MODRA SUDDENLY STARTED, WITH A SHARP intake of breath. “Josef’s dead!”
Gun Roh Chin nodded in the darkness. “I felt it, too.” He stared out from the trees toward the station entrance, which had far too many Quintara around it for them to possibly contend with.
“But Jimmy’s still in there! You said we’d go to their aid if they got caught!”
“It would make no difference except to render their deaths meaningless to do so at this point,” he said sadly. “We’ve just got to wait for the bombs to go off and do what we came here to do. It is all or nothing now.”
“But you said we needed a Mycohl to face the Engineer, and he was the only one! We may be trapped in the other plane with him, unable to lock the door!”
Krisha stared stonily at the milling Quintara. “We will do what must be done,” she said simply.
“But—”
“We must have commitment,” Gun Roh Chin told her. “Without all three of us, all this and our cause is lost. I would have preferred it not come down to this, but there it is. Ninety trillion, Modra. We three hold ninety trillion lives and countless generations yet unborn in our hands.”
“But we don’t even know if we can do anything!”
“Better to try than to not try, Modra,” Krisha said stonily, as if this whole thing were but some terrible dream. “I could not live, would not want to live, watching them destroy so much, and most of all cover the future with darkness, wondering if it was all due to my single lapse.”
“As soon as the way is clear, group on me,” Chin told them. “Helmets down, full shields, full instruments. The time for hiding in secret is over. It shouldn’t be long now.”
A series of tremendous explosions shook the ground even where they were, almost knocking them off their feet.
For a fleeting moment the connection was re-formed; they saw the face of the demon prince, saw the hand with the cross, saw it plunge deep into the core of the chest of Baal . . .
The Quintara were in a state of near panic, heightened even more by the terrible psychic scream of Baal dying within the ruins of the collapsed castle. For a second it seemed as if the mob mentality would dominate and that they would flee into the station, but fear of what might await an accounting of such an action overrode their terror at that monstrous death agony and they bolted as a group instead for the city.
Two demons, dazed and confused, remained, staring back at the sound of the explosions whose echoes still rippled across the plains beyond like peals of thunder.
<Group on me! Now!>
For a precious moment Modra hesitated.
If you deserve it if you deserve it if you deserve it if you . . .
She grouped with Chin and Krisha and the three bolted from the woods straight for the station.
One of the remaining pair of Quintara turned and saw them and from Chin came a blast of white energy that knocked it back off its feet. The other, confused and disoriented, seemed unable to act and in a moment they were inside.
The entry chamber looked the same as always, but the inner great room no longer had the rubble of broken pillars in the center. Instead the pentagonal crystalline shapes stood like podiums, with a matched set descending from overhead. To one side, neatly stacked in piles, was enough Quintara clothing to outfit an army of the creatures.
The upper and lower parts of one set of crystals began to glow and pulse, and between the two apparent terminals flowed a field of black plasma. Before their eyes, a Quintara was being reborn.
They ignored the process and made direct contact with the station. A stream of equations, fed from a source a thousand and more light-years from them, was fed into the station master controller, which accepted them with the speed of thought and sent an acknowledgment.
They turned and headed quickly by the still forming Quintara, through the rear passageway to the exit chamber and then to the doorway beyond. Although they had walked in a straight line, they emerged at the same point they had entered.
There were more Quintara now, returning as the wiser ones took charge, far too many for them to deal with. One of the Quintara spotted them emerging and called to the others, who turned to see the three tiny figures in full suits walk from the station, slowly and deliberately, toward them.
The station behind them shimmered a moment, then vanished as if it were never there, leaving them suddenly lit only by torchlight.
The effect on the Quintara of the station vanishing was greater than the explosions or death cry of their leader had been. It was impossible. Either these tiny and insignificant slaves could do the impossible or, more terrifying to them, they had been abandoned by their master. They had little doubt that the three frail-looking figures moving so eerily in unison had something to do with the death of their prince; the fact that the minds of this trio were a blank, a cipher to them, only increased their sense that something was afoot, something not at all in their interests, something that was making everything go suddenly and terribly wrong.
They stopped and stared at the demons, amazed. They are frightened of us! They are actually frightened of us!
