Melchior's Fire

VIII: THE THREE KINGS

“Get out of here and hang on, you little creep!”

Eyegor didn’t seem to have real feelings but it was apologetic. “I am sorry, but I have nothing else to photograph at the moment.”

“Well, go photograph the C&C board or something!” Randi Queson snapped. “Just not me, not here, not now! Understand?”

“Yes, I believe I understand. You are—”

“Get the hell out of here before I smash you! Now!”

“Oh, well, if it’s that way…” Eyegor responded, but it floated away and outside the room.

Go piss off An Li, she thought with a wicked smile on her face.

They were all in their cabins, lying down and strapped into their bunks, waiting for the big bang that would tell them they were in a wild hole. It might well be instant death, or at least a quick death, or it might be nothing at all, but if they were to live through it, nobody wanted to be the one with the broken arm or gashed forehead because they didn’t heed the captain’s cautions.

No human pilot could do what the captain was doing now. It could only be done by a pure machine or a hybrid like the captain and the Stanley. At velocities approaching a third of light speed for short bursts, with no real margin for error, and with a target that had to be hit dead center even though it wasn’t there yet, this was one hell of a tricky maneuver. Any mistake, whether in calculations on where and when the wild hole they wanted would appear, or in just when to start for it or precisely how much thrust was sufficient, meant they were either doomed to fail or they were burnt toast.

This was what the captain was designed for, what she gained from her sacrifice of her humanity.

The calculations came through as simply as a grade school addition, and she didn’t even consciously think of doing them and putting them into action. She had done three trial runs and had completed full diagnostics on the hardware involved, and now she was ready.

It was almost certainly best that none of the people within the ship could see what was really going on, for nobody without the captain’s massive calculating abilities and tremendous database of information would believe that this was anything more than idiocy.

The ship came around, sighted on a trajectory so precise that the margin of error was under one millimeter over the vibration of the ship at full thrust. The engines roared into life, shuddering as they did so and causing a massive series of subsonic vibrations that went through the entire ship and all within it, and then it was off at increasing speed, on that precise line to a point in space where there was most assuredly nothing at all.

Although cushioned in artificial gravity and a stable internal environment, they could all slightly feel what was going on, and for the longest time nobody breathed.

At just the precise vanishing point of the original trajectory, and just as the ship reached the mathematical point it had represented, a hole opened up, a hole in space and time. It had no elegant look, no sense of symmetry, nor did it give off the sensation of brute force, although it certainly had that. It looked in fact like a ghostly, twisting plasma of something indefinable, some sort of plasma that was unlike anything in the known universe, and which throbbed and swirled.

The captain took her best data and punched right into the center of the throbbing mass, which slowly enveloped the ship. At that moment the ship seemed to sway in all directions at once, and it took some fast experimenting to keep it solid, as it now appeared to be riding dead center through a ghostly translucent tube.

Most instrumentation was now useless, but enough was known about the energy properties of a wormhole to allow at least a calculation of the amount of subjective time they would be inside and during which the captain would have to be constantly in control.

There was no need to add power now, beyond positioning; the hole simply ignored things like thrust and mass and did its own things according to its own dimly understood extra-universe rules.

The main engines cut off and the internal buffered living environment stabilized. Everything was suddenly unnaturally quiet and even more disconcertingly still.

An Li unbuckled herself from her bed, sat up, opened a small box on a nightstand near it and removed a Styngan cigarette and an elegant lighter with a stylized rat embossed on its side. She pressed the stud, and the top element glowed. She brought it up to the cigarette.

For some reason, it took her several tries before her hand would obey enough to get the heat where she wanted it to go.

She finally got the thing lit, but just sat there, staring at the blank bulkhead, barely puffing on it, allowing her nerve to come back and her heart to slow down.

Everybody, she thought, needed at least one bad habit, if only for moments like these.

