Before going round the corner he detached the suit's remote sensor from the side of the helmet and edged its small lens round the corner of sculpted rock. On an internal screen he saw the short length of tunnel, the flyer lying on the ground, and a few metres beyond it the wall of plastic planking which filled the tunnel and showed where the human accommodation section of the Changer base began.
By the side of the small flyer lay four bodies.
There was no movement.
Horza felt his throat closing up. He swallowed hard, then put the remote sensor back on the side of the helmet. He walked along the floor of fused rock to the bodies.
Two were dressed in light, unarmoured suits. They were both men, and he didn't recognise them. One of them had been lasered, the suit flash-burned open so that the melted metals and plastics had mingled with the guts and flesh inside; the hole was half a metre in diameter. The other suited man had no head. His arms were stuck out stiffly in front of him as though to embrace something.
There was another man, dressed in light, loose clothes. His skull had been smashed in from behind, and at least one arm was broken. He lay on his side, as frozen and dead as the other two. Horza was aware that he knew the man's name but he couldn't think of it just then.
Kierachell must have been asleep. Her slim body was lying straight, inside a blue nightgown; her eyes were closed, her face peaceful.
Her neck had been broken.
Horza looked down at her for a while, then took one of his gloves off and bent down. There was frost on her eyelashes. He was aware of the wrist seal inside the suit gripping his forearm tightly, and of the thin cold air his hand was exposed to.
Her skin was hard. Her hair was still soft, and he let it run through his fingers. It was more red than he remembered, but that might just have been the effect of the helmet visor as it intensified the poor light of the darkened tunnel. Perhaps he should take his helmet off, too, to see her better, and use the helmet lights…
He shook his head, turning away.
He opened the door to the accommodation section — carefully, after listening for any noise coming through the wall.
In the open, vaulted area where the Changers had kept their outdoor clothes and suits and some smaller pieces of equipment, there was little to show that the place had been taken over. Further through the accommodation unit, he found traces of a fight: dried blood; laser burns; in the control room, where the base's systems were monitored, there had been an explosion. It looked like a small grenade had gone off under the control panel. That accounted for the lack of heating, and the emergency light. It looked as though somebody had been trying to repair the damage, judging by some tools, spare pieces of equipment and wiring lying around.
In a couple of the cabins he found traces of Idiran occupation. The rooms had been stripped bare; religious symbols were burned onto the walls. In another room the floor had been covered with some sort of soft, deep covering like dry gelatin. There were six long indentations in the material, and the room smelt of medjel. In Kierachell's room, only the bed was untidy. It had changed little otherwise.
He left it and went to the far end of the accommodation unit, where another wall of plastic boards marked the beginning of the tunnels. He opened the door cautiously.
A dead medjel lay just outside, its long body seemingly pointing the way down the tunnel to the waiting shafts. Horza looked at it for a while, monitored its body for a moment (dead still, frozen), then prodded it and finally shot it once through the head, just to be sure. It was in standard fleet-ground-force uniform, and it had been wounded some time ago, badly. It looked like it had suffered from frostbite earlier, too, before it had died of its wounds and frozen. It was a male, grizzled, its green-brown skin leathery with age, its long muzzle-face and small delicate-looking hands deeply lined.
He looked down the dark tunnel.
Smooth fused floor, smooth arched walls, the tunnel went on into the mountain side. Blast doors made ribs along the tunnel sides, their tracks and slots carved across the floor and roof. He could see the elevator-shaft doors, and the boarding point for the service-tube capsules. He walked along, past the sets of ancient blast door6, until he came to the access shafts. The elevators were all at the bottom; the transit tube was locked shut. No power seemed to be running through any of the systems. He turned and walked back to the accommodation section, through it and past the bodies and the flyer without giving them a glance, and eventually out into the open air.
He sat down at the side of the tunnel entrance, in the snow, his back to the rock. They saw him from the
'No,' he said, turning the laser rifle off. 'No, I'm not.'
'What's wrong?' Yalson said quickly. Horza took the suit helmet off, putting it down on the snow beside him. The cold air sucked heat from his face, and he had to breathe hard in the thin atmosphere.
'There is death here,' he said to the cloudless sky.
10. The Command System: Batholith
'It's called a batholith: a granitic intrusion which rose up like a molten bubble into the sedimentary and metamorphic rocks already here a hundred million years ago.
'Eleven thousand years ago the locals built the Command System in it, hoping to use the rock cover as protection from fusion warheads.
'They built nine stations and eight trains. The idea was that the politicos and military chiefs sat in one train, their seconds-in-command and deputies in another, and during a war all eight trains would be shuffled around the tunnels, halting in a station to be linked via hardened communication channels to the transceiver sites on the immediate surface and throughout the state, so they could run the war. The enemy would have a hard time cracking the granite that deep anyway, but hitting something as relatively small as a station would be even more difficult, and they never could be sure there would be a train in it, or that it would be manned, and on top of that they had to knock out the back-up train as well as the main one.
'Germ warfare killed them all off, and some time between then and ten thousand years ago the Dra'Azon moved in, pumping the air out of the tunnels and replacing it with inert gas. Seven thousand years ago a new ice age started, and about four thousand years after that the place got so cold Mr Adequate pumped the argon out and let the planet's own atmosphere back in; it's so desiccated, nothing's rusted in the tunnels for three millennia.
'About three and a half thousand years ago the Dra'Azon came to an agreement with most of the rival Galactic Federations which allowed ships in distress to cross the Quiet Barriers. Politically neutral, relatively powerless species were permitted to set up small bases on most of the Planets of the Dead to provide help for those in distress and — I suppose — to provide a sop to the people who had always wanted to know what the planets were like; certainly on Schar's World, Mr Adequate let us take a good look at the System every year, and turned a blind eye when we went down unofficially. However nobody's ever taken unscrambled recordings of any sort out of the tunnels.
'The entrance we're at is here: at the base of the peninsula, above station four, one of the three main stations — the others are one and seven — where repair and maintenance facilities exist. There are no trains parked in four, three or five. There are two trains in station one, two in seven, one train each in the rest. At least that's where they ought to be; the Idirans may have moved them, though I doubt it.
'The stations are twenty-five to thirty-five kilometres apart, linked by twin sets of tunnels which only join up at each of the stations. The whole System is buried about five kilometres down.
'We'll take lasers… and a neural stunner, plus chaff grenades for protection — nothing heavier. Neisin can take his projectile rifle; the bullets he has are only light explosive… But no plasma cannons or micronukes. They'd be dangerous enough in the tunnels anyway, God knows, but they might also bring down Mr Adequate's wrath, and we
'Wubslin's rigged up our ship mass anomaly sensor into a portable set, so we can spot the Mind. In addition, I've got a mass sensor in my suit, so we shouldn't have any problem actually finding what we're after, even if it's hidden itself-'
'Assuming the Idirans don't have their own communicators, they'll be using the Changers'. Our transceivers