It would not last forever. Fright would turn to resignation, and resignation to anger and desperation. They did not know what to do next, but they were beyond concealment, beyond hit and run. They could only wait for the combined group mind whom they represented, the entire planet of the Mycohl in its own Gathering, the entire data bank that was the capital of the Exchange, the combined powerful minds of the Angels, to direct them.
<It is only three miserable little Terrans! What have we to fear of such as them?>
They put out their right hands and pointed at the ground, and the ground blazed with brilliant white light, illuminating them all. The white-hot beam of energy, as smooth and perfect as if a computer hologram, fanned out, encircled the three, and when the circle was complete moved inward, tracing a complex geometric pattern. The Quintara saw the pattern and stepped back in fear and revulsion at what it represented to them.
The three then spoke mentally with one voice, stronger and more powerful than theirs, both ancient and very young, both male and female, a chorus of confident pronouncements, in a tongue strange and ancient to the speakers, but not to those who heard it.
<Let the Quintara be placed once more in endless not-sleep, sealed between the universes, to suffer for their rebellion! Your holes lead only to your prisons from which you have been untimely loosed. Who dares stand against us, to risk imprisonment not in amber but in fire or deepest pit? The people must bear you within themselves; they need not bear you as well. We are the people, and as the people we cast you out!>
The ground shook as if a mighty earthquake had suddenly struck; the idol beyond, the great stone altar itself, trembled and moved off its foundations, and beyond the city was in panic as buildings shimmered and all that was loose fell into the darkened streets.
A great darkness beyond the darkness of the night came upon them; around the three and their blazing seal formed a region of that which could not be conceived; a blackness that was truly nothing, given shape only by that of the world which it touched. That world vanished for the three, and they were suddenly falling, falling free into the nothingness, falling down a great, deep hole supported only by the ancient seal which itself could not illuminate the great abyss. Down, down, they sunk, into the void that had no end.
Now something did reach out from below: concentric rings of color, blacks and browns and grays, swirling, capturing them like a maelstrom, spinning around in counterclockwise fashion, spinning them, spinning toward a central point below.
They passed through the bottom and through lawyers of color, brilliant, without imperfection, perfect squares forming a progressive spectrum of colors as they sank down, down . . .
They held fast and firm to their platform, and Gun Roh Chin, in the center, reached out his hands and took one of theirs in each of his own.
Falling forever in the nothingness, they suddenly realized that a new element was forming, a something beyond shape, beyond the ability of even the Higher Races behind them to truly comprehend.
He comes, the thought said, and it was all.
Spirals of silver, green, and violet, like spider’s webs, shot from him who still could be only glimpsed, a darkness beyond darkness, a creature spawned in a cosmos whose rules they were unable to comprehend. Strange, overpowering foul odors hit them all although they were sealed in their suits; great menacing balls of incredible smoothness struck all around them, bouncing here and there, coming very close.
Some of its rules . . .
RED for the rage at what they would do to those if left free. YELLOW for the faith that sustained those who would oppose them. BLUE for the knowledge needed to fight them.
But . . .
The colors sprang from the three; red, blue, and yellow gold, swirled around them, energized them, transfigured them in all ways.
They grew and spread mighty wings of force, controlling their position and descent. Off the Seal now, under it, behind it, using it as both shield and weapon, pressing forward, making the Seal their one mighty thought forcing out all others, creating before them a solid, impenetrable juggernaut and pressing forward, not falling now but in motion, in controlled, confident flight. Homo in excelsis, united, powerful, balanced, supreme!
The black coldness of pure Will, tempered not by pity, or sympathy, nor tainted by morality, love or hate, beauty or ugliness, pushed against them, a solid wall of smooth, shiny blackness, in which all colors were combined as one having equal value and thus canceled themselves out. A terrible, machine-like blackness, Reason without Feeling, immense, monolithic, alone.
Anticipating that this was the attack he had to fight off but had not thought it necessary to fight this time, the Engineer’s tactic was to attempt to absorb their radiations. The shield of the Seal, however, glowed a perfect white, reflecting back all of the blackness and enveloping within its contrails the three who pushed it on.
Black pentagrams spit from the receding wall of darkness, some bouncing harmlessly off the shield, others swooping and swerving in and out and about attempting to snare just one of them, to unbalance the shield and turn it so that blackness could overwhelm it. To those attacks they returned the circle and the star; centered on the pentagrams they set them spinning dizzily out of control, containing the blackness of the pentagram within and rendering it harmless.
