Balshazzar's Serpent

XI: SHADOWS AND DOUBT

Although few of the large crew/congregation suspected it, the most nervous man aboard The Mountain when it made orbit at Marchellus, a well-developed old colonial world with no dry dock but a great many maintenance facilities and all the services and connections to elsewhere in the colonial region, was Doctor Karl Woodward himself. For all his bluster, he was still half convinced that, when access to the planet below was allowed, he’d find himself almost alone aboard his big vessel.

Well, he thought nervously. At least we won’t have much overhead.

In the end, some did go. More than he would have liked, far fewer than he feared. Out of a ship’s company of well over a thousand, barely ten percent left, and a few of those, around that son of a bitch Timothy, he didn’t allow to choose. If they wanted that after all he’d taught them, then they should go after it.

Timothy actually tried to say goodbye and justify himself even though he should have known better. Woodward had refused to see him, and when the man persisted he had sent him a handwritten note that read, simply, “In the name of God, just go now!” Old Timothy and his band would do all right with their “Just believe” campaign, but they wouldn’t get anybody to God that way, only create another movement of people feeling good showing off their godliness to each other.

During the refitting, he also received word from some of his old colleagues outside of religion, and those messages he accepted. At least one, Doctor McGraw, whom he’d have wagered a bundle that the old boy had been dead of old age for a decade, was actually on Marchellus and wanted to see him. McGraw was a theoretical physicist, one of the smartest men around, and they’d worked together on a number of complex problems before Woodward’s decision to change careers, as he sometimes referred to it.

McGraw had been very young and very handsome in the old days, and it was a shock to see this little, bent old man come aboard instead. Still, Woodward knew that he didn’t look much like the young firebrand of physics who’d gotten his first doctorate at seventeen and was going to solve all the remaining mysteries of the cosmos by the time he was thirty.

Yeah, sure, he thought. That was when I was so arrogant I didn’t realize that every time you solved one you got three more puzzles that were worse. And with computers smarter than the lot of them working nonstop on those problems, few had been solved since.

“I can not believe you are still going around with this God business,” McGraw told him over a good meal and good wine. “Karl, I can not understand this. What a waste.”

“So you’ve solved the mystery of the Great Silence, and why all the gates inward and all the wild holes inward no longer work?” Woodward teased, knowing the answer.

“No, of course not, but it is a solvable problem. Nothing supernatural. No voodoo and priestly mumbo jumbo.”

Woodward didn’t take offense. He long ago realized that there were those who were called and could hear and those for whom the Word would always be blocked off. That was the way humanity was set up. He never set out to convert everybody; he was looking for the few amongst the many.

“So, Oscar, I see at least that medical technology has kept you going as it has me for longer than either of us expected.”

“I always expected an exception to be made in my case,” McGraw chuckled. “Me, I only fear that one day they are going to say, ‘Celebrate! We’ve discovered the key to immortality and total regeneration of mind and body! But you can’t be more than fifty years old or it doesn’t work.’ ”

They laughed over that, but McGraw kept returning to Woodward’s sudden decision to chuck a hard science career and pursue a religious vocation he’d never shown any interest in up to that point. “We never could understand it,” he told his old friend.

“Oscar, I will wager that in all your intense study of physics and mathematics you’ve spent incredible time in deep analytical work, learning all you could, testing what you could,” Woodward said. “How much time, almost since you could read, have you ever spent studying religion? Any religion? A few years? A few months? Weeks? Days?”

“I gave up those childish beliefs when I discovered the wonders of science. You know that,” the little man replied. “You need not waste time on what is a remnant of our primitive past, any more than it would profit me to spend any time studying gnomes and fairies. There are too many real miracles in the rational universe for me to go chasing after fantasies.”

“Politics and religion are the two areas where every single person is an expert and nobody has to study anything,” Woodward responded. “Well, it hasn’t been a waste. It’s been rewarding and enriching, even though you’ll probably hear different from the dissidents I just threw off the ship.”

