Consider Phlebas

4. Temple of Light

The Clear Air Turbulence swung through the shadow of a moon, past a barren, cratered surface — its track dimpling as it skirted the top edge of a gravity well — and then down towards a cloudy, blue-green planet. Almost as soon as it passed the moon its course started to curve, gradually pointing the craft’s nose away from the planet and back into space. Halfway through that curve the CAT released its shuttle, slinging it towards one hazy horizon of the globe, at the trailing edge of the darkness which swept over the planet surface like a black cloak.

Horza sat in the shuttle with most of the rest of the CAT’s motley crew. They were suited up, sitting on narrow benches in the cramped shuttle’s passenger compartment in a variety of spacesuits; even the three Bratsilakins had slightly different models on. The only really modern example was the one Kraiklyn wore, the Rairch suit he had taken from Horza.

They were all armed, and their weapons were as various as their suits. Mostly they were lasers, or to be more exact what the Culture called CREWS — Coherent Radiation Emission Weapon Systems. The better ones operated on wavelengths invisible to the human eye. Some people had plasma cannons or heavy pistols, and one had an efficient-looking Microhowitzer, but only Horza had a projective rifle, and an old, crude, slow-firing one at that. He checked it over for the tenth or eleventh time and cursed it. He cursed the leaky old suit he’d been given, too; the visor was starting to mist up. This whole thing was hopeless.

The shuttle started to lurch and vibrate as it hit the atmosphere of the planet Marjoin, where they were going to attack and rob something called the Temple of Light.

It had taken the Clear Air Turbulence fifteen days to crawl across the twenty-one or so standard light-years that lay between the Sorpen system and that of Marjoin. Kraiklyn boasted that his ship could hit nearly twelve hundred lights, but that sort of speed, he said, was for emergencies only. Horza had taken a look at the old craft and doubted it would even get into four figures without its outboard warping engines pancaking the ship and everything in it all over the skies.

The Clear Air Turbulence was a venerable Hronish armoured-assault ship from one of the declining, later dynasties, and was built more for ruggedness and reliability than for performance and sophistication. Given the level of technical expertise possessed by its crew, Horza thought this was just as well. The ship was about a hundred metres long, twenty across the beam and fifteen high, plus — on top of the rear hull — a ten-metre-high tail. On either side of the hull the warp units bulged, like small versions of the hull itself, and connected to it by stubby wings in the middle and thin flying pylons swept back from just behind the craft’s nose. The CAT was streamlined, and fitted with sprinter fusion motors in the tail, as well as a small lift engine in the nose, for working in atmospheres and gravity wells. Horza thought its accommodation left a lot to be desired.

He had been given Zallin’s old bunk, sharing a two-metre cube — euphemistically termed a cabin — with Wubslin, who was the mechanic on the ship. He called himself the engineer; but after a few minutes’ talk trying to pump him for technical stuff on the CAT, Horza realised that the thickset white-skinned man knew little about the craft’s more complex systems. He wasn’t unpleasant, didn’t smell, and slept silently most of the time, so Horza supposed things could have been worse.

There were eighteen people on the ship, in nine cabins. The Man, of course, had one to himself, and the Bratsilakins shared one rather pungent one; they liked to leave the door to it open; everybody else liked to close the door as they went past. Horza was disappointed to find that there were only four women aboard. Two of them hardly ever showed themselves outside their cabin and communicated with the others mostly by signs and gestures. The third was a religious fanatic who, when not trying to convert him to something called the Circle of Flame, spent her time wired up in the cabin she shared with Yalson, spooling fantasy head-tapes. Yalson seemed to be the only normal female on board, but Horza found it difficult to think of her as a woman at all. It was she, however, who took on the job of introducing him to the others and telling him the things about the ship and its crew which he would need to know.

He had cleaned up in one of the ship’s coffin-like wash-points, then followed his nose as Yalson had suggested to the mess, where he was more or less ignored, but some food was shoved in his direction. Kraiklyn looked at him once as he sat down, between Wubslin and a Bratsilakin, then didn’t look at him again and continued talking about weapons and armour and tactics. After the meal Wubslin had shown Horza to their cabin, then left. Horza cleared a space on Zallin’s bunk, hauled some torn sheets over his tired, aching, old-looking frame, and fell into a deep sleep.

When he woke he bundled up Zallin’s few possessions. It was pathetic; the dead youth had a few T-shirts, shorts, a couple of little kilts, a rusty sword, a collection of cheap daggers in frayed sheaths and some large plastic micropage books with moving pictures, repeating and repeating scenes from ancient wars for as long as they were held open. That was about all. Horza kept the youth’s leaky suit, though it was far too big and non-adjustable, and the badly maintained and ancient projectile rifle.

He carried the rest, wrapped in one of the more tatty bed sheets, down to the hangar. It was as it had been when he’d left it. Nobody had bothered to roll the shuttle back. Yalson was there, stripped to the waist, exercising. Horza stood in the doorway at the bottom of the steps, watching the woman work out. She spun and leapt, did backflips and somersaults, kicked her feet out and jabbed punches at the air, making small grunting noises with each sharp movement. She stopped when she saw Horza.

“Welcome back.” She stooped and picked up a towel from the deck, then started to rub it over her chest and arms, where sweat glistened in the golden down. “Thought you’d croaked.”

“Have I been asleep long?” Horza asked. He didn’t know what sort of time system they used on the ship.

“Two days standard.” Yalson towelled her spiky hair and draped the damp towel over her lightly furred shoulders. “You look better for it, though.”

“I feel better,” Horza said. He hadn’t had a look in a mirror or a reverser yet, but knew that his body was starting to come back to normal, losing the geriatric look.

“That Zallin’s stuff?” Yalson nodded at the package in his hands.

“Yes.”

“I’ll show you how to work the vactubes. We’ll probably sling it when we next come out of warp.”

Yalson opened the deck and the tube hatch beneath, then Horza dropped Zallin’s gear into the cylinder and Yalson closed it again. The Changer liked the way Yalson smelled when he caught the scent of her warm, perspiring body, but somehow there was nothing in her attitude towards him to make him think they would ever become more than friends. He’d settle for a friend on this ship, though. He certainly needed one.

They went to the mess after that, to have something to eat. Horza was ravenous; his body demanded food to rebuild itself and put more bulk onto the thin shape it had assumed to impersonate the Gerontocracy of Sorpen’s outworld minister.

At least, thought Horza, the autogalley works all right and the AG field seems smooth. The idea of cramped cabins, rotten food and a lumpy or erratic gravity field filled the Changer with horror.

“…Zallin didn’t have any real friends,” Yalson said, shaking her head as she stuffed some food into her mouth. They were sitting in the mess together. Horza wanted to know if there was anybody on the ship who might want to avenge the youth he had killed.

“Poor bastard,” Horza said again. He put his spoon down and stared across the cluttered space of the low-ceilinged mess room for a second, feeling again that quick, decisive bone-snap through his hands, seeing in his mind’s eye the spinal column sever, windpipe crumple, arteries compress — turning off the youth’s life as though rotating a switch. He shook his head. “Where did he come from?”

“Who knows?” Yalson shrugged. She saw the expression on Horza’s face and added, between chews, “Look, he’d have killed you. He’s dead. Forget about him. Sure it’s tough, but… anyway, he was pretty boring.” She ate some more.

