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MARTYRS TO THE CAUSE

BAAL, VICE LORD OF HELL, PRINCE OF THE OUTER Darkness, dwarfed the Quintara gathered around the altar both in stature and in presence, dressed in purple velvet, his cape rippling in the soft breeze.

<WELL?>

<We have scanned the entire region, My Lord. There is nothing out there that could have caused this.>

The prince was not mollified. <Scanned? By chance, did anyone think to actually LOOK?>

He didn’t need that question answered.

<Too late now, you idiots. Some Master Race! The more I look at your miserable selves, the more I am tempted to go to the pit and loose the Legions! But I have hopes we may yet be able to conquer without having to turn the whole sector into a wasteland in which even you would yearn for death!>

The thought of loosing the Legions terrified them. Insane, fanatical, uncontrollable, they were the Quintara distilled, not corrupters but destroyers of all they found. So fearsome were they that not even the Engineer could tame them, and they had been sealed in their own dimensional wormhole by their master and creator.

<Perhaps, Highness, it was just a horrible accident. The robot—>

<IDIOT! She was careless and stupid and she got what she deserved! When she is reborn she shall suffer a few centuries in the Lake of Fire to see if she can have some sense burned into her. A mere machine can hold no terrors for us. Someone out-thought her, although right now I’m none too sure an insect couldn’t have out-thought her and maybe the lot of you. But this someone still is very good indeed.>

<Highness, could they have come from the station? Hit and run?>

He thought about it. <Very likely. There is hope for you. But I am also disturbed of this report of this spaceship that was blown up yesterday. Why was I not told of it? And what idiot blew it up rather than forcing it down so we could see why it was here? Oh, never mind! I—>

He suddenly stopped, turned, and started sniffing the air, as if he’d suddenly caught a strange and unnatural scent.

<Odd. For a moment there I thought I detected a presence. Someone—familiar somehow. I can’t place it, but it will come to me.> He sighed, and his sigh was like a roar of lions. <All right. From now on I want a full detail here at all times, with emphasis on the station, not the altar. I may come out at any time, and anyone I find sleeping behind the altar will suffer! And remember that that idol represents our Lord! I want no more disrespect, unless you want me to report such attitudes to Him!>

That was the one thing they were unanimous on.

<Very well. First, get rid of that body. Burn it beyond recognition! We want no one to have a demonstration that we can be done in. And I want a full sweep of the area for fifty kilometers square around this spot. Starting now! Use everything at your disposal. If there is anything, anything, within this region that doesn’t belong there I want to know it immediately!>

They were stunned. <But, My Lord, the Rithians are not much good at night. At dawn—>

<RITHIANS! Who said anything about them? You shall do it. Do you think a Rithian or even a Rithian army is any match for anyone who can bring down any one of us?>

<But—My Lord! It will take a hundred of us to cover such an area with any speed and thoroughness!>

<I don’t care if it takes two hundred! Something far more serious than the loss of a sentry is at foot here, and I will know about it before it strikes!>


It was incredible to see the Quintara virtually evacuating the city. Incredible—but also frightening to see a veritable demonic army on the march.

They lay there on a blackened rooftop three stories above the scene, watching things unfold.

“How many do you make?” Jimmy whispered.

“A hundred, certainly. Perhaps much more,” Chin responded. “But remember they’re looking for us, and even if there’s two hundred, that leaves more than thirty in the city, or about the same number as in their own city. Only this time we’ve got a regular population to contend with as well.”

“Fat lot of good it does us anyway,” Josef commented. “The sky is already growing light, and the sun will be up in maybe an hour and a half tops. There’s maybe sixty, seventy thousand Rithians in this hive. We may be able to blank a few minds, but not the kinds of crowds that will be out on those streets soon.”

“I agree,” Chin told him. “As much as I would love to take advantage of their absence, we didn’t count on it.”

“Well, it’s going to be hot as a volcano on this rooftop,” Krisha noted. “What do we do?”

“Hostile environment,” Modra replied. “Full suits, full internal systems. There is far too much high-tech stuff in this place for them to pick up five suits. No power problems; I assume these suits have a solar charge option. We relax and get some sleep in air-conditioned comfort. I’ve spent worse times in suits similar to these on worlds you couldn’t live for three seconds on without a full suit. This isn’t nearly as hot as that volcanic place on the path to the city. This isn’t the kind of roof that sees much traffic.”