And there would be several days more to go with things probably getting worse for everybody. Days and days with nothing to do, but also nothing more to learn. They didn’t have anything new, no data on what was at the other end. But it was going to be bedlam and constant tension and work once they broke out, from the very moment they broke out, assuming all went well.

And she was right. By the time they got the warning that it was only a matter of hours left, they were through all the diversions and all the drugs and cyber entertainment aboard and were starting at each other’s throats. That, though, would change the moment things started to happen. It was already happening as they began to think of the job ahead.

The captain, though, was quite pleased. “We managed to get in, we’ve had no incidents, and we’re in excellent condition,” she assured them. “I was afraid that others would try following us in; that’s a good way to destabilize the interior of a wild hole and cause all sorts of nastiness. We had a few followers, early on, but if anyone was present to tell our course, speed, and match us going in, it wasn’t clear on any of my sensors.”

“Do they really need that?” Randi Queson asked her. “I mean, if they have a surveyor unit in the area and just register us—course, speed, which hole—they don’t have to risk any destabilization or detection, do they?”

“Perhaps not, but it’s not that easy. Without the data Sanders had downloaded into me, I do not see how they could determine the pattern and pick the correct hole and appearance with sufficient time to get through. And if we get back, we’re going to own the destination.”

“Do you think you can hold us together on the way out?” Lucky Cross asked her. “I always suspected that it was that that tore ships apart. Got to be a fuckin’ monster to keep a hole like that re-forming over and over. Those forces and the inevitable debris field have got to be Hell itself.”

“Who can answer that sort of hypothetical?” the captain mused. “I don’t know. I think so. The ships that returned as beaten-up wrecks appeared to be victims of the wormhole itself, and the one that didn’t showed no apparent outward damage, although its data banks were fried. If that happens to me, then you will have to take it through. I am confident that this ship can do it, with or without me, if need be. In the meantime, I’m going to ask that you be strapped into the emergency bridge in the C&C while we emerge, just in case, and that everyone else be firmly fixed in their bunks. I will transfer holograms of the C&C board to every cabin so that you can see what we see and are facing. If we get clear, I will unlock and extend the visual camera, which has so far been useless to us. Fair enough.”

Cross sighed. “I guess.” She didn’t see how the hell she was going to fly this thing if the captain couldn’t, though.

“All hands,” the captain announced throughout the ship. “If you have not eaten, I suggest you do it now, then secure everything loose throughout the ship. At the fifteen-minute mark I will sound an alarm indicating that you are to go to your assigned places and strap in. I will then cue you up until we emerge. At that point, deduction suggests that there may be some periods of brief power fluctuations, weightlessness, and/or severe movement of the ship beyond the abilities of the inner core to compensate. Just hang on until Lucky or I tell you it’s safe to move about.”

“Aye, aye, ma’am,” Sark grumbled. “Me, I don’t care what happens by this point, just so long as it’s something.”

Nobody ate a meal, although a couple of them drank a little bit and nibbled on some energy bars, mostly to settle nerves. There was a lot of loose stuff to pick up and store, but they all knew they’d miss some of it anyway. Nobody was really thinking of anything but the end of the trip that everyone else had spun stories and legends about, and many had died trying to get to and from. And there wasn’t one damned thing they could do except wait for it.

At fifteen minutes, the emergency alarm sounded and the captain said, “All hands to rough-condition stations and strap in.”

Everybody except Cross went for their quarters with one last look around to make sure they weren’t forgetting the obvious. Lucky headed down and aft to C&C, only to find Eyegor waiting for her there.

“You better find a way to hold on or you’re going to get smashed against this equipment,” she told the robot.

“I will use internal energy beams to secure myself to the bulkhead,” Eyegor told her. “I have determined that nothing critical runs through it, so I should not disrupt anything. I must be here and active to record this historic event.”

