Balshazzar's Serpent

XII: THE THREE KINGS

They all stared at the forward screen which showed a fairly dim and distant starfield and not much else.

“Show spacial abnormalities,” the captain instructed.

Suddenly a good three dozen objects of varying size and intensity flared to life, all in constant motion, none a consistent shape, and all radiating enormous energy. It really wasn’t an unusual number of such things for this sort of area, but it was unnerving nonetheless to think of putting the ship, and themselves, into and perhaps through one of them.

“That’s the one in the data, second from the far left,” the captain told Woodward and the others sitting there at the monitoring and communications stations.

Invisible to the naked eye, the wormhole seemed to shimmer and twist, elongate and then snap back to nearly round, only to go off in what might be called a twisted frown, and so on. Woodward had to stare at the thing and felt some trepidation in spite of all his comments. How can you center something this size in that? he wondered to himself. For that matter, what made them be there at all? A natural wormhole was a transitory affair; it formed for fractions of a second, then was gone unless forced open and locked that way until a ship went through. It was within the capabilities of all modern interstellar craft to do that; this had been the key to the stars in the first place. Once through, the equations said that the trip would be near instantaneous, but for reasons still not fully understood it was not. Still, the hole to the Three Kings, never stabilized and locked down, simply should not be there. It should not be reappearing over a three parsec region in a varying but not quite random order. Something very big and very powerful was powering that thing.

He suddenly thought of that key simulation, the one that would have given the key to erasing whole areas of space-time, that had forced him out of his old work and into this, and he wondered. Sapenza, did you give me the right one? Or did you cook the books for revenge?

It was too late for that now, he told himself. They had to trust the figures. They seemed to hold up, anyway. It was either that or slink back into port and disband. He wasn’t going to do that, so there was really little choice.

“Proceed, Captain. Take us in,” he told the ship’s commander.

Lining up would be slow, careful, precise, with the computers checking and double checking and awaiting a final command that could only be given by the human captain. Once that command was given, though, it was entirely out of his or Woodward’s or anybody else’s hands but God’s. The commitment would be total, and at a speed as fast as the old Mountain could give them.

“Put forward screen throughout the ship,” the captain ordered, allowing those in their quarters, in the ward room, and on duty stations to see what was going on. What was most important wasn’t the visual but the small figure down in the lower right that began “OPT” and then gave a percentage. The navigational computers were trying out every single approach while calculating and trying to predict the shape and size of the wormhole from moment to moment. When they got it as close to “optimal,” or one hundred percent, as they thought they could, then they would commit. From that point, no human would have any control until they emerged at the other end.

If they emerged at the other end.

“Riding the serpent,” they called it, after going through the long, writhing, snakelike tunnel through space-time. Woodward thought about that for a moment. The serpent, the source of evil, of original sin, expelled from Eden. It was somewhat ironic.

The optimization rate had reached as high as eighty-one percent twice, but never above that. It wasn’t comforting to think about the odds, even if in their favor, since you had no room for error, no allowance for mistakes. Eighty-one percent you live, nineteen percent you die. With a controlled genhole the percentage was always just a hundred thousandth of a point below one hundred.

The captain shook his head. “I’ve seen and been through about this bad, but it’s going to be hairy, sir!”

“Well, we knew that.”

And now the captain gave his last order to the computers. He sat down in the command chair, leaned back, and said, “Commit at best possible point.”

There was a pregnant pause when it seemed as if all was silent and the only sound throughout the whole ship was the collective heartbeats of the almost nine hundred still aboard, and then the screen said, “OPT 83.”

People were suddenly slammed back into their seats or found things rolling away or crashing against bulkheads. The increasing roar of the great engines made the whole ship shake.

Before anybody could react further, the writhing, gyrating oval suddenly grew to immense proportions and then vanished.

There was a massive bang! as if something very large and vital had exploded all around them, but they were still there, and the vibration, if anything, was getting worse. Woodward felt his left pant leg get wet. Startled, he looked down and saw that the half a cup of coffee he’d left in his mug had vibrated up and out and all over him.

On the screen was nothing particularly intelligible. It looked gray and black and white and lumpy and irregular and it went on and on. What was unnerving about it was its apparent undulation; genholes were round and very stiff.

“Damage control, report,” the captain said, still looking at the screen and the readouts.

“Minor breakage, and a few bruises and possible broken bones from people who don’t listen to the briefings, nothing more,” a woman’s voice responded over the ship’s intercom. “Recommend lifelines with clips for the duration, belts when seated or sleeping, and covered food and beverages. Full tie-down.”

