"Come with me," Noneth enjoined, gently persuasive, his gaunt hand beckoning to Kira. "Come," echoed the sepulchral voice greedily.
The ground car had no sooner left the base of the KH-834 than the guard began to move.
"She will see Him Who Orders," one sighed enviously. "The bareface harlot will be given an unjust reward. Now! Up the lift and let us secure the cargo. Think of it! Thousands more to die to expiate the sin against Him Who Orders."
That was sufficient for Helva. She locked the lift controls and slid the airlock securely tight. Curse, hammer, buffet though those Aliothites might, Helva was invulnerable against such weapons as Alioth's technology possessed. She activated the tight beam to Cencom. Alioth would rue the day its religious hierarchy decided to hijack the cargo of a Service ship, much less kidnap its brawn.
Dispassionately Helva took account of the matter of Kira's departure. The girl had, in the extremes of grief, sought death. But Helva doubted Kira would betray her service. For one thing, she couldn't, although the Aliothites didn't realize the ship was capable of independent thought and action. Having enticed the brawn away, they assumed the ship was grounded, impotent, and they could take their time forcing Kira to accede to their designs on the embryos.
I could just leave, Helva thought. If death is the reward these zealots seek, then I don't need to have any compunctions about burning the guard detail to its due merits. But I cannot leave Kira. Not yet. I have time. What was the matter with Cencom? They were never around when you needed them! And why in the name of little apples did they permit Kira to land on a death-dedicated planet? You idiot, Helva told herself, because they didn't know that's the way the religion turned.
The ground rumbled beneath her. Far to the north a fireball zoomed heavenward, bursting in a shower of lighted fragments. Other fireworks followed, as well as more ominous movement beneath Helva's tailfins. She held herself ready for an instant liftoff if her balance was shaken beyond the normal recovery in her stabilizers. Somewhere to the northeast, another volcano answered the eruption of the first.
Helva saw the ground car carrying Kira reach the central building and she muttered ineffective mental commands for Kira to snap out of her trance and switch on the contact button.
The guard, impervious to the massed eruptions, went right on trying to force the lift mechanism. Their cowls kept falling from their faces and they kept replacing them as if a bare face were indecent. The red light from the fireballs that continued to light the sky illuminated gaunt, ascetic faces, dirty with ingrained volcanic dusts, dulleyed from improper nutrition and continual fatigue.
Klra alighted from the transport and, flanked by guards, was escorted to a smaller vehicle that disappeared from Helva's augmented vision into the complex of city buildings. The transport turned back to the field and Helva.
An enterprising guard urged his fellows to bring a gantry rig against the ship. Slowly and with much effort, they wheeled the cumbersome frame from a far side of the field.
Helva watched the performance with grim amusement. Their own fault for insisting we set down so far from the facilities of the port. Perhaps they couldn't see in the gloom of Alioth's perpetual twilight that the lock was closed tight, too.
She tried to rouse Cencom on the tight beam, cursing at that delay because she was so worried about not reaching Kira on the contact.
"Contact button," she muttered to herself, recalling the anomalous appearance of one on Noneth's hood. Now, if it were a Service issue or a true imitation, she ought to be able to use it. That Temple female had utilized one to second Noneth's commands to Kira.
Helva wasted no time in throwing open the wide-wave on the contact band. As hastily, she closed it, dazed with the resultant chaotic kaleidoscope of sight and sound that besieged her. Mentally reeling from the impact on her senses, she wondered painfully how she had managed to get several hundred thousand contacts at once. Quickly she scanned the scurrying guards, still trying to wrestle the gantry frame to her. Each one had a button securing his hood at the neck.
"Great glittering galaxies," moaned Helva. "This religion must be composed of schizoids to deal with that kind of chaos."
Holding tightly to her sanity, Helva opened the band a fraction, wincing at the confusion of sound and sight. She tried to focus in on one contact alone but felt herself drowning in the myriad pictures that returned. It was like trying to focus on a pinpoint through the faceting of a fly's eyeball.
Grimly she refined vision to one small area, forcing herself to accept only one of the conflicting and overlapping images that returned to her. She cut out the sound completely. Fortunately every wearer in the selected segment was converging on one location, crossing a huge plaza, crowded with gyrating, swaying cowled figures, their robes flapping around them as they approached the wide deep steps that led up the side of the dead volcano. This was the ziggurat Helva had noticed in the tape clip.
Suddenly everything and every figure tilted. It took Helva a moment to realize she too was rocking with earthquake as three more volcanoes spewed out their guts skyward. She waited, alert, lest the instability of the spaceport field became too critical for her to remain planet-bound!
An ecstatic, moaning roar wafted through the air, now hazy as the earth's minute shifts released gases from narrow fissures in the floor of the plaza. Helva, already confused, did not at first catch the significance of the gas or the fact that the ululation was reaching her ship's outer ears, not issuing from the dumb contact circuits.
Helva increased power in the tight beam, desperately trying to raise Cencom over the volcanic interferences.
Simultaneously she cut in the narrow contact, anxious not to lose Kira. Everyone in the plaza was now waving arms aloft, hoods thrown back from joyful faces raised to the spark-filled, gas-fogged skies. Then the Aliothites wheeled, ducking their heads to breathe deeply of the rising gas fumes. Incredulous, Helva watched, as more and more people pushed and crowded around the fissures; inhaling deeply, staggering away; faces rapt, arms aloft, movements erratic. Then Helva realized that the gases were either hallucinogenic or euphoric, doubly dangerous at a time of mass volcanic eruptions. Yet the exposed open plaza was rapidly filling with bodies either already intoxicated or frantically trying to be.
The significance of gas eruptions in the plaza before the Temple of this demoniac religion was not lost on Helva. Obviously, this effect was known and calculated by the temple hierarchy. Helva was revolted and enraged by such depravity and she redoubled her efforts to locate Kira and her escort. They would have to leave the vehicle and enter the plaza on the south side. One multi-exposed group caught her searching eyes. There couldn't be two such slender hoodless figures on this mad planet. Kira was just entering the plaza, her inexorable progress toward the ziggurat steps impeded by the jerking, jolting freak-inebriates.
Fully alarmed, Helva widened the band, trying to skip from contact to contact, forward toward Kira. The effect was maddening, like seeing thousands of film tapes all interlocking fuzzily, playing on the same master screen. For the first time in her life, Helva felt vertigo and nausea. Her sense of impending disaster deepened as she tried to reach Kira before she entered the Temple of Death. Placed as it was on the top of the massive ziggurat, right next to the old volcano, it must be heavy with the hallucinogenic gases. Helva thanked the Service for the small blessing that Kira had been desensitized to such hazards as hallucinogens, but the girl was as immobile in her trance as if she were susceptible.
Helva groaned at her inability to reach Kira, spiritually or physically.
"Ooooh," an answering groan rose from the multitude. "The Temple weeps," the garbled cry went up from a thousand throats. Even the guards at the spaceport, wrestling with the gantry frame, echoed the chant.