Consider Phlebas

by Iain M. Banks

  ‘I’m going inside,’ he told the ship, aiming a tight beam at it rather than broadcasting the signal.

  ‘OK,’ Wubslin said in his ear.

  ‘You don’t want somebody there to cover you?’ Yalson said.

  ‘No,’ Horza replied.

  He walked down the tunnel, keeping close to the wall. In the first equipment bay were some ice sleds and rescue gear, tracking apparatus and signalling beacons. It was all much as he recalled it.

  In the second bay, where the flyer should have been, there was nothing. He went on to the next one: more equipment. He was about forty metres inside the tunnel now, ten metres shy of the right-angled turn which led into the larger, segmented gallery where the living accommodation of the base lay.

  The mouth of the tunnel was a white hole when he turned back to face it. He set the tight beam on wide aperture. ‘Nothing yet. I’m about to look into the accommodation section. Bleep but don’t reply otherwise.’ The helmet speakers bleeped.

  Before going round the corner he detached the suit’s remote sensor from the side of the helmet and edged its small lens round the corner of sculpted rock. On an internal screen he saw the short length of tunnel, the flyer lying on the ground, and a few metres beyond it the wall of plastic planking which filled the tunnel and showed where the human accommodation section of the Changer base began.

  By the side of the small flyer lay four bodies.

  There was no movement.

  Horza felt his throat closing up. He swallowed hard, then put the remote sensor back on the side of the helmet. He walked along the floor of fused rock to the bodies.

  Two were dressed in light, unarmoured suits. They were both men, and he didn’t recognise them. One of them had been lasered, the suit flash-burned open so that the melted metals and plastics had mingled with the guts and flesh inside; the hole was half a metre in diameter. The other suited man had no head. His arms were stuck out stiffly in front of him as though to embrace something.

  There was another man, dressed in light, loose clothes. His skull had been smashed in from behind, and at least one arm was broken. He lay on his side, as frozen and dead as the other two. Horza was aware that he knew the man’s name but he couldn’t think of it just then.

  Kierachell must have been asleep. Her slim body was lying straight, inside a blue nightgown; her eyes were closed, her face peaceful.

  Her neck had been broken.

  Horza looked down at her for a while, then took one of his gloves off and bent down. There was frost on her eyelashes. He was aware of the wrist seal inside the suit gripping his forearm tightly, and of the thin cold air his hand was exposed to.

  Her skin was hard. Her hair was still soft, and he let it run through his fingers. It was more red than he remembered, but that might just have been the effect of the helmet visor as it intensified the poor light of the darkened tunnel. Perhaps he should take his helmet off, too, to see her better, and use the helmet lights . . .

  He shook his head, turning away.

  He opened the door to the accommodation section – carefully, after listening for any noise coming through the wall.

  In the open, vaulted area where the Changers had kept their outdoor clothes and suits and some smaller pieces of equipment, there was little to show that the place had been taken over. Further through the accommodation unit, he found traces of a fight: dried blood; laser burns; in the control room, where the base’s systems were monitored, there had been an explosion. It looked like a small grenade had gone off under the control panel. That accounted for the lack of heating, and the emergency light. It looked as though somebody had been trying to repair the damage, judging by some tools, spare pieces of equipment and wiring lying around.

  In a couple of the cabins he found traces of Idiran occupation. The rooms had been stripped bare; religious symbols were burned onto the walls. In another room the floor had been covered with some sort of soft, deep covering like dry gelatin. There were six long indentations in the material, and the room smelt of medjel. In Kierachell’s room, only the bed was untidy. It had changed little otherwise.

  He left it and went to the far end of the accommodation unit, where another wall of plastic boards marked the beginning of the tunnels.

  He opened the door cautiously.

  A dead medjel lay just outside, its long body seemingly pointing the way down the tunnel to the waiting shafts. Horza looked at it for a while, monitored its body for a moment (dead still, frozen), then prodded it and finally shot it once through the head, just to be sure.

