Kaspar's Box

X: THE THREE KINGS

“You can’t do this to me! You gave me your word!”

Maslovic grinned at the little man, who had been going back and forth about this for most of the trip.

“What’s the matter, Macouri? You know we made a deal. I thought you were the agent of the devil here. Isn’t that the devil’s trademark? Finding the loopholes and sneaking in the fine print? You’re not so good at it on the receiving end, are you?”

“But you said—”

“I promised you that you would be off the Thermopylae for good if you gave me what I wanted to know, and you are. This is Agrippa, and it’s a much smaller ship, comparatively speaking. And while you are under ship’s security, you are no longer a prisoner and are free to mix with the others, walk the decks, you name it. Just be aware that if you or anyone else without the proper security codes tries to, oh, disengage a lifeboat or raid a weapons locker or something of that sort they will get a nasty and very painful experience and will, from that point, be locked away in a padded cell in the brig wearing nothing but a smile.”

“But I could have gone at any time! I don’t wish to go!”

“Nevertheless, you are going. We are lining up on your coordinates even as we speak. And if we don’t come out the other end at the Three Kings, you will have more than a little explaining to do. It is one of the major reasons you’re here. If you have anything to tell me that we don’t know about what’s on the other end and what might be expected or not, you’d better tell us soon, because whatever happens to us from this point on also happens to you.”

“This is beyond even your powers! I demand to be returned at once!”

“Remember our weighty conversation? Power is everything, isn’t it? Your money means nothing here, nothing to me anyway, or the others. You might be able to buy Murphy, but he can’t drive this ship.”

They had kept it from him until just now, when they lay off the region of wild holes waiting for the correct mathematical match to pop in. That could be any time, and at that point Chung would have to instantly commit or abort. Wild holes were unstable; they popped in and out like soap bubbles and lasted in most cases only fractions of a second before “bursting,” closing up and ceasing to exist once more. Only by putting a ship and its energy field into that hole at precisely the moment it was open could they stabilize it. Once inside, they could ride through it to the other end even as it closed itself back down. Not only space, but time itself, would be bent and twisted. It was why the route to the Three Kings had been so difficult to find even if you knew in what region to look for the entrance on the human end, and why it was as hard or harder to find your way back if you made it.

“I—I don’t know if the numbers work! They’re the right numbers!” Macouri insisted. “They’re the ones everybody else used. Who knows where they actually go? I—I—Oh, god! Don’t make me go in one of those!”

Maslovic grinned, feeling no sympathy for the murdering little fart. “Did I hear you just call on God? That might not be the best way to go there, I wouldn’t think. Not if you meet your old master on the other side.”

It was too much for the little man. He stood up and tried to look his captor straight in the eyes while getting his blood pressure down enough so he wasn’t totally beet red. It didn’t happen.

“I am Georgi Macouri!” he thundered, as authoritative as anyone could sound. “You can’t do this to me!”

“You’re the same mix of a few cheap chemicals and water, born little different than anyone else and destined to die like all of us and go back to those components,” Maslovic shot back. “You have the same value to me as those girls you slaughtered had to you. How’s it feel now, Georgi? What the hell ever gave you the idea that you were somehow immune?”

There was dead silence for a moment as the reality of that seeped into Macouri’s brain. While it was still percolating, Chung’s voice came over the public address.

“Attention! Please be seated at a secure station. Strap yourselves in if possible or hold on. The mathematical progression of hole formations is following the correct formula we were given. I will sound the alarm. At any point after that, we may have to go in fast and hard.”

Macouri’s mind suddenly shifted to the imminent. “How many times has she jumped through a wild hole in a ship this size?” he asked nervously.

“Never, as far as I know, except in simulation the past few days. Relax. Size doesn’t matter as much on this one, I’m told, and the ship’s own systems know what to do. I’m belting in. You should do the same.”

Almost at the end of his sentence the warning klaxon sounded throughout the ship. Almost everyone else was already lying down and secured or belted in a proper jump chair.

“NEVER???” Georgi Macouri’s voice sounded even as the ship suddenly accelerated from a near coast to fantastic speeds and headed for what the Macouri formula said would be the wild hole to the Three Kings.

“Definitely not what I expected,” Darch commented. Although his primary job was security on this mission, he was also the de facto head of the entire science department aboard the ship. In fact, except for the computerized labs and research programs, he was the entire science department. “In fact, what I am seeing not only I but all our science computers say is damned near impossible.”