Gun Roh Chin nodded. “I’m a little concerned about the higher buildings, but none are nearby and we have something of a roof wall. It is reasonably flat. Still, we are vulnerable in sleep if discovered. Modra and I will sleep first. Josef, at two hours awaken me and I will relieve you. An hour after that, Krisha will awaken Modra and do the same. Jimmy, you will then wake Josef and be relieved by him, and so on until we are in darkness once more. The three awake, if vigilant, should be sufficient to thwart any real danger. Just group and it will come to you. The sleepers will awaken when you do. No use of the intercoms, telepathic shields up. We want no monitors picking us up.”

It was not the greatest sleep any of them had ever had, nor the most comfortable, but it was sufficient. It had to be sufficient. At least no one came up there the entire day, and nobody seemed to have peered out of the wrong window at just the right time. The hardest part was guard duty; with full systems on, but no intercom allowed, and shields up, there was no way to really talk. Mostly, you just stared at the city and watched it work.

The Rithians really did look like giant bipedal insects; their native speech, as opposed to the Mycohl standard tongue, appeared to consist of rapid clicks, whistles, and hums which filled the shimmering hot air. They appeared not to wear or need clothes in this customized environment, but most carried backpacks or shoulder purses to hold their essentials. The two sexes were easy to differentiate; there were large reddish-brown Rithians, rather plain-looking, and smaller, almost beige-colored ones who appeared to pretty themselves up by having designs painted on their shells. Modra naturally assumed that the smaller ones with the fancy designs were the females and was startled to realize that the children, who ranged from fat white worm-like things to miniature versions of their parents depending on age, were almost invariably associated with the larger, plain sex. By sign, she managed to ask Josef who was who, and he indicated that the big plain ones were indeed the females.

Modra couldn’t help but think that there was something to say about the women being the big, strong ones and the men the smaller and weaker sex who had to dress themselves up to please the girls. She wondered if “Lord” wasn’t a generic; Squazos might well be a female.

The Rithian form of the drol was much in evidence as well, and as disturbing as ever. All of the cleaning and pulling and hauling and whatnot she saw them doing could have been done by machines, yet machines were left for security. No civilization that could restructure a planet to its own design and send spaceships far and wide should ever need slaves; apparently they had them either for status, to feel power, or just because that’s the way things were done. Josef saw nothing wrong, and he was of Terran ancestry himself. He’d explained while they moved from lake to city that drols were Terrans because there were more surplus Terrans, and that their race had replaced the patchwork of other races used by most until Terran inclusion. On the moral question, he’d asked them if they’d be as upset if this were a Terran world and the drols had looked like Rithians. All of them liked to think that they’d feel the same, but Modra wasn’t the only one who, deep down, wasn’t all that sure. She hoped so.

No new drols had been developed for centuries, of course, which gave present-day Terrans some distance, but there was a method, generic male and generic female for some drol creation. Terran authorities used it as the ultimate punishment and to make examples of rebels, spies, and would-be usurpers. It used some kind of nanotechnology and it was very fast, and it had frightened Josef as nothing else had when he was younger. No worry here, though; you couldn’t create drols from Rithians so why bother?

The worse thing, though, was that it made them wonder what other quaint Mycohl customs there might be that they weren’t seeing. There were ugly enough worlds in the Exchange—Tris’s home world was a horror—so what might some worlds be like here?

As night fell, the city slowed down to a crawl. Within the first hour of darkness, everything appeared to close and there were few on the streets save some drols sweeping the remnants of the day’s commerce up and throwing it into carts.

Some Quintara had been going in and out of the city all day, but only in small numbers, usually ones and twos. It was fascinating to see the Rithians’ reaction to the huge creatures; they dropped to all fours and prostrated themselves in near automatic motion and remained that way as the demons passed, usually ignoring them completely. It was more than fear, although that was there in abundance; the emotions washing up when the demons passed was also bordering on worshipful adoration. Either they’d sold out body and soul to the Quintara, or the demons had dealt with the doubters.

Other races, too, had been present, although in very small numbers. Lord Squazos had a number of worlds and races under the hive, including two Terran worlds, although no one had seen a sign of any Terrans anywhere during the day watch.