The battle raged, each side in near constant thrust and parry, but as it raged they tired as well, and as it raged the Engineer kept falling back. Soon it became obvious that the three would tire while the Engineer had no such limitations, and it was a matter of not tiring too greatly or too soon before the Engineer fell to the Hatch.
The Engineer, too, understood this. From the expanse of his transdimensional realm he fashioned weapon after weapon, hurling them again and again as if in hope that numbers would make up for lack of direction, forcing them to counter, counter, counter again and again, tiring them beyond their ability to sustain the push of the attack.
They passed beyond what they thought was their limit, pain and nausea racking them, their colors fading and with that their maneuverability and their ability to fend off the constant attacks and keep the shield fully energized as the pure white the logic of this place required.
How long had it been? How long must they go on? How long could they go on? Only the faces, the dead faces, kept them going now, the faces that floated past . . .
Manya, and Savin, and Morok the Holy Ladue . . .
Robokuk, and Desereth, and Josef, too, and Tris and the Durquist and Jimmy McCray . . .
And beyond them the other faces, the pleading faces, the faces looking into the pit of horrors. Terran faces, and Rithian, too, and Gnolls, Mesoks, Julkis, Thions, and hundreds more. Ninety trillion, but not strong; ninety trillion and uncountable futures for their children and grandchildren until the very universe was dead, and darkness enveloped all those shining lights around them, all those tiny galaxies and supergalaxies and megagalaxies and beyond . . .
Even now Quintara-led fleets bore down on them, on the Holy Worlds of the Mizlaplan, upon the very capital of the Exchange, upon the great ringed mother world of the Mycohl.
There would be no second chance. If the Engineer escaped from this he would join those fleets, energize them, envelop all before them in his darkness and engulf them in the Nothing. Even if they fought off the attacks, others would come, again and again, as numerous and infinite as the pentagrams thrown at them, until at least one bastion fell.
The grid appeared suddenly: green lines of force representing they knew not what, yet it was familiar to them. The harder blackness, the creatures of the spaces of the grid, reached out for them and then retreated as if receiving horrible shocks.
They turned leftward and into the spiral sinister that led down, down, to the city below.
Now the narrowing that had so blocked their path became their ally; there was less space for pentagrams to get past the Seal, and diminishing all the time. Now the shield was virtually touching the walls, burning, scouring the foulness that dwelt within those places. The sight of it and the break it gave them infused them with renewed energy reserves from places they hadn’t suspected were there.
Suddenly they burst out and the great city was below them; now the Engineer reached out, called his minions to his aid, and the city was suddenly ablaze with activity. It did not matter; the fall was now too short. The Engineer plunged into the whirling eye of energy at the edge of the city and sank beneath it, and they followed.
Beyond was an outer darkness, a place that had no rules or reason, a place into which the bright energy drained. The Engineer plunged through to that place, but the three were stopped by the Seal, which struck the opening and stuck there, setting the whole great pool of energy ablaze with a bright white glow.
They rested a moment, bathing in the glow, exulting in the victory, but the job was not yet finished. Connectors, conductors of pure force dipped into the pool, leading upward to a great, throbbing, living dynamo, and beyond that the pyramid.
One tiny tendril was not like the rest; it stood out black, a great hairline against the pulsing glow, extending from the dynamo and master logic systems down to a point away from the Seal. Down and into the wall that separated the All from the Nothing.
How long had it taken the Engineer to create that tiny hole? How long to push his fashioned cable upward until somehow it hit just right and connected into the master logic systems center? How long was long to a being like the Engineer?
They broke the cable and sealed the nearly microscopic hole with another Seal of Solomon, this fashioned from the very energy in which they bathed. Then they rose to the point where the master control center contacted the pool of energy. This time he would have to think of another way. This time the ancient mistake would not be repeated. This time, after reprogramming the system, the access points below would themselves be shielded.
But not completely.
To totally seal it off would mean cutting it off from its power source, shutting down the system. To shut down the system would mean endless reincarnation for the Quintara, for the stations were natural things that depended not at all on the system itself, having been connected to it but not dependent upon it. To contain the Quintara, power must be maintained. Otherwise they would be merely inconvenienced in having to manually reprogram each one. To maintain the power was to leave a gap, albeit small and as far away from the bottom of the pool as possible, through which contact might be re-established. It was a risk that had to be taken, a price that had to be paid yet again.
