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 hunchbacked man with the long yellow-skinned face probably knew just about enough, Horza reckoned, to handle anything that went wrong with the ship's brains, 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.
"What the hell are you looking at me for?" Lamm's voice said, in amongst the storm of static, as Horza sat in the shuttle, shaking and rattling inside his too-big suit. Horza realised he had been looking across at the other man, who was directly opposite. He touched the mike button on his neck and said:
"Thinking about something else."
"I don't want you looking at me."
"Us all got to look somewhere," Horza said jokingly to the man in the matt-black suit and grey-visored helmet. The black suit made a gesture with the hand not holding a laser rifle.
"Well, don't fucking look at me."
Horza let his hand drop from his neck. He shook his head inside the suit helmet. It fitted so badly it didn't move on the outside. He stared at the section of fuselage above Lamm's head.
They were going to attack the Temple of Light. Kraiklyn was at the controls of the shuttle, bringing it in low over the forests of Marjoin, still covered in night, heading for the line of dawn breaking over the packed and steaming greenery. The plan was that the CAT would come back in towards the planet with the sun very low behind it, using its effectors on any electronics the temple did have, and making as much noise and as many flashes as it could with its secondary lasers and a few blast bombs. While this diversion was absorbing any defensive capacity the priests might have, the shuttle would either head straight for the temple and let everybody off, or, if there was any hostile reaction, land in the forest on the night side of the temple and disgorge its small force of suited troops there. The Company would then disperse and, if they had the facility, use their AG to fly to the temple, or — as in Horza's case — just crawl, creep, walk or run as best they could for the collection of low, slope-sided buildings and short towers which made up the Temple of Light.