Consider Phlebas

and one arm tensed against the wreckage, which creaked and moved. Then the warrior brought his arm out from beneath the press of metal and unfastened the scarred battle-helm; he let it fall to the floor. The great saddle-face looked up at the Changer.

'The greetings of the battle-day,' Horza said in careful Idiran.

'Ho,' boomed the Idiran, 'the little one speaks our tongue.'

'I'm even on your side, though I don't expect you to believe it. I belong to the intelligence section of the First Marine Dominate under the Querl Xoralundra.' Horza sat down on the ramp, almost level with the Idiran's face. 'I was sent in here to try to get the Mind,' he continued.

'Really?' the Idiran said. 'Pity; I believe my comrade just destroyed it.'

'So I hear,' Horza said, levelling the laser rifle at the big face viced between the twisted metal planking. 'You also «destroyed» the Changers back up at the base. I am a Changer; that's why our mutual masters sent me in here. Why did you have to kill my people?'

'What else could we do, human?' the Idiran said impatiently. 'They were an obstacle. We needed their weaponry. They would have tried to stop us. We were too few to guard them.' The creature's voice was laboured as it fought the weight of ramp crushing its torso and rib cylinder. Horza aimed the rifle straight at the Idiran's face.

'You vicious bastard, I ought to blow your fucking head off right now.'

'By all means, midget,' the Idiran smiled, the double set of hard lips spreading. 'My comrade has already fallen bravely; Quayanorl has started his long journey through the Upper World. I am captured and victorious at once, and you offer me the solace of the gun. I shall not close my eyes, human.'

'You don't have to,' Horza said, letting the gun down. He looked over, through the darkness of the station, at Dorolow's body, then into the dim, smoke-hazed light in the distance, where the nose and control deck of the train glowed faintly, illuminating an empty patch of floor where the Mind had been. He turned back to the Idiran. 'I'm taking you back. I believe there are still units of the Ninety-Third Fleet out beyond the Quiet Barrier; I have to report my failure and deliver a female Culture agent to the Fleet Inquisitor. I'm going to report you for exceeding your orders in killing those Changers; not that I expect it'll do any good.'

'Your story bores me, little one.' The Idiran looked away and strained once more at the press of twisted metal covering him, but to no avail. 'Kill me now; you do smell so, and your speech grates. Ours is not a tongue for animals.'

'What's your name?' Horza said. The saddle-head turned to him again; the eyes blinked slowly.

'Xoxarle, human. Now you'll sully it by trying to pronounce it, no doubt.'

'Well, you just rest there, Xoxarle. Like I said, we'll take you with us. First I want to check on the Mind you destroyed. A thought has just occurred to me.' Horza got to his feet. His head hurt abominably where the helmet had slammed into it, but he ignored the pounding in his skull and started back down the ramp, limping a little.

'Your soul is shit,' the Idiran called Xoxarle boomed after him. 'Your mother should have been strangled the moment she came on heat. We were going to eat the Changers we killed; but they smelled like filth!'

'Save your breath, Xoxarle,' Horza said, not looking at the Idiran. 'I'm not going to shoot you.'

Horza met Yalson at the bottom of the ramp. The drone had agreed to look after Neisin. Horza looked to the far end of the station. 'I want to see where the Mind was.'

'What do you think happened to it?' Yalson asked, falling into step beside him. He shrugged. Yalson went on, 'Maybe it did the trick it did earlier; went into hyperspace again. Maybe it reappeared somewhere else in the tunnels.'

'Maybe,' Horza said. He stopped by Wubslin, taking the man's elbow and turning him round from Dorolow's body. The engineer had been crying. 'Wubslin,' Horza said, 'guard that bastard. He might try and get you to shoot him, but don't. That's what he wants. I'm going to take the son of a bitch back to the fleet so they can courtmartial him. Dirtying his name is a punishment; killing him would be doing him a favour; understand?'

Wubslin nodded. Still rubbing the bruised side of his head, Horza went off down the platform with Yalson.

They came to where the Mind had been. Horza turned the lights on his suit up and looked over the floor. He picked up a small, burned-looking thing near the mouth of the foot tunnel leading to station seven.

'What's that?' Yalson said, turning away from the body of the Idiran on the other access gantry.

'I think,' Horza said, turning the still warm machine over in his hand, 'it's a remote drone.'

'The Mind left it behind?' Yalson came over to look at it. It was just a blackened slab of material, some tubes and filaments showing through the lumpy, irregular surface where it had been hit by plasma fire.

'It's the Mind's, all right,' Horza said. He looked at Yalson. 'What exactly happened when they shot the Mind?'

'When he eventually hit it, it vanished. It had started to move, but it couldn't have accelerated that fast; I'd have felt the shock wave. It just vanished.'

'It was like somebody turning off a projection?' Horza said.

Yalson nodded. 'Yes. And there was a bit of smoke. Not much. Do you mean to-'

'He got it eventually; what do you mean?'

'I mean,' Yalson said, putting one hand on her hip and looking at Horza with an impatient expression on her face, 'that it took three or four shots. The first few went straight through it. Are you saying it was a projection?'

Horza nodded and held up the machine in his hand. 'It was this: a remote drone producing a hologram of the Mind. Must have had a weak force field as well so that it could be touched and pushed as though it was a solid object, but all there was inside was this.' He smiled faintly at the wrecked machine. 'No wonder the damn thing didn't show up on our mass sensors.'

'So the Mind's still around somewhere?' Yalson said, looking at the drone in Horza's hand. The Changer nodded.

Balveda watched Horza and Yalson walk into the darkness at the far end of the station. She went over to where the drone floated above Neisin, monitoring his vital functions and sorting out some vials of medicine in the medkit. Wubslin kept his gun pointed at the trapped Idiran, but watched Balveda from the corner of his eye at the same time; the Culture woman sat down cross-legged near the stretcher.

'Before you ask,' the drone said, 'no, there's nothing you can do.'

'I had guessed that, Unaha-Closp,' Balveda said.

'Hmm. Then you have ghoulish tendencies?'

'No, I wanted to talk to you.'

'Really.' The drone continued to sort the medicines.

'Yes…' She sat forward, elbow on her knee, chin cupped in her hand. She lowered her voice a little. 'Are you biding your time, or what?'

The drone turned its front to her; an unnecessary gesture, they both knew, but one it was used to making. 'Biding my time?'

'You've let him use you so far. I just wondered: how much longer?'

The drone turned away again, hovering over the dying man. 'Perhaps you hadn't noticed, Ms Balveda, but my choices in this matter are almost as limited as yours.'

'I've only got arms and legs, and I'm locked away at night, trussed up. You're not.'

'I have to keep watch. He has a movement sensor which he leaves switched on, anyway, so he would know if I tried to escape. And besides, where would I go?'

'The ship,' Balveda suggested, smiling. She looked back up the dark station, where the lights on their suits showed Yalson and the Changer picking something up from the ground.

'I would need his ring. Do you want to take it from him?'

'You must have an effector. Couldn't you fool the ship's circuits? Or even just that motion sensor?'

'Ms Balveda-'

'Call me Perosteck.'

'Perosteck, I am a general-purpose drone, a civilian. I have light fields; the equivalent of many fingers, but not major limbs. I can produce a cutting field, but only a few centimetres in depth, and not capable of taking on