But this time the open spaces filled, not covering the rest but linking and binding all three against a new color, a soft glowing green, the binding color of hope and rebirth; a pure color, untainted by blackness.
Now for the station and upward, to affix the broken seals, to secure the system, to spin out of phase those stations that intersected points in the known universe. Through fire and through rain, through bitter cold and terrible heat, through soft breezes and howling gales, through billeting and maintenance depots left over from the perfecting of the universe they walked, until once more they stepped out into fresh warm air under a starry sky.
They stood there on a hilltop, great wings folded, looking out across a sea of stars.
<We are on our own,> Gun Roh Chin noted.
Modra looked at the other two, great beings of soft green cores inside softly glowing white as grand as the images of angels of old, and knew that she must look that way, too.
She knew, as the others did, that she had but to spread her wings and visualize a pattern and fly into it to move to any other point. The amount of knowledge and sheer power that she possessed was awesome, beyond anything they had imagined.
<Poor Kalia,> Krisha thought, shaking her beautiful head. <Had she chosen wisely she would have had power beyond anything they could have given her.>
<She would never have accepted it,> Chin noted. <No matter what the cause, the environment in which she was raised, the abuses she suffered, there was far too much darkness in her soul to attain this. She would have attracted his bolts like a magnet, and the whiteness would have eaten her alive.>
The mere thought of Kalia brought a flood of images to their minds: of Rithian, drol, and even Quintara digging frantically through the rubble to free their tapped mates from the ruins of the castle, and finding their great one’s body crushed and atop it the body of a small Terran, his hand locked upon an object thrust up under the demon prince’s breastplate with such force that it was almost all the way in. And Jimmy, crushed, frozen in death, with an incredible smile on his face . . .
And yet, miraculously, well away from the pair, in a space made by the falling of several beams and pillars, they found Kalia, unconscious but alive, and brought her out.
<That infection she sought for Josef is within her now,> Krisha noted. <I wonder if there is an antidote for it at this stage?>
Almost instantly, although she didn’t know how, she knew that there was such a thing, if administered within the first three days.
<But there is no one there to give it to her,> Modra noted. <And she is no longer of much value to them. It will work on her, yet her body is self-renewing. That was part of the price paid for her treachery by the demon prince. She will become what she made others become, but, unlike them, she will not age.>
<It is not an unfitting judgment,> Gun Roh Chin noted. <Perhaps, in a few decades or so, one of us might remember her and have enough mercy to seek her out and kill her.>
<If we think of it,> Krisha said without much conviction that she, at least, would get around to it.
It was one thing to feel pity, even an impulse to mercy; they all felt that. But true justice could not be evil.
<There are still a couple of things about this matter that trouble me,> Gun Roh Chin commented. <I am having problems reconciling them.>
<Only a couple?> Modra responded. <Even with all this new-found knowledge and power I have to honestly admit that I don’t understand a thing that we did.>
Krisha wasn’t at all bothered. <We won. This time. What else is there to know?>
<Well,> Gun Roh Chin replied, <for openers, how did those two Quintara back at Rainbow Bridge and the others we saw have clothes on? We know the system.>
The answer was amazingly simple. Cornered, trapped in that last ancient conflict, some of the Quintara had indeed surrendered rather than face the possibility of the volcanic fires or the Bottomless Pit. Those were placed within the closest stations by the Mycohl and sealed there, blocking the reincarnation in those areas of the more fanatical ones who had gone to the end. That might even have to be an option again, they knew.
<All right, that one had bothered me,> he admitted. <I will admit that this method of getting information is far superior to mere deduction. So, how did we affix the Mycohl seal when we had no Mycohl among us?>
But they did. All that was required was the Grand Gathering; all three Higher Races were linked to all of them. Josef was in fact more pragmatic a choice than an essential one, although his knowledge of the Qaamil hive was important to the way they ultimately drew the Engineer out. But, symbolically as well, in a very small way a Mycohl was truly present.
