Consider Phlebas c-1

by Iain M. Banks

  The hands didn't move. He edged closer.

  "What was it?" Wubslin's voice came through the speakers.

  "Just a moment," Horza said. He went closer, rifle ready. One of the hands moved slightly, as though trying to get a better grip on the lip of the tunnel floor. Horza's heart thudded. He went towards the tall open doors, his feet crunching on the warm debris. He saw semi-suited arms as he went closer, then the top of a long, laser-scarred helmet-

  With a rasping noise he had heard medjel make when they charged during a battle, another third hand — he knew it was a foot, but it looked like a hand and it was holding a small pistol — flashed up from the elevator shaft at the same time as the medjel's head looked up and out, straight at him. He started to duck. The pistol cracked, its plasma bolt missing him by only a few centimetres.

  Horza shot quickly, ducking and going to one side. Fire blew out all around the lip of the elevator, smashing into the gloves. With a scream the gloved hands vanished. Light flickered briefly in the circular shaft. Horza ran forward, stuck his head between the doors and looked down.

  The dim shape of the falling medjel was lit by the guttering fire still burning on its suit gloves. Somehow it still held the plasma pistol; as it fell, screaming, it fired the small weapon, the cracks of its shots and the flashes from the bolts drawing further away as the creature holding it, firing it, whirled, its six limbs flailing, down into the darkness.

  "Horza!" Yalson shouted. "Are you all right? What the fuck was that?"

  "I'm fine," he said. The medjel was a tiny, wriggling shape, deep in the shaft's tunnel of vertical night. Its screams still echoed, the microscopic sparks of its burning hands and the firing plasma pistol still flaring. Horza looked away. A few small thuds recorded the hapless creature's contact with the sides of the shaft as it dropped.

  "What's that noise?" Dorolow said.

  "The medjel was still alive. It shot at me, but I got it," Horza told them, walking away from the open elevator doors. "It fell — it's still falling — down the elevator shaft."

  "Shit!" breathed Neisin, still listening to the faint, fading, echoing screams. "How deep is that?"

  "Ten kilometres, if none of the blast doors are shut," Horza said. He looked at the external controls for the other two lifts and the transit capsule entrance. They had escaped more or less undamaged. The doors leading to the transit tubes were open. They had been closed when Horza inspected the area earlier.

  Yalson shouldered her gun and walked down the tunnel towards Horza. "Well," she said, "let's get this op on the road."

  "Yeah," Neisin said. "What the hell! These guys aren't so tough after all. That's one down already."

  "Yeah, deep down," Yalson said.

  Horza inspected the damage to his suit while the others came down the tunnel. There was a burn on the right thigh, a millimetre deep and a couple of finger-breadths wide. Save for the unlikely chance of another shot falling on the same place, it hadn't harmed the suit.

  "A fine start, if you ask me," the drone muttered as it started down the tunnels with the others.

  Horza went back to the tall, buckled, pitted doors of the lift shaft and looked down. With the magnifier up full he could just make out a tiny sparkling, deep, deep below. The helmet's external mikes picked up a noise, but from so far away and so full of echoes, it sounded like nothing more than the wind starting to moan through a fence.

  They clustered in front of the opened doors of an elevator shaft, not the one the medjel had fallen down. The doors were twice the height of anyone of them, dwarfing them all, as though they were children. Horza had opened those doors, taken a good look, floated down on the suit's AG a little way, then come back up. It all looked safe.

  "I'll go first," he told the assembled group. "If we hit any trouble, let off a couple of chaff grenades and get back up here. We're going to the main system level, about five kilometres down. Once we get through the doors that's us more or less in station four. From there we'll be able to turn on the power, something the Idirans haven't been able to do. After that we'll have transport in the form of transit-tube capsules."

  "What about the trains?" Wubslin asked.

  "The transit tubes are faster," Horza said. "We might have to start a train up if we capture the Mind; depends exactly how big it is. Besides, unless they've moved them since I was here, the nearest trains will be at station two or station six, not here. But there is a spiral tunnel at station one we could bring a System train up."

