it was, this frozen rock-ball? Would they, indeed!

Unaha-Closp left the screens glowing, and floated out of the train, back through the tunnel towards the station itself. The tunnels were bright now, but no warmer, and to Unaha-Closp it seemed as though there was a sort of revealed heartlessness about the harsh yellow-white light which streamed from ceilings and walls; it was operating-theatre light, dissection-table light.

The machine floated through the tunnels, thinking that the cathedral of darkness had become a glazed arena, a crucible.

Xoxarle was on the platform, still trussed against the access ramp girders. Unaha-Closp didn’t like the way the Idiran looked at it when it appeared from the tunnels; it was almost impossible to read the creature’s expression, if he could be said to have one, but there was something about Xoxarle that Unaha-Closp didn’t like. It got the impression the Idiran had just stopped moving, or doing something he didn’t want to be seen doing.

From the tunnel mouth, the drone saw Aviger look up from the pallet where he was sitting, then look away again, without even bothering to wave.

The Changer and the two females were in the train control area with the engineer Wubslin. Unaha-Closp saw them, and went forward to the access ramps and the nearest door. As it got there it paused. Air moved gently; hardly anything, but it was there; it could feel it. Obviously with the power on, some automatic systems were circulating more fresh air from the surface or through atmospheric scrubbing units.

Unaha-Closp went into the train.

“Unpleasant little machine, that,” Xoxarle said to Aviger. The old man nodded vaguely. Xoxarle had noticed that the man looked at him less when he was speaking to him. It was as though the sound of his voice reassured the human that he was still tied there, safe and sound, not moving. On the other hand, talking — moving his head to look at the human, making the occasional shrugging motion, laughing a little — gave him excuses to move and so to slip the wires a little further. So he talked; with luck the others would be on the train for a while now, and he might have a chance to escape.

He would lead them a merry dance if he got away into the tunnels, with a gun!

“Well, they should be open,” Horza was saying. According to the console in front of him and Wubslin, the doors in the reactor car had never been locked in the first place. “Are you sure you were trying to open them properly?” He was looking at the engineer.

“Of course,” Wubslin said, sounding hurt. “I know how different types of locks work. I tried to turn the recessed wheel; catches off… OK, this arm of mine isn’t perfect, but, well… it should have opened.”

“Probably a malfunction,” Horza said. He straightened, looking back down the train, as though trying to see through the hundred metres of metal and plastic between him and the reactor car. “Hmm. There’s not enough room there for the Mind to hide, is there?”

Wubslin looked up from the panel. “I wouldn’t have thought so.”

“Well, here I am,” Unaha-Closp said testily, floating through the door to the control deck. “What do you want me to do now?”

“You took your time searching that other train,” Horza said, looking at the machine.

“I was being thorough. More thorough than you, unless I misheard what you were saying before I came in. Where might there be enough room for the Mind to hide?”

“The reactor car,” Wubslin said. “I couldn’t get through some of the doors. Horza says according to the controls they ought to be open.”

“Shall I go back and have a look, then?” Unaha-Closp turned to face Horza.

The Changer nodded. “If it isn’t asking too much,” he said levelly.

“No, no,” Unaha-Closp said airily, backing off through the door it had entered by, “I’m starting to enjoy being ordered about. Leave it to me.” It floated away, back through the front carriage, towards the reactor car.

Balveda looked through the armoured glass, at the rear of the train in front, the one the drone had been looking through.

“If the Mind was hiding in the reactor car, wouldn’t it show up on your mass sensor, or would it be confused with the trace from the pile?” She turned her head slowly to look at the Changer.

“Who knows?” Horza said. “I’m not an expert on the workings of the suit, especially now it’s damaged.”

“You’re getting very trusting, Horza,” the Culture agent said, smiling faintly, “letting the drone do your hunting for you.”

“Just letting it do some scouting, Balveda,” Horza said, turning away and working at some more of the controls. He watched screens and dials and meters, changing displays and readout functions, trying to tell what was going on, if anything, in the reactor car. It all looked normal, as far as he could tell, though he knew less about the reactor systems than about most of the train’s other components from his time as a sentinel.

“OK,” Yalson said, turning her chair to one side, putting her feet upon the edge of one console and taking her helmet off. “So what do we do if there’s no Mind there, in the reactor car? Do we all start touring round in this thing, take the transit tube, or what?”

“I don’t know that taking a mainline train is a good idea,” Horza said, glancing at Wubslin. “I considered leaving everybody else here and taking a transit tube by myself on a circular journey right round the System, trying to spot the Mind on the suit mass sensor. It wouldn’t take too long, even doing it twice to cover both sets of tracks between stations. The transit tubes have no reactors, so it wouldn’t get any false echoes to interfere with the sensor’s readings.”

Wubslin, sitting in the seat which faced the train’s main controls, looked downcast.

“Why not send the rest of us back to the ship, then?” Balveda said.

Horza looked at her. “Balveda, you are not here to make suggestions.”

“Just trying to be helpful.” The Culture agent shrugged.

“What if you still can’t find anything?” Yalson asked.

“We go back to the ship,” Horza said, shaking his head. “That’s about all we can do. Wubslin can check the suit mass sensor on board and, depending on what we find is wrong with it, we might come back down or we might not. Now the power’s on none of that should take very long or involve any hard slog.”

“Pity,” Wubslin said, fingering the controls. “We can’t even use this train to get back to station four, because of that train in station six blocking the way.”

“It probably would still move,” Horza told the engineer. “We’ll have to do some shunting whichever way we go, if we use the mainline trains.”

“Oh, well, then,” Wubslin said, a little dreamily, and looked over the controls again. He pointed at one of them. “Is that the speed control?”

Horza laughed, crossing his arms and grinning at the man, “Yes. We’ll see if we can arrange a little journey.” He leaned over and pointed out a couple of other controls, showing Wubslin how the train was readied for running. They pointed and nodded and talked.

Yalson stirred restlessly in her seat. Finally she looked over at Balveda. The Culture woman was looking at Horza and Wubslin with a smile; she turned her head to Yalson, sensing her gaze, and smiled more widely, moving her head fractionally to indicate the two men and raising her eyebrows. Yalson, reluctantly, grinned back, and shifted the weight of her gun slightly.

The lights came quickly now. They streamed by, creating a flickering, strobing pattern of light in the dim cabin. He knew; he had opened his eye and had seen.

It had taken all his strength just to lift that eyelid. He had drifted off to sleep for a while. He was not sure for how long, he only knew he had been dozing. The pain was not so bad now. He had been still for some time, just lying here with his broken body slanted out of the strange, alien chair, his head on the control console, his hand wedged into the small flap by the power control, fingers jammed under the fail-safe lever inside.

It was restful; he could not have expressed how pleasant it all was after that awful crawl through both the train and the tunnel of his own pain.

The train’s motion had altered. It still rocked him, but a little faster now, and with a new rhythm added as well, a more rapid vibration which was like a heart beating fast. He thought he could hear it, too, now. The noise of the wind, blowing through these deep-buried holes far under the blizzard-swept wastes above. Or maybe he imagined it. He found it hard to tell.

He felt like a small child again, on a journey with his year fellows and their old Querlmentor, rocked to sleep, slipping in and out of a dozing, happy sleep.

He kept thinking: I have done all I could. Perhaps not enough, but it was all I had in my power to do. It was comforting.

Like the ebbing pain, it eased him; like the rocking of the train, it soothed him.

He closed his eye again. There was comfort in the darkness, too. He had no idea how far along he was, and was starting to think it did not matter. Things were beginning to drift away from him again; he was just beginning to forget why he was doing all this. But that didn’t matter, either. It was done; so long as he didn’t move, nothing mattered. Nothing.

Nothing at all.

The doors were jammed, all right; same as the other train. The drone became exasperated and slammed against one of the reactor chamber doors with a force field, knocking itself back through the air with the reaction.

The door wasn’t even dented.

Oh-oh.

Back to the crawlways and cable-runs. Unaha-Closp turned and headed down a short corridor, then down a hole in the floor, heading for an inspection panel under the floor of the lower deck.

Of course I end up doing all the work. I might have known. Basically what I’m doing for that bastard is hunting down another machine. I ought to have my circuits tested. I’ve a good mind not to tell him even if I do find the Mind somewhere. That would teach him.

It threw back the inspection hatch and lowered itself into the dim, narrow space under the floor. The hatch hissed shut after it, blocking out the light. It thought about turning back and opening the hatch again, but knew it would just close automatically once more, and that it would lose its temper and damage the thing, and that was all a bit pointless and petty, so it didn’t; that sort of behaviour was for humans.

