Balshazzar's Serpent

IX: THE DEVIL IN IRONS

It might have been that after all this time, Captain Sapenza was just too rusty, but he’d clearly made an amateur’s mistake and now he was going to pay for it. With the security team sweep having made certain that there were no unwelcome snipers about as had been planted the day before, the primary danger came from who and what they could see and from the single entrance/exit they already knew about.

From the moment Doctor Woodward had signalled the “Go ahead” with his cigar, things pretty much automatically happened. As the Doctor stepped back, Cromwell’s combat suit sent a strong stun charge straight into Ziggee, dropping him before the little man even was aware that anything was wrong. At the same moment, Robey tapped the small button just inside the sleeve of his robe and felt the pistol shoot into his hand. He didn’t have Cromwell’s computerized super accuracy but he didn’t need it; his job was to shoot Eve at maximum stun.

Even as she took the force of the blast and seemed to collapse like some kind of marionette whose strings were swiftly cut, Cromwell had swiveled and fired a series of strong blasts directly at the cave opening. Large rocks and part of the shattered door blew up and out with a bang.

Woodward now crouched and ran forward, picking up the limp Eve as if she were a rag doll and then running back towards the ship. By this point, he was under protective cover from three of Cromwell’s snipers and from Archangel orbiting above.

Neither Cromwell nor Robey stopped. They both went forward, Robey behind the armored Cromwell for protection, making as fast as they could for the opening to down below. Reaching the still smoking spot, Cromwell jumped into the hole as Robey undid the sash of his robe in order to remove the portable ferret monitor strapped to his chest, put it on the ground and activate it.

“Damn!” he heard Cromwell swear, and knew that not everything was according to plan.

“Problems, sir?”

“It’s Englar. Will Englar. The bastard was using him as a secondary remote! I’d hoped to see Sapenza, but he’s rusty, not dumb. All right, I’m going to bring the boy out. He’s probably under control, like your girl, but he’s also hurt bad here. Get him back to Olivet as fast as you can!”

“Sir? You don’t need me for the ferrets?”

“Come on, lad! Take him! My people are coming in to reinforce as we speak! Your job’s over!”

Even as Robey struggled with the big man’s limp body, he heard the sounds of explosions off in the distance. The other teams were in and probably ahead of them.

It was obvious to him that he just couldn’t get Englar back to the ship alone. The guy was bigger than he was, limp, and bleeding from several wounds. Eve was a lot easier to handle.

“Need help with a wounded man here!” he radioed on the general frequency. “Bleeding, time of the essence!”

Within a couple of minutes, even as the rest of Cromwell’s team was going in, two brown-robed Chief Ushers were at Robey’s side, one with a litter. With that, and a man on each end, Robey realized that he had nothing else to do.

Well, the black-clad security people didn’t have those fancy Cromwell-type suits on when they’d gone down that hole, he thought. Cromwell wanted the combat suits spread out among the different teams going in all over the area.

“Archangel, hook me into Secured Tactical,” he called. “I’m going in.”

“That’s not authorized, Brother,” the monitoring security officer responded.

“Look, I’ve just about had it with these people and the only one I’ve been able to shoot so far is my partner. I’m going in. If you don’t patch me in, they’ll probably shoot me thinking I’m a bad guy, but I’m going in!”

“Very well. We’ll patch you in, but this will be reported to the Doctor.”

“Fine. I’ve been with him the last day and a half. He may not approve but I think he’ll understand. Going in!”

He jumped down into the hole.

It was clear almost immediately that they’d jury-rigged some kind of comm link using the two captured and controlled Arms as the last links. That way, Sapenza was in no immediate danger from the kind of move they pulled, and their own people had taken the brunt of it. So be it.

Whatever the chemical was that they sprayed on these mostly natural caverns to illuminate them was effective. It wasn’t exactly daylight, but it was pretty easy to see and to navigate through the area.