  It was in standard fleet-ground-force uniform, and it had been wounded some time ago, badly. It looked like it had suffered from frostbite earlier, too, before it had died of its wounds and frozen. It was a male, grizzled, its green-brown skin leathery with age, its long muzzle-face and small delicate-looking hands deeply lined.

  He looked down the dark tunnel.

  Smooth fused floor, smooth arched walls, the tunnel went on into the mountain side. Blast doors made ribs along the tunnel sides, their tracks and slots carved across the floor and roof. He could see the elevator-shaft doors, and the boarding point for the service-tube capsules. He walked along, past the sets of ancient blast door 6, until he came to the access shafts. The elevators were all at the bottom; the transit tube was locked shut. No power seemed to be running through any of the systems. He turned and walked back to the accommodation section, through it and past the bodies and the flyer without giving them a glance, and eventually out into the open air.

  He sat down at the side of the tunnel entrance, in the snow, his back to the rock. They saw him from the CAT, and Yalson said, ‘Horza! Are you all right?’

  ‘No,’ he said, turning the laser rifle off. ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Yalson said quickly. Horza took the suit helmet off, putting it down on the snow beside him. The cold air sucked heat from his face, and he had to breathe hard in the thin atmosphere.

  ‘There is death here,’ he said to the cloudless sky.

  10.

  The Command System: Batholith

  ‘It’s called a batholith: a granitic intrusion which rose up like a molten bubble into the sedimentary and metamorphic rocks already here a hundred million years ago.

  ‘Eleven thousand years ago the locals built the Command System in it, hoping to use the rock cover as protection from fusion warheads.

  ‘They built nine stations and eight trains. The idea was that the politicos and military chiefs sat in one train, their seconds-in-command and deputies in another, and during a war all eight trains would be shuffled around the tunnels, halting in a station to be linked via hardened communication channels to the transceiver sites on the immediate surface and throughout the state, so they could run the war. The enemy would have a hard time cracking the granite that deep anyway, but hitting something as relatively small as a station would be even more difficult, and they never could be sure there would be a train in it, or that it would be manned, and on top of that they had to knock out the back-up train as well as the main one.

  ‘Germ warfare killed them all off, and some time between then and ten thousand years ago the Dra’Azon moved in, pumping the air out of the tunnels and replacing it with inert gas. Seven thousand years ago a new ice age started, and about four thousand years after that the place got so cold Mr Adequate pumped the argon out and let the planet’s own atmosphere back in; it’s so desiccated, nothing’s rusted in the tunnels for three millennia.

  ‘About three and a half thousand years ago the Dra’Azon came to an agreement with most of the rival Galactic Federations which allowed ships in distress to cross the Quiet Barriers. Politically neutral, relatively powerless species were permitted to set up small bases on most of the Planets of the Dead to provide help for those in distress and – I suppose – to provide a sop to the people who had always wanted to know what the planets were like; certainly on Schar’s World, Mr Adequate let us take a good look at the System every year, and turne
d a blind eye when we went down unofficially. However nobody’s ever taken unscrambled recordings of any sort out of the tunnels.

  ‘The entrance we’re at is here: at the base of the peninsula, above station four, one of the three main stations – the others are one and seven – where repair and maintenance facilities exist. There are no trains parked in four, three or five. There are two trains in station one, two in seven, one train each in the rest. At least that’s where they ought to be; the Idirans may have moved them, though I doubt it.

  ‘The stations are twenty-five to thirty-five kilometres apart, linked by twin sets of tunnels which only join up at each of the stations. The whole System is buried about five kilometres down.

  ‘We’ll take lasers . . . and a neural stunner, plus chaff grenades for protection – nothing heavier. Neisin can take his projectile rifle; the bullets he has are only light explosive . . . But no plasma cannons or micronukes. They’d be dangerous enough in the tunnels anyway, God knows, but they might also bring down Mr Adequate’s wrath, and we don’t want that.