It started off along the crawlway, heading towards the rear of the train, underneath where the reactor ought to be.

The Idiran was talking. Aviger could hear it, but he wasn’t listening. He could see the monster out of the corner of his eye, too, but he wasn’t really looking at it. He was gazing absently at his gun, humming tunelessly and thinking about what he would do if — somehow — he could get hold of the Mind himself. Suppose the others were killed, and he was left with the device? He knew the Idirans would probably pay well for the Mind. So would the Culture; they had money, even if they weren’t supposed to use it in their own civilisation.

Just dreams, but anything could happen out of this lot. You never knew how the dust might fall. He would buy some land: an island on a nice safe planet somewhere. He’d have some retro-ageing done and raise some sort of expensive racing animals, and he’d get to know the better-off people through his connections. Or he’d get somebody else to do all the hard work; with money you could do that. You could do anything.

The Idiran went on talking.

His hand was almost free. That was all he could get free for now, but maybe he could twist his arm out later; it was getting easier all the time. The humans had been on the train for a while; how much longer would they stay? The small machine hadn’t been on for so long. He had only just seen it in time, appearing from the tunnel mouth; he knew its sight was better than his own, and for a moment he had been afraid it might have seen him moving the arm he was trying to get free, the one on the far side from the old human. But the machine had disappeared into the train, and nothing had happened. He kept looking over at the old man, checking. The human seemed lost in a day-dream. Xoxarle kept talking, telling the empty air about old Idiran victories.

His hand was almost out.

A little dust came off a girder above him, about a metre over his head, and floated down through the near still air, falling almost but not quite straight down, gradually drifting away from him. He looked at the old man again, and strained at the wires over his hand. Come free, damn you!

Unaha-Closp had to hammer a corner from a right angle to a curve to get into the small passage it wanted to use. It wasn’t even a crawlway; it was a cable conduit, but it led into the reactor compartment. It checked its senses; same amount of radiation here as in the other train.

It scraped through the small gap it had created in the cable-run, deeper into the metal and plastic guts of the silent carriage.

I can hear something. Something’s coming, underneath me…

The lights were a continuous line, flashing past the train too quickly for most eyes to have distinguished them individually. The lights ahead, down the track, appeared round curves or at the far end of straights, swelled and joined and tore past the windows, like shooting stars in the darkness.

The train had taken a long time to reach its maximum speed, fought for long minutes to overcome the inertia of its thousands of tonnes of mass. Now it had done so, and was pushing itself and the column of air in front of it as fast as it ever would, hurtling down the long tunnel with a roaring, tearing noise greater than any train had ever made in those dark passages, its damaged carriages breaking the air or scraping the blast-door edges to decrease its speed a little but increase the noise of its passage a great deal.

The scream of the train’s whirling motors and wheels, of its ruffled metal body tearing through the air and of that same air swirling through the open spaces of the punctured carriages, rang from the ceiling and the walls, the consoles and the floor and the slope of armoured glass.

Quayanorl’s eye was closed. Inside his ears, membranes pulsed to the noise outside, but no message was transmitted to his brain. His head bobbed up and down on the vibrating console, as though still alive. His hand shook on the collision brake override, as if the warrior was nervous, or afraid.

Wedged there, glued, soldered by his own blood, he was like a strange, damaged part of the train.

The blood was dried; outside Quayanorl’s body, as within, it had stopped flowing.

“How goes it, Unaha-Closp?” Yalson’s voice said.

“I’m under the reactor and I’m busy. I’ll let you know if I find anything. Thank you.” It switched its communicator off and looked at the black-sheathed entrails in front of it: wires and cables disappearing into a cable-run. More than there had been in the front train. Should it cut its way in, or try another route?

Decisions, decisions.

His hand was out. He paused. The old man was still sitting on the pallet, fiddling with his gun.

Xoxarle allowed himself a small sigh of relief, and flexed his hand, letting the fingers stretch then fist. A few motes of dust moved slowly past his cheek. He stopped flexing his hand.

He watched the dust move.

A breath, something less than a breeze, tickled at his arms and legs. Most odd, he thought.

“All I’m saying,” Yalson told Horza, shifting her feet on the console a little, “is that I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come down here yourself. Anything could happen.”

“I’ll take a communicator; I’ll check in,” Horza said. He stood with his arms crossed, his backside resting on the edge of a control panel; the same one Wubslin’s helmet lay on. The engineer was familiarising himself with the controls of the train. They were pretty simple really.

“It’s basic, Horza,” Yalson told him; “you never go alone. What stuff did they teach you at this goddamned Academy?”

“If I’m allowed to say anything,” Balveda put in, clasping her hands in front of her and looking at the Changer, “I would just like to say I think Yalson’s right.”

Horza stared at the Culture woman with a look of unhappy amazement. “No, you are not allowed to say anything,” he told her. “Whose side do you think you’re on, Perosteck?”

“Oh, Horza,” Balveda grinned, crossing her arms, “I almost feel like one of the team after all this time.”

About half a metre away from the gently rocking, slowly cooling head of Subordinate-Captain Quayanorl Gidborux Stoghrle III, a small light began to flash very rapidly on the console. At the same time, the air in the control deck was pierced by a high-pitched ululating whine which filled the deck and the whole front carriage and was relayed to several other control centres throughout the speeding train. Quayanorl, his firmly wedged body tugged to one side by the force of the train roaring round a long curve, could have heard that noise, just, if he had been alive. Very few humans could have heard it.

Unaha-Closp thought the better of cutting off all communication with the outside world, and reopened its communicator channels. Nobody wanted to speak to it, however. It started to cut the cables leading into the conduit, snipping them one by one with a knife-edged force field. No point in worrying about damaging the thing after all that had happened to the train in station six, it told itself. If it hit anything vital to the normal running of the train, it was sure Horza would yell out soon enough. It could repair the cables without too much trouble anyway.

A draught?

Xoxarle thought he must be imagining it, then that it was the result of some air-circulation unit recently switched on. Perhaps the heat from the lights and the station’s systems, once it was powered up, required extra ventilation.

But it grew. Slowly, almost too slowly to discern, the faint, steady current increased in strength. Xoxarle racked his brains; what could it be? Not a train; surely not a train.

He listened carefully, but could hear nothing. He looked over at the old human, and found him staring back. Had he noticed?

“Run out of battles and victories to tell me about?” Aviger said, sounding tired. He looked the Idiran up and down. Xoxarle laughed — a little too loudly, even nervously, had Aviger been well enough versed in Idiran gestures and voice tones to tell.

“Not at all!” Xoxarle said. “I was just thinking…” He launched into another tale of defeated enemies. It was one he had told to his family, in ship messes and in attack-shuttle holds; he could have told it in his sleep. While his voice filled the bright station, and the old human looked down at the gun he held in his hands, Xoxarle’s thoughts were elsewhere, trying to work out what was going on. He was still pulling and tugging at the wires on his arm; whatever was happening it was vital to be able to do more than just move his hand. The draught increased. Still he could hear nothing. A steady stream of dust was blowing off the girder above his head.

It had to be a train. Could one have been left switched on somewhere? Impossible…

Quayanorl! Did we set the controls to—? But they hadn’t tried to jam the controls on. They had only worked out what the various controls did and tested their action to make sure they all moved. They hadn’t tried to do anything else; and there had been no point, no time.

It had to be Quayanorl himself. He had done it. He must still be alive. He had sent the train.

For an instant — as he tugged desperately at the wires holding him, talking all the time and watching the old man — Xoxarle imagined his comrade still back in station six, but then he remembered how badly injured he had been. Xoxarle had earlier thought his comrade might still be alive, when he was still lying on the access ramp, but then the Changer had told the old man, this same Aviger, to go back and shoot Quayanorl in the head. That should have finished Quayanorl, but apparently it hadn’t.

You failed, old one! Xoxarle exulted, as the draught became a breeze. A distant whining noise, almost too high pitched to hear, started up. It was muffled, coming from the train. The alarm. Xoxarle’s arm, held by one last wire just above his elbow, was almost free. He shrugged once, and the wire slipped up over his upper arm and spilled loose onto his shoulder.

“Old one, Aviger, my friend,” he said. Aviger looked up quickly as Xoxarle interrupted his own monologue.

“What?”

“This will sound silly, and I shall not blame you if you are afraid, but I have the most infernal itch in my right eye. Would you scratch it for me? I know it sounds silly, a warrior tormented half to death by a sore eye, but it has been driving me quite demented these past ten minutes. Would you scratch it? Use the barrel of your gun if you like; I shall be very careful not to move a muscle or do anything threatening if you use the muzzle of your gun. Or anything you like. Would you do that? I swear to you on my honour as a warrior I tell the truth.”

