The torch swung, and just as the final clip came undone, and the spot of light started to leave the inside edge of the suit, to shine on his face, the torch flickered and went out.
He stared. It was almost totally dark. There was the hint of light from outside the car; the faintest of red glows, produced by all the near-dead people and the quietly watching equipment.
Out. The torch had gone out; charge exhausted or just a fault, it didn't matter. It had gone out. It hadn't shone on his face. The suit beeped again, plaintive above the quiet hiss of escaping air.
He looked down, at the hand that lay over his chest.
He looked back up at where the torch must be, unseen in the centre of the car in the centre of the ship, in the middle of its journey.
How do I die now? he thought.
He did go back to his chill sleep, after a year. Erens and Ky, their sexual predilections forever estranging them despite the fact they seemed like a well-matched couple otherwise, were still arguing when he left.
He ended up in another lo-tech war, learning to fly (because he knew now that aircraft would always win against a battleship), and flying the frosty vortices of air above the vast white islands that were the colliding tabular icebergs.
Thirteen
Where they lay, the discarded robes looked like the just-shed skin of some exotic reptile. He had been going to wear those, but then changed his mind. He would wear the clothes he had come here in.
He stood in the bathroom, in its steams and smells, stopping the razor again, then putting it to his head, slowly and carefully as though pulling a comb through his hair in slow motion. The razor scraped through the foam on his skin, catching a last few stubbly hairs. He swept the razor past the tops of his ears, then took up a towel, wiped the gleaming skin of his skull, inspecting the baby-smooth landscape he had revealed. The long dark hair lay scattered on the floor, like plumage scattered during a fight.
He looked out to the citadel parade grounds, where a few weak fires glowed. Above the mountains, the sky was just starting to become light.
From the window, he could see a few craggy levels of the citadel's curbed wall and jutting towers. In that first outlining light, it looked, he thought — though trying hard not to feel maudlin — poignant, even noble, now that he knew it was doomed.
He turned from the sight and went to put on his shoes. The air moved over his shaven skull, feeling very strange. He missed the feel and sweep of his hair on the nape of his neck. He sat on the bed, pulled on the shoes and clasped them, then looked at the telephone sitting on the bedside cabinet. He lifted the device.
He recalled (he seemed to remember) contacting the space port last night, after Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw had gone. He had been feeling bad, dissociated and remote somehow, and he was not at all certain he really did remember calling the technicians there, but he thought he probably had. He'd told them to ready the ancient space craft, for the Decapitation strike, sometime that morning. Or he hadn't. One of the two. Maybe he had been dreaming.
He heard the citadel operator asking him who he wanted. He asked for the space port.
He talked to the technicians. The chief flight engineer sounded tense, excited. The craft was ready, fuelled up, coordinates locked in; it could be launched within a few minutes as soon as he gave the word.
He nodded to himself as he listened to the man. He heard the chief flight engineer pause. The question was unasked, but there.
He watched the skies outside the window. They still looked dark, from inside here. "Sir?" the chief flight engineer said. "Sir Zakalwe? What are your orders, sir?"
He saw the little blue cube, the button; he heard the whisper of escaping air. There was a shudder, just then. He thought it was his own body, reacting involuntarily, but it was not; the shudder ran through the fabric of the citadel, through the walls of the room, through the bed beneath him. Glass rattled in the room. The noise of the explosion rumbled through the air beyond the thick windows, low and unsettling.
"Sir?" the man said. "Are you still there?"
They would probably intercept the spacecraft; the Culture itself — the Xenophobe, probably — would use effectors on it… the decapitation strike was bound to fail…
"What should we do, sir?"
But there was always a possibility…
"Hello? Hello, sir?"
Another explosion shook the citadel. He looked at the handset he held. "Sir, do we go ahead?" he heard a man say, or remembered a man saying, from long ago and far away… And he had said yes, and taken on a terrible cargo of memories, and all the names that might bury him…
"Stand down," he said quietly. "We won't need the strike now," he said. He put the handset down, and left the room quickly, taking the rear stairs, away from the main entrance to his apartments, where he could already hear a commotion building.
More explosions shook the citadel, dislodging dust around him as the curtain wall was breached and breached again. He wondered how it would be with the regional headquarters, how they would fall, and whether the raid to capture the high priests would be as bloodless as Sma had hoped. But he realised even as he thought about it all that he no longer really cared.
He left the citadel via a postern and entered the great square that was the parade ground. The small fires still burned outside the tents of the refugees. In the distance, great clouds of dust and smoke floated slowly into the grey dawn sky above the curtain wall. He could see a couple of gaps in the wall from here. The people in the tents were starting to wake up and come out. From the citadel walls at his back and above him, he could hear the crackle of gunfire.
A heavier gun fired from the breached walls, and a huge explosion shook the ground, ripping a great hole in the cliff that was the citadel; an avalanche of stone thundered into the parade ground, burying a dozen tents. He wondered what sort of ammunition the tank was firing; not a type they'd had until this morning, he suspected.
He walked on through the tent city, as the people appeared, blinking, from their sleep. Scattered firing continued from the citadel; the vast cloud of dust rolled over the parade ground from the great tumbled breach in the towering walls. Another shot from near the curtain walls; another ground-quaking detonation that brought a whole side of the citadel down, the stones bursting from the wall as though with relief, falling and tumbling in their own rolling dust; released, returning to the earth.
There was less firing from the citadel ramparts now, as the dust drifted and the sky slowly lightened and the frightened people clutched at each other outside their tents. More firing came from the breached curtain walls, and from inside the parade ground, within the tent city.
He walked on. Nobody stopped him; few people really seemed to notice him. He saw a soldier fall from the curtain wall to his right, tumbling into the dust. He saw the people running this way and that. He saw the Imperial Army soldiers, in the distance, riding on a tank.
He walked through the clustered tents, avoiding people running, stepping over a couple of the smouldering fires. The huge breaches in the curtain wall and the citadel itself smoked in the increasing grey light, which was just starting to take on colour as the sky burned pink and blue.
Sometimes, as the people milled and streamed around him, running past, clutching babies, dragging children, he thought he saw people he recognised, and several times was on the point of turning and talking to them, putting out his hand to stop the snowfall effaces rushing past him, shouting after them…
Suddenly aircraft screamed overhead, tearing through the air over the curtain wall, dropping long canisters into the tents, which erupted in flame and black, black smoke. He saw burning people, heard the screams, smelled the roasting flesh. He shook his head.