They were lying several million kilometers back from the mini system, far enough outsystem that they could see both the strange dense star and the close-in massive gas giant as well. The visible-light screen view was impressive; it was almost as if they were looking at two suns, one on fire, the other not.

“Science is not my strong point,” Maslovic told him. “In fact, I believe it because the folks who know it tell me about it.”

“This kind of system is unprecedented, and for good reason,” Darch explained, not just to his boss but to all of them. “The kind of gravitational forces I’m reading show that there is simply no way this system can be in this kind of stable formation. This is a system that should be at war, pulling things apart, pulling others in for incineration. That kind of star shouldn’t even have planets. The turbulence on the big gas giant is an indicator of just how nasty things should be. These kinds of forces are why that wild hole field is where it is.” He exhaled and shook his head. “No, I don’t even envy the captain keeping us in any kind of stable orbit anywhere around here. No wonder almost nobody came back. Anybody who came along here who wasn’t the best would have been sucked in or flung down and crashed. This kind of system makes no sense. It can’t exist like this if physics is to be believed. There has to be a third force here, something not showing up on our instruments, that acts as the stabilizing constant between the warring sides. Otherwise it’s voodoo, Chief. It’s magic.”

“I knew it! I knew it!” Macouri muttered. “This is Hell! The seat of the Powers of Darkness! Oh, my! Oh, my!”

Maslovic totally ignored him. “Any idea of the force?”

“Well, in one sense our quaking friend here is right. In a good simulator I might well be able to build this thing. Sure, this is the universe. Anything’s possible out here, or so it seems, but it would be a lot easier to build it than to wait to find it, maybe, naturally, including some mysterious third force we haven’t seen anywhere else.”

Maslovic turned and looked at him. “And you could create a third force?”

“Maybe. It wouldn’t probably work here, or be much like here, but I could kludge it. This, now—this is no kludge. This was designed. This was engineered. I’d bet anything I had that this whole damned place was built.”

“Well, we sure couldn’t build it,” Broz noted.

“Irrelevant,” Maslovic told her.

“Huh?”

“If it was built, and I defer to the experts on that, then the question isn’t how, not unless you want to build another and I have no desire to do that. The question is why.”

“Beg your pardon,” he heard Murphy’s voice behind him. “Sure’n it’s obvious, I would think.”

“More of your wheelbarrows, Captain?”

“No, not exactly. But the same analogy. On at least twenty worlds that I know of there exist plants, or what serves for plants, that don’t eat sunlight and minerals or the usual. They got confused somewhere after creation, poor things, and decided to eat meat instead. There’s a ton of them types back on Barnum’s World. They keep the insect population down to that dull roar, or help to.”

“Yes? So?”

“That’s what that is, don’t you see? It’s a giant flycatcher. And we’re the flies.”

“He might be right,” Darch commented. “Hold on. Let me do a hypothetical here.” His tone changed and he adjusted something on his control panel, then said, “Computer, assume for problem that the data read in represents an intelligent construct.”

“Postulating,” the computer responded.

“Now, give me a visible representation of the missing energy force X that would be required by a builder to maintain the system at stasis.”

On the screen, superimposed on the actual view, was a series of translucent spidery webs connecting the various parts of the inner solar system and particularly the secondary system around the gas giant. Primary energy flowed not from the moons or sun as expected but from the gas giant.

“Interesting. They’re using the very instability of the system that’s causing the tremendous storms and volatility on the planet to give them the power they need to stabilize the inner system,” Darch noted. “There’s no perfect stability, however. Eventually sufficient energy will be lost in the exchange to weaken the planet. Not much, but the tolerances here are very slight. It will slow, begin falling inward taking everything with it, and collide with the sun. The result will be a monstrous explosion and possibly the formation of a small singularity. We don’t want to be anywhere around when that happens.”

“How far away would be safe?” Maslovic asked him.

“Um, how about a hundred and fifty or so light-years minimum? No, when this goes, it’s going to take the evidence with it.”

“How long until that happens?”

“Hard to say. Remember, what you’re seeing is presupposing an artificial construct with forces we can’t measure or understand and which, if they exist, have been fairly stable for centuries, maybe longer. However, there is very small slippage, measurable slippage, of the big guy in system. Whatever process is going on, it’s begun. Still, I don’t think we’re talking tomorrow or next week or even next year, but when it goes, it’s going to go really quick.”

