Kaspar's Box

VII: THE DISLOYAL OPPOSITION

The street might have been out of some idealized old history film or photo save for some of the exotic trees and flowers that could be seen both in front of the stately line of cleaner-than-nature brick brownstones and in the small flower boxes set outside oversized upper-floor windows. The places were larger than they looked at first glance, but still might have been dismissed as middle-class housing but for the gilding around the windows, doors, and immaculate edgework, and the fact that few middle-class townhouses sported upper-story gargoyles and such intricate wrought-iron works placed almost purely for decoration. More Embassy Row than Accountant’s Row, although there was no sign of any more formal function on any of the houses than as homes. The exception was a single city block stuck almost incongruously in the middle of the double rows of brownstones, a block that contained not houses but something more like a compound.

High wrought-iron gates, or gates of some material that seemed like it, blocked vehicle-sized entrances at both ends of the block, and between was a long and quite tall brick wall of the same complexion as the facing houses. Looking in through either gate’s lattice work revealed a semicircular driveway around a formal garden leading to a single large brick structure two stories high but fully a third of the block in area. It might have been an old-style mansion house or the headquarters of the local historical society.

Murphy thought it looked like a funeral home.

In the dwindling light of dusk it appeared as a remote chunk of near pitch darkness, out of place here or most anywhere in spite of the attempts to blend in using the brick and iron facade. It barely looked inhabited, but the light from two upper-floor windows was bleeding through drawn curtains, and the indirect lighting illuminated the walkway up to the rather imposing pale yellow front door. He had no doubt, though, that there were cameras galore embedded in or perhaps peering over that wall, and all sorts of security monitors covering every square millimeter of the grounds. The mere fact that it wasn’t already victim to hordes of robbers attested to that.

Murphy really didn’t know why he was there, not exactly. Concern for the girls, certainly, even though they might well be far from the city by now and nowhere near this mausoleum, and possibly curiosity as well. These people had used him many times; now he thought it was about time to stop just counting the money and taking the rest for granted.

Most of all, he didn’t like the way things had been handled. After all this time, he deserved a bit more than going down to the local monkey house and having his charges snatched right in front of him. There was simply no call to do it, particularly since they knew he knew who the client was and even where in the city they dwelled.

If they were aware of him at all at this point, then they certainly would recognize him. He didn’t mind that so much, except that they might think he was double-crossing them and now represented some sort of threat. There was always that angle, he reflected. To them, he was a shady agent employed on a need-to-know basis and not needing to know very much, working strictly for money. They had always dealt with him at arm’s length, by electronic messenger and security level calls, never in person, and that alone said to him that they had a very low opinion of his character.

He took a flask from his back pocket and drank a slug, letting it burn as it went down. How dare they impugn his honor and his motives! Never in his entire life had he ever betrayed his word, nor failed to protect the interest of his paying clients.

He reached the end of the long block, turned, and began walking down the side street along the now unbroken wall. Definitely sensors all along it. He didn’t dare bring any really good surveillance tools with him, since he assumed that strangers on foot would be observed, but he did have a few things in his clothing that could give him silent readings. The electrical fields were quite clear. The wall was literally riddled with top-of-the line security monitoring systems, that was for sure. Anybody trying to climb over that wall would be known in nothing flat. Anyone using any kind of cloaking to prevent that monitoring would still fail, since the continuous energy field their stuff set up would create a moving silhouette of any intruder that would be just as obvious as someone tripping the alarms. Even the best cloaking would reveal sufficient distortion to draw much attention to the one who was cloaked.

One thing was certain: the Order of Saint Phineas had money to burn and used it to buy only the best.

Hell, they’d used it to hire him, hadn’t they?

There were two small service entrances in the back wall off an urban alley, but neither afforded any view at all of the inside, not even what could be seen through the front gates. The big house was set back, so it was much closer to the alley than the main street, but there was still a fair amount of space to cover if you went in here, and those sensors were everywhere and quite directional.

So, okay, Murphy. You’re an old fart way past your prime who gets winded going downhill. How the hell would the likes of you get into a place the likes of this one?

He didn’t have an answer for that. In fact, the only answers for the really tough ones were twofold: local, preferably inside information, which he didn’t have, and whatever money it took to finance what was needed to pull it off once you had that information.

He had the money, but it would take far too much to pull something like this off, and to what end? To see the inside? To say goodbye to the Three Ditzy Colleens? Hardly.

Nope. You’d have to go in by air somehow, and silently at that, then land quiet as a mouse on one of them attic dormers, then find one that you could neutralize the alarms for and then open and squeeze in undetected. You’d need night vision, a couple of good ferrets to scout ahead, and personal shielding just in case you stepped on the wrong floorboard and they came looking just to check.

Magnetic field levitators would be out, they’d surely be detected by this setup. Parachute, then, from someplace a few blocks away and at night. The good old ways. In fact, except for the night vision and the ferrets, the best way to do it at all would be with as little technology as possible. Folks who could afford this kind of super protection paid to guard against every damned piece of potential burglary in all creation, but often forgot that folks often could do things without all those machines. A bit of diversion—say, a runaway elephant or somesuch charging at the gate—and it wouldn’t be that impossible to get in.

Getting out would be a different and more complex matter.

