Consider Phlebas

by Iain M. Banks

  Dorolow’s suit was blown tumbling and burning across the black floor of the station. Wubslin’s gun arm was hit. Then Yalson’s shots found the Idiran, scattering fire across his suit, the structure of the gantry and the side of the train. The ramp supports gave way before the Idiran’s armoured suit; softening and disintegrating under the stream of fire, the gantry tubing sagged and collapsed, sending the top platform of the ramp crashing down, trapping the Idiran warrior underneath the smoking wreckage. Wubslin cursed and shot one-handed at the nose of the train, where the second Idiran was still firing.

  Horza lay against the wall, his ears roaring, his skin cold and sweat-slicked. He felt numb, dissociated. He wanted to take his helmet off and gasp at some fresh air but knew he shouldn’t. Even though the helmet was damaged it would still protect him if he was shot again. He compromised by opening the visor. Sound assaulted his ears. Shockwaves thrummed at his chest. Yalson looked back at him, motioned him further back down the tunnel as shots smacked into the floor near him. He stood, but fell, blacking out briefly.

  The Idiran at the front of the train stopped firing for a moment, Yalson took the opportunity to look back at Horza again. He lay on the tunnel floor behind her, moving weakly. She looked out to where Dorolow lay, her suit ripped and smouldering. Neisin was almost out of his tunnel, firing long bursts down the station, scattering explosions all over the nose of the train. The air boomed with the rasping noise of his gun, ebbing and flowing through the cavern and accompanied by a pulsing wave of light that seemed to reach back from where the bullets struck and detonated.

  Yalson was aware of somebody shouting – a woman’s voice, yelling – but she could hardly hear over the noise of Neisin’s gun. Plasma bolts came singing down the platform from the front of the train again, from high up, near the forward access ramps. She returned fire. Neisin poured shots in the same direction, paused.

  ‘—in! Stop!’ the voice shouted in Yalson’s ears. It was Balveda, ‘There’s something wrong with your gun; it’ll—’ The Culture agent’s voice was drowned by the noise of Neisin firing again. ‘—crash!’ Yalson heard Balveda scream despairingly; then a line of light and sound seemed to fill the station from one end to the other, ending at Neisin. The bright stalk of noise and flame blossomed into an explosion Yalson felt through her suit. Bits of Neisin’s gun were scattered across the platform; the man was thrown back against the wall. He fell to the ground and lay still.

  ‘Motherfucker,’ Yalson heard herself say, and she started running up the platform, enfilading the front of the train, trying to widen the angle of fire. Shots dipped to meet her, then cut out. There was a pause, while she still ran and fired, then the second Idiran appeared on the top level of the distant access ramp, holding a pistol in both hands. He ignored both her and Wubslin’s fire and shot straight across the breadth of the cavern, at the Mind.

  The silvery ellipsoid started to move, heading for the far foot tunnel. The first shot seemed to go right through it, as did a second; a third bolt made it vanish completely, leaving only a tiny puff of smoke where it had been.

  The Idiran’s suit glittered as Yalson and Wubslin’s shots struck home. The warrior staggered; he turned as though to start firing down at them again, just as the armoured suit gave way; he was blown back and across the gantry, one arm disappearing in a cloud of flame and smoke; he fell over the edge of the ramp and crashed down to the middle level, the suit burning brightly, one leg snagging over the guard rails on the middle ramp. The plasma pistol was blown from his hand. Other shots tore at the wide helm, fracturing the blackened visor. He hung, limp and burning and pummelled with laser fire, for a few more seconds; then the leg caught on the guard rail gave way, snapping cleanly off and falling to the station floor. The Idiran slid, crumpling, to the deck of the ramp.

  Horza listened, his ears still ringing.

  After a while it was quiet. Acrid smoke stung his nose: fumes of burned plastic, molten metal, roasted meat.

  He had been unconscious, then woken to see Yalson running up the platform. He had tried to give her covering fire, but his hands shook too much, and he hadn’t been able to get the gun to work. Now everybody had stopped firing, and it was very quiet. He got up and walked unsteadily into the station, where smoke rose from the battered train.

  Wubslin knelt by Dorolow’s side, trying with one hand to undo one of the woman’s gloves. Her suit still smouldered. The helmet visor was smeared red, covered with blood on the inside, hiding her face.