“On the contrary, most of them say you are the smartest and wisest man they ever met, but they just can’t live up to your demands.”

Woodward’s eyebrows rose. “Indeed? They would say that. I’d much prefer they said the opposite, or that they took your pragmatic and utilitarian view of the cosmos, Oscar. They’re just going to take their misunderstanding of my teaching and pervert a new group as it is. I guess I can’t stop them, though. Did any of them say what caused them to walk?”

Oscar McGraw stared into his old friend’s face. “They say you’ve found the Three Kings. Is this true?”

Woodward smiled. “Come, come, Oscar! The Three Kings? Fairy stories! El Dorado, the Mines of King Solomon, the Golden Moon of Perseus. Surely you don’t believe in those pie-in-the-sky legends!”

“You are mocking me. You have found them, then! I can tell, even after all this time.”

“You’ve done the math. You know that a system like the Three Kings is bordering on unlikely to impossible.”

“Karl—there are good reasons why scouts become cybernetic hybrids, fused with their small and highly maneuverable ships. Taking a ship through a natural wormhole into a situation where the forces of gravity alone must create bizarre conditions—this is not what you do with lots of young people and a ship like this.”

Karl Woodward looked into the eyes of his former colleague and said, quite simply, “Yes, it is.”

Eve had progressed rather well, much faster than anyone had expected. She was now in a maglev chair, able to glide around with minimal effort using a direct neural connection. Her voice, while lower and raspier than before, was back, and she had reasonable control of her mouth, tongue, and vocal chords so the lisping was now quite mild. She had feeling to one degree or another through most of her body, but operations were still difficult and the muscles were still in need of retraining. Still, she was beginning to look, sound, and feel human.

John Robey had tried to visit with her as much as possible every day since the first, and the medtechs had incorporated him into her rehabilitation routine. Machines could do a lot of the basic work on her body, but they were nearly helpless in healing the mental scars.

The old Eve would have been irrepressible and flying all around the big ship in her levitating chair, but this Eve, the new one, would not leave the medical facility or even go from one part of it to another without someone else along. Strangers, and there were many aboard during the orbital docking and retrofitting, caused her to freeze and then go back and hide in her room. Anybody she didn’t know, even from the ship’s company, caused her deep anxiety, even when with somebody like Robey.

“You can’t keep torturing yourself like this,” he warned her. “You’ll go crazy.”

“I know it’s insane, that there’s nothing to it, but saying that and feeling that, deep down, are two different things,” she replied. “I keep thinking that somebody’s gonna just put something on me or near me and it’s gonna go into me and I’ll be a puppet again, only this time nobody’ll know but me. The feeling of total helplessness is just indescribable. I’d rather be dead than have anything like that happen again.”

“What are you going to do when we get to the Three Kings? Sit in your room here and watch on the screen?” he asked her. “You know the Doctor hasn’t made up his mind about the former hostages yet.”

She looked panicked. “What do you mean?”

“He doesn’t want anybody to go unless they are demonstrating total faith. If you’re hiding out from life the way you and some of the others are, well, he says that’s a total lack of faith and he won’t be a part of it. The work here will be done in a few more days. At that point he’ll pick the final company. We’re just about broke, you know, as it is. That last mission was all give and no take, and this thing takes some work to keep in shape. I think the only reason he’s getting some work at cut rate prices here is that folks know we’re off for the Three Kings and they either want to horn in on a share of the riches that might be there or they want to take it from us. He says he wants a committed, determined group.”

“He can’t! He wouldn’t!”

“He can and he will. You know the old man.”

“But you’re going, and you yourself said your faith was a little cracked!”