Mostly, that meant seeing where Cromwell’s people had been. At various hollows, where “rooms” had been cut out or enlarged from natural expansion, there were signs of skirmishes and even a couple of bodies. Villagers from their looks, which meant Sapenza’s crew in this case.

There was no fooling around at this point, either. People with any sort of weapon in their possession or near them were stone cold dead; those without weapons were mostly out in heavy stun, to be collected by a mop-up team that was even now being deployed from Olivet and going into each of the openings.

The first time, Robey stared at the open, lifeless eyes and death expressions and tried to get a grip on himself. Stun, even heavy stun, he’d seen and done, but people deliberately killed was new to him. The fact that they appeared to have been almost surgically selected and almost certainly dispatched with incredible speed was a tribute to Cromwell’s skill, and a scary look inside the old soldier’s soul. There were all sorts of legends as to who and what Cromwell had been before joining The Mountain, but only here was Robey faced with the probability that some of them were true.

Robey snapped out of it and turned and started running down the cave as the noises of various light weapons could be heard echoing in the distance. No more looking in at each room or musing about life and death; what was happening was happening ahead, and if he didn’t get there soon he might wind up with the mop-up team.

“Archangel, how far ahead is the security team?” he called, then suddenly realized that the same coating and mineral structure that had protected Sapenza’s empire from being detected also had him cut off from anybody else. All of a sudden he was aware of how alone he really was.

This was brought home to him when he suddenly came out into a larger cave only to see a half dozen smaller tubular caves leading away in different directions. There were no signs, no “You Are Here” plaques, nothing. Like the cave where these people had hidden their arsenal, he and possibly the rest were in a Minoan maze without benefit of string to find their way out.

He was about to pick one at random and trust to Providence when the distinctive electronic sound of rifle fire reached him from the second cave entrance to his right. He quickly moved towards it and saw that somebody had chalked an “X” just at its entrance. He hadn’t noticed it because it was rather light and from any distance just mixed with the mineral’s glimmerings but now he realized how the mop-up team was supposed to follow. Entering, he ran down the cave at full speed.

Some of the cave segments were much larger or wider than others, but the longest was no more than a few hundred meters before it opened into one or another chamber. In this one, the chamber it opened into was impressive indeed; it was, in fact, almost an entire small town in and of itself, complete with a couple of echoing barking dogs.

These looked to be offices or apartments of some kind, and they looked prefabricated, not something that anyone would expect or even be able to make on this rural backwater of a world.

Cubes stacked atop cubes… How did they get them in here? he wondered. Was there another lift like the one used at the arsenal? Or did these construct themselves from programmed modules once you got them down through a cave opening?

He didn’t have much time to ruminate or explore. An armored head suddenly shot out from a second-story window of the complex and Cromwell’s unmistakable voice, icy to the point of freezing anything it touched, yelled, “Robey, what the devil do you think you’re doing here? Go! Get out of here! Get back to the ship! It’s important, unless you want to stay on this miserable rock with the surviving ones who did this to us!”

Robey suddenly had the awful feeling that he’d slept through the meeting or something. “But where do I go?” he called back. “How do I find the way out?”

“Use the chalk marks! Keep to the right and look for up arrows! The rest will be obvious! Now move!”

He wasn’t quite sure what all the fuss was about, since so long as they didn’t have the location and control of those defensive naval guns everybody was stuck here anyway, but you didn’t argue with Cromwell. Next to the Doctor, he was the most formidable power anybody who grew up in the mission ever knew or could conceive of.

“Keep to the right…” Sounded simple enough. An “X” on the far right cave confirmed things. Now he was on the trail of Cromwell’s heavily armed squad, although he wasn’t sure what the security man was doing hanging back. Looking for anything useful in that previously hidden headquarters, most likely.

Still, he was so concerned with getting out at this point that he almost ran straight into a firefight.