  ‘Wubslin’s rigged up our ship mass anomaly sensor into a portable set, so we can spot the Mind. In addition, I’ve got a mass sensor in my suit, so we shouldn’t have any problem actually finding what we’re after, even if it’s hidden itself.

  ‘Assuming the Idirans don’t have their own communicators, they’ll be using the Changers’. Our transceivers cover their frequencies and more, so we can listen in on them, but they can’t hear us.

  ‘So those are the tunnels. That Mind is in there somewhere, and so, presumably, are some Idirans and medjel.’

  Horza stood in the mess room at the head of the table, under the screen. On the screen a diagram of the tunnels was superimposed over a map of the peninsula. The others looked at him. The empty semi-suit of the medjel he had found lay in the centre of the table.

  ‘You want to take us all in?’ the drone Unaha-Closp said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What about the ship?’ Neisin said.

  ‘It can take care of itself. I’ll programme its automatics so that it’ll recognise us and defend itself against anybody else.’

  ‘And you’re going to take her?’ Yalson asked, nodding at Balveda, who was sitting opposite her.

  Horza looked at the Culture woman. ‘I’d prefer to have Balveda where I can see her,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t feel safe leaving her here with any of you.’

  ‘I still don’t see why I have to go,’ Unaha-Closp said.

  ‘Because,’ Horza told it, ‘I don’t trust you on board here, either. Besides, I want you to carry stuff.’

  ‘What?’ The drone sounded angry.

  ‘I don’t know that you’re being completely honest here, Horza,’ Aviger said, shaking his head ruefully. ‘You say that the Idirans and medjel . . . well, that you’re on their side. But here they are, and they’ve killed four of your own people already, and you think that they’re somewhere inside these tunnels, wandering about . . . And they’re supposed to be about the best ground-troops in the galaxy. You want to send us up against them?’

  ‘First of all,’ Horza sighed, ‘I am on their side. We’re after the same thing. Secondly, it looks to me as though they don’t have many weapons of their own, otherwise that medjel would certainly have been armed. All they probably have here are the Changers’ weapons. Also it looks, from this medjel suit we’ve got’ – he gestured at the webbed apparatus in the middle of the table, which he and Wubslin had been studying since they had brought it on board – ‘like a lot of their equipment is blown. Only the lights and the heaters on this thing were working. Everything else had fused. My guess is all that happened when they came through the Quiet Barrier. They were all zapped inside the chuy-hirtsi, and their battle gear was fucked up. If the same thing happened to their weapons as happened to their suits, they’re virtually unarmed, and with a lot of problems. With all these fancy new AG harnesses and lasers, we’re much better equipped, even in the unlikely event that it does come to a fight.’

  ‘Which is very likely, considering they won’t have any communicators left,’ Balveda said. ‘You’ll never get close enough to tell them. And even if you did, how are they supposed to know you’re who you say you are? If they’re the same lot you think they are, they came in here just after the Mind did; they won’t even have heard of you. They certainly won’t believe you.’ The Culture agent looked round the others. ‘Your surrogate captain is leading you to your deaths.’

  ‘Balveda,’ Horza said, ‘I’m doing you a courtesy letting you in on all this; don’t annoy me.’

  Balveda arched her eyebrows, staying silent.

  ‘How do we know these are the same lot who got here inside this weird animal anyway?’ Neisin said. He looked suspiciously at Horza.

  ‘They can’t be anybody else,’ Horza said. ‘They were damn lucky to survive what the Dra’Azon did to them, and even the Idirans wouldn’t risk sending any other forces in after they saw what had happened to this lot.’

  ‘But that means they’ve been here for months,’ Dorolow said. ‘How are we supposed to find something if they’ve been here all this time and haven’t found anything?’

  ‘Perhaps they have,’ Horza said, spreading his arms wide and smiling at the woman, a trace of sarcasm in his voice; ‘but if they haven’t, it’s very possibly because they won’t have any working gear with them. They’d have to search the whole Command System.