“Which of those three big moons in the life tolerances zone around the big boy would be most likely to harbor the builders?”

Darch chuckled. “Oh, none of ’em. Whoever did this, assuming somebody did, wasn’t from around here any more than we are. But, boy! Is that technology impressive!”

Maslovic thought a moment, then asked, “So, Darch, if they have that kind of power, could we blow it up if we have to?”

“All else being even, I’d say yes,” the tech chief replied. “Depends on whether or not they deployed defenses at the same level as their building projects. I’d walk real careful on this one, Chief. If we could blow it, we’d almost certainly be killed in the same attempt, since it would destabilize everything. Wouldn’t be much of an escape route.”

“Have you done a lifescan of the big three moons there?”

“No sweat. Now, understand, there’s a ton of moons around this baby, but only three that could sustain our kind of carbon-based life. That and the Macouri pictures identify those three as the Kings. They’re not all resort spots, but I can tell you that all three are just teeming with life. The one that gives the weirdest readings is the little cold one. I’m not sure that the majority life-form there is carbon-based, but it’s within our biological understanding. If there are any devils or even angels around, then they’re made of something our sensors don’t know about.”

“What about humans?”

“I don’t get any signs of our folks on any one except the middle one. Not real surprising, I don’t think, if we’re the smart ones. A land of milk and honey. Rich atmosphere, mostly warm to hot on all the land masses, vegetable life that might well produce stuff we can eat, all that. We’re by no means the majority population there, but there’s a lot of our kind. I don’t get any close matches on the other two, which means that if any of us are there we’re in numbers too small to register. Just what is there, well, we’ll have to go and see, I guess. Not human. Not consistent types, either. I’d say at least twenty different major life-forms on the big volcanic one alone, and a couple on the little cold one, although in that case one really stands out. I think, though, Chief, we’ve broken the old puzzle. I don’t know how intelligent they’ll turn out to be, but I’ll bet you pretty good that we’ve got not one but several thinking alien types out there.”

“Well,” Murphy muttered, “there goes the neighborhood.”

“Let’s go see,” Darch suggested.

Maslovic wasn’t quite as eager. “We aren’t the first ship from our species to make it this far,” he reminded them all. “And none of them got back. Murphy may be right. That may be a gigantic flytrap. It’s definitely well baited.”

“But we can’t just sit here,” Darch noted.

“True, but we may be able to take a bit of a lesser risk. Captain Chung! I believe it’s time to tighten up all security at all points,” he said in a particularly loud voice. “And then you and I will get some of the jewels out of the vault.”

“What are you going to do?” Murphy asked, still feeling a bit protective of his wards.

“They, whoever they are out there, came and looked us over uninvited and without saying a word. Macouri seemed to think that the girls were a unique conduit to whatever’s here. Let’s see.”

They were delighted to get their “jewels” back. Maslovic was careful to match each girl with the color of the stone she’d been wearing in the earlier encounter so that things would be replicated as much as possible. He did hope, though, that they wouldn’t have to go through a long and boring ceremony painting their naked bodies and chanting over a pentagram. Nothing he’d seen indicated that what people like Macouri and his group had come up with or interpolated into this business had anything to do with what was really going on. He was, however, prepared to gather together Macouri and his bodyguard Joshua with the girls if he had to and endure almost anything.

Right away the girls all seemed to notice something different and tried to figure it out.

“They’re talkin’ to us, like as always,” Irish O’Brian noted, and the others nodded. “Kind of funny, though.”

“Yeah,” Mary Margaret McBride responded. “None of the ceremonies done, and you can still sort of hear ’em. Like tiny voices.”

Maslovic looked over at Darch who shook his head briskly in the negative. Nothing was being picked up on the instruments, although if his “simulation” was correct about the third stabilizing force in the system, then by now they were well within its range and influence.

Darch in particular seemed somewhat relieved by this. The observable phenomena was consistent with his model even if he had no way to actually detect this third force, and things like physics and practical sense didn’t seem all that violated, either. These might well be some kind of alien transceivers, but they were of very limited range and power. He had theorized, though, that somehow there was an exponential power growth when these stones were combined. If so, this trio should be able to get increasingly clearer signals. They might well even be overwhelmed and dominated by whatever was out there, as had happened to a degree back on the Thermopylae.

