Consider Phlebas (57 page)

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 stared 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 Charger’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 though 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 Bickering, 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.