Consider Phlebas c-1

by Iain M. Banks

  The ship shuddered under Horza's feet. He rocked. Lamm looked at him, puzzled. "Did you feel that?" Horza shouted.

  "Feel what?" Kraiklyn said.

  "Kraiklyn?" It was Mipp again. "I can see something…"

  "Lamm, get back here!" Horza shouted, through the air and into his helmet mike together. Lamm looked around him. Horza thought he could feel a continuing tremor in the deck below.

  "What did you feel?" Kraiklyn said. He was starting to get annoyed.

  Yalson chipped in, "I thought I felt something. Nothing much. But listen, these things aren't supposed to… they aren't supposed to-"

  "Kraiklyn," Mipp said more urgently, "I think I can see-"

  "Lamm!" Horza was backing off now, back down the long tunnel of corridor. Lamm stayed where he was, looking hesitant.

  Horza could hear something, a curious growling noise; it reminded him of a jet engine or a fusion motor heard from a very long distance away, but it wasn't either. He could feel something under his feet, too — that tremor, and there was some sort of pull, a tug that seemed to be dragging him forward, towards Lamm, towards the bows, as though he was in a weak field, or-

  "Kraiklyn!" Mipp yelled. "I can! There is! I — you — I'm-" he spluttered.

  "Look, will you all just calm down?"

  "I can feel something…" Yalson began.

  Horza started running, pounding back down the corridor. Lamm, who had started to walk back, stopped and put his hands on his hips when he saw the other man running, away from him. There was a distant roaring noise in the air, like a big waterfall heard from far down a gorge.

  "I can feel something too, it's as if-"

  "What was Mipp yelling about?"

  "We're crashing!" Horza shouted as he ran. The roaring was coming closer, growing stronger all the time.

  "Ice!" It was Mipp. "I'm bringing the shuttle! Run! It's a wall of ice! Neisin! Where are you? Neisin! I've got-"

  "What!"

  "ICE?"

  The roaring noise grew; the corridor around Horza started to groan. Several of the opaque roof panels fractured and fell to the floor in front of him. A section of wall suddenly sprang out like an opening door and he just avoided running into it. The noise filled his ears.

  Lamm looked round, and saw the end of the corridor coming towards him; the whole end section was closing off steadily with a grinding roar, advancing towards him at about running speed. He fired at it but it didn't stop; smoke poured into the corridor. He swore, turned and ran, following Horza.

  People were yelling and shouting from all over now. There was a babble of tiny voices in both Horza's ears, but all he could really hear was the thundering noise behind him. The deck beneath his feet bucked and trembled, as though the whole gigantic ship was a building caught in an earthquake. The plates and panels which made up the corridor walls were buckling; the floor rose up in places; more roof panels shattered and fell. All the time the same sapping force was pulling him back, slowing him down as though he was in a dream. He ran out into daylight, heard Lamm not far behind.

  "Kraiklyn, you stupid motherfucking son of a bitch's bastard!" Lamm screamed.

  The voices yammered in his ear; his heart pounded. He threw each foot forward with all his might, but the roaring was coming closer, growing stronger. He ran past the empty state rooms where the soft materials blew, the roof was starting to fold in on the apartments and the deck was tilting; the holosphere they had seen earlier came rolling and bouncing out of the collapsing windows. A hatch near Horza blew out in a gust of pressured air and flying debris; he ducked as he ran, felt splinters strike his suit. He skidded as the deck under him banged and leapt. Lamm's steps came pounding behind him. Lamm continued to scream abuse at Kraiklyn over the intercom.

  The noise behind him was like a gigantic waterfall, a big rock-slide, like a continuous explosion, a volcano. His ears ached and his mind reeled, stunned by the volume of the racket. A line of windows set in the wall ahead of him went white, then exploded towards him, throwing particles at his suit in a series of small hard clouds. He put his head down again, he headed for the doorway.

  "Bastard bastard bastard!" Lamm bellowed.

  "— not stopping!"

  "— over here!"

  "Shut up, Lamm."

  "Horzaaa…!"