“There’s somebody talkin’, or tryin’ to,” McBride commented. “Only they’re still so far away I can’t make out what they’re sayin’.”

“It’s speaking in English, then, or Gaelic, or what?” Murphy asked them.

They all shrugged. “It’s inside your head, y’see,” O’Brian tried to explain. “It’s like talkin’ only it ain’t. I don’t think what tongue they use would have anything to do with what I understood, if that makes any sense.”

“Telepathy?” Maslovic asked his people.

“I don’t think so,” Broz told him. “At least not the way we think of it. It really is more like radio. The earliest radios were created with crystal sets, and could be made simply by poor people even without any local source of power for reception. Like this, reception wasn’t very good, but you had it if the transmitter had enough power to vibrate that crystal from far off. We all build one as part of our training classes. In this case, though, acting as both receiver and amplifier, the transmission isn’t through vibration of the air but of something inside the brain. The question is how they have enough power from this end to send back from that area, but I think they do. In some ways, it’s the old basic crystal radio principle. In others, it is to us what a hyperspacial tight-beam com signal would be to those early crystal set people who were our ancestors. It’s close enough that I can understand what it’s doing, but far enough ahead of our technology that I can’t for a moment imagine how it’s doing it.”

“They ain’t talkin’ to us!” Brigit Moran muttered, sounding disappointed. “It’s some guy and some girl talkin’.”

Maslovic was suddenly doubly interested. “They’re definitely people? Like us? You can tell that?”

“Yeah, sure’n she’s right,” O’Brian agreed. “It’s a kind of gab fest. And from the few words I can make out, it ain’t even dirty or romantic.”

“Do they know you’re listening in?”

All three shook their heads. “Don’t seem to,” Mary Margaret told them. “It’s like we’re just eavesdroppin’ on the extension.”

“What about our mysterious friend who always seems to lurk around the other side in those gems? Any sign of him?”

“What? You mean the demon? He don’t usually show up for a while. Sometimes he don’t show up at all,” O’Brian said. “I don’t get much sense of him yet, at least not in this stuff. I don’t think he’s in the same place as the talkers. Come to think on it, it don’t seem like these two are anywhere near close, either. That’d make sense, though. If they was close, why would they need these to talk?”

Maslovic looked up at the main screen, which showed the subsystem view and highlighted the three huge planet-sized moons that had life-sustaining atmospheres. “Now, let’s see. Kaspar, Melchior, and Balshazzar?”

“You have the last two backwards,” Broz told him. “Kaspar’s the small cold one, all right, but the pretty one in the middle is Balshazzar, the one in and belching smoke into warm oceans is Melchior. If your guess is right, and the controlling force or group or whatever is on Kaspar, then maybe these two aren’t. Best bet is that they’re on separate continents on Balshazzar, since that’s where the people are.”

“Them three worlds, they’re the Kings?” Mary Margaret asked, looking at the same picture.

Maslovic nodded. “Yes. You saw their pictures at Macouri’s big place in the city.”

“Yeah, I remember. I can tell you, and I dunno why, that the guy I’m hearin’ is on the one in the middle and the girl’s on the big one closest in. That help?”

“On Melchior! Yes, that does help. Darch?”

“I don’t get any human readings for the world, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few or even a few hundred down there. That small a signature would be lost in that sea of alien life.”

“Okay, okay. So we have people on at least two of them, and they can contact each other. Now, if our watchers are on Kaspar, that could mean that they don’t even pay attention to that kind of local traffic.”

“No,” Captain Murphy said, thinking in his usual bent way. “But you and I both know, Sarge, that they’d be lookin’ at us right this moment.”

Maslovic nodded. “I agree. Girls, still no sign of your mysterious friend?”

“Shush!” responded Brigit Moran. “We’re tryin’ to put ourselves together so we can really eavesdrop!”

The marine put his finger to his lips and made sure the others in the room saw it. If the girls wanted to chant a little and hold hands and get in sync to boost their power, that was exactly what he wanted this time.

The girls, as usual, started off in anything but unison, but within a few minutes the chanting—not just the words, which were mostly nonsense, but the pitch and meter—seemed to come together, first as a sort of harmony, and finally as if a single voice, even though the three voices were very different normally. All three had their eyes closed and seemed lost in a world of their own.