“I just wondered if there was anybody I ought to send anything to. Friends or relations or—”

“Look, Horza,” Yalson said, turning to him, “when you come on board this ship you don’t have a past. It’s considered very bad manners to ask anybody where they came from or what they’ve done in their lives before they joined. Maybe we’ve all got some secrets, or we just don’t want to talk or think about some of the things we’ve done, or some of the things we’ve had done to us. But either way, don’t try to find out. Between your ears is the only place on this crate you’ll ever get any privacy, so make the most of it. If you live long enough, maybe somebody will want to tell you all about themselves eventually, probably when they’re drunk… but by that time you may not want them to. Whatever; my advice is just to leave it for the moment.”

Horza opened his mouth to say something, but Yalson went on, “I’ll tell you all I know now, just to save you asking.” She put her spoon down and wiped her lips with one finger, then turned in her seat to face him. She held up one hand. The tiny hairs of the light fur on her forearms and the back of her hands gave a golden outline to her dark skin. She stretched one finger out. “One — the ship: Hronish; been around hundreds of years. At least a dozen not very careful owners. Currently without its bow laser since we blew it up trying to alter its wavelength pattern. Two—” She extended another finger. “Kraiklyn: he’s had this craft since any of us have known him. He says he won it in a game of Damage somewhere, just before the war. I know he plays the game but I don’t know how good he is. Anyway, that’s his business. Officially we’re called the KFC, Kraiklyn’s Free Company, and he’s the boss. He’s a pretty good leader and he isn’t afraid to slug it out with the rest of the troops when it comes to the crunch. He leads from the front, and that makes him OK in my book. His gimmick is he never sleeps. He has a… ah…” Yalson frowned, obviously looking for the right words. “…an enhanced hemispherical task-division in his brain. One third of the time one half sleeps and he’s a bit dreamy and vague; the other third of the time the other half sleeps and he’s all logic and numbers and he doesn’t communicate too well. The other third of the time, like when he’s in action or whenever there’s an emergency, both sides are awake and functioning. Makes it pretty hard to sneak up on him in his bunk.”

“Paranoid clones and a Man with a shift system in his skull,” Horza shook his head. “OK. Go on.”

“Three—” Yalson said, “we’re not mercenaries. We’re a Free Company. Actually we’re just pirates, but if that’s what Kraiklyn wants to call us, that’s what we are. In theory anybody can join so long as they eat the food and breathe the air, but in practice he’s a bit more selective than that, and he’d like to be even more so, I’ll bet. Anyway. We’ve carried out a few contracts, mostly protection, a couple of escort duties for third-level places who’ve found themselves caught up in the war, but most of the time we just attack and steal wherever we think the confusion caused by the war makes us likely to get away with it. That’s what we’re on our way to do at the moment. Kraiklyn heard about this place called the Temple of Light on a just-about-level-three planet in this neck of the woods and he reckons it’ll be easy in, easy out — to use one of his favourite expressions. According to him it’s full of priests and treasure; we shoot the former and grab the latter. Then we head for the Vavatch Orbital before the Culture blows it away and we buy something to replace our bow laser. I guess the prices should be pretty good. If we hang on long enough people will probably be trying to give the stuff away.”

“What’s happening to Vavatch?” Horza asked. This wasn’t something he’d heard about. He knew the big Orbital was in this part of the war zone, but he’d thought its condominium-style ownership would keep it out of the firing line.

“Didn’t your Idiran friends tell you?” Yalson said. She dropped the hand with the outstretched fingers. “Well,” she said, when Horza just shrugged, “as you probably do know, the Idirans are advancing through the whole inward flank of the Gulf — the Glittercliff. The Culture seems to be putting up a bit of a fight for a change, or at least preparing to. It looked like they were going to come to one of their usual understandings and leave Vavatch as neutral territory. This religious thing the Idirans have about planets means they weren’t really interested in the O as long as the Culture didn’t try to use it as a base, and they promised they wouldn’t. Shit, with these big fucking GSVs they’re building these days they don’t need bases on Os or Rings, or planets or anything else… Well, all the various types and weirdos on Vavatch thought they were going to be just fine, thank you, and probably do very well out of the galactic fire-fight going on around them… Then the Idirans announced they were going to take Vavatch over after all, though only nominally; no military presence. The Culture said they weren’t having this, both sides refused to abandon their precious principles, and the Culture said, ‘OK, if you won’t back down we’re going to blow the place away before you get there.’ And that’s what’s happening. Before the Idiran battle fleets arrive the Culture’s going to evacuate the whole damn O and then blast it.”

“They’re going to evacuate an Orbital?” Horza said. This really was the first he’d heard of any of this. The Idirans had mentioned nothing about Vavatch Orbital in the briefings they had given him, and even once he was actually impersonating the outworld minister Egratin, most of what had been coming in from outside had been rumour. Any idiot could see that the whole volume around the Sullen Gulf was going to become a battle space hundreds of light-years across, hundreds tall and decades deep at least, but exactly what was going on he hadn’t been able to find out. The war was shifting up a gear indeed. Still, only a lunatic would think of trying to move everybody off an Orbital.

Yalson nodded, all the same. “So they say. Don’t ask me where they’re going to pull the ships from for that one, but that’s what they say they’re going to do.”

“They’re crazy.” Horza shook his head.

“Yeah, well, I think they proved that when they went to war in the first place.”

“OK. Sorry. Go on,” Horza said, waving one hand.

“I’ve forgotten what else I was going to say,” Yalson grinned, looking at the three fingers she had extended as though they would give her a clue. She looked at Horza. “I think that about covers it. I’d advise you to keep your head down and your mouth shut until we get to Marjoin, where this temple is, and still to keep your head down once we get there, come to think of it.” She laughed, and Horza found himself laughing with her. She nodded and picked up her spoon again. “Assuming you come through OK, people will accept you more once you’ve been in a fire-fight with them. For now you’re the baby on the ship, no matter what you’ve done in the past, and regardless of Zallin.”

Horza looked at her doubtfully, thinking about attacking anywhere — even an undefended temple — in a second-hand suit with an unreliable projectile rifle. “Well,” he sighed, spooning more food from his plate, “so long as you don’t all start betting on which way I’ll fall again…”

Yalson looked at him for a second, then grinned, and went back to her food.

Kraiklyn proved more inquisitive about Horza’s past, despite what Yalson had said. The Man invited Horza to his cabin. It was neat and tidy, with everything stowed and clamped or webbed down, and it smelt fresh. Real books lined one wall, and there was an absorber carpet on the floor. A model of the CAT hung from the ceiling, and a big laser rifle was cradled on another wall; it looked powerful, with a large battery pack and a beam-splitter device on the end of the barrel. It gleamed in the soft light of the cabin as though it had been polished.

“Sit down,” Kraiklyn said, motioning Horza to a small seat while he adjusted the single bed to a couch and flopped into it. He reached behind to a shelf and picked up two snifflasks. He offered one to Horza, who took it and broke the seal. The captain of the Clear Air Turbulence drew deeply on the fumes from his own bowl, then sipped a little of the misty liquid. Horza did the same. He recognised the substance but couldn’t remember the name. It was one of those you could snort and get high on or drink and just be sociable; the active ingredients lasted only a few minutes at body temperature, and anyway were broken up rather than absorbed by most humanoid digestive tracts.

“Thanks,” Horza said.

