There are more on the train. Three, I think. Walking from the rear. Now what?
Xoxarle breathed in, breathed out. He flexed his muscles, and the wires slipped over his keratin plates. He stopped, when the old man wandered over to look at him.
“You are Aviger, aren’t you?”
“That’s what they call me,” the old man said. He stood looking at the Idiran, gazing from Xoxarle’s three feet with their three slab toes and round ankle collars, over his padded-looking knees, the massive girdle of pelvic plates and the flat chest, up to the section leader’s great saddle-head, the broad face tipped and looking down at the human beneath.
“Frightened I’ll escape?” Xoxarle rumbled.
Aviger shrugged and gripped his gun a little tighter. “What do I care?” he said. “I’m a prisoner, too. That madman’s got us all trapped down here. I just want to go back. This isn’t my war.”
“A very sensible attitude,” Xoxarle said. “I wish more humans would realise what is and what is not theirs. Especially regarding wars.”
“Huh, I don’t suppose your lot are any better.”
“Let us say different, then.”
“Say what you like.” Aviger looked over the Idiran’s body again, addressing Xoxarle’s chest. “I just wish everybody would mind their own business. I see no change, though; it’ll all end in tears.”
“I don’t think you really belong here, Aviger.” Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly.
Aviger shrugged, and did not raise his eyes. “I don’t think any of us do.”
“The brave belong where they decide.” Some harshness entered the Idiran’s voice.
Aviger looked at the broad, dark face above him. “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” He turned away and walked back towards the pallet. Xoxarle watched, and vibrated his chest quickly, tensing his muscles, then releasing. The wires on him slipped a little further. Behind his back, he felt the bonds around one wrist slacken fractionally.
The train gathered speed. The controls and screens looked dim to him, so he watched the lights on the tunnel walls outside. They had slid by gently at first, passing the side windows of the broad control deck more slowly than the quiet tide of his breathing.
Now there were two or three lights running by for each time he breathed. The train was pushing him gently in the back, drawing him towards the rear of the seat and anchoring him there. Blood — a little of it, not much — had dried under him, sticking him there. His course, he felt, was set. There was only one thing left to do. He searched the console, cursing the darkness gathering behind his eye.
Before he found the circuit breaker on the collision brake, he found the lights. It was like a little present from God; the tunnel ahead flashed with bright reflections as the train’s nose headlights clicked on. The double set of rails glinted, and in the distance he could see more shadows and reflections in the tunnel walls, where access tubes slanted in from the foot tunnels, and blast doors ribbed the black rock walls.
His sight was still going, but he felt a little better for being able to see outside. At first he worried, in a distant, theoretical way, that the lights might give too much warning, should he be lucky enough to catch the humans still in the station. But it made little difference. The air pushed in front of the train would warn them soon enough. He raised a panel near the power-control lever and peered at it.
His head was light; he felt very cold. He looked at the circuit breaker and then bent down, jamming himself between the rear of the seat — cracking the blood seal beneath him and starting to bleed again — and the edge of the console. He shoved his face against the edge of the power-control lever, then took his hand away and gripped the collision brake fail-safe. He moved his hand so that it would not slip out, then just lay there.
His one eye was high enough off the console to see the tunnel ahead. The lights were coming faster now. The train rocked gently, lulling him. The roaring was fading from his ears, like the sight dimming, like the station behind slipping away and vanishing, like the seemingly steady, slow-quickening stream of lights flowing by on either side.
He could not estimate how far he had to go. He had started it off; he had done his best. No more — finally — could be asked of him.
He closed his eye, just to rest.
The train rocked him.
“It’s great,” Wubslin grinned when Horza, Yalson and Balveda walked onto the control deck. “It’s all ready to roll. All systems go!”
“Well, don’t wet your pants,” Yalson told him, watching Balveda sit down in a seat, then sitting in another herself. “We might have to use the transit tubes to get around.”
Horza pressed a few buttons, watching the readouts on the train’s systems. It all looked as Wubslin had said: ready to go.
“Where’s that damn drone?” Horza said to Yalson.
“Drone? Unaha-Closp?” Yalson said into her helmet mike.
“What is it now?” Unaha-Closp said.
“Where are you?”
“I’m taking a good look through this antiquated collection of rolling stock. I do believe these trains may actually be older than your ship.”
“Tell it to get back here,” Horza said. He looked at Wubslin. “Did you check this whole train?”
Yalson ordered the drone back as Wubslin nodded and said, “All of it except the reactor car; couldn’t get into bits of it. Which are the door controls?”
Horza looked around for a moment, recalling the layout of the train controls. “That lot.” He pointed at one of the banks of buttons and light panels to one side of Wubslin. The engineer studied them.
Ordered back. Told to return. Like it was a slave, one of the Idirans’ medjel; as though it was a machine. Let them wait a little.
Unaha-Closp had also found the map screens, in the train just down the tunnel. It floated in the air in front of the coloured expanses of back-lit plastic. It used its manipulating fields to work the controls, turning on small sets of lights which indicated the targets on both sides, the major cities and military installations.
All of it dust now, all of their precious humanoid civilisation ground to junk under glaciers or weathered away by wind and spray and rain and frozen in ice — all of it. Only this pathetic maze-tomb left.
So much for their humanity, or whatever they chose to call it, thought Unaha-Closp. Only their machines remained. But would any of the others learn? Would they see this for what it was, this frozen rock-ball? Would they, indeed!
Unaha-Closp left the screens glowing, and floated out of the train, back through the tunnel towards the station itself. The tunnels were bright now, but no warmer, and to Unaha-Closp it seemed as though there was a sort of revealed heartlessness about the harsh yellow-white light which streamed from ceilings and walls; it was operating-theatre light, dissection-table light.
The machine floated through the tunnels, thinking that the cathedral of darkness had become a glazed arena, a crucible.
Xoxarle was on the platform, still trussed against the access ramp girders. Unaha-Closp didn’t like the way the Idiran looked at it when it appeared from the tunnels; it was almost impossible to read the creature’s expression, if he could be said to have one, but there was something about Xoxarle that Unaha-Closp didn’t like. It got the impression the Idiran had just stopped moving, or doing something he didn’t want to be seen doing.
From the tunnel mouth, the drone saw Aviger look up from the pallet where he was sitting, then look away again, without even bothering to wave.
The Changer and the two females were in the train control area with the engineer Wubslin. Unaha-Closp saw them, and went forward to the access ramps and the nearest door. As it got there it paused. Air moved gently; hardly anything, but it was there; it could feel it. Obviously with the power on, some automatic systems were circulating more fresh air from the surface or through atmospheric scrubbing units.