“CAPTAIN!” MODRA RAN TO GUN ROH CHIN AND hugged him. “You’ll never know how happy we were when we heard you were coming back with good news!”
“It was no easy thing,” he responded, a bit embarrassed by the emotion of the greeting. “They hemmed and they hawed and they took forever to recognize the obvious. And, it’s not ‘Captain’ any more, just ‘Gunny’, or ‘Chin’ or ‘Hey you!’ I fear they demoted me to priest.”
She was shocked, even though she’d seen his robe. “Oh, they didn’t—”
He pulled out a cigar. “Thankfully, they left me blissfully alone in those areas. Not alone in others, although it did not at the time seem a sacrifice. To be working with and under Krisha is a joy that compensates for the loss of command, but I fear the joy will have to be after this is finished.”
She frowned. “Why? What’s the matter?”
“At the moment, she’s not quite herself. She seems normal, but she is possessed. Within her is a Presence, perhaps an Angel, perhaps something that the Angels created, but there is Another there. Most times it is dormant, but when it comes out it can be a bit frightening, and even when it appears to sleep it is really there. We played Go on the way. I am a Grand Master of Go. Krisha never even learned the game. She defeated me. Easily. Every time. It was child’s play. I wasn’t playing Krisha, you see. Perhaps it is a test to see if I can truly be made humble.”
She sighed. “Well, I don’t have that kind of presence, but I’ve got some sort of company.” She pushed her hair back and pointed.
“Good heavens! It appears as if you have a tiny jewel in the center of your forehead!”
She nodded. “Jimmy, too. They can’t talk to us directly, but they’re getting everything we see, hear, think, even dream. Jimmy has these nightmares that it can grow, take as much of us as it wants. Sometimes I do, too. Those images of Tris at the end . . . ”
He nodded. “Don’t worry. Uh—I’m told you are with child. I know it is probably Josef’s, but . . . ”
She grinned. “I don’t know, either. I didn’t have the full battery. And it’s still kind of up in the air as to whether any children should be bom in the future, isn’t it?”
“Perhaps. I have hope now. We have managed to sort of convene all of the Higher Races here, and that is in itself a miracle. Krisha just ignored the blackness. It couldn’t touch her. I, of course, assisted by taking out the four Qaamil fighters that jumped us. It was a very sinful feeling for a priest. Like I was back at the Academy in the simulators, taking out the enemies of the Mizlaplan although outnumbered and outgunned. I enjoyed every minute of it.”
She grinned. “I think, deep down, you were born for our descent, Chin, and perhaps for this moment. Not that we enjoyed losing our good comrades, or seeing the terrible things the Quintara can do, but, well, you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I fear you are right. I honestly and truly wish all this had never come about, had never been necessary. That is sincere. But, if it had to happen, I should have felt most terrible had I been left out of it.” He paused. “Um, I assume Josef could not be kept from knowing about the child?”
“Hardly. As soon as I did, he did, more or less. He wants me to have it removed and given to be developed in the lab so it won’t be harmed.”
“And what did you say?”
“It is not something I tell just any priest, but it had to be very strong. After all, I considered just telling him to go to hell, but he’s already been there!”
Chin looked over her shoulder. “They are signaling for us to come. I do not think now that they wish to waste any time at all on this.”
Modra saw just what Chin meant about Krisha. She talked normally, and seemed all right, but she moved her head in an odd, unbalanced manner, as if she expected it to fall off, and the blast of pure power radiating from within her was no Krisha that Modra had ever known.
The ward room of a Mycohlian heavy cruiser had been transformed. All furniture had been unshipped and removed; the shiny polished floor had been painted with a great tricolored design, one they now all recognized, and it was large enough for them all to enter.
Tobrush was essentially in charge as host. “We apologize for the rush, but we have received word of a large Qaamil rebel task force heading towards us,” the Mycohlian told them. “Considering its origin and likely course, I needn’t tell you who, or rather what, is probably in command. Due to the distance, we are in no immediate danger, but the closer they get to us the more we will have to consider defenses, and the Great Gathering should have as much time as it requires.”
“How long will it require, Tobrush?” Gun Roh Chin asked.
“It is impossible to know. Perhaps hours. Perhaps nanoseconds. There is no memory of this in any of our collective minds. Although it did happen before, in what must have been in some ways an even greater drama, considering that the Mizlaplan and Guardians were asked to trust my own people when there was little basis for that trust in past behavior, it is, for all practical purposes, unprecedented. We do not know what will happen. We do not know what we are all about to find out. In any event, the speed and possibly volume of data exchange will probably be too much for your Terran minds to absorb. Our experts believe that you will essentially black out. Do not worry. We will tell you what you need to know—when we know it. Now, each of you take one of the five remaining points, but remain inside the circle. Yes, you too, Chin. For some reason all three parties believe that you are an important element in this.”
They moved down and did as instructed.
“Cymol, the level of power you require to maintain full two-way contact is being diverted from the ship’s auxiliary engines to this transformer. Come inside the circle, make your full contact with the Guardians, and then with your two representatives. Modra, take the point to my right. Jimmy, next to her. Then you, Captain—sorry, Reverend Chin. Krisha, to my left. Josef, between Krisha and Chin. Everyone make physical contact with the person on either side of them. Hold hands, tendrils, whatever, but flesh against flesh. We tried to calculate the size of the seal so that it would be little effort for anyone. Good. Now, as you might notice, a very tiny chip on the seal is left open behind me. I shall now connect the last millimeter or so of the circle. From this point, do not leave or break the circle or contact. Good. Now, cymol—your power sufficient? Very well. Make the connection. You Terrans, just let your minds go as blank as possible and just relax.”
