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 fire-fight, 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.
13. The Command System: Terminus
“One can read too much into one’s own circumstances. I am reminded of one race who set themselves against us — oh, long ago now, before I was even thought of. Their conceit was that the galaxy belonged to them, and they justified this heresy by a blasphemous belief concerning design. They were aquatic, their brain and major organs housed in a large central pod from which several large arms or tentacles protruded. These tentacles were thick at the body, thin at the tips and lined with suckers. Their water god was supposed to have made the galaxy in their image.
“You see? They thought that because they bore a rough physical resemblance to the great lens that is the home of all of us — even taking the analogy as far as comparing their tentacle suckers to globular clusters — it therefore belonged to them. For all the idiocy of this heathen belief, they had prospered and were powerfuclass="underline" quite respectable adversaries, in fact.”
“Hmm,” Aviger said. Without looking up, he asked, “What were they called?”
“Hmm,” Xoxarle rumbled. “Their name…” The Idiran pondered. “…I believe they were called the… the Fanch.”
“Never heard of them,” Aviger said.
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Xoxarle purred. “We annihilated them.”
Yalson saw Horza staring at something on the floor near the doors leading back to the station. She kept watching Balveda, but said, “What have you found?”
Horza shook his head, reached to pick something from the floor, then stopped. “I think it’s an insect,” he said incredulously.
“Wow,” Yalson said, unimpressed. Balveda moved over to have a look, Yalson’s gun still trained on her. Horza shook his head, watching the insect crawl over the tunnel floor.
“What the hell’s that doing down here?” he said. Yalson frowned when he said that, worried at a note of near panic in the man’s voice.
“Probably brought it down ourselves,” Balveda said, rising. “Hitched a ride on the pallet, or somebody’s suit, I’ll bet.”
Horza brought his fist down on the tiny creature, squashing it, grinding it into the dark rock. Balveda looked surprised. Yalson’s frown deepened. Horza stared at the mark left on the tunnel floor, wiped his glove, then looked up, apologetic.
“Sorry,” he told Balveda, as though embarrassed. “…Couldn’t help thinking about that fly in The Ends of Invention… Turned out to be one of your pets, remember?” He got up and walked quickly into the station. Balveda nodded, looking down at the small stain on the floor.
“Well,” she said, arching one eyebrow, “that was one way of proving its innocence.”
Xoxarle watched the male and the two females come back into the station. “Nothing, little one?” he asked.
“Lots of things, Section Leader,” Horza replied, going up to Xoxarle and checking the wires holding him.
Xoxarle grunted. “They’re still somewhat tight, ally.”
“What a shame,” Horza said. “Try breathing out.”
“Ha!” Xoxarle laughed and thought the man might have guessed. But the human turned away and said to the old man who had been guarding him:
“Aviger, we’re going onto the train. Keep our friend company; try not to fall asleep.”
“Fat chance, with him gibbering all the time,” the old man grumbled.
The other three humans entered the train. Xoxarle went on talking.
In one section of the train there were lit map screens which showed how Schar’s World had looked at the time the Command System had been built, the cities and the states shown on the continents, the targets on one state on one continent, the missile grounds, air bases and naval ports belonging to the System’s designers shown on another state, on another continent.
Two small icecaps were shown, but the rest of the planet was steppe, savannah, desert, forest and jungle. Balveda wanted to stay and look at the maps, but Horza pulled her away and through another door, going forward to the nose of the train. He switched off the lights behind the map screens as he went, and the bright surface of blue oceans, green, yellow, brown and orange land, blue rivers and red cities and communication lines faded slowly into grey darkness.
Oh-oh.