“Well, you’re looking a lot better than when you came on board,” Kraiklyn said, looking at Horza’s chest and arms. The Changer had almost resumed his normal shape after four days of rest and heavy eating. His trunk and limbs had filled out to something approaching their fairly muscular usual and his belly had grown no larger. His skin had tautened and taken on a golden-brown sheen, while his face looked both firmer and yet more supple, too. His hair was growing in dark from the roots; he had cut off the yellow-white lankness of the Gerontocrat’s sparse locks. His venom-teeth were also regrowing, but they would need another twenty days or so before they could be used. “I feel better, too.”

“Hmm. Pity about Zallin, but I’m sure you could see my point.”

“Sure. I’m just glad you gave me the chance. Some people would have zapped me and thrown me out.”

“It crossed my mind,” Kraiklyn said, toying with the flask he held, “but I sensed you weren’t totally full of crap. Can’t say I believed you about this ageing drug and the Idirans, at the time, but I thought you might make a fight of it. Mind you, you were lucky, right?” He smiled at Horza, who smiled back. Kraiklyn looked up at the books on the far wall. “Anyway, Zallin was sort of dead weight; know what I mean?” He looked back at Horza. “Kid hardly knew which end of his rifle to point. I was thinking of dropping him from the team next place we hit.” He took another gulp of the fumes.

“Like I say — thanks.” Horza was deciding that his first impression of Kraiklyn — that the Man was a shit — was more or less correct. If he had been going to drop Zallin anyway there was no reason for the fight to be to the death. Horza could have bunked down in the shuttle or the hangar, or Zallin could have. One more person wouldn’t have made the CAT any more roomy for the time it took to get to Marjoin, but it wouldn’t have been for all that long, and they weren’t going to start using up all the air or anything. Kraiklyn had just wanted a show. “I’m grateful to you,” Horza said, and raised the flask towards the captain briefly before inhaling again. He studied Kraiklyn’s face carefully.

“So, tell me what it’s like working for these guys with the three legs,” Kraiklyn said, smiling and resting one arm on a shelf at the side of the couch bed. He raised his eyebrows. “Hmm?”

Ah-hah, thought Horza. He said, “I didn’t have much time to find out. Fifty days ago I was still a captain in the marines on Sladden. Don’t suppose you’ve heard of it?” Kraiklyn shook his head. Horza had been working on his story for the past two days, and knew that if Kraiklyn did check up he would find there was such a planet, its inhabitants were mostly humanoid and it had recently fallen under Idiran suzerainty. “Well, the Idirans were going to execute us because we fought on after the surrender, but then I was hauled out and told I’d live if I did a job for them. They said I looked a lot like this old guy they wanted on their side; if they removed him, would I pretend to be him? I thought, what the hell. What have I got to lose? So I ended up on this Sorpen place with this ageing drug, impersonating a government minister. I was doing all right, too, until this Culture woman shows, blows my whole bloody act and nearly gets me killed. They were just about to bump me off when this Idiran cruiser came in to snatch her. They rescued me and captured her and they were making their way back to the fleet when they got jumped by a GCU. I got stuffed into that suit and thrown overboard to wait for the fleet.” Horza hoped his story didn’t sound too rehearsed. Kraiklyn stared into the flask he held, frowning.

“I’ve been wondering about that.” He looked at Horza. “Why should a cruiser go in by itself when the fleet was just behind it?”

Horza shrugged. “Don’t really know, myself. They hardly had time to debrief me before the GCU showed up. I guess they must have wanted that Culture woman pretty badly, and thought if they waited for the fleet to show, the GCU would have spotted it, picked up the woman and made a run for it.”

Kraiklyn nodded, looking thoughtful.

“Hmm. They must have wanted her awful bad. Did you see her?”

“Oh, I saw her all right. Before she dropped me in it, and afterwards.”

“What was she like?” Kraiklyn furrowed his brows and played with the flask again.

“Tall, thin, sort of good looking, but off-putting as well. Too damn smart for my liking. I don’t know… Not much different from any Culture woman I’ve seen. I mean, they all look different and so on, but she wouldn’t have stood out.”

“They say they’re pretty special, some of these Culture agents. Supposed to be able to… do tricks, you know? All sorts of special adaptations and fancy body chemistry. She do anything special you heard of?”

Horza shook his head, wondering where all this was leading. “Not that I know of,” he said. Fancy body chemistry, Kraiklyn had said. Was the Man starting to guess? Did he think Horza was a Culture agent, or even a Changer? Kraiklyn was still looking at his drug flask. He nodded and said:

“About the only sort of woman I’d have anything to do with, one of these Culture ones. They say they really do have all these… alterations, you know?” Kraiklyn looked at Horza and winked as he inhaled the drug. “Between the legs; the men have these souped-up balls, right? Sort of recirculating… And the women have something similar, too; supposed to be able to come for fucking hours… Well, minutes, anyway…” Kraiklyn’s eyes looked slightly glazed as his voice trailed off. Horza tried not to appear as scornful as he felt. Here we go again, he thought. He tried to count the number of times he’d had to listen to people — usually from third- or low fourth-level societies, usually fairly human-basic, and more often than not male talking in hushed, enviously admiring tones about how It’s More Fun in the Culture. Perversely coy for once, the Culture played down the extent to which those born into it inherited such altered genitalia.

Naturally, such modesty only increased everybody else’s interest, and Horza occasionally became angry with humans who exhibited the sort of fawning respect the Culture’s quasi-technological sexuality so often engendered. Coming from Kraiklyn, it didn’t surprise him a bit. He wondered if the Man had had some cheap, Culture-imitative surgery himself. It wasn’t uncommon. It wasn’t safe, either. Too often such alterations were simply plumbing jobs, especially on males, and made no attempt to uprate the heart and the rest of the circulatory system — at least — to cope with the increased strain. (In the Culture, of course, that high performance was genofixed in.) Such mimicking of this symptom of the Culture’s decadence had, quite literally, caused a lot of broken hearts. I suppose we’ll hear about those wonderful drug glands next, Horza thought.

“…Yeah, and they have those drug glands,” Kraiklyn went on, eyes still unfocused, nodding to himself. “Supposed to be able to take a hit of almost anything, any time they want. Just by thinking about it. Secrete stuff that makes them high.” Kraiklyn stroked the flask he held. “You know, they say you can’t rape a Culture woman?” He didn’t seem to expect an answer. Horza stayed silent. Kraiklyn nodded again. “Yeah, they’ve got class, those women. Not like some of the shit on this ship.” He shrugged and took another snort from the flask. “Still…”

Horza cleared his throat and leant forward in his seat, not looking at Kraiklyn. “She’s dead now, anyway,” Horza said, looking up.

“Hmm?” Kraiklyn said absently, looking at the Changer.

“The Culture woman,” Horza said. “She’s dead.”

“Oh yes.” Kraiklyn nodded, then cleared his throat and said, “So what do you want to do now? I’m sort of expecting you to come along on this temple caper. I think you owe us that, for the ride.”

“Oh yeah, don’t worry,” Horza said.

“Good. After that, we’ll see. If you shape up you can stay; otherwise we’ll drop you off somewhere you want, within reason, like they say. This operation should be no problem: easy in, easy out.” Kraiklyn made a dipping, flying motion with his flattened hand, as though it was the model of the CAT which hung somewhere over Horza’s head. “Then we go to Vavatch.” He took another gulp from the fumes in the snifflask. “Don’t suppose you play Damage, hmm?” He brought the flask down, and Horza looked into the predatory eyes through the thin mist rising from the flask’s neck. He shook his head.