  "What about the transit tube up here?" Yalson said. "If that's the way that medjel suddenly appeared, what's to stop another one hiking up the tunnel?"

  Horza shrugged. "Nothing. I don't want to fuse the doors closed in case we want to come back that way once we have the Mind, but if one of them does come up that way, so what? It'll be one less down there for us to worry about. Anyway, somebody can stay up here until we're all safely down the lift shaft, then follow us. But I don't think there will be another one so close behind that one."

  "Yes, that one you didn't manage to talk into believing you were both on the same side," the drone said testily.

  Horza squatted down on his haunches to look at the drone; it was invisible from above because of the pellet of equipment it was carrying.

  "That one," he said, "didn't have a communicator, did it? Whereas any Idirans down there certainly will have the ones they took from the base, won't they? And medjel do as Idirans tell them to, right?" He waited for the machine to reply and when it didn't he repeated, "Right?"

  Horza had the impression that, had the drone been human, it would have spat.

  "Whatever you say, sir," the drone said.

  "And what do I do, Horza?" Balveda said, standing in her fabric jumpsuit, wearing a fur jacket on top. "Do you intend to throw me down the shaft and say you forgot I didn't have any AG, or do I have to walk down the transit tunnel?"

  "You'll come with me."

  "And if we hit trouble, you'll… what?" Balveda asked.

  "I don't think we'll hit any trouble," Horza said.

  "You're sure there were no AG harnesses in the base?" Aviger said.

  Horza nodded. "If there had been, don't you think one of the medjel we've encountered so far would have had them on?"

  "Maybe the Idirans are using them."

  "They're too heavy."

  "They could use two," Aviger insisted.

  "There were no harnesses," Horza said through his teeth. "We were never allowed any. We weren't supposed to go into the Command System apart from yearly inspections, when we could power everything up. We did go in; we walked down the spiral to station four, like that medjel must have slogged up, but we weren't supposed to, and we weren't allowed gravity harnesses. They'd have made getting down there too easy."

  "Dammit, let's get down there," Yalson said impatiently, looking at the others. Aviger shrugged.

  "If my AG fails with all this rubbish I'm carrying-" the drone began, its voice muffled by the pallet over its top surface.

  "You drop any of that stuff down that shaft and you'd be as well to follow it, machine," Horza said. "Now just save your energy for floating, not talking. You'll follow me; keep five or six hundred metres up. Yalson, will you stay up here till we get the doors open?" Yalson nodded. "The rest of you," he looked round them, "come after the drone. Don't bunch up too much but don't get separated. Wubslin, stay at the same level as the machine, and have chaff grenades ready." Horza held his hand out to Balveda. "Madam?"

  He held Balveda to him; she rested her feet on his boots, facing away from him; then Horza stepped into the shaft, and they descended together into the night-dark depths.

  "See you at the bottom," Neisin said in the helmet speakers.

  "We're not going to the bottom, Neisin," Horza sighed, shifting his arm slightly round Balveda's waist. "We're going to the main system level. I'll see you there."

  "Yeah, OK; wherever."

  They fell on AG without incident, and Horza forced open the doors at
the system level five kilometres below in the rock.

  There had been only one exchange with Balveda on the way down, a minute or so after they had started out:

  "Horza?"

  "What?"

  "If any shooting starts… from down there, or anything happens and you have to let go… I mean, drop me…"

  "What, Balveda?"

  "Kill me. I'm serious. Shoot me; I'd rather that than fall all that way."

  "Nothing," Horza said after a moment's thought, "would give me greater pleasure."

  They dropped into the chill stone silence of the tunnel's black throat, clasped like lovers.

  "Goddamn it," Horza said softly.

