It drifted through the bright, humming spaces of the train, like a detached part of the mechanism itself.
Wubslin scratched his head. He had stopped at the reactor car on his way to the control deck. Some of the reactor carriage doors wouldn’t open. They had to be on some sort of security lock, probably controlled from the bridge, or flight deck, or footplate, or whatever they called the bit at the nose the train was controlled from. He looked out of a window, remembering what Horza had ordered.
Aviger sat on the pallet, his gun pointing at the Idiran, who stood stock still against the girders. Wubslin looked away, tested the door through to the reactor area again, then shook his head.
The hand, the arm, was weakening. Above him, rows of seats faced blank screens. He pulled himself along by the stems of the chairs; he was almost at the corridor which led through to the front car.
He wasn’t sure how he would get through the corridor. What was there to hold onto? No point in worrying about it now. He grabbed at another chair stem, hauled at it.
From the terrace which looked over the repair area, they could see the front train, the one the drone was in. Poised over the sunken floor of the maintenance area, the glittering length of the train, nestling in the scooped half-tunnel which ran along the far wall, looked like a long thin spaceship, and the dark rock around it like starless space.
Yalson watched the Culture agent’s back, frowning. “She’s too damn docile, Horza,” she said, just loud enough for the man to hear.
“That’s fine by me,” Horza said. “The more docile the better.”
Yalson shook her head slightly, not taking her eyes off the woman in front. “No, she’s stringing us along. She hasn’t cared up till now; she’s known she can afford to let things happen. She’s got another card she can play and she’s just relaxing until she has to use it.”
“You’re imagining things,” Horza told her. “Your hormones are getting the better of you, developing suspicions and second sight.”
She looked at him, transferring the frown from Balveda to the Changer. Her eyes narrowed. “What?”
Horza held up his free hand. “A joke.” He smiled.
Yalson looked unconvinced. “She’s up to something. I can tell,” she said. She nodded to herself. “I can feel it.”
Quayanorl dragged himself through the connecting corridor. He pushed open the door to the carriage, crawled slowly across the floor. He was starting to forget why he was doing this. He knew he had to press on, go forward, keep crawling, but he could no longer recall exactly what it was all for. The train was a torture maze, designed to pain him.
I am dragging myself to my death. Somehow even when I get to the end, where I can crawl no more, I keep going. I remember thinking that earlier, but what was I thinking of? Do I die when I get to the train’s control area, and continue my journey on the other side, in death? Is that what I was thinking of?
I am like a tiny child, crawling over the floor… Come to me, little fellow, says the train.
We were looking for something, but I can’t recall… exactly… what… it…
They looked through the great cavern, searching, then climbed steps to the gallery giving access to the station’s accommodation and storage sections.
Balveda stood at the edge of the broad terrace which ran round the cavern, midway between floor and roof. Yalson watched the Culture agent while Horza opened the doors to the accommodation section. Balveda looked out over the broad cavern, slender hands resting on the guard rail. The topmost rail was level with Balveda’s shoulders; waist level on the people who had built the Command System.
Near where Balveda stood, a long gantry led out over the cavern, suspended on wires from the roof and leading to the terrace on the other side, where a narrow, brightly lit tunnel led into the rock. Balveda looked down the length of the narrow gantry at the distant tunnel mouth.
Yalson wondered if the Culture woman was thinking of making a run for it, but knew she wasn’t, and wondered then whether perhaps she only wanted Balveda to try, so she could shoot her, just to be rid of her.
Balveda looked away from the narrow gantry, and Horza swung open the doors to the accommodation section.
Xoxarle flexed his shoulders. The wires moved a little, sliding and bunching.
The human they had left to guard him looked tired, perhaps even sleepy, but Xoxarle couldn’t believe the others would stay away for very long. He couldn’t afford to do too much now, in case the Changer came back and noticed how the wires had moved. Anyway, though it was far from being the most interesting way things could fall, there was apparently a good chance that the humans would be unable to find the supposedly sentient computing device they were all looking for. In that case perhaps the best course of action would be no action. He would let the little ones take him back to their ship. Probably the one called Horza intended to ransom him; this had struck Xoxarle as the most likely explanation for being kept alive.
The fleet might pay for the return of a warrior, though Xoxarle’s family were officially barred from doing so, and anyway were not rich. He could not decide whether he wanted to live, and perhaps redeem the shame of being caught and paid for by future exploits, or to do all he could either to escape or to die. Action appealed to him most; it was the warriors’ creed. When in doubt, do.
The old human got up from the pallet and walked around. He came close enough to Xoxarle to be able to inspect the wires, but gave them only a perfunctory glance. Xoxarle looked at the laser gun the human carried. His great hands, tied together behind his back, opened and closed slowly, without him thinking about it.
Wubslin came to the control deck in the nose of the train. He took his helmet off and put it on the console. He made sure it wasn’t touching any controls, just covering a few small unlit panels. He stood in the middle of the deck, looking round with wide, fascinated eyes.
The train hummed under his feet. Dials and meters, screens and panels indicated the train’s readiness. He cast his eyes over the controls, set in front of two huge seats which faced over the front console towards the armoured glass which formed part of the train’s steeply sloping nose. The tunnel in front was dark, only a few small lights burning on its side walls.
Fifty metres in front, a complex assembly of points led the tracks into two tunnels. One route went dead ahead, where Wubslin could see the rear of the train in front; the other tunnel curved, avoiding the repair and maintenance cavern and giving a through route to the next station.
Wubslin touched the glass, stretching his arm out over the control console to feel the cold, smooth surface. He grinned to himself. Glass: not a viewscreen. He preferred that. The designers had had holographic screens and superconductors and magnetic levitation — they had used all of them in the transit tubes — but for their main work they had not been ashamed to stick to the apparently cruder but more damage-tolerant technology. So the train had armoured glass, and it ran on metal tracks. Wubslin rubbed his hands together slowly and gazed round the many instruments and controls.
“Nice,” he breathed. He wondered if he could work out which controls opened the locked doors in the reactor car.
Quayanorl reached the control deck.
It was undamaged. From floor level, the deck was metal seat stems, overhanging control panels and bright ceiling lights. He hauled himself over the floor, racked with pain, muttering to himself, trying to remember why he had come all this way.