Telling any of them to relax was like telling somebody not to think of the word “Quintara,” but they tried as best they could and braced themselves for the inevitable shock and disorientation.
After a few moments, when nothing happened, many of them relaxed just a bit.
There was a sudden, violent shock so powerful it stunned them all, coming not from any one of them but seemingly from the design itself, linking them through its interconnections as if each were touching the other. The energy field was so strong and so sustained that none of them could have let go if they retained enough wits to think about doing so. A surge jumped from Jimmy and Modra into the cymol; the transformer smoked, and the cymol fell in the center as if dead.
All sense was lost. Colors were solids. Blue leaped from Modra and Jimmy and met gold at Krisha, then collided with red at Tobrush.
Gun Roh Chin felt the shock, too, and saw the colors in a way he had never been able to see before, although he was too stunned to even realize it.
Other Mycohl, monitoring from beyond the circle, gasped as the colors on the seal began to glow and then flow with a pulsing life of their own, while pulses of all three colors now ran round and round the exterior enclosing circle as if chasing each other endlessly around the loop.
The inner colors flowed like mercury, collided, but would not mix; again and again the combinations attempted and failed, until, by random selection, all three converged at a single point and flowed inward.
Flowed into Gun Roh Chin.
There was one Mind, one thought. Within the body of the Guardians, within the Gathering of the Mycohl, within the interlinked minds of the Holy Angels, there was One. Information was assembled, sorted, collated, interpreted at speeds approaching the infinite, linked through dimensional passageways undisturbed for millennia. Data was linked; files were reconstructed and gaps filled rapidly.
And from it all came the one path, the bizarre mechanisms by which the Engineer could be taken. And, grasping only the procedure, not the incredible logic behind it dictated on a plane and from a vantage point beyond all the abilities of the Grand Gathering, a single, nagging thought emerged in the One, a disturbing but very comprehensible one.
This wasn’t going to be easy.
Before, the Mycohl had taken the path, but they had an easier time, for not even the Engineer suspected that there was treachery in their progress until too late. Now the Mycohl could not go again, for they would be the first to fail. The Mizlaplanians could not go because they lacked the mobility to get to the Engineer. The Guardians could not go because it would be nearly impossible not to notice a planet moving toward you.
The Terrans had to go. They could get there and get in. They would not be considered a serious threat, particularly after having faced the Quintara before. And, as the Guardians could not believe that mere Terrans could have gone to the Underworld and emerged other than slaves of the Quintara, so the Engineer and his chieftains would be unable to believe that they might harm him.
But no conditioning, no rebuilding, no hypnotics or grand designs could be upon them. They would bring the power and the knowledge with them, but the will to use the tools and do the job must be their own.
It was finished. The great link was formed, the chain was complete. The rules and the players had now been set.
They suddenly felt free; free not only in the sense that the forces were gone as suddenly as they had come, but also free of any and all controls upon them. The Higher Races were their masters no more, but their tools.
Several of them collapsed in shock and exhaustion; Josef breathed in and out very heavily but for some reason was afraid to open his eyes. Nobody really wanted to move; the stunned shock was within them all.
Suddenly Gun Ron Chin jumped up with a holler and began clawing, pulling at his robe, finally getting it off and throwing it out of the circle. It landed nearby, and the observers noted that it was smoking.
They all felt as if they had undergone a massive ordeal, but Krisha called, “Gunny! What happened?”
“The cigars!” he shouted, rubbing his leg. “Darned stuff must’ve lit every one of ’em that was in my pocket!”
They were brought food and drink, but mostly just sat on the floor. Chin’s burn looked mean but wasn’t all that serious, and a quickly applied medical ointment had removed the pain.
Greta Thune, however, was now beyond anything. She was dead, her cymol brain blown as surely as the aux engines were blown. She had served her purpose, but it was a shock.
“Does anybody remember anything of what went on?” Josef asked incredulously.
“It was as if, suddenly, all the answers were clear, but now I can make little sense of it,” Tobrush told them.
They all spoke pretty much the same way except for Chin, who was silent, drinking some wine. Finally, he said, “I know.”
For a moment they hardly heard, then they were suddenly quiet.
“What do you know, Gunny?” Krisha asked, the link or whatever it was with the Angels now completely vanished, although, apparently, she hadn’t been aware of it while it was there.
“It’s just us five. We’re it. We represent all thirty-plus trillion Terrans and sixty-odd trillion non-Terrans, as well as the Three Races. It is almost a wager. They have given us powers, and a very big gun which we can use not to kill, but at least force back, even the big one himself, but it’s entirely up to us, as sure as if we were still on the road to Hell.”
“Captain—how do you know this?” Modra asked him.
“I’ll take that title again. It seems I’ve been appointed somehow. It seems I’m the proverbial empty vessel. That’s why a null had to be one of them. It didn’t have to be me, but it is. I am unencumbered by experience. The tools they’ve given us are effective, but anyone who’s naturally on the talent band has grown up using them in one fixed way, in assuming everything works such and so. These tools don’t work quite that way. They have to be used intuitively, without preconceptions. One of you might get them right, but I’m the most likely to succeed. If anything happens to me, one of you will have to use them. Josef, you’re probably number two, since you’ve also had military training and you grew up a hypno, no matter what your powers may be now. After that, only the gods know. And one of you, perhaps.”
