Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

“Try this,” it said. “Excuse me.” She felt it lean over her, bending her forward; she heard a click, then lights glowed. The android leant back again. She looked round at it; its face gleamed softly in the green light spilling from the vehicle’s screen and instruments.

“Perhaps you should drive,” she said.

“The position here is a little exposed,” it told her. “Allow me to navigate.”

“All right.” She turned back and studied the controls; a twinstalk hand-grip with various buttons arranged on the columns, two pedals for her feet; various dials, screens and touch-bolos, and a head-up display seemingly hovering in mid-air in front of her.

She pressed a pedal; the monowheel’s nose dipped. The other pedal brought it level again. She took the hand controls and squeezed both; her left hand was stiff and hurt a little, but it was bearable. There was a beeping noise from the instruments. Nothing else happened until she let go the left grip. The monowheel leapt forward, banging her head against the seat’s head-rest.

“Stop!” Feril yelled.

She released the grip and they stopped quickly. She sensed the android turning behind her.

“Oh well,” it said, turning back. “I don’t believe you were too keen on that young man, anyway.”

“Dead?” she asked.

“Thoroughly,” Feril said.

She found the lights and another holo display, switchable between radar, ultrasound and passive EM. “Hell,” she said, “I had a unit like this on a bike once.” She adjusted the display to optimum on EM.

She was sitting on the safety harness; she lifted, pulled the straps out and fastened them round her. The holo display showed the whole bunker ahead of her in grey; the roof had collapsed in at least two places. The ramp she had been brought up was lying off to her left.

There was a muffled rumble from above, followed by another hot gust of air.

“I think we should leave this place fairly soon,” Feril said.

“So do I,” she said. “Ready?”

“Ready. I suggest you head for the ramp.”

“On my way.” She pressed the right grip lightly, sending the monowheel humming forward over the floor, then tipped the wheel; the vehicle turned. She looked at the squashed body of the young emissary she’d kicked and then run over. The monowheel was obviously quite heavy.

The other emissary lay still at the foot of the dais. His chest, neck and face were still cooling. She thought she heard him moan.

She took the laser from her jacket, reached out over the side of the cockpit and shot him twice in the head.

She paused just once more, at the other cooling body on the floor, then left her image lying there and powered the monowheel down the ramp.

There was a door. “Just a minute,” Feril said. “This seems to require a fairly simple radio code…”

The door trundled aside, revealing the short corridor walled with roller doors.

“Well done,” she said, moving the monowheel forward.

“My pleasure.” The second roller door on the left rippled as a rumble of noise sounded all about them. “The door opposite that, I think,” Feril said. “It will require the vehicle’s cannon.”

“Cannon?” she said, looking round at the android.

It nodded. “I believe this was a robo-tank hunter; a sporting vehicle used by the Vrosal Moguls following the-”

Another blast shook the roller door.

“Aiming and firing controls?” she said quickly.

“You aim the whole vehicle,” Feril said. “The pedals control nose angle, the red cursor on the head-up is aim-point and the red button on top of the left hand-grip fires.”

She fired at the door; there was a burst of light from beneath the monowheel vehicle, an ear-ringing bang and a single small hole appeared in the roller door. An instant later the door bulged and burst open as the shell exploded behind it.

Wreckage tumbled past them; she ducked, glanced back at Feril, who seemed to be unharmed, then eased the monowheel over the remains of the door. The vehicle rolled with uncanny smoothness into a circular-section tunnel fitted with twin toothed-metal rails. There were flat rail-cars sitting on the rails; beyond them the tunnel spiralled upwards.

“This is how I was brought in,” Feril said. “I believe it leads to just below the surface.”

“Maybe so, but how do we get over these flat cars?”

“I believe this vehicle is quite sophisticated for our. day; I suggest just driving at them.”

“All right,” she said. She sent the monowheel forward slowly; it climbed over the flat cars as though they weren’t there. She looked back and shrugged, then powered on up the spiral tunnel.

There were blast doors but they had all been opened.

The monowheel hummed up the spiral tunnel for several minutes without incident, eventually emerging into an underground marshalling yard. She heard heavy-calibre gunfire echoing in the distance and saw flashes reflect off the ribbed grey concrete of the ceiling.

“That way, I think,” Feril said, pointing past some supporting columns, away from the firing but towards an area of the yard where the view was hazed with smoke.

The monowheel raced over a tracery of tracks, keeping perfectly stable. The vehicle crossed a bridge over another level of the underground yard where smoke billowed up; past the smoke they found the bodies of a Keep guard and one of the original attackers. The Keep guard still clutched his rifle. He had been beheaded, presumably by the bloody sword hanging by its lanyard from the hand of the other dead man, who lay against the railings of the underground bridge, his tunic blown almost right off by the grenade explosion that had killed him.

She stared at the man’s naked right arm as they passed, slowing down for a better look.

She shook her head and accelerated again. The black mouth of another tunnel expanded to swallow the speeding monowheel.

The Advance Tactical Command Team entered the Deep Citadel through an aperture in the roof. They were covered in dust and stank of smoke. A couple of them had been lightly wounded, though really they had been almost unopposed. The Keep’s own defenders seemed to have been effectively disarmed by their original attackers, who themselves had not been equipped with heavy ordnance.

One of the Keep’s defenders had been captured and made to cooperate; he had guided them here, to the throne room.

The throne itself had gone, vanished into the roof; tech teams were still trying to break into the secure tunnels on the two levels immediately above. They suspected the master of this underground maze had flown, and taken their quarry with him. There were many tunnels and escape routes into the desert and the mountains around and they had not been able to find all of them in the short time they’d had available, between being granted permission to make this incursion and the launch of the attack itself, precipitated by that of the quaintly mounted and lightly armed forces who had preceded them.

They explored the remains of the circular chamber, using nightsights.

Ghosts , thought the Priest Colonel. We are like ghosts.

They were almost a kilometre underground, and they feared that once the man who had ruled over this sunken fortress had made good his escape, it would all be destroyed.

“Sir!” a yearfellow shouted from the other side of the black column that filled the middle of the dark chamber.

The Priest Colonel and his aides approached the yearfellow, standing pointing his quivering gun at the body on the floor.

They all looked at it for a while.

A couple of his men wept; several offered up muttered prayers of thanks.

“It’s her,” a voice said.

“Analysis,” the Priest Colonel said. One aide crouched down to the body, unstrapping a bulky piece of equipment from his back-pack. “Send the results direct to the Shrine,” the Priest Colonel said. Another aide knelt, unhitching a powerful comm unit.