“Thanks, anyway," he told her.
“For what."
“I think you just reinforced my faith in the ultimate outcome of this war."
“Oh, just go away, Horza." Balveda sighed and looked down to the floor.
Horza wanted to touch her, to ruffle her short black hair or pinch her pale cheek, but guessed it would only upset her more.
He knew too well
the bitterness of defeat to want to aggravate the experience for somebody who was, in the end, a fair and
honorable adversary. He went to the
door, and after a word with the guard outside he was let out.
“Ah, Bora Horza," Xoralundra said as the human appeared out of the cell doorway. The Querl came striding along the companionway.
The
guard outside the cell straightened visibly and blew some imaginary dust off his carbine. “How is our guest."
“Not very happy. We were trading justifications and I think I won on points." Horza grinned. Xoralundra stopped by the man
and looked
down.
“Hmm. Well, unless you prefer to relish your victories in a vacuum, I suggest that the next time you leave my cabin while
we are at battle
stations you take your—"
Horza didn’t hear the next word. The ship’s alarm erupted.
The Idiran alarm signal, on a warship as elsewhere, consists of what sounds like a series of very sharp explosions. It is
the amplified
version of the Idiran chest-boom, an evolved signal the Idirans had been using to warn others in their herd
or clan for several hundred thousand
years before they became civilized, and produced by the chest-flap which is the Idiran
vestigial third arm.
Horza clapped his hands to his ears, trying to shut out the awful noise. He could feel the shock waves on his chest, through
the open neck of
the suit. He felt himself being picked up and forced against the bulkhead. It was only then that he realized
he had shut his eyes. For a second he
thought he had never been rescued, never left the wall of the sewercell, that this was
the moment of his death and all the rest had been a
strange and vivid dream. He opened his eyes and found himself staring
into the keratinous snout of the Querl Xoralundra, who shook him
furiously and, just as the ship alarm cut off and was replaced
by a merely painfully intense whine, said very loudly into Horza’s face, “HELMET!"
“Oh shit!" said Horza.
He was dropped to the deck as Xoralundra let him go, turned quickly, and scooped a running medjel off the floor as it tried
to get past him.
“You!" Xoralundra bellowed. “I am the spy-father Querl of the fleet," he shouted into its face and shook
the six-limbed creature by the front of its
suit. “You will go to my cabin immediately and bring the small space helmet lying
there to the port-side stern emergency lock. As fast as
possible. This order supersedes all others and cannot be countermanded.
Go!" He threw the medjel in the right direction. It landed running.
Xoralundra flipped his own helmet over from its back-hinged position, then opened the visor. He looked as though he was about
to say
something to Horza, but the helmet speaker crackled and spoke, and the Querl’s expression changed. The small noise
stopped and only the
continuing wail of the cruiser’s alarm was left. “The Culture craft was hiding in the surface layers
of the system sun," Xoralundra said bitterly,
more to himself than to Horza.
“In the
sun.
" Horza was incredulous. He looked back at the cell door, as though somehow it was Balveda’s fault. “Those bastards are
getting
smarter all the time."
“Yes," snapped the Querl, then turned quickly on one foot. “Follow me, human." Horza obeyed, starting after the old Idiran
at a run, then
bumping into him as the huge figure stopped in its tracks. Horza watched the broad, dark, alien face as it
swiveled round to look over his head
at the Idiran trooper still standing stiffly at the cell door. An expression Horza could
not read passed over Xoralundra’s face. “Guard," the Querl
said, not loudly. The trooper with the laser carbine turned. “Kill
the woman."
Xoralundra stamped off down the corridor. Horza stood for a moment, looking first at the rapidly receding Querl, then at the
guard as he
checked his carbine, ordered the cell door to open, and stepped inside. Then the man ran down the corridor after
the old Idiran.
“Querl!" gasped the medjel as it skidded to a stop by the airlock, the suit helmet held in front of it. Xoralundra swept the
helmet from its grasp
and fitted it quickly over Horza’s head.
“You will find a warp attachment in the lock," the Idiran told Horza. “Get as far away as possible. The fleet will be here
in about nine standard
hours. You shouldn’t have to do anything; the suit will summon help on a coded IFF response. I, too—"
Xoralundra broke off as the cruiser
lurched. There was a loud bang and Horza was blown off his feet by a shock wave, while
the Idiran on his tripod of legs hardly moved. The
medjel which had gone for the helmet yelped as it was blown under Xoralundra’s
legs. The Idiran swore and kicked at it; it ran off. The cruiser
lurched again as other alarms started. Horza could smell
burning. A confused medley of noises that might have been Idiran voices or muffled
explosions came from somewhere overhead.
“I too shall try to escape," Xoralundra continued. “God be with you, human."
Before Horza could say anything the Idiran had rammed his visor down and pushed him into the lock. It slammed shut. Horza
was thrown
against one bulkhead as the cruiser juddered mightily. He looked desperately round the small, spherical space for
a warp unit, then saw it and
after a short struggle unclamped it from its wall magnets. He clamped it to the rear of his suit.
“Ready." a voice said in his ear.
Horza jumped, then said, “Yes! Yes! Hit it!"
The airlock didn’t open conventionally; it turned inside out and threw him into space, tumbling away from the flat disc of
the cruiser in a tiny
galaxy of ice particles. He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself not to be stupid; it was
probably still several trillion kilometers away. That
was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You
could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate
planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into
novae from light-years off… and still have no good idea why you were really
fighting.
With one last thought for Balveda, Horza reached until he found the control handle for the bulky warp unit, fingered the correct
buttons on it,
and watched the stars twist and distort around him as the unit sent him and his suit lancing away from the
stricken Idiran spacecraft.
He played with the wrist-set for a while, trying to pick up signals from
The Hand of God 137,
but got nothing but static. The suit spoke to him
once, saying “Warp/unit/charge/half/exhausted." Horza kept a watch on the
warp unit via a small screen set inside the helmet.
He recalled that the Idirans said some sort of prayer to their God before going into warp. Once when he had been with Xoralundra
on a ship
which was warping, the Querl had insisted that the Changer repeat the prayer, too. Horza had protested that it meant
nothing to him; not only
did the Idiran God clash with his own personal convictions, the prayer itself was in a dead Idiran
language he didn’t understand. He had been
told rather coldly that it was the gesture that mattered. For what the Idirans
regarded as essentially an animal (their word for humanoids was
best translated as “biotomaton"), only the behavior of devotion
was required; his heart and mind were of no consequence. When Horza had
asked, what about his immortal soul. Xoralundra had
laughed. It was the first and only time Horza had experienced such a thing from the old
warrior. Whoever heard of a mortal
body having an immortal soul.
When the warp unit was almost exhausted, Horza shut it off. Stars swam into focus around him. He set the unit controls, then
threw it away
from him. They parted company, he moving slowly off in one direction, while the unit spun off in another; then
it disappeared as the controls
switched it back on again to use the last of its power leading anybody following its trace
away in the wrong direction.