Even though it was still a steambath, it was a relief to have helmets off again and therefore to be able to speak.

“I think redirecting the crystal station is out for the moment. They’ll have it bristling with guards and traps,” Chin said with a trace of disappointment.

“Not necessarily,” Josef responded, thinking. “I can’t think of a single act that would bring about what we want quicker and with the least fuss. The problem is simply one of drawing them off. Cap, how many of us could do that job?”

“The minimum number. Three. But I dislike splitting up the team for any reason. If we should lose any one of the three for any reason, we’d be dead.”

“Wouldn’t we still be able to link, even though physically separated?”

“Yes, but—”

“Let’s hear what he’s got in mind first,” Jimmy said. “It beats livin’ up here and thumb-twiddlin’. If we don’t move fast, before they know who and what they’re facing, we’re bound to be in for it.”

Gun Roh Chin sighed. “All right. Let’s hear your plan, Josef.”

“Well, I suggest that three of us get as near the station as is possible without being detected. The other two will take the explosives into the city and pack them in the right places around the central hive. There’s enough here to do a lot of damage to that keep.”

“So what?” Jimmy asked him. “You’ll not harm the Quintara with any bombs, unless you get lucky and some debris hits their soft spots. You’ll just make a mess, tell ’em we’re here, and leave a calling card.”

Modra thought about it. “Jimmy, you’ve seen the typical Quintara they have around here now. If those types were guarding the crystal and suddenly saw the castle blow, what do you think they’d do?”

“Stay put, as their leaders will order them to do,” Chin answered. “They’re all powerful telepaths, you remember.”

“Maybe,” Josef said, “but the Quintara I saw coming into the city today headed straight for the keep. Not, I bet, to visit Lord Squazos, either. And if I were an officer in charge, and particularly royalty, that’s where I’d stay while I was here. It’s the nerve center of the entire hive. I don’t care if they’re harmed or not, while they’re in our universe they’re physical, just as we are. Put a few tons of building on them and the only thing they’ll want right away is to be dug out—fast. My bet is that you could get in and out before they noticed you. And they might even take you for Qaamil Terrans, dressed as you are, if they didn’t try to mind-probe you.”

Chin considered it. “Incredibly risky, but it might work. What do the rest of you think? We won’t get many shots at this, you know.”

“Such an explosion might not hurt them, but it would kill a lot of innocent people,” Krisha pointed out.

Modra stared at her. “Did you see those streets? Honey, in this place, there are no innocent people. I say go for it. It’s the best chance we have.”

“I agree that we must take chances,” the captain said, “but while the three are inside, they will be out of phase with the other two. Grouping will be impossible. The two would be strictly on their own with insufficient power to block a real Quintara onslaught. And what if he doesn’t come as a result of the action? Then the hunt will be on and it will be a near constant battle to remain free.”

“If blowing up the hive of Lord Squazos with Quintara big shots inside and then making one of their stations on their network disappear doesn’t bring him, I can’t imagine what would,” Modra replied. “Worse, can you come up with anything else, particularly anything less risky, that would do the job?”

The captain was silent looking at their faces. Finally he sighed and said, “All right, who goes where?”

“I have to be one going to the hive,” Josef pointed out. “I know this city and the general layout of the place.”

“All right. One of us has to go each place, I agree, and I don’t know who has the more dangerous job,” Chin told him. “Who else?”

“We all want to do it, Captain,” Modra told him. “Don’t we all want to give them a taste of what they put us through?”

“I say we match for it,” Jimmy suggested. “Odds and evens. All three of us put a fist behind our back and on signal we all bring it out with either one or two fingers out. We do it until there’s an odd one out.”

Josef was noticeably relieved when Jimmy won at his own game the first time out. He was never comfortable around Krisha and he didn’t want Modra to be his responsibility.

“All right, then,” the captain sighed. “But if anyone is captured, the plan’s off. We go immediately to aid them. Use no talents unless it’s an emergency. So long as you don’t use them, you’re effectively a null to them. Once you use them, you might as well be broadcasting on your radios. If you fall into a Quintara trap, we’ll know. The same goes with any of us. If you get away, you’ll know where to find us. And may the gods be with us all!”