They were shooting back and forth from cave openings across a small chamber just ahead. He could see two of the security team firing what they called rifles but which were, if at full power, more like portable laser canons of the sort Cromwell had used to initially blast the opening pack in the pasture. Return fire seemed to be smaller hand weapons, pulse blasters and laser pistols. They were no match for the security team’s firepower, but so long as they could shoot across the open space there was no way anybody else was going to cross.

One of the black-clad squad glanced back and noticed him and seemed about as thrilled by his presence as Cromwell had been. Still, he was one more gun if need be.

He crouched low and tried to see what he could. “Where are they?”

“Just stick your head out there and you’ll find out!” the nearest team member responded. He was surprised to hear a woman’s voice, particularly one with that kind of toughness. The Doctor really was kind of sexist, but somehow he’d never let that get in the way of pragmatism, and Cromwell only wanted to see you in action.

“They’re blocking that one tunnel on both sides,” the woman continued. “We don’t know why. If they don’t have an escape hatch in between they’re virtually committing suicide and they have to know that.”

Robey could see the problem. You couldn’t use gas down here for obvious reasons, particularly not with hostages and idiots like him wandering about, and you couldn’t just turn limestone into marble using the laser canons because you didn’t want to block access.

“Cover your ears and open your mouth!” the woman told him sharply. “It might not save your ears, but you deserve that much for being where you shouldn’t!”

He barely had time to do as instructed when the two of them used the targeting computer modules on their rifles to calibrate and time two shots, including ricochets. This was a new one on him, but he noted that before they started their computations both members of the squad had put on ear mufflers.

The light was almost blinding as it was, the initial sounds the twangs of laser weapons, but when the shots, one after the other, struck the cave where resistance was mounted there was a noise louder and more prolonged and more intense than John Robey had ever heard. His ears literally hurt as if somebody had stuck sharp objects into them, and for a moment he seemed to lose consciousness and then come back with a horrible and persistent ringing all he could hear.

The squad members, having no such problems thanks to their mufflers, now moved, removing the head gear as they did so, and advanced, military style, across the cavern to the targeted cave opening.

There were several more shots that Robey could tell only by seeing the flashes, and then nothing. Curious, the pain in his ears subsiding although not the ringing, he decided to follow. If he was on the way out, then his best route might well be by following those two.

They had shot to kill, that was clear, but the expressions on the faces and the huge amount of blood evident there made it even more dramatic. They weren’t bleeding from the coup de gras, that was for sure. They were bleeding from their ears, noses, and mouths.

Almost subconsciously he reached up to both his ears and put a finger in each, then looked at them. No blood, thank the Lord! But he was aware that he did in fact have something of a bloody nose. He hoped that was all.

One of the squad said something to him, but all he could do was reply, “I can’t hear! Ringing in my ears won’t stop!”

“That’s a good reason why you should do as you’re told,” he heard from the implant radio. It was the woman on tactical. “Stay close and don’t stray or get in the way!”

There was only one side opening off the cave, and they reached it at just about the same time as two other black-clad security team members met them coming the other way. It was frustrating not to be able to hear them talk, although if they made any calls on the tactical frequency the implant would give him the same as they were broadcasting, which was something.

The woman from his side and a guy from the other side of the cavern flattened on either side of the door, then, at a nodded signal, rifles at ready, spun around and went into the chamber.

Traffic was quick. “Father, use the ferret line!”

“Go ahead. What have you got?” Hearing this way wasn’t like hearing normal speech, but he was pretty certain it was Cromwell just from the tone and manner of speaking.

“We’re going to fire straight up from this position. No access doors nearby that we can find. We need everything you got. Looks like thirty, forty of our people. Mostly dead, but some are still moving. This just happened!”

“Then speed’s of the essence. We’re moving now. Make your opening!”

The other two security team members moved down to where the cavern opened into a chamber and, with precision and their rifles on full power, aimed at the same spot above and to the left of them and just kept firing.