Lucky Cross sat in the command chair and belted herself in, then reclined, triggering two command panels next to her right and left hands and activating voice control. It would have no effect unless the captain were cut off from the controls, but if that happened she would have complete command of the ship in nanoseconds. It was the last thing she wanted, nor was she trained for it, but she was the best qualified of the group if it came to that.

“Comm check,” she said in as cool a voice as she could manage.

“Comm check aye,” responded a more mechanical-sounding version of the captain’s voice from the panel in front of her.

“Emergency backup power.”

“Backup power at one hundred three percent of nominal,” the board assured her. “Connection time three nanoseconds.”

“Very well. Display on, forward, wide.”

The big display board came on and showed… nothing. There was as yet nothing really to see that any of the instruments could pick up other than constantly fluctuating energy surges.

And then there was the clock. The simplest, most primitive device on the board, it was the one that interested Cross the most. It read “00:00:05:35:16,” and it was counting down.

Five and a half minutes.

She felt a curious detachment now, as if she were cut off, watching from some safe and far-off place and time Eyegor’s recording of the moment rather than experiencing it. It was often like that, when push came to shove. It also somehow caused five and a half minutes to go by in a kind of agonizing slowness that physics would never explain.

“Five minutes,” the captain’s voice said throughout the ship. “I will call each minute now until one, then count from ten seconds.”

Lucky Cross wanted a cigar, but she knew it would be some time before she could have one. She sat there now, watching the timer crawl down, and she found some personal satisfaction in the situation as tense as it was.

Big, fat, foul-mouthed, coarse lowlife Gail Cross, she thought. They’d laugh and tease me, they’d call me names and make me the butt of their jokes, and they’d go off to their fine places while I went home to a ramshackle junk house built from yesterday’s disasters. Nobody ever gave me nothin’, but I didn’t take like An Li. I learned and I earned, and look who’s sittin’ in the C&C chair now ready to set eyes on the Three Kings!

“Thirty seconds.”

C’mon, c’mon! If we’re gonna die, then let’s do it. Either that, or a share of the biggest pie in creation!

“Ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… two… one… egress!”

The board came alive with so many things it was impossible to make them all out, but that wasn’t the thing that Cross and the others thought of just then. The vibrations, the crashing sounds, the objects they’d missed shooting lethally around them as they lay strapped in, the ship’s lurching, nearly out of control movement in all directions for what seemed like several minutes, all combined to give them a carnival ride and a sea of sensations, mostly unpleasant.

The captain’s warning hadn’t been the half of it, and even the lights, the blowers, everything except the flying and clanking junk around flickered on and off and they felt themselves growing sick and disoriented.

But the captain definitely had control of all engines and energy controls and stabilizers, and although it took some time the ride eventually smoothed out and the noises, smells, and spinning sensations ceased.

Cross hit the intercom. “Everybody check in! An Li?”

“Here! I’ve got strap bruises and a small cut, otherwise okay.”

“Doc?”

“Bad bruise on my right arm above the elbow. At least I hope it’s just a bruise. Something hit it with tremendous force. Still, I’ll live.”

“Jerry?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. Something put one hell of a dent in the bulkhead here, though.”

“Sark?”

“Broke one of the straps and got tossed a little, but I’m okay. Just feel like I’ve had a few back-alley brawls with some ghosts from my growing up years.”

“Well, I seem to be no worse for wear, but I had more protection. Cap? I don’t have to fly the damned ship, do I?”

“Not yet,” the captain responded. “Damage control reports a great deal of minor damage but nothing that can not be attended to by self-maintenance systems. I believe we made it in very good shape, although it will take a little bit of skill and a lot of power to navigate in this system.”

They all immediately forgot their bruises and turned to the hologram of the primary C&C screen in front of Lucky Cross. Cross gave a low whistle.