With that the two teams split, after Jimmy drew a chalk pentagram on the roof surface—”For emergencies only,” he emphasized. Then Chin and the two women watched nervously as Josef and Jimmy let themselves down off the roof and then vanished into the shadows.

Chin lowered his helmet for a moment and looked in the opposite direction, then raised it again. “The forest is on either side of the station area,” he noted. “Our best bet is probably to work around from the left side through the bush. If the gods smile upon us, we should get to within thirty meters of the entrance without exposing our cover. Each park looks to be, oh, not more than a couple of square kilometers.” He sighed, “Let us begin,” and started down himself. The other two followed quickly, and they were off in the opposite direction from the two men.


The park land surrounding the approach to the hive through which the three of them had to travel to get anywhere near the station without being detected was black as pitch, the dense upper growth blocking off what light there was.

“We’ll have to use the helmet viewers,” Chin told Modra and Krisha. “That means no communications, so everyone keep in sight of everyone else, understand? Hand signals only. And be wary of traps of any kind,” he added worriedly. “If I had that altar and station so close in to dense forest, I would put some traps out.”

There were traps set within the park; most, at least after just going in a few meters, appeared rather simple and primitive, easy to spot with the low light and infrared viewers on. Concealed rope snares, some thinly disguised pits with false breakaway tops, that kind of thing.

They got more numerous but not less obvious as they went on. Modra, in the middle, watched as Gun Roh Chin gingerly went between a snare and a pit, then followed his moves. Suddenly Chin stopped and stared at the ground, thought a moment, then jumped a small distance to his right. He turned and gestured for Modra to do the same. She didn’t see anything, but by now she knew enough to take the captain at his word and tried the leap. She came down wrong, stumbled, and fell, and before either of them could get to her aid she reached out to break her fall and touched something small and thin. A stick of some kind came across the ground and met with two other long sticks, and suddenly she felt frozen, suspended in a netherworld that had no points of reference at all, conscious but unable to move, unable to even get her bearings enough to think.

<Where in the Pits ofSargos did she come from?>

<lt’s one of the traps near Qaamil, I think. But she’s Terran! What’s a Terran doing there?>

<Odd. She doesn’t know herself. Examine her mind. She’s one of the ones they were talking about. Got out of the city somehow. Yet her memories only run to the city station. Very odd.>

<Erased, perhaps? What’s an Exchange Terran doing in a Mycohl uniform in the heart of Qaamil?>

<There is a sense of some erasure, but only to a point. A few glimpses here and there, no sense. Very odd. I’ve never seen anything like it.>

<Well, it’s a certainty that she doesn’t know, either. Whoever or whatever was operating her movements has severed all contact. She’s useless. An enigma, but useless.>

<Not to me. I’ll take her.>

<You’ll take anything. You are too sentimental about these kind just because you once worked Terra.>

<Nevertheless, give her handle to me. Terrans aren’t in your area anyway.>

<Oh, very well.>

The entity who wanted her now addressed her directly.

<Listen well, woman. I can use clever and resourceful ones such as you. You are in my complete and total power. With a flick of my will I can make you cease to exist, or drive you mad with horrors, or I can reward. My power is great. Pray to me and submit to doing my will and I shall give you joy and riches. Pray for what you desire and I shall grant it in exchange for that submission, and I shall raise you up above the others of your kind.>

She could not remember anything beyond the city of the demons, yet she had met this sort before.

<You ask me to act against my own kind, to spread your terror for you. If you are so powerful, why do you ask me to do this at all? Why not simply make me do it?>

<A fair question. I can make you mine, it is true, even enter your body or place a subordinate there, controlling you by urges and by force of will as a puppet. But a puppet is not a free agent; it acts by the motion of others, without thought or commitment. I have millions of puppets. I need those who will serve me freely to create a dominion and not merely preside over a puppet show. I offer you one of two choices: puppet or puppeteer?>

<In your kind of universe a puppet is free while the puppeteer is in chains, even if they’re golden chains, > she retorted. <No matter how foul the puppet’s deeds, the stains are not on the puppet but on the puppeteer. I will not have the blood of your millions on my hands! Better to die or be forced to act against my will than to sell myself to you!>

<I could break you,> the demon mused, <but broken people are truly worthless. Better a subtle approach. You will pray to me. You will do so. You will get down on your knees and you will beg me for mercy and acknowledge me as your one true god. Now feel my power, for I am the only one who can help you, if you are sincere. If not for me, for the sake of your family and your child to come.>

<My what?>

There was a sudden rush in her mind of strange, bizarre symbols. With a start she realized, somehow, that these were incredibly long, complex mathematical formulae, and that in some odd manner they were coming from her. They seemed to dance around her, long streams of incomprehensible equations. And then another stream appeared, very like the first, but from some remote point, and the two danced around each other in concentric spirals until they finally met at a point where her mind interpreted a single separator of the pair, not an “ = “ but a “:” instead.

