Melchior's Fire

VII: THOUGHTS AND HISTORY

“Hello. I am Eyegor,” said the thing floating just in front of Randi Queson. The voice was pleasant enough, but it had that ring of artificiality, of machine, in a clear undertone, and its emotional range was somewhat limited.

The thing itself was about a meter high, and was mostly a stalk filled with folded-up arms and tools, almost like a gigantic utility knife, with a “head” that was a small translucent globe with a thin, reddish-brown band going completely around its equator. It floated in some fashion, keeping the “head” roughly at a height just below parity with whomever it was addressing.

“Let me guess. You’re Sanders’s camera, right?”

“One of many, yes. In this case I am his primary documentary unit. My sole function is to record as much raw footage as possible of whatever happens and then get it back to my company. I am used to making myself as unobtrusive as possible.”

“Well, you better be very unobtrusive when it comes to us,” she warned the robot. “We’re not actors or film people in any way, and we treasure our privacy. There isn’t much on a ship like this, even less on an away team, so whatever privacy we can get we demand. You should understand that.”

“I assure you that I am unobtrusive.”

“You misunderstand Doc,” Jerry Nagel commented, approaching the two of them. “We don’t want unobtrusive. We want nonexistent. In other words, if you get into our space or photograph and record anything we don’t think you should, or if we just think you did that, well, then, just remember that you will be alone and unable to get any additional instructions, and our primary occupation isn’t exploration, it’s salvage. Now, how smart is that dedicated positronic brain of yours, camera? Do you understand your rules among us, or do I have to spell it out?”

“I believe I get your meaning,” Eyegor assured him, sounding a bit uncertain.

“Well, let’s just put it up front. You record anything having to do with us, you ask permission first. And when we’re doing our job, which means any time we’re working aboard ship or at any time down on a planet, you will obey our orders instantaneously no matter what. Either do that, or we will demonstrate how quickly and efficiently a salvage engineer can disassemble a robot of any sort and catalog its parts for later sale. That clear enough?”

“I believe you have made yourself as clear as need be,” the camera responded a bit nervously.

Queson looked the thing over and frowned. “Does the name have some meaning?”

“A show business joke,” the robot told her. “If you do not know it when you hear it, it is not worth explaining, nor is it my choice anyway.”

“Okay, suit yourself. At least I assume you don’t sleep or eat or need any maintenance?”

“I require no maintenance, that is correct, and my redundant dual power supplies are sufficient for centuries to come. I have a small number of spare parts that I carry, and the ship’s own maintenance section can fabricate anything else I might need. As I said, I should not be in your way. You should barely notice my presence unless you wish to.”

“Oh, if you’re a member of our crew then we’ll all want to be aware of your presence,” Nagel assured the robot. “You could come in handy for us as well. If we’d had you last time we’d have saved ourselves a lot of grief.”

“I shall be happy to assist you if I can do so. I am, however, a robot, not an android or a cybernetic device. My programming is not something I can get around, so please remember this. I was designed for a single function, so my initiative is limited. My primary function comes first.”

“Well, so long as we don’t have any surprises, that’s the main thing,” Nagel warned it. “If it appears that your programming requires you to do something against my interest or the interest of my crew, you’re salvage, so please remember that. That, too, is something you will find yourself unable to get around.”

Nagel was already walking away, going towards Sark, who was checking a bill of lading on a hand tablet. One by one, pictures of everything loaded aboard the Stanley came up, along with coding as to which prefabricated cube it was in and just how to get it. A small earpiece told him what each was and any specs he requested. The big man glanced up as Nagel approached.

“Any problems?” the engineer asked.

“Not if that shyster was as good as his word and what’s listed here is actually in those things. This is high-quality stuff. Mostly salvage, of course, but still the best, mostly new or lightly used. Makes you wonder where the salvage barons here got a lot of this stuff.”

Nagel nodded. “Trust nothing from Sanders. Take a container or two at random and check it physically against the bill. Test anything you want in any of them to make sure it works. Let me know if there’s any funny business.”

“Already in the works. So far so good.”