  He and Wubslin stood in a room just off the dark, echoing vault that was station four. The others were waiting outside. The lights on Horza and Wubslin's suits illuminated a space packed with electric switching gear; the walls were covered with screens and controls. Thick cables snaked over the ceiling and along the walls, and metal floor-plates covered conduits filled with more electrical equipment.

  There was a smell of burning in the room. A long black sooty scar had printed itself onto one wall, above charred and melted cabling.

  They had noticed the smell on their walk through the connecting tunnels from the shaft to the station. Horza had smelt it and felt gall rise in his throat; the odour was faint and could not have turned the most sensitive of stomachs, but Horza had known what it meant.

  "Think we can mend it?" Wubslin asked. Horza shook his head.

  "Probably not. This happened once on a yearly test when I was here before. We powered up in the wrong sequence and blew that same cable-run; if they've done what we did there'll be worse damage further down, in the deeper levels. Took us weeks to repair it." Horza shook his head. "Damn," he said.

  "I guess it was pretty smart of those Idirans to figure out as much as they did," Wubslin said, opening his visor to reach in and scratch his head awkwardly. "I mean, to get this far."

  "Yes," Horza said, kicking a large transformer. "Too goddamn smart."

  They made a brief search of the station complex, then gathered again in the main cavern and crowded round the jury-rigged mass sensor Wubslin had removed from the Clear Air Turbulence. Wires and light-fibres were tangled about it, and attached to the top of the machine was a cannibalised screen from the ship's bridge, now plugged directly into the sensor.

  The screen lit up. Wubslin fiddled with its controls. The screen hologram showed a diagrammatic representation of a sphere, with three axes shown in perspective.

  "That's about four kilometres," Wubslin said. He seemed to be talking to the mass sensor, not the people around it. "Let's try eight…" He touched the controls again. The number of lines on the axes doubled. One very faint smudge of light blinked near the edge of the display.

  "Is that it?" Dorolow said. "Is that where it is?"

  "No," Wubslin said, fiddling with the controls again, trying to get the little patch of light to become clearer. "Not dense enough." Wubslin doubled the range twice more, but only the single trace remained, submerged in clutter.

  Horza looked round, orienting himself with the grid pattern shown on the screen. "Would that thing be fooled by a pile of uranium?"

  "Oh yeah," Wubslin said, nodding. "The power we're putting through it, any radiation will upset it a bit. That's why we're down to roughly thirty kilometres maximum anyway, see? Just because of all this granite. Yeah, if there's a reactor, even an old one, it'll show up when the sensor's reader waves get to it. But just like this, as a patch. If this Mind's only fifteen metres long and weighs ten thousand tonnes, it'll be really bright. Like a star on the screen."

  "OK," Horza said. "That's probably just the reactor down at the deepest service level."

  "Oh," Wubslin said. "They had reactors, too?"

  "Back-up," Horza said. "That one was for ventilation fans if the natural circulation couldn't cope with smoke or gas. The trains have reactors, too, in case the geothermal failed." Horza checked the reading on the screen with the built-in mass sensor in his suit, but the faint trace of the back-up reactor was out of its range.

  "Should we investigate this one?" Wubslin asked, his face lit by the glowing screen.

  Horza straightened up, shaking his head. "No," he said wearily. "Not for now."

  They sat in the station and had something to eat. The station was over three hundred metres long and twice the width of the main tunnels. The metal rails the Command System trains ran on stretched across the level floor of fused rock in double tracks, appearing from one wall through an inverted U and disappearing through another, towards the repair and maintenance area. At either end of the station there were sets of gantries and ramps which rose almost to the roof. Those provided access to the two upper floors of the trains when they were in the station, Horza explained when Neisin asked about them.

  "I can't wait to see these trains," Wubslin mumbled, mouth full.

  "You won't be able to see them if there's no light," Aviger told him.

  "I think it's intolerable that I have to go on carrying all that junk," the drone said. It had set the equipment-loaded pallet down. "And now I'm told I have to carry even more weight!"

  "I'm not that heavy, Unaha-Closp," said Balveda.