“Agreed. What was that bang?”

“Unknown. Doesn’t show up on any of our status boards, sir. It may be that it was a last second correction just as we entered.”

Or it could have been us striking the hole wall, thought not only the captain but just about everybody who knew how these things worked. So far power and shields were holding up at close to perfect, but even a slight tap could take a toll later on as they would have to put out at near maximum power for days.

“Captain? Nav desk,” another woman, this one on the bridge, called over to him.

“Yes?”

“I have another object following us keeping regular distance. It might be another ship.”

“Put it on my screen.”

The data from inside a wild hole wasn’t reliable enough to tell much, but there definitely did seem to be an object there, matching them move for move. Either another, smaller ship, or…

Or debris knocked off our engines, the captain thought nervously. Still, it felt like a ship. Maybe they hadn’t quite shaken off everybody.

“I wouldn’t be all that upset right now, Captain,” Woodward told him. “Even if one of the leeches did manage to fool us and come along, they’ve got a pretty miserable ride, and there’s nothing much we can do about them until we all get to the other side anyway, is there?”

“No, sir, that’s true,” the captain admitted.

It was rough getting used to the ship’s motions, too, particularly as time passed and people needed to move from one part of the ship to the other for various purposes. Some of the old-timers, including both Woodward and Cromwell, likened it to experiences on larger ships on big and rough bodies of water, where the whole environment was going up and down and side to side at one and the same time. Some people could never get used to it; some got violently ill. Most learned to compensate as time went on.

Still, by three days in, everybody was royally sick of the sensations and the vibrations and all the trouble they were going through just to do the most normal of things. That included Woodward, who, nonetheless, used the intercom systems and screens to keep morale up, speak on faith and the future, and also incidentally remind them that this uncomfortable ride was much better than the alternative, which was striking the wall and shattering into a million tiny pieces.

The countdown timer was on every screen, but it was based upon the Three Kings data fed into the navigational computers. It had worked out up to now, but there was simply no way to tell if Sapenza had given them the goods, or perhaps not all of the goods, or if it was going to work out.

With three days to go, Eve tried on a smart body suit that was kind of embarrassing in how it clung to every curve but which allowed her to move, use her arms and legs fully, and also give them the kind of stimulus and energy they needed to keep building. It allowed her to actually move much like everyone else, and with confidence, although with the ship’s yawing motions and severe vibration she wasn’t about to practice much in the way of long distance walking, not yet.

As the last day clicked over and they were counting down hours, time seemed to suspend, even drag. It had been so long that it seemed as if this trip would never end, that they would be passing through this nightmare umbilical forever.

And then, almost on the nose of when the countdown timer finally reached all zeroes, there was a massive bang and thump, the entire ship shuddered, and they were in normal space.

Almost at once every single alarm on the bridge went off, and the computers struggled for control of the ship. It took several minutes before there was anything approaching normalcy, but even when the data streams stabilized there was a terrible rumble all around and sounds like metal twisting and breaking.

Captain Lime and the engineering officers brought down small headband units and did a mindlink with the computers so that they could instantly go to where the problem was and have an understanding of it.

What they saw wasn’t good.

“Four of the six main tubes are cracked, one crack going for forty-two meters,” Lime reported to the Doctor and others who’d gathered on the bridge. “There’s also one whole huge section of engine thirty degrees on the port side that’s simply, well, missing. I’ll put it on the screen.”

The damage was obvious to anybody who looked, and the nearest place for any repairs was…?

“Sir, computers report zero reference point matches,” the captain told him. “Either we’re on the other side of the galaxy or, well—there’s nothing to reference. We might as well be in another galaxy, and maybe we are.”

Woodward let out a breath. “You’re saying that we’re here to stay?”

“Sir, take a look at what we just came out of—or, more properly, got ejected from.”

The wormhole signature was gyrating so fast that it was nearly impossible to get any sort of shape for it before it changed. It was a whirling dervish of a signature, and it didn’t stay in one spot. As the navigational data had warned, it was a spurting high pressure hose, moving over half the sky.

“We’ve got about thirty percent power, at least temporarily,” the captain told him, “and I’m using that to put some distance between us and that—thing. I would suggest, though, that we begin an evacuation of Sinai immediately except for essential personnel, bringing everybody into Olivet. At the moment, now that we’ve stabilized, I’m going to allow us to continue to use the full Mountain to bring us in-system, but we may have to hop out fast at any moment.”

“Do you have enough power to get us in-system to be able to use Olivet exclusively?” the Doctor asked.

