Consider Phlebas

cover their frequencies and more, so we can listen in on them, but they can't hear us.

'So those are the tunnels. That Mind is in there somewhere, and so, presumably, are some Idirans and medjel.'

Horza stood in the mess room at the head of the table, under the screen. On the screen a diagram of the tunnels was superimposed over a map of the peninsula. The others looked at him. The empty semi-suit of the medjel he had found lay in the centre of the table.

'You want to take us all in?' the drone Unaha-Closp said.

'Yes.'

'What about the ship?' Neisin said.

'It can take care of itself. I'll programme its automatics so that it'll recognise us and defend itself against anybody else.'

'And you're going to take her?' Yalson asked, nodding at Balveda, who was sitting opposite her.

Horza looked at the Culture woman. 'I'd prefer to have Balveda where I can see her,' he said. 'I wouldn't feel safe leaving her here with any of you.'

'I still don't see why I have to go,' Unaha-Closp said.

'Because,' Horza told it, 'I don't trust you on board here, either. Besides, I want you to carry stuff.'

'What?' The drone sounded angry.

'I don't know that you're being completely honest here, Horza,' Aviger said, shaking his head ruefully. 'You say that the Idirans and medjel… well, that you're on their side. But here they are, and they've killed four of your own people already, and you think that they're somewhere inside these tunnels, wandering about… And they're supposed to be about the best ground-troops in the galaxy. You want to send us up against them?'

'First of all,' Horza sighed, 'I am on their side. We're after the same thing. Secondly, it looks to me as though they don't have many weapons of their own, otherwise that medjel would certainly have been armed. All they probably have here are the Changers' weapons. Also it looks, from this medjel suit we've got' — he gestured at the webbed apparatus in the middle of the table, which he and Wubslin had been studying since they had brought it on board — 'like a lot of their equipment is blown. Only the lights and the heaters on this thing were working. Everything else had fused. My guess is all that happened when they came through the Quiet Barrier. They were all zapped inside the chuy-hirtsi, and their battle gear was fucked up. If the same thing happened to their weapons as happened to their suits, they're virtually unarmed, and with a lot of problems. With all these fancy new AG harnesses and lasers, we're much better equipped, even in the unlikely event that it does come to a fight.'

'Which is very likely, considering they won't have any communicators left,' Balveda said. 'You'll never get close enough to tell them. And even if you did, how are they supposed to know you're who you say you are? If they're the same lot you think they are, they came in here just after the Mind did; they won't even have heard of you. They certainly won't believe you.' The Culture agent looked round the others. 'Your surrogate captain is leading you to your deaths.'

'Balveda,' Horza said, 'I'm doing you a courtesy letting you in on all this; don't annoy me.'

Balveda arched her eyebrows, staying silent.

'How do we know these are the same lot who got here inside this weird animal anyway?' Neisin said. He looked suspiciously at Horza.

'They can't be anybody else,' Horza said. 'They were damn lucky to survive what the Dra'Azon did to them, and even the Idirans wouldn't risk sending any other forces in after they saw what had happened to this lot.'

'But that means they've been here for months,' Dorolow said. 'How are we supposed to find something if they've been here all this time and haven't found anything?'

'Perhaps they have,' Horza said, spreading his arms wide and smiling at the woman, a trace of sarcasm in his voice; 'but if they haven't, it's very possibly because they won't have any working gear with them. They'd have to search the whole Command System.

'Besides, if that warp animal was as badly damaged as I heard it was, they won't have had much control over it. Very likely they crash-landed hundreds of kilometres away and had to slog here through the snow. In that case they might have only been here for a few days.'

'I can't believe the god would let this happen,' Dorolow said, shaking her head and looking at the surface of the table in front of her. 'There must be something else to all this. I could feel its power and… and goodness when we came through the Barrier. It wouldn't let those poor people just be shot down like that.'

Horza rolled his eyes. 'Dorolow,' he said to her, leaning forward and planting his knuckles on the table top, 'the Dra'Azon are barely aware there's a war going on. They don't really give a damn about individuals. They recognise death and decay, but not hope and faith. As long as the Idirans, or we, don't wreck the Command System or blow the planet away, they won't give a damn who lives or dies.'

Dorolow sat back, silent but unconvinced. Horza straightened. His words sounded fine; he had the impression the mercenaries would follow him, but inside, deeper than where the words were coming from, he felt no more caring, no more alive than the snow-covered plain outside.

He, Wubslin and Neisin had gone back into the tunnels. They had investigated the accommodation section, and found more evidence of Idiran habitation. It looked as though a very small force — one or two Idirans and maybe half a dozen medjel — had stayed for a while at the Changer base after they had taken it over.

They had apparently taken a lot of freeze-dried emergency food supplies with them, the two laser rifles and the few small pistols the Changer base was allowed, and the four portable communication sets from the store room.

Horza had covered the dead Changers up with the reflector foil they had found in the base, and removed the semi-suit from the dead medjel. They had looked at the flyer, to see if it was serviceable. It wasn't; its micropile had been partially removed and badly damaged in the process. Like almost everything else in the base, it was without power. Back on board the Clear Air Turbulence, Horza and Wubslin had dissected the medjel's suit and discovered the subtle but irreparable damage which had been inflicted on it.

All the time, whenever Horza wasn't worrying about what their chances and their choices were, each moment he stopped concentrating on what he was looking at or supposed to be thinking about, he saw a hard and frozen face, at right angles to the body it was attached to, with frost on the eyelashes.

He tried not to think about her. There was no point; nothing he could do. He had to go on, he had to see this through, even more so now.

He had thought for a long time about what he could do with the rest of the people on the Clear Air Turbulence, and decided he had no real choice but to take them all into the Command System with him.

Balveda was one problem; he wouldn't feel safe even leaving the whole crew to guard her, and he wanted the best fighters along with him, not stuck on the ship. He could have got round this problem just by killing the Culture agent, but the others had got too used to her, had come to like her just a little too much. If he killed her, he would lose them.

'Well, I think it's insanity to go down into those tunnels,' Unaha-Closp said. 'Why not just wait up here until the Idirans reappear, with or without this precious Mind?'

'First of all,' Horza said, watching the expressions on the others' faces for any sign of agreement with the drone, 'if they don't find it they probably won't reappear; these are Idirans, and a carefully chosen crack squad of them at that. They'll stay down there for ever.' He looked at the tunnel system drawn on the screen, then back at the people and the machine around the table. 'They could search for a thousand years in there, especially if the power's off and they don't know how to bring it back up, which I'm assuming they don't.'

'And you do, of course,' the machine said.

'Yes,' Horza said, 'I do. We can turn the power on at one of three stations: this one, number seven or number one.'

'It still works?' Wubslin looked sceptical.

'Well, it was working when I left. Deep geothermal, producing electricity. The power shafts are sunk about a hundred kilometres through the crust.

'Anyway, as I say, there's too much space down there for those Idirans and medjel to have a hope of