What are you thinking about this for, you old fool? he scolded himself. You said yourself that there’s no rhyme or reason to doin’ it, no profit, only the gravest danger. And he was certainly in poor physical shape for such an operation.

Damn it! That’s what made the damned challenge so appealing!

And when you’re caught, Murphy, what do you tell ’em then? They’d put your brain through a wringer with one of them stones of theirs, find out what an old idiot you were, then scrub your brain clean as a whistle and you’d wake up in a trash dumpster someplace not even rememberin’ that you ever done it.

Idly he wondered just how many of those gems they had, and whether or not all of them were in use or stuck in boxes someplace. Just a few dozen of them wouldn’t depress the collector’s market but would set him up nice for life.

He couldn’t forget the effect on that young sergeant, though, looking into just that one. But it showed that you had to basically touch one, or be very close to it, and look into it in order for it to work its voodoo. No getting around touching, but you sure as hell didn’t need to look into the damn thing’s cursed eyes.

It seemed so strange, standing here in the middle of genteel civilization, thinking of those girls and such things as those gem necklaces. It wasn’t the idea of losing his soul to the devil—if he had one, the devil long ago owned it outright. But he preferred not to meet the old bastard until he had to.

So what the hell are you doin’ here, you blasted idiot?

At just that moment he sensed that he was not alone in the alleylike back lane. It wasn’t anything he could see or hear or smell, but there was some old survival sense that told him that he was being observed, and not through some remote camera or sensor. Someone, something, was right here with him, watching, waiting, and, somehow too, he felt that it knew him.

He tried to seem natural, looking eventually up one direction and then back the other. Nothing. Nothing but some of the inevitable big bugs and other creepy crawlies that were too much a part of this world to even be banished from these sorts of neighborhoods.

He knew, though, that he wasn’t imagining it. Life and death more than once had depended on him accepting these feelings, and more than one promising young scoundrel he’d known had died by dismissing them.

The back doors and windows? Maybe, but the feeling didn’t seem that remote, nor did the stone walls lining both sides of the alley lane make for good, consistent angles from which to observe an intruder. Robotic systems would be used for security by folks with this kind of money and status; maybe some suspicious, noisy pet with big teeth as well. This wasn’t that. It was more like the sense you got in a jungle when you knew that the snake was just two meters from your neck and ready to pounce. And since nothing that large and intelligent and dangerous would be allowed outside private grounds and certainly would never get this far into the city without tripping all sorts of animal control sensors, that meant a mind.

But where? The brickwork seemed unbroken, the tops of the walls and fences were high but not high enough to conceal somebody like that, and certainly there was nobody in the middle of the road.

Suddenly a male voice whispered to him, so close that he jumped.

“Captain, go down the street to the end, make a left. Someone will meet you at the end of the block.”

He went from jumping to freezing solid, and then he turned and slowly, warily, looked closely again. Nobody. Nothing.

He started walking down to the end of the block, casually, but rather obviously in a hurry, taking out his hip flask as he did so and going a wee bit faster with each step. He got to the end, took a hard swallow, looked around, saw nobody yet, took another, and then began walking down the street as directed. At this point, he was too committed to run, and too curious and involved to want to.

Near the end of the block was a lamppost and an ornamental tropical tree. As he approached the tree, a figure seemed to ooze right out of it.

“Captain Murphy, what in the world are you doing here?”

He stared at the small figure for a moment. “Why, it’s Lieutenant Chung, isn’t it? I could ask the same of you.”

“I can’t believe you’d miss them or worry about them at this point,” she said, shaking her head. “Not you.”

He looked a bit sheepish and shrugged. “I know, I know. But there was just somethin’ about them, somethin’ that was wrong, if you know what I mean. Volunteers is one thing, even young girls, but them devil jewels—they was runnin’ the show. I don’t like that sort of thing. Never held with it. Besides, somethin’ in the whole stinkin’ mess just got me Irish up. Hundreds of years the damned Limeys run our old land, worked us on our own home soil like slaves, treated us like no better than animals. We threw ’em out finally. Got fed up with it. I’ll be damned if I see some other group doin’ the same damned thing again.”

His answer surprised her. She hadn’t thought him even that deep. “My people had a similar experience with the Japanese so I can sympathize. Still, what were you going to do?” she asked him. “Be a new hero of your people? Rush in, blow open the iron gates, find them and steal them back?”

He seemed to sag a bit, and sighed. “Somethin’ like that, I guess. Or maybe not. I dunno, really, what I was thinkin’ of doin’, or what I might be able to do. But I had to see if there weren’t somethin’, y’see. And,” he added, needling a bit, “it didn’t look like there was anybody else that cared.”

“We’ve been here ever since they were brought in,” the lieutenant told him. “That’s why we couldn’t stay with you. That way, we were an obvious and public danger to whoever went to so much trouble to get them.”

“You saw who took ’em, then?”

She nodded. “We know a fair amount at this point, although not nearly enough. We didn’t have to put a one-on-one tail on them, you see. There was enough chemical tracer in the bath wash in the courier ship that I could probably eventually trace them down within a couple of parsecs of this planet if need be.”

Murphy glanced back up the street towards the compound. “So what do they look like, these devil folks?”