She slept, but lightly, and she dreamed, and the dreams became memories.


“Look, Madam—Stryke,” the cymol said. “You suddenly arrived here at the space salvage yards stark naked and with some bizarre and unbelievable account of being an exploiter and having gone to a literal Hell, but with no memories of how you got from there to here. We’ve run through the records and there is a ship named the Widowmaker under a Captain Lankur, which is currently out on a job, but there is no record of you or anyone answering your description associated with it or with anything else, nor does your genetic record produce any matches at all. You claim to be educated and fluent in standard yet you speak and think only in an obscure dialect called Kor that I had to read into my memory just to speak with you and which is derived primarily from an ancient Terran tongue known as Arabic. There is only one world where Kor is spoken at all, Berbary, and we note that Widowmaker had a repair layover there four months ago. As you are seventeen weeks pregnant, it is clear to us that you had a liaison with this Captain Lankur, not an unknown thing, and that you have fantasized an incredible background for yourself which you now believe in the shock of discovering your pregnancy and, with my research on Berbary, subsequent loss of all status.”

“No! That’s not true!”

The cymol ignored her protest. “So you stowed away on the next ship calling there that was headed for the capital and here you are, delusions and all.”

“It’s true I’m originally from Berbary, but—”

“Enough! It is clear that you require psychiatric help but lack the means to pay for it. You have no skills, no command of a useful language, and you are pregnant. There is simply no way for you to be anything here but a ward of the state, and we do not allow that here. You will, therefore, be placed on the first ship out of here calling on Berbary and deported back to there. Until then you will be detained here.”

“No! You can’t! I am who I say! I did go those places!”

The cymol flicked a switch. “The hearing is over. Until you leave you will do menial tasks here to pay for your keep but be under arrest in this building. Citizen Bhorg, please establish the situation for no more trouble.”

She turned and saw a huge, lizard-like creature with great bulging red eyes standing there. The eyes caught her, and the hypno had her under almost immediately.

She remained there, doing mostly make-work, obedient, helpful, and not even curious about why she was there or who she was, until they put her on a freighter and the daily hypno treatments wore off. The crew, none of whom were Terrans, were told she was a harmless nut case being deported and that was that. There was little she could do about it.

She did, however, remember the demon, and was beginning to understand just what he’d meant and just how great his power was. To alter probability! To create an alternate Modra, one who hadn’t been so fortunate! It was incredible. The only solace she found was that, this way at least, Tris and the Durquist and the others were still alive, still going! If she had never been a member of their team Tris had no reason to kill himself. Their lives for her current reality didn’t really seem like much a punishment. More like penance. Maybe that demon bastard had blown it.

But the Quintara were a reality here, so maybe not. Maybe they just went in, whole, but without her. From the translator on the ship she learned that they were spreading, and their influence even more so, and that many Terran worlds had gone over to them and others were being attacked to prevent them from going over. It was a grim picture.

Berbary was another shock. It looked and felt much the same, but when she arrived she was past seven months pregnant and showing badly, and the threadbare makeshift dress she’d made for herself back in confinement was no help at all.

“The Stryke family,” she told the man at customs and immigration. “They have a big farm over near Zahari, with fruit orchards as far as the eye can see.”