The whole complex shook as if undergoing a minor earthquake, and molten rock began to form and then ooze down. They had to be very careful that they had as straight an angle as possible while being just enough off not to get caught in this white-hot residue.

At about twelve meters beyond the chamber roof there was a sudden buckling and then the two beams shot out and made open air.

“Cease firing and clear that area. We’ll enlarge from above and then get people in. Any resistance?”

“All dead,” the security people reported. “We’ll establish a parameter at the other end, but we need more people, all kinds, as quick as possible!”

Above, having picked up the flash of the laser canon and the deformation in the rock, Archangel targeted the position and gave a surgical blast with a naval grade disintegrator. It reamed a hole about three meters around all the way to the chamber and also eliminated the still heated edges left by the blast.

At least forty people from Olivet ran for the opening as soon as it was made, carrying bales of netting, ropes, whatever they could find. It was still a little dicey working around the remnants of molten rock below, but that was localized and the security team quickly sprayed it with a yellow chalk dye so that nobody was going to go into those piles by accident.

Robey had kept well back while all this was going on, but he’d also taken advantage of the action to look into the liberated chamber that the pirates had fought so hard to guard.

There were bodies, and parts of bodies, and the awful smell of charred flesh all around. He was suddenly thankful that he couldn’t hear their groaning, the ones left alive, and he pulled back and felt suddenly very sick.

Almost since he could speak he’d been taught that man was saved only by grace and that evil was always lurking about and victories were always partial, but he’d been taught, too, that there was only one unforgiveable sin, and that was denying God to save oneself and going over into the service of evil. All else was supposedly forgivable if sincerely repented. Well, he didn’t want any repentance on the part of these bastards! Not now, not ever. All he wanted for any of them, any of them, was that they be resurrected in indestructible bodies but in the Lake of Fire, roasting eternally without hope.

Somebody tapped him on the shoulder. He saw an usher, ashen-faced, and the man pointed up and tugged at Robey’s sleeve. The Arm of Gideon nodded. He had seen more down here than he ever really wanted to see, more than he should have seen.

He climbed up the netting, even though it was no easy task, and into the sunlight without even thinking of the exertion and effort. He was trying very hard not to think at all.

Thomas Cromwell, too, had seen enough, even though few here realized that he’d seen even worse in the past, much worse.

Using magsleds helped along by good old fashioned guide ropes, they managed to evacuate the wounded, anybody still alive in that massacre chamber. Olivet’s hospital, though, was already overwhelmed; it was adequate for the basic things the staff and a transitory group might encounter—the usual aches, pains, accidental breaks, that kind of thing—but not this kind of heavy duty work. Things had improved a bit after a couple of bad previous landings, but nothing had compared with this kind of damage.

“Sir, I think we’d better move everybody out,” one of his squad told him as he looked at the aftermath of the killing room.

“Eh? What, girl? Oh—what’s the hurry, now? We still don’t have His Nibs and the top henchmen off our earlier ferret recordings.”

“Yes, sir, but we believe now that they’ve gotten far enough back that they are in a position to flood this entire cave complex. We came across the watertight doors with automated devices on them and we haven’t been able to solve the security there. We think they’re going to blow them. Please, sir! There’s nothing left here now!”

He looked at the dead bodies, a low priority until all the living were evacuated, and muttered, “Until the sea shall give up her dead, in the sure and certain belief in the resurrection and life to come…” Then he seemed to snap out of it. “Very well, Sergeant. Get everybody out now! You, too! Complete evacuation. Everybody to Olivet unless you want to stay here with these—these people!” He made the word sound like the worst kind of vermin.

Olivet could only mark time, and then for only so long. They had twenty-six critically injured and probably dying if they didn’t get help, and while only three of the women were dead in the other chamber discovered over a kilometer away on the other side, the damage to them mentally and physically was going to take a lot of work. He didn’t have the total score yet, but he estimated that, deaths alone, they’d lost about half the hostages and most likely would lose some more. He couldn’t imagine any of the others coming out of this without severe spiritual and psychological damages.