“Ordinary. I don’t think they’re behind this at all. Just tools, like the girls and many others. Rich folks playing at being naughty. Their kind’s always been with us. Some can be quite dangerous, fanatics who have become lost in their own fantasy world, but they can be dealt with. Oddly, they are usually intellectuals with good contacts and influence. We would rather not have to harm them if we can avoid it, but they must be dealt with.”

“You’re sure the girls are still in there?”

She nodded. “As of now, yes. But people and vehicles come and go around here, and we sincerely doubt if this is their final destination. They’re going to want those babies born outside the city, outside of authorities and monitors and records. We’re scouting the place now as minutely as possible to see if there is a good, easy way in. The problem is, the girls are only a part of our problem. We need to know who is behind all this. We need to know just precisely what this is really all about.”

“Hmph! Well, I wish I was, but I ain’t much of a burglar. Not at my age,” the old captain told her.

“That’s all right,” she responded almost instantly. “We are.”

The next big shock Murphy got was the discovery that there were eight commandos in the team, not just the two. The other six apparently spent the trip in a lower compartment of the courier in some sort of quick-acting suspended animation. The girls, and the powers they had thanks to the gems, apparently never sensed their presence for just that reason. When the enemy’s got hold of your computer, it seems, don’t tell your computer anything you don’t want everyone to know.

Of the group—four men, four women—only a five-person team were the kind of commandos, all marines, who went in and engaged in the action; the other three were naval technicians who backed them up and oversaw an arsenal of high-tech spy devices and systems. Although Chung was the nominal officer in charge, she was Navy; the man in operational charge was Maslovic, or, as the others chuckled, whatever he was calling himself that mission. They generally referred to him as “Sarge” or sometimes “Chief,” but he clearly outranked the only identified commissioned officer in the group. Murphy suspected that not even these men and women who trained and worked with him regularly knew who he really was or what true rank he might hold, but he took his orders from Intelligence and possibly reported directly to the cybernetic Admiralty. To Maslovic, it didn’t matter, either. Only missions mattered.

They were set up in an upstairs apartment a block down and on the opposite side of the street from the Order of Saint Phineas. It was as close as they could get and have a back entrance that couldn’t be observed from the street and which therefore allowed for unhindered comings and goings by the team. The owners of the place were away on business; they were not expected back for more than a month, which was weeks longer than the Navy would need the place. All wore stock nondescript clothing and hairpieces when going in or out and drew no particular attention from the other neighbors. People in the neighborhood tended not to socialize with one another and to keep their lives pretty much to themselves.

Maslovic stood in back of a small bank of monitors the techs had set up in the back room. He nodded at Murphy and pointed.

“Well, can’t say I’m glad to see you on this, since you’re not part of the team, but since you’re here you might as well get comfortable and watch the show.”

Murphy pretended to be hurt. “And here I thought you was just pinin’ for me company.”

“I had enough of that on the courier. Seriously, Captain, everybody here has worked and trained with everybody else so long that we almost know what the other is thinking. That’s why things generally go right when they send us in and why we don’t suffer many losses. I’d feel the same way if you were Lieutenant Commander Mohr or even higher up. We need you to keep out of the way no matter what happens. You can watch, but it’s not your show. Understand?”

Murphy nodded.

“We’ve hesitated up to now to send some ferrets in there because we don’t know what their alarm systems are like. It’s entirely possible we could tip the whole show by doing it, but I don’t see any other way. We’re going to send two in late tonight and see what we can see anyway, but we’ll have a small team ready to go in if things go bad. You’ve already had a run-in with our Sunday suits, as we call them. Turns you into the spirit in a hurry. If I don’t move, that thing’ll make me look just like whatever I’m against. We’ve got the same kind of AI camouflage on the ferrets, small as they are. They’re quiet, fast, and efficient, but the fact is that ferrets still make noise and they still put out electrical fields. There’s no such thing as a perfect ferret any more than there’s a perfect disguise for anybody, but we are damned close. Morrie? You got them tuned up?”

A small tech with a round face and hawk nose looked up from his data screens and nodded. “Any time you need ’em, Chief.”

“Well, then, as soon as we’re sure they’ve settled down, we’ll go. I don’t like the fact that there’s a landing pad out front of the grounds there. They could go any time.” He looked eager for action. “Now we’ll give them a little taste of their saint right back at ’em.”

Murphy grinned. “And it’s sure that you know who that patron of this world and that society really is?”

“Not particularly. Nobody in the small databank we have with us, anyway.”

Murphy’s grin widened. “Phineas T. Barnum. ‘There’s a sucker born every minute,’ he once is said to have proclaimed. The trick is to know which is the sucker and which is the Barnum.”

“But this whole world’s named Barnum!”

“Exactly. He also ran the biggest and greatest circus in the world. And when he quit being a showman and a con man, he became a politician. Got elected, too. Con men and circus men and politicians. All one and the same.”

“And you’re sure that’s the Barnum of this world? And the saint this society says?” Maslovic wasn’t convinced.

“Oh, yes. It’s even in the bloody information line in the phone directory. I think the old boy would have loved this place, and the idea that it was named for him. He’d like these ferrets, too. All the more because they’re such clever machines.”

“Chief, I think we got a problem,” the tech at the control screens said without taking any eyes off the displays.

Maslovic turned quickly. “What?”

“Company coming over there. I think maybe we waited too long.”