He sighed. “Yeah, maybe it was, maybe it still is. But, well, if I don’t have it then what do I have? If I can’t live up to my own standards, what good am I? This is the best test I’ve ever faced or can hope to face. Besides, I want to see what the Three Kings really are. Just more colonial-type planets in an unusual setting? Remnants of ancient alien civilizations? Heaven and Hell? It’s almost a part of me, I guess. I looked out at the Brother Timothy kind of life and I couldn’t be that kind of hypocrite in a minute. What else would I do? No money, no resumй, everything I’ve done has been here, and as a part of the Church. I’m not about to join another one, and yet the only marketable skill I’ve got is bodyguard or event organizer. I don’t know about a lot of things, but I know that this is where I’m supposed to be. This is what I do. I think it’s where you belong, too, but not if you’re no good to God or man. I’m not supposed to tell you this, but I think fairly soon you’re going to get a test from the old man.”

“A test? What kind of test?”

“I don’t know. But pass it. If not for God’s sake, or your sake, then for my sake.”

She looked surprised. “Your sake?”

He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the cheek, then straightened up and winked. “I think we made a pretty good team. I think we still can.”

And, with that, he left her to her deeply disturbed and thoroughly confused thoughts.

For the first time, the next day he didn’t come to see her, and she felt nervous and abandoned. Why had he kissed her and winked? Had he left for good? Was he saying goodbye?

She worked extra hard and long on her therapy, and managed to grasp a stylus with her right hand and even draw a crude sketch, kind of like one a small child might make but it was a great advance considering all the coordination that had to be brought into play just to do it.

Just after dinner, she received a message. It wasn’t in the form of an intercom call, but rather as a note hand-delivered by one of the cleanup robots. It looked quite imposing, and she struggled, managed to open it, and pulled it out.

It said, in a classical cursive script that seemed out of a different time and place, “My dear Sister Eve: Please join me in the executive office off the Olivet ward room at eighteen hundred hours so that we may discuss your continuing role with our new mission.” That was it, nothing more. And it was signed, “Karl Woodward, Ph.D.”

She started to tremble, and fought to keep herself together. The office off the Olivet ward room! That was virtually the length of the entire ship and several levels up after that! From all the way aft to just about the bow of the entire hybrid vessel. She looked at the small clock in her room. It read “17:20.” Forty minutes! Oh God, I’ll never make it!

She was bright enough to at least suspect that this was either the test John warned her about or a prelude to it.

If she didn’t go, they’d pump her with feel-good drugs and ship her off to a local rehab center and she would be cut off from the body of the congregation, probably forever. But how could she? That far? With all these strangers checking over things and lurking around?

She looked around for a hairbrush before remembering that she no longer had hair long enough to brush and in any event it would be more than she’d managed with her arms to that point. She looked at her clock. “17:25.” Where was it going so fast? Why was there nobody around? She’d need a half hour just to make it there in the chair!

She called the medtech, and after an interminable wait she appeared. “Yes, Eve?”

“I have to go to the Olivet ward room by eighteen hundred,” she told the tech.

“Well, then, go ahead. There are no restrictions on you if you’ve taken your physical therapy and timed medication.”

“But—but I can’t—wait! Will you come with me?”

“Sorry, I’m on duty. Everybody here is. What about that nice fellow who comes around all the time?”

Yes, yes! That was it! John would come! She turned to the intercom. “Robey, seven one two six six, Arm.”

“Buzzing.” Pause. “I am sorry. There appears to be no one in that room at the moment. Would you like to leave a message?”

“Yes. No! Page him!”

“Ship’s page is not available without security or bridge clearance.”

She started to curse the intercom, even though it was a computer and she almost never had said as much as a “damn” or “hell” in her whole life. Suddenly she stopped, realizing that no help would be forthcoming, not from medical, not from the Arm, nor from anywhere. It was arranged that way.

She either would make her way on her own through the ship or she would not, and she now had exactly thirty minutes to do it.

With no one else to help her, she began to pray, silently, but fervently, as she’d never prayed before. Be with me, Lord. Do not forget or forsake me, and give me the strength to do Thy will.

The chair glided forward, rather steadily at first, until it reached the first hallway and she looked down the dimly lit and seemingly endless corridor forward and could only think of those miserable, damnable caves under the surface of that cursed planet.