“Not one of my vices. Never really got the chance to learn.”

“Yeah, I guess not. It’s the only game.” Kraiklyn nodded. “Apart from this…” He smiled and glanced about, obviously meaning the ship, the people in it and their occupation. “Well,” Kraiklyn said, smiling and sitting up, “I think I’ve already said welcome aboard, but you are welcome.” He leant forward and tapped Horza on the shoulder. “So long as you realise who’s boss, eh?” He smiled widely.

“It’s your ship,” Horza said. He drank what remained of the flask’s contents and put it on a shelf beside a portrait holocube which showed Kraiklyn standing in his black suit, holding the same laser rifle which was mounted on the wall above.

“I think we’ll get on just fine, Horza. You get to know the others and train up, and we’ll knock the shit out of these monks. What do you say?” The Man winked at him again.

“You bet,” Horza said, standing and smiling. Kraiklyn opened the door for him.

And for my next trick, thought Horza as soon as he was out of the cabin and walking down to the mess, my impression of… Captain Kraiklyn!

During the next few days he indeed got to know the rest of the crew. He talked to those who wanted to talk and he observed or carefully overheard things about those who didn’t. Yalson was still his only friend, but he got on well enough with his room-mate, Wubslin, though the stocky engineer was quiet and, when not eating or working, usually asleep. The Bratsilakins had apparently decided that Horza probably wasn’t against them, but they seemed to be reserving their opinion about whether he was for them until Marjoin and the Temple of Light.

Dorolow was the name of the religious woman who roomed with Yalson. She was plump, fair skinned and fair haired, and her huge ears curved down to join onto her cheeks. She spoke in a very high, squeaky voice which she said was pretty low as far as she was concerned, and her eyes watered a lot. Her movements were fluttery and nervous.

The oldest person in the Company was Aviger, a smallish, weather-beaten man with brown skin and little hair. He could do surprisingly supple things with his legs and arms, like clasp his hands behind his back and bring them over his head without letting go. He shared a cabin with a man named Jandraligeli, a tall, thin, middle-aged Mondlidician who wore the scar-marks from his homeworld on his forehead with unrepentant pride and a look of perpetual disdain. He ignored Horza devoutly, but Yalson said he did this with every new recruit. Jandraligeli spent a lot of time keeping his old but well-maintained suit and laser rifle clean and sparkling.

Gow and kee-Alsorofus were the two women who kept themselves so much to themselves and were alleged to do things when alone in their cabin, which seemed to annoy the less tolerant of the Company males — that is, most of them. Both women were fairly young and had a rather poor grasp of Marain. Horza thought maybe that was all that kept them so isolated, but it turned out they were pretty shy anyway. They were of average height, medium build, and sharp-featured in grey skin, with eyes that were pools of black. Horza thought perhaps it was just as well they didn’t look at people straight too often; with those eyes it could be an unsettling experience.

Mipp was a fat, sombre man with jet-black skin. He could pilot the ship manually when Kraiklyn wasn’t aboard and the Company needed close support on the ground, or he could take over at the shuttle controls. He was supposed to be a good shot, too, with a plasma cannon or rapid projectile rifle, but he was prone to binges, getting dangerously drunk on a variety of poisonous liquids he procured from the autogalley. Once or twice Horza heard him throwing up in the next stall in the heads. Mipp shared a cabin with another drunkard, called Neisin, who was more sociable and sang a lot. He had, or had convinced himself he had, something terrible to forget, and although he drank more steadily and regularly than Mipp, sometimes when he’d had a bit more than usual he would go very quiet and then start crying in great, sucking sobs. He was small and wiry and Horza wondered where he put all the drink, and where all the tears came from inside his compact, shaved head. Perhaps there was some sort of short circuit between his throat and his tear ducts.

Tzbalik Odraye was the ship’s self-styled computer ace. Because he and Mipp together could, in theory, have overridden the fidelities Kraiklyn had programmed into the CAT’s non-sentient computer and then flown off in the ship, they were never allowed to stay on the craft together when Kraiklyn wasn’t aboard. In fact, Odraye wasn’t that well versed in computers at all, as Horza discovered through a little close but apparently casual questioning. However, the tall, slightly hunchbacked man with the long yellow-skinned face probably knew just about enough, Horza reckoned, to handle anything that went wrong with the ship’s brains, which seemed to have been designed for durability rather than philosophical finesse. Tzbalik Odraye roomed with Rava Gamdol, who looked as though he came from the same place as Yalson, judging from his skin and light fur, but he denied this. Yalson was vague on the subject, and neither liked the other. Rava was another recluse; he had boarded off the tiny space around his top bunk and installed some small lights and an air fan. Sometimes he spent days at a time in this small space, going in with a container of water and coming out with another full of urine. Tzbalik Odraye did his best to ignore his room-mate, and always vigorously denied blowing the smoke from the pungent Cifetressi weed, which he smoked, through the ventilation holes of Rava’s tiny cubicle.

The final cabin was shared by Lenipobra and Lamm. Lenipobra was the youngster of the Company; a gangly youth with a stutter and garish red hair. He had a tattooed tongue which he was very proud of and would display at every possible opportunity. The tattoo, of a human female, was in every sense crude. Lenipobra was the CAT’s best excuse for a medic and was rarely seen without a small screenbook which contained one of the more up-to-date pan-human medical textbooks. He proudly showed this to Horza, including a few of the moving pages, one of which showed in vivid colour the basic techniques for treating deep laser burns in the most common forms of digestive tracts. Lenipobra thought it looked like great fun. Horza made a mental note to try even harder not to get shot in the Temple of Light. Lenipobra had very long and skinny arms, and spent about a quarter of each day going about on all fours, though whether this was entirely natural to his species or merely affectation Horza could not discover.

Lamm was rather below average height, but very muscular and dense looking. He had double eyebrows and small horngrafts; the latter stuck out from his thinning but very dark hair above a face he usually did his best to make aggressive and threatening. He did comparatively little talking between operations, and when he did talk, it was usually about battles he had been in, people he had killed, weapons he had used, and so on. Lamm considered himself second-in-command on the ship, despite Kraiklyn’s policy of treating everybody else as equals. Every now and again Lamm would remind people not to give him any problems. He was well armed and deadly, and his suit even had a nuclear device in it which he said he would set off sooner than be captured. The inference he seemed to hope people would make was that, if they upset him, he might just set off this fabled nuke in a fit of pique.

“What the hell are you looking at me for?” Lamm’s voice said, in amongst the storm of static, as Horza sat in the shuttle, shaking and rattling inside his too-big suit. Horza realised he had been looking across at the other man, who was directly opposite. He touched the mike button on his neck and said:

“Thinking about something else.”

“I don’t want you looking at me.”

“Us all got to look somewhere,” Horza said jokingly to the man in the matt-black suit and grey-visored helmet. The black suit made a gesture with the hand not holding a laser rifle.

“Well, don’t fucking look at me.”

Horza let his hand drop from his neck. He shook his head inside the suit helmet. It fitted so badly it didn’t move on the outside. He stared at the section of fuselage above Lamm’s head.

