Use of Weapons (55 page)

He
saw the chair again. Small and white. He closed his eyes, tasting bitterness in
this throat.

He
opened his eyes. Three final clips to go, then one quick twist... he looked at
the spot of light. It was invisible, so close to the helmet, so close to his
head. The torch in the centre of the elevator car was facing almost straight at
him, its lens bright. He undid one of the three final helmet clips. There was a
tiny hiss, barely noticeable.

Dead,
he thought, seeing the girl's pale face. He undid another clip. The hiss grew
no louder.

There
was a sense of brightness at the side of the helmet, where the light would be
shining.

Metal
ship, stone ship, and the unconventional chair. He felt tears come to his eyes,
and one hand - the one not undoing the third helmet clip - went to his chest,
where, under the many synthetic layers of the suit, beneath the fabric of the
under-suit, there was a small puckered mark on the skin just over his heart; a
scar that was two decades old, or seven decades old, depending how you measured
time.

The
torch swung, and just as the final clip came undone, and the spot of light
started to leave the inside edge of the suit, to shine on his face, the torch
flickered and went out.

He
stared. It was almost totally dark. There was the hint of light from outside
the car; the faintest of red glows, produced by all the near-dead people and
the quietly watching equipment.

Out.
The torch had gone out; charge exhausted or just a fault, it didn't matter. It
had gone out. It hadn't shone on his face. The suit beeped again, plaintive
above the quiet hiss of escaping air.

He
looked down, at the hand that lay over his chest.

He
looked back up at where the torch must be, unseen in the centre of the car in
the centre of the ship, in the middle of its journey.

How
do I die now? he thought.

He
did go back to his chill sleep, after a year. Erens and Ky, their sexual
predilections forever estranging them despite the fact they seemed like a
well-matched couple otherwise, were still arguing when he left.

He
ended up in another lo-tech war, learning to fly (because he knew now that
aircraft would always win against a battleship), and flying the frosty
vortices of air above the vast white islands that were the colliding tabular
icebergs.

Thirteen

Where
they lay, the discarded robes looked like the just-shed skin of some exotic
reptile. He had been going to wear those, but then changed his mind. He would
wear the clothes he had come here in.

He
stood in the bathroom, in its steams and smells, stopping the razor again, then
putting it to his head, slowly and carefully as though pulling a comb through
his hair in slow motion. The razor scraped through the foam on his skin,
catching a last few stubbly hairs. He swept the razor past the tops of his
ears, then took up a towel, wiped the gleaming skin of his skull, inspecting
the baby-smooth landscape he had revealed. The long dark hair lay scattered on
the floor, like plumage scattered during a fight.

He
looked out to the citadel parade grounds, where a few weak fires glowed. Above
the mountains, the sky was just starting to become light.

From
the window, he could see a few craggy levels of the citadel's curbed wall and
jutting towers. In that first outlining light, it looked, he thought - though
trying hard not to feel maudlin - poignant, even noble, now that he knew it was
doomed.

He
turned from the sight and went to put on his shoes. The air moved over his
shaven skull, feeling very strange. He missed the feel and sweep of his hair on
the nape of his neck. He sat on the bed, pulled on the shoes and clasped them,
then looked at the telephone sitting on the bedside cabinet. He lifted the
device.

He
recalled (he seemed to remember) contacting the space port last night, after
Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw had gone. He had been feeling bad, dissociated and
remote somehow, and he was not at all certain he really did remember calling
the technicians there, but he thought he probably had. He'd told them to ready
the ancient space craft, for the Decapitation strike, sometime that morning. Or
he hadn't. One of the two. Maybe he had been dreaming.

He
heard the citadel operator asking him who he wanted. He asked for the space
port.

He
talked to the technicians. The chief flight engineer sounded tense, excited.
The craft was ready, fuelled up, coordinates locked in; it could be launched
within a few minutes as soon as he gave the word.

He
nodded to himself as he listened to the man. He heard the chief flight engineer
pause. The question was unasked, but there.

He
watched the skies outside the window. They still looked dark, from inside here.
'Sir?' the chief flight engineer said. 'Sir Zakalwe? What are your orders,
sir?'

He
saw the little blue cube, the button; he heard the whisper of escaping air. There
was a shudder, just then. He thought it was his own body, reacting
involuntarily, but it was not; the shudder ran through the fabric of the
citadel, through the walls of the room, through the bed beneath him. Glass
rattled in the room. The noise of the explosion rumbled through the air beyond
the thick windows, low and unsettling.

'Sir?'
the man said. 'Are you still there?'

They
would probably intercept the spacecraft; the Culture itself - the
Xenophobe
, probably - would use
effectors on it... the decapitation strike was bound to fail...

'What
should we do, sir?'

But
there was always a possibility...

'Hello?
Hello, sir?'

Another
explosion shook the citadel. He looked at the handset he held. 'Sir, do we go
ahead?' he heard a man say, or remembered a man saying, from long ago and far
away... And he had said yes, and taken on a terrible cargo of memories, and all
the names that might bury him...

'Stand
down,' he said quietly. 'We won't need the strike now,' he said. He put the
handset down, and left the room quickly, taking the rear stairs, away from the
main entrance to his apartments, where he could already hear a commotion
building.

