‘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. W
as 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 hunch
backed man with the long yellow-skinned face probably knew just about enough, Horza reckoned, to handle anything that went wrong with the ship’s brain, 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.