  Voices screamed in his ear. He was running on carpet now, inside a broad corridor; open doors were flapping, light fittings on the ceiling were vibrating. Suddenly a deluge of water swept across the corridor in front of him, twenty metres away, and for a second he thought he was at sea level, but knew he couldn't be; when he ran over the place where the water had been he could see and hear it frothing and gurgling down a broad spiral stairwell, and only a few dribbles were falling from overhead. The tugging of the slowly decelerating ship seemed less now, but the roar of noise was still all around him. He was weakening, running in a daze, trying to keep his balance as the long corridor vibrated and twisted around him. Now a rush of air was flowing past him; some sheets of paper and plastic flapped past him like coloured birds.

  "— bastard bastard bastard-"

  "Lamm-"

  There was daylight ahead, through a glassed-over sun deck of broad windows. He jumped through some big-leaved plants growing in large pots and landed in a group of flimsy chairs set round a small table, demolishing them.

  "— fucking stupid bast-"

  "Lamm, shut up!" Kraiklyn's voice broke in. "We can't hear-"

  The line of windows ahead went white, cracking like ice then bursting out; he dived through the space, to skid over the fragments scattered on the deck beyond. Behind him, the top and bottom of the shattered windows started to close slowly, like a huge mouth.

  "You bastard! You motherfu-"

  "Dammit, change channels! Go to-"

  He slipped on the shards of glass, almost falling.

  Only Lamm's voice sounded through his helmet now, filling his ears with oaths which were mostly drowned in the smothering roar of the endless wreck behind. He looked back, just for a second, to see Lamm throwing himself between the jaws of the crumpling windows; he careened over the deck, falling and rolling, then rising again, still holding his gun, as Horza looked away. It was only at that point he realised he no longer had his own gun; he must have dropped it, but he couldn't remember where or when.

  Horza was slowing down. He was fit and strong, but the above-standard pull of Vavatch's false gravity and the badly fitting suit were taking their toll.

  He tried, as he ran in something like a trance, as his breath streamed back and forth through his wide-open mouth, to imagine how close they had been to the bows, for how long that immense weight of ship behind would be able to compress its front section as its billion-tonne mass rammed into what must — if it had filled the cloud bank they had seen earlier — be a massive tabular iceberg.

  As though in a dream, Horza could see the ship about him, still wrapped in clouds and mist but lit from above by the wash of golden sunlight. The towers and spires seemed unaffected, the whole vast structure still sliding forward towards the ice as the kilometres of Megaship behind them pressed forward with the vessel's own titanic momentum. He ran by game courts, past tents of billowing silver, through a pile of musical instruments. Ahead there was a huge tiered wall of more decks, and above him were bridges, swaying and thrashing as their bow-ward supports, out of sight behind him, came closer to the advancing wave of wreckage and were consumed. He saw the deck to one side drop away into airy, hazy nothing. The deck under his feet started to rise, slowly, but for fifteen metres or more in front of him; he was fighting his way up a slope growing steeper all the time. A suspension bridge to his left collapsed, wires flailing; it disappeared into the golden mist, the noise of its fall lost in the crushing din assaulting his ears. His feet started to slide on the tilt of deck. He fell, landed heavily on his back and turned, looking behind him.

  Against a wall of pure white towering higher than the Olmedreca's tallest spire, the Megaship was
throwing itself to destruction in a froth of debris and ice. It was like the biggest wave in the universe, rendered in scrap metal, sculpted in grinding junk; and beyond and about it, over and through, cascades of flashing, glittering ice and snow swept down in great slow veils from the cliff of frozen water beyond. Horza stared at it, then started to slide down towards it as the deck tilted him. To his left a huge tower was collapsing slowly, bowing to the breaking wave of compacted wreckage like a slave before a master. Horza felt a scream start in his throat as he saw decks and railings, walls and bulkheads and frames he had only just run past start to crumple and smash and come towards him.

  He rolled over sliding shards and skidding fragments to the buckling rail at the edge of the deck, grabbed at the rails, caught them, heaved with both arms, kicked with one foot, and threw himself over the side.

  He fell only one deck, crashing into sloped metal, winding himself. He got to his feet as fast as he could, sucking air through his mouth and swallowing as he tried to get his lungs to work. The narrow deck he was on was also buckling, but the fold-point was between him and the wall of towering, grinding wreckage; he slipped and slid away from it down the sloping surface as the deck behind him rose into a peak. Metal tore, and girders crashed out of the deck above like broken bones through skin. A set of steps faced him, leading to the deck he'd just jumped from, but to an area that was still level. He scrambled up to the level deck, which only then started to tip, canting away from the wave front of debris as its front edge lifted, crumpling.

