'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.
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.
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
They sprawled in the hangar of the
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