He also knew what this would do to the Doctor. Karl Woodward was a great actor, as all teachers and leaders must be, but Cromwell knew him better. This would break his heart, for all his words about martyrdom and New Jerusalem.

Cromwell was just about the last one out, and barely in the nick of time. The explosions could be heard both below and above, and the waters from that distant lake started flowing down through the network, washing through all they struck, on the way to even deeper pools that would lead eventually towards the far-off ocean.

They had worried about this flooding almost since they started planning the taking of the underground complex; teams had discovered the other ends, nicely sealed, when exploring the area around the downed ship and the burned-out villages and they’d guessed what the seals were for. Initially dry and airlocked so that they could be used to bring in all of the downed ship’s cargo and weaponry without any local prying eyes left to say what it was or where it went, they then became nice last-ditch suicidal defenses. The only thing was, anybody triggering them would have to be in either an upward elevation region of the caves or outside on the surface. Cromwell’s battle computers had taken a good guess at how long this would take once operations commenced, and as it turned out they were rather conservative, but it had weighed on his mind since the start.

The only reason he’d gone for it at all was that these sorts of people were criminals, not zealots. Captain Sapenza hadn’t sounded like a man of much faith, even if a man of great nerve, and he certainly couldn’t have sustained that kind of live conversation via Eve from much of a distance.

So, Captain, where are you now, eh? At the control center of one of those twelve ship’s naval guns you removed and built into this region, I’d say. Waiting.

Waiting for Olivet, its crew, tactical squads, Doctor, and all the rest, to take off in a desperate attempt to get those injured ones to hospital.

Cromwell looked around at the region, the village, the now packed-up Olivet, all the rest, and nodded to himself.

“Everybody on board? If not, five minutes. Five minutes or you learn to love it here.” He called on all frequencies, then walked towards the ship with a slow, deliberate military gait.

“All the children been set loose and returned to Mummy?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” the reply came. “We told the villagers to remain inside the village today at the risk of being burned out or worse, and they’ve complied. All the kids are back, but in the big barn, where they’re still more or less under our monitoring.”

As Cromwell went up the ramp and heard it close behind him, he asked, “Anybody here or above discovered those bloody guns yet?”

“No, sir. They’re pretty well hid. We can guess at a few, but there’s no way we can cover them all. Remember, they had thirty years to disguise them, and deploying, setting up, and hiding those guns was the number one priority. They were certain they were still being chased.”

“All right,” the security chief sighed. “I just hope the engineers are right on what sort of guns were removed and what their limitations are in planetary mounts,” he said. “Otherwise, this is going to be a very short trip.”

“Stand by for motion!” the ship’s intercom warned. “Secure all loose items, strap in if you can or hold on. Thirty seconds.”

Even Robey, who had yet to get rid of the ringing or hear much of anything else in spite of some treatment, knew what it meant when he felt the vibration in the deck and he was suddenly almost overcome with sheer panic.

My God in Heaven! he thought to himself. I’m about to be blown up!

It was one thing for the Doctor to have full faith in miracles, but having the same sort of faith in engineers and their computers was quite another. And only a miracle would keep this ship from being blown to bits in the next minute or so.

John couldn’t help it. Unable to move, to run, to do anything much at all, he instead just sat there in the Arm’s quarters and stared at the clock on the wall.

When first one minute dragged by, then another, he began to doubt his senses, then wonder if in fact they were really going anywhere. By all rights they should be dead by now.

Now he desperately wanted to see where they were, how far they’d gotten, how far it was to the safety of the union in The Mountain, but he dared not move while the red flashing danger light was on or his hearing might well be the least of his problems.

He couldn’t understand what was going on. They should be well up in the planetary stratosphere by now, essentially in space, yet the vibration continued at its maximum and there was a fair amount of buffeting, the kind of ride you got when you were maneuvering to land rather than blasting off at full speed.