Aviger stood up. He looked towards the nose of the train.

He can’t hear the alarm. He is old. Can the other, younger ones hear? Is it too high-pitched for them? What of the machine? Oh come here, you old fool. Come here!

Unaha-Closp pulled the cut cables apart. Now it could reach into the cable-run and try cutting further up, so it could get in.

“Drone, drone, can you hear me?” It was the woman Yalson again.

“Now what?” it said.

“Horza’s lost some readouts from the reactor car. He wants to know what you’re doing.”

“Damn right I do,” Horza muttered in the background.

“I had to cut some cables. Seems to be the only way into the reactor area. I’ll repair them later, if you insist.”

The communicator channel cut off for a second. In that moment, Unaha-Closp thought it could hear something high pitched. But it wasn’t sure. Fringes of sensation, it thought to itself. The channel opened again. Yalson said, “All right. But Horza says to tell him the next time you think about cutting anything, especially cables.”

“All right, all right!” the drone said. “Now, will you leave me alone?” The channel closed again. It thought for a moment. It had crossed its mind that there might be an alarm sounding somewhere, but logically an alarm ought to have repeated on the control deck, and it had heard nothing in the background when Yalson spoke, apart from the Changer’s muttered interjection. Therefore, no alarm.

It reached back into the conduit with a cutter field.

“Which eye?” Aviger said, from just too far away. A wisp of his thin, yellowish hair was blown across his forehead by the breeze. Xoxarle waited for the man to realise, but he didn’t. He just patted the hairs back and stared up quizzically at the Idiran’s head, gun ready, face uncertain.

“This right one,” Xoxarle said, turning his head slowly. Aviger looked round towards the nose of the train again, then back at Xoxarle.

“Don’t tell you-know-who, all right?”

“I swear. Now, please; I can’t stand it.”

Aviger stepped forward. Still out of reach. “On your honour, you’re not playing a trick?” he said.

“As a warrior. On my mother-parent’s unsullied name. On my clan and folk! May the galaxy turn to dust if I lie!”

“All right, all right,” Aviger said, raising his gun and holding it out high. “I just wanted to make sure.” He poked the barrel toward Xoxarle’s eye. “Whereabouts does it itch?”

“Here!” hissed Xoxarle. His freed arm lashed out, grabbed the barrel of the gun and pulled. Aviger, still holding the gun, was dragged after it, slamming into the chest of the Idiran. Breath exploded out of him, then the gun sailed down and smashed into his skull. Xoxarle had averted his head when he’d grabbed the weapon in case it fired, but he needn’t have bothered; Aviger hadn’t left it switched on.

In the stiffening breeze, Xoxarle let the unconscious human slide to the floor. He held the laser rifle in his mouth and used his hand to set the controls for a quiet burn. He snapped the trigger guard from the gun’s casing, to make room for his larger fingers.

The wires should melt easily.

Like a squirm of snakes appearing from a hole in the ground, the bunched cables, cut about a metre along their length, slid out of the conduit. Unaha-Closp went into the narrow tube and reached behind the bared ends of the next length of cables.

“Yalson,” Horza said, “I wouldn’t take you with me anyway, even if I decided not to come back down alone.” He grinned at her. Yalson frowned.

“Why not?” she said.

“Because I’d need you on the ship, making sure Balveda here and our section leader didn’t misbehave.”

Yalson’s eyes narrowed. “That had better be all,” she growled. Horza’s grin widened and he looked away, as though he wanted to say more, but couldn’t for some reason.

Balveda sat, swinging her legs from the edge of the too-big seat, and wondered what was going on between the Changer and the dark, down-skinned woman. She thought she had detected a change in their relationship, a change which seemed to come mostly from the way Horza treated Yalson. An extra element had been added; there was something else determining his reactions to her, but Balveda couldn’t pin it down. It was all quite interesting, but it didn’t help her. She had her own problems anyway. Balveda knew her own weaknesses, and one of them was troubling her now.

She really was starting to feel like one of the team. She watched Horza and Yalson arguing about who should accompany the Changer if he came back down into the Command System after a return to the Clear Air Turbulence, and she could not help but smile, unseen, at them. She liked the determined, no-nonsense woman, even if her regard was not returned, and she could not find it in her heart to think of Horza as implacably as she ought.

It was the Culture’s fault. It considered itself too civilised and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The idea was fine as long as you didn’t get too close, but once you had spent some time with your opponents, such empathy could turn against you. There was a sort of detached, non-human aggression required to go along with such mobilised compassion, and Balveda could feel it slipping away from her.

Perhaps she felt too safe, she thought. Perhaps it was because now there was no significant threat. The battle for the Command System was over; the quest was petering out, the tension of the past few days disappearing.

Xoxarle worked quickly. The laser’s thin, attenuated beam buzzed and fussed at each wire, turning each strand red, yellow and white, then — as he strained against them — parted each one with a snap. The old man at the Idiran’s feet stirred, moaned.

The faint breeze had become a strong one. Dust was blowing under the train and starting to swirl around Xoxarle’s feet. He moved the laser to another set of wires. Only a few to go. He glanced towards the nose of the train. There was still no sign of the humans or the machine. He glanced back the other way, over his shoulder, towards the train’s last carriage and the gap between it and the tunnel mouth where the wind was whistling through. He could see no light, still hear no noise. The current of air made his eye feel cold.

He turned back and pointed the laser rifle at another set of wires. The sparks were caught in the breeze and scattered over the station floor and across the back of Aviger’s suit.

Typical: me doing all the work as usual, thought Unaha-Closp. It hauled another bunch of cables out of the conduit. The wire run behind it was starting to fill up with cut lengths of wire, blocking the route the drone had taken to get to the small pipe it was now working in.

It’s beneath me. I can feel it. I can hear it. I don’t know what it’s doing, but I can feel, I can hear.

And there’s something else… another noise…

The train was a long, articulated shell in some gigantic gun; a metal scream in a vast throat. It rammed through the tunnel like a piston in the biggest engine ever made, sweeping round the curves and into the straights, lights flooding the way ahead for an instant, air pushed ahead of it — like its howling, roaring voice — for kilometres.

Dust lifted from the platform, made clouds in the air. An empty drink container rolled off the pallet where Aviger had been sitting and clattered to the floor; it started rolling along the platform, towards the nose of the train, hitting off the wall a couple of times. Xoxarle saw it. The wind tugged at him, the wires parted. He got one leg free, then another. His other arm was out, and the last wires fell away.

A piece of plastic sheeting lifted from the pallet like some black, flat bird and flopped onto the platform, sliding after the metal container, now halfway down the station. Xoxarle stooped quickly, caught Aviger round the waist and, with the man held easily in one arm and the laser in his other hand, ran back, down the platform, towards the wall beside the blocked tunnel mouth where the wind made a moaning noise past the sloped rear of the train.

“…or lock them both away down here instead. You know we can…” Yalson said.

We’re close, Horza thought, nodding absently at Yalson, not listening as she told him why he needed her to help him look for the Mind. We’re close, I’m sure we are; I can feel it; we’re almost there. Somehow we’ve — I’ve — held it all together. But it’s not over yet, and it only takes one tiny error, one oversight, a single mistake, and that’s it: fuck-up, failure, death. So far we’ve done it, despite the mistakes, but it’s so easy to miss something, to fail to spot some tiny detail in the mass of data which later — when you’ve forgotten all about it, when your back is turned — creeps up and clobbers you. The secret was to think of everything, or — because maybe the Culture was right, and only a machine could literally do that — just to be so in tune with what was going on that you thought automatically of all the important and potentially important things, and ignored the rest.

With something of a shock, Horza realised that his own obsessive drive never to make a mistake, always to think of everything, was not so unlike the fetishistic urge which he so despised in the Culture: that need to make everything fair and equal, to take the chance out of life. He smiled to himself at the irony and glanced over at Balveda, sitting watching Wubslin experimenting with some controls.

Coming to resemble your enemies, Horza thought; maybe there’s something in it, after all—

“…Horza, are you listening to me?” Yalson said.

“Hmm? Yes, of course,” he smiled.

Balveda frowned, while Horza and Yalson talked on, and Wubslin poked and prodded at the train’s controls. For some reason, she was starting to feel uneasy.

Outside the front carriage, beyond Balveda’s field of view, a small container rolled along the platform and into the wall alongside the tunnel mouth.