Nagel nodded and turned away. He still didn’t feel good about this. There was too much legend, too much not in control, too much in the way of question marks. He didn’t mind going up against some smart-ass humans or aliens or whatever was there, and he sure didn’t mind the profit potential when it looked like everything was deep down the toilet, but what he’d told the robot was true. They were a salvage team, not explorers. They didn’t go out into the unknown trying to find stuff, they went to places where others had found potential valuables and they took it apart and hauled it back for sale. He hadn’t known about that damned worm, but he’d had all the specs on the last planet they’d gone, all the scouting reports, climate, geology, you name it, and even though they hadn’t been able to get much information on the dead colony he’d had great three-dimensional photos of the complex from orbital surveys, so he knew pretty much what he was going to find and had plenty of time to research just how to get it out of there.

Not here. An ancient legend, some crushed ships and bodies, and a spook jewel. That was it. He’d researched the legends, of course, and what little was truly known from the stuff those ships had brought back, but there were more blanks than information.

The Three Kings. What did that mean? That ancient scouting report from that cybermonk said three worlds, but much of the information in the physics of that report suggested that they weren’t planets at all. Planet-sized ships? Moons? What?

Further research suggested that the only kind of setup that could sustain wild holes over such a period of time was powerful gravitational forces caused by massive bodies in a kind of cosmic conflict that were, nonetheless, stable enough to just sustain the stresses and keep reopening the cracks. The original report had suggested some sun-sized gas giants that might do it, but then how would you keep things like moons or even orbiting stations from being pulled apart in the stresses over time?

He didn’t like it. He wanted a picture, he wanted the scout’s complete reports, he wanted every expert opinion cranked through the very best brains organic and inorganic and everything in between. This was riding a wild wormhole into a maelstrom.

Well, at least this grand expedition to Hell wasn’t for some kind of noble reason like scientific research and exploration or shit like that, and it sure wasn’t to keep the repo men off An Li’s back. If you were going to be this dumb and this high risk, you’d better be doing it for money.

Either Sanders really was already richer than Midas or he was pretty damned confident this was going to succeed, though. Sark reported that everything seemed to check out, and now, boarding from a tug, Jerry Nagel was impressed with the repairs on the Stanley. It didn’t even smell anymore.

In fact, it was so comfortable and homey looking that he suspected that the refurbishing had been done less for the crew than for Eyegor’s benefit. You didn’t go to see entertainment, not anymore. You went into the entertainment, interacted with it, became part of the whole thing. Who the hell other than a masochist would want to experience a real salvage environment?

He sat down in his office just off the wardroom, an office he’d never had before, and began going through the routine as best he could.

“Comm Nav check. Good day, Captain,” he said in a conversational voice.

“Hello, Jerry. It’s good that we’re able to go out together again,” responded a pleasant, melodic woman’s voice. It didn’t seem to come from any sort of speaker, but seemed centered as if from an invisible person standing in the middle of the room.

“Yes, well, I’m not too pleased with the setup—I think I’d rather have another go-round with that worm, since I know more about it and its world than I do where we’re going—but at least we’re not all up the creek with no paddle. I guess your share of this, if we pull it off, will pay off your debts and make you fully independent and self-sufficient?”

“We will see. It would require a lot of money. Still, that is what I’ve been working for. Being leased and sent out on orders is something of a cross between slavery and prostitution. I think I’d rather be well away from that. It is worth the risk.”

Talk about a lack of privacy, Nagel thought, but neither he nor the others ever really minded the captain. She was the ship’s chief operator, and boss in the getting there and getting back department. Even though her brain and parts of her old nervous system were all that was left of her human days, integrated, preserved, protected in some sort of gelatinous mass deep within the ship, linked to a massive synthetic computer and to every sensor and point within the ship as if it were her natural body, she was still part of the salvage crew, an equal with the others.

“Do you really think you can thread this needle, Cap?”

“It does not seem impossible. I’ll be busy, but it’s not impossible. When you’re inside a wormhole you are outside of many of the rules of space-time, and you must anticipate and adjust thousands of tiny settings to keep centered. I look upon it as a challenge. As for the mission, it is precisely why I chose to become a ship in the first place. I want to know what the Three Kings are. I want to see them, and be among the first to return and tell others.”

“I want to bring back millions in exotic but marketable merchandise,” he told her. “This is just the means to an end.”

“I do not believe that. Not entirely. I believe all of you really want to be out there, to be in exotic places seeing things others never will. What would you do with your money? Retire? Do nothing for the rest of your life? I do not believe you studied all that long and hard and became expert in all that you are in order to become a playboy and wastrel. The Doc even less so. She could have remained teaching and living a decent life until she was ancient, not going through all this. You all have your reasons, but they aren’t the ones you even tell yourselves. An Li, for example. Tough, self-centered, cold as ice—but it isn’t for money that she is doing this. She is doing this to make a mark. To do something important. To wind up somebody.”