Something was definitely wrong, yet it was impossible to tell what when you were inside such a massive flying structure.

When the clock passed the twenty-minute mark, he knew that they weren’t headed up to Sinai and he suspected that they weren’t headed up at all. The back and forth rolling and jerky motions were continuing, and even getting a little worse.

Suddenly, he realized what they were doing, what they had to be doing.

Olivet had taken off, all right, and it had gone straight up—for maybe a couple of meters. Then, with the landing sensors on, they had been moving not up but sideways, following the topography at just that couple of meters height. Somebody smart had figured out that you could not depress those naval guns so that they’d be useful as surface-to-surface weapons; instead, they were aimed at creating a crisscross defensive pattern that would be certain to nail any spaceship either landing or taking off.

Olivet was doing neither, but there were at most only twelve naval guns in place and they were large and required separate fire control positions when not networked into the ship as designed.

He could see the engineers now, working out the most effective and broadest pattern for total defense. Now, extend that from the lake area and their ship over to the village and perhaps even to the original colony headquarters site and you were already short a gun or two. Get beyond there, towards the other side of the continent, even a few hundred kilometers, and you would be out of range. Then you could launch on a trajectory that their firing patterns could not be altered to nail without moving the guns. Move those big guns and their power supplies and you were a sitting duck for Archangel.

It was a long, rough ride because this sort of lateral movement was something Olivet was never intended to do. But as a former orbit-to-ground-to-orbit cargo shuttle it had that capability, at least theoretically. Now it was more than theory, but it might well be a couple of hours before it could move beyond the curvature of the planet, far enough away so that even an orbital trajectory wouldn’t be anywhere in the line of sight of the armorers staffing those gun emplacements.

Robey let out a breath and relaxed as well as he could. Only the faces of those poor devils maimed and murdered kept him from feeling exhilarated at the now obvious escape. He wondered how the downed pirate captain was taking it. Certainly it would not do to be all that close to him physically right at this moment, he bet.

In point of fact, Olivet’s lateral motion was barely fifty kilometers per hour; it was too massive to move any faster at such a low level, and the whole lateral movement capability designed into it was to make it move several meters one way or the other, not long distances. There was always the danger that the small engines would burn out before they made it far enough to feel safe; these were not the big engines designed for orbit, after all.

Still, while one was showing real signs of strain and another was giving intermittent readings, the movement was steady and solid as a rock as far as the bridge was concerned. They’d built these lifting bodies, as the engineers called them, for harsh conditions on planets never intended for humans and far from space dry-dock and repair facilities, and it was sure showing the quality of its construction now.

They didn’t need to complete the journey before Captain Sapenza knew he was licked. The ship was already well out of sight over the horizon, and the captain had no planetary tracking equipment or orbiting satellites to tell him just where the fleeing quarry was nor how far it could go.

“They blew up the arsenal at the same time,” Gregnar told him. “That lift shot so far in the air it came down five kilometers away in the middle of a maize field.”

“Figures,” Sapenza commented in an almost disinterested tone.

It was only when Almarie, his longtime chief woman, started nattering that he showed what was going on inside him.

“Yeah, sure. Kidnap ’em. The Holy Joes’ll freak and give us our ticket. Torture a few to make ’em scared. They scared real good, didn’t they? You couldn’t have tried it straight with them first? Maybe cut their throats later if it didn’t work? No! You hadda screw ’em from the start! Now we’re stuck here! You happy now?”

Sapenza sighed and said nothing, but he took out a small pistol and shot her at point-blank range on maximum blast. Her whole form shimmered and then there was only the smell of burnt flesh and a little pile of gray powder where she’d stood.

Gregnar and the rest moved back several steps.

The Captain turned towards them and they all froze, half expecting this to be their last moments anywhere. Instead, he said, “Can we still contact them?”

“Yeah, boss. They use standard frequencies. You just call them and if they’re out of range it’ll be intercepted by their orbiting ship and passed along,” somebody told him. “But, boss—you start broadcasting, you tell ’em just where we are.”