I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me, she prayed, and started on down the hall.

More than once people would suddenly walk into the hallway and look at her or come towards her. In every case she felt her heart jump to her throat and she came to a sudden halt, but each time she prayed a bit more and continued on.

She kept going, straight down the corridor, feeling like she was about to throw up, seeing Sapenza in every shadow or darkened hallway.

She had been born aboard this ship; she’d spent most of her life inside it. This very corridor, like just about every other main corridor, she’d traversed time and time again, knew by heart. She kept telling herself that even as her heart kept pounding, pounding in her chest feeling almost like it was going to burst. She heard herself breathing, breathing hard, and she was tasting bile and having trouble catching one of those breaths.

How could a place so intimately familiar suddenly seem so alien?

On, on down the corridor, past rows of offices and crew’s quarters, past rec rooms and classrooms and training areas. From Suite 1200, the main ship’s hospital, down now to the five hundreds, the four hundreds, the three hundreds…

And then she reached the bulkhead and the stairs and lift to higher levels. She looked at the lifts, which she’d ridden thousands of times, and decided that the time wasn’t yet right for them. Increasing power, she managed to levitate the chair up, parallel to the stairs, carefully avoiding any obstacles like the center handrails or reinforcing molding.

On the second level she passed through a vaultlike hatchway into Olivet, now docked and parked inside the greater ship. Only the emergency hall lights were on; everything else was dark, shut down, terrifying.

The more she looked down the hall the more she was convinced she could see shapes moving in the darkness, hear whispers and hushed laughter. She hovered there, staring, the terror starting to overtake her, unsure that she could go on, resisting the urge to flee back into Sinai’s safety. But it wouldn’t be to Sinai that she would go if she did; she knew that. It would be somewhere on Marchellus, a planet she didn’t know and full of nothing but strangers and dark places.

She went slowly forward down the corridor. To her right was the large cathedral-like main hall where the Doctor lectured whether aboard ship and en route or as part of the camp meeting and revival he set up on the ground at his colonial destinations. Beyond it would be a stair/ramp combination to one more level up, then back along the complex of offices, quarters, cafeteria, and so forth needed when Olivet was down on the surface and on her own. At the very end of it would be the ward room, with exits to the Olivet bridge and the meeting rooms and quarters of the Doctor and other important high elders.

She was just about to the darkened stairs when she was startled almost out of her wits by a ghostly, supernatural laughter coming from the meeting hall. She struck the bulkhead and almost pitched out of the chair, being saved only by the safety straps. Even so, if she tipped on her side the magnetic resistance would be lost and she would be stuck lying on her side there on the deck until somebody found her.

The sounds came again, and she repressed her panic and realized that it was just the sound of somebody, maybe a couple of people, somewhere inside, probably checking out the layout for the next teaching service once they were under way.

Feeling increasing panic, she nonetheless made her way up the second stairs using the ramp and came in sight of her goal. Again, she kept telling herself that these were places she’d been all her life, that she’d played hide and seek in the darkened mode up here when she was a little girl. It didn’t help as much as it should have. Instead, it made her feel even worse for being more frightened now than she’d been at the age of seven or eight.

I know more now than I did then, she told herself.

Finally she turned and glided into the ward room. The door was open, but the lights were on emergency only, and the place looked locked up tight. The clock on the wall, synchronized to the ship’s master clock like all the others, read “18:22.” So she was already too late. Had it been over fifty minutes to come this way? Had she truly been that slow? It seemed barely five or ten minutes since she’d set out.

And as late as she was, was anybody still there? Would she have to slink back, a failure, because she hadn’t made it in time?

She glided over to the meeting room door and pushed the sensor for entry. It hadn’t had any illumination, but suddenly it turned green and the door slid open.

Inside, Doctor Karl Woodward sat in a big fake leather chair at the end of a long table. To his right sat John Robey, who looked quite pleased.