  He ran down the increasing slope, water from shallow ornamental pools cascading around him. More steps: he hauled himself towards the next deck.

  His chest and throat seemed filled with hot coals, his legs with molten lead, and all the time that awful, nightmarish pull came from behind, dragging him back towards the wreckage. He stumbled and gasped his way from the top of the steps past the side of a broken, drained swimming pool.

  "Horza!" a voice yelled. "Is that you? Horza! It's Mipp! Look up!"

  Horza lifted his head. In the mist, thirty metres above him, was the CAT's shuttle. He waved weakly at it, staggering as he did so. The shuttle lowered itself through the mist ahead of him, its rear doors opening, until it was hovering just over the next deck above.

  "I've opened the doors! Jump in!" Mipp shouted. Horza tried to reply, but could produce no sound apart from a sort of rasping wheeze; he staggered on, feeling as though the bones in his legs had turned to jelly. The heavy suit bumped and crashed around him, his feet slipped on the broken glass which covered the thrumming deck under his boots. Yet more steps towered ahead, leading to the deck where the shuttle waited. "Hurry up, Horza! I can't wait much longer!"

  He threw himself at the steps, hauled himself up. The shuttle wavered in the air, swivelling, its open rear ramp pointing at him, then away. The steps beneath him shuddered; the noise around him roared, full of screams and crashes. Another voice was shouting in his ears but he couldn't make out the words. He fell onto the upper deck, lunged forward for the shuttle ramp a few metres away; he could see the seats and lights inside, Lenipobra's suited body slumped in one corner.

  "I can't wait! I've-" Mipp shouted above the scream of the wreckage and the other shouting voice. The shuttle started to rise. Horza threw himself at it.

  His hands caught the lip of the ramp just as it rose level with his chest. He was hoisted from the deck, swinging under outstretched arms and looking forward under the shuttle's fuselage belly as the craft forced its way up into the air.

  "Horza! Horza! I'm sorry," Mipp sobbed.

  "You've got me!" Horza yelled hoarsely.

  "What?"

  The shuttle was still climbing, passing decks and towers and the thin horizontal lines of monorail tracks. All Horza's weight was taken by his fingers, hooked in their gloves over the edge of the ramp door. His arms ached. "I'm hanging onto the goddamn ramp!"

  "You bastards!" screamed another voice. It was Lamm. The ramp started to close; the jerk almost broke Horza's grip. They were fifty metres up and climbing. He saw the top part of the doors jawing down towards his fingers.

  "Mipp!" he yelled. "Don't close the door! Leave the ramp where it is and I'll try to get in!"

  "OK," Mipp said quickly. The ramp stopped angling up, halting at about twenty degrees. Horza began swinging his legs from side to side. They were seventy, eighty metres up, facing away from the wave of wreckage and heading slowly away from it.

  "You black bastard! Come back!" Lamm bellowed.

  "I can't, Lamm!" Mipp cried. "I can't! You're too close!"

  "You fat bastard!" Lamm hissed.

  Light flickered around Horza. The underside of the shuttle blazed in a dozen places as laser fire hit it. Something slammed into Horza's left foot, on the sole of his boot, and his right leg was kicked out as his leg burned with pain.

  Mipp screamed incoherently. The shuttle started to gather speed, heading back over the Megaship and diagonally across it. The air roared around Horza's body, slowly tearing his grip away. "Mipp, slow down!" he shouted.

  "Bastard!" Lamm yelled again. The mist to one side glowed as a fan of short-lived beams incandesced within it, then the laser fire shifted and the shuttle sparkled again, cracking with five or six small explosions around the front and nose section. Mipp howled. The shuttle increased speed. Horza was still trying to swing one leg onto the sloped ramp, but the clawed fingers of his gloves were slowly scraping along the roughened surface as his body was slipstreamed back behind the speeding craft.

  Lamm screamed — a high, gurgling sound which went through Horza's head like an electric shock, until the noise snapped off suddenly, replaced for an instant by sharp cracking, breaking noises.

