upset her more. He knew too well the bitterness of defeat to want to aggravate the experience for somebody who was, in the end, a fair and honourable adversary. He went to the door, and after a word with the guard outside he was let out.
'Ah, Bora Horza,' Xoralundra said as the human appeared out of the cell doorway. The Querl came striding along the companionway. The guard outside the cell straightened visibly and blew some imaginary dust off his carbine. 'How is our guest?'
'Not very happy. We were trading justifications and I think I won on points.' Horza grinned. Xoralundra stopped by the man and looked down.
'Hmm. Well, unless you prefer to relish your victories in a vacuum, I suggest that the next time you leave my cabin while we are at battle stations you take your-'
Horza didn't hear the next word. The ship's alarm erupted.
The Idiran alarm signal, on a warship as elsewhere, consists of what sounds like a series of very sharp explosions. It is the amplified version of the Idiran chest-boom, an evolved signal the Idirans had been using to warn others in their herd or clan for several hundred thousand years before they became civilised, and produced by the chest-flap which is the Idiran vestigial third arm.
Horza clapped his hands to his ears, trying to shut out the awful noise. He could feel the shock waves on his chest, through the open neck of the suit. He felt himself being picked up and forced against the bulkhead. It was only then that he realised he had shut his eyes. For a second he thought he had never been rescued, never left the wall of the sewercell, that this was the moment of his death and all the rest had been a strange and vivid dream. He opened his eyes and found himself staring into the keratinous snout of the Querl Xoralundra, who shook him furiously and, just as the ship alarm cut off and was replaced by a merely painfully intense whine, said very loudly into Horza's face, 'HELMET!'
'Oh shit!' said Horza.
He was dropped to the deck as Xoralundra let him go, turned quickly, and scooped a running medjel off the floor as it tried to get past him. 'You!' Xoralundra bellowed. 'I am the spy-father Querl of the fleet,' he shouted into its face and shook the six-limbed creature by the front of its suit. 'You will go to my cabin immediately and bring the small space helmet lying there to the port-side stem emergency lock. As fast as possible. This order supersedes all others and cannot be countermanded. Go!' He threw the medjel in the right direction. It landed running.
Xoralundra flipped his own helmet over from its back-hinged position, then opened the visor. He looked as though he was about to say something to Horza, but the helmet speaker crackled and spoke, and the Querl's expression changed. The small noise stopped and only the continuing wail of the cruiser's alarm was left. 'The Culture craft was hiding in the surface layers of the system sun,' Xoralundra said bitterly, more to himself than to Horza.
'In the
'Yes,' snapped the Querl, then turned quickly on one foot. 'Follow me, human.' Horza obeyed, starting after the old Idiran at a run, then bumping into him as the huge figure stopped in its tracks. Horza watched the broad, dark, alien face as it swivelled round to look over his head at the Idiran trooper still standing stiffly at the cell door. An expression Horza could not read passed over Xoralundra's face. 'Guard,' the Querl said, not loudly. The trooper with the laser carbine turned. 'Kill the woman.'
Xoralundra stamped off down the corridor. Horza stood for a moment, looking first at the rapidly receding Querl, then at the guard as he checked his carbine, ordered the cell door to open, and stepped inside. Then the man ran down the corridor after the old Idiran.
'Querl!' gasped the medjel as it skidded to a stop by the airlock, the suit helmet held in front of it. Xoralundra swept the helmet from its grasp and fitted it quickly over Horza's head.
'You will find a warp attachment in the lock,' the Idiran told Horza. 'Get as far away as possible. The fleet will be here in about nine standard hours. You shouldn't have to do anything; the suit will summon help on a coded IFF response. I, too-' Xoralundra broke off as the cruiser lurched. There was a loud bang and Horza was blown off his feet by a shock wave, while the Idiran on his tripod of legs hardly moved. The medjel which had gone for the helmet yelped as it was blown under Xoralundra's legs. The Idiran swore and kicked at it; it ran off; The cruiser lurched again as other alarms started. Horza could smell burning. A confused medley of noises that might have been Idiran voices or muffled explosions came from somewhere overhead. 'I too shall try to escape,' Xoralundra continued. 'God be with you, human.'
Before Horza could say anything the Idiran had rammed his visor down and pushed him into the lock. It slammed shut. Horza was thrown against one bulkhead as the cruiser juddered mightily. He looked desperately round the small, spherical space for a warp unit, then saw it and after a short struggle unclamped it from its wall magnets. He clamped it to the rear of his suit.
'Ready?' a voice said in his ear.
Horza jumped, then said, 'Yes! Yes! Hit it!'
The airlock didn't open conventionally; it turned inside out and threw him into space, tumbling away from the flat disc of the cruiser in a tiny galaxy of ice particles. He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometres away. That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off… and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.
With one last thought for Balveda, Horza reached until he found the control handle for the bulky warp unit, fingered the correct buttons on it, and watched the stars twist and distort around him as the unit sent him and his suit lancing away from the stricken Idiran spacecraft.
He played with the wrist-set for a while, trying to pick up signals from
He recalled that the Idirans said some sort of prayer to their God before going into warp. Once when he had been with Xoralundra on a ship which was warping, the Querl had insisted that the Changer repeat the prayer, too. Horza had protested that it meant nothing to him; not only did the Idiran God clash with his own personal convictions, the prayer itself was in a dead Idiran language he didn't understand. He had been told rather coldly that it was the gesture that mattered. For what the Idirans regarded as essentially an animal (their word for humanoids was best translated as 'biotomaton'), only the behaviour of devotion was required; his heart and mind were of no consequence. When Horza had asked, what about his immortal soul? Xoralundra had laughed. It was the first and only time Horza had experienced such a thing from the old warrior. Whoever heard of a mortal body having an immortal soul?
When the warp unit was almost exhausted, Horza shut it off. Stars swam into focus around him. He set the unit controls, then threw it away from him. They parted company, he moving slowly off in one direction, while the unit spun off in another; then it disappeared as the controls switched it back on again to use the last of its power leading anybody following its trace away in the wrong direction.
He calmed his breathing down gradually; it had been very fast and hard for a while, but he slowed it and his heart deliberately. He accustomed himself to the suit, testing its functions and powers. It smelled and felt new, and looked like a Rairch-built device. Rairch suits were meant to be among the best. People said the Culture made better ones, but people said the Culture made better everything, and they were still losing the war. Horza checked out the lasers the suit had built in and searched for the concealed pistol he knew it ought to carry. He found it at last, disguised as part of the left forearm casing, a small plasma hand gun. He felt like shooting it at something, but there was nothing to aim at. He put it back.
He folded his arms across his bulky chest and looked around. Stars were everywhere. He had no idea which one was Sorpen's. So the Culture ships could hide in the photospheres of stars, could they? And a Mind — even if it was desperate and on the run — could jump through the bottom of a gravity-well, could it? Maybe the Idirans would have a tougher job than they expected. They were the natural warriors, they had the experience and the guts, and their whole society was geared for continual conflict. But the Culture, that seemingly disunited, anarchic, hedonistic, decadent melange of more or less human species, forever hiving off or absorbing different groups of people, had
