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 behaviour was for humans.
It started off along the crawlway, heading towards 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 civilisation.
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-ageing 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 day-dream. 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 metre 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 tonnes 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 armoured 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.”
“I’ll take a communicator; I’ll check in,” Horza said. He stood with his arms crossed, his backside resting on the edge of a control panel; the same one Wubslin’s helmet lay on. The engineer was familiarising himself with the controls of the train. They were pretty simple really.
“It’s basic, Horza,” Yalson told him; “you never go alone. What stuff did they teach you at this goddamned Academy?”
“If I’m allowed to say anything,” Balveda put in, clasping her hands in front of her and looking at the Changer, “I would just like to say I think Yalson’s right.”
Horza stared at the Culture woman with a look of unhappy amazement. “No, you are not allowed to say anything,” he told her. “Whose side do you think you’re on, Perosteck?”
“Oh, Horza,” Balveda grinned, crossing her arms, “I almost feel like one of the team after all this time.”
About half a metre away from the gently rocking, slowly cooling head of Subordinate-Captain Quayanorl Gidborux Stoghrle III, a small light began to flash very rapidly on the console. At the same time, the air in the control deck was pierced by a high-pitched ululating whine which filled the deck and the whole front carriage and was relayed to several other control centres throughout the speeding train. Quayanorl, his firmly wedged body tugged to one side by the force of the train roaring round a long curve, could have heard that noise, just, if he had been alive. Very few humans could have heard it.