“Oh, sir, once I’ve managed this acceleration maneuver we’ll have no problems getting in. The real question is going to be whether or not we can stop. At a guess, I’d say we’re going to have a very quick exit.”

The screens changed, and everyone throughout the ship, from the Doctor on the bridge to Eve and John back in medical gasped at the same moment.

It was one heck of a solar system.

The G-class star was slightly larger than average but not outside the range of such suns in the database of known systems; what was spectacular was the fact that there was a series of debris rings where solid planets might be expected, and, beyond, well out from its star, was a single gas giant so massive that had it ignited there would probably be nothing else around at all. At a diameter of almost three hundred thousand kilometers it dominated everything, and it had not one spectacular ring but two, eerily paralleling one another above and below its equator.

“That thing is impossible!” the navigator exclaimed. “There is simply no logical explanation why gravity hasn’t torn this whole system to pieces. Something we can’t see or measure as yet has to be balancing this. Either that or we’re in a parallel universe where things just don’t work the way physics says they must!”

Woodward shook his head. In other circumstances, the physicist in him would have truly loved this sort of mystery, but he didn’t have the luxury. He had a crippled ship that, with what acceleration it could muster, would almost certainly be pulled towards that giant planet without sufficient force by then to break away.

“Most likely we have some sort of odd balance involving some sort of dark massive object,” the Doctor told them, “and somehow all this has come together just so to keep it remarkably stable. Still, some of the forces generated explain the nature of that wild hole and the lack of obvious smaller solid planets. What a great laboratory for research! It’s places like this that throw what you know into a cocked hat and make science fun. Too bad we can’t take the time to do it.”

“Sir, it’s weirder than you think,” the navigator reported. “There’s a constant heat coming off that thing, although it’s pretty stable. The gas mixture is giving off a kind of weak starlike corona even though there’s no obvious source for it. It’s not going to become a star, but it’s acting like, well, not a failed sun, but a sun that was frozen in the instant before it blew. Very, very weird. There’s nothing like this in all our data. It’s as unlikely as, well…”

“The emergence of humanity on ancient Earth,” Woodward finished. “Yes, I can see that. If anything, we might be more probable than this. How wonderful that for all our knowledge God continually surprises us.” He paused for a moment, thinking on that, then asked, “Satellites?”

“That thing? Yes, sir! Hundreds. Every shape and size, and that’s not counting the double rings. Most follow the rings’ angle at about fifteen degrees off the elliptical, but a few actually go through the rings and probably look it, and a number seem to be in their own orbits, a couple running counter to the rest. Captured, most likely.”

“Give me large ones in any theoretical life zone that maintain relatively stable orbits,” the Doctor ordered.

“There’s one right here, and a second over there,” the navigator noted, highlighting them on the screens. “Either would be a respectable planet in its own right. This thing is big enough it has its own system and it’s amazingly stable. The largest, on the left there, is almost sixty thousand kilometers in diameter, solid, and shows evidence of heavy volcanism. Much of the cloudy atmosphere is actually water, though. My bet is that the place is very hot and very wet all at once. Whether the atmosphere is breathable or the surface temperature bearable, unlikely but impossible to tell without probes and a much closer look.”

“The second one, on the right-hand side, is about thirty-eight thousand kilometers in diameter, quite average, a bit farther out and on the chilly side. The large white areas are ice, probably pretty deep, and those are heavy polar caps. Still, atmospheric analysis shows a breathable if slightly weak atmosphere, and those large snow fields could very easily be the frozen tops of oceans. Equatorial region seems to be a cold desert, mostly. Conditions there would be livable, but not pleasant. I don’t—”

She suddenly paused and gave a slight gasp as a third planet-sized satellite suddenly came into view. Smaller than the other two at under thirty thousand kilometers in diameter, it was nonetheless a gem, a jewel, and it shouted beauty and life, a blue and white haven in the distance.

“That’s water all right, sir,” the navigator reported. “Oceans, continental land masses, an atmospheric balance with a very slightly rich oxygen content that’s compensated by the humidity. No really cold regions, but it appears to be a bit scorched in spots near the equator. Subtropical over most of the latitudes north and south of there, though. The kind of readings I’m getting, sir, say it’s a greenhouse, but one that is optimum for plants and maybe people.”

“Correlation?”

“Well, sir, it’s hard to say for sure, but I’d say that, checking against the Three Kings data and legends, the pretty blue one is Balshazzar, the cold one is Kaspar, and the large cloud-obscured hot one is Melchior. Not as romantic to look at as the legends, but otherwise things do match up. Those are the only planet-sized moons capable of supporting life, and they are in remarkably stable orbits considering that monster of a planet and the chaos it causes all around. Those just about have to be the Three Kings.”