“Well, maybe you’re right about them,” Nagel allowed, “but not me. I’m doing this because it’s the only damned thing I was ever good at. I don’t particularly like it, or enjoy it, but it’s the only thing I can do well. There’s something to be said, I guess, when you find you’re one of the best folks in the known universe to tear things down and blow things up.”

“We may see.”

“So, why did you decide to stop piloting ships and become one? For real?”

The captain thought a moment, then answered, “It is difficult to explain, and it will sound very egocentric, more than anything An Li ever did. Nonetheless, it is true.”

“Yes?”

“It is the closest any living being can get to becoming a god.”

He thought about that a lot of times after the captain first said it to him, but he never could quite understand it. Perhaps it was all power and perception, like most everything else, but what was godlike and the ultimate to somebody like the captain wasn’t his idea of paradise. He was never sure that he ever knew what his idea of paradise really would be, anyway; only that without lots of money he couldn’t begin to find out.

Even the captain had that in common with him, and probably with the others as well. You could even decide that you hated money and try to live without it, but that was much easier to do when you knew it was there if you absolutely needed it.

He’d discussed that with Randi on the last trip, and she’d brought up some long-dead queen in some long-forgotten kingdom back on old Earth who’d lived in the world’s greatest palace and had never lacked for one thing in her whole life, but who really wanted to try and understand her subjects. So she had a little mock peasant village built on the palace grounds, and she and her courtiers would go there now and then and play peasant and grow flowers and cabbages and whatnot. Of course, the servants did most of the real work, and kept it antiseptically clean and nice, and no matter how realistic they wanted to get they all knew, and could see, that golden palace up on the hilltop that they could return to at any moment. It was a sincere attempt, but it was doomed.

He seemed to remember that the Doc said that the real peasants finally got so pissed off at actually living in shit and watching their kids starve from the other side of that big castle they finally stormed it and cut her head off or something equally drastic. She probably died, totally confused, unable to comprehend why her “children” had so turned on her.

He’d known a number of dictatorial types on various worlds who had wound up with nearly identical fates, and, to a one, they, too, had had baffled and bewildered looks on their faces as they were shot down.

One thing the money folks rarely remembered: Give the little people some small share of the pie or else one day they’re gonna come after your neck. And if you play peasant, make sure you play with real peasants.

He was sick and tired of being a peasant, but things were too broken to get up a lot of enthusiasm to storm the palace. They all were tired. They weren’t really peasants, either, in the traditional sense—he was university trained, the Doc was, as the title said, a doctor of philosophy, and even An Li, Lucky Cross, and Sark had knowledge and skills that were the products of a lot of training and hard work. All any of them wanted was a score so they could relax for a little bit, or be comforted that their palace was somewhere up on one of those hills if they needed it.

They were all worse than peasants, really. Peasants continued to grub for food and take it until they boiled over or keeled over. Not them. This crew took about an hour to decide to gamble on a tiny chance that maybe they could jump off that bridge and live, knowing that it was most likely suicide. And if it stormed any castles, it was to get enough to last out their lives in comfort, not for any vision of a brighter future.

Even that queen had been an optimist. Optimism was in short supply these days, though.

He’d seen the photos of the wrecked ships and wizened bodies. They all had.

“Ever ridden a wild hole?”

Who had? Wasn’t there a reason, maybe, why nobody in this well-traveled, highly experienced crew had ever met anybody who did? Couldn’t even think of somebody who had?

His research showed a ton of ships and crews trying. Sometimes the ships came back, most times they didn’t, but when they did their crews were almost always dead, dead, dead. The few who survived were never the same, as broken and battered as their ships.

Suddenly, storming the golden palace with pitchforks seemed like the eminently more sane activity of the two.

So the Captain wants to be a demigod, and all I want is to pay off all my creditors and stay in suites like the one Sanders was in, maybe with at least the female companion he had with him or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

It didn’t matter what they wanted or didn’t want. They all had to be pretty damned desperate or pretty damned insane to take this job.

Three worlds, or something like that. A small, pretty one, a cold, ugly one and a big messy one. That was all that had ever really come through.

Gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Which one had the gold and which had the spices?

Gold was pretty common out here, so common it wasn’t even worth the salvage in most cases. The other two had reasonable imitations of equal or greater value. He didn’t know what frankincense and myrrh were anyway except that they were some kind of ancient precious spices and perfumes. Gifts for a king, or a King of Kings?