Xoxarle ran to the rear of the station. By the entrance to the foot tunnel, leading off at right angles into the rock behind the station’s platform, was the tunnel which the Changer and the two women had emerged from when they had returned from their search of the station. It provided the ideal place from which to watch; Xoxarle thought he would escape the effects of the collision, and would have the best opportunity for a clear field of fire, right down the station to the nose of the train, in the meantime. He could stay there right up until the train hit. If they tried to get off, he would have them. He checked the gun, turning its power up to maximum.

Balveda got down from the seat, folding her arms, and walked slowly across the control deck towards the side windows, staring intently at the floor, wondering why she felt uneasy.

The wind howled through the gap between the tunnel edge and the train; it became a gale. Twenty metres away from where Xoxarle waited in the foot tunnel, kneeling there with one foot on the back of the unconscious Aviger, the train’s rear carriage started to rock and sway.

The drone stopped in mid-cut. Two things occurred to it: one, that dammit there was a funny noise; and two, that just supposing there had been an alarm sounding on the control deck, not only would none of the humans be able to hear it, there was also a good chance that Yalson’s helmet mike would not relay the high-pitched whine, either.

But wouldn’t there be a visual warning, too?

Balveda turned at the side window, without looking out properly. She sat against the console there, looking back.

“…on how serious you still are about looking for this damn thing,” Yalson was saying to Horza.

“Don’t worry,” the Changer said, nodding at Yalson, “I’ll find it.”

Balveda turned round, looked at the station outside.

Just then, Yalson and Wubslin’s helmets both came alive with the urgent voice of the drone. Balveda was distracted by a piece of black material, which was sliding quickly along the floor of the station. Her eyes widened. Her mouth opened.

The gale became a hurricane. A distant noise, like a great avalanche heard from far away, came from the tunnel mouth.

Then, up the long final straight which led into station seven from station six, light appeared at the end of the tunnel.

Xoxarle could not see the light, but he could hear the noise; he brought the gun up and aimed along the side of the stationary train. The stupid humans must realise soon.

The steel rails began to whine.

The drone backed quickly out of the conduit. It threw the cut, discarded lengths of cable against the walls. “Yalson! Horza!” it shouted at them through its communicator. It dashed along the short length of narrow tunnel. The instant it turned the corner it had hammered in to make passable, it could hear the faint, high, insistent wailing of the alarm. “There’s an alarm! I can hear it! What’s happening?”

There, in the crawlway, it could feel and hear the rush of air coursing through and around the train.

“There’s a gale blowing out there!” Balveda said quickly, as soon as the drone’s voice stopped. Wubslin lifted his helmet from the console. Where it had lain, a small orange light was flashing. Horza stared at it. Balveda looked up at the platform. Clouds of dust blew along the station floor. Light equipment was being blown off the pallet, opposite the rear access gantry. “Horza,” Balveda said quietly, “I can’t see Xoxarle, or Aviger.”

Yalson was on her feet. Horza glanced over at the side window, then back at the light, winking on the console. “It’s an alarm!” the drone’s voice shouted from the two helmets. “I can hear it!”

Horza picked up his rifle, grabbed the edge of Yalson’s helmet while she held it and said, “It’s a train, drone; that’s the collision alarm. Get off the train now.” He let go of the helmet, which Yalson quickly shoved over her head and locked. Horza gestured towards the door. “Move!” he said loudly, glancing round at Yalson, Balveda and Wubslin, who was still sitting holding the helmet he had removed from the console.

Balveda headed for the door. Yalson was just behind her. Horza started forward, then turned as he went, looked back at Wubslin, who was setting his helmet down on the floor and turning back to the controls. “Wubslin!” he yelled. “Move!”

Balveda and Yalson were running through the carriage. Yalson looked back, hesitated.

“I’m going to get it moving,” Wubslin said urgently, not turning to look at Horza. He punched some buttons.

“Wubslin!” Horza shouted. “Get out, now!”

“It’s all right, Horza,” Wubslin said, still flicking buttons and switches, glancing at screens and dials, grimacing when he had to move his injured arm, and still not turning his head. “I know what I’m doing. You get off. I’ll get her moving; you’ll see.”

Horza glanced towards the rear of the train. Yalson was standing in the middle of the forward carriage, just visible through two open doors, her head going from side to side as she looked first at the still running Balveda heading for the second carriage and the access ramps, and then at Horza, waiting in the control deck. Horza motioned her to get out. He turned and strode forward and took Wubslin by one elbow. “You crazy bastard!” he shouted. “It could be coming at fifty metres a second; have you any idea how long it takes to get one of these things moving?” He hauled at the engineer’s arm. Wubslin turned quickly and hit Horza across the face with his free hand. Horza was thrown back over the floor of the control deck, more amazed than hurt. Wubslin turned back to the controls.

“Sorry, Horza, but I can get it round that bend and out of the way. You get out now. Leave me.”

Horza took his laser rifle, stood up, watched the engineer working at the controls, then turned and ran from the place. As he did so, the train lurched, seeming to flex and tighten.

Yalson followed the Culture woman. Horza had waved at her to go on, so she did. “Balveda!” she shouted. “Emergency exits; go down; bottom deck!”

The Culture agent didn’t hear. She was still heading for the next carriage and the access ramps. Yalson ran after her, cursing.

The drone exploded out of the floor and raced through the carriage for the nearest emergency hatch.

That vibration! It’s a train! Another train’s coming, fast! What have those idiots done? I have to get out!

Balveda skidded round a corner, threw out one hand and caught hold of a bulkhead edge; she dived for the open door which led to the middle access ramp. Yalson’s footsteps pounded behind her.

She ran out onto the ramp, into a howling gale, a constant, gustless hurricane. Instantly the air around her detonated with cracks and sparks; light glared from all sides, and the girders blew out in molten lines. She threw herself flat, sliding and rolling along the surface of the ramp. The girders ahead of her, where the ramp turned and sloped down to one side, glittered with laser fire. She got half up again and, feet and hands scrabbling for purchase on the ramp, threw herself back into the train fractionally before the moving line of shots blasted into the side of the ramp and the girders and guard rails beyond. Yalson almost tripped over her; Balveda reached up and grabbed the other woman’s arm. “Somebody’s firing!”

Yalson went forward to the edge and started firing back.

The train gave a lurch.

The final straight between station six and station seven was over three kilometres long. The time between the point the racing machine’s lights would have become visible from the rear of the train sitting in station seven, and the instant the train flashed out of the dark tunnel into the station itself, occupied less than a minute.

Dead, body shaking and rocking, but still wedged too tightly to be dislodged from the controls, Quayanorl’s cold, closed eye faced a scene through sloped, armoured glass of a night-dark space strung with twin bright lines of almost solid light, and directly in front, rapidly enlarging, a halo of brightness, a glaring ring of luminescence with a grey, metallic core.

Xoxarle cursed. The target had moved quickly, and he’d missed. But they were trapped on the train. He had them. The old human under his knee moaned and tried to move. Xoxarle trod down harder on him and got ready to shoot again. The jetstream of air screamed out of the tunnel and round the rear of the train.

Answering shots splashed randomly around the rear of the station, well away from him. He smiled. Just then, the train moved.

“Get out!” Horza said, arriving at the door where the two women were, one firing, one crouched down, risking the occasional look out. The air was whirling into the carriage, shaking and roaring.

“It must be Xoxarle!” Yalson shouted above the noise of the storming wind. She leant out and fired. More shots rippled over the access ramp and thudded into the outer hull of the train around the door. Balveda ducked back as hot fragments blew in through the open door. The train seemed to wobble, then move forward, very slowly.

“What—?” Yalson yelled, looking round at Horza as he joined her at the door. He shrugged as he leant out to fire down the platform.

“Wubslin!” he shouted. He sent a hail of fire down the length of the station. The train crept forward; already a metre of the access ramp was hidden by the side of the train’s hull near the open door. Something sparkled in the darkness of the distant tunnel, where the wind screamed and the dust blew and a noise like never-ending thunder came.

Horza shook his head. He waved Balveda forward, to the ramp, now with only about half its breadth available from the door. He fired again; Yalson leant out and fired, too. Balveda started forward.

At that moment a hatch blew out, near the middle of the train, and from the same carriage a huge circular plug of train hull fell clanging out — a great flat cork of thick wall tipping down to the station floor. A small dark shape dashed from the broken hatch, and from the great circular hole near by a silver point came, swelling quickly to a fat, bright, reflecting ovoid as the wall section hit the platform, the drone whizzed through the air, and Balveda started forward along the ramp.

“There it is!” Yalson screamed.

