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 leaned 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 vaporize 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 righthand branch
of the corridor, past heavy wooden doors, then down some curved steps toward 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 vaporized. 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 realize 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 burnedoff 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 toward 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, centimeters 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, recognizing Gow’s suit, and stood about
three meters from her while she looked
at him. She pushed the visor on her helmet up slowly. Her gray 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 firefight 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 nearby 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 vaporize a few monks,
but Kraiklyn ordered the retreat.