This was the most dangerous time for the experiment, they all knew. The last time these three had achieved this level of unity they’d managed to almost literally take over a starship.

Maslovic decided they were far enough into their self-induced hypnotic trance that speaking was no longer a problem, although he kept his voice quiet and low.

“Anything, Captain?”

“I felt several weak probes of my systems,” Chung responded, keeping that quiet tone and localizing it as much as possible on the science control panel. “Nothing threatening at all, though. They’re casting out, but it’s strictly one-way. Nobody or nothing’s yet trying to come through them at me or us.”

“Stay alert. It might come in the twinkling of a star and those folks know their system a lot better than we know how to stop it.”

“I’ll let you know. If they do break through, at least I feel confident at this point that I could warn you about it.”

Maslovic turned and looked over at Murphy. “Cap, you want to give it a try? They still seem to trust you, for some reason.”

The old man shrugged. “Well, I’ll give it me best. The big problem may be gettin’ through to ’em.”

He walked over to where the three had stopped chanting now but were standing together holding hands with eyes closed.

“Hello, darlin’s, this is Captain Murphy. Can you hear me?”

No response.

“C’mon, darlin’s! Speak to the old captain, now.”

Still no reaction. He was just about to give it up as a bad bet when all three voices as one said, “Captain?”

There was something in the way they said it that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It didn’t sound like them or anybody else he knew at all.

“Yes? And who might ye be?”

“You have an accent. It is hard to make it out.”

“I doubt if it’s me accent that’s the problem. Just who might I be speakin’ to through these girls?”

“I had no idea you were speaking through others. Are you on Balshazzar?”

“Goodness, no! I’m on a ship in space.”

There was no reaction for a moment, then the voice said, “You are in a spaceship? From the colonial sector?”

“Yes. We’re just comin’ insystem now.”

Maslovic gave him a frown at that, but he figured that any possible enemy around who hadn’t noticed a naval destroyer approaching inbound by this time wasn’t much of a threat.

“How about you?” he asked the voice. “Are you human, or one of them peek-a-books from the stones?”

“I’m human. Just barely any more. It’s been very hard here.”

“Looked like Balshazzar wasn’t that bad a place to be stuck,” he noted.

“We—we’re not on Balshazzar. We’re on Melchior.”

That caused some consternation among everybody on the Agrippa.

“Melchior! Ain’t supposed to be no folks like me there!”

“There’s not many. Four of us are left. We were marooned when the salvage freighter Stanley deserted us. No way to get off. No human population, no alien population that we can trust.”

“How is it you’re talkin’ to me like this, then?”

“The stones. We can use them like communicators. They grow here. Millions of them, probably. Too many around and they’ll drive you insane, but you can handle a few. Large population of us on Balshazzar. We can talk through these. For God’s sake, if you can come and get us, please do so! Don’t try Balshazzar. Something will let you land but won’t let you leave.”

“Names,” Maslovic hissed. “We need names!”

“Just who are ye, then? Kinda hard to make out when you’re hearin’ yourself this way.”

“I am Doctor Randi Queson, sort of science jack-of-all-trades. With me are engineer Jerry Nagel, shuttle pilot Gail Cross, and team leader An Li. Li suffered a breakdown or seizure or something partly due to the stones and hasn’t been anything but childlike since. We have minimal food we’ve been able to gather, too much water, no supplies.”

Murphy thought a moment. “You say somethin’ keeps folks from leavin’ Balshazzar? What about where you are?”

“Should not be a problem. We went back and forth to the Stanley. My head is killing me now. This only works for short periods. Got to stop or I’ll pass out.”

“Wait! Is there any way we could locate you? That’s a mighty big world down there!”

“We have nothing. Lost everything now in the storms and quakes and always moving. Big oceans, lots of dust and islands. Oh, God! This close! I don’t know how…”

“Do you think you could link up with me girls here again via these alien stones?”

“I dunno! Got to quit! I—”

It was clear from the total slack in the faces of the three young women that there was no longer any contact.

Darch threw his arms up in a gesture of helplessness. “Damn! If we had a conventional signal, anything, I could trace it, but sending and receiving via the brains of morons helps not a bit! How do I find four humans who could be anywhere on a world bigger than the one we left not long ago? It’s impossible!”

