Rakki couldn’t imagine anywhere beyond the sky. “What is it they seek from us?” he muttered.
“Why must they be seeking anything?”
“It is the way. They must know this, for they are powerful. The strong only become weak by serving others.”
“You lived, Rakki, because Enka came looking for you, and brought us to where you were,” Shell Eyes said, referring to Gap Teeth by his name. “You became strong again because of others.”
“Others who needed my strength,” Rakki said. “You live here now because I lead. You left the caves to escape from Jemmo. Left to him, you, White Head, would have died.”
“Is that why you think we saved you?” White Head asked.
Rakki scowled and found that he couldn’t answer. The question had made him angry. He wasn’t sure why. “Everyone must seek for themselves,” he said. And turning away to end the conversation, he stalked out of the hut.
The head god, whom the metal bird obeyed, was standing a short distance away, talking with the warrior god who had watched. Rakki studied them and their strange garb again, and his eyes came back to the gun that the warrior was carrying, now slung behind a shoulder like a bow. It looked heavier and larger than the one Rakki had handled briefly at the caves. Sims said it was more powerful, holding more bullets and sending them farther.
Rakki forced himself to control his resentments, remain calm, and think again why he should permit these gods to steal glory before his own people. Because by tolerating their arrogance, he might gain a place as an ally to them in whatever it was they sought. If he and his people became allies, then they would have access to guns too. Then his vengeance upon Jemmo would be total and crushing, and he would rule the Swamplands as well as the caves.
Everyone had to seek for themselves. It was the way.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Jupiter survey mission vessel Trojan was virtually a sister ship to the ill-fated Osiris, which had perished during its return voyage to Earth after bringing Keene’s group and other Terran survivors to Kronia. Like the Osiris, it had been constructed with armaments during the time of political tension that had existed between Kronia and Earth, and the armaments had been retained as a resource for the Security Arm in case of need. In fact, the Security Arm were crewing and operating the craft jointly with SOE, making the Jupiter mission a combined planetary survey and SA training venture.
Also like the Osiris, Trojan was built with a unique Kronian variable geometry that combined linear and rotational accelerations to provide a simulation of normal gravity whether the ship was in freefall or under drive. The basic form was that of wheel attached to one end of an axle. The axle was the main body of the vessel and consisted of a relatively thick cylindrical forward end, with a thinner section extending tailward like the handle of an old-fashioned potato masher and containing the fusion reactant tanks and propulsion system. The larger part carried the heavy equipment, cargo bays, and docking port, and also formed the base for six spoke booms (the Osiris had been built with four) extending radially to accommodation modules carried at their ends. The modules were interconnected by a circular communications tube to complete the wheel.
The booms pivoted at their bases to be capable of trailing back like the spokes of a partly opened umbrella when the ship was under drive acceleration. The angle they assumed was always such that the forces produced by the vessel’s forward thrust and by the rotation of the whole structure formed a resultant perpendicular to the decks in the modules at the ends. Telescopic sections in the connecting ring compensated for changes in the ring’s circumference when the trailing angle altered.
Colonel Birt Nyrom, commander of the Trojan’s SA contingent, stood in the minigravity of the Forward Port Hoist Compartment in the Hub, watching a practice squad completing the drill of bringing long-range attack boosters up from the main armory. The boosters were for attaching to multi-targeting fission-pumped laser warheads, which constituted the vessel’s primary long-range armament. The LORIN shield against incoming meteoroids was an adaptation of the same concept. Since the device was triggered—and in the process, vaporized—by a nuclear bomb, it had to be ejected to a safe distance from the ship before firing, typically fifty miles when used as a defense screen. Larger boosters could be attached for carrying out attacks over longer ranges. During the voyage to Jupiter, it was intended to carry out a series of exercises in deploying and recovering unarmed attack-configured warheads over varying distances from the ship. The boosters were being brought up to the ejection stations in preparation.