“It—it gave you these tools, Gunny?” Krisha asked in amazement.
“No. You all carry the tools. I use them. Josef, you’re about as important as I am in all this, since we can push him through the door with the Mycohl but we can’t lock it. That just postpones things a bit and I don’t much cherish the idea of spending an eternity in some other-dimensional Hell holding the door shut. We must work as a team. A single unit. And it is most definitely not going to be easy, and the odds of our even getting a crack at him are—well, about the same odds as going in that first station and getting all the way to the city and coming back out alive.”
“Where do we begin?” Jimmy asked him. “How do we find this Grand Prince of Darkness?”
Gun Roh Chin chuckled. “Well, over the years, he’s had a pretty good record finding us. And that’s what we must do. He can be almost anywhere, so we have to bring him to where we’re at.”
“Joseph? Qaamil is your old turf,” Chin noted.
“That great sorceress who supposedly turned the army into drols? I never saw her, but I got some descriptions while snooping around. Not enough to be sure, but I’d bet it’s Kalia. And, if it is, she’d set up in Lord Squazos’ hive, simply because he’s a Rithian who keeps Terrans and drols made from Terrans for slaves, pets, you name it. Making him crawl, or, just as bad, be under her, would be just the kind of thing she’d do. She’d already have handled the Terran-led hives. Squazos is right in the middle of things. Rule from there and you control the Lords of the Qaamil. But there’s no way they gave her that kind of power and no way she’d have the patience to learn to use it if they did. That means she’s got at least one, maybe more, of the princes with her, and probably a lot of regular Quintara as well, it’s worse than a death trap.”
“It is also the center of the darkness growing through the Mycohl,” Tobrush noted. “It is a point that, if it could be somehow threatened, the Engineer would have to come to fix.”
“Precisely my point,” the captain said. “We are not defenseless. None of us. You’ll discover that as we go along. Individually, we’re strong but no match for them. Together, collectively, they cannot harm us! The Quintara, even the princes, are all egomaniacal individualists. Each thinks of him- or herself as a potential god or demigod. As you picked them off in that other plane, we can pick them off in the flesh, as it were. But the source of our greatest strength also points up our greatest weakness.”
“You make it sound almost easy,” Jimmy commented.
“No. The odds against us are as great as the odds were against the Three acting that last time. If the Quintara can isolate us, if they can separate us, we are vulnerable. If that happens, all mental links with us, indeed, all knowledge of all this, will cease as well. You won’t even remember where you are or how you got there. That’s essential, since, if they ever suspect that our sole aim is to bring the Engineer to us, he will never come. They will not believe or accept that, of course. They will be convinced that you have some sort of shield. If any of us winds up captured, we will be offered almost anything. Literally. And, the worst thing is, with that kind of power there at their disposal, and on a one-to-one basis, they can in, fact do what they offer and their code requires that they do it. But, although you won’t remember any specifics of this, you will know and remember that acceptance means selling out to them, totally and irrevocably, and that you will then become like Kalia, an active ally of their cause. You can’t fool them, and they won’t let you fool them. That you will know.”
“That is understood,” Krisha told him.
“And, if they can’t bribe you, they’ll try and scare you as they did in their damnable city. They might try scare first, then bribe, even alternating. What they do will be quite convincing. You will seem to be alone and you will see and feel and know whatever horrors they dredge up for you. If you break under their onslaught, they will be delighted but they will have no respect or use for you. If you hold, if you remain defiant, we will get you out, although you must hold without knowledge of that hope. If you break, then you are damned, and whatever they make you see and feel will become permanent, real, and beyond the ability of anyone to save you.”
It was a sobering threat. Krisha remembered the effect of the blackness and the invasion of her mind by the Quintara in the city. “How can anyone, any of us, be expected to hold when we will not know there is hope?”
“We are here because we survived and did not embrace them. Some of us were broken, but even that toughened you. You remain faithful to our side. Your inner strength must sustain you. Burn that into your minds! Defiance! They will not have the satisfaction of seeing you crawl no matter what they dish out! No matter how low they may take you, you know that there is something inside you they cannot own! So long as that is inside you, we can and we will get you back.”
Josef gave a low whistle. “And these are just the Quintara you’re talking about!”
“Indeed. But it’s not as difficult as all that. It’s a matter of locating either you or the Quintara who has you, then moving against the demon. We have psychic, or other-physics, or whatever you wish to call them defenses that will nail them good. Merely distracting the right one could break the hold. And we will have much, both physical and mental, equipment to do just that. I pray that none of us will fall individually into their hands, but the enemy is not to be underestimated, and it remains only a prayer.”
“Hold on, Captain! Back at the capital we saw the records from the breakout at Rainbow Bridge,” Jimmy pointed out. “Reconstructed in spite of the best efforts of some others who will remain nameless to melt them down. They showed them to us before we left for here, and they are very much what Tris Lankur said when he read out the dead cymol’s memory. They shot the bastards, point-blank, with heavy-duty weapons, and they hardly blinked! And that ship we thought they’d blasted—it was a horror show inside! They all went mad!”