They were going to attack the Temple of Light. Kraiklyn was at the controls of the shuttle, bringing it in low over the forests of Marjoin, still covered in night, heading for the line of dawn breaking over the packed and steaming greenery. The plan was that the CAT would come back in towards the planet with the sun very low behind it, using its effectors on any electronics the temple did have, and making as much noise and as many flashes as it could with its secondary lasers and a few blast bombs. While this diversion was absorbing any defensive capacity the priests might have, the shuttle would either head straight for the temple and let everybody off, or, if there was any hostile reaction, land in the forest on the night side of the temple and disgorge its small force of suited troops there. The Company would then disperse and, if they had the facility, use their AG to fly to the temple, or — as in Horza’s case — just crawl, creep, walk or run as best they could for the collection of low, slope-sided buildings and short towers which made up the Temple of Light.

Horza couldn’t believe they were going in without some sort of reconnaissance; but Kraiklyn, when tackled on this point during the pre-op briefing in the hangar, had insisted that that might mean giving up the element of surprise. He had accurate maps of the place and a good battle plan. As long as everybody stuck to the plan, nothing would go wrong. The monks weren’t total idiots, and the planet had been Contacted and doubtless knew about the war going on around it. So, just in case the sect had hired any overhead observation, it was wiser not to attempt a look-see which might give the game away. Anyway, temples didn’t change much.

Horza and several of the others hadn’t been very impressed with this reading of the situation, but there was nothing they could do. So here they all sat, sweating and nervous and being shaken up like the ingredients of a cocktail in this clapped-out shuttle, slamming into a potentially hostile atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. Horza sighed and checked his rifle again.

Like his antique armour, the rifle was old and unreliable; it had jammed twice when he tested it on the ship using dummy shells. Its magnetic propulsor seemed to work reasonably, but, judging by the erratic spread of the bullets, its rifling field was next to useless. The shells were big — at least seven-millimetre calibre and three times that long — and the gun could hold only forty-eight at a time and fire them no faster than eight a second. Incredibly, the huge bullets weren’t even explosive; they were solid lumps of metal, nothing else. To top it all, the weapon’s sight was out; a red haze filled the small screen when it was turned on. Horza sighed.

“We’re about three hundred metres above the trees now,” Kraiklyn’s voice said from the shuttle flight deck, “doing about one and a half sounds. The CAT’s just started its run-in. About another two minutes. I can see the dawn. Good luck, all.” The voice crackled and died in Horza’s helmet speaker. A few of the suited figures exchanged glances. Horza looked over at Yalson, sitting on the other side of the shuttle about three metres away, but her visor was mirrored. He couldn’t tell if she was looking at him or not. He wanted to say something to her, but didn’t want to bother her over the open circuit in case she was concentrating, preparing herself. Beside Yalson, Dorolow sat, her gloved hand making the Circle of Flame sign over the top of her helmet visor.

Horza tapped his hands on the old rifle and blew through his mouth at the mist of condensation forming on the top edge of his visor. It made it worse, just as he thought it might. Perhaps he should open his visor, now that they were inside the planet’s atmosphere.

The shuttle shook suddenly as though it had clipped the top of a mountain. Everybody was thrown forward, straining their seat harnesses, and a couple of guns went sailing forward and up, to clatter off the shuttle ceiling before slamming back to the deck. People grabbed for the guns and Horza closed his eyes; he wouldn’t have been at all surprised if one of these enthusiasts had left their safety catch off. However, the guns were retrieved without mishap, and people sat cradling them and looking about.

“What the hell was that?” the old man, Aviger, said, and laughed nervously. The shuttle began some hard manoeuvring, throwing first one half of the group on their backs while the people on the other side were suspended by their seat webbing, then flipping in the other direction and reversing the postures. Grunts and curses came over the open channel into Horza’s helmet. The shuttle dipped, making Horza’s stomach feel empty, floating, then the craft steadied again.

“Bit of hostile fire,” Kraiklyn’s clipped tones announced, and all the suited heads started to look from side to side.

“What?”

“Hostile fire?”

“I knew it.”

“Oh-oh.”

“Fuck.”

“Why did I think as soon as I heard those fateful words, ‘easy in, easy out,’ that this was going—” began Jandraligeli in a bored, knowing drawl, only to be cut off by Lamm.

“Hostile fucking fire. That’s all we need. Hostile fucking fire.”

“They are gunned up,” Lenipobra said.

“Shit, who isn’t these days?” Yalson said.

“Chicel-Horhava, sweet lady; save us all,” muttered Dorolow, speeding up the tracings of the Circle over her visor.

“Shut the fuck up,” Lamm told her.

“Let’s hope Mipp can distract them without getting his ass blown off,” Yalson said.

“Maybe we should call it off,” Rava Gamdol said. “Think we ought to call it off? Do you think we should call it off? Does anybody—”

“NO!” “YES!” “NO!” shouted three voices, almost in unison. Everybody looked at the three Bratsilakins. The two outer Bratsilakins turned their helmets to look at the one in the middle, as the shuttle swooped again. The middle Bratsilakin’s helmet turned briefly to each side. “Oh, shit,” a voice said over the open channel, “all right: NO!”

“I think maybe we should—” Rava Gamdol’s voice started again.

Then Kraiklyn shouted, “Here we go! Everybody ready!”

The shuttle braked hard, banking steeply one way, then the other, shuddering once and dipping. It bounced and shook, and for a second Horza thought they were crashing, but then the craft slid to a stop and the rear doors jawed open. Horza was on his feet with the rest of them, piling out of the shuttle and into the jungle.

They were in a clearing. At its far end a few branches and twigs were still tumbling from huge, heavy-looking trees where the shuttle had just seconds before torn through the edge of the forest canopy as it dipped in for the small area of level, grassy ground. Horza had time to see a couple of bright birds flying fast out of the trees near by and caught a glimpse of a blue-pink sky. Then he was running with the others, round the front of the shuttle where it still glowed dark red and vegetation beneath it smouldered, and on into the jungle. A few of the Company were using their AG, floating over the undergrowth between the moss-covered tree trunks, but hampered by creepers which hung like thick, flower-strewn ropes between the trees.

So far they still couldn’t see the Temple of Light, but according to Kraiklyn it was just ahead of them. Horza looked round at the others on foot as they clambered over fallen trees covered in moss and swept past creepers and suspended roots.

“Fuck dispersing; this is too hard going.” It was Lamm’s voice. Horza looked round and up, and saw the black suit heading vertically for the green mass of foliage above them.

“Bastard,” said a breathless voice.

“Yeah. B-b-bastard,” Lenipobra agreed.

“Lamm,” Kraiklyn said, “you son of a bitch, don’t break through up there. Spread out. Disperse, damn it!”

Then a shock wave Horza could feel through his suit blasted over them all. Horza hit the ground immediately and lay there. Another boom came through the hissing helmet speaker as it fed in the noise from outside.

“That was the CAT going over!” He didn’t recognise the voice.

“You sure?” Somebody else.

“I saw it through the trees! It was the CAT!”

Horza got up and started running again.

“Black bastard nearly took my fucking head off…” Lamm said.

There was light ahead of Horza, through the trunks and leaves. He heard some firing: the sharp crack of projectiles, the sucking whoop of lasers and the snap-whoosh-crash of plasma cannon. He ran to a small earth and shrub bank and threw himself down so that he could just see over the top. Sure enough, there was the Temple of Light, silhouetted against the dawn, all covered in vines and creepers and moss, with a few spires and towers sticking out above like angular tree trunks.