  Horza watched Yalson come back down the station, gun still at the ready. Her suit had taken a couple of plasma bolts to the body; the roughly spiralled marks showed as black scars on the grey surface. She looked up suspiciously at the rear access ramps, where one Idiran lay trapped and unmoving; then she opened her visor. ‘You all right?’ she asked Horza.

  ‘Yes. Bit groggy. Sore head,’ he said. Yalson nodded; they went over to where Neisin lay.

  Neisin was still just alive. His gun had exploded, riddling his chest, arms and face with shrapnel. Moans bubbled from the crimson ruin of his face. ‘Fucking hell,’ Yalson said. She took a small medipack from her suit and reached through what was left of Neisin’s visor to inject the semi-conscious man’s neck with painkiller.

  ‘What’s happened?’ Aviger’s tiny voice came from Yalson’s helmet. ‘Is it safe yet?’ Yalson looked at Horza, who shrugged, then nodded.

  ‘Yeah, it’s safe, Aviger,’ Yalson said. ‘You can come in.’

  ‘I let Balveda use my suit mike; she said she—’

  ‘We heard,’ Yalson said.

  ‘Something about a . . . “barrelcrash”? That right . . . ?’ Horza heard Balveda’s muffled voice affirming this. ‘. . . She thought Neisin’s gun might blow up, or something.’

  ‘Well, it did,’ Yalson said. ‘He looks pretty bad.’ She glanced over at Wubslin, who was putting Dorolow’s hand back down. Wubslin shook his head when he saw Yalson looking at him. ‘. . . Dorolow got blown away, Aviger,’ Yalson said. The old man was silent for a moment, then said:

  ‘And Horza?’

  ‘Took a plasma round on the head-box. Suit damage; no communication. He’ll live,’ Yalson paused, sighed. ‘Looks like we lost the Mind, though; it disappeared.’

  Aviger waited another few moments before saying, his voice shaking, ‘Well, a fine little mess. Easy in, easy out. Another triumph. Our Changer friend taking over where Kraiklyn left off!’ His voice finished on a high pitch of anger; he switched his transceiver off.

  Yalson looked at Horza, shook her head and said, ‘Old asshole.’

  Wubslin still knelt over Dorolow’s body. They heard him sob a couple of times, before he, too, cut out of the open channel. Neisin’s slowing breath spluttered through a mask of blood and flesh.

  Yalson made the Circle of Flame sign over the red haze masking Dorolow’s face, then covered the body with a sheet from the pallet. Horza’s ears stopped ringing, the grogginess cleared. Balveda, freed from the restrainer harness, watched the Changer tend to Neisin. Aviger stood near by with Wubslin, whose arm wound had already been treated. ‘I heard the noise,’ Balveda explained. ‘. . . It has a distinctive noise.’

  Wubslin had asked why Neisin’s gun had exploded, and how Balveda had known it was going to happen.

  ‘I’d have recognised it, too, if I hadn’t been smacked on the head,’ Horza said. He was teasing fragments of visor out of the unconscious man’s face, spraying skin-gel onto the places where blood oozed. Neisin was in shock, probably dying, but they couldn’t even take him out of his suit; too much blood had clotted between the man’s body and the materials of the device he wore. It would plug the many small punctures effectively enough until the suit was removed, but then Neisin would start to bleed in too many places for them to cope with. So they had to leave him in the thing, as though in that mutual wreckage the human and machine had become one fragile organism.

  ‘But what happened?’ Wubslin said.

  ‘His gun barrelcrashed,’
Horza said. ‘The projectiles must have been set to explode on too soft an impact, so the shells started to detonate when they hit the blast wave from the bullets in front, not the target. He didn’t stop firing, so the blast front retarded right back into the muzzle of the gun.’

  ‘The guns have sensors to stop it happening,’ Balveda added, wincing with vicarious pain as Horza drew a long sliver of visor from an eye socket. ‘I guess his wasn’t working.’

  ‘Told him that gun was too damn cheap when he bought it,’ Yalson said, coming over to stand by Horza.

  ‘Poor little bugger,’ Wubslin said.

  ‘Two more dead,’ Aviger announced. ‘I hope you’re happy, Mr Horza. I hope you’re so pleased about what your “allies” have—’

  ‘Aviger,’ Yalson said calmly, ‘shut up.’ The old man glared at her for a second, then stamped off. He stood looking down at Dorolow.