Gun Roh Chin sighed. “Yes. The ship I’m not surprised about. They could probably draw enough power from the station to transmit their usual horrors. Their immunity to what we’d call conventional weapons appears to be a more natural thing. Perhaps it’s because they’re merely casing for what’s inside. From that volcanic template we went through, I’d say they’re close to fireproof as well. They do breathe, sleep, and, um, eat, but the odds of getting to them that way with our situation is probably low, although I think those are avenues to explore for fighting them elsewhere. They do, however, have a weak spot. It’s here”—he pointed to his chest—“below and between the nipples, below the breastplate, where Terrans think their hearts are. Any sharp, pointed object driven into there, or through there, bursts a key organ. They die. Only from the front, though. They have chitinous plates under the skin of the back which are designed, if not to stop, at least to deflect from anything vital.”
“Great. So they’re going to stand there while we drive wooden stakes through their hearts?” Jimmy said sarcastically.
“If we find them sleeping it might be enough. If not, distraction will do.”
“Yeah, so what if five of them each takes one of us?” Josef asked.
“They won’t.”
“You seem pretty sure of that. Because you are a null?”
Gun Roh Chin signed. “I’m afraid that, on this point, I am no longer immune. That which flowed within me sensitized me to the bands of the Higher Races. The Quintara are Higher Races. I am no longer immune from them. It is not a thought I cherish, I assure you.” He paused a moment. “However, that is beside the point. They won’t take on all five of us no matter how many they are because they are all arrogant, egomaniacal individualists. If they are concentrating on us, they are not watching their backs from their comrades who might also cherish us. As a group, they will fight, and we can hold them in a fight. You four already proved that. Only when one of them thinks they’ve got you to themselves will they make the attempt. Back in the city one of them could handle two of us, but we’ve changed a bit since then. Even a bunch should be able to take no more than two of us at a time; the remaining three, if quick and clever enough, should be sufficient in that case. I’ve been told that the one who went after Jimmy and Krisha totally ignored the rest of you, which bears out my statement on their character.”
“We’re not immune to pistols, though,” Josef noted. “And there’ll also be Qaamil about, and they’ve got some of the best defensive robots I know.”
Chin shrugged. “You neutralized a very good Exchange security system at Rainbow Bridge and reprogrammed a cymol to boot. What are mere robots? As for the others, forget them. We have the combined powers of the Three Races at our command. They are within us now. That is what I meant by power. We are linked in a way I doubt even they can explain to us. But, in a sense, you are right. We cannot get too arrogant or, like the Quintara, we will suffer for it. We’re mortals. If we miss a sentry and get shot, we will fry, or bleed.”
Krisha was still concerned. “Gunny—how many of these—nightmares—can we expect to face? The place will be crawling with Quintara.”
“The only one that should be a real killer is the first one. After that you’ll be sensitized to the wavelengths; you’ll know, and if you know, you can throw it off. I won’t say it’s impossible to have it done to you effectively more than once, but everything tells me we should catch on. Then we can deflect them, just as the Quintara do themselves. Otherwise they’d be giving each other nightmares constantly.”
“Captain, I hate to say this, but I don’t feel very powerful at all,” Modra said worriedly. “In fact, I don’t even feel that mind-link any more, even though that’s something of a relief.”
“Pick a leader,” he told them. “The same one. Focus on him or her with your mind. Give him or her control. Don’t worry, it’ll be automatic. If the leader is down, or out, pick another.”
“You seem to have all the answers,” Josef noted. “Did they give that all to you?”
Gun Roh Chin shrugged and looked a bit embarrassed. “Josef, I don’t have anything I’m not telling you. All we are doing is providing a focus and collection point for the Higher Races. You ask me a question, the glib answer comes. From where? The Guardians? The Mycohl? I don’t know. We need an attribute. It comes. From where? The Holy Angels? I don’t know. Perhaps from a combination. We’re not at their level, Josef. Our descendants may be, someday, if we have descendants. We’ll never be, any more than they are the equal of that celestial Crew, or comprehend the realm of The Ship.”
“Okay, but you’re saying we, us, with them or not, are going to have to take on one of those Crew, rebel or not,” Jimmy noted. “How are we supposed to do that?”
“We’ll know when we must,” the captain promised him. “Because the knowledge and means was put on file here by Ones who do comprehend him.”
“I wonder what he looks like,” Krisha said more than asked. “I wonder if we can even know?”
“The foulest creature of darkness and corruption,” Modra answered.
“Or the second most beautiful thing possible,” Jimmy replied. “The favored Prince of Angels, second in beauty and glory only to God.”
“This may well be the first time anyone ever went to the devil via spaceship,” Jimmy commented.
“I am just amazed that this blackness parts before us,” Modra commented. “It’s the densest stuff we’ve ever seen and the widest spread, as if this area was attracting it like a magnet, yet we’re being given a path. It feels like we’re going right into a trap.”
“We’re in a Qaamil ship, with Qaamil markings and registration,” Josef pointed out. “If they’re doing fleet operations they can’t have this stuff going all through them. Programmable or not, it’s too undependable for that. It’s not really here as a barrier, like the border, anyway.”
“No,” Jimmy breathed, feeling the tension. “It’s here as raw material.”
“All right,” Josef said with the same kind of tenseness in his voice, “breakout point coming up. Everyone ready? We’ll have to move fast, because once we don’t have the password we’re going to be a real target.”
