Consider Phlebas (55 page)

‘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.