“There she is!” Kraiklyn shouted. Horza looked along the earth bank and saw a few of the Company, in the same prone position as he was. “Wubslin! Aviger!” Kraiklyn shouted. “Cover us with the plasmas. Neisin, you keep the micro on each side of the grounds beyond, as well. Everybody else, follow me!”

More or less as one, they were off, over the tangled bank of mossy ground and bushes and down the other side, through light scrub and long, cane-like grass, the stalks covered in clinging, dark green moss. The mixture of ground cover came up to about chest height and made the going difficult, but it would be reasonably easy to duck down out of a line of fire. Horza waded through as best as he could. Plasma bolts sang through the air above them, lighting the dim stretch of ground between them and the sloping temple wall.

Distant fountains of earth and crashes he could feel through his feet told Horza that Neisin, sober the last two days, was laying down a convincing and, more importantly, accurate fire pattern with the Microhowitzer.

“There’s a little gunfire from the upper left level,” the cool, unhurried voice of Jandraligeli said. According to the plan, he was supposed to be hiding high in the forest canopy watching the temple. “I’m hitting it now.”

“Shit!” somebody yelled suddenly. One of the women. Horza could hear firing from ahead, though there were no flashes from the part of the temple he could see.

“Ha ha.” Jandraligeli’s smug voice came through the helmet speaker. “Got them!” Horza saw a puff of smoke over to the left of the temple. He was about halfway there by now, maybe closer. He could see some of the others not far away, to his left and right, pushing and striding through the cane grass and bushes with their rifles held high to one shoulder. They were all gradually getting covered in the dark green moss, which Horza supposed might be useful as camouflage (providing, of course, that it didn’t turn out to be some horrible, previously undiscovered sentient killer-moss… He told himself to stop being silly).

Loud crashes in the shrubbery around him, and smashed bits of cane and twigs fluttering past like nervous birds, sent him diving for the ground. The earth beneath him shuddered. He rolled over and saw flames lick the mossy stalks above; a flickering patch of fire lay directly behind him.

“Horza?” a voice said. Yalson’s.

“OK,” he said. He got up to a crouch and started running through the grass, past bushes and young trees.

“We’re coming in now,” Yalson said. She was up in the trees, too, along with Lamm, Jandraligeli and Neisin. According to the plan, all except Neisin and Jandraligeli would now start moving through the air on AG towards the temple. Although the anti-gravity units on their suits gave them an extra dimension to work with, they could be something of a mixed blessing; while a figure in the air tended to be harder to hit than one on the ground, it also tended to attract a lot more fire. The only other person in the Company with AG was Kraiklyn, but he said he preferred to use his for surprise or in emergencies, so he was still on the ground with the rest of them.

“I’m at the walls!” Horza thought it was Odraye’s voice. “This looks all right. The walls are really easy; the moss makes it—”

Horza’s helmet speaker crackled. He wasn’t sure if there was something wrong with his communicator or if something had happened to Odraye.

“— ver me while I’m—”

“— on you useless—” Voices clashed in Horza’s helmet. He kept wading through the cane grass, and thumped the side of his helmet.

“— asshole!” The helmet speaker buzzed, then went silent. Horza swore and stopped, crouching down. He fumbled with the communicator controls at the side of the helmet, trying to coax the speaker back into life. His too-big gloves hindered him. The speaker stayed silent. He cursed again and got to his feet, pushing through the scrub and long grass to the temple wall.

“— rojectiles inside!” a voice yelled suddenly. “This — … — cking simple!” He couldn’t identify the voice, and the speaker went dead again immediately.

He arrived at the base of the wall; it slanted out of the scrub at about forty degrees and was covered in moss. Further along, two of the Company were clambering up it, almost at the top, about seven metres above. Horza saw a flying figure weaving through the air and disappearing over the parapet. He started climbing. The clumsily large suit made it more difficult than it should have been, but he got to the top without falling and jumped down from the parapet onto a broad wall-walk. A similar moss-covered wall sloped up to the next storey. To Horza’s right the wall turned a corner beneath a stubby tower; to his left the wall-walk seemingly disappeared into a blank cross-wall. According to Kraiklyn’s plan Horza was supposed to head along that way. There ought to be a door there. Horza jogged along towards the blank wall.

A helmet bobbed up from the side of the sloped wall. Horza started to duck and swerve, just in case, but first an arm waved from the same place, then both helmet and arm appeared, and he recognised the woman Gow.

Horza threw back the visor on his helmet as he ran, getting a faceful of jungle-scented Marjoin air. He could hear some rattling projectile fire from inside the temple, and the distant thud of an exploding Microhowitzer round. He ran up to a narrow entrance cut in the sloped wall, half covered by streamers of mossy growth. Gow was kneeling, gun ready, on the splintered remains of a heavy wooden door which had blocked the passageway beyond. Horza knelt beside her and pointed at his helmet.

“My communicator’s out. What’s been happening?”

Gow touched a button on her wrist, and her suit PA said, “OK so far. No hurts. They on towers.” She pointed up. “Them no fly go in. They enemy got projectile guns only, them fall back.” She nodded and kept glancing round through the doorway and into the dark passageway beyond. Horza nodded too. Gow tapped his arm. “I tell Kraiklyn you go in, yes?”

“Yeah, tell him my communicator’s out, OK?”

“Yeah, sure. Zallin same trouble had. You be safe, OK?”

“Yeah, you be safe, too,” Horza said. He stood up and entered the temple, scuffing over splinters of wood and fragments of sandstone scattered over the moss by the door’s demolition. The dark corridor branched three ways. He turned back to Gow and pointed. “Centre corridor, correct?”

The crouched figure, silhouetted against the light of the dawn, nodded and said, “Yeah, sure. Go middle.”

Horza set off. The corridor was covered in moss. Every few metres dim yellow electric lights burned from the walls, casting murky pools of light which the dark moss seemed to absorb. Soft-walled, sponge-floored, the narrow passage made Horza shiver, though it wasn’t cold. He checked that his gun was ready to fire. He could hear no other sound apart from his own breathing.

He came to a T-junction in the corridor and took the right-hand branch. Some steps appeared and he ran up them, stumbling once as his feet tried to run out of his oversized boots; he put his hand out and jarred his arm on the step. Some moss came off the step and he caught a glimpse of something glinting underneath, in the dull yellow light cast by the wall lights. He recovered his balance, shaking his jarred arm as he continued up the steps and wondering why the temple’s builders had made the steps out of what looked like glass. At the top of the steps he went down a short corridor, then up another flight of stairs, curving to the right and unlit. Considering its name, Horza thought, the temple was remarkably dark. He came out onto a small balcony.

The monk’s cloak was dark, the same colour as the moss, and Horza didn’t see him until the pale face turned towards him, along with the gun.

Horza threw himself to one side, against the wall to his left, and fired his gun from the hip at the same time. The monk’s gun jerked upwards and let loose a fusillade of rapid fire at the ceiling as he collapsed. The shots echoed round the dark, empty space beyond the small balcony. Horza squatted by the wall, gun pointed at the dark, crumpled figure only a couple of metres away. He raised his head and in the gloom saw what was left of the monk’s face, then relaxed slightly. The man was dead. Horza levered himself away from the wall and knelt by the balcony balustrade. Now he could see a large hall in the dim light of the few small globes which protruded from its roof. The balcony was about halfway up and along one of the longer walls, and, from what he could see, there was some sort of stage or altar at one end of the hall. The light was so dim he couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw shadowy figures on the floor of the hall, moving. He wondered if it was the Company and tried to recall seeing other doors or corridors on his way to the balcony; he was supposed to be down there, on that level, on the floor of the hall. He cursed his useless communicator and decided he would have to risk shouting down to the people in the hall.