“We have time, I think,” Maslovic said. “They’ve survived this long, they can make it another couple of days, and we have a valuable heads-up on Balshazzar. The prettiest one’s always the biggest trap. That’s probably why all the humans are there. Weird, though, that these stones would be formed on a hellhole like Melchior.” He sighed. “Okay, people! We got a couple of days to work out a way to locate these folks. No question we can use some locals aboard, particularly if they’re adults who can use these things without us having to go into chanting rituals and who don’t think everything is magic.”

“Of course, we hav’ta make sure that they’re actually rescued, too,” Murphy noted. “Just gettin’ ’em off there ain’t gonna do much good if we wind up stuck someplace else.”

Murphy looked over at the still-entranced girls. “So what do we do with them for now?”

“I’m not going to sit around and wait for somebody to wake up out there, notice them, and try and take this ship,” Maslovic commented. “I think we get some of the squad up here and strip those stones off them again. That should break the circle.”

But before he could even call down via the ship’s intercom, the trio, as one, suddenly swayed, let go of one another, and collapsed in a heap on the deck.

Maslovic and Broz were there before Murphy could even move a step, quickly taking the necklaces holding the stones off their necks. That done, Maslovic called down for Rosen and Sanchez to come up and take the girls back to their quarters, carrying them if need be. Sanchez still wasn’t a hundred percent back, but she was more than up to this sort of thing.

Now they could settle back and try and figure out how to locate and extract four humans from a moon almost fifty-six thousand kilometers around at the equator and teeming with hundreds of thousands of representatives of unknown alien life-forms.

“Why do you still serve this man, Joshua?” Maslovic asked the big bodyguard who had chosen to come with them of his own free will.

“I have sworn a blood oath,” Joshua replied. “I shall follow him into Hell if need be.”

“You might not be far from doing just that,” Maslovic pointed out. “But why? What kind of oath would hold a man like you?”

Joshua turned and looked straight at the intelligence man. “What, precisely, is ‘a man like me’? Do you think I am nothing but a pirate? That I have no honor?”

“It is difficult to tell someone’s innermost self at the best of times. In your case, the only way I have of judging your sincerity and honor is by the company you keep. Tell me this, then: do you believe what he believes? Is that a part of it as well? That is, do you believe that there are actually demons out there, and that we are moving towards them?”

“I believe in evil,” the big man responded without hesitation. “Who commits it or who has it is the only question. I also believe in good. In an evil universe that is crumbling around us all, honor is the only thing one can cling to. That is my code and I cannot vary it. To do so would leave me with nothing at all.”

“You know he’s insane, don’t you? That he hears voices and sees visions no one else does and that he acts upon them without a second thought, even if they are random acts of violence?”

“He saved my life once, and the life of my extended family. Sane or not, I am bound to him.”

“Was it a Faustian bargain, then?” Captain Murphy put in. “Did you sell him your soul in exchange for them services that saved the others?”

“No. I appreciate that you are both attempting to understand what can only be understood in my personal context. To have sold him my soul would have been easy. He buys many, and is generous to those who sell. But as I do not believe in souls, I could not sell him mine. It would be meaningless. No. We were on a far colonial outpost. Most of my family was barely making ends meet. We were attacked by pirates, and Mister Macouri happened to be nearby doing some more normal business. He answered our call, and asked me what I would give for salvation, since his own beliefs preclude charity involving risk. I offered my humble services for soever long as he needed them, and my unquestioned obedience in life. He accepted, and hired local mercenaries to rescue us. He then put a reward on each pirate head, and they were tracked down and their heads delivered to his representative for payment. I had the will but not the resources to do that. Does that answer your question?”

Maslovic nodded. “I believe so. I’m not sure, though, that you won’t have to make a choice that is as ugly as any you’ve made before.”

“Why are you so disturbed, Maslovic? We are the same,” Joshua said to him.

“I beg your pardon?”

“We are the same. Your code—it says you obey orders. That you serve your mission as given by your superiors regardless of whether or not you, personally, believe it is right or wrong. You do it for family, for personal honor, and because it is your function in life. The rest do the same, except, perhaps, for the man Murphy here, who may do what is right and honorable, or not, depending on how he feels that moment, and those young women.”

Maslovic didn’t want to travel that road. “What about Magda Schwartz?”