The G-class star was slightly larger than average but not outside the range of such suns in the database of known systems; what was spectacular was the fact that there was a series of debris rings where solid planets might be expected, and, beyond, well out from its star, was a single gas giant so massive that had it ignited there would probably be nothing else around at all. At a diameter of almost three hundred thousand kilometers, it dominated everything, and it had not one spectacular ring but two, eerily paralleling one another above and below its equator. But the oddest thing about it was that, even beyond its terminator, on the half turned away from its sun, it had an eerie but bright luminescence that transferred a good deal of light and even some heat from internal forces to the moons. It was what made at least three of those moons capable of life support in spite of long periods when the moons hid from the primary source of their energy.

There were three more gas giants farther out, none nearly the size or complexity of the massive inner one, and a number of very thick asteroid belts that might well have been other planets if the gravitational forces of the monster planet and its interaction with the others had permitted them to form.

“There’s little use even looking at the other gas bags, they are too far out,” the captain noted. “And while the asteroid belts contain some of extraordinary size, I cannot at this point sense any with any sort of atmosphere that might be stable and life supporting, let alone old enough to develop anything. That leaves that inner monster. Of its many moons, two currently visible are planet sized with atmospheres, and indications are that they are within tolerances for sustaining life as we know it. A third might be on the other side at the moment.”

“So the Three Kings are moons. Curious that the monk who discovered them wouldn’t nail that down,” Nagel commented.

“Not necessarily. The survey was considerably garbled, and much of the information we did have was reconstructed and some of it interpreted,” Queson put in. “There certainly were suggestions of it in the report, but who would have thought that they would be three among many around some monster that size?”

“I’d like to know what stabilizes the temperatures on those worlds,” Nagel replied. “I mean, running the two visibles we can see, I get fairly reasonable surface and low atmospheric temps even on the night side. There’s some heat from the giant, which, like most of that type, is virtually a failed sun, but why don’t they broil when they get into real sunlight? There’s no way they can do both. It’s almost like they have thermostats.”

“Perhaps they do, in a way,” the captain said. “The combination of inert atmospheric gases might well interact with the sunlight on the other side to filter out some of the solar heat and disperse it. That is certainly true of the pretty blue and white one. I just ran a simulation, and the addition of sunlight to that mixture would almost create both a heat and light shield. You could almost think of it as a planet with a natural sunscreen. It’s still going to be very hot on the other side, but if you limited your activities to ‘night,’ when it was turned towards the planet and away from the sun, and took shelter during the day, you could live through it. It’s also got quite a lot of water, so think of it as a tropical steam bath.”

“That other one isn’t any steam bath,” Nagel pointed out.

“No, it’s mostly desert, and a cold desert at that, at least on this side of the planet, away from the sun. Still, there is considerable water, much as ice, on the surface, and a good atmospheric mix. It probably gets just cold enough to be nearly unbearable when it rounds the big one and gets hit by sunlight. I think it might well be a whole different world on the solar side. Warmer, liquid water, who knows what else? Heated up just enough to sustain it and anything on it that knows how to compensate during the cold outsystem time. Roughly thirty standard days on this side, about the same on the other. Our jungle world is faster, under fifteen days each side. Wonder what the third is like?”

“Well, it’s a long way from here, but I haven’t anything better to do,” Cross noted. “Let’s go see.”

“Moving in-system. I’m going to take a little extra time to leapfrog that nasty inner asteroid belt as much as possible. In the meantime, we’ve all got lots of new information to work with.”

“Any scan of radio or other broadcast signals from in-system?” An Li asked. “Or the remnants of other ships?”

“Hard to say on the ships. There’s nothing recognizable as a ship’s power signature, if that’s what you mean, not in orbit around any of them or in the visible system, but we’ve only seen half of it and haven’t begun to map things yet. There are life signs on both worlds, even the frozen one, but it’s much too far to tell what sort of life we’re talking about. The pretty blue and white one has a few surface energy signatures that could be ships of some kind, but, if they are, they aren’t big suckers. More like the shuttle we use to go from planet to orbit—only there are no evident ships in orbit, if you see what I mean. That says that they could be anything. The cold little desert one has a vast number of really odd energy signatures, no fixed locations, but there is simply nothing in my data that matches any of them. Could be your alien masterminds, but more likely it’s some kind of energy signatures from minerals or deep down interactions below the crust. I have no records of any readings like this before, but, then again, I’ve got hundreds of cases of readings just as bizarre and all turned out to be natural phenomena.”