“Set the thing on automatic and get to your escape pod!” Chin snapped. “Timing is going to be tricky here as it is.”
Josef made some adjustments, then threw off the command helmet and rushed back to the open escape pod hatch, strapped in, and sealed the hatch. “All set,” he told them.
“Remember to stay as a group,” Chin warned them. “Focus on Josef and stay with him. He knows where he’s going.”
They each put one hand on their jettison switches and then concentrated on Josef, giving him control. There was some hesitancy in doing this with Josef on both Krisha’s and Modra’s part, but Chin had lectured them both on the importance of total trust. No matter how much they disliked the individual, they sank or swam together.
The ship shuddered and emerged into normal space. Josef was a good pilot with excellent charts; the world below, only seconds from its G-class star, almost filled their individual screens.
“Now!” Josef said, and they launched all five pods within fractions of a second of one another.
“Move away! Move away! Don’t group on me until you’re away!” Josef shouted.
The ship was invisible behind them, masked in the planet’s shadow, but suddenly there was a bright flash and the ship exploded, spectacular but eerie in the silence of space.
“Take it easy, group on me,” Josef called soothingly. “Concentrate on my position.”
They were so tiny that seeing him was impossible, and their instruments were not designed to detect things this small in a region this vast, but, somehow, they knew where he was. They grouped on him, raggedly at first, then in tight formation, and headed for the terminator below.
Gun Roh Chin had suggested that they work together as much as possible before going in to try and get used to the team concept, but it had been ragged at best. Sometimes the focus, the group as one, worked well, sometimes it didn’t work at all, and most of the time it worked less than perfectly. It was not a good omen; given six weeks or so on some warm planet close to the one below they might have made it nearly perfect, but a few days had been all they were given.
More and more the Executive Officer’s comment that they could win—if they deserved it—came back to haunt them. Could five people, the products of vastly different cultures and value systems, really trust each other to this degree?
They had to; at least they knew that. Ninety trillion Fausts had been reduced to but five, each representing eighteen trillion Terran and non-Terran souls. Even Josef felt the weight of that kind of responsibility.
“There is a lake about twenty-five kilometers outside of the Lord’s hive, which is called Vrmul,” Josef told them. “It’s the main water source for the city and for irrigation. It should be just after dawn there, so we’re not going to light up the sky. The center is quite deep but near the shore it’s only about five meters deep. Follow my lead minus a half-second each and we should go in the shallow area grouped together in order. Once you’re in, break the seal, get to the surface, and make for shore. Be certain you have everything you need before breaking the seal. There’s no going back for it.”
It was a sobering thought to face. Their ship was destroyed, the entire sector was in enemy hands and it was unlikely anyone from outside could reach them now, and the pods would be sunk in a lake. There was definitely no turning back.
The splashdown was a big jolt, but they’d been prepared for that. It was the second bang, like hitting a stone wall, that jarred them, as they went under and struck bottom, then rose again slowly to the surface.
Restraints were undone, systems shut down completely, and deep breaths were taken, then hatches were opened. Water flooded in almost immediately, and the pods began to sink. As soon as they were under, however, each of them swam out and up toward the surface, their e-suits protecting them from the water’s chill and giving them the air they needed to do it right, even adding buoyancy so that the weight of the suits didn’t drag them down.
They emerged from the water surprisingly close together, and after they assembled, first Josef and then the others disengaged their helmets and they fell back and collapsed into a small ring on the back of the suits.
“Everybody did remember their extra battery packs this time?” Gun Roh Chin asked jokingly.
There was nervous laughter, and Krisha looked out across the lake. “It is quite beautiful here,” she said, sounding amazed.
Josef was a bit nettled. “What did you expect? A chamber of horrors? It is an engineered world, like so many of yours. One that did not quite come out right for us in nature but which we could fix. Nobody builds a slime pit for their home. Rithians look pretty nasty, but they’re similar to Terrans in a number of not readily apparent ways. They do, however, like things pretty hot most of the time.”
“I’ll say!” Modra exclaimed. “It’s just after dawn here and my suit says it’s almost thirty-five!”
“By mid-day it’ll be at least fifty degrees,” Josef told her. “Halfway to boiling. Stones get so hot you can fry eggs on them. It’s quite humid, though, once we get into the lowlands, so it feels even worse.”
“I do not find that appetizing,” Chin said, “but I think we’d better get going. Not that I think we’ll make it today—too exposed—but we don’t want to chance that they picked up our pods coming in. We need a shady spot of concealment with a water source. The suits can keep our bodies reasonably comfortable, but our heads are exposed. We’re a bit too obvious with helmets up, but I do not want the irony of losing one or more of us to heat stroke.”
Josef seemed to know the country, and he led them through dense foliage down rocky inclines for several kilometers, then stopped in a stand of woods near a swift-flowing but shallow stream. “No scans of any kind, talent or suit, but if you come with me through this last patch you can see it all.”
They followed him cautiously to where the forest ended in a breathtaking drop, and before them was a panoramic view of Lord Squazos’ neighborhood.
Below, the gently rolling landscape was a patchwork quilt of tilled fields, dirt tracks that cut through them like scars, the pattern broken here and there by deliberate stands of tropical trees, and, along meandering streams, dense foliage right at the water’s edge. Beyond it all, in the distance, rose gleaming towers of stone, steel, and synthetics. The Squazos hive.
“It looks almost idyllic,” Krisha breathed. “Very much like many worlds I know in the Mizlaplan.”
