Consider Phlebas

the transit tubes were open. They had been closed when Horza inspected the area earlier.

Yalson shouldered her gun and walked down the tunnel towards Horza. 'Well,' she said, 'let's get this op on the road.'

'Yeah,' Neisin said. 'What the hell! These guys aren't so tough after all. That's one down already.'

'Yeah, deep down,' Yalson said.

Horza inspected the damage to his suit while the others came down the tunnel. There was a burn on the right thigh, a millimetre deep and a couple of finger-breadths wide. Save for the unlikely chance of another shot falling on the same place, it hadn't harmed the suit.

'A fine start, if you ask me,' the drone muttered as it started down the tunnels with the others.

Horza went back to the tall, buckled, pitted doors of the lift shaft and looked down. With the magnifier up full he could just make out a tiny sparkling, deep, deep below. The helmet's external mikes picked up a noise, but from so far away and so full of echoes, it sounded like nothing more than the wind starting to moan through a fence.

They clustered in front of the opened doors of an elevator shaft, not the one the medjel had fallen down. The doors were twice the height of anyone of them, dwarfing them all, as though they were children. Horza had opened those doors, taken a good look, floated down on the suit's AG a little way, then come back up. It all looked safe.

'I'll go first,' he told the assembled group. 'If we hit any trouble, let off a couple of chaff grenades and get back up here. We're going to the main system level, about five kilometres down. Once we get through the doors that's us more or less in station four. From there we'll be able to turn on the power, something the Idirans haven't been able to do. After that we'll have transport in the form of transit-tube capsules.'

'What about the trains?' Wubslin asked.

'The transit tubes are faster,' Horza said. 'We might have to start a train up if we capture the Mind; depends exactly how big it is. Besides, unless they've moved them since I was here, the nearest trains will be at station two or station six, not here. But there is a spiral tunnel at station one we could bring a System train up.'

'What about the transit tube up here?' Yalson said. 'If that's the way that medjel suddenly appeared, what's to stop another one hiking up the tunnel?'

Horza shrugged. 'Nothing. I don't want to fuse the doors closed in case we want to come back that way once we have the Mind, but if one of them does come up that way, so what? It'll be one less down there for us to worry about. Anyway, somebody can stay up here until we're all safely down the lift shaft, then follow us. But I don't think there will be another one so close behind that one.'

'Yes, that one you didn't manage to talk into believing you were both on the same side,' the drone said testily.

Horza squatted down on his haunches to look at the drone; it was invisible from above because of the pellet of equipment it was carrying.

'That one,' he said, 'didn't have a communicator, did it? Whereas any Idirans down there certainly will have the ones they took from the base, won't they? And medjel do as Idirans tell them to, right?' He waited for the machine to reply and when it didn't he repeated, 'Right?'

Horza had the impression that, had the drone been human, it would have spat.

'Whatever you say, sir,' the drone said.

'And what do I do, Horza?' Balveda said, standing in her fabric jumpsuit, wearing a fur jacket on top. 'Do you intend to throw me down the shaft and say you forgot I didn't have any AG, or do I have to walk down the transit tunnel?'

'You'll come with me.'

'And if we hit trouble, you'll… what?' Balveda asked.

'I don't think we'll hit any trouble,' Horza said.

'You're sure there were no AG harnesses in the base?' Aviger said.

Horza nodded. 'If there had been, don't you think one of the medjel we've encountered so far would have had them on?'

'Maybe the Idirans are using them.'

'They're too heavy.'

'They could use two,' Aviger insisted.

'There were no harnesses,' Horza said through his teeth. 'We were never allowed any. We weren't supposed to go into the Command System apart from yearly inspections, when we could power everything up. We did go in; we walked down the spiral to station four, like that medjel must have slogged up, but we weren't supposed to, and we weren't allowed gravity harnesses. They'd have made getting down there too easy.'

'Dammit, let's get down there,' Yalson said impatiently, looking at the others. Aviger shrugged.

'If my AG fails with all this rubbish I'm carrying-' the drone began, its voice muffled by the pallet over its top surface.

'You drop any of that stuff down that shaft and you'd be as well to follow it, machine,' Horza said. 'Now just save your energy for floating, not talking. You'll follow me; keep five or six hundred metres up. Yalson, will you stay up here till we get the doors open?' Yalson nodded. 'The rest of you,' he looked round them, 'come after the drone. Don't bunch up too much but don't get separated. Wubslin, stay at the same level as the machine, and have chaff grenades ready.' Horza held his hand out to Balveda. 'Madam?'

He held Balveda to him; she rested her feet on his boots, facing away from him; then Horza stepped into the shaft, and they descended together into the night-dark depths.

'See you at the bottom,' Neisin said in the helmet speakers.

'We're not going to the bottom, Neisin,' Horza sighed, shifting his arm slightly round Balveda's waist. 'We're going to the main system level. I'll see you there.'

'Yeah, OK; wherever.'

They fell on AG without incident, and Horza forced open the doors at the system level five kilometres below in the rock.

There had been only one exchange with Balveda on the way down, a minute or so after they had started out:

'Horza?'

'What?'

'If any shooting starts… from down there, or anything happens and you have to let go… I mean, drop me…'

'What, Balveda?'

'Kill me. I'm serious. Shoot me; I'd rather that than fall all that way.'

'Nothing,' Horza said after a moment's thought, 'would give me greater pleasure.'

They dropped into the chill stone silence of the tunnel's black throat, clasped like lovers.

'Goddamn it,' Horza said softly.

He and Wubslin stood in a room just off the dark, echoing vault that was station four. The others were waiting outside. The lights on Horza and Wubslin's suits illuminated a space packed with electric switching gear; the walls were covered with screens and controls. Thick cables snaked over the ceiling and along the walls, and metal floor-plates covered conduits filled with more electrical equipment.

There was a smell of burning in the room. A long black sooty scar had printed itself onto one wall, above charred and melted cabling.

They had noticed the smell on their walk through the connecting tunnels from the shaft to the station. Horza had smelt it and felt gall rise in his throat; the odour was faint and could not have turned the most sensitive of stomachs, but Horza had known what it meant.

'Think we can mend it?' Wubslin asked. Horza shook his head.

'Probably not. This happened once on a yearly test when I was here before. We powered up in the wrong sequence and blew that same cable-run; if they've done what we did there'll be worse damage further down, in the deeper levels. Took us weeks to repair it.' Horza shook his head. 'Damn,' he said.