“Who the hell cares now?” he asked them. “Get me to a transceiver.”

They quickly brought him to a communications terminal inside one of the camouflaged gun emplacements. Not a shot fired, he thought ruefully. Maybe their God really is somebody. Or maybe we just blew it.

“Captain Sapenza to Doctor Woodward,” he called. “Patch me through if he’s available, please, anyone who picks this up. Repeat, Captain Sapenza to Doctor Karl Woodward.”

“Just a minute,” came a young man’s voice over the speaker. “We’ll hail him and see if he wants a patch.”

Woodward did indeed.

“Well, Captain! If you hadn’t killed so many innocent people I might well be in a very good mood right now,” the Doctor responded. “As it is, I’m royally pissed.”

Sapenza couldn’t help but smile. Who’d ever have thought that his match would be a pot-bellied white-bearded evangelist? He almost felt like the whole damn universe was sniggering behind his back.

“Good to talk to you directly, Doctor,” he responded in his calm, businesslike but friendly tone. “I don’t suppose we can talk repentance?”

Woodward did manage a chuckle. “I would and could discuss it with you all day if need be, but it’s between you and God. It doesn’t cut quite so much ice between you and me at the moment, though. Problem is, unlike the Almighty, I don’t have any way of knowing the sincerity of repentance.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m sorry I tried it this way, or that anybody got hurt, but I have to admit that I’m mostly sorry it didn’t work.”

“Well, honesty is a good starting point,” the Doctor noted. “So, what can I do for you now? If you want to tell me who you’ve been scared would find you all these years I’ll be happy to go look him or her or them or it up and give them your regards. I think a more fitting punishment would be to simply blow the genhole gate controller by timer after we leave. What do you think?”

“And isolate forever this colony population, so they’ll never have a crack at their utopia?” the Captain responded. “Could you really live with that on your conscience?”

“Quite easily, considering their easy and facile collusion with you and your people against us,” the Doctor replied. “We came here and delivered a good bit of the truth to them. We also have left a great deal of study materials, Bibles, written and computer material and the like for those whom the spirit might call to discover and perhaps build upon here. The rest—they had their choice, us or you, and they clearly parked their ethics and morality at the door and listened not to me or the truth in the Word. No, Captain, I would not lose a single minute of sleep doing that. Those who might accept the truth won’t need the return of their dead matriarch or the Three Kings; they will have a better deal. The rest don’t deserve any better than this.”

“You sound like you’re serious.”

“I am quite serious, sir! While I would have liked to have reached the rest of these people directly, I can no longer afford to do so. I can’t know what goodies you’ve booby-trapped near and far, or who is who and what is what. I depend on the Word to get there the way God intended. It will spread, and be heard by those who have ears to hear. Faith comes by hearing the word of God.”

“Faith…” Sapenza repeated, more to himself than to the Doctor. He was thinking. “You know something, Doctor? I will propose a deal to you, in spite of this, um, unpleasantness. It’s a good one, I think.”

“What can you possibly propose that we could take seriously, Captain?”

Sapenza sighed deeply, then said, “I really have got the Three Kings, Doc. You saw the stone. Mother Tymm’s ship broke apart, it’s true, but on the way back. She was a nun, a Mother Superior or whatever they call them, you know. Catholic nun. She somehow got or solved part of the puzzle. She got there. She even sort of broke with her church, or at least didn’t let them know. She took her group and she was going to ferry them to Paradise. She got there, but getting back killed her. Divine justice, maybe, or maybe she just didn’t have quite enough faith.”

“I’m not going to take you out of here, Sapenza,” Woodward warned him. “Nor any of your people. The corruption after my own folks see these poor souls would be too great, and we couldn’t watch our backs often enough even if we stuck you in space suits and hung you on the outside. You all get to live, which is more than you deserve, but not to move.”

