Consider Phlebas (56 page)

But wouldn’t there be a visual warning, too?

Balveda turned at the side window, without looking out properly. She sat against the console there, looking back.

‘ . . . on how serious you still are about looking for this damn thing,’ Yalson was saying to Horza.

‘Don’t worry,’ the Changer said, nodding at Yalson, ‘I’ll find it.’

Balveda turned round, looked at the station outside.

Just then, Yalson and Wubslin’s helmets both came alive with the urgent voice of the drone. Balveda was distracted by a piece of black material, which was sliding quickly along the floor of the station. Her eyes widened. Her mouth opened.

The gale became a hurricane. A distant noise, like a great avalanche heard from far away, came from the tunnel mouth.

Then, up the long final straight which led into station seven from station six, light appeared at the end of the tunnel.

Xoxarle could not see the light, but he could hear the noise; he brought the gun up and aimed along the side of the stationary train. The stupid humans must realise soon.

The steel rails began to whine.

The drone backed quickly out of the conduit. It threw the cut, discarded lengths of cable against the walls. ‘Yalson! Horza!’ it shouted at them through its communicator. It dashed along the short length of narrow tunnel. The instant it turned the corner it had hammered in to make passable, it could hear the faint, high, insistent wailing of the alarm. ‘There’s an alarm! I can hear it! What’s happening?’

There, in the crawlway, it could feel and hear the rush of air coursing through and around the train.

‘There’s a gale blowing out there!’ Balveda said quickly, as soon as the drone’s voice stopped. Wubslin lifted his helmet from the console. Where it had lain, a small orange light was flashing. Horza stared at it. Balveda looked up at the platform. Clouds of dust blew along the station floor. Light equipment was being blown off the pallet, opposite the rear access gantry. ‘Horza,’ Balveda said quietly, ‘I can’t see Xoxarle, or Aviger.’

Yalson was on her feet. Horza glanced over at the side window, then back at the light, winking on the console. ‘It’s an alarm!’ the drone’s voice shouted from the two helmets. ‘I can hear it!’

Horza picked up his rifle, grabbed the edge of Yalson’s helmet while she held it and said, ‘It’s a train, drone; that’s the collision alarm. Get off the train now.’ He let go of the helmet, which Yalson quickly shoved over her head and locked. Horza gestured towards the door. ‘Move!’ he said loudly, glancing round at Yalson, Balveda and Wubslin, who was still sitting holding the helmet he had removed from the console.

Balveda headed for the door. Yalson was just behind her. Horza started forward, then turned as he went, looked back at Wubslin, who was setting his helmet down on the floor and turning back to the controls. ‘Wubslin!’ he yelled. ‘Move!’

Balveda and Yalson were running through the carriage. Yalson looked back, hesitated.

‘I’m going to get it moving,’ Wubslin said urgently, not turning to look at Horza. He punched some buttons.

‘Wubslin!’ Horza shouted. ‘Get out, now!’

‘It’s all right, Horza,’ Wubslin said, still flicking buttons and switches, glancing at screens and dials, grimacing when he had to move his injured arm, and still not turning his head. ‘I know what I’m doing. You get off. I’ll get her moving; you’ll see.’

Horza glanced towards the rear of the train. Yalson was standing in the middle of the forward carriage, just visible through two open doors, her head going from side to side as she looked first at the still running Balveda heading for the second carriage and the access ramps, and then at Horza, waiting in the control deck. Horza motioned her to get out. He turned and strode forward and took Wubslin by one elbow. ‘You crazy bastard!’ he shouted. ‘It could be coming at fifty metres a second; have you any idea how long it takes to get one of these things moving?’ He hauled at the engineer’s arm. Wubslin turned quickly and hit Horza across the face with his free hand. Horza was thrown back over the floor of the control deck, more amazed than hurt. Wubslin turned back to the controls.

‘Sorry, Horza, but I can get it round that bend and out of the way. You get out now. Leave me.’

Horza took his laser rifle, stood up, watched the engineer working at the controls, then turned and ran from the place. As he did so, the train lurched, seeming to flex and tighten.

Yalson followed the Culture woman. Horza had waved at her to go on, so she did. ‘Balveda!’ she shouted. ‘Emergency exits; go down; bottom deck!’