“She is in highly profitable sales. Security equipment and all the peripherals that are needed. Most of her clients might be considered insane in one way or another. Great fortune and no responsibility does that more than not I have learned. She makes them happy and does not judge them. When she makes them happy, they give her big orders that make her rich by commissions. She, too, thinks that our part of the universe is falling apart. Her solution to it is to amass sufficient money so that she can at least be very comfortable until it ends or she dies happy. It is not something I would like to do, but I can understand it.”

“As can I, Joshua. As can I. Tell me, though—Macouri’s beliefs? Did he come by them himself, or did he get something through those stones?”

“I do not use the stones. He does. I do not think he gets any messages, but he does get the effects. They excite him and conform to his cosmology. But I believe he envies the young women. They can speak and understand. They have no need of cosmology.”

“And they couldn’t pronounce it anyway,” Murphy noted.

“Then why is he so frightened to be here?” Maslovic asked the bodyguard.

“Mister Macouri is a powerful man. He places power where I place honor and you place duty. That is more than sufficient where we live. But here, in their part of the universe, what is he? Without his power he is nothing. Without his power he is the potential victim.”

“Well, go on back and help him prop himself up,” the marine said. “We may yet need him.”

After Joshua had left, Maslovic turned to Murphy. “You’ve been around more than I have with these types. What do you think?”

“I dunno. If honor is so important that you promise to obey every command and the bastard commands you to strangle children, are you honorable? I don’t trust folks like that. They got no questions. This is a man who will unhesitatingly butcher the innocent because he promised a madman he’d do whatever the madman asked. Them’s the kind that put women and children in ovens and turned on the gas in past history. They give me the creeps.”

“Point taken.”

“You better watch it yourself, though, Sarge. Your own folk have a history of openin’ up on innocent kids if some crazy general or admiral says to. You got the real rock and a hard place. You expect your team to obey instantly, to die for you if need be, ’cause if they don’t it could be too late for everybody. That don’t make your kind evil like that fellow—he has a choice and he already decided it—but it does open up the same result. None of you are no better than the folks what give you the orders. That’s why I’m me own man. ’Cause everything I do is my responsibility, my decision, and I’m the only one what decides if I sleep good nights or not.”

“You continue to amaze me, Murphy. I thought you were just a drunken old sot.”

“Oh, I am. But there’s worst things to be. If I was real smart I’d be rich and retired with scantily clad girls peelin’ and feedin’ me grapes while I reclined in me garden. But I’m clever enough to have done somethin’ that most folks in me line of work rarely get to do.”

“Yes?”

“I’m old, Sergeant. I got old and I’m still here.”

The computers were of little help in figuring out a method of isolating and picking up the Stanley survivors, and they soon realized that the only hope they had was the same sort of contact system they’d used to speak in the first place. Somehow the waves or particles or whatever sort of energy linked all the Magi stones would have to lead them to one another.

“We’re going to have to use the shuttle, not any of the fighters, to have any sort of chance here,” Broz said. “That means making contact while inside, and hoping that we can somehow use that link to ride the beam, as it were, down to the people.”

“No probes?” the sergeant asked.

“Many probes, sure, and I still got some good ferrets, too, but what good do they do? They can’t identify and latch on to this broadcast connection, and they can’t be one end of it, either. It seems to work only with a brain at each end.”

“I don’t like it. That means taking the girls, who seem to need to be all together on this. Add a pilot and a couple of people to aid in getting the survivors aboard, and we’ve got a significant group of exposed personnel. What if it’s a trick? What if nobody’s down there and they nail our people? We’d have no practical way to rescue them, considering how stripped the old girl is here.” Maslovic shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

“Still and all, we got to try,” Murphy said flatly.

The sergeant sighed. “Yes, we do. The girls okay?”

“Yep. Don’t remember a thing ’cept that for a while they felt hotter’n Hell and everything smelled bad. Got to smell like sulphur down there, and if they’re in the mid latitudes, north or south, what’d we figure? Forty-five, forty-six degrees Celsius? They felt and smelled what the speaker told ’em. Kinda sounds like what you’d expect from a demon at that, don’t it?”

“Don’t you start on that! They willing to try it?”

“Sure. It’s somethin’ to do, and it gets them their pretty baubles. They’re still pissed we took ’em back before they woke up.”

“Okay, then. Cap, you with the girls. We’ll let Sanchez and Nasser handle the rescue, and Broz, you fly it manually. No merging, you’re just not trained for it.”