“Ah, Sister Toloway!” the Doctor greeted her, half standing. “Please! Come in! Your young man here has been telling me all about you and your experiences back on the colony! You must be really something! It seems he wants to quit the Arm and marry you!”

The Doctor did not minimize anything in his final talk before they left orbit. After pretty much selecting certain people who’d elected to remain and throwing them off anyway, primarily because of attitudes and comments made, in a few cases because they had been traumatized former hostages who had not been as willful nor as successful as Eve in breaking out of their shells and were therefore going for the wrong reasons, he tried to talk any wavering minds out of it.

“I don’t want anyone with us who doesn’t believe that this is God’s will and that we are bound to succeed based upon our faith in Him,” he warned. “Anybody else would be a fool to come. Nor will this be an easy or comfortable task in any event. We’ve stripped the old Mountain as bare as we could; this is no missionary or teaching expedition. We’ve sold everything of value to insure that we have the most state-of-the-art navigational computing system available, and I think we do. I’ve been told that taking something this large into a wild hole is tantamount to suicide. Well, I don’t believe in committing suicide and I think we can do it. There’s no choice, anyway. If you all stay, we have to have something big enough to transport you!”

That brought something of a tension-breaking chuckle from the congregation.

“This is going to be it,” he continued. “At zero nine twenty tomorrow all the umbilicals and work platforms will be gone, all the hatches sealed. We will power up, and we will move out. You have until about zero eight forty-five to take the last exit, the central hatchway Fourteen A. If you aren’t gone by then, you’re stuck. Also, be prepared for a lot of bizarre flying even before we do what we intend to do. The word is out: we’re headed for the Three Kings and its fabled treasures. In addition to all the tracking devices various groups have bribed workers to implant into the Mountain, there will undoubtedly be a small navy shadowing us, ready to pounce right in behind us when we show them where the entrance lies. It’s not going to happen, but keeping them from doing so will take some fancy flying and some chicanery. And, when we do jump into that hole, the fun really begins. It will probably be the longest, roughest, nastiest, most sickening trip any of us have ever taken. Sensors to the new computers will require millions, perhaps billions of minute corrections in all planes every second just to keep us centered. Just remember that, even inside there, God is there, too.”

As they left to return to their quarters, John and Eve saw Cromwell standing rather casually at the rear. Although most feared the enigmatic security chief and kept their distance, Robey felt like he had a certain link with the man. He didn’t understand him; nobody did, nor probably could who didn’t know the details of the rumored dark past. Still, he did not fear him, either.

“Brother Cromwell,” Robey greeted the big man as they reached the exit. “I should have thought that you and your people would be busily digging out all those tracking devices.”

Cromwell gave a slight smile. “No use in doing that until we’re under way. They’d just put them back again somewhere else. At least we think we know where they all are. I understand congratulations are in order.”

Robey grinned and looked over at Eve, still in her levitating chair but looking much stronger by the day. “As soon as Eve can stand on her own we plan to have the Doctor marry us,” he said.

“Very well. Let me know the time, if you’ll allow me to come.”

Robey was surprised. “I’d be honored, sir. Thank you.”

After they’d gone a ways outside, Robey said, “I’d love to know what drives that man. I’d trust him with just about anything and yet there’s something very scary deep inside him, something dark and dangerous.”

“I know,” she replied. “I wonder if he’s still walking a darkened hall, or, maybe, keeping in the ghosts of all those who died by his hand before he found faith. I keep thinking of what happened to me and the others.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“Yes, I should! Too often we take things like faith for granted, and we pay lip service to our beliefs. Maybe we have to get slapped or kicked in the rear and then scared silly in order to fully understand and appreciate it all. We all know that man was a soldier. We just don’t know how many people he killed, or caused to be killed. This, all this, may be the only thing that keeps the darkness from consuming him.”