The Culture agent didn’t hear. She was still heading for the next carriage and the access ramps. Yalson ran after her, cursing.

The drone exploded out of the floor and raced through the carriage for the nearest emergency hatch.

That vibration! It’s a train! Another train’s coming, fast! What have those idiots done? I have to get out!

Balveda skidded round a corner, threw out one hand and caught hold of a bulkhead edge; she dived for the open door which led to the middle access ramp. Yalson’s footsteps pounded behind her.

She ran out onto the ramp, into a howling gale, a constant, gustless hurricane. Instantly the air around her detonated with cracks and sparks; light glared from all sides, and the girders blew out in molten lines. She threw herself flat, sliding and rolling along the surface of the ramp. The girders ahead of her, where the ramp turned and sloped down to one side, glittered with laser fire. She got half up again and, feet and hands scrabbling for purchase on the ramp, threw herself back into the train fractionally before the moving line of shots blasted into the side of the ramp and the girders and guard rails beyond. Yalson almost tripped over her; Balveda reached up and grabbed the other woman’s arm. ‘Somebody’s firing!’

Yalson went forward to the edge and started firing back.

The train gave a lurch.

The final straight between station six and station seven was over three kilometres long. The time between the point the racing machine’s lights would have become visible from the rear of the train sitting in station seven, and the instant the train flashed out of the dark tunnel into the station itself, occupied less than a minute.

Dead, body shaking and rocking, but still wedged too tightly to be dislodged from the controls, Quayanorl’s cold, closed eye faced a scene through sloped, armoured glass of a night-dark space strung with twin bright lines of almost solid light, and directly in front, rapidly enlarging, a halo of brightness, a glaring ring of luminescence with a grey, metallic core.

Xoxarle cursed. The target had moved quickly, and he’d missed. But they were trapped on the train. He had them. The old human under his knee moaned and tried to move. Xoxarle trod down harder on him and got ready to shoot again. The jetstream of air screamed out of the tunnel and round the rear of the train.

Answering shots splashed randomly around the rear of the station, well away from him. He smiled. Just then, the train moved.

‘Get out!’ Horza said, arriving at the door where the two women were, one firing, one crouched down, risking the occasional look out. The air was whirling into the carriage, shaking and roaring.

‘It must be Xoxarle!’ Yalson shouted above the noise of the storming wind. She leant out and fired. More shots rippled over the access ramp and thudded into the outer hull of the train around the door. Balveda ducked back as hot fragments blew in through the open door. The train seemed to wobble, then move forward, very slowly.

‘What - ?’ Yalson yelled, looking round at Horza as he joined her at the door. He shrugged as he leant out to fire down the platform.

‘Wubslin!’ he shouted. He sent a hail of fire down the length of the station. The train crept forward; already a metre of the access ramp was hidden by the side of the train’s hull near the open door. Something sparkled in the darkness of the distant tunnel, where the wind screamed and the dust blew and a noise like never-ending thunder came.

Horza shook his head. He waved Balveda forward, to the ramp, now with only about half its breadth available from the door. He fired again; Yalson leant out and fired, too. Balveda started forward.

At that moment a hatch blew out, near the middle of the train, and from the same carriage a huge circular plug of train hull fell clanging out - a great flat cork of thick wall tipping down to the station floor. A small dark shape dashed from the broken hatch, and from the great circular hole near by a silver point came, swelling quickly to a fat, bright, reflecting ovoid as the wall section hit the platform, the drone whizzed through the air, and Balveda started forward along the ramp.

‘There it is!’ Yalson screamed.

The Mind was out of the train, starting to turn and race off. Then the flickering laser fire from the far end of the station switched; no longer smashing into the access ramp and girders, it began to scatter flashing explosions of light all over the surface of the silvery ellipsoid. The Mind seemed to stop, hang in the air, shaken by the fusilade of laser shots; then it fell sideways, out over the platform, its smooth surface suddenly starting to ripple and grow dim as it rolled through the rushing air, falling towards the side wall of the station like a crippled airship. Balveda was across the ramp, running down the sloped section, almost at the lower level. ‘Get out!’ Horza yelled, shoving Yalson. The train was away from the ramps now, motors growling but unheard in the raging hurricane which swept through the station. Yalson slapped her wrist, switching on her AG, then leapt out of the door into the gale, still firing.