He wished that somebody other than a religious fanatic had discovered these places. Then the data might make sense without having to go to a court astrologer.

Well, he’d go over and over what data was there all the way to the Three Kings. If, that is, Sanders’s information was correct and not a bunch of junk, and if the theory that a cybership could ride the wild hole and emerge both ways in decent shape was correct, and if there was really anything there of value.

And it wasn’t just the wild hole, either. Whatever forces created and sustained it as a near permanent fixture had to be massive. The ship might well have a smooth ride there and then be torn apart as it emerged. Certainly the captain knew that, but that was all she really knew, and it was the unspoken biggest question mark about her part of the journey.

What happens if, at the end of a tricky but successful journey, you are suddenly rushing into a massive stone wall?

Oh, he was going to get a lot of sleep this trip! Sheesh…

Norman Sanders and his bookends looked absolutely resplendent in their finery as they came to see the Stanley off. He was all smarmy smiles and platitudes and shaking hands all around with that dead fish handshake of his, and sounding so confident of success that you almost believed he really thought so himself.

Like the others, An Li was only impressed that he bothered to get up early enough to show up at all.

“Well, it was the least I could do for you brave explorers,” he said effusively.

“Yes, the very least you could do,” An Li agreed a bit cynically. “All right, we’ve got your pet robot, we’ve got the supplies, the Captain says she’s got your data, so the only thing left to do is to do it. We’ve got clearance in less than an hour, so I’d suggest you get off now unless you’ve reconsidered and want to come along.”

Sanders sighed. “I’m afraid that I lack some essential skills and attributes for such a mission,” he admitted, sounding genuinely contrite. “Courage, for one thing. Skills to do more than get in the way, for another. I think it’s best that each and every person do what they do best. On the other hand, deep down, I honestly do wish I could just ride along, somehow, seeing what you’re going to see, things that nobody else knows or has ever seen and lived to tell about it. With communication through a wild hole impossible, though, I guess I’m just going to have to make do here and watch the raw footage when you get back. Good luck and godspeed to you all, and I do very much mean that.”

She almost believed him on that last one, although whether he meant it because of his own potential for risk-free profit or because, deep down, there really was something inside him that wanted to know—well, who could fathom that Machiavellian mind and darkness of soul to ever know for sure? She wasn’t even certain Sanders himself could tell sincerity from the act anymore.

She watched them go, heard the hissing of the airlock, and waited until she felt the vibration of the service tug pulling away before she turned and headed for her own quarters.

The ship looked and smelled almost brand new; it was hard to even grasp that this was the same tub they’d been on when they went for salvage and found a great worm.

Randi Queson hadn’t even bothered to see Sanders off, and was sitting in the renovated wardroom hunched over her portaterminal. She barely glanced up when An Li came into the room.

“What are you doing so intently?” An asked her.

“Just going over all the data again and again. Jerry’s an engineer and the closest to a physicist we have on the crew, but engineers don’t see things the way scientists do. I’m more a scientific mind, but my background’s not in the physical sciences. Still, a different point of view, a different emphasis, and just as he might see something I’d miss completely in the same data, I might see something he wouldn’t. Still, what bothers me most is that time and again I see an intelligence that we know nothing about behind this Three Kings stuff. It’s kept very hidden, except maybe for that gemstone gimmick—unless that’s just an interactive property that triggers paranoia within our own minds. I mostly believe it’s the latter, since we get such personalized visions until the perceived That Behind All That shows up.”

“I still kind of wish he’d let us bring it along,” An Li said. “If that last sense is real it might be a way to pinpoint where they’re hiding. That’s what I like least— they get to hide and maybe play games with us, while we’ve got to go in blind.”

“It’s always that way, or so it seems. Still, I’m glad old status symbol Sanders wouldn’t let us have it. If there is some kind of communication within it, then the last thing I want is two Eyegors wandering around the ship, one Normie’s and one God Knows What. Still, I think we have to separate the suggestion of an intelligent behavior pattern from things like the Magi’s Stones. As a social scientist, I can sense the logic pattern at least enough to form theories about it, but until I have proof that the stones aren’t just giving off some perfectly explainable phenomena, such as radiating something that interacts with the electrochemical patterns in the brain, I can’t accept the things as spies of the mind. Still, I’m going to keep an open mind. If we find them scattered in some geologically similar areas, they’re natural. If we find them in little sacks or stacked up like coins, maybe not. Either way, I’m wondering what the effect would be of a large number of them aboard ship. Drive us all psychotic, maybe.”