The Mind was out of the train, starting to turn and race off. Then the flickering laser fire from the far end of the station switched; no longer smashing into the access ramp and girders, it began to scatter flashing explosions of light all over the surface of the silvery ellipsoid. The Mind seemed to stop, hang in the air, shaken by the fusilade of laser shots; then it fell sideways, out over the platform, its smooth surface suddenly starting to ripple and grow dim as it rolled through the rushing air, falling towards the side wall of the station like a crippled airship. Balveda was across the ramp, running down the sloped section, almost at the lower level. “Get out!” Horza yelled, shoving Yalson. The train was away from the ramps now, motors growling but unheard in the raging hurricane which swept through the station. Yalson slapped her wrist, switching on her AG, then leapt out of the door into the gale, still firing.

Horza leant out, having to fire through the girders of the access ramp. He held onto the train with one hand, felt it shaking like a frightened animal. Some of his shots smacked into the access ramp girders, blasting fountains of debris out into the slipstream of air and making him duck back in.

The Mind crunched into the side wall of the station, rolling over to lodge in the angle between the floor and the curved wall, its silver skin quivering, going dull.

Unaha-Closp twisted through the air, avoiding laser shots. Balveda reached the bottom of the ramp and ran across the station floor. The fan of shots from the distant foot tunnel seemed to hesitate between her and the flying figure of Yalson, then swept up to close around the woman in the suit. Yalson fired back, but the shots found her, made her suit sparkle.

Horza threw himself out of the train, falling to the ground from the slowly moving carriage, crashing into the rock floor, winding himself, being bowled over by the tearing blast of air. He ran forward as soon as he could get to his feet, bouncing up from the impact, firing through the hurricane towards the far end of the station. Yalson still flew, moving into the torrent of air and the crackling laser fire.

Light blazed around the rear of the train, now heading at a little over walking speed from the station. The noise of the oncoming train — drowning out every other sound, even explosions and shots, so that everything else seemed to be happening in a shocked silence within that ultimate scream — rose in pitch.

Yalson dropped; her suit was damaged.

Her legs started to work before she hit the ground, and when she did she was running, running for the nearest cover. She ran for the Mind, dull silver by the wall side.

And changed her mind.

She turned, just before she would have been able to dive behind the Mind, and ran on round it, towards the doorways and alcoves of the wall beyond.

Xoxarle’s fire slammed into her again the instant she turned, and this time her suit armour could soak up no more energy; it gave way, the laser fire bursting through like lightning all over the woman’s body, throwing her into the air, blowing her arms out, kicking her legs from under her, jerking her like a doll caught in the fist of an angry child, and throwing a bright crimson cloud from her chest and abdomen.

The train hit.

It flashed into the station on a tide of noise; it roared from the tunnel like a solid metal thunderbolt, seeming to cross the space between the tunnel mouth and the slowly moving train in front in the same instant as it appeared. Xoxarle, closest of them all, caught a fleeting glimpse of the train’s sleek shining nose before that great shovel front slammed into the back of the other train.

He could not have believed there was a sound greater than that the train had made in the tunnel, but the noise of its impact dwarfed even that cacophony. It was a star of sound, a blinding nova where before there had only been a dim glow.

The train hit at over one hundred and ninety kilometres per hour. Wubslin’s train had barely progressed a carriage length into the tunnel and was moving hardly faster than walking speed.

The racing train smashed into the rear coach, lifting and crumpling it in a fraction of a second, crushing it into the tunnel roof, jack-hammering its layers of metal and plastic into a tight wad of wreckage in the same instant as its own nose and front carriage caved in underneath, shattering wheels, snapping rails and bursting the train’s metal skin like shrapnel from some vast grenade.

The train ploughed on: into and under the front train, skidding and crashing to one side as smashed sections of the two trains kicked out to the wall side of the tracks, forcing them both into the main body of the station in a welter of tearing metal and fractured stone, while the carriages bucked, squashed, telescoped and disintegrated all at once.

The whole length of the racing train continued to pour out of the tunnel, coaches flashing by, streaming into the chaos of disintegrating wreckage in front, lifting and crashing and slewing. Flames burst and flickered in the detonating debris; sparks fountained; glass blew spraying out from the breaking windows; flaying ribbons of metal beat at the walls.

Xoxarle ducked in, away from the pulverising sound of it.

Wubslin felt the train hit. It threw him back in the chair. He knew already he had failed; the train, his train, was going too slowly. A great hand from nowhere rammed into his back; his ears popped; the control deck, the carriage, the whole train shook round him, and suddenly, in the midst of it, the rear of the next train, the one in the repair and maintenance cavern, was racing towards him. He felt his train jump the tracks on the curve that might have let him roll to safety. The acceleration went on. He was pinned, helpless. The rear carriage of the other train flashed towards him; he closed his eyes, half a second before he was crushed like an insect inside the wreckage. Horza was curled in a small doorway in the station wall, with no idea how he had got there. He didn’t look, he couldn’t see. He whimpered in a corner while the devastation bellowed in his ears, pelted his back with debris and shook the walls and floor.

Balveda had found a space in the wall, too — an alcove where she hid, her back turned, her face hidden.

Unaha-Closp had planted itself on the station ceiling, behind the cover of a camera dome. It watched the crash as it went on beneath; it saw the last carriage leave the tunnel, saw the crashing train smash into and through the one they had been in only seconds before, pushing it forward in a skidding, tangled mess of mangled metal. Carriages left the tracks, skidding sideways over the station floor as the wreck slowed, tearing the access ramps from the rock, smashing lights from the ceiling; debris flew up, and the drone had to dodge. It saw Yalson’s body, beneath it on the platform, hit by the slewing, rolling carriages, tumbling over the fused rock surface in a cloud of sparks; they swept past, just missing the Mind, scraped the woman’s torn body from the floor and buried it with the access ramps in the wall, hammering into the black rock by the side of the tunnel where a squeezed-out collar of wreckage swelled as the last of the impetus from the collision spent itself compressing metal and stone together.

Fire burst out; sparks flashed from the tracks; the station lights flickered. Wreckage fell back, and the quivering echo of the wreck reverberated through the station. Smoke started up, explosions shook the station, and suddenly, from out of the ceiling, surprising the drone, water started to spray from holes all along the surface of rock, beside the flickering lines of lights. The water turned to foam and floated down through the air like warm snow.

The mangled wreckage hissed and groaned and creaked as it settled. Flames licked over it, fighting against the falling foam as they found flammables in the debris.

Then there was a scream, and the drone looked down through a haze of smoke and foam. Horza ran from a doorway in the wall, just up the platform from the near edge of the burning metal rubble.

The man ran up the wreckage-littered platform, screaming and firing his gun. The drone saw rock fracture and explode around the distant tunnel entrance Xoxarle had been firing from. It expected to see answering fire and the man fall, but there was nothing. The man kept on running and firing, shouting incoherently all the time. The drone couldn’t see Balveda.

Xoxarle had stuck the gun round the corner as soon as the noise died away; at the same time the man appeared and started firing. Xoxarle had time to take aim but not to fire. A shot landed near the gun, on the wall, and something hammered into Xoxarle’s hand; the gun sputtered, then went dead. A splinter of rock protruded from the weapon’s casing. Xoxarle swore, threw it away across the tunnel. More shots burst around the tunnel mouth as the Changer fired again. Xoxarle looked down at Aviger, who was moving weakly on the floor, face down, limbs shifting in the air and over the rock like somebody trying to swim.

Xoxarle had kept the old one alive to use as a hostage, but he was of little use now. The woman Yalson was dead; he had killed her, and Horza wanted to avenge her.

Xoxarle crushed Aviger’s skull with his foot, then turned and ran.

There were twenty metres to run before the first turn. Xoxarle ran as fast as he could, ignoring the pains from his legs and body. An explosion sounded from the station. A hissing noise came from above Xoxarle’s head, and spurts of water from the sprinkler system started to fall from the ceiling.

The air glowed with laser fire as he dived for the first side tunnel; the wall blew out at him, and something hit his leg and back. He ran on, limping.

There were some doors ahead, to the left. He tried to remember how the stations were laid out. The doors ought to lead to the control room and accommodation dormitories; he could cut through there, cross the repair and maintenance cavern by the gantry bridge, and get up a side tunnel to the transit tube system. That way he could escape. He hobbled quickly, shoulder-charging the doors. The Changer’s steps sounded loud somewhere in the tunnels behind him.

The drone watched Horza, his gun still firing, his legs pumping, run up the platform like a madman, screaming and howling and vaulting bits of wreckage. He sprinted over the place where Yalson’s body had lain before it was brushed from the station floor by the tumbling carriages, then ran on, preceded by a cone of glowing light from his gun, past where the pallet had been, to the far end of the station, where Xoxarle had been firing from, and disappeared into the side tunnel.