  "You'll manage," Horza told the machine. With no power the only thing they could do was use their suits" AG to float along to the next station; it would be slower than the transit tube, but quicker than walking. Balveda would have to be carried by the drone.

  "Horza… I was wondering," Yalson said.

  "What?"

  "How much radiation have we all soaked up recently?"

  "Not much." Horza checked the small screen inside his helmet. The radiation level wasn't dangerous; the granite around them gave off a little; but even if they hadn't been suited up, they'd have been in no real danger. "Why?"

  "Nothing." Yalson shrugged. "Just with all these reactors, and this granite, and that blast when the bomb went off in the gear you vac'd from the CAT… well, I thought we might have taken a dose. Being on the Megaship when Lamm tried to blow it apart didn't help, either. But if you say we're OK, we're OK."

  "Unless somebody's particularly sensitive to it, we haven't got much to worry about."

  Yalson nodded.

  Horza was wondering whether they should split up. Should they all go together, or should they go in two groups, one down each of the foot tunnels which accompanied the main line and the transit tube? They could even split up further and have somebody go down each of the six tunnels which led from station to station; that was going too far, but it showed how many possibilities there were. Split up, they might be better placed for a flanking attack if one group encountered the Idirans, though they wouldn't initially have the same firepower. They wouldn't be increasing their chances of finding the Mind, not if the mass sensor was working properly, but they would be increasing their chances of stumbling into the Idirans in the first place. Staying together, though, in the one tunnel, gave Horza a feeling of claustrophobic foreboding. One grenade would wipe them out; a single fan of heavy laser-fire would kill or disable all of them.

  It was like being set a cunning but unlikely problem in one of the Heibohre Military Academy's term exams.

  He couldn't even decide which way to head. When they'd searched the station, Yalson had seen marks in the thin layer of dust on the foot-tunnel floor leading to station five, which suggested the Idirans had gone that way. But ought they to follow, or should they go in the opposite direction? If they followed, and he couldn't convince the Idirans he was on their side, they'd have to fight.

  But if they went in the other direction and turned the electricity on at station one, they'd be giving power to the Idirans as well. There was no way of restricting the energy to one part of the Command System. Each station could isolate its section of track from the supply loop, but the circuitry had been designed so that no single traitor — or incompetent — could cut off the whole System. So the Idirans, too,
would have use of the transit tubes, the trains themselves and the engineering workshops… Better to find them and try to parley; settle the issue one way or the other.

  Horza shook his head. This whole thing was too complicated. The Command System, with its tunnels and caverns, its levels and shafts, its sidings and loops and cross-overs and points, seemed like some infernal closed-circuit flow chart for his thoughts.

  He would sleep on it. He needed sleep now, like the rest of them. He could sense it in them. The machine might get run down but it didn't need sleep, and Balveda still seemed alert enough, but all the rest were showing signs of needing a deeper rest than just sitting down. According to their body clocks it was time to sleep; he would be foolish to try to push them further.

  He had a restrainer harness on the pallet. That should keep Balveda secure. The machine could stand guard, and he would use the remote sensor on his suit to watch for movement in the immediate area where they slept; they ought to be safe enough.

  They finished their meal. Nobody disagreed with the idea of turning in. Balveda was trussed in the restrainer harness and barricaded in one of the empty store rooms off the platform. Unaha-Closp was told to sit itself up on one of the tall gantries and stay still unless it heard or saw anything untoward. Horza set his remote sensor near where he would sleep, on one of the lower girders of a hoist mechanism. He had wanted a word with Yalson, but by the time he had finished making all these arrangements several of the others, including Yalson, had fallen asleep already, lying back against the wall or laid out on the ground, their visors blanked or their heads turned away from the weak lights of the others" suits.

  Horza watched Wubslin wander around the station for a bit, then the engineer, too, lay down, and everything was still. Horza switched the remote sensor on, primed to alarm if it sensed anything above a certain low level of movement.