They also fit the old scout’s alternate names according to the legends. A little paradise of a world, a world cold and inhospitable but livable where one might work things off in a kind of Purgatory, and a hot and cloudy place that was Inferno.

“One and one only. Choose wisely.”

It would be pretty easy from this early data to choose, and there would be popular sentiment only for the garden, but the Doctor wondered about the other part of that scout legend, where the monk warned to look beyond the obvious. Why hadn’t he used his original Dante-inspired names? Why had he thought they would be misleading?

“How long can we maintain ourselves in Olivet alone?” he asked the captain.

“Well, sir, we’ve fewer people than before, but Olivet was never designed to take the whole company anywhere. The food generators and waste cycling, water demands, all that will put an enormous strain on it. We can fly, although it’s going to be a bit tricky with all those gravitational forces and with all the debris bound to be in between those rings—”

“Just cut to the chase!” the Doctor snapped.

“Well, sir, I think I don’t want to maintain it in that space for very long in any event, particularly not under these conditions. With so much power to the shields, I’d recommend putting down on one of them and using the small scouts to take a look at the others. If a piece of rock penetrates the shields, then instead of having just one ship we’ll have no ship. I know how you hate this sort of thing, and no more than I do, but we’re going to have to pretty well choose where we want to go in the next few days, and we’re going to have to head there as straightaway as possible in Olivet after we do. And that’s assuming that Sinai can hold together enough to get us reasonably close. You’ve really got a choice on Olivet between shields on the one hand and food, heat, and toilets on the other. You see what I mean, sir?”

Woodward did. This should be a matter of careful exploration and good science, but in this case faith would have to be enough.

The obvious choice to everyone else was not the obvious choice to him, though. The pretty blue and white world with the subtropical climate and spectrographic analysis that it would accept the seeds of key fruits, vegetables, and the like allowing for a stable food supply from the Mountain’s supplies seemed obvious, but it also seemed too easy. There would be little to challenge or test the people; it looked like an invitation to grow soft and fat.

Three Kings… Gold, frankincense, myrrh… The blue world was certainly one of the spices, the cold world represented gold and might well be where the curious gems and other artifacts from the Three Kings had been found. The clouded, volcanic world had to be another spice or scent; he wished he could see below and know if it really was a place where they could survive. Was the atmosphere toxic, or did the clouds cause some sort of greenhouse effect? Most of his experts doubted the latter; if it had been a planet in orbit around the star, certainly, but the composition and the position around the gas giant would allow for sufficient cooling. As to the toxicity, though, they couldn’t guess without probes.

All three were supposedly places where humans could live, but that was legend. Two at least bore this out; if so, there was some reason to believe that the harsh and violent surface of Melchior was livable as well.

But what about the water quality, the soil, the other essentials that would make sustaining life possible? Did he dare commit all of them to that level of unknown?

Please, Lord! Show me what to do!

“Ship!” somebody shouted. “There’s another ship just shot out of the wormhole and if looks are any indication it’s worse beat up than us!”

It looked to be a small Talcan raider, a fast and heavily armed single unit vessel related to the much larger class of ships Sapenza had commanded. These had been built as local warships that could also be used for official business by the more prosperous colonial worlds, and to give them some autonomy from the interstellar naval forces that might not have their best interests at heart nor be under their command.

Many had gone pirate or mercenary, or been turned to it, over the years since the Great Silence. This had to be one such, probably from some colonial trace in the neighborhood of Marchellus who’d picked up the rumor. The captain had to be pretty good; it seemed to be the only one they hadn’t shaken.

That, however, appeared to have been a decidedly mixed blessing to the ship, which was desperately trying to right itself, stop its merciless spin, and which was, rather clearly, trailing parts of spacecraft.

The small ship managed a measure of stability and turned itself in-system, but it still seemed to have little control, and even its energy shields were intermittently changing strength or cutting out and then coming back in again.

“What do you think, Captain?” Woodward asked.

“I think that fellow’s in far worse shape than we are, that he’d better get himself and his people into lifeboats if he’s got them and get the hell down someplace. He’s going about as fast as he can go without breaking apart, and he’s going to pass us in a matter of hours. That ship just can’t take it for very long, and when it gets within the gravitational field of that big planet it’s going to be pulled every which way from Sunday.”

“Can you talk to them?”