Unaha-Closp floated down. The wreckage crackled and fumed; the foam fell to sleet. The ugly smell of some noxious gas started to fill the air. The drone’s sensors detected medium-high radiation. A series of small explosions burst from the wrecked carriages, starting fresh fires to replace the ones smothered by the foam now coating the chaos of the mangled metal like snow on jagged mountains.

Unaha-Closp came up to the Mind. It lay by the wall, its surface rippled and dark, the colours of oil on water, and dull.

“Bet you thought you were smart, didn’t you?” Unaha-Closp said to it quietly. Perhaps it could hear, maybe it was dead; it had no way of telling. “Hiding in the reactor like that: I bet I know what you did with the pile, too; dumped it down one of those deep shafts, near one of the emergency ventilation motors, maybe even the one we saw on the screen of the mass sensor on the first day. Then hid in the train. Pleased with yourself, I’ll bet.

“Look where it got you, though.” The drone looked at the silent Mind. Its top surface was collecting the falling foam. The drone brushed its own casing clear with a force field.

The Mind moved; it lifted abruptly about half a metre, one end at a time, and the air hissed and crackled for a second. The device’s surface shimmered momentarily while Unaha-Closp backed off, uncertain what was happening. Then the Mind fell back, and rested lightly on the floor again, the colours on its ovoid skin shifting lazily. The drone smelled ozone. “Down but not quite out, eh?” it said. The station began to darken as the undamaged lights were clouded by the rising smoke.

Somebody coughed. Unaha-Closp turned and saw Perosteck Balveda staggering from an alcove. She was bent double, holding her back, and coughing. Her head was gashed and her skin looked the colour of ashes. The drone floated over to her.

“Another survivor,” it said, more to itself than to the woman. It went to her side and used a field to support her. The fumes in the air were choking the woman. Blood leaked from her forehead, and there was a wet patch of red glistening on the back of the jacket she wore.

“What…” she coughed. “Who else?” Her footsteps were unsteady, and the drone had to support her as she stumbled over scattered pieces of the train’s carriages and sections of track. Rocks littered the floor, torn from the walls of the station during the impact.

“Yalson’s dead,” Unaha-Closp said matter-of-factly. “Wubslin, too, probably. Horza’s chasing Xoxarle. Don’t know about Aviger; didn’t see him. The Mind is still alive, I think. It was moving, anyway.”

They approached the Mind; it lay, bobbing up and down at one end every now and again, as though trying to get into the air. Balveda tried to go over to it, but the drone held her back.

“Leave it, Balveda,” it told her, forcing her to keep heading up the platform, her feet skidding on the debris. She went on coughing, her face contorted with pain. “You’ll suffocate in this atmosphere if you try to stay,” the drone said gently. “The Mind can look after itself, or if not there isn’t anything you can do for it.”

“I’m all right,” Balveda insisted. She stopped, straightened; her face became calm, and she stopped coughing. The drone stopped, too, looking at her. She turned to face it, breathing normally, her face still ashen but her expression serene. She brought her hand away from her back, covered in blood, and with the other hand wiped some of the red fluid from her forehead and eye. She smiled. “You see.”

Then her eyes closed, she doubled at the waist, and her head came swooping down towards the rock floor of the station as her legs buckled.

Unaha-Closp caught her neatly in mid-air before she hit the floor and floated her out of the platform area, through the first set of side doors it found, leading towards the control rooms and accommodation section.

Balveda started to come round in the fresh air, before they had gone more than ten metres along the tunnel. Explosions boomed behind them, and the air moved in pulses along the gallery like beats of a huge erratic heart. The lights flickered; water started to drip, then pour from the tunnel roof.

Just as well I don’t rust, Unaha-Closp said to itself, as it floated along the tube to the control room, the woman stirring in its force-field grip. It heard the noise of firing: laser fire, but it couldn’t tell whereabouts the firing was because the noise came from ahead and behind and above, through ventilation outlets.

“See… I’m fine…” Balveda muttered. The drone let her move; they were nearly at the control room, and the air was still fresh, the radiation level decreasing. More explosions rocked the station; Balveda’s hair, and the fur on her jacket, moved in the air current, releasing flakes of foam. Water streamed down, pattering and splashing.

The drone moved through the doors into the control room; the room’s lights did not flicker, and the air was clear. No water flowed from the ceiling, and only the woman’s body and its own casing dripped on the plastic-covered floor. “That’s better,” Unaha-Closp said. It laid the woman down on a chair. More muffled detonations shuddered through the rock and the air.

Lights flickered and flashed throughout the room, from every console and panel.

The drone sat the Culture woman up, then gently shoved her head down between her knees and fanned her face. The explosions boomed, shaking the atmosphere in the room like… like… like stamping feet!

Dum-drum-dum. Dum-drum-dum.

Unaha-Closp hauled Balveda’s head up, and was about to scoop her from the chair when the footsteps from beyond the far door, no longer masked by the sound of explosions from the station itself, suddenly swelled in volume; the doors were kicked open. Xoxarle, wounded, limping as he ran, water streaming from his body, cannoned into the room; he saw Balveda and the drone and headed straight for them.

Unaha-Closp rammed forward, right at the Idiran’s head. Xoxarle caught the machine in one hand and slammed it into a control console, smashing screens and light panels in a fury of sparks and acrid smoke. Unaha-Closp stayed there, jammed halfway into the fused and spluttering switch assembly, smoke pouring out around it.

Balveda opened her eyes, stared round, her face bloodied and wild and frightened; she saw Xoxarle and started forward towards him, opening her mouth but only coughing. Xoxarle grabbed her, pinning her arms to her side. He looked round, to the doors he had smashed through, pausing for a second to draw breath. He was weakening, he knew. His keratinous back plates were almost burnt through where the Changer had shot him, and his leg was hit, too, slowing him all the time. The human would catch him soon… He looked into the face of the female he held and decided not to kill her immediately.

“Perhaps you’ll stay the little one’s trigger finger…” Xoxarle breathed, holding Balveda over his back with one arm and hobbling quickly to the door leading to the dormitories and accommodation section and then to the repair area. He kneed the doors open and let them close behind him. “…But I doubt it,” he added, and hobbled down the short tunnel, then through the first dormitory, under the swaying nets, in a flickering, uncertain light, as the sprinklers started to come on above.

In the control room, Unaha-Closp pulled itself free, its casing covered in burning pieces of plastic wire covering. “Filthy bastard,” it said groggily, wavering through the air away from the smoking console, “you walking cell-menagerie…” Unaha-Closp turned unsteadily through the smoke and made for the doors Xoxarle had come through. It hesitated there, then with a sort of shaking, shrugging motion moved away down the tunnel, gathering speed.

Horza had lost the Idiran. He had followed him down the tunnel, then through some broken doors. There was a choice then: left, right or ahead; three short corridors, lights flickering, water showering from the roof, smoke crawling under the ceiling in lazy waves.

Horza had gone right, the way the Idiran would have gone if he was heading for the transit tubes, and if he had worked out the right direction, and if he didn’t have some other plan.

But he’d chosen the wrong way.

He held the gun tight in his hands. His face ran with the false tears of the showering water. The gun hummed through his gloves; a swollen ball of pain rose from his belly, filling his throat and his eyes and souring his mouth, weighing in his hands, clamping his teeth. He stopped at another junction, near the dormitories, in an agony of indecision, looking from one direction to another while the water fell and the smoke crept and the lights guttered. He heard a scream, and set off that way.

The woman struggled. She was strong, but still powerless, even in his weakened grasp. Xoxarle limped along the corridor, towards the great cavern.

Balveda screamed, tried to wriggle her way free, then use her legs to kick at the Idiran’s thighs and knees. But she was held too tightly, too high on Xoxarle’s back. Her arms were pinned at her sides; her legs could only beat against the keratin plate which curved out from the Idiran’s rump. Behind her, the sleep-nets of the Command System’s builders swayed gently in the tides of air which swept through the long dormitory with each fresh explosion from the platform area and the wrecked trains.

She heard firing from somewhere behind them, and doors at the far end of the long room blew out. The Idiran heard the noise, too; just before they crashed through the exit from the dormitory his head turned to glance back in the direction the noise had come from. Then they were in the short corridor and out onto the terrace which ran round the deep cavern of the repair and maintenance area.