More
explosions shook the citadel, dislodging dust around him as the curtain wall
was breached and breached again. He wondered how it would be with the regional
headquarters, how they would fall, and whether the raid to capture the high
priests would be as bloodless as Sma had hoped. But he realised even as he
thought about it all that he no longer really cared.

He
left the citadel via a postern and entered the great square that was the parade
ground. The small fires still burned outside the tents of the refugees. In the
distance, great clouds of dust and smoke floated slowly into the grey dawn sky
above the curtain wall. He could see a couple of gaps in the wall from here.
The people in the tents were starting to wake up and come out. From the citadel
walls at his back and above him, he could hear the crackle of gunfire.

A
heavier gun fired from the breached walls, and a huge explosion shook the
ground, ripping a great hole in the cliff that was the citadel; an avalanche of
stone thundered into the parade ground, burying a dozen tents. He wondered what
sort of ammunition the tank was firing; not a type they'd had until this morning,
he suspected.

He
walked on through the tent city, as the people appeared, blinking, from their
sleep. Scattered firing continued from the citadel; the vast cloud of dust
rolled over the parade ground from the great tumbled breach in the towering
walls. Another shot from near the curtain walls; another ground-quaking
detonation that brought a whole side of the citadel down, the stones bursting
from the wall as though with relief, falling and tumbling in their own rolling
dust; released, returning to the earth.

There
was less firing from the citadel ramparts now, as the dust drifted and the sky
slowly lightened and the frightened people clutched at each other outside their
tents. More firing came from the breached curtain walls, and from inside the
parade ground, within the tent city.

He
walked on. Nobody stopped him; few people really seemed to notice him. He saw a
soldier fall from the curtain wall to his right, tumbling into the dust. He saw
the people running this way and that. He saw the Imperial Army soldiers, in the
distance, riding on a tank.

He
walked through the clustered tents, avoiding people running, stepping over a
couple of the smouldering fires. The huge breaches in the curtain wall and the
citadel itself smoked in the increasing grey light, which was just starting to
take on colour as the sky burned pink and blue.

Sometimes,
as the people milled and streamed around him, running past, clutching babies,
dragging children, he thought he saw people he recognised, and several times
was on the point of turning and talking to them, putting out his hand to stop
the snowfall effaces rushing past him, shouting after them...

Suddenly
aircraft screamed overhead, tearing through the air over the curtain wall,
dropping long canisters into the tents, which erupted in flame and black, black
smoke. He saw burning people, heard the screams, smelled the roasting flesh. He
shook his head.

Terrified
people jostled him, bumped into him, once knocked him down so that he had to
pick himself up, dust himself down, and suffer the knocks and the shouts and
screams and curses. The aircraft came back, strafing, and he was the only one
who stayed upright, walking while the rest fell to the ground; he watched the
puffs and bursts of dust fountain in lines around him, saw the clothing of a
few of the fallen people suddenly jerk and flap as a round hit home.

It
was getting lighter as he encountered the first troops. He dodged behind a tent
and rolled as a trooper fired at him, then got back on his feet and ran round
the rear of a tent, almost bumping into another soldier, who swung his carbine
round too late. He kicked it away. The soldier drew a knife. He let him lunge
and took the knife, throwing the soldier to the ground. He looked at the blade
he held in his hand, and shook his head. He threw the knife away, looked at the
soldier - lying on the ground staring fearfully up at him - then shrugged and
walked away.

Still
people rushing past; soldiers shouting. He saw one take aim at him, and could
not see anywhere to go for cover. He raised his hand to explain, to say there
was really no need, but the man shot him anyway.

Not
a very good shot, considering the range, he thought as he was kicked back and
spun round by the force of the impact.

Upper
chest near the shoulder. No lung damage, and possibly not even a chipped rib,
he thought as the shock and pain burst through him, and he fell.

He
lay still in the dust, near the staring face of a dead city guardsman. As he'd
spun round, he'd seen the Culture module; a clear shape hovering uselessly over
the remains of his apartments high in the ruined citadel.

Somebody
kicked him, turning him over and bursting a rib at the same time. He tried not
to react to the stab of pain, but looked through cracked eyes. He waited for
the
coup-de-grace
, but it did not
come.

The
shadow-figure above him, dark against light, passed on.

He
lay a while longer, then got up. It wasn't too difficult to walk at first, but
then the planes came back again, and though he didn't get hit by a bullet,
something splintered somewhere nearby, as he passed by some tents that shook
and rippled as the bullets hit them, and he wondered if the sharp, puncturing
pain in his thigh was a bit of wood or stone, or even bone, from somebody in
one of the tents. 'No,' he muttered to himself as he limped away, heading for
the biggest breach in the wall. 'No; not funny. Not bone. Not funny.'

An
explosion blew him off his feet, into and through a tent. He got up, head
buzzing. He looked round and up at the citadel, its summit starting to glow
with the first direct sunlight of the day. He couldn't see the module any more.
He took a shattered wooden tent pole to use as a crutch; his leg was hurting.

Dust
wrapped him, screams of engines and aircraft and human voices pierced him; the
smells of burning and stone-dust and exhaust fumes choked him. His wounds
talked to him in the languages of pain and damage, and he had to listen to
them, but paid them no further heed. He was shaken and pummelled and tripped
and stumbled and drained and fell to his knees, and thought perhaps he was hit
by more bullets, but was no longer sure.