On the full scanner they could see the identification symbol and blip for a private transport headed down towards them, and a corresponding ID line from it to the Order’s front lawn that it was following like a glide path to the landing pod there.

“Might not be for the girls,” the tech said hopefully.

“You know it is!” the intelligence agent snapped. His hand went to his chin and his eyes fixed on a spot on the wall as he tried to decide what to do next.

“You gonna follow ’em out, Sarge?” Murphy asked.

The other man shook his head. “No, no, not necessary. They’re going to be traceable over the whole damned world for several more days yet. We don’t have everything here until the ship arrives, and I wouldn’t want to bring them down blind in that jungle. No, if they’re going, let them go. Broz, get a ferret over there on the double. At least we should see who the hell is on the thing.”

“Rolling now,” another tech said in back of them.

Murphy turned and saw a chunky woman remove a small cylindrical object from a specialized case, then go out to the back door area. In half a minute she was back and said, “It’s off. Pick it up on Control One.”

Although various ferrets were common throughout the colonies for a vast number of jobs, ones of this sophistication were rare. The military model was damned fast, and smart enough to think a bit for itself, at least insofar as carrying out its primary directives. Added control by cybernetic link or by simple voice or typed commands was possible from the control panel.

Several local flying things seemed interested in the speedy little unknown as it raced across the street, up the wall and over it, and down into the garden area inside the compound, but the ferret was too smart for them. When one predatory insect the size of a large bird swooped down on it, the little robotic probe simply stopped, then used the millions of control pixels that made it look covered in fur to match the purplish grass it was on. Without motion, scent, or distinguishing color, the ferret went instantly invisible to the predator, who seemed a bit confused but broke off and flew away into the distance.

On the control screen, they had a very nice three-dimensional “window” seeing just what the ferret was seeing. Smaller, two-dimensional windows across the top and bottom showed views of what was in back of it and what was above it.

“Observe from above, position and freeze,” Broz told it, and the ferret scampered most of the way up the front of the large house or lodge or whatever it was and then stuck there, looking back at the landing pod. It was nicely positioned before the aerobus landed and settled with just a deep whine.

A door slid back from the center of the small craft and two women got out, both wearing medical blue uniforms.

“Doctors? Nurses?” Maslovic wondered.

“Midwives, like as not,” Murphy responded. “I’d put ’em as nurses overall. Neither of ’em have that command swagger you’d get from a doctor in this kind of position.”

“No matter. It’s pretty certain now that they’re gonna take them out of there,” Maslovic commented.

“Door’s opening,” Broz noted.

Out of the doorway came two people, a man and a woman, both dressed in rather too clean and clichйd tropical clothing, from khaki shorts to pith helmets and wearing heavy-duty boots. The angle didn’t give too good a look at the faces, but they both seemed middle-aged and plump, perhaps a bit dowdy or dumpy, and they moved almost like they were playing a game. Some sort of adventure, perhaps.

“Georgi Macouri and his companion Magda Schwartz,” Maslovic said, filling Murphy in. “He’s the spoiled rich idiot playing at devil worship and she’s even more into the play than he is. Don’t underestimate them, though. The local police files suspect him of being behind some disappearances, mostly young women, and she’s formerly employed by Crossline Shipping as their security director and knows all the gimmicks and tricks.”

“Disappearances? You mean he…?” The captain’s voice trailed off as he thought of the unpleasant possibilities.

“He could indeed. Human sacrifice wouldn’t be beyond him if it was part of the ritual and gave him a thrill. He’s spent most of his life being incredibly bored and now he isn’t bored any more.”

“But—the girls! You don’t think he’d…?”

“He might, but I doubt it. They’re not innocent in this and they’re not for sacrificing, at least not right now. Too much was invested in getting them here to just do to them what he’s probably done to poor locals. It looks like we may be in a little luck here, though. The way they’re dressed and taking charge, it sure looks like they intend to go on the bus.”

“Right at sunset,” Broz noted. “Good timing.”

“Earlier than I’d expected, though. It complicates getting the girls, but it does allow us the opportunity to see just what the hell’s inside that place. Ah! Here come the girls!”

Their angle, again, was overhead and offset, but there was no mistaking the three of them. Each had been cleaned up, their hair was nicely fluffed and brushed, and each wore a robe whose color roughly matched the colors of the three Magi stones they had. None seemed to be very comfortable walking even the short distance, and it seemed to Murphy at least that they hesitated as they reached the aerobus’s open doorway, but each in turn ducked down a bit and entered. The medics or midwifes, whatever they were, then got back in and, finally, the two from the house started to enter the vehicle as well. Then Macouri stopped, turned, and asked Schwartz in a voice that sounded sinister and gravelly, “You have secured the place, my dear?

“Absolutely, darling,” she responded in a deep, businesslike tone. “If you’re that worried, call and leave someone.”

“No, we’ll be gone too long to make that practical. I just have that feeling we’re being watched, that’s all. I shouldn’t like unwanted visitors in there while we were away for so long.”

“Oh, relax. It would scare the living daylights out of any silly policeman who tried. Come! I’m anxious to be off!”

Macouri nodded and sighed. “Very well, my dear. I suppose you’re right.” He turned and entered, followed by his companion, and the door slid silently closed.

