Quayanorl stared at the controls in front of him. They had worked out a lot of their functions earlier, before the humans
had arrived. He had to try
to remember it all now. What did he have to do first. He reached forward, rocking unsteadily on
the alien-shaped seat. He flicked a set of
switches. Lights blinked; he heard clicks.
It was so hard to remember. He touched levers and switches and buttons. Meters and dials moved to new readings. Screens flickered;
figures began blinking on the readouts. Small high noises bleeped and squeaked. He thought he was doing the right things,
but couldn’t be
sure.
Some of the controls were too far away, and he had to drag himself halfway on top of the console, being careful not to alter
any of the
controls he had already set, to reach them, then shove himself back into the seat again.
The train was whirring now; he could feel it stir. Motors turned, air hissed, speakers bleeped and clicked. He was getting
somewhere. The
train wasn’t moving but he was slowly bringing it closer to the moment when it might.
His sight was fading, though.
He blinked and shook his head, but his eye was giving out. The view was going gray before him; he had to stare at the controls
and the
screens. The lights on the tunnel wall in front, retreating into the black distance, seemed to be dimming. He could
have believed that the power
was failing, but he knew it wasn’t. His head was hurting, deep inside. Probably it was sitting
that was causing it, the blood draining.
He was dying quickly enough anyway, but now there was even more urgency. He hit the buttons, moved some levers. The train
should have
moved, flexed; but it stayed motionless.
What else was there left to do. He turned to his blind side; light panels flashed. Of course: the doors. He hit the appropriate
sections of the
console and heard rumbling, sliding noises; and most of the panels stopped flashing. Not all, though. Some
of the doors must have been
jammed. Another control overrode their fail-safes; the remaining panels went dim.
He tried again.
Slowly, like an animal stretching after hibernation, the Command System train, all three hundred meters of it, flexed; the
carriages pulling a
little tighter to each other, taking up slack, readying.
Quayanorl felt the slight movement and wanted to laugh. It was working. Probably he had taken far too long, probably it was
now too late, but
at least he had done what he had set out to do, against all the odds, and the pain. He had taken command
of the long silver beast, and with only
a little more luck he would at least give the humans something to think about. And
show the Beast of the Barrier what he thought of its precious
monument.
Nervously, fearing that it would still not work, after all his effort and agony, he took hold of the lever he and Xoxarle
had decided governed
the power fed to the main wheel motors, then pushed it until it was at its limit for the starting mode.
The train shuddered, groaned and did not
move.
His one eye, containing the gray view, began to cry, drowning in tears.
The train jerked, a noise of metal tearing came from behind. He was almost thrown from the seat. He had to grab the edge of
the seat, then
lean forward and take the power lever again as it flicked back to the off position. The roaring in his head
grew and grew; he was shaking with
exhaustion and excitement; he pushed the lever again.
Wreckage blocked one door. Welding gear hung under the reactor car. Strips of metal torn from the train’s hull were splayed
out like stray
hairs from a badly groomed coat. Lumps of debris littered the tracks by the sides of both access gantries,
and one whole ramp, where Xoxarle
had been buried for a while, had crashed through the side of a carriage when it had been
cut free.
Groaning and moaning as though its own attempts at movement were as painful as Quayanorl’s had been, the train lurched forward
again. It
moved half a turn of its wheels, then stopped as the jammed ramp stuck against the access gantry. A whining noise
came from the train motors.
In the control deck, alarms sounded, almost too high for the injured Idiran to hear. Meters flashed,
needles climbed into danger zones, screens
filled with information.
The ramp started to tear itself free from the train, crumpling a jagged-edge trench from the carriage surface as the train
slowly forced its
way forward.
Quayanorl watched the lip of the tunnel mouth edge closer.
More wreckage ground against the forward access gantry. The welding gear under the reactor car scraped along the smooth floor
until it
came to the lip of stone surrounding an inspection trough; it jammed, then broke, clattering to the bottom of the
trough. The train rammed slowly
forward.
With a grinding crash, the ramp caught on the rear access assembly fell free, snapping aluminium ribs and steel tubes, flaying
the
aluminium and plastic skin of the carriage it had lodged in. One corner of the ramp was nudged under the train, covering
a rail; the wheels
hesitated at it, the linkages between the cars straining, until the slowly gathering onward pull overcame
the ramp. It buckled, its structures
compressing, and the wheels rolled over it, thumping down on the far side and continuing
along the rail. The next wheels clattered over it with
hardly a pause.
Quayanorl sat back. The tunnel came to the train and seemed to swallow it; the view of the station slowly disappeared. Dark
walls slid gently
by on either side of the control deck. The train still shuddered, but it was slowly gathering speed. A series
of bangs and crashes told Quayanorl
of the carriages dragging their way after him, through the debris, over the shining rails,
past the wrecked gantries, out of the damaged station.
The first car left at a slow walking pace, the next a little faster, the reactor carriage at a fast walk, and the final car
at a slow run.
Smoke tugged after the departing train, then drifted back and rose to the roof again.
… The camera in station six, where they had had the firefight, where Dorolow and Neisin had died and the other Idiran had
been left for dead,
was out of action. Horza tried the switch a couple of times, but the screen stayed dark. A damage indicator
winked. Horza flicked quickly
through the views from the other stations on the circuit, then switched the screen off.
“Well, everything seems to be all right." He stood up. “Let’s get back to the train."
Yalson told Wubslin and the drone; Balveda slipped off the big seat, and with her in the lead, they walked out of the control
room.
Behind them, a power-monitoring screen—one of the first Horza had switched on—was registering a massive energy drain in the
locomotive supply circuits, indicating that somewhere, in the tunnels of the Command System, a train was moving.