“We’re trying, but there’s no reply. Either their equipment is damaged or out, or they just don’t want to talk right now. They’d better. If they time it right we could snag their lifeboats, but we could never slow or stop their ship.”

Over those hours, repeated attempts to communicate with them continued to fail, and the Mountain was reduced to simply giving them instructions on crossing over via lifeboat if they were so inclined. Even as Mountain continued the monumental task of moving everything and everyone they wanted to save into Olivet, they all kept one eye and ear open to see if the mysterious stranger was going to do anything.

“Maybe they’re all dead,” someone suggested. “It’s pretty beat up. Maybe it’s just the ship’s computers flying it.”

“No, they’ve still got sensor control and they’ve used them,” the captain told them. “Somebody’s still alive on that thing.”

But when they reached the point of no return, after which they could not launch boats and reach the Mountain, they went right on past without any communication.

“They’ll be there well before us,” the captain noted. “If, of course, they don’t wind up as the hundred and first or whatever moon of that thing, crash into its gaseous surface, or skip around and go off into deep space.”

From that point, it was simply a matter of tracking them inbound; the people of the Mountain had much more important things to do for their own future survival.

Within three days, the gas giant began to fill their vision. It was a very dangerous object, but it was also impressive, even awe-inspiring.

“You know, in ancient times if people had gazed out and seen something like that they would have mistaken it for a god and worshipped it,” Karl Woodward noted. “We must make certain that our descendants don’t fall into that kind of error and make a mockery of all that we’ve stood for over the years.”

Thomas Cromwell stared at it and nodded. “Curious that it’s described in the data from both the original legendary discoverer of this place, Father Ishmael Hand, and Mother Tymm, but neither attempted to name it. It’s simply a gas giant.”

“Well, then, I suppose we can name it, for all the good it will do for the future considering nobody will know it but our people. Nothing divine, though. Nothing that can be perverted later. Maybe that was their problem. The ones here before us couldn’t come up with a name that was both adequate for that thing and at the same time didn’t run the risk of potential blasphemy.” He changed the subject. “And what of our silent friends?”

“I’m astonished their ship held as much together as it has, but it’s about at its end now,” Captain Lime reported. “They’ve been doing much what we did, using remote sensors to probe what they can, and they’ve centered on the Kings. I’ve seen evidence they’re putting all the power they have left into deflecting towards the blue one, Balshazzar. At a guess, they are going to try and get as close as they can and then use the lifeboats to make it to the surface.”

Woodward thought about it. “As suckered by it as most of us, I suppose,” he commented, sounding disappointed. Still, he had asked for some divine guidance. Was this it? Could he in good conscience lead them to a landing on Melchior knowing that other human beings had landed on Balshazzar?

The near magnetic pull to his own people of Balshazzar seemed to be underlined; his fervent and near constant prayers gave him only this guidance, yet nothing else had emerged to support his instinct to head for Melchior.

He hated having his hand forced like this, but if Lime was right and a lifeboat from the other vessel did get away and settle on the surface of Balshazzar, they’d have to follow. And he was quite insistent, even to himself, that God had given him the choice of only one.

Balshazzar, then, it almost certainly would be, even though everything in his core being shouted against it and, most of all, he hated doing the popular and expected thing.

Halfway into the fourth day inbound all the indicators and full ship’s computers began to sound their warnings that the Mountain was about to give up the ghost. The crack in the main engines had continued to expand, and if it reached an edge then some of the great power plant modules would rupture and they would cease to exist, making all choices moot.

With enormous sadness and great reluctance, Karl Woodward ordered all personnel off Sinai, sealed Olivet, and detached the smaller interplanetary capable vessel from the wounded and dying interstellar beast.

They were now headed in towards the double-ringed giant with shields at maximum and power full. All around them they could see evidence that they were going through a relatively dense debris field of mercifully very tiny particles that were hitting the energy shields and burning up. Having committed to a Three Kings approach vector, however, they could not maintain these power levels for long and required much of the power from ship’s functions to support it as it was.

As expected, a single lifeboat detached from the mysterious ship ahead of them and headed for Balshazzar. The rest of that ship continued on, on a trajectory to strike and bury itself deep into the great gas giant, a rather minor splinter in Moby Dick’s backside.

“Did they get down okay?” Woodward asked, feeling guilty that he almost hoped that the answer would be no.

“Yes, sir. At least, no explosion, no major impact in the area they would have gone down. Every bit of evidence says that if anybody was in that lifeboat they’re on the surface.”

He sighed. “Then the choice for us is the same, I suppose. Balshazzar, Captain.”

Now let’s see what’s so mysterious and special about these three damned moons!