“Madam, they sent me your report and I read it,” the customs man said. “We checked. A Stryke family did have a farm there years ago, but most of them were wiped out in the plague. The rest perished in a major fire that swept the house. There was a report that one small child survived but she hadn’t been registered and between the plague and the fire there was no one to confirm her identity. Further, several employees saw the child and swore that she was not a Stryke; no Stryke had red hair. As a result, the child was turned over to the orphanage in Zahari where, at age fourteen, while picking fruit for a co-op, she fled, apparently to here, where she lived on the streets and possibly sold herself to spacers. Your code matches the one on file at the orphanage.” He sighed. “I cannot refuse you entry, madam, but I wish I could. My advice to you is to go to the Crescent Society, arrange to have the child and give it up for adoption, then seek cleansing in the faith and find some productive place for yourself. If I see you around here again I will charge you with pandering and prostitution and arrest you accordingly. Now—be gone!”

Now the full force of the demon’s threat hit her and reduced her to sobs of grief. Her parents . . . her brothers and sisters . . . all gone. Her birthright and dowry gone to distant relatives. Her favorite uncle Amri, who’d left her the cash to buy into the Widowmaker, was certainly dead in this life, too, but never knowing her. Her family’s lands would probably have gone to Zakir Fahmond, a cockroach in human form, relative or not, and most likely the one who’d paid off the employees to swear that no Stryke had red hair even though she’d gotten it from her immigrant grandfather whose features were fair and whose flaming red hair had made him a legend. And, in this loose but still traditionalist society, that left her without anybody or anything and with a choice of prostitution or itinerant fruit and vegetable picker.

She didn’t want to give up the child, not Tris’s child, to possibly a fate no better than hers right now, but she knew she’d be forced to. Without money there was no way she could provide anything at all. As the man had said, she needed charity just to eat and be sheltered and guarantee as much as possible a live, healthy child.

She was totally alone.

The demon’s words came back to her under the hot sun on the lonely stone walkway in front of the spaceport. “I am the only one who can help you, if you are sincere. If not for me, for the sake of your family and your child to come.

And what if she did? Would the demon resurrect her family? Restore her money and position? Legitimize her child?

<Pray, and you shall be permitted to raise the child and the child will prosper as one of mine.>

“No, you son of a bitch,” she muttered. “I’ll sell myself first. I’ll do anything I have to, but you’re not getting me and you’re not getting my baby!”

She started walking along the lonely, desolate street when she thought she heard shouting far off. “Break the seal!” a familiar voice was saying, but it didn’t seem to be in Kor. “That’s it! Just break—got it!”

The street vanished. The sun went dark. She was suddenly lying in an e-suit drenched with so much sweat that the suit couldn’t keep up, and it was night.

A hand pushed an external control and her helmet slid back. Memory flooded back into her mind, and with it awareness of reality.

“Got you!” said Gun Roh Chin happily.

“No he didn’t,” she muttered. “He was never even close!”


“Is it me, or is the gravity suddenly lighter?”

Josef grinned in the darkness. “It’s all that explosive now in its proper place instead of on our backs. How many charges do you have left?”

Jimmy checked. “Two.”

“So do I, and I know just the place to put them. All that we’ve done will do a lot of damage but it won’t structurally damage the main building. There’s four pillars, though, that support the great hall and its trusses. With the others pushing on all sides, if we can blow those pillars we might get the whole building to implode.”

Jimmy checked his watch. “I hate to tell you, old man, but we’ve got a bit under half an hour until they go, with or without us inside.”

“Plenty of time. Come on—for the basement area.”

Jimmy sighed. “All right, but we’ve left a pretty big load of Rithian bodies about. Somebody’s bound to miss them or find one sooner or later.”

There were four more bodies before they reached the lower level, all felled by crossbow bolts into the area between their shoulder blades where the Rithian brain case was located. Jimmy was beginning to like the weapons; silent, deadly, and undetectable by instruments or hearing even when fired.

“What’s down here? Dungeons?”

“A few for special prisoners,” Josef told him, “but they’re nowhere near where we’re going. There’s a number of rooms used for storage and maintenance, a medical lab, master controls for the security robots and such, but the area under the great hall is mostly generating equipment, backup electrical, that sort of thing.”

The place bristled with all sorts of automated alarms, but they were simple to either bypass or go over, under, or around. Still, by the time they reached the central basement almost ten minutes had passed, even though it had taken little time once there to plant the charges. Concealing and setting the explosives wasn’t much of a problem. Touching a contact from the e-suit to the small computer module on each unit caused them to be in absolute synchronization with the others. The whole lot would go not simultaneously but in rapid series.