On one side of the huge cavern, a fallen, tangled heap of smashed carriages and wrecked machinery blazed. The train Wubslin had started moving had been rammed into the rear of the train already in the long scooped-out alcove which hung over the cavern floor. Parts of both the front trains had scattered like toys; down to the cavern floor, piled against the walls, crushed into the roof. The foam fell through the cavern, sizzling on the hot debris of the wreck, where flames spilled up from crumpled carriages, and sparks flashed.

Xoxarle slipped on the terrace, and for one second Balveda thought they would both skid off its surface, over the guard rails and down to the jumble of machinery and equipment on the cold, hard floor below. But the Idiran steadied himself, turned and pounded along the broad walkway towards the metal catwalk which crossed the breadth of the cavern and led over the far edge of the terrace into another tunnel — the tunnel which led to the transit tubes.

She heard the Idiran breathe. Her ringing ears caught the crackle of flames, the hiss of foam and the laboured wheeze of Xoxarle’s breath. He held her easily, as though she weighed nothing. She cried out in frustration, heaved her body with all her strength, trying to break his grip or even just get an arm free, struggling weakly.

They came to the suspended catwalk, and again the Idiran almost slipped, then again caught himself in time and steadied. He started along the narrow gantry, his limping, unsteady tread shaking it, making it sound like a metal drum. Her back hurt as she strained; Xoxarle’s grip stayed firm.

Then he skidded to a halt, brought her round in front of his huge, saddle-face. He held her by both shoulders for a moment, then took her right arm by the elbow with one hand, keeping hold of her right shoulder with the other fist.

He brought one knee out, holding his thigh level with the cavern floor, thirty metres below. Held by elbow and shoulder, her weight taken by that one arm, her back aching, her head hardly clear, she suddenly realised what he was going to do.

She screamed.

Xoxarle brought the woman’s upper arm down across his thigh, snapping it like a twig. Her cry broke like ice.

He took her by the wrist of her good arm and swung her out over the side of the catwalk, sweeping her down beneath him and positioning her hand on a thin metal stanchion, then he left her. It was done in a second or two; she swung like a pendulum under the metal bridge. Xoxarle ran off, limping. Each step, shaking the suspended gantry, vibrated through the stanchion to Balveda’s hand, loosening her grip. She hung there. Her broken arm dangled uselessly at her side. Her hand gripped the cold, smooth, foam-smeared surface of the thin stanchion. Her head spun; waves of pain she tried to but could not shut off crashed through her. The cavern lights blinked out, then came back on again. Another explosion shook the wrecked carriages. Xoxarle crossed the catwalk and ran hobbling over the terrace on the other side of the great cave, into the tunnel. Her hand started to slip, going numb; her whole arm was going cold.

Perosteck Balveda twisted in the air, put her head back, and howled.

The drone stopped. Now the noises were from behind. It had taken the wrong direction. It was still fuddled; Xoxarle hadn’t doubled back after all. I’m a fool! I shouldn’t be allowed out by myself!

It turned its body over in the air of the tunnel leading away from the control room and the long dormitories, slowed and stopped, then powered back down the way it had come. It could hear laser fire.

Horza was in the control room; it was clear of water and foam, though smoke was coming from a large hole in one console. He hesitated, then heard another scream — the sound of a human, a woman — and ran through the doors leading to the dormitories.

She tried to swing herself, make a pendulum of her body and so hook a leg onto the gantry, but the already injured muscles in her lower back could not do it; the muscle fibres tore; pain swamped her. She hung. She couldn’t feel her hand. Foam settled on her upturned face and stung her eyes. A series of explosions wracked the mangled heap of carriages, making the air around her quiver, shaking her. She felt herself slip; she dropped fractionally, her grip moving down the stanchion a millimetre or two. She tried to hold on tighter, but could feel nothing.

Noise came from the terrace. She tried to look round and in a moment she saw Horza, racing along the terrace for the catwalk, holding the gun. He skidded on the foam and had to reach out with his free hand to steady himself.

“Horza…” she tried to shout, but all that came out was a croak. Horza ran along the catwalk above her, staring ahead. His steps shook her hand; it had started to slip again. “Horza…” she said again, as loud as she could.

The Changer ran on past her, his face set, the rifle raised, his boots hammering the metal deck above her. Balveda looked down, her head dropping. Her eyes closed.

Horza… Kraiklyn… that geriatric Outworld minister on Sorpen… no piece or image of the Changer, nothing and nobody the man had ever been could have any desire to rescue her. Xoxarle seemed to have hoped some pan-human compassion would make Horza stop and save her, and so give the Idiran a few precious extra moments to make his escape; but the Idiran had made the same mistake about Horza that his whole species had made about the Culture. They were not that soft after all; humans could be just as hard and determined and merciless as any Idiran, given the right encouragement…

I’m going to die, she thought, and was almost more surprised than terrified. Here, now. After all that’s happened, all I’ve done. Die. Just like that!

Her numb hand loosened slowly around the stanchion.

The footsteps above her stopped, returned; she looked up.

Horza’s face was above her, staring down at her.

She hung there, twisting in the air, for an instant, while the man looked into her eyes, the gun near his face. Horza glanced round, over the catwalk, where Xoxarle had gone.

“…help…” she croaked.

He knelt and, taking her hand, pulled her up. “Arm’s broken…” she choked, as he caught her by the neck of her jacket and pulled her onto the surface of the suspended gantry. She rolled over as he stood up. Foam drifted down through the wavering light and dark of the huge, echoing cavern, and flames cast momentary shadows when the lights guttered.

“Thanks,” she coughed.

“That way?” Horza looked round, the way he had been heading, the way Xoxarle had gone. She did her best to nod.

“Horza,” she said, “let him go.”

Horza was already backing off. He shook his head. “No,” he said, then turned and ran. Balveda curled up, her numbed arm going to the broken one; towards it, but not touching it. She coughed and put her hand to her mouth, feeling inside, spluttering. She spat out a tooth.

Horza crossed the catwalk. He felt calm now. Xoxarle could delay him if he liked; he could even let the Idiran get to the transit tube, then he would just step into the tubeway and fire at the retreating end of the transit capsule, or blast the power off properly and trap the Idiran: it didn’t matter.

He crossed the terrace and ran into the tunnel.

It led straight into the distance for over a kilometre. The way to the transit tubes was off to the right somewhere, but there were other doors and entrances, places where Xoxarle could hide.

It was bright and dry in the tunnel. The lights flickered only slightly, and the sprinkler system had remained off.

He thought of looking at the floor only just in time.

He saw the drips of water and foam while he ran towards a pair of doors which faced each other on either side of the tunnel. The line of drips stopped there.

He was running too fast to stop; he ducked instead.

Xoxarle’s fist flicked through the air, out from the left-hand doorway, over the Changer’s head. Horza turned and brought the gun to bear; Xoxarle stepped from the doorway and kicked out. His foot caught the gun, sending its barrel up into the Changer’s face, slamming into Horza’s mouth and nose while the gun sprayed laser fire over the man’s head into the ceiling, bringing a hail of rock dust and splinters down over the Idiran and the human. Xoxarle reached out while the stunned man was staggering back. He took the gun, tearing it from Horza’s hands. He turned it round and pointed it at Horza as the man steadied himself against the wall with one hand, his mouth and nose bleeding. Xoxarle tore the trigger guard from the gun.

Unaha-Closp raced through the control room, banked in the air, flashed through the smoke and past the smashed doors, then darted down the short corridor. It flew down the length of the dormitory, between the swaying nets, through another short tunnel and out onto the terrace.

There was wreckage everywhere. It saw Balveda on the catwalk, sitting up, holding one shoulder with the other hand, then putting her hand down to the floor of the gantry. Unaha-Closp tore through the air towards her, but just before it got to her, as her head was coming up to look at it, the noise of laser fire came from the tunnel on the far side of the cavern. The drone banked again and accelerated.

Xoxarle pressed the trigger just as Unaha-Closp hit him from behind; the gun hadn’t even started to fire as Xoxarle was thrown forward, down to the floor of the tunnel. He rolled over as he fell, but the gun’s muzzle staved into the rock, taking all the Idiran’s weight for a moment; the barrel snapped cleanly in two. The drone stopped just short of Horza. The man was lunging forward for the Idiran, who was already recovering his balance and rearing up in front of them. Unaha-Closp rushed forward again, diving then zooming, attempting an uppercut like the one that had caught the Idiran out once before. Xoxarle fended off the machine with one swiping arm. Unaha-Closp bounced off the wall like a rubber ball, and the Idiran swatted it once more, sending the drone spinning back, dented and crippled, along the corridor towards the cavern.

Horza dived forward. Xoxarle brought his fist down on the human’s head as he lunged. The Changer swerved, but not fast enough; the glancing blow he received hit the side of his head, and he crashed onto the floor, scraping along the side of the wall and coming to rest in a doorway across the tunnel.