We’ve all got aliens on the brain, Randi Queson thought to herself. Still, we had no such thoughts the last trip and look what we met up with. That cold little world there, for example, reminds me a little too much of where we’ve already been.

An Li’s “cut” caused by a flying something turned out to be a pretty nasty slash right across her forehead in a jagged and bloody shape. It was easily attended to, and they even had skin repair in the medical unit that would, over time, make it vanish completely. For the moment, she refused the full repairs, much to everyone’s surprise, and accepted only the treatment pack that would seal and heal it in a day or two. It would also leave a pretty nasty scar that would mar her delicate beauty, and if An Li was anything she was quite vain about that.

Randi’s “bruise” turned out to be a fracture, but, again, it was easily set within the medical unit. She would have very limited movement there and have to wear a healing splint for a few days, but, again, there would be no permanent damage. The fracture was clean and rather slight, not a full break but more a chip. As she was left-handed anyway, it wouldn’t crimp her style very much, and it was likely that both would be fine by the time they got close in on the big planet.

At least the monk scout’s information as far as it went was borne out. The pretty little moon was almost certainly what he’d called Balshazzar; the cold and inhospitable but still livable moon was Kaspar; and still among the missing was Melchior, supposedly much larger than the other two and far more active and violent a world. Kaspar was almost two thirds of the way through its cold side transverse, and Balshazzar about midway. It was likely that all three were within sight for at least a good part of their short “years,” so either Melchior had set just before they’d gotten there or it was due to show up any time now.

And show up it did.

Balshazzar was about 30,000 kilometers around, and the smaller Kaspar was a shade over 22,500 kilometers, but Melchior now was impressive in its own right.

Over 50,000 kilometers at the equator, it was certainly the king of moons even in this system. It was also a nearly impossible mixture of nasty and nice. Mostly ocean, it had one huge continent straddling the equator almost three quarters of the way around, but it didn’t look like anyplace you’d want to go for a vacation. The land was riddled with volcanoes, some huge, most active to some degree, and the entire continental mass was slightly on the move, shuddering here and there with volcanic earthquakes and causing huge fissures, some of which ran for hundreds of kilometers, opening up to reveal bright hot lava. It reminded Randi Queson of a giant jigsaw puzzle in which lava seemed to run at every junction of pieces, but there was sufficient motion that sometimes the pieces were so tightly fitted the meeting edges could not be seen.

It was also smoky, with a permanent cloud layer over a good share of the planet. Still, there were enough forces at work both below and in the gravitational effects of the big planet and other passing moons that the atmosphere was constantly in motion and there were often virtually clear spots. In most areas, though, and particularly in the highest volcanic ranges of the continent, it seemed to be raining all the time, often torrentially. There was certainly vegetation, though; the atmospheric mix, minerals in the volcanic soil, and warmth both from the planet and sun and from the near-surface volcanic activities fed a nearly perfect organic stew.

More comfortable but by no means pleasant were the islands of the mid latitudes, some of enormous size. Like the continent, they were primarily volcanic, but whole areas appeared to be either ages dormant, with often only one, or even no, active ones. There were still active volcanic regions in other respects, but their mountain-building days seemed to have slowed to a crawl or stopped.

Still, the place seemed to teem with life. Vast areas of foliage, low broad-leafed trees and enormous vines, and possibly a lot more, and not just on the islands, either. Life always found a way if there was one, and even on the most active areas of the continent there were large areas of vegetation. White steam rising said that hot magma might not be too far below the ground even there.

