“This right one," Xoxarle said, turning his head slowly. Aviger looked round toward the nose of the train again, then back
at Xoxarle.
“Don’t tell you-know-who, all right."
“I swear. Now, please; I can’t stand it."
Aviger stepped forward. Still out of reach. “On your honor, you’re not playing a trick." he said.
“As a warrior. On my mother-parent’s unsullied name. On my clan and folk! May the galaxy turn to dust if I lie!"
“All right, all right," Aviger said, raising his gun and holding it out high. “I just wanted to make sure." He poked the barrel
toward Xoxarle’s
eye. “Whereabouts does it itch."
“Here!" hissed Xoxarle. His freed arm lashed out, grabbed the barrel of the gun and pulled. Aviger, still holding the gun,
was dragged after
it, slamming into the chest of the Idiran. Breath exploded out of him, then the gun sailed down and smashed
into his skull. Xoxarle had averted
his head when he’d grabbed the weapon in case it fired, but he needn’t have bothered;
Aviger hadn’t left it switched on.
In the stiffening breeze, Xoxarle let the unconscious human slide to the floor. He held the laser rifle in his mouth and used
his hand to set the
controls for a quiet burn. He snapped the trigger guard from the gun’s casing, to make room for his larger
fingers.
The wires should melt easily.
Like a squirm of snakes appearing from a hole in the ground, the bunched cables, cut about a meter along their length, slid
out of the conduit.
Unaha-Closp went into the narrow tube and reached behind the bared ends of the next length of cables.
* * *
“Yalson," Horza said, “I wouldn’t take you with me anyway, even if I decided not to come back down alone." He grinned at her.
Yalson frowned.
“Why not." she said.
“Because I’d need you on the ship, making sure Balveda here and our section leader didn’t misbehave."
Yalson’s eyes narrowed. “That had better be all," she growled.
Horza’s grin widened and he looked away, as though he wanted to say more, but couldn’t for some reason.
Balveda sat, swinging her legs from the edge of the too-big seat, and wondered what was going on between the Changer and the
dark,
down-skinned woman. She thought she had detected a change in their relationship, a change which seemed to come mostly
from the way
Horza treated Yalson. An extra element had been added; there was something else determining his reactions to
her, but Balveda couldn’t pin it
down. It was all quite interesting, but it didn’t help her. She had her own problems anyway.
Balveda knew her own weaknesses, and one of them
was troubling her now.
She really was starting to feel like one of the team. She watched Horza and Yalson arguing about who should accompany the
Changer if he
came back down into the Command System after a return to the
Clear Air Turbulence,
and she could not help but smile, unseen, at them. She
liked the determined, no-nonsense woman, even if her regard was not
returned, and she could not find it in her heart to think of Horza as
implacably as she ought.
It was the Culture’s fault. It considered itself too civilized and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to
understand them and their
motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way
which ensured they would not become enemies
again. The idea was fine as long as you didn’t get too close, but once you had
spent some time with your opponents, such empathy could turn
against you. There was a sort of detached, non-human aggression
required to go along with such mobilized compassion, and Balveda could
feel it slipping away from her.
Perhaps she felt too safe, she thought. Perhaps it was because now there was no significant threat. The battle for the Command
System
was over; the quest was petering out, the tension of the past few days disappearing.
Xoxarle worked quickly. The laser’s thin, attenuated beam buzzed and fussed at each wire, turning each strand red, yellow
and white, then—as
he strained against them—parted each one with a snap. The old man at the Idiran’s feet stirred, moaned.
The faint breeze had become a strong one. Dust was blowing under the train and starting to swirl around Xoxarle’s feet. He
moved the laser
to another set of wires. Only a few to go. He glanced toward the nose of the train. There was still no sign
of the humans or the machine. He
glanced back the other way, over his shoulder, toward the train’s last carriage and the gap
between it and the tunnel mouth where the wind was
whistling through. He could see no light, still hear no noise. The current
of air made his eye feel cold.
He turned back and pointed the laser rifle at another set of wires. The sparks were caught in the breeze and scattered over
the station floor
and across the back of Aviger’s suit.
Typical: me doing all the work as usual,
thought Unaha-Closp. It hauled another bunch of cables out of the conduit. The wire run behind it was
starting to fill up
with cut lengths of wire, blocking the route the drone had taken to get to the small pipe it was now working in.
It’s beneath me. I can feel it. I can hear it. I don’t know what it’s doing, but I can feel, I can hear.
And there’s something else… another noise….
The train was a long, articulated shell in some gigantic gun; a metal scream in a vast throat. It rammed through the tunnel
like a piston in the
biggest engine ever made, sweeping round the curves and into the straights, lights flooding the way ahead
for an instant, air pushed ahead of it
—like its howling, roaring voice—for kilometers.
Dust lifted from the platform, made clouds in the air. An empty drink container rolled off the pallet where Aviger had been
sitting and clattered to
the floor; it started rolling along the platform, toward the nose of the train, hitting off the wall
a couple of times. Xoxarle saw it. The wind tugged at
him, the wires parted. He got one leg free, then another. His other
arm was out, and the last wires fell away.
A piece of plastic sheeting lifted from the pallet like some black, flat bird and flopped onto the platform, sliding after
the metal container,
now halfway down the station. Xoxarle stooped quickly, caught Aviger round the waist and, with the man
held easily in one arm and the laser in
his other hand, ran back, down the platform, toward the wall beside the blocked tunnel
mouth where the wind made a moaning noise past the
sloped rear of the train.
“… or lock them both away down here instead. You know we can…." Yalson said.
We’re close,
Horza thought, nodding absently at Yalson, not listening as she told him why he needed her to help him look for the Mind.
We’re
close, I’m sure we are; I can feel it; we’re almost there. Somehow we’ve—I’ve—held it all together. But it’s not over
yet, and it only takes one
tiny error, one oversight, a single mistake, and that’s it: fuck-up, failure, death. So far we’ve
done it, despite the mistakes, but it’s so easy to