bother me a bit you're older and smaller than me. You want me to kick your balls in…' she nodded and pursed her lips, still staring at the limp body of the Idiran officer lying in front of her, '… I'll do it for you, old boy.'
Balveda came up to Aviger and slipped her arm through his, starting to lead him away as she walked by, 'Aviger,' she said, 'let me tell you about the time-' But Aviger shrugged her away and went off by himself, to sit with his back to the station wall, opposite the reactor car.
Horza looked down the platform to where the old man sat. 'He'd better watch his radiation meter,' he said to Yalson. 'It's pretty hot down there near the reactor car.'
Yalson gnawed at another ration bar. 'Let the old bastard fry,' she said.
Xoxarle woke up. Yalson watched him regain consciousness, then waved the gun at him. 'Tell the big creep to head on down the ramp, will you Horza?' she said.
Xoxarle looked down at Horza and struggled awkwardly to his feet. 'Don't bother,' he said in Marain, 'I can bark as well as you in this miserable excuse for a language.' He turned to Yalson. 'After you, my man.'
'I am a female,' Yalson growled, and waved the gun down the ramp, 'now get your trefoil ass down there.'
Horza's suit AG was finished. Unaha-Closp couldn't have taken Xoxarle's weight anyway, so they would have to walk. Aviger could float; so could Wubslin and Yalson, but Balveda and Horza would have to take turns riding on the pallet; and Xoxarle would need to foot-slog the whole twenty-seven kilometres to station seven.
They left the two human bodies near the doors to the transit tubes, where they could collect them later. Horza threw the useless lump of the Mind's remote drone to the station floor, then blasted it with his laser.
'Did that make you feel better?' Aviger said. Horza looked at the old man, floating in his suit, ready to head up the tunnel with the rest of them.
'Tell you what, Aviger. If you want to do something useful, why don't you float up to that access ramp and put a few shots through the head of Xoxarle's comrade up there, just to make sure he's properly dead?'
'Yes, Captain,' Aviger said, and gave a mock salute. He moved through the air to the ramp where the Idiran's body lay.
'OK,' Horza said to the rest; 'let's go.'
They entered the foot tunnel as Aviger landed on the middle level of the access ramp.
Aviger looked down at the Idiran. The armoured suit was covered with burn marks and holes. The creature had one arm and one leg missing; there was blood, dried black, all over the place. The Idiran's head was charred on one side, and where he had kicked it earlier Aviger could see the cracked keratin just below the left eye socket. The eye, dead, jammed open, stared at him; it looked loose in its bone hemisphere, and some sort of pus had oozed out of it. Aviger pointed his gun at the head, setting the weapon to single shot. The first pulse blew the injured eye off; the second punched a hole in the creature's face under what might have been its nose. A jet of green liquid splashed out of the hole and landed on Aviger's suit chest. He splashed some water from his flask over the mess and let it dribble off.
'Filth,' he muttered to himself, shouldering his gun, 'all of it… filth.'
'Look!'
They were less than fifty metres into the tunnel. Aviger had just entered it and started floating towards them, when Wubslin shouted. They stopped, looking into the screen of the mass sensor.
Almost at the centre of the close-packed green lines there was a grey smudge; the reactor trace they were used to seeing, the sensor being fooled by the nuclear pile in the train behind them.
Right at the very edge of the screen, straight ahead and over twenty-six kilometres away, there was another echo. It was no grey patch, no false trace. It was a harsh, bright pinpoint of light, like a star on the screen.
12. The Command System: Engines
'… A sky like chipped ice, a wind to cut you to the body core. Too cold for snow, for most of the journey, but once for eleven days and nights it came, a blizzard over the field of ice we walked on, howling like an animal, with a bite like steel. The crystals of ice flowed like a single torrent over the hard and frozen land. You could not look into it or breathe; even trying to stand was near impossible. We made a hole, shallow and cold, and lay in it until the skies cleared.
'We were the walking wounded, straggled band. Some we lost when their blood froze in them. One just disappeared, at night in a storm of snow. Some died from their wounds. One by one we lost them, our comrades and our servants. Every one begged us make what use we could of their corpse once they were gone. We had so little food; we all knew what it meant, we were all prepared; name a sacrifice more total, or more noble.
'In that air, when you cried, the tears froze on your face with a cracking sound, like a heart breaking.
'Mountains. The high passes we climbed to, famished in that thin and bitter air. The snow was white powder, dry as dust. To breathe it was to freeze from inside; flurries from the jagged slopes, dislodged by feet in front, stung in the throat like acid spray. I saw rainbows in the crystal veils of ice and snow which were the product of our passing, and grew to hate those colours, that freezing dryness, the starved high air and dark blue skies.
'Three glaciers we traversed, losing two of our comrades in crevasses, beyond sight or sound, falling further than an echo's reach.
'Deep in a mountain ring we came to a marsh; it lay in that scoop like a cess for hope. We were too slow, too stupefied, to save our Querl when he walked out into it and floundered there. We thought it could not be, with air so cold around us, even in that wan sunlight; we thought it must be frozen and we saw what only seemed to be, and our eyes would clear and he come walking back to us, not slip beneath that dark ooze, out of reach.
'It was an oil marsh, we realised too late, after the tarry depths had claimed their toll from us. The next day, while we were still looking for a way across, the chill came harder still, and even that sludge locked itself to stillness, and we walked quickly to the other side.
'In the midst of frozen water we began to die of thirst. We had little to heat the snow with save our own bodies, and eating that white dust until it numbed us made us groggy with the cold of it, slowing our speech and step. But we kept on, though the cold sucked at us whether awake or trying to sleep, and the harsh sun blinded us in fields of glittering white and filled our eyes with pain. The wind cut us, snow tried to swallow us, mountains like cut black glass blocked us, and the stars on clear nights taunted us, but on we came.
'Near two thousand kilometres, little one, with only the small amount of food we could carry from the wreck, what little equipment had not been turned to junk by the barrier beast, and our own determination. We were forty- four when we left the battle cruiser, twenty-seven when we began our trek across the snows: eight of my kind, nineteen of the medjel folk. Two of us completed the journey, and six of our servants.
'Do you wonder that we fell upon the first place we found with light and heat? Does it surprise you that we just took, and did not ask? We had seen brave warriors and faithful servants die of cold, watched each other wear away, as thought the ice blasts had abraded us; we had looked into the cloudless, pitiless skies of a dead and alien place, and wondered who might be eating who when the dawnlight came. We made a joke of it at first, but later, when we had marched a thirty-day, and most of us were dead, in ice gullies, mountain ravines or raw in our own bellies, we did not think it so funny. Some of the last, perhaps not believing our course was true, I think died of despair.
'We killed your humans friends, these other Changers. I killed one with my own hands; another, the first, fell to a medjel, while he still slept. The one in the control room fought bravely, and when he knew he was lost, destroyed many of the controls. I salute him. There was another who put up a fight in the place where they stored things; he, too, died well. You should not grieve too much for them. I shall face my superiors with the truth in my eyes and heart. They will not discipline me, they will reward me, should I ever stand before them.'
Horza was behind the Idiran, walking down the tunnel after him while Yalson took a rest from guarding the tall triped. Horza had asked Xoxarle to tell him what had happened to the raiding party which had come to the planet inside the chuy-hirtsi animal. The Idiran had responded with an oration.
'
