Rhiow sat down, looking the gate over. “It does seem to be behaving. You want to run it through the standard patency sequence? We should check that this week’s bout of construction hasn’t affected it.”
“Right.” Saash sat up on her hindquarters, settling herself and reaching up to the glowing weft, spreading her claws out to catch selected strings in them and pull—
She froze, then reached in and through the webbing of the gate once more, feeling for something—
“Rhi,” she said, “we’ve got a problem.”
Rhiow stared as Saash grasped for the strings again—and once more couldn’t get a grip on them. In the midst of this bizarre turn of affairs, the last thing Rhiow would have expected to hear was purring, except she did hear it, then turned in surprise and saw Arhu standing there rigid, looking not at Saash or the gate, but out into the darkness beyond them. The purr was not pleasure or contentment: it was that awful edgy purr that comes with terror or pain, and the sound of it made Rhiow’s hackles rise.
“Arhu—”
He paid no attention to her; just stood there, trembling violently, his eyes wide and dark, his throat rough with the purr of fear.
“Something’s coming,” he said.
They all listened for the telltale tick of rails, for the sound of an unscheduled loco down in the main tunnel past Tower U, where forty tracks narrowed to four. But no such sound could be heard. Neither could what Rhiow half-expected— the squeak of rats—though just the thought made her bristle.
Flashback, Urruah said silently. We’ve brought him down too soon.
“Arhu,” Rhiow said, “maybe you and Urruah should go back out to the concourse.”
“It won’t make any difference,” Arhu said, his voice oddly dry and drained-sounding. “It’s coming all the same. It came before. Once, to see. Once, to taste. Once, to devour—”
“Get him back out there,” Rhiow said to Urruah.
Urruah reached over past her, grabbed Arhu by the scruff of the neck as if he were a much smaller kitten than he was, leapt up onto the platform with him, and hurried off down it, half-dragging Arhu like a lion with a gazelle. Fortunately the youngster was still sidled: allowing any watching station staff to view the spectacle of him being dragged down the platform by something that wasn’t there, Rhiow thought, would have produced some choice remarks from Har’lh later.
Rhiow turned her attention back to Saash, who was hissing softly with consternation and anger. “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. I interrogated it not five minutes ago and it was fine! Here—” She pulled her paws out of the gate-weave, then carefully put out a single claw and hooked it behind the three-string bundle that led into the interrogation routines. Saash pulled, and the lines of light stretched outward and away from the weft structure, came alive with flickers of dark red fire that ran down the threads like water.
“See? That’s fine. But the gate won’t hyperextend, Rhi! The control functions aren’t answering. It’s simply refusing to open.”
“That can’t happen. It can’t.”
“I’d have thought a gate couldn’t have its logs erased, either,” Saash hissed, “but this seems to be our week for surprises. Now what do we do? There is simply no way I can do this”— she pushed her forepaws through the strings again, leaned back, and pulled, and her paws simply came out again, without a pause—“without getting a response. It’s like dropping something and having it not fall down. In fact, gravity would be easier to repeal than hyperstring function! What in Iau’s name is going on?”
“I wish I knew,” Rhiow said, and heartily she did, for life was now much more complicated than she wanted it to be. “We need advice, and a lot of it, and fast.” She looked over at the gate. “If it’s not functional, you’d better shut it down. FU notify Har’lh.”
“Rhi,” Saash said with exaggerated patience, “what I’m trying to tell you is that I cannot shut it down. Though the gate diagnoses correctly, none of the command structures are palpable. It’s going to have to hang here just like this until it starts answering properly, and we’d better pray to the Queen that the thing doesn’t come alive again without warning, with some train full of coffee-swigging commuters halfway through it.”
Rhiow swallowed. “Go check the others,” she said. “I want to make sure they’re not doing the same thing. Then get yourself right out of here.”
Saash loped off into the darkness. Rhiow sat and looked at the recalcitrant gate. I really need this right now, she thought.
The gate hung there and did nothing but glow and ripple subtly, splendid to look at, and about as useful for interspatial transit as that silk rug back in her ehhif’s den.
Miserable vhai’d thing, Rhiow thought, and looked out into the darkness, trying to calm herself down: there was no tune to indulge her annoyance. No trains were coming as yet, but something needed to be done so that the commuters would not meet this gate before it was functioning correctly again.
Rhiow trotted hurriedly westward down the track, toward Tower A. Directly opposite the tower was a portion of switched track, used to shunt trains into Tracks 23, 24, and 25, and crossing more shunting track for Tracks 30 through 34. She found the spot where the two “joints” of track interleaved in a shape like an ehhif letter X, or like an N or V, depending in which direction the interleave was set.
Rhiow glanced up hurriedly at the windows of the tower. There were a couple of the station ehhif sitting there, watching the board behind them, its colored lights indicating the presence of trains farther up the line. She could read those lights well enough, after some years of practice, to know that no moving train was anywhere near her, and the ehhif weren’t likely to turn and see her before she did what needed doing.
She stood on the little black box set down in the gravel beside the switch and looked at it with her eyes half-shut, seeing into it, watching how the current flowed. Not a complicated mechanism, fortunately: it simply moved the track one way or the other, depending on what the tower told it.
Rhiow closed her eyes all the way, put herself down into the flow of electricity in the switch, and told the switch that she was the tower, and it should move the track this way.
It did. Clunk, clunk, went the track, and it locked in position: the position that would shunt an incoming train away from Tracks 23, 24, and 25.
Rhiow glanced up at the tower. One of the men inside at the desk was looking over his shoulder at a control board, having heard something: an alarm, or maybe just a confirming click inside the tower that the switch was moving. Right, Rhiow thought, and leapt over to the switched track itself. The switch had been the hard part. This would be easier.
She put her paws on the cool metal of the track and spoke to it in the Speech. Why do you want to lie there with your atoms moving so slowly? Why so sluggish? Let them speed up a bit: here’s some energy to do it with.… A bit more. Go on, keep it up. Don’t stop till I tell you.
Then she got her paws off it in a hurry because the metal was taking her seriously. The segment of track went from cool to a neutral temperature she couldn’t feel, to warm, to hot, to really hot, in a matter of seconds. She loped away quickly while it was still shading up from a dull apple-red to cherry-red, to a beautiful glowing canary-yellow. A few seconds more to the buttercup-yellow stage, and the steel of the two pieces of track had fused together. All right, that’s fine, you can stop now, thank you! she yowled silently to the metal, jumped up onto the platform, and skittered back toward the concourse.