Within a minute or two, Murphy could hear the low whine of the engine and feel the vibration even a block and a half down, and the aerobus lifted up and quickly moved off and away into the darkness.

“Darch?” Maslovic asked.

The man at the main panels shrugged. “No problem. They’re showing up just fine. Going to be a long trip for them, though. They’re heading out over the ocean. We’re going to need our own wings to catch them, Chief.”

“We’ll manage. Broz, you heard Schwartz on that house. Sounds like it’s pretty well rigged.”

“We’ll send the other ferret over now. Our best bet is to go in right away and remotely, even if the systems are all on. The odds are that anything serious that might require their attention or draw their alarms would be better triggered when they’re making their trip than after they get where they’re going, get settled in, and can call their security computer and maybe friends and associates.”

“Fine with me,” the sergeant replied. “Let’s get moving. I really am curious about that place, and this suits me fine. Captain, grab a chair from the other room and bring it in. This may take a while.”

“I got nowhere else to be right now,” Murphy replied. “And ’tis curious I am as well about all this business.”

“Second ferret’s away,” Broz called from the back.

Maslovic nodded. “Okay, then. Here we go.”

It usually wasn’t as easy to get a ferret into an allegedly unoccupied house as this was, but in spite of the junglelike animal life that was all over the city and much of the world for that matter, most of the houses that were tightly built still had weak points to be exploited, from slight warping and settling causing small gaps in the foundation to exhaust ports around the upper stories that were blocked mostly by heavy mesh screens and used by the automated systems to exchange air in otherwise climate controlled environments. It was one of these that proved the way in.

The military ferrets could have cut the screen, but in earlier scouting the operators had discovered two small duct ports where the mesh had come loose and could be easily pushed in to allow entry by something the size and plasticity of the ferrets. While there were some dangers following them down into the house, most notably lasers guided by sensors whose sole purpose was to zap any wildlife that might find similar openings inside, they tended to be of a standard sort for which electronic countermeasures were already in the ferrets along with routines to deploy them. The sensors were easily fooled by the simplest of mechanisms—making them see and focus on some suspicious small moving object away from the ferret and then targeting the lasers there while the ferrets darted by on the opposite side.

“Too easy,” Murphy muttered.

Broz, the self-styled Commander of the Ferrets, shrugged. “Not easy at all. Probably cost a bloody fortune. What good’s a ferret if it can’t get by the simple systems designed to swat cockroaches?”

“Maybe. Still and all, didn’t you say the lady was some kind of security expert?”

“Efficiency,” Maslovic put in. “You don’t set bombs and dogs to kill flies. You put your security where it will best secure what you need to secure. If we’d come in over the walls ourselves or through the doors, I think we’d have quite a mess right now, but the ferrets are not us. They’ll have something that can detect them, I suspect, but not yet. Ferrets, after all, can only report, they can’t carry out the family jewels.”

Ferret One was already pushing through the vents built into a top-floor room and now looked down upon it. A quick scan showed it to be on the right side of the house, third floor, and most likely a bedroom.

An old-fashioned-looking ceiling fan turned just below the ferret, keeping the air moving so that it would not get stuffy or build up smells even if the room were left unoccupied for weeks. The ferret could see the air and sense the movement and feed the information back to the computer a block and a half away for analysis. It betrayed no traps, no hidden passages, nothing like that. It was as it should have been.

Below and against the wall was an enormous four-poster bed, its linens still thrown randomly back, indicating that it had been recently used and not yet serviced by a robotic or human housekeeper. Overall, the place looked pleasant and lived in but contained nothing odd or suspicious even if it did seem to be out of another time and place. The ferret stuck to the wall but registered no serious concern. Whatever traps and sensors there were weren’t here.

“You’d think they’d at least have somethin’ on the windows,” Murphy noted.

“Pastine,” Broz explained. “The kind of material used in making transparent windows for spacecraft and camera and sensor covers for space work. Not unbreakable, but what it would take to punch a hole in them would not only alert the household but probably the neighbors a kilometer away. Vacuum welded. You aren’t going to go in and out of those.”

“And remember, this is the third floor,” Maslovic pointed out. “Second floor’s more of the same, and the first floor adds a vacuum layer through which pass some of the most accurate sensors made. And if you were really observant, you’d see that the roof overhang and gutter system covered the grounds around the house to a distance of three meters. Anything heavier than two kilos would trip it, so you’re not likely to walk up or use a ladder, and if you’re on some kind of floating platform, you’ll break the sensor webbing for more than five seconds and that will set off the alarm. Anything more sensitive and you’d have alarms going off every time a bug flew by or a heavy rain rolled down too much for the guttering. The ferrets are less than one kilo and were on the building’s siding in under five seconds in any event.”

“You make me feel like a rank amateur here,” the old captain said respectfully.

Maslovic smiled. “Now you know why you should always pay your defense taxes.”

With both ferrets now inside, they fanned out, mapping the entire third floor before going down one level. Some nice bedrooms, sumptuous baths, a full spa in the east wing, but nothing threatening nor of interest to them.

A center atrium framed a circular staircase which the ferrets declined to take. There was a small but detectable electrical current in the stair that indicated some connection to the master maintenance and alarm systems. As usual, the walls were much nicer.

“Interesting paintings hung on the atrium walls there,” Murphy noted.