“I think I’ll take a look with the magnification viewers,” Gun Roh Chin said, and his helmet rose out of its thin ring holder and came down in front of him.
“All right, but just look—no scanning,” Josef warned. “If anybody’s looking for us they’ll pick it up.”
Soon they all had visors down. Modra saw what she took to be a tiny cart pulled by draft animals of some sort going along one of the dirt tracks and zeroed in on it, bringing the magnification up until it was in full view.
“Those are Terrans pulling that cart!” she gasped. “Hitched up like some kind of animals, with that driver creature actually using a whip!”
They all took the figures from her suit and looked at the scene.
Josef laughed. “They’re not Terrans—exactly. Those are drols, the particular kind Squazos breeds around here. There’s tons of varieties of them. They were bred from Terran stock, yes, but they’ve been so modified now they’re separate races, so different we couldn’t even interbreed—not that you’d want to. The ones the Terran lords keep look enough like us we could actually mix in with them. I’ve done it. The ones bred by non-Terran races run the gamut of bizarre variations. They all have some things in common, though. They’re not very bright—their working vocabulary is maybe sixty, seventy words tops—but they’re strong as can be, bred for the climate, tireless, and they’ll eat anything organic and thrive, even grass or garbage. And, for all that, they’re a pretty cheerful lot.”
“Disgusting,” Krisha sneered, revolted. “They could use animals for this.”
“Or somebody with this Lord’s power and position could automate the whole thing,” Modra added.
“Animals aren’t as smart or as self-sufficient, and they need more care,” Josef noted pragmatically. “Sure, he could automate the thing, but much technology’s kept from the masses, just like in the Mizlaplan, partly because we’d have huge, idle populations, and partly because the upper class likes it this way. It’s the way things are here, that’s all.” He chuckled. “Wait’ll you see some female Squazos drols. Then you’ll really be revolted.”
“What’s that creature in the driver’s seat?” Jimmy asked him. It was a bizarre creature, smaller and slighter than the darkly browned bald-headed drols by far; humanoid, but also somehow insect-like, with a smooth, glistening reddish-brown skin or covering, with multiple joints in the arms and legs, and a thin, oval-shaped head whose features were hidden because they were now going away from them.
“That’s a Rithian,” Josef told them. “He probably manages a few of the plots down there.”
“Looks like a bug,” Jimmy commented.
“Well, they do have a fairly hard shell that they shed now and then, but they’re just another race, like all the others. They marry and they mate in much the same way we do, and they bear and nurse live young, usually two at a time. But they’re tough little bastards; they had a six-system, one-hundred-and-forty-light-year mini-empire before they were discovered and overrun by the Mycohl.”
“I think I’ve seen enough for right now,” Krisha said in disgust.
“Hold on!” Chin responded. “Take my mark and blow it up.”
They all did so, and soon the magnifiers brought into focus a thing so distant it couldn’t readily be distinguished with the naked eye. But what it was, very near the far-off city, was very familiar.
“It’s a station! One of the crystals!” Modra exclaimed excitedly.
“Where’d it come from? How’d it get here?” Josef asked, puzzled.
“At a guess,” the captain replied, “I’d say it’s probably one of the ones from that hot world template we went through. Cut from the crystal cave long ago, tempered in those fires and tuned, somehow, and then transported here via the interdimensional passageways. They know their way around, that’s for sure.”
Krisha thought a moment. “How many finished crystals were there in that horrible place? Twenty? Thirty?”
“Certainly no more, although we didn’t see the whole region,” Modra agreed.
“And they certainly hadn’t started any work getting or growing more. The cave was pretty wild.”
Jimmy nodded. “I see what you mean! They don’t have many of those bloody things at the moment, so the fact that they moved one here shows we aren’t up the creek. This is one of their headquarters!”
“I never had any doubt,” Josef said with a somewhat relieved sigh. “And neither did the Higher Races or they wouldn’t have committed us like this.”
“When do we go?” Jimmy asked.
“After dark,” the captain replied. “When the farm community’s in for the night and the ones in the city up there are relaxed, and when it’s cooler. It’ll take four or five hours to cautiously get close to that city, and even if the powers of Hell are stronger after dark, they’re also overconfident then. In the meantime, check your equipment.”
The Mycohl technicians had done their best to create what they themselves felt they needed beyond the standard suit defensive equipment. Because energy weapons had no effect on the Quintara, Josef had requested and the shops had made one of Terra’s most feared weapons of old, crossbows. These crossbows had extended range, a small energy pack that produced exceptional tension, and a superior computerized targeting scope, all to put a hard-tipped arrow in the right place. Even with all that, its accuracy outside very close ranges wasn’t great, and there was some thought that if any of them were close enough to use them they’d be in the mental clutches of the enemy and unable to do so. Still, it was something.
Jimmy had extra equipment that was of interest only to him, but which made him feel far more comfortable. One was a small medal suspended from a short chain around his neck on which was embossed a cross centered over the Seal of Solomon. The other was a cross, almost as large as a pistol but small enough to fit in his utility pouch, made out of a lightweight material with a golden finish.
Gun Roh Chin was amused by it. “The ancient cross, I see. I never could understand a religion that so worshiped death and whose highest state of grace was to die a martyr.”