  Unaha-Closp floated down from the rear access ramp. ‘That Idiran up there,’ it said, its voice pitched to betray mild surprise; ‘he’s alive. Couple of tons of junk on top of him, but he’s still breathing.’

  ‘What about the other one?’ Horza said.

  ‘No idea. I didn’t like to go too close; it’s terribly messy up there.’

  Horza left Yalson to look after Neisin. He walked over the debris-strewn platform to the wreckage of the rear access gantry.

  He was bare-headed. The suit’s helmet was ruined, and the suit itself had lost its AG and motor power, as well as most of its senses. On back-up energy, the lights still worked, as did the small repeater screen set into one wrist. The suit’s mass sensor was damaged; the wrist screen filled with clutter when linked to the sensor, barely registering the train’s reactor at all.

  His rifle was still working, for whatever that was worth now.

  He stood at the bottom of the ramps and felt the dregs of heat seeping from the metal support legs, where laser fire had struck. He took a deep breath and climbed up the ramp to where the Idiran lay, his massive head sticking out of the wreckage, sandwiched between the two levels of ramp. The Idiran turned slowly to look at him, and one arm tensed against the wreckage, which creaked and moved. Then the warrior brought his arm out from beneath the press of metal and unfastened the scarred battle-helm; he let it fall to the floor. The great saddle-face looked up at the Changer.

  ‘The greetings of the battle-day,’ Horza said in careful Idiran.

  ‘Ho,’ boomed the Idiran, ‘the little one speaks our tongue.’

  ‘I’m even on your side, though I don’t expect you to believe it. I belong to the intelligence section of the First Marine Dominate under the Querl Xoralundra.’ Horza sat down on the ramp, almost level with the Idiran’s face. ‘I was sent in here to try to get the Mind,’ he continued.

  ‘Really?’ the Idiran said. ‘Pity; I believe my comrade just destroyed it.’

  ‘So I hear,’ Horza said, levelling the laser rifle at the big face viced between the twisted metal planking. ‘You also “destroyed” the Changers back up at the base. I am a Changer; that’s why our mutual masters sent me in here. Why did you have to kill my people?’

  ‘What else could we do, human?’ the Idiran said impatiently. ‘They were an obstacle. We needed their weaponry. They would have tried to stop us. We were too few to guard them.’ The creature’s voice was laboured as it fought the weight of ramp crushing its torso and rib cylinder. Horza aimed the rifle straight at the Idiran’s face.

  ‘You vicious bastard, I ought to blow your fucking head off right now.’

  ‘By all means, midget,’ the Idiran smiled, the double set of hard lips spreading. ‘My comrade has already fallen bravely; Quayanorl has started his long journey through the Upper World. I am captured and victorious at once, and you offer me the solace of the gun. I shall not close my eyes, human.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Horza said, letting the gun down. He looked over, through the darkness of the station, at Dorolow’s body, then into the dim, smoke-hazed light in the distance, where the nose and control deck of the train glowed faintly, illuminating an empty patch of floor where the Mind had been. He turned back to the Idiran. ‘I’m taking you back. I believe there are still units of the Ninety-Third Fleet out beyond the Quiet Barrier; I have to report my failure and deliver a female Culture agent to the Fleet Inquisitor. I’m going to report you for exceeding your orders in killing those Changers; not that I expect it’ll do any good.’

  ‘Your story bores me, little one.’ The Idiran looked away and strained once more at the press of twisted metal covering him, but to no avail. ‘Kill me now; you do smell so, and your speech grates. Ours is not a tongue for animals.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ Horza said. The saddle-head turned to him again; the eyes blinked slowly.

  ‘Xoxarle, human. Now you’ll sully it by trying to pronounce it, no doubt.’

  ‘Well, you just rest there, Xoxarle. Like I said, we’ll take you with us. First I want to check on the Mind you destroyed. A thought has just occurred to me.’ Horza got to his feet. His head hurt abominably where the helmet had slammed into it, but he ignored the pounding in his skull and started back down the ramp, limping a little.

  ‘Your soul is shit,’ the Idiran called Xoxarle boomed after him. ‘Your mother should have been strangled the moment she came on heat. We were going to eat the Changers we killed; but they smelled like filth!’