“Yes, I agree,” Maslovic responded. “Broz, let’s see them in turn.”

They were huge and ornately framed, yet there was something about them that didn’t seem quite right.

“Separated, but a triptych,” the old captain said. “Odd. Go in on the one on the left, if you please.”

Broz framed it perfectly in the monitor. Although it didn’t come through properly on their screen, it was clearly some kind of holographic photo, a scene that in person would seem almost suspended in the framing. It was a violent scene, a landscape of stark barren landscape, volcanic activity along a rift in the back, and with storm-tossed clouds seeming to close in as if ready to engulf the whole scene.

“Is that a creation of someone’s imagination or a photograph of a real place?” the Irishman wondered, the question rhetorical.

“Impossible to say. Let’s see the middle.”

A dark, cold, threatening landscape it was, with little sense of life of any sort. In the background, rolling hills seemed to fold like dough or plastic in and out of the undulating landscape below a sky of bright, numerous stars.

“And the right,” Maslovic requested.

What was dangerous in the first and bleak and cold in the second was absent from the third, a veritable garden of trees, flowers, sparkling pools and even a small waterfall. It was as bright and cheery as the others were threatening and desolate.

“Pull back a bit.”

On the wall, between the first and second and again between the second and third picture were ornately carved symbols, three each, overlapping and with one above the other two creating a small pyramid of frozen, mechanical facelike designs.

“Those are like the girls’ stones,” Maslovic noted, trying to figure out the grand scheme.

“More than that,” Murphy responded. “The one up top’s quite dark and shiny, the two below are lighter yet have duller finishes. Not the Magi stones but the Magi, Sergeant. Wise men, magicians, astrologers. Balshazzar, Melchior, and Kaspar, the Three Kings of Christian lore. One carried gold to the Christ child, one frankincense, an exotic scent, and the third a rare spice, myrrh.”

“I thought you weren’t religious.”

“I’m not, but by God them catechism classes finally come in handy. ’Twas a Catholic monk that found ’em, so there’s a common source, if you please. Me sainted mother always hoped I’d become a priest, but there wasn’t no money in it.”

“And what’s all that have to do with these pictures?” Broz interjected, impatient to go on.

“You don’t get it, do you? You never heard of the Three Kings on that shiny sterile factory ship of yours? The three lost worlds of treasure and ease, where all your wishes can come true. That’s them, you see. That’s what they look like. Shows how much ugliness gets lost in the legend, don’t it? That’s where the stones come from. That’s where whatever this is all about is centered. That’s where your mysterious enemy is.”

“So why don’t we just pack up here and go there and face them down?” the tech asked, both bored and confused.

“Aye, see, that’s the rub. Nobody knows where they are or how to get there, and them few what did never got back. Devil worship my ass! They found some rich suckers to do their dirty work for ’em, that’s all.”

“Who?”

Maslovic frowned and turned back to the screen. “Let’s see if we can find out. What’s that down at the base of the atrium, Broz? I thought I saw it as we were descending until we got sidetracked on the pictures.”

The ferret’s cameras turned back and then down. “Looks like the top of some kind of statue,” she said. “Pretty big, too. Comes up not quite to the second floor itself. Must be real impressive when you come through the door.”

“Get around and down a bit. I want to see as much of it as we can without actually touching anything on the ground floor for now.”

“Can do. Now zoom out and—what the…?”

The position of the ferret allowed them to see the head and a bit of the neck of the statue, and it was not exactly as expected.

It was the devil, all right, complete with horns, pointed ears, and goatee, but it was one happy devil, with a grin from ear to ear and the happiest overall expression ever seen on a human or humanoid face. And on top of his head, balanced on one of the horns, was an outrageous top hat tilted to one side.

“He looks rather chipper,” Captain Murphy commented. “I wonder if he’ll break into ‘Melancholy Baby’?”

As Ferret One made its way back up to the second floor and began, along with its companion, a survey of that level, Broz said, “They’re not serious, are they?”

“Very serious,” Maslovic shot back. “That statue’s a thumb in the eye to all the religious types who might get in for some reason or another. These aren’t people who are comedians, Corporal, they’re people who are supremely confident.”

“So far, all they look like are a study in the rich and lazy,” Broz responded.

“Well, now that we’ve met Saint Phineas of Barnum himself, maybe we’ll be able to see a bit of what they’re up to,” Murphy said hopefully. “But the greatest show off Earth won’t be here, it’s gonna be on them three worlds in the pictures. Too bad we ain’t yet found a map to the places.”

Maslovic thought about that. “We’d run the legend on the Three Kings when we went to identify and quantify those stones,” he told the captain. “Now it seems that we have a more basic link. Not that those places looked like paradises. In fact, they don’t look all that different than other worlds in these areas. Interesting, though, if they’re true pictures of the real thing.”

“That garden one looked pretty good,” Murphy noted. “I could see meself lyin’ there while voluptuous nymphs peeled me grapes.”

Maslovic nodded. “And if I had to pick the one I’d least trust, it would be that one. Compared to the other two it’s like sweets to a baby. It’s the one we’re supposed to look at. The hot, stormy, volcanic one, though, looks too unstable for any kind of base for any sort of advanced civilization. It must have a function, because if those three are real, then they were either built or terraformed, designed that way, but staying alive and staying healthy would be a full-time challenge there. No, if I were hiding out and running things, I’d go where nobody was likely to pick. I’d go to the smaller, dark, barren one. Not on the surface—that’s the blanket you hide under. Underneath. Under the ground.” He looked over at Murphy. “Those aren’t mystical or nostalgic pictures, they’re guides. And if I knew where they were, I’d use them to take me right to the enemy.”

