Zallin went still, a gurgling noise coming from his throat where Horza's hands held him. He was more than strong enough to throw the Changer off, to roll on his back and crush him; but before he could have done anything, one flick of Horza's hands would have broken his neck.

Zallin was looking up at Kraiklyn, who stood almost right in front of him. Horza, too, lathered in sweat and gulping air, looked up into the dark, deep-set eyes of the Man. Zallin wriggled a little, then went motionless again when Horza tensed his forearms.

They were all looking at him — all the mercenaries, all the pirates or privateers or whatever they wanted to call themselves. They stood round the two walls of the hangar and they looked at Horza. But only Kraiklyn was looking into Horza's eyes.

"This doesn't have to be to the death," Horza panted. He looked for a moment at the silver hairs in front of him, some of them plastered with sweat to the boy's scalp. He looked up at Kraiklyn again. "I won. You can let the kid off next place you stop. Or let me off. I don't want to kill him."

Something warm and sticky seemed to be seeping from the deck along his right leg. He realised it was Zallin's blood from the wound on his leg. Kraiklyn had a strangely distant look on his face. The laser gun, which he had holstered, was lifted easily back out of its holster into his left hand and pointed at the centre of Horza's forehead. In the silence of the hangar, Horza heard it click and hum as it was switched on, about a metre away from his skull.

"Then you'll die," Kraiklyn told him, in a flat, even voice. "I've no place on this ship for somebody who hasn't the taste for a little murder now and again."

Horza looked into Kraiklyn's eyes, over the motionless barrel of the laser pistol. Zallin moaned.

The snap echoed round the metal spaces of the hangar like a gunshot. Horza opened his arms without taking his eyes off the mercenary chief's face. Zallin's limp body tumbled slackly to the deck and crumpled under its own weight. Kraiklyn smiled and put the gun back in its holster. It clicked off with a fading whine.

"Welcome aboard the Clear Air Turbulence." Kraiklyn sighed and stepped over Zallin's body. He walked to the middle of one bulkhead, opened a door and went out, his boots clattering on some steps. Most of the others followed him.

"Well done." Horza, still kneeling, turned at the words. It was the woman with the nice voice again, Yalson. She offered him her hand once more, this time to help him up. He took it gratefully and got to his feet.

"I didn't enjoy it," he told her. He wiped some sweat from his brow with his forearm and looked into the woman's eyes. "You said your name was Yalson, right?"

She nodded. "And you're Horza."

"Hello, Yalson."

"Hello, Horza." She smiled a little. Horza liked her smile. He looked at the corpse on the deck. Blood had stopped flowing from the wound in one leg.

"What about that poor bastard?" he asked.

"Might as well dump him," Yalson said. She looked over at the only other people left in the hangar, three thickly furred and identical heavy-set males in shorts. They stood in a group near the door the others had left by, looking at him curiously. All three had heavy boots on, as though they had just started to suit up and had been interrupted at the same moment. Horza wanted to laugh. Instead he smiled and waved.

"Hello."

"Ah, those are the Bratsilakins," Yalson said, as the three furry bodies waved dark grey hands at him, not quite in synch. "One, Two and Three," she continued, nodding at each one in turn. "We must be the only Free Company with a clone group that's paranoid."

Horza looked at her to see if she was serious, just as the three furry humans came over to him.

"Don't listen to a word she says," one of them said, in a soft voice Horza found surprising. "She's never liked us. We just hope that you're on our side." Six eyes looked anxiously at Horza. He did his best to smile.

"You can depend on it," he told them. They smiled back and looked from one to another, nodding.

"Let's get Zallin into a vactube. Probably dump him later," Yalson said to the other three. She went over to the body. Two of the Bratsilakins followed her, and between the three of them they got the limp corpse to an area of the hangar deck where they lifted some metal planks up, opened a curved hatch, stuffed Zallin's body into a narrow space, then closed both hatch and deck again. The third Bratsilakin took a cloth from a wall panel and mopped up the blood on the deck. Then the hairy clone group headed for the door and the stairs. Yalson came up to Horza. She made a sideways gesture with her head. "Come on. I'll show you where you can clean up."

He followed her over the hangar deck towards the doorway. She turned round as they went. "The rest have gone to eat. I'll see you in the mess if you're ready in time. Just follow your nose. Anyway, I have to collect my winnings."

"Your winnings?" Horza said as they got to the doorway, where Yalson put her hand on what Horza assumed were lighting switches. She turned to him, looking into his eyes.

"Sure," she said, and pressed one of the switches covered by her hand. The lights didn't change, but under his feet Horza could feel a vibration. He heard a hiss and what sounded like a pump running. "I bet on you," Yalson said, then turned and bounded up the steps beyond the door, two at a time.

Horza looked round at the hangar once and then followed her.

Just before the Clear Air Turbulence went back into warp and its crew sat down at table, the ship expelled the limp corpse of Zallin. Where it had found a live man in a suit, it left a dead youth in shorts and a tattered shirt, tumbling and freezing while a thin shell of air molecules expanded around the body, like an image of departing life.

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.