  The shuttle raced over the surface of the crashing Megaship, a hundred metres up. Horza felt the strength ebbing from his fingers and arms. He looked through the helmet visor at the interior of the shuttle only a few metres away as, millimetre by millimetre, he slipped away from it.

  The interior flashed once, then an instant later blazed white, blindingly, unbearably. His eyes closed instinctively, and a burning yellow light came through his eyelids. His helmet speakers made a sudden, piercing, inhuman noise, like a machine screaming, then cut out altogether. The light faded slowly. He opened his eyes.

  The shuttle interior was still brightly lit, but it was smouldering now, too. In the turbulent air whirling in from the open rear doors, wisps of smoke were tugged from scorched seats, singed straps and webbing, and the crisped black skin on Lenipobra's exposed face. Shadows seemed to be burnt onto the bulkhead in front.

  Horza's fingers, one by one, came to the edge of the ramp.

  My God, he thought, looking at the scorch marks and the smoke, that maniac had a nuke after all. Then the shock wave hit.

  It slapped him forward, over the ramp and into the shuttle, just before it hit the machine itself, throwing it bucking and bouncing about the sky like a tiny bird caught in a storm. Horza was rattled about the interior from side to side, trying desperately to grab hold of something to stop himself falling back out through the open rear doors. His hand found some straps and fisted round them with the last of his strength.

  Back through the doors, through the mist, a huge rolling fireball was climbing slowly into the sky. A noise like every clap of thunder he had ever heard vibrated through the hot, hazed interior of the fleeing machine. The shuttle banked, throwing Horza against one set of seats. A big tower flashed by the open rear doors, blocking out the fireball as the shuttle continued to turn. The rear doors seemed to try to close, then jammed.

  Horza felt heavy and hot inside his suit, as the heat from the bomb's flash seeped through from the surfaces which had been exposed to the initial fireball. His right leg hurt badly, somewhere below the knee. He could smell burning.

  As the shuttle steadied and its course straightened, Horza got up and limped forward to the door set in the bulkhead, where the outlines of the seats and Lenipobra's slumped body — now spread-ea
gled near the rear doors — were burnt in frozen shadows onto the off-white surface of the wall. He opened the door and went through.

  Mipp was in the pilot's seat, hunched over the controls. The monitor screens were blank, but the view through the thick, polarised glass of the shuttle's windscreen showed cloud, mist, some towers sliding underneath and open sea beyond, covered with yet more cloud. "Thought you… were dead…" Mipp said thickly, half turning towards Horza. Mipp looked wounded, crouched in his seat, hunchbacked, eyelids drooped. Sweat glistened on his dark brow. There was smoke in the flight deck, acrid and sweet at once.

  Horza took his helmet off and fell into the other seat. He looked down at his right leg. A neat, black-rimmed hole about a centimetre across had been punched through the back of the suit calf, matched by a larger and more ragged hole on the side. He flexed the leg and winced; just a muscle burn, already cauterised. He could see no blood.

  He looked at Mipp. "You all right?" he asked. He already knew the answer.

  Mipp shook his head. "No," he said, in a soft voice. "That lunatic hit me. Leg, and my back somewhere."

  Horza looked at the back of Mipp's suit, near where it rested against the seat. A hole in the bowl of the seat led to a long, dark scar on the suit surface. Horza looked down at the flight-deck floor. "Shit," he said. "This thing's full of holes."

  The floor was pitted with craters. Two were directly under Mipp's seat; one laser shot had caused that dark scar on the side of the suit, the other must have hit Mipp's body.

  "Feels like that bastard shot me right up the ass, Horza," Mipp said, trying to smile. "He did have a nuke, didn't he? That's what went off. Blew all the electrics away… Only the optic controls still working. Useless damn shuttle…"

  "Mipp, let me take over," Horza said. They were in cloud now; only a vague coppery light showed through the crystal screen ahead. Mipp shook his head.

  "Can't. You couldn't fly this thing… with it in this shape."

  "We've got to go back, Mipp. The others might have-"

  "Can't. They'll all be dead," Mipp said, shaking his head and gripping the controls tighter, staring through the screen. "God, this thing's dying." He looked round the blank monitors, shaking his head slowly. "I can feel it."