“You seem pretty sure they’re an enemy.”

“They aren’t acting like anything else. We’re cut off from our mother world and more than half of all that’s human, and if you aim at the area where they were that we can no longer reach, you find the place boiling, almost a hell of gamma ray eruptions strong enough to sterilize the whole sector. They don’t tell you that because if they did the combination of panic and despair would be incalculable. We’ve seen such things happen before, but never this close, never even in this galaxy. Until now, there was no reason to think that it wasn’t natural, some kind of thing that just happens in the physics of the cosmos. Now, though, we have a question. So far, all the major emissions have been away from us; it’s barely been a ripple here. But if they were to go off in this direction, or almost anywhere in this sector, all of us, and everything we’ve ever known, everything that is left of the human race, would be gone forever. All life gone, a sterilized museum.”

“You really want to fill a man with cheer,” the captain commented. “And you think all this is a part of that?”

“We don’t know. It doesn’t seem likely that we encounter this kind of nasty business wielding this kind of power and have it not connect.” The sergeant turned back to the controls. “Full second-floor sweep done?”

“Yes, sir,” Broz responded. “Large formal dining room, a number of meeting rooms, library, formal study, that sort of thing, as well as one heavily sealed security zone right in the center behind the atrium stair. House maintenance has started, so we’ll have to watch it. Lots of robotic cleaning and polishing, but if they happen to detect the ferrets, then they’ll bring security on full.”

He nodded. “All right, then, we’ll ease down to the ground floor. Watch the floors and lower halves of the walls, though. Keep to the inside walls. This will be where maximum security would be deployed.”

“I’m well aware of that, sir,” Broz responded. “I know my job.” Even as the ferrets descended on either side of the giant statue, though, the controller looked at the monitors and the instruments and suddenly had a sharp intake of breath, freezing both ferrets.

“Corridors in back of the security column aft of the statue,” Broz noted. “Both sides are protected with pretty strong force fields powered from within the security unit and separate from the house power. These are full fields, backed up with lasers and ray sweepers. They sure don’t want anybody or anything going back there.”

“Think we can get in there?”

“I’m running the checks now. The security room’s out of the question. Sealed right, best I’ve ever seen, and in a vacuum as well. That woman and her company know the business. No way to tell if it runs over all the way to the back of the house through the ceiling. Not without ripping up the ceiling from the top, which is more than these ferrets can do. Under is even less likely. Under that fake polished-wood veneer is an energized plasma running through layers of weapons-grade material.”

“How does the air get in and out?” Maslovic asked.

“It appears common air molecules pass without hindrance in and out and through the force field. Interesting effect, too. Note that thin line of material on the floor there? That’s dust and pollen, possibly a few insects. The air that gets through is purified as it goes.”

“Messy. How do they clean it, I wonder?” the captain mused.

“Eh?” All three of the military team there turned and looked at him in puzzlement for a moment.

“Fancy pants like these, they sure as hell won’t let some nice, thin lines of dirt show up so clearly just beyond the entrance. What would Lord and Lady Triplefarts think when they came for tea? You see what I mean?”

“No,” they all answered at once.

“You just don’t have no experience with these kinds of folk. That floor, and that line of crud, has just got to be the most cleaned up and maintained little place in the whole damned house. And if it even cleans the dust and pollen in the air, then it’s got to happen just about all the time, not just when the house is bein’ treated, y’see. I’ll bet you that the two lines are vacuumed and polished every couple of hours. No longer, surely.”

“So it’s blown and vacuumed. So what?”

“No, no. Can’t be. That just winds up with a lot of it goin’ back and forth into the air. We’d have dust all over, and we can’t have that. It’d show on the white gloves. And there’s no border or seam, so the thing has to be close vacuumed or washed and then repolished, and I mean repolished directly under the beam. Are you gettin’ it now?”

Maslovic gave a low whistle. “You’ve saying that something, some gadget, is immune to the force field. Either that, or the force field’s off for a few seconds, maybe longer, while that happens.”

“Got to be.”

“Let’s see. Broz, keep one ferret on that force field where it meets the floor. If the captain’s right, it shouldn’t be too long considering the size of that dust ring right now. The other we can use to carefully survey the rest of the place.”

“Fair enough.”

The sergeant turned and looked at Murphy with unusual appreciation. “How’d you figure this? You a better thief than I took you for or what?”

“That, perhaps,” the old man admitted. “At least in me own day. That and the fact that I come from a family with a pretty long line of charwomen…”

It wasn’t quite as quick as Murphy guessed, but, eventually, they saw it: a tiny round robotic cleaner with a fanlike action that came out of an eight-centimeter-high compartment on one side of the opening and seemed to glide along picking up the accumulation right along the force field, half in and half out. It was lightning fast and the field above it ceased only so long as it was traveling its small route along the floor, a width of no more than fifteen or sixteen centimeters, but for that very brief time and in effectively constant motion, there was a gap.