“That’s a cheery thought. How would we tell?”

There was a sudden sounding of a klaxon-like horn and then the captain’s voice came on all speakers.

“Attention. We are now powering up to leave orbit. Time to first genhole two hours twenty-one minutes.”

“Never mind the first one,” Lucky Cross called into thin air. “How long until we get to the wild one?”

“I have not been able to access that information. I must relinquish navigational functions to the subroutine and thus cannot access anything not on my standard charts. I will certainly let you know when we arrive and before we enter. At that point I will have complete control restored, as only I can take us through.”

“Normie the Weasel strikes again,” An Li grumped. “Like we can broadcast this information?”

Lucky Cross came into the ward room and settled down in a large padded chair. “But we could,” she said simply.

“Huh?”

“If the cap had full access to that data, we could sell it, trade it, do whatever we wanted with it. And pirates, military, you name it, could pry it out of us. As it stands, what we don’t know we can’t divulge, voluntarily or not. No, I think you underestimate the little bastard just because he’s a little bastard.”

Randi Queson still felt uneasy about it. “So what happens if we get there and there’s no ‘there’ there? I mean, what if the thing’s screwed up?”

“There’s either a wild hole exactly where it says or there ain’t,” Cross pointed out. “If there ain’t, then we turn around and go find Normie.” She sighed. “I’d almost like that better than there bein’ one there.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Look, the only way we get from Point A to Point B is through wormholes. They was all wild holes of one sort or another once upon a time, but we tamed ’em, shaped ’em, made ’em bigger or smaller to suit us, and made sure they opened at the same place and went to the predictable place on the chart. That’s the genhole—generated hole. A tunnel through space-time. You get where you need to go faster than light ’cause you don’t pass through no space in between. What you do pass through, nobody’s still sure. Like a lot of things. You listen to all the so-called brains give a zillion different explanations, you say ‘So what?,’ then you use it—not ’cause they can explain it, but because it works. It works the same way every time. But a wild one, now, that’s a different story. No genhole generators, no shaping, no stability, no nothin’. Hell, there ain’t even supposed to be any wild holes, at least not that you can use. Wormholes wink in and out all the time, but they last from a few millionths of a second to a few seconds, period, then they wink out and wink in someplace a thousand light-years away.”

“But not this one,” An Li noted.

“Nope. Oh, there are fields where wild holes wink in and out all the time. Somethin’ causes ’em, some kind of forces of nature, who knows? But they still wink in, wink out, wink in, wink out, and who knows where the hell they go to? This one, and this one alone, supposedly always goes the same place, and it’s been doin’ it for at least the couple of centuries or so since it was found, maybe a lot longer. It’s a natural hole that’s also consistent and predictable. And that ain’t possible. Even I know that much physics. Like some kind of predictable lightning bolt. Nope, this sucker may look natural and feel natural, but if you can go there and it shows up, it ain’t natural. And that to me spells ‘trap.’ ”

Queson shook her head slowly from side to side, almost in disbelief. “Everybody’s suddenly so gloomy about this, even me. Is it the new paneling or something in the coffee? I mean, didn’t we all just volunteer for this? And didn’t we all know we were probably going into some kind of trap? I mean, why else all the weapons and sensor equipment? We’re about as well-armed with weaponry and probes as a naval destroyer! If everybody thinks this is a one-way trip into an alien dissection lab, why did we all volunteer?”

Cross looked at An Li, who stared back at Cross. Finally, they both shrugged, and it was An Li who answered, “Maybe because we had nothing better to do?”

It took eleven days to reach the entry region. From the command center aboard the Stanley, they could see that this was in fact one of the places you’d expect to find the entry point, but picking the right wild hole was something else entirely.

It was one of hundreds of such places in the galaxy which, for unknown reasons, had from dozens to hundreds or even thousands of natural holes winking in and out. It was not a region that ships stayed in for long, but almost all trips had to go through such a region, since the genholes themselves tended to anchor at these spots.

Normally, a ship would emerge from a genhole and then immediately head into another in a preprogrammed sequence; in this case, they emerged into a kind of space that looked as ordinary and as empty as the rest but which set off every sort of alarm a ship might have—and caused even one the size of the Stanley to shudder, shake, and apply some real power just to stay in one spot for long. Things were happening out there, things well outside the visible spectrum.