Sark looked at the pictures of the three on the big screen and commented in his low, perpetually sour voice, “Well, if I got stuck out here I know which one I’d head for and move to.”

“Huh? Oh, you mean Balshazzar?”

“The pretty one. Sure.”

An Li wasn’t as convinced. “I wonder if it isn’t supposed to be that way. Everybody who likes our kind of climate would be naturally attracted to that one, but if there’s any kind of rhyme or reason to this then that’s the one I’d stay away from. You draw the bugs with sugar and then you trap ’em.”

Nagel chuckled. “Ah, the secret hidden alien masterminds again, huh? Why would they want to lay a trap for such as us? And keep such an elaborate and expensive trap open to little bits of us over such a long time? No, I can’t buy it.”

“Three worlds that all could support human life? That’s not suspicious?”

“I don’t think so. Unprecedented, sure, but it’s a big universe. One, two, three, a dozen, what’s the difference? And if not here, then somewhere else.”

“But they are here,” she persisted. “And linked to human regions via a self-renewing wormhole.”

Randi Queson thought a moment, then said, “You might both be right for all that it matters. The point is, Li’s got a point. Look, from the point of view of sheer pragmatism and a knowledge of human nature, let’s look at the three. Want to find remnants of anybody who came before and might still be around? Go for the pretty one. But don’t expect to find much of value there other than refugees. You’d have to have mines and other heavy-duty works to find much of value on it, particularly with that necessary level of erosion and deposition. Now, if you want to hunt for those mysterious artifacts of some long-gone alien civilization, I’d take Kaspar, the little cold one. Anything left there in the sands or probably in the cliffs would eventually be exposed by the wind and such, and the cold would be a good preservative. But if you want your gemstones, I’d take Melchior. It’s far too dynamic for much else, but those kind of internal forces are just the kind that create unique mineral recipes from whatever compounds are beneath the earth. So, what do we want to go hunting for first? Refugees and aliens, maybe, or even alien refugees, or artifacts, or gems?”

“Gems,” An Li, Lucky Cross, and Sark all responded as one.

“Then we go to Melchior and we hold our noses. I bet you that world is gonna stink something awful. And considering those rains, everybody better know how to swim, too.”

“I think we ought to do a systematic survey before committing to any planetfall,” Jerry Nagel said to them.

“Why? What’s the difference?” An Li shot back.

“Because we don’t see any derelicts here, that’s why. Lots of forces, lots of history, but no clear-cut signs we aren’t the first ones here. I think I want to know what I’m getting into before I go down, particularly this time. It may not be as easy as it looks to park and go down and scoop up treasure, even if we can find it. Let’s look at them all. There aren’t enough of us to do any kind of real exploration, and none of us are gonna live that long to completely cover one, let alone all three, of these things. It makes it all the more important that we decide right off which one we want to commit to this first trip, make sure we’re landing where there’s something worth taking, and, if possible, spot what we can of ugly surprises. Why not? You got something better to do?”

His logic wasn’t what they wanted to hear, but it made too much sense to be argued with. Gold and frankincense and myrrh were not lying all over the ground down there waiting to be picked up and stuffed in their pockets. The Three Kings weren’t quite the easy El Dorado of spacefarer legends, but just three new and very odd worlds. They needed more information, and getting it wasn’t something you could argue yourself out of.

Lucky Cross sighed, a little disappointed. “All right. Agreed.” And, one by one, the others echoed her sentiments.

“I’ll plot a systematic route,” the captain told them, sounding very satisfied with their decision. “Kaspar, Balshazzar, then Melchior. Then you’ll have to decide.”

“Fair enough,” Nagel replied. “When we go down and come back up, and when we go back, I want to already have enough stuff so that no matter what Normie pulls or tries to pull on us—and he’ll definitely try and pull something, bet on it—our share will still be enough so we don’t have to worry or ever come back again unless we want to.”

They settled back and headed for Kaspar.