Consider Phlebas (47 page)

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

‘I let Balveda use my suit mike; she said she - ‘

‘We heard,’ Yalson said.

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

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

‘And Horza?’

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

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

Yalson looked at Horza, shook her head and said, ‘Old asshole.’ Wubslin still knelt over Dorolow’s body. They heard him sob a couple of times, before he, too, cut out of the open channel. Neisin’s slowing breath spluttered through a mask of blood and flesh.

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

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

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

‘But what happened?’ Wubslin said.

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

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

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

‘Poor little bugger,’ Wubslin said.

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

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

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

‘What about the other one?’ Horza said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘The greetings of the battle-day,’ Horza said in careful Idiran.

‘Ho,’ boomed the Idiran, ‘the little one speaks our tongue.’

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

‘Really?’ the Idiran said. ‘Pity; I believe my comrade just destroyed it.’

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

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

‘You vicious bastard, I ought to blow your fucking head off right now.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘It was like somebody turning off a projection?’ Horza said.

Yalson nodded. ‘Yes. And there was a bit of smoke. Not much. Do you mean to - ‘

‘He got it eventually; what do you mean?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I had guessed that, Unaha-Closp,’ Balveda said.

‘Hmm. Then you have ghoulish tendencies?’

‘No, I wanted to talk to you.’

‘Really.’ The drone continued to sort the medicines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I would need his ring. Do you want to take it from him?’

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

‘Ms Balveda - ‘

‘Call me Perosteck.’

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

‘Damn,’ Balveda said into the shadows. ‘No aces up your sleeve?’

‘No sleeves, Perosteck.’

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

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

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

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

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

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