“I understand that, Doctor. All I’m asking is for a reset to the previous status quo.”

“A what?”

“I give you the Three Kings. You leave and do with that knowledge what you want. Go there, give it to somebody else, destroy it—it’s all up to you. The Kings are even a little in your theology. See? I did too listen! You’re better off and better equipped than Mother Tymm. Hell, you’re better equipped than the Colonial Navy from the looks of it! You might make it there, and back. You might make it there and want to stay. I can’t use it. I can give them to you.”

“In exchange for what?”

“Well, as much as we could get, I suppose. At the very minimum, you leave, don’t mention this place to anybody, leave the gate as it is, and simply go your own way. We’re worse off than we were by a long shot, having lost most of our weapons and all of our creature comforts, as it were. This way, at least, we won’t be at the mercy of anybody else and we won’t be so cut off that, one day, we might not still get off this giant turd.”

“I could just say ‘yes’ and then roll out the welcome mat,” the Doctor pointed out.

“Yeah, you could, but you’re not like me. You’re a man of honor. If you swore an oath to God that you’d keep your word, you’d keep it. That’s the minimum price.”

Karl Woodward was still thinking about it when the engineering computers decided that they were far enough away to launch on a south trajectory and safely attain orbit with no vulnerability to the big guns.

He was still thinking about it many minutes later when, at orbital velocity, Olivet made the turn that would reunite it with its interstellar-capable big brother.

There was never any real doubt in the Doctor’s mind that the offer would be accepted, but if Sapenza could not be brought to account by human judgment, at least he would have to wait a bit and sweat.

There were people on The Mountain who were opposed to any deal and who, in fact, urged Woodward to blast the radio and the entire region north of the lake tubes, but this just made the Doctor angry and sad at the same time.

“Have you learned nothing here? Is my whole life a failure?” he thundered. “Do you so easily give yourselves over to hatred and vengeance? We protect ourselves! God can’t abide wimps! But the moment, the moment we turn into our enemy then we might as well become the enemy! God knows that in my own heart I can never truly forgive the bastards, but I am content to leave their ultimate fate to God’s judgment! This is not the Navy! We aren’t in the business of taking lives! God will take care of them and bring justice! Our job is to look ahead to His new work!”

Have I been deluding myself? he wondered. Don’t they truly understand anything? Damn them! Act in faith, not out of vengeance and hatred. Somehow, sometime, when he wasn’t looking, the devil had snuck back aboard and corrupted them. He hated that realization more than he hated the dead and wounded. They were supposed to be better than that.

“All right, Sapenza, you have a deal,” he told the pirate below. “But what you initially stated is what you get. Nothing more, and nothing less. I will trust to God that you will rot here, and leave it entirely in His hands whether or not you do. In exchange, you send all the pertinent details, a copy of everything you have on the Three Kings. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” the captain responded.

“You sound too self-satisfied,” the Doctor commented suspiciously. “Don’t alter or edit the material. We will test it out, and if there’s any funny business you will be on the map of everyone in creation as quickly as we can manage it. That’s understood?”

“Understood.”

“Then what the hell’s making you so smug, Sapenza?”

The captain paused a moment. “I think, at least, I’ve blown a lot of your confidence in your own faithful,” he commented. “I’d bet on that. But I haven’t laid a glove on you. I’m doing you no favor, Doctor, but I suspect you won’t take my warning. Keep your faith and erase what I send and forget the Three Kings. That’s my good deed advice of the day. If you do, you may wind up living the rest of your life and dying in self-deluded saintliness. But if you go to the Three Kings, like Mother Tymm, you’re going to find your faith is far too simplistic and no matter how smart you are, deep down you’re just like your people who you think have failed you. This is my revenge, Doctor. I tell you that right up front. And you won’t even believe it until it happens. When it does, when your faith fails you, then think of me, stuck here, but laughing! I’m sending the data now as we speak, Doctor. See you in Hell!”