He leant forward. Some shards of glass had fallen from the roof, where it had been hit by the monk’s gun, and his suited knee crunched on the debris. Before he could open his mouth to shout down into the hall, he heard noises from beneath — a high-pitched voice speaking a language of squeaks and clicks. He went still, said nothing. It might just have been Dorolow’s voice, he supposed, but why would she talk in anything other than Marain? The voice called again. He thought he heard another, but then laser and projectile fire erupted briefly from the opposite end of the hall from the altar. He ducked and in the lull heard something click behind him.

He spun round, tightening his finger on the trigger, but there was nobody there. Instead, a small round thing, about the size of a child’s clenched fist, wobbled on the top of the balustrade and plonked down onto the moss about a metre away. He kicked at it with his foot and dived across the body of the dead monk.

The grenade detonated in mid-air, just under the balcony.

Horza jumped up while the echoes were still cracking back from the altar. He leapt into the doorway at the far end of the balcony, putting out one hand and grabbing the soft corner of the wall as he went past, spinning himself round as he fell to his knees. He reached out and grabbed the dead monk’s gun from the corpse’s slack grip, just as the balcony started to come away from the wall with a glassy, grinding noise. Horza shoved himself back into the corridor behind him. The balcony tipped bodily away into the empty space of the hall in a dully glittering cloud of fragments and fell with a great, shattering crash onto the floor below, taking the shadowy form of the dead monk fluttering with it.

Horza saw more of the shapes scatter in the darkness beneath him, and fired down with the gun he had just acquired. Then he turned and looked down the corridor he was now in, wondering if there was some way down to the hall floor, or even back outside. He checked the gun he had taken; it looked better than his own. He crouched and ran away from the doorway looking over the hall, putting his old rifle over his shoulder. The dimly lit corridor curved right. Horza straightened gradually as he left the doorway behind, and stopped worrying about grenades. Then it all started to happen in the hall behind him.

The first thing he knew was that his shadow was being thrown in front of him, flickering and dancing on the curving wall of the passage. Then a cacophony of noise and a stuttering burst of blast waves rocked him on his feet and assaulted his ears. He brought the helmet visor down quickly and crouched again as he turned back towards the hall and the bright flashes of light. Even through the helmet, he thought he could hear screams mixed in with the gunfire and explosions. He ran back and threw himself down where he had been before, lying looking out into the hall.

He put his head down as fast as he could and used his elbows to lever himself back the instant he realised what was happening. He wanted to run, but he lay where he was, stuck the dead monk’s rifle round the corner of the doorway and sprayed fire in the general direction of the altar until the weapon stopped firing, keeping his helmet as far back from the doorway as possible, visor turned away. When that gun stopped he threw it away and used his own, until it jammed. He slid himself away after that, and ran off down the corridor, away from the opening of the hall. He didn’t doubt that the rest of the Company would be doing the same thing, those that could.

What he had seen ought to have been incredible, but although he had looked only long enough for a single, hardly moving image to form on his retinas, he knew what he was seeing and what was happening. As he ran he tried to work out why the hell the Temple of Light had been laserproofed. When he came to a T-junction in the corridor he stopped.

He swung his rifle butt at the corner of the wall, through the moss; the metal connected, doubtless denting, but he felt something else give too. Using the weak light from the suit torch cells on either side of the visor, he looked at what lay underneath the moss.

“Oh God…” he breathed to himself. He struck at another part of the wall and looked again. He remembered the glint of what he’d thought was glass under the moss on the stairs, when he’d jarred his arm, and the crunching feeling under his knee on the balcony. He leant against the soft wall, feeling sick.

Nobody had gone to the extraordinary lengths of laserproofing an entire temple, or even one large hall. It would have been horrendously expensive and surely unnecessary on a stage-three planet anyway. No; probably the whole interior of the temple (he recalled the sandstone to which the outer door had been attached) had been built from blocks of crystal, and that was what was buried under all the moss. Hit it with a laser and the moss would vaporise in an instant, leaving the interior surfaces of the crystal beneath to reflect the rest of that pulse and any subsequent shots falling on the same place. He looked again at the second place he’d struck with the gun, looked deep into the transparent surface beyond, and saw his own suit lights shining dully back at him from a mirrored boundary somewhere inside. He pushed himself away and ran down the right-hand branch of the corridor, past heavy wooden doors, then down some curved steps towards a splash of light.

What he had seen in the hall was chaos, lit with lasers. A single glimpse, coinciding with several flashes, had burned an image into his eyes he thought he could still half see. At one end of the hall, on the altar, monks were crouched, guns firing, their own guns flashing with chemical-explosive fire; around them burst dark explosions of smoke as moss vaporised. At the other end of the hall several of the Company stood or lay or staggered, their own shadows huge on the wall behind them. They were loosing off with everything they had, rifles strobing pulses off the far wall, and they were being hit by their own shots slamming back from the internal surfaces of crystal blocks they didn’t even realise they were aiming at. At least two were blind already, judging by the way they were caught in poses of sightless blundering, arms out in front of them, guns firing from one hand.

Horza knew too well that his own suit, his visor especially, was not capable of stopping a laser hit, from either visible wavelength guns or X-rays. All he could do was get his head out of the way and loose off with what projectiles he had, hoping to get a few of the priests or their guards. He had probably been lucky he hadn’t been hit even in the brief length of time he’d looked into the hall; now all he could do was get out. He tried shouting into the helmet mike, but the communicator was dead; his voice sounded hollow in the suit and he couldn’t hear himself through the ear speaker.

He saw another shadowy shape ahead, a dim silhouette crouched low against the wall in the pool of daylight coming from another corridor. Horza threw himself into a doorway. The figure didn’t move.

He tried his rifle; its knocks on the crystal walls seemed to have unjammed it. A burst of fire made the figure collapse slackly to the floor. Horza stepped out of the doorway and walked to it.

It was another monk, dead hand gripped round a pistol. His white face was visible in the light which came down another passageway. On the wall behind the monk there were the pockmarks of burned-off moss; clear, undamaged crystal showed through beneath. As well as the holes produced by Horza’s burst of fire, the monk’s tunic, now seeping with bright red blood, was covered with laser burns. Horza stuck his head round the corner, looking into the light.

Against the morning glow, framed in a slanting doorway, a suited form lay on the mossy floor, gun extended at the end of one hand so that it pointed down the passageway towards Horza. A heavy door lay at an angle behind, just hanging by one twisted hinge. It’s Gow, Horza thought. Then he looked at the door again, thinking it looked wrong somehow. The door and the walls leading to it were scarred with laser burns.