Jimmy checked the time. “There’s only twenty minutes! And I sense Quintara nearby. Maybe we missed an alarm. We can’t afford to run into one or more of those buggers right now! Not with the clock running.”

Josef hesitated. “We don’t dare draw a pentagram! Not inside here! With the Quintara all about there’s no guarantee we’d reach the roof instead of someplace a lot uglier, and even if we did we’d probably be instantly traced and stuck, trapped there for them.” He looked around. “That stair, there! It leads to a concealed access entrance to the hall. If there are no Quintara up there we might be able to get out the main gate.”

“Worth a try,” Jimmy agreed, and Josef led the way up, crossbow at the ready.

“The hell with defenses,” Josef whispered at the top. “I don’t care if I trigger every alarm in this place. Shoot anything that moves and just get out!”

A clever latch system slid the panel to one side and they stepped into the main hall. It was in fact a truly great room, but both stopped a moment, taken aback at the changes in it. Braziers blazed with a combination of fire and eerie changing colors; just in front of them, blocking the view of their entrance from anyone in the hall, was another massive altar with its grotesque half-god half-Terran idol, and in front of it the great seal of the Mycohl, set in mosaic in the floor, had been marked off, the five points of the pentagram inside the five-pointed star adorned with elaborate candles and golden paraphernalia of unknown use.

A small but ornate balcony surrounded the scene on three sides, the supports for it creating two effective narrow corridors from back to front.

Two Rithian guards armed with high-energy rifles guarded the door on either side, looking outward, but too far away to ensure two well-placed shots. Josef gestured to Jimmy, who understood and went to the far right, crouching low and going down the corridor under the balcony while Josef broke to the left. Stealthily, both men crept to near the guards, wishing they dared link to fire simultaneously.

Jimmy got into position, crossed himself, and raised the crossbow. The additional second wasted in the motion, however, left him slightly behind Josef, who jumped up and fired point-blank into the left guard’s brain case.

The other guard reacted instantly to the hit, turning ever so slightly so that Jimmy’s bolt struck its shoulder muscle instead of the casing. It roared in eerie, high-pitched agony, the sound echoing through the hall, freezing Jimmy for a moment while Josef bolted for the great open double door, tossing away his crossbow and shooting the wounded guard with his pistol as he ran.

The big man struck the apparently wide-open door as if it were solid stone, and, stunned, fell back.

“Josef! How delightful! I just knew it would be you!”

Her voice, coming from the top of the balcony, reverberated again and again around the hall.

Jimmy froze for a moment, then ducked down below the bunting that helped create the corridor. For a terrible moment he thought they both were caught, but now he realized that she hadn’t actually seen the shots and was fixated on Josef alone. She apparently gave the big man credit for more fighting ability than he actually possessed.

Josef climbed unsteadily to his feet and shook his head as if to clear it, then looked up at the small figure on the balcony. “Kalia,” he said.

“You surely didn’t think we’d leave the front gate wide open, did you?” she taunted. “I mean, even you didn’t come in that way.”

He looked at the apparently open escape route and understood. “Force field,” he muttered. “It wasn’t there a second ago.”

“No, of course not, darling Josef,” she responded, enjoying this moment as if she’d dreamt of it over and over again in her mind. “In case there were any neutralizers or disrupters, it was designed to be either triggered by a guard or by any triggering of energy such as your pistol within fifty meters. Don’t blame yourself, though. When the first guard fell outside the station lines there it went up.”

“You’ve come a long way, Kalia,” Josef noted icily. “Still, I didn’t expect you to be here, not in this place. You never were too fond of Rithians.”

“Oh, but darling, I can be anyplace. With the power of the Great Ones, and a proper pentagram, I can be almost anywhere in the Qaamil almost instantaneously. We have some nice drols just sitting about playing with themselves whose only job is to lock us in phase when we materialize. You have no idea of the power you’re playing with. Look!”

The floor of the hall suddenly erupted in front of him, a thin bead of liquid fire emerging, spreading, encircling him, coming together to form a perfect flaming pentagram in just over a second. His perspective switched; now, suddenly, he was not in the fiery shape but instead in the center, in front of the altar, within the large mosaic, trapped and out of phase.

“Don’t go away, darling!” she shouted, and vanished from the top of the balcony.