“Sloppy,” Broz commented. “Lots of small remotes could get through.”

“Yeah? Then how come you didn’t think of it?” Murphy asked.

Broz ignored the insult. “The only question is, is there a second line of defense inside that would make this meaningless? If so, then we’re still stuck and we might as well just blow the thing. If not, though, it’s a lapse in either logic or cost that can get us in. That is, if you want to risk one of the ferrets.”

“Why not?” Maslovic responded. “I have a feeling we’ll have to blow our way in there anyway, but at least we can see what we’re up against. If it’s destroyed, we’ve got a dangerous problem. If it gets through, then the security’s basic and for show.”

“Not like your security, of course, which thought of everything ’cept maybe three wee girls compromisin’ your whole security system,” Murphy said with a half smile.

Again, his comment was neither acknowledged nor returned.

They almost missed their next opportunity, even though it was something they should have expected. The next time, the cleaner came from the opposite side back towards where they’d first seen it. Fortunately, the ferret was smart enough to refigure the angle and keep to the basic instruction, which was to breach the force field. At the precise moment, it leaped and passed over the cleaner at an angle, giving it just enough time to clear the field.

“We’re in,” Broz said needlessly.

“Better than in,” the sergeant responded. “There are the basic controls at that wall panel. Doesn’t even look like a code pad or biometric pass. Don’t go for it yet—it still might set off an alarm. Let’s see what’s back there.”

The ferret had no choice but to be on the floor at this point, but got back on the side wall as soon as it could do so.

The two sides of the hallway around the sealed security master console joined again on the other side and, in the area beyond, descended into a large semisunken chamber that could be seen only using the ferret’s high-capability, low-light system.

The room itself was out of another age, but not like the house. Instead, it seemed from some ancient time, a burial vault in ancient Egypt, perhaps, or some long forgotten prehistoric civilization. If it hadn’t been so antiseptically clean, it might have been taken for something original rather than some kind of show business set.

“I’m half surprised he doesn’t have robotic rats and cockroaches and such scurryin’ about,” Murphy noted. “Kind of loses some of its atmosphere without ’em.”

“But it gets it back with that central altar,” the security man replied.

And, in fact, that was the dominant part of the room: a raised rectangular object made to look as if carved out of solid stone, and on top was space enough for a human of average build to lie in a concave area designed for that purpose. From the sacrificial area came careful channels running off and down to the sides, and then down to a depression that went completely around the altar stone.

“Spectroanalysis on the stains along the channels and sides, please,” Maslovic ordered.

Broz adjusted some controls, focused on a particularly promising spot, and almost immediately began getting data.

“We don’t have to go very far in the analysis to figure this one out,” Broz commented. “It’s blood.”

“What kind of blood?”

“Human. Beyond that we’d need a sample for DNA analysis.”

“Hardly worth it. We probably wouldn’t know them anyway,” Maslovic replied. “So, he’s loonier than even we thought. I bet the ceremonies here are right out of ancient thrillers. I’m not sure we need to see much more. We can feed this to the local cops here and they’ll have a field day, but I’m beginning to think now our best interest is in assembling the team and going into the bush.”

“If Macouri has this much guts in town, in this surveillance paradise, to do this, imagine what he does out there, where there’s nobody to catch him,” Broz said.

“I doubt if he’s any more, or less, dangerous out there, but I don’t think he uses the bush for that kind of cover. No, he gets off by doing this under the noses of everybody. The risk is part of it for those types. The idea that he’s doing this sort of thing right here, in a rich section of the city, under the noses of the best human and automated policing systems around. That said, I want to nail this bastard out of the city if possible.”

“With this sort of evidence? Why not make it the locals’ problem?” Broz asked him.

“Because he might beat it, or it’s possible he has a very efficient trap under there or in that sealed security module that might eliminate not only the evidence but several square blocks around including here. No, as much as I’d love a crack at that house and particularly the records inside, all this has convinced me that we have to move on him now, where he is, while he’s away.”

“And me?” the old captain asked him. “I was thinkin’ of the girls, y’see. I did bring ’em, after all. And others, too, before ’em.”

Maslovic turned and looked at him. “Were all your previous passengers women?”

“Well, no, come to think of it. And not all the women were preggers, neither. But these are, and it don’t mean that some folks I was responsible for didn’t wind up on that slab in there.”

Maslovic shook his head. “No, Captain. We train for this. We practically know how one another thinks, and we have all our own gadgets as well. You can follow with the techs, but you have to stay with them until we finish what we have to do out there and signal that you can come in.”

“I figured as much on that. But the girls… You’re not gonna git ’em in the middle of a firefight, are you?”

“We’ll do the best we can. Just remember that they aren’t captives, they’re a part of it.”

“But them devil’s gems—”

“Those things give them power and direction, but I didn’t have any sense that they hadn’t knowingly put them on, nor that they had any intention of fighting the power and influence. No, Captain, this isn’t the rescue of the innocents. What happens to them will be partly their own choice. We’re after not only the bastards like Georgi Macouri, we’re much more after the ones he’s serving and the ones behind those devices. If we’re all lucky, the girls will have a choice, but only a choice. They can help us, or the others.” He turned to the two techs. “Recall the ferrets as soon as possible. I’ll get Lieutenant Chung and we’ll start prepping the team. Let’s move!”