Sprinklers spat from the ceiling near where Horza’s gun had fired into it. Xoxarle rounded on the fallen human, who was trying to get to his feet, his legs wobbly and unsure, arms scrambling for purchase over the smooth rock walls. The Idiran brought up his leg to stamp his foot into Horza’s face, then sighed and put his leg down again as the drone Unaha-Closp, riding unevenly in the air, its casing dented, leaking smoke, wobbling as it advanced, came slowly back up the tunnel towards the Idiran. “…You animal…” Unaha-Closp croaked, its small voice broken and harsh.

Xoxarle reached out, grabbed the machine’s front, raised it easily in both hands over his head, over Horza’s head — the man looked up, eyes unfocused — then brought it down, scything towards the man’s skull.

Horza rolled, almost tiredly, to one side, and Xoxarle felt the whimpering machine connect with Horza’s head and shoulder. The man fell, sprawling on the tunnel floor.

He was still alive; one hand moved feebly to try to protect his naked, bleeding head. Xoxarle turned, raised the helpless drone high over the man’s head once more. “And, so…” he said quietly as he tensed his arms to bring the machine down.

“Xoxarle!”

He looked up, between his upraised arms, while the drone struggled weakly in his hands and the man at his feet moved one hand slowly over his blood-matted hair. Xoxarle grinned.

The woman Perosteck Balveda stood at the end of the tunnel, on the terrace over the cavern. She was stooped, and her face looked limp and worn. Her right arm dangled awkwardly at her side, the hand hanging by her thigh turned outwards. In her other hand her fist seemed closed around something small which she was pointing at the Idiran. Xoxarle had to look carefully to see what it was. It resembled a gun: a gun made mostly of air; a gun of lines, thin wires, hardly solid at all, more like a framework, like a pencil outline somehow lifted from a page and filled out just enough to grip. Xoxarle laughed and brought the drone swooping down.

Balveda fired the gun; it sparkled briefly at the end of its spindly barrel, like a small jewel caught in sunlight, and made the faintest of coughing noises.

Before Unaha-Closp had been moved more than a half-metre through the air towards Horza’s head, Xoxarle’s midriff lit up like the sun. The Idiran’s lower torso was blown apart, blasted from his hips by a hundred tiny explosions. His chest, arms and head were blown up and back, hitting the tunnel roof then tumbling down again through the air, the arms slackening, the hands opening. His belly, keratin plates ripped open, flooded entrails onto the water-spattered floor of the tunnel as his whole upper body bounced into the shallow puddles forming under the artificial rain. What was left of his trunk section, the heavy hips and the three body-thick legs, stayed standing for a few seconds by themselves, while Unaha-Closp floated quietly to the ceiling, and Horza lay still under the falling water, now colouring in the puddles with purple and red as it washed his own and the Idiran’s blood away.

Xoxarle’s torso lay motionless where it fell, two metres behind where his legs still stood. Then the knees buckled slowly, as though only reluctantly giving in to the pull of gravity, and the heavy hips settled over the splayed feet. Water splashed into the gory bowl of Xoxarle’s sliced open pelvis.

“Bala bala bala,” Unaha-Closp mumbled, stuck to the ceiling, dripping water. “Bala labalabalabla… ha ha.”

Balveda kept the gun pointing at Xoxarle’s broken body. She walked slowly up the corridor, splashing through the dark red water.

She stopped near Horza’s feet and looked dispassionately at Xoxarle’s head and upper torso, lying still on the tunnel floor, blood and internal organs spilling from the fallen giant’s chest. She sighted the gun and fired at the warrior’s massive head, blowing it from his shoulders and blasting shattered pieces of keratin twenty metres up the tunnel. The blast rocked her; the echoes sang in her ears. Finally, she seemed to relax, shoulders drooping. She looked up at the drone, floating against the roof.

“Here am are, downly upfloat, falling ceilingwards bala bala ha ha…” Unaha-Closp said, and moved uncertainly. “So there. Look, I am finished, I’m just… What’s my name? What’s the time? Bala bala, hey the ho. Water lots of. Downly upmost. Ha ha and so on.”

Balveda knelt down by the fallen man. She put the gun in a pocket and felt Horza’s neck; he was still alive. His face was in the water. She heaved and pushed, trying to roll him over. His scalp oozed blood.

“Drone,” she said, trying to stop the man from falling back into the water again, “help me with him.” She held Horza’s arm with her one good hand, grimacing with pain as she used her other shoulder to roll him further over. “Unaha-Closp, damn you; help me.”

“Bla bala bal. Ho the hey. Here am are, am here are. How do you don’t? Ceiling, roof, inside outside. Ha ha bala bala,” the drone warbled, still fast against the tunnel roof. Balveda finally got Horza onto his back. The false rain fell on his gashed face, cleaning the blood from his nose and mouth. One eye, then the other, opened.

“Horza,” Balveda said, moving forward, so that her own head blocked out the falling water and the overhead light. The Changer’s face was pale save for the thin tendrils of blood leaking from mouth and nostrils. A red tide came from the back and side of his head. “Horza?” she said.

“You won,” Horza said, slurring the words, his voice quiet. He closed his eyes. Balveda didn’t know what to say; she closed her own eyes, shook her head.

“Bala bala… the train now arriving at platform one…”

“…Drone,” Horza whispered, looking up, past Balveda’s head. She nodded. She watched his eyes move back, trying to look over his own forehead. “Xoxarle…” he whispered. “What happened?”

“I shot him,” Balveda said.

“…Bala bala throw your out arms come out come in, one more once the same… Is there anybody in here?”

“With what?” Horza’s voice was almost inaudible; she had to bend closer to hear. She took the tiny gun from her pocket.

“This,” she said. She opened her mouth, showing him the hole where a back tooth had been. “Memoryform. The gun was part of me; looks like a real tooth.” She tried to smile. She doubted the man could even see the gun.

He closed his eyes. “Clever,” he said quietly. Blood flowed from his head, mingling with the purple wash from Xoxarle’s dismembered body.

“I’ll get you back, Horza,” Balveda said. “I promise. I’ll take you back to the ship. You’ll be all right. I’ll make sure. You’ll be fine.”

“Will you?” Horza said quietly, eyes closed. “Thanks, Perosteck.”

“Thanks bala bala bala. Steckoper, Tsah-hor, Aha-Un-Clops… Ho the hey, hey the ho, ho for all that, think on. We apologise for any inconvenience caused… What’s the where’s the how’s the who where when why how, and so…”

“Don’t worry,” Balveda said. She reached out and touched the man’s wet face. Water washed off the back of the Culture woman’s head, down onto the Changer’s face. Horza’s eyes opened again, flicking round, staring at her, then back towards the collapsed trunk of the Idiran; next up at the drone on the ceiling; finally around him, at the walls and the water. He whispered something, not looking at the woman.

“What?” Balveda said, bending closer as the man’s eyes closed again.

“Bala,” said the machine on the ceiling. “Bala bala bala. Ha ha. Bala bala bala.”

“What a fool,” Horza said, quite clearly, though his voice was fading as he lost consciousness, and his eyes stayed closed. “What a bloody… stupid… fool.” He nodded his head slightly; it didn’t seem to hurt him. Splashes sent red and purple blood back up from the water under his head and onto his face, then washed it all away again. “The Jinmoti of—” the man muttered.

“What?” Balveda said again, bending closer still.

“Danatre skehellis,” Unaha-Closp announced from the ceiling, “ro vleh gra’ampt na zhire; sko tre genebellis ro binitshire, na’sko voross amptfenir-an har. Bala.”

Suddenly the Changer’s eyes were wide open, and on his face there appeared a look of the utmost horror, an expression of such helpless fear and terror that Balveda felt herself shiver, the hairs on the back of her neck rising despite the water trying to plaster them there. The man’s hands came up suddenly and grabbed her thin jacket with a terrible, clawing grip. “My name!” he moaned, an anguish in his voice even more awful than that on his face. “What’s my name?”

“Bala bala bala,” the drone murmured from the ceiling.

Balveda swallowed and felt tears sting behind her eyelids. She touched one of those white, clutching hands with her own. “It’s Horza,” she said gently. “Bora Horza Gobuchul.”

“Bala bala bala bala,” said the drone quietly, sleepily. “Bala bala bala.”

The man’s grip fell away; the terror ebbed from his face. He relaxed, eyes closing again, mouth almost smiling.

“Bala bala.”

“Ah yes…” Horza whispered.

“Bala.”

“…of course.”

“La.”