Josef tried to switch the prison, activating and ordering himself to the pentagram on the roof, but nothing happened. He looked at his watch. Fourteen minutes! Get out of here, McCray, if you can! Don’t try for me! he thought to himself. At least I’m going to take that traitorous bitch with me!

The first burning pentagram vanished, leaving not even a burn mark, but another suddenly appeared just outside the big one that held him, and Kalia appeared in the middle carrying something in her right hand. She smiled, clapped her hands, then said, “Impressive, isn’t it? Throw a little harmless smoke bomb ahead of you and it looks like you appear in a cloud of smoke. Impresses the hell out of people.”

An ugly, misshapen drol emerged from a doorway to the right of the altar, obviously in response to the clapping, came over to her, and stamped on the fire with bare feet. It went out all around, and Kalia smiled, petted the creature, and walked over to Josef as the drol retreated back to its post.

“Don’t try your evil eye on me any more,” she warned him. “It doesn’t work with me.” She walked around the outside of the symbol, examining him as if he were some sort of specimen.

“You look good, Kalia,” he noted. No trace of the hideous burns or even the scar remained; she was a stunningly beautiful woman.

“You’re looking good yourself, Josef. This is when I want to look my best and impress the handsome young officers. Still, when one of them forgets his place, he finds himself hugging this.

She changed. Not slowly, but all at once, in the blinking of an eye, and she was hideous: a rotting, foul, animated corpse with charred and flaking skin and upper teeth protruding from a skull-like head from which dangled wisps of snow-white hair.

As soon as she saw his revulsion, she was back to her beauty once more. “What’s the matter, Josef? Don’t want to kiss me any more?”

“No, I think the other way suited you just fine, Kalia,” he retorted. “It lets the true ‘you’ shine through.”

She ignored the sarcasm. “You should have joined me, Josef. I admit it’s a little bit of a letdown to see how it’s done. Sort of like finding out how a sleight-of-hand artist palms coins. Still, the power is so awesome it might as well be supernatural. You have no idea what you are dealing with, even after all that in the city and before. You know what those things we passed through were, darling? Not worlds—templates for worlds, and workshops in between. Workshops to build the worlds of this entire galaxy. And there’s more than we can count beyond those, as many as there are galaxies. And you sneak in here, skulking around, thinking in your supreme male ego that you can take on that. And I have that power! More power than any Terran ever dreamed existed!”

“So long as you bow and scrape to your horny masters,” he retorted. “I thought your goal in life was to be nobody’s slave.”

She shrugged. “So did I. But then I realized that everybody’s lower than somebody. I rose to be—what? Your subordinate on a two-bit packet ship under your absolute command. You’re under a whole string of officers, then the High Command, and under every single Lord of every single Realm or Hive in the Mycohl. And they were under the masters of the Mycohl. Even the Quintara take orders. We aren’t a Higher Race, let alone the highest. It’s not how many are above you that matters, it’s how many are below. So what that I can’t own the Qaamil? I rented it and it’s mine!

“That much power must get boring as hell after a while.”

She laughed. “I admit I am getting lazy. For instance, before I’d show off my fighting skills against you. Now all I do is this.” She came over, stepped on the pentagram, and threw up her left hand. Although suddenly in phase with her, he found himself paralyzed, unable to move, yet able to speak. “It’s not as much fun, darling, but it’s ever so satisfying. I might get bored, but we have the Three Empires to conquer, and then the rest of the galaxy, and even beyond yet!”

“Even the Quintara’s master has masters,” he pointed out. “Sooner or later it will end.”

“And so what? The Day of Reckoning is billions of years from now. Billions! By then I’m sure we’ll all be so bored we’ll be ready to pack it in. In the meantime, we can always be creative. Do you know what this is?” She held up the vaguely pistol-shaped device in her right hand.

Still eleven minutes! Time was crawling by! “I’m sure you’re just itching to tell me.”

She smiled. “I thought of it almost immediately when I saw you. I knew the moment I found out about it quite a while ago that if I ever got this chance it was exactly what I wanted for you. We’re changing the drols, darling. Standardizing on the model you see here. No more of the kind we had way back when at the Celebration that were so close to us I could pretend to be one of them. Security, you see. Nobody is going to be able to pass themselves off as one of these creatures.”

“I heard you turned a whole infantry unit into them with a few