  ‘Save your breath, Xoxarle,’ Horza said, not looking at the Idiran. ‘I’m not going to shoot you.’

  Horza met Yalson at the bottom of the ramp. The drone had agreed to look after Neisin. Horza looked to the far end of the station. ‘I want to see where the Mind was.’

  ‘What do you think happened to it?’ Yalson asked, falling into step beside him. He shrugged. Yalson went on, ‘Maybe it did the trick it did earlier; went into hyperspace again. Maybe it reappeared somewhere else in the tunnels.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Horza said. He stopped by Wubslin, taking the man’s elbow and turning him round from Dorolow’s body. The engineer had been crying. ‘Wubslin,’ Horza said, ‘guard that bastard. He might try and get you to shoot him, but don’t. That’s what he wants. I’m going to take the son of a bitch back to the fleet so they can courtmartial him. Dirtying his name is a punishment; killing him would be doing him a favour; understand?’

  Wubslin nodded. Still rubbing the bruised side of his head, Horza went off down the platform with Yalson.

  They came to where the Mind had been. Horza turned the lights on his suit up and looked over the floor. He picked up a small, burned-looking thing near the mouth of the foot tunnel leading to station seven.

  ‘What’s that?’ Yalson said, turning away from the body of the Idiran on the other access gantry.

  ‘I think,’ Horza said, turning the still warm machine over in his hand, ‘it’s a remote drone.’

  ‘The Mind left it behind?’ Yalson came over to look at it. It was just a blackened slab of material, some tubes and filaments showing through the lumpy, irregular surface where it had been hit by plasma fire.

  ‘It’s the Mind’s, all right,’ Horza said. He looked at Yalson. ‘What exactly happened when they shot the Mind?’

  ‘When he eventually hit it, it vanished. It had started to move, but it couldn’t have accelerated that fast; I’d have felt the shock wave. It just vanished.’

  ‘It was like somebody turning off a projection?’ Horza said.

  Yalson nodded. ‘Yes. And there was a bit of smoke. Not much. Do you mean to—’

  ‘He got it eventually; what do you mean?’

  ‘I mean,’ Yalson said, putting one hand on her hip and looking at Horza with an impatient expression on her face, ‘that it took three or four shots. The first few went straight through it. Are you saying it was a projection?’

  Horza nodded and held up the machine in his hand. ‘It was this: a remote drone producing a hologram of the Mind. Must have had a weak force field as well so that it could be touched and pushed as though it was a
solid object, but all there was inside was this.’ He smiled faintly at the wrecked machine. ‘No wonder the damn thing didn’t show up on our mass sensors.’

  ‘So the Mind’s still around somewhere?’ Yalson said, looking at the drone in Horza’s hand. The Changer nodded.

  Balveda watched Horza and Yalson walk into the darkness at the far end of the station. She went over to where the drone floated above Neisin, monitoring his vital functions and sorting out some vials of medicine in the medkit. Wubslin kept his gun pointed at the trapped Idiran, but watched Balveda from the corner of his eye at the same time; the Culture woman sat down cross-legged near the stretcher.

  ‘Before you ask,’ the drone said, ‘no, there’s nothing you can do.’

  ‘I had guessed that, Unaha-Closp,’ Balveda said.

  ‘Hmm. Then you have ghoulish tendencies?’

  ‘No, I wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘Really.’ The drone continued to sort the medicines.

  ‘Yes . . .’ She sat forward, elbow on her knee, chin cupped in her hand. She lowered her voice a little. ‘Are you biding your time, or what?’

  The drone turned its front to her; an unnecessary gesture, they both knew, but one it was used to making. ‘Biding my time?’

  ‘You’ve let him use you so far. I just wondered: how much longer?’

  The drone turned away again, hovering over the dying man. ‘Perhaps you hadn’t noticed, Ms Balveda, but my choices in this matter are almost as limited as yours.’

  ‘I’ve only got arms and legs, and I’m locked away at night, trussed up. You’re not.’

  ‘I have to keep watch. He has a movement sensor which he leaves switched on, anyway, so he would know if I tried to escape. And besides, where would I go?’

  ‘The ship,’ Balveda suggested, smiling. She looked back up the dark station, where the lights on their suits showed Yalson and the Changer picking something up from the ground.