He rested his face on the cold floor of the deck. The train hummed at him, vibrating beneath his face. It was still alive; it was damaged and like him it would never get any better, but it was still alive. He had intended to do something, he knew that, but it was all slipping away from him now. He wanted to cry with the frustration of it all, but it was as though he had no energy left even for tears.
What was it? he asked himself (while the train hummed). I was… I was… what?
Unaha-Closp looked through the reactor car. Much of it was inaccessible at first, but the drone found a way into it eventually, through a cable run.
It wandered about the long carriage, noting how the system worked: the dropped absorber baffles preventing the pile from heating up, the wasted uranium shielding designed to protect the fragile humanoids’ bodies, the heat-exchange pipes which took the reactor’s heat to the batteries of small boilers where steam turned generators to produce the power which turned the train’s wheels. All very crude, Unaha-Closp thought. Complicated and crude at the same time. So much to go wrong, even with all their safety systems.
At least, if it and the humans did have to move around in these archaic nuclear-steam-electric locomotives, they would be using the power from the main system. The drone found itself agreeing with the Changer; the Idirans must have been mad to try to get all this ancient junk working.
“They slept in those things?” Yalson looked at the suspended nets. Horza, Balveda and she stood at the end door of a large cavern which had been a dormitory for the long-dead people who had worked in the Command System. Balveda tested one of the nets. They were like open hammocks, strung between sets of poles which hung from the ceiling. Perhaps a hundred of them filled the room, like fishing nets hung out to dry.
“They must have found them comfortable, I guess,” Horza said. He looked round. There was nowhere the Mind could have hidden. “Let’s go,” he said. “Balveda, come on.”
Balveda left one of the net-beds swinging gently, and wondered if there were any working baths or showers in the place.
He reached up to the console. He pulled with all his strength and got his head onto the seat. He used his neck muscles as well as his aching, feeble arm to lever himself up. He pushed round and swivelled his torso. He gasped as one of his legs caught on the underside of the seat and he almost fell back. At last, though, he was in the seat.
He looked out over the massed controls, through the armoured glass and into the broad tunnel beyond the train’s sloped nose; lights edged the black walls; steel rails snaked glittering into the distance.
Quayanorl gazed into that still and silent space and experienced a small, grim feeling of victory; he had just remembered why he’d crawled there.
“Is that it?” Yalson said. They were in the control room, where the station complex’s own functions were monitored. Horza had turned on a few screens, checking figures, and now sat at a console, using the station’s remote-control cameras to take a final look at the corridors and rooms, the tunnels and shafts and caverns. Balveda was perched on another huge seat, swinging her legs, looking like a child in an adult’s chair.
“That’s it,” Horza said. “The station checks out; unless it’s on one of the trains, the Mind isn’t here.” He switched to cameras in the other stations, flicking through in ascending order. He paused at station five, looking down from the cavern roof at the bodies of the four medjel and the wreckage of the Mind’s crude gun carrier, then tried the roof camera in station six…
They haven’t found me yet. I can’t hear them properly. All I can hear is their tiny footsteps. I know they’re here, but I can’t tell what they’re doing. Am I fooling them? I detected a mass sensor, but its signal vanished. There is another. They have it here with them but it can’t be working properly; maybe fooled as I hoped, the train saving me. How ironic.
They may have captured an Idiran. I heard another rhythm in their step. All walking, or some with AG? How did they get in here? Could they be the Changers from the surface?
I would give half my memory capacity for another remote drone. I’m hidden but I’m trapped. I can’t see and I can’t hear properly. All I can do is feel. I hate it. I wish I knew what is going on.
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 grey 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 metres 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 grey 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.