The sudden onset of the Great Silence had jolted those left on this side of that now unreachable area of humanity’s birth from a solid technological and near totally secular existence back into the arms of religion, which always offered a refuge during times that people could not understand and from things which they feared.

Even with his own emotional involvement, he was certain, as had been the medtechs, that Eve had been headed towards self-destruction. That same sense of faith and religious belief had kept her from going all the way over, and now was the rock against which she pushed to get back to normalcy.

Woodward had always preached that those who had no sense of or feel for religion had simply never been tested. Only those who had really were required to make the most basic of choices.

Robey didn’t know if he’d been tested, really, or was simply the product of his upbringing. He wondered what kind of a test had forced Cromwell’s choice, or, for that matter, Doc Woodward’s.

One thing was for sure: from the time they would shove off tomorrow morning, and ever after, the very nature of The Mountain and its mission would be changed forever, and those who were within it would be dragged along.

Absolutely nobody slept well that night, and few slept at all, knowing the truth of that. Most spent at least some of the time in prayer and conversation with God, in private, as was consistent with their beliefs.

Forward, in his luxurious cabin, stripped as it was of many of the valuables he’d collected over the years, Doctor Karl Woodward tried to sleep, and dozed in fits and starts.

After so many decades of bringing the gospel to so many isolated worlds, to have scored so badly and been so wounded this last time out had to mean something. It had to mean that the time for spreading the Word was over, that God was giving him the stewardship He had promised in that first dream, so long ago.

No hallucinogens, no drunkenness, it hadn’t been like that. Most of his old friends and colleagues, Oscar among them, thought it was a small stroke caused by overwork and stress. Even he had wondered, but it was impossible to explain it fully to himself or put it aside, even though he could never have explained it to his old colleagues.

You just had to be there, he thought.

Like Ebenezer Scrooge waiting for the Ghosts of Christmas, he had lain there in his bedroom, comfortable and fat, but, like tonight, having trouble sleeping for some reason, and into the bedroom had come an angel.

The creature had been beautiful, radiant, grandiose, an unbelievably wonderful creature, yet as real as anybody he’d ever known. He sensed immediately that he was seeing the creature as something deep down from his childhood told him angels should look like, but it didn’t matter. It had been a conscious entity of great power and intellect and a sense of goodness and purity that came through any physical manifestation.

“If you run the next series of simulations, you will get a byproduct, a single series of equations, that will cause the human race to annihilate itself,” the angel had warned him. “That which has always been feared will come true by your hands, and very quickly. The first practical field test of the equations will do it. Alter the simulation even slightly and these byproduct equations will not come forth. Then study God’s word as you have studied God’s work. You will find that its logic is sound and that the truth is not what you or most religions think. Your choice.”

And, with that, the angel had vanished.

The next day he slightly altered the simulation and things went rather smoothly. Later, when he’d worked out the method, he was able to privately run a subset of the original under a routine that essentially erased itself as it ran. The byproducts showed up, and, to him, they were obvious in their implications.

Had the angel been a figment of his imagination, a psychological construct to deliver what his mind had already suspected, or was it divine intervention and warning? He’d been brought up in a totally secular environment with just about no religious background at all. What he knew of religion of any sort at that point was what he’d seen and dismissed as childish superstition for the ignorant masses when he’d seen services on broadcasts or passed churches, mosques, synagogues, whatever.

It was the fact that he’d barely given it any thought at all his whole life up to that point that convinced him that the experience hadn’t been entirely in his own mind. He began his studies, and the more he studied religion the more he discovered that most of the others seemed to have been based on old traditions, long histories, but nobody appeared to have read the books. And then he found this ministry that seemed to say what he was coming up with, and after the death of its leader he’d assumed the leadership. It seemed so natural and so true.

But he’d not gotten a single divine message after that one. Everything else was either subtle, with things just falling in his way, or realized through hard work. His old colleagues who thought him stressed out and dropping out of serious work to flee from its pressures didn’t understand just how tough a job this was. Working with computers so smart he could not even comprehend their internal musings, and simulations, and budget committees seemed almost a vacation compared to running a show like this one.

