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 toward a cloudy, bluegreen 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 toward
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 armoredassault 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 meters long, twenty across the beam and fifteen high, plus—on
top of the rear hull—a ten-
meter-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-meter 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 realized 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 armor 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."