“It’s not death but redemption this symbolizes,” McCray replied. “We may have the demon in all of us, but this reminds us that it needn’t control us. We cannot help being born with Adam’s sin, but someone else paid the price for all who would but take it. There’s only one not born in sin I ever addressed in prayer, yet someone high and not of this universe said I had talked to Him. And a martyr dies in joy in the sure and certain faith that he or she will be reborn with all the corruption expunged, in new and perfect flesh. No, Captain, it took a descent into Hell literal and Hell personal, but I’ve laid to rest my doubt.”
Chin said nothing in reply. He didn’t want to argue theology with the little man. McCray might have a simple and parochial faith that events had left a curiosity, but faith he had, and that was important here—perhaps the most important thing of all to have. Anyone could draw a simple pentagram; it took certain faith to activate its interdimensional properties. Six-pointed stars abounded, but in the hands of one with faith in their use they could be incredibly powerful in the same realm. Who was to say that the cross was not another of those geometric symbols of a rules set beyond known physics? Faith was a powerful thing in interdimensional geometry; he wished he had a lot of it himself. He certainly was not going to attempt to argue the little priest out of it.
The air had cooled to a “mere” forty-four degrees on the centigrade scale by the time they started out near dusk. There was no sign that anyone was searching for them or suspected their presence. Some, like Krisha and Modra, were actually more worried about the lack of attention; it seemed far too easy no matter what the physical conditions. The men, for their part, seemed relieved; to Chin and Josef in particular, it pointed out how totally secure the Quintara felt against mere mortal opposition.
That would not help them, though, once they were inside the hive. Even if the Quintara there didn’t sense them, they were there to cause attention, to destroy and even kill the demons. It didn’t matter that the demons would not truly die; the information in Chin’s mind told him that the shock of death on this plane was great enough that it would be many months, perhaps years, before a “killed” Quintara could refashion another body to walk this plane again. In essence, the Quintara were not the problem to be solved here, even though they were dangerous and deadly. With the Engineer at large, miracles were possible; miracles of the darkest sort. With the Engineer gone, the Quintara could then be hunted down and, if killed, the great computer that controlled the linkage between their city and the other plane could be reset so that their new bodies, which could form only inside the crystals, would emerge to be trapped once more where they were born.
The Rithians saw poorly at night, and kept to their well-lit dome-shaped houses scattered here and there across the landscape, but now and then they did run into drols patiently turning water wheels or switching irrigation channels. At Josef’s urging, they ignored the drols, and the drols, after looking at them for a moment, ignored them when they neither approached nor said anything to the poor creatures. To drols, there were only drols and nodrols; all nodrols were the same. Up close, the male drols looked even more grotesque; muscles almost on top of their muscles, squat, square-headed with little neck, but with the most gigantic—
“Oh, my heavens!” Modra whispered. “It’s big as a sausage and goes almost to their knees.”
As Josef warned, the females, when they saw them, horrified them even more. As hairless as the males, they were incredibly obese and could hardly walk, with elephantine legs but very tiny arms and hands, and with two pairs of breasts, the second pair enormous and hanging down to their crotches. Josef casually explained that the Rithians had hit upon the design when they discovered they had a taste for Terran milk. It was a mild but pleasantly addicting narcotic drink to them.
The two women weren’t the only ones who wanted to throw up.
And this, Modra thought, this was the Mycohl, enemies of the Quintara. No wonder the other two empires hated them and thought them evil. They were an evil society, who had betrayed the Quintara because they didn’t want to take orders from the demons, not out of any sense that the Quintara were in themselves morally abhorrent. Josef, at least, had the excuse that he was brought up to think that this was normal and right; Tobrush, though—kindly, wise Tobrush—toured around this and who knew what other depravities, encouraging innovation in evil and enjoying every minute of it.
It was becoming easier to see why the Guardians and the Exchange had tried everything to avoid contact with the Mycohl. A mind-link with the Mycohl must seem like throwing yourself into a barrel of excrement.
Finally, they reached the area of the great crystal, the station stop to Hell.
“You can feel its power,” Jimmy whispered to them. “It’s pulsing, twisting this way and that, with a great deal more energy than I remember.”
“You are not misremembering,” Gun Roh Chin told him. “Before, the station was in automatic mode; now the full network is turned on.”
“I wish we could turn that one off,” Modra said. “One alarm and you could be up to your neck in Quintara, and we’re supposed to make enough fuss to sound that alarm.”
“It is only in phase for a nanosecond or so every two seconds,” Chin told them, again saying facts he hadn’t known until he was saying them. “During the entry walk you are in phase with it for that brief blink, but it is enough to carry you out of phase with here. It phases with an unimaginable number of other stations during its two-second cycle, and the center region resets your phase to the destination. That’s how it works. An eternal, programmable tesseract. Amazing. And that’s how the Quintara got it here. They used their own database to locate this place and then picked one of the countless other points it would touch in the pattern. Fix it to that and you can walk to this!”
And all at once it came to him. Once he was told how to do it, it was amazingly perfect for their purposes.
“Of course!” he said.
“What’s that about?” Jimmy asked him.
“We five are the instruments through which the combined knowledge and wisdom of the Three Races may be focused. We can reprogram it, to a degree! Or, rather, they can, through us! A simple order—skip this phasing in the cycle. It’ll throw the whole thing off. It’ll touch slightly different points. Imagine the effect when they find out that someone’s been able to reprogram a station in their own back yard! If you were the Quintara, suddenly faced with that fact, and with long memories of past defeat, would you rush in to re-establish the link?”