  ‘Besides, if that warp animal was as badly damaged as I heard it was, they won’t have had much control over it. Very likely they crash-landed hundreds of kilometres away and had to slog here through the snow. In that case they might have only been here for a few days.’

  ‘I can’t believe the god would let this happen,’ Dorolow said, shaking her head and looking at the surface of the table in front of her. ‘There must be something else to all this. I could feel its power and . . . and goodness when we came through the Barrier. It wouldn’t let those poor people just be shot down like that.’

  Horza rolled his eyes. ‘Dorolow,’ he said to her, leaning forward and planting his knuckles on the table top, ‘the Dra’Azon are barely aware there’s a war going on. They don’t really give a damn about individuals. They recognise death and decay, but not hope and faith. As long as the Idirans, or we, don’t wreck the Command System or blow the planet away, they won’t give a damn who lives or dies.’

  Dorolow sat back, silent but unconvinced. Horza straightened. His words sounded fine; he had the impression the mercenaries would follow him, but inside, deeper than where the words were coming from, he felt no more caring, no more alive than the snow-covered plain outside.

  He, Wubslin and Neisin had gone back into the tunnels. They had investigated the accommodation section, and found more evidence of Idiran habitation. It looked as though a very small force – one or two Idirans and maybe half a dozen medjel – had stayed for a while at the Changer base after they had taken it over.

  They had apparently taken a lot of freeze-dried emergency food supplies with them, the two laser rifles and the few small pistols the Changer base was allowed, and the four portable communication sets from the store room.

  Horza had covered the dead Changers up with the reflector foil they had found in the base, and removed the semi-suit from the dead medjel. They had looked at the flyer, to see if it was serviceable. It wasn’t; its micropile had been partially removed and badly damaged in the process. Like almost everything else in the base, it was without power. Back on board the Clear Air Turbulence, Horza and Wubslin had dissected the medjel’s suit and discovered the subtle but irreparable damage which had been inflicted on it.

  All the time, whenever Horza wasn’t worrying about what their chances and their choices were, each moment he stopped concentrating on what he was looking at or supposed to be thinking about, he saw a hard and frozen face, at right angles to the body it was attached to, with frost on the eyelashes.

  He tried not to think about her. There was no p
oint; nothing he could do. He had to go on, he had to see this through, even more so now.

  He had thought for a long time about what he could do with the rest of the people on the Clear Air Turbulence, and decided he had no real choice but to take them all into the Command System with him.

  Balveda was one problem; he wouldn’t feel safe even leaving the whole crew to guard her, and he wanted the best fighters along with him, not stuck on the ship. He could have got round this problem just by killing the Culture agent, but the others had got too used to her, had come to like her just a little too much. If he killed her, he would lose them.

  ‘Well, I think it’s insanity to go down into those tunnels,’ Unaha-Closp said. ‘Why not just wait up here until the Idirans reappear, with or without this precious Mind?’

  ‘First of all,’ Horza said, watching the expressions on the others’ faces for any sign of agreement with the drone, ‘if they don’t find it they probably won’t reappear; these are Idirans, and a carefully chosen crack squad of them at that. They’ll stay down there for ever.’ He looked at the tunnel system drawn on the screen, then back at the people and the machine around the table. ‘They could search for a thousand years in there, especially if the power’s off and they don’t know how to bring it back up, which I’m assuming they don’t.’

  ‘And you do, of course,’ the machine said.

  ‘Yes,’ Horza said, ‘I do. We can turn the power on at one of three stations: this one, number seven or number one.’

  ‘It still works?’ Wubslin looked sceptical.

  ‘Well, it was working when I left. Deep geothermal, producing electricity. The power shafts are sunk about a hundred kilometres through the crust.

  ‘Anyway, as I say, there’s too much space down there for those Idirans and medjel to have a hope of searching properly without some sort of detection device. A mass anomaly sensor is the only one that’ll work, and they can’t have one. We have two. That’s why we have to go in.’