In places the tunnel ran straight. If he turned he could see the main group following half a kilometre behind him. In other places the tunnel described a series of shallow curves, cutting down the view provided by the scanning radar to a couple of hundred metres or less, so that he seemed to float alone in the chill blackness.
At station five they found a battleground.
His suit had picked up odd scents; that had been the first sign, organic molecules in the air, carbonised and burnt. He'd told the others to stop, gone on ahead cautiously.
Four dead medjel were laid out near one wall of the dark, deserted cavern, their burned and dismembered bodies echoing the formation of frozen Changer corpses at the surface base. Idiran religious symbols had been burned onto the wall over the fallen.
There had been a fire-fight. The station walls were pocked with small craters and long laser scars. Horza found the remains of one laser rifle, smashed, a small piece of metal embedded in it. The medjel bodies had been torn apart by hundreds more of the same tiny projectiles.
At the far end of the station, behind the half-demolished remains of one set of access ramps, he found the scattered components of some crudely manufactured machine, a kind of gun on wheels, like a miniature armoured car. Its mangled turret still contained some of the projectile ammunition, and more bullets were scattered like wind-seeds about the flame-seared wreck. Horza smiled slightly at the debris, weighing a handful of the unused projectiles in his hand.
'The Mind?' Wubslin said, looking down at what was left of the small vehicle. 'It made this thing?' He scratched his head.
'Must have,' Horza said, watching Yalson poke warily at the torn metal of the wreck's hull with one booted foot, gun ready. 'There was nothing like this down here, but you could manufacture it, in one of the workshops; a few of the old machines still work. It'd be difficult, but if the Mind still had some of its fields working, and maybe a drone or two, it could do it. It had the time.'
'Pretty crude,' Wubslin said, turning over a piece of the gun mechanism in his hand. He turned and looked back at the distant corpses of the medjel and added, 'Worked well enough, though.'
'No more medjel, by my count,' Horza said.
'Still two Idirans left,' Yalson said sourly, kicking at a small rubber wheel. It rolled a couple of metres across the debris and flopped over again, near Neisin, who was celebrating the discovery of the demised medjel with a drink from his flask.
'You sure these Idirans aren't still here?' Aviger asked, looking round anxiously. Dorolow peered into the darkness, too, and made the sign of the Circle of Flame.
'Positive,' Horza said. 'I checked.' Station five hadn't been difficult to search; it was an ordinary station, just a set of points, a chicane in the Command System's double loop and a place for the trains to stop and connect themselves with the communication links to the planet's surface. There were a few rooms and storage areas off the main cavern, but no power-switching gear, no barracks or control rooms, and no vast repair and maintenance area. Marks in the dust showed where the Idirans had walked away from the station after the battle with the Mind's crude automaton, heading for station six.
'You think there'll be a train at the next station?' Wubslin said.
Horza nodded. 'Should be.' The engineer nodded, too, staring vacantly at the double sets of steel rails gleaming on the station floor.
Balveda swung herself off the pallet, stretching her legs. Horza still had the suit's infra-red sensor on, and saw the warmth of the Culture agent's breath waft from her mouth in a dimly glowing cloud. She clapped her hands and stamped her feet.
'Still not too warm, is it?' she said.
'Don't worry,' grumbled the drone from underneath the pallet. 'I may start to overheat soon; that ought to keep you cosy until I seize up completely.'
Balveda smiled a little and sat back on the pallet, looking at Horza. 'Still thinking of trying to convince your tripedal pals you're all on the same side?' she said.
'Huh!' said the drone.
'We'll see,' was all Horza would say.
Again his breathing, his heartbeat, the slow wash of stale air.
The tunnels led on into the deep night of the ancient rock like an insidious, circular maze.
'The war won't end,' Aviger said. 'It'll just die away.' Horza floated along the tunnel, half listening to the others talk over the open channel as they followed behind him. He'd switched his suit's external mikes from the helmet speakers to a small screen near his cheek; the trace showed silence. Aviger continued, 'I don't think the Culture will give in like everybody thinks it will. I think they'll keep fighting because they believe in it. The Idirans won't give in, either; they'll keep fighting to the last, and they and the Culture will just keep going at each other all the time, all over the galaxy eventually, and their weapons and bombs and rays and things will just keep getting better and better, and in the end the whole galaxy will become a battleground until they've blown up all the stars and planets and Orbitals and everything else big enough to stand on, and then they'll destroy all of each other's big ships and then the little ships, too, until everybody'll be living in single suits, blowing each other up with weapons that could destroy a planet… and that's how it'll end; probably they'll invent guns or drones that are even smaller, and there'll only be a few smaller and smaller machines fighting over whatever's left of the galaxy, and there'll be nobody left to know how it all started in the first place.'
'Well,' said Unaha-Closp's voice, 'that sounds like a lot of fun. And what if things go badly?'
'That's too negative an attitude to battle, Aviger.' Dorolow's high-pitched voice broke in, 'You have to be positive. Contest is formative; battle is a testing, war a part of life and the evolutionary process. In its extremity, we find ourselves.'
'… Usually in the shit,' Yalson said. Horza grinned.
'Yalson,' Dorolow began, 'even if you don't be-'
'Hold it,' Horza said suddenly. The screen near his cheek had flickered. 'Wait there. I'm picking up some sound from ahead.' He stopped, sat still in mid-air and put the sound from outside through the helmet speakers.
A low noise, deep and boomy, like heavy surf from a long way off, or a thunderstorm in distant mountains.
'Well, there's something making a noise up there,' Horza said.
'How far to the next station?' Yalson said.
'About two kilometres.'
'Think it's them?' Neisin sounded nervous.
'Probably,' Horza said. 'OK. I'm going ahead. Yalson, put Balveda in the restrainer harness. Everybody check weapons. No noise. Wubslin, Neisin, go forward slowly. Stop as soon as you can see the station. I'm going to try talking to these guys.'
The noise boomed vaguely on, making him think of a rockslide, heard from a mine deep inside a mountain.
He approached the station. A blast door came into view round a corner. The station would be only another hundred metres beyond. He heard some heavy clunking noises; they came down the dark tunnel, deep and resonant, hardly muffled by the distance, sounding like huge switches being closed, massive chains being fastened. The suit registered organic molecules in the air — Idiran scent. He passed the edge of the blast door and saw the station.
There was light in station six, dim and yellow, as though from a weak torch. He waited for Wubslin and Neisin to tell him they could see the station from their tunnels, then he went closer.
A Command System train stood in station six, its rotund bulk three storeys tall and three hundred metres long, half filling the cylindrical cavern. The light came from the train's far end, high at the front, where the control deck was. The sounds came from the train, too. He moved across the foot tunnel so he could see the rest of the station.
