Nothing at all.
The doors were jammed, all right; same as the other train. The drone became exasperated and slammed against one of the reactor
chamber
doors with a force field, knocking itself back through the air with the reaction.
The door wasn’t even dented.
Oh-oh.
Back to the crawlways and cable-runs. Unaha-Closp turned and headed down a short corridor, then down a hole in the floor,
heading for an
inspection panel under the floor of the lower deck.
Of course I end up doing all the work. I might have known. Basically what I’m doing for that bastard is hunting down another
machine. I
ought to have my circuits tested. I’ve a good mind not to tell him even if I do find the Mind somewhere. That would
teach him.
It threw back the inspection hatch and lowered itself into the dim, narrow space under the floor. The hatch hissed shut after
it, blocking out
the light. It thought about turning back and opening the hatch again, but knew it would just close automatically
once more, and that it would lose
its temper and damage the thing, and that was all a bit pointless and petty, so it didn’t;
that sort of behavior was for humans.
It started off along the crawlway, heading toward the rear of the train, underneath where the reactor ought to be.
The Idiran was talking. Aviger could hear it, but he wasn’t listening. He could see the monster out of the corner of his eye,
too, but he wasn’t
really looking at it. He was gazing absently at his gun, humming tunelessly and thinking about what he
would do if—somehow—he could get
hold of the Mind himself. Suppose the others were killed, and he was left with the device.
He knew the Idirans would probably pay well for the
Mind. So would the Culture; they had money, even if they weren’t supposed
to use it in their own civilization.
Just dreams, but anything could happen out of this lot. You never knew how the dust might fall. He would buy some land: an
island on a nice
safe planet somewhere. He’d have some retro-aging done and raise some sort of expensive racing animals, and
he’d get to know the better-
off people through his connections. Or he’d get somebody else to do all the hard work; with money
you could do that. You could do anything.
The Idiran went on talking.
His hand was almost free. That was all he could get free for now, but maybe he could twist his arm out later; it was getting
easier all the
time. The humans had been on the train for a while; how much longer would they stay. The small machine hadn’t
been on for so long. He had
only just seen it in time, appearing from the tunnel mouth; he knew its sight was better than
his own, and for a moment he had been afraid it
might have seen him moving the arm he was trying to get free, the one on the
far side from the old human. But the machine had disappeared
into the train, and nothing had happened. He kept looking over
at the old man, checking. The human seemed lost in a daydream. Xoxarle kept
talking, telling the empty air about old Idiran
victories.
His hand was almost out.
A little dust came off a girder above him, about a meter over his head, and floated down through the near still air, falling
almost but not quite
straight down, gradually drifting away from him. He looked at the old man again, and strained at the
wires over his hand.
Come free, damn you!
Unaha-Closp had to hammer a corner from a right angle to a curve to get into the small passage it wanted to use. It wasn’t
even a crawlway; it
was a cable conduit, but it led into the reactor compartment. It checked its senses; same amount of radiation
here as in the other train.
It scraped through the small gap it had created in the cable-run, deeper into the metal and plastic guts of the silent carriage.
I can hear something. Something’s coming, underneath me….
The lights were a continuous line, flashing past the train too quickly for most eyes to have distinguished them individually.
The lights ahead,
down the track, appeared round curves or at the far end of straights, swelled and joined and tore past the
windows, like shooting stars in the
darkness.
The train had taken a long time to reach its maximum speed, fought for long minutes to overcome the inertia of its thousands
of tons of
mass. Now it had done so, and was pushing itself and the column of air in front of it as fast as it ever would,
hurtling down the long tunnel with a
roaring, tearing noise greater than any train had ever made in those dark passages, its
damaged carriages breaking the air or scraping the
blast-door edges to decrease its speed a little but increase the noise
of its passage a great deal.
The scream of the train’s whirling motors and wheels, of its ruffled metal body tearing through the air and of that same air
swirling through
the open spaces of the punctured carriages, rang from the ceiling and the walls, the consoles and the floor
and the slope of armored glass.
Quayanorl’s eye was closed. Inside his ears, membranes pulsed to the noise outside, but no message was transmitted to his
brain. His
head bobbed up and down on the vibrating console, as though still alive. His hand shook on the collision brake
override, as if the warrior was
nervous, or afraid.
Wedged there, glued, soldered by his own blood, he was like a strange, damaged part of the train.
The blood was dried; outside Quayanorl’s body, as within, it had stopped flowing.
“How goes it, Unaha-Closp." Yalson’s voice said.
“I’m under the reactor and I’m busy. I’ll let you know if I find anything. Thank you." It switched its communicator off and
looked at the black-
sheathed entrails in front of it: wires and cables disappearing into a cable-run. More than there had
been in the front train. Should it cut its way
in, or try another route.
Decisions, decisions.
* * *
His hand was out. He paused. The old man was still sitting on the pallet, fiddling with his gun.
Xoxarle allowed himself a small sigh of relief, and flexed his hand, letting the fingers stretch then fist. A few motes of
dust moved slowly past
his cheek. He stopped flexing his hand.
He watched the dust move.
A breath, something less than a breeze, tickled at his arms and legs. Most odd, he thought.
“All I’m saying," Yalson told Horza, shifting her feet on the console a little, “is that I don’t think it’s a good idea for
you to come down here
yourself. Anything could happen."