If Oscar only knew…

And if the congregation, too, only knew. Knew that he doubted as often as they, and had long periods when his old rational self wondered if he hadn’t been delusional. It was easy when things were going well; it was exciting, exhilarating, to go out to the colonies and plant new seed. But three worlds now, in a row… Three worlds that had been vicious, nasty, had cost a huge percentage of the ship’s company, mostly its youth, just to get out in one piece. All those kids… Abused, raped, tortured, murdered…

This really wasn’t to renew their faith. Not really. It was to renew his.

And as he lay there, tossing and turning, wondering if what he was doing was right, wondering if much of his life had been based on truth or delusion, he heard a voice. A familiar voice, one he’d not heard in a very, very long time. There was no physical manifestation, and it might have been in a dream in one of those fitful brief sleeps, but there it was.

“The Three Kings each bear gifts to the Christ child. One of those gifts He gives to you. Choose wisely, but only one.”

Gold or spices. He wondered if it would be that obvious.

There was a sudden, persistent, and irritating buzzing noise. He tried to shut it out, to hear if the Voice had anything more to tell him, but he finally couldn’t and opened his eyes.

“Yes?”

“Sir, we’re about to leave orbit,” Captain Lime’s voice informed him. “You said you wanted to be notified.”

“Huh? Oh, yes, yes! Proceed, Captain!”

He needed a good cup of coffee. No, he needed a good pot of coffee. This was going to be a long day. Sure, he could have popped a pill and been wide awake and energized in a minute, but where was the pleasure in that?

By the time he reached the bridge, he saw the large carafe in the anchor just to the right of his judge’s seat overlooking the whole complex and knew that they had done their jobs and anticipated him.

The bridge of a starship was unlike the bridge of anything else. Even Olivet had its bridge forward and actually had both screens and areas of hull that could be made transparent if asked. A starship’s bridge was amidships of the engine module, dead center, with the protection of the ship all around it. There were screens to show good representations of what was outside if you wanted to see it or, rather, if there was anything much to see, but they were all taken from the sensors built into the entire vessel.

For the most part, computers flew the ship without human intervention, and in some areas, such as when passing through any sort of wormhole, artificial and stable or wild and extreme as this one was, the computers could not be overridden by human hands or commands. The human brain simply couldn’t think fast enough to make any difference in that sort of environment.

Still, it was the computer’s job to interpret the wishes of the captain and carry them out, while always maintaining the safety and integrity of the ship and its passengers and crew if at all possible. That wasn’t necessarily possible in a wild hole; the kind of chaos-based mathematics that could be used to predict the safety and success levels of such a trip could only be initiated after you entered the hole and had at least some sense of the demands placed upon the ship. That was why you had to have real faith or be crazy, or maybe both, to go through a wild hole like this one.

But first the captain and crew would be doing some decision-making inside the more normal constraints of space and genholes. That was because ships trailing other ships had computers of about equal abilities, so shaking a tail wasn’t all that easy. You needed to put in some random, and often illogical, moves just to throw them off.

As soon as they entered the first genhole, Cromwell’s people went to work disabling or jamming all the devices that had been planted for tracking purposes. These would be of little use within the wormhole, but would leave signatures when they emerged if left to do their jobs. The way you shook tails in space was to go through increasing genhole gates leading to multiple-choice exits and entrances and, frankly, picking each one at random until you wound up certain that you’d shaken everybody off.

Some of the chasers were good, but Woodward was convinced that his crew was better. Still, it took almost three days before they slowed and then came to a dead stop near one particularly complex junction of gates to get their bearings and also to wait.

The occasional ship would emerge from one and go into another, but none of them seemed to pause or even slow down. They had finally shaken the last of the tails.

Now it would take them another three days just to get to the jumping off spot. If anybody out there was clever enough to have guessed that, well, maybe they deserved to come along and see if they could ride the serpent.