“Not them. Not when it’s their necks,” Modra agreed. “They’d scream for Daddy.”
“All right, so how do we do it?” Josef asked.
“Unfortunately, the only way is to go into it. The contact, the control point, is in the center, where the Quintara were imprisoned. It’s the power fulcrum, whatever that means.”
“Yeah? But won’t we go bye-bye with it?” Jimmy asked worriedly.
“No. The program will be effective when we exit. We keep walking through afterwards, and in spite of going in a straight line, we will wind up at the entrance again. It’s the only way to tell which point to eliminate.”
“Then we’ve got a problem,” Krisha told him. “First of all, didn’t any of you notice that very familiar-looking structure opposite the station? And if you scan the area, I make several animated machines, which I assume are the security robots, and one Quintara within the area of that altar and the crystal.”
“Visors down, group your thoughts on me,” Chin said in a determined tone.
The Five became Three became One.
Sensors sought out the first of the security robots. At the moment they found one of the huge gleaming black monsters, the robot also sensed them, but robots could only act and react near light speed; they could use a route the robot did not comprehend to be faster.
Input . . . image of the five . . . friendly forces. Assist if requested, otherwise ignore. Silently summon other units.
One by one the black behemoths came, two from the area of the crystal, one from behind the altar. Instantly they were seized and reprogrammed in a mathematical language, codes and all, that none of those doing the reprogramming knew or understood. The Three could not have known, either; apparently it was child’s play.
Ascertain location of all Quintara in vicinity.
The location showed on a grid in the robot’s “brain.” Just one within the immediate area, doing something between the statue of the goat-god sitting there in the lotus position facing the crystal and the sacrificial altar itself.
Approximate number of Quintara in hive.
Two hundred and thirty-four! They were having a convention!
A demonic face appeared behind the altar, eyes glowing, as it sensed a powerful Presence.
Too powerful. They caught but could not block the Quintara’s mental call.
<Something odd at the station. Strong presence.>
<Another Mycohl come skulking in the dark to take you on,> was the scornful and less than sympathetic reply. <All right. Smoke the creature out and hold it if you can. We’ll send the rest of the detail.>
They had the sense that a Quintara detail numbered six. They sensed that the Quintara on the altar was nervous, a sensation they’d never felt in one of them before and a heartening one, but the nervousness was more than overcome by the embarrassment of having called for help in the first place. When you think of yourself as a demigod, the loss of face from such a thing when you don’t even have a clear enemy in sight was enormous.
Suddenly enraged by his self-inflicted wound to the ego, the Quintara stood and walked confidently to the side of the platform, its hooves making a clicking sound on the hard surface. They could see it clearly now—a female! That made her sense of shame all the more intolerable, because she did not wish to have the males think of her as weaker than they. As she moved to the side of the platform, two robots came and flanked the down stairway.
<Who comes to face me?> she sent, then opened her mouth and gave a terrible roar that echoed across the landscape.
<What is your name, demon? Give me your name or I will kill you.> It was sent in a calm, businesslike tone meant to unnerve. It wasn’t only the Quintara who could play games.
<Who dares speak thus to me?>
<We do.> They stepped out in a row from their place of concealment, since once they had revealed their presence the Quintara knew their location anyway.
The demon looked at them, saliva dripped from its open mouth, its huge, sharp teeth anxious for a morsel of living flesh. She looked at them and laughed.
<Your name or you die, to be sent back in disgrace to that darkness from which you sprang to be reborn as the lowest of the race.>
<Big talk!> They felt the sudden Quintara onslaught and it was nothing to just brush aside, but neither was it so powerful that it could not be handled, deflected, neutralized.
She was startled, even amazed, at the action, but far too enraged to back down now and wait for help to arrive. She saw only five Terrans—Terrans!—and if one was a strong Mycohl inside, that only made it regrettably inedible.
The demon came down the small stairs, her eyes fixed on the five. Her protected body was in and of itself an armored fighting machine, and nothing she saw could stop her physical progress.
As she reached the bottom of the stairs, the robot to her left turned suddenly and struck its entire arm, lance-like, into the area under her breasts.
She roared in agony from the unexpected blow; writhed and twisted, and so powerful was she that she managed to break off the robot arm and with a shove send the rest of it hurtling through the air to crash to the ground five meters away.
But the wound was mortal. She writhed, clutched at the arm still protruding from her chest, then collapsed. There was a sudden bright flash, and, as in the city station, a presence, a horrible face of hatred composed of pure emotion, flashed briefly before them, and then was gone.
They broke the connection and ran to the dead body.
“Incredible!” Gun Roh Chin said, amazed. “We actually killed one!”
“A leaf, a blade of grass. Every race has its idiots and its assholes,” Jimmy commented. “There was a reason why she was stuck on guard duty out here in the middle of the night.”
“But the others will know she’s dead!” Modra reminded them. “They’ll come in force, see this, and send for a ton of them, better ones than this!”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Chin said worriedly. “We can’t take on two hundred, even one at a time! And while they’re unable to group, they can afford to send fifty against us while another hundred just circle around and gnaw. The station will have to wait. We’re going to have to find a hiding place and lie low and pull no funny stuff they can sniff out. Now!”
“Okay,” Jimmy agreed. “But not before we reprogram the other three robots. We shouldn’t disappoint the lads, should we?”