“Got it, Boss,” she said. “Don’t worry. If we can get the coordinates, we’ll get them. Man! Is that one ugly place down there, though! I’d take breathers.”

Everyone was nervous except the girls, who thought it was a big adventure. As far as the others were concerned, once the people on the surface were located, it was going to be quick in and out just as fast as possible.

The shuttle was launched from high orbit, and Broz decided to take it in a broad series of spirals covering as much of the northern hemisphere as possible from a decent altitude. If they found nothing, she was prepared to climb and do the same at the south.

“You gals ready to get into your magic circle or whatever?” Murphy asked them.

“Don’t need to,” Irish O’Brian told him. “I can almost smell ’em now.”

“Me, too!” piped up Brigit Moran. “And they don’t smell good, neither!”

“Well, I hope they’re away from them seaside colonies,” Murphy commented. “You see the sucker mouths on them things? I don’t think I want to introduce meself to them right now.”

“They’re not near the big ocean,” Mary Margaret McBride said. “Oh, I wish I could really see down there! I can feel ’em when we get close!”

“Take your time,” Broz told them. “You tell me when we’re close and when we’re going away. I’ll try and narrow it down.”

It took much of the day to do it the hard way, but finally they were able to zero in on one particularly large and active island whose interior had a series of jungle outcrops amidst what seemed to be blowing dust and steaming ground.

“There! Right down there!” McBride announced. “Oh! You’re goin’ past ’em again!”

Broz slowed to a crawl and then backtracked a bit. All sensors were deployed now, and they were at such a low altitude that she felt sure she could locate individuals if they got close enough. The trouble was, they were getting pretty exposed to whatever other hostile elements might be down there, including the creatures Murphy had christened the Big Suckers. Still, this location made sense if you wanted to avoid that kind of contact. The Suckers weren’t averse to going in the ocean, but they didn’t seem to stray more than a few kilometers inland.

“Got ’em!” Broz announced. “I have absolutely no idea how we just did this, but we got ’em! Right down there, just ahead and below us to the right. And they see us!”

Murphy and Sanchez checked the screens. “I only see three of ’em,” the marine noted.

“Well, we’re not staying around here long. I’m putting down. Cap, you and the girls come forward into the pilot’s compartment. I’m going to seal us off and keep us pressurized here, so we won’t have to eat that dust. Sanchez and Nasser will have the suits and breathers, and medical kits as well.”

The people who came out to meet the shuttle were burned black by the sun, but their hair had turned almost snow white. They were all thin enough to count ribs from afar, but still they looked in reasonably good shape. It was in their eyes that you saw the length and depth of their ordeal. These people had been camping out in Hell for several lifetimes.

Even with the breather and the protective suit it was no place the others, even the marines, wanted to linger. The air was thick with volcanic dust and gasses, there seemed tremors that vibrated everything and everybody coming every minute or two, and with just breathers on there was no way to completely avoid the stench.

The girls hadn’t been joking. Hot as hell and it stank.

It was only when the marines were helping the castaways aboard that they could see the signs of injuries on the leatherlike skin: scars and missing or chipped teeth, and places where they’d been both punctured and sandblasted with nothing in a kit to help.

Nonetheless, the one man in the group carried something in a kind of sack made from the leaves of one of the jungle outcrop tree fronds.

Over the howls of the wind outside, Sanchez yelled at him, “Where’s the fourth person? We can’t stay!”

“We don’t know! She’s around! We haven’t had much of a way to control her!” Jerry Nagel shouted back.

“Well, we’ll give her a few minutes. Otherwise we’ll just mark the spot and see if we can come back later.”

“Li! For God’s sake! Get in here!” the smaller and older of the women yelled.

Suddenly, from the thick brush beyond, a tiny figure raced for the shuttle and almost jumped on board.

Nasser hit the bay door closed the second she’d cleared it, and even before it was all the way shut, Broz had begun to lift off. The wind and coming storm were actually buffeting the shuttle, and she wanted up and out of there as quickly as possible. The moment the aft compartment was sealed and pressurized, she took it up at full speed.

Most of their new passengers were out cold the moment they hit the deck inside, but one, a nearly skeletonlike figure of an older woman, kept looking around at them and muttering, over and over, “Thank God! Thank God!”