<The child! I still carry Josef’s child! Sorry, Chin.>
The captain shrugged it off. <It is of no consequence. Yes, I see the pulsing of another life within you still, even in this form. We represent the dawning of a new Higher Race here, yet within these forms we are still Terran. I wonder what we do now?>
And again the answer came. Anything you want. The experience had purified them, even elevated them, eaten away the blackness within them and replaced it with something else, something from beyond and above, from those inside The Ship itself. Jimmy might have called them saints, even angels of the Lord. But they were “human” still.
No one not of their kind would see them this way, not on this plane, except perhaps the highest of the Higher Races such as the Princes, or Higher Races in mind-links, and perhaps some others called “psychic” or with hints of talents not fully defined or explored might see or sense it, but to all others they would seem quite ordinary, just mere Terrans, although seeming nulls. What had been subtracted from them had been inner corruption; what had been added was on a plane those early battlers for the hearts and souls of Terrans on the part of The Ship had hoped to develop, and whose planted seeds they now had justified. Some, too, may sense the purity inside them, but most, as always, wouldn’t even notice.
And those few who could see beyond the surface they could purify, one at a time, if they felt that those others were candidates for it, and would prove their worthiness. The right ones would shine as well; the wrong ones would be destroyed by the process. It was something that called for much wisdom and patience, for the responsibility was great.
Modra had feared that the child growing within her would be harmed, but now she realized that it had been a part of the process, although still far too undeveloped to be aware of the fact. Still too much a part of her to be an independent organism, it had been cleansed with her, and would be the firstborn of a newer and higher race.
<We can be whoever and whatever we want to be,> Krisha said, amazed at the realization. <Captain—by sheer will I am complete again. The genetic code is obvious and easy to adjust. Modra need not bear your children. We can have our own.>
Gun Roh Chin stared at her, dumbfounded and at a loss for words for the first time in his life.
She reached over and squeezed his hand. <But first we have a greater responsibility. There are millions of Quintara out there, including three more princes. They must be hunted down, stopped, so that the horrible holocaust that occurred last time is limited this time. Then it will be time to establish a fourth realm, a Terran realm, whose green will link the galaxy. We have a lot of work yet to do, and we must also meet with the other races and again fragment the knowledge, so that while the Quintara are being hunted down no one else can repeat this deliberately.>
Modra sighed. <Well, maybe, but I’ve got another priority here, a more personal one. And a few other personal priorities. I think I will visit Jimmy’s world. He has a large family there and they must be desolate since he ran out. They must be told, his Church must be told, how he died, and why, and for what.>
Gun Roh Chin thought about it. <Perhaps it is for the best. We shall be the fighters, the hunters of demons, the trainers of a new and very different Inquisition. It is what we were trained for. It is what we do best. You—you shall be the ambassador, the diplomat and link between the Higher Races. We’re new, the first of our kind, and not yet systematized and stratified nor forgotten half the powers we have. We also have some built-in advantages thanks to our ancestral home being an early battleground. We were given more potential than all three of the others—if we deserved it and earned it. Then go to the Exchange. Pick out a planet—a pretty one, green, with fresh seas and warm breezes, out along the frontier. Those whom we choose will go there. Then, no matter what happens in the eternal battles to come, no matter our own eventual fates, there will be one place safe, one wise, one with the knowledge of good and evil. One tiny speck among the vast stars that will be eternally green. It is a big job, and a big responsibility, we three mere Terran reprobates have been handed, but I’m just egotistical enough to think that maybe those who ultimately chose us chose well and that we can pull it off.>
<The three of us cannot hope to cure the evils that we know,> Krisha agreed, <any more than we three alone could defeat the remaining Quintara. But so long as there is someplace for us to grow and learn and expand what we now represent, we three can at least give eternal hope.>
Modra smiled. <I’ll find the place and keep it secure,> she promised them. <And, as Jimmy would say, the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it!>
Gun Roh Chin sighed and looked once more at the stars. < We must not make the mistake that they made—the Angels and the Guardians as well as the Mycohl. When they finished the last battle they thought themselves the new masters of the galaxy. They set about to reign and rule at their own whims and created societies in their own images and imposed them on all comers, and in so doing they proved their unworthiness for the real job, which is why we have been handed it, and became, at their cores, indistinguishable from the Quintara except by degree.>
He raised his hand and swept it across the starry sky.
<We’re not the new gods,> he continued after a moment. <We’re the new janitors.>