He went up the corridor to the fallen figure and rolled it over so that he could see the face. His head swam for a second as he looked. It wasn’t Gow; it was her friend, kee-Alsorofus, who had died here. Her blackened, cracked face stared out, dry-eyed, through the still clear visor of her helmet. He looked at the door and at the corridor. Of course: he was in another part of the temple. Same situation, but a different set of passageways, and a different person…

The woman’s suit was holed, centimetres deep, in a few places; the smell of burned flesh leaked into Horza’s ill-fitting suit, making him gag. He stood up, took kee-Alsorofus’s laser, stepped over the slanted door and went out onto the wall-walk. He ran along it, round a corner, ducking once as a Microhowitzer shell landed too close to the temple’s sloping walls and sent up a shower of flashing crystal fragments and ruddy chunks of sandstone. The plasma cannons were still firing from the forest, too, but Horza couldn’t see any flying figures. He was looking for them when he suddenly sensed the suit to one side of him, standing in the angle of the wall. He stopped, recognising Gow’s suit, and stood about three metres from her while she looked at him. She pushed the visor on her helmet up slowly. Her grey face and black, pit-like eyes fixed on the laser rifle he was carrying. The look on her face made him wish he had checked the gun was still switched on. He looked down at the gun in his hand, then at the woman, who was still staring at it.

“I—” He was going to explain.

“She killed, yeah?” The woman’s voice sounded flat. She seemed to sigh. Horza drew in a breath, was about to start talking again, but Gow spoke in the same monotone. “I thought I hear she.”

Suddenly she brought her gun hand up, flashing in the blue and pink of the morning sky. Horza saw what she was doing and started forward, reaching out instantly with one hand even though he knew he was too far away and too late to do anything.

“Don’t!” he had time to shout, but the gun was already in the woman’s mouth and an instant later, as Horza started to duck and his eyes closed instinctively, the back of Gow’s helmet blew out in a single pulse of unseen light, throwing a sudden red cloud over the mossy wall behind.

Horza sat down on his haunches, hands closed round the gun barrel in front of him, eyes staring out at the distant jungle. What a mess, he thought, what a fucking, obscene, stupid mess. He hadn’t been thinking of what Gow had just done to herself, but he looked round at the red stain on the angled wall and the collapsed shape of Gow’s suit, and thought it again.

He was about to start back down the outer wall of the temple when something moved in the air above him. He turned and saw Yalson landing on the wall-walk. She looked at Gow’s body once, then they exchanged what they both knew of the situation — what she had heard over the open communicator channel, what Horza had seen in the hall — and decided they would stay put until some of the others came out, or they gave up hope. According to Yalson only Rava Gamdol and Tzbalik Odraye were definitely dead after the fire-fight in the hall, but all three Bratsilakins had been there too, and nobody had heard anything from them after the open channel had become intelligible again and most of the screaming had stopped.

Kraiklyn was alive and well but lost; Dorolow lost too, sitting crying, maybe blinded; and Lenipobra, against all advice and Kraiklyn’s orders, had entered the temple through a roof door and was heading down to try to rescue anybody he could, using only a small projectile pistol he’d been carrying.

Yalson and Horza sat back to back on the wall-walk, Yalson keeping the Changer informed on how things were going in the temple. Lamm flew overhead, heading for the jungle where he took one of the plasma cannons from the protesting Wubslin. He had just landed near by when Lenipobra announced proudly he had found Dorolow, and Kraiklyn reported he could see daylight. There was still no sound from the Bratsilakins. Kraiklyn appeared round a corner of the wall-walk; Lenipobra leapt into view, clutching Dorolow to his suit and bounding down over the walls in a series of great slow jumps as his AG struggled to lift both him and the woman.

They set off back to the shuttle. Jandraligeli could see movement on the road beyond the temple, and there was sniper fire coming from the jungle on either side. Lamm wanted to tear into the temple with the plasma cannon and vaporise a few monks, but Kraiklyn ordered the retreat. Lamm threw the plasma gun down and sailed off towards the shuttle alone, swearing loudly over the open channel on which Yalson was still trying to call the Bratsilakins.

They waded through the tall cane grass and bushes under the whooshing trails of plasma bolts, as Jandraligeli gave them cover. They had to duck occasionally as small-bore projectile fire tore through the greenery around them.

They sprawled in the hangar of the Clear Air Turbulence, beside the still warm shuttle as it clicked and creaked, cooling down again after its high-speed climb through the atmosphere.

Nobody wanted to talk. They just sat or lay on the deck, some with their backs against the side of the warm shuttle. Those who had been inside the temple were the most obviously affected, but even the others, who had only heard the mayhem over their suit communicators, seemed in a state of mild shock. Helmets and guns lay scattered about them.

“ ‘Temple of Light,’,” Jandraligeli said eventually, and gave what sounded like a mixture of laugh and snort.

“Temple of fucking Light,” Lamm agreed.

“Mipp,” Kraiklyn said in a tired voice to his helmet, “any signals from the Bratsilakins?”

Mipp, still on the CAT’s small bridge, reported that there was nothing.

“We ought to bomb that place to fuck,” Lamm said. “Nuke the bastards.” Nobody replied. Yalson got up slowly and left the hangar, walking tiredly up the steps to the upper deck, helmet dangling from one arm, gun from the other, her head down.

“I’m afraid we’ve lost that radar.” Wubslin closed an inspection hatch and rolled out from underneath the nose of the shuttle. “That first bit of hostile fire…” His voice trailed off.

“Least nobody’s injured,” Neisin said. He looked at Dorolow. “Your eyes better?” The woman nodded but kept her eyes closed. Neisin nodded, too. “Actually worse, when people are injured. We were lucky.” He dug into a small pack on the front of his suit and produced a little metal container. He sucked at a nipple at the top and grimaced, shaking his head. “Yeah, we were lucky. And it was fairly quick for them, too.” He nodded to himself, not looking at anybody, not caring that nobody seemed to be listening to him. “See how everybody we’ve lost all shared the same… I mean they went in pairs… or threes… huh?” He took another slug and shook his head. Dorolow was near by; she reached over and held out her hand. Neisin looked at her in surprise, then handed the small flask to her. She took a swig and passed it back. Neisin looked around, but no one else wanted any.

Horza sat and said nothing. He was staring at the cold lights of the hangar, trying not to see the scene he had witnessed in the hall of the dark temple.

The Clear Air Turbulence broke orbit on fusion drive and headed for the outer edge of Marjoin’s gravity well, where it could engage its warp motors. It didn’t pick up any signals from the Bratsilakins and it didn’t bomb the Temple of Light. It set a course for the Vavatch Orbital.

From radio transmissions they had picked up from the planet they worked out what had happened to the place, what had caused the monks and priests in the temple to be so well armed. Two nation states on the world of Marjoin were at war, and the temple was near the frontier between the two countries, constantly ready for attack. One of the states was vaguely socialist; the other was religiously inspired, the priests in the Temple of Light representing one sect of that militant faith. The war was partly caused by the greater, galactic conflict taking place around it, as well as being a tiny and approximate image of it. It was that reflection, Horza realised, which had killed the members of the Company, as much as any bounced laserflash.

Horza wasn’t sure how he would sleep that night. He lay awake for a few hours, listening to Wubslin having quiet nightmares. Then the cabin door was tapped lightly. Yalson came in and sat on Horza’s bunk. She put her head on his shoulder and they held each other. After a while she took his hand and led him quietly down the companionway, away from the mess — where a splash of light and distant music witnessed that the unsleeping Kraiklyn was unwinding with a drug flask and a holosound tape — down to the cabin which had been Gow’s and kee-Alsorofus’s.

In the darkness of the cabin, on a small bed full of strange scents and new textures, they performed the same old act, theirs — they both knew — an almost inevitably barren cross-matching of species and cultures thousands of light-years apart. Then they slept.