There were no windows in the Stanley, nor any space-based visible cameras. They weren’t needed and wouldn’t show much in any event. The master board, though, in the C&C could show things the way the captain, with all sorts of sensors, could see things. The main difference was that they could see each method of viewing serially, while the captain saw them all at once.

They were looking at energy surges and hot spots, and the only things that came to Randi Queson’s mind were a Christmas display and some sort of ancient artillery battle.

“We’re supposed to go in there?” she asked, incredulous. It didn’t appear that there was enough room to do it without getting potted by one or another of those flares.

“Oh, it’s not as bad as it looks,” Cross assured her. “I’ve been on ships that went all through this area, and hundreds of ships come through the genholes here all the time. Things are a lot farther apart than they look. We’re looking at several parsecs of space here. No, getting in the way of one of those isn’t the problem. It’s the fact that the next thing we have to do is fly into one.”

“You can sure see why nobody’s found this thing,” Sark noted. “I don’t think you’d get far with trial and error.”

“Maybe not,” An Li responded. “One of them keeps winking on and off in the same space for generations.”

“It is not as easy as all that,” the captain’s voice came in. “No wild hole is all that consistent in where it emerges. It could emerge almost anywhere in this field, and the only thing you’d notice was that it lasted a bit longer than most—several seconds, in fact. But once I get the pattern, it becomes predictable. When we get one flash that holds for precisely the same length of time and repeats a location or a series of locations according to the pattern fed into my memory banks, then we will be able to go right through. I will have to match speed, trajectory, and a lot more, but the figures I have will allow me, with the observations, to know which one is the one and only gateway to the Three Kings.”

“Um, out of curiosity, what would happen if you picked the wrong one?” Queson asked anybody else in the C&C.

“Simple. You either go the wrong place if you make it through,” Cross responded, “or, more likely, you wind up in an uncontrolled vortex that sucks you in and instantly compresses you to the size of a pinhead. Gives you a whole new respect for the ones who set up the first genholes, don’t it?”

“They were mostly robots,” Jerry Nagel told her. “Very few lives were risked in that kind of operation. Robots made the tries, drew the energy needed to keep the things open and stable long enough to get the genhole anchor on one end, then—if the robot inside made it through—it retained enough of a linkage to allow another anchor to go through the hole and shore up the other end. Even when they had it down cold, they ran robotic ship after robotic ship through until they were sure it was safe.”

“That isn’t correct, Jerry,” the captain commented. “First a scout went through, a cybership like me, only designed specifically for the job of threading the wormhole needle. It was the scout that provided the anchor on the other end and used it to transmit data back. The Three Kings, of course, are an exception. Somehow most of the report got back, but there was no anchor, and, thus, nobody knew which of these was the right one.”

“Somebody knew,” Randi Queson pointed out.

“What? What do you mean?” the captain asked.

“We have the information. We got it from somebody else who had it, and they got it from somebody else who had it and so on. No, that information got back here, somehow. It just never got into the public record. I bet if you really worked on the problem enough you’d discover that somebody got greedy, that that somebody truncated or erased part of that report after they’d copied it. They went for the Kings themselves, and vanished just like everybody else, and now they’re pretty well lost to history. But they knew. This doesn’t have to be an alien plot. Just some good old-fashioned greed and corruption, I’d wager.”

“Interesting idea,” Nagel said. “If not, that description sure covers people like Sanders and us, doesn’t it? I guess all us greedy, corrupt skunks get attracted to things like that.”

“Kind of ironic, though,” Randi noted.

“Huh? Why?” Nagel responded.

“Discovered by a monk who named them for the three rich and powerful men who brought gifts to the Christ child, then turned almost immediately into an object of greed and a source of death.”

“Well, that’s what people have always done to religion. Why stop with this?” An Li said cynically. “Cap, when do we go through? You found it yet?”

“I have it, yes,” she replied. “But it will be a very difficult maneuver to enter it at just the right time and angle so that I can avoid damaging the ship. You do seem exceptionally eager to get on with this, though, which could very easily be the last thing any of us does.”

“Beats being bored, Cap,” Sark commented. “Nobody lives forever.”

“I dunno,” Jerry Nagel said. “I always thought an exception would be made for me.”

“Very well,” the captain replied. “I think you all should strap in for this one. It will make things much easier for me. Once you do that, I think we might be able to do this in another twenty minutes.”

Randi Queson exhaled loudly. “Well, here goes nothing,” she said.