Horza leant out, having to fire through the girders of the access ramp. He held onto the train with one hand, felt it shaking like a frightened animal. Some of his shots smacked into the access ramp girders, blasting fountains of debris out into the slipstream of air and making him duck back in.

The Mind crunched into the side wall of the station, rolling over to lodge in the angle between the floor and the curved wall, its silver skin quivering, going dull.

Unaha-Closp twisted through the air, avoiding laser shots. Balveda reached the bottom of the ramp and ran across the station floor. The fan of shots from the distant foot tunnel seemed to hesitate between her and the flying figure of Yalson, then swept up to close around the woman in the suit. Yalson fired back, but the shots found her, made her suit sparkle.

Horza threw himself out of the train, falling to the ground from the slowly moving carriage, crashing into the rock floor, winding himself, being bowled over by the tearing blast of air. He ran forward as soon as he could get to his feet, bouncing up from the impact, firing through the hurricane towards the far end of the station. Yalson still flew, moving into the torrent of air and the crackling laser fire.

Light blazed around the rear of the train, now heading at a little over walking speed from the station. The noise of the oncoming train - drowning out every other sound, even explosions and shots, so that everything else seemed to be happening in a shocked silence within that ultimate scream - rose in pitch.

Yalson dropped; her suit was damaged.

Her legs started to work before she hit the ground, and when she did she was running, running for the nearest cover. She ran for the Mind, dull silver by the wall side.

And changed her mind.

She turned, just before she would have been able to dive behind the Mind, and ran on round it, towards the doorways and alcoves of the wall beyond.

Xoxarle’s fire slammed into her again the instant she turned, and this time her suit armour could soak up no more energy; it gave way, the laser fire bursting through like lightning all over the woman’s body, throwing her into the air, blowing her arms out, kicking her legs from under her, jerking her like a doll caught in the fist of an angry child, and throwing a bright crimson cloud from her chest and abdomen.

The train hit.

It flashed into the station on a tide of noise; it roared from the tunnel like a solid metal thunderbolt, seeming to cross the space between the tunnel mouth and the slowly moving train in front in the same instant as it appeared. Xoxarle, closest of them all, caught a fleeting glimpse of the train’s sleek shining nose before that great shovel front slammed into the back of the other train.

He could not have believed there was a sound greater than that the train had made in the tunnel, but the noise of its impact dwarfed even that cacophony. It was a star of sound, a blinding nova where before there had only been a dim glow.

The train hit at over one hundred and ninety kilometres per hour. Wubslin’s train had barely progressed a carriage length into the tunnel and was moving hardly faster than walking speed.

The racing train smashed into the rear coach, lifting and crumpling it in a fraction of a second, crushing it into the tunnel roof, jack-hammering its layers of metal and plastic into a tight wad of wreckage in the same instant as its own nose and front carriage caved in underneath, shattering wheels, snapping rails and bursting the train’s metal skin like shrapnel from some vast grenade.

The train ploughed on: into and under the front train, skidding and crashing to one side as smashed sections of the two trains kicked out to the wall side of the tracks, forcing them both into the main body of the station in a welter of tearing metal and fractured stone, while the carriages bucked, squashed, telescoped and disintegrated all at once.

The whole length of the racing train continued to pour out of the tunnel, coaches flashing by, streaming into the chaos of disintegrating wreckage in front, lifting and crashing and slewing. Flames burst and flickered in the detonating debris; sparks fountained; glass blew spraying out from the breaking windows; flaying ribbons of metal beat at the walls.

Xoxarle ducked in, away from the pulverising sound of it.

Wubslin felt the train hit. It threw him back in the chair. He knew already he had failed; the train, his train, was going too slowly. A great hand from nowhere rammed into his back; his ears popped; the control deck, the carriage, the whole train shook round him, and suddenly, in the midst of it, the rear of the next train, the one in the repair and maintenance cavern, was racing towards him. He felt his train jump the tracks on the curve that might have let him roll to safety. The acceleration went on. He was pinned, helpless. The rear carriage of the other train flashed towards him; he closed his eyes, half a second before he was crushed like an insect inside the wreckage. Horza was curled in a small doorway in the station wall, with no idea how he had got there. He didn’t look, he couldn’t see. He whimpered in a corner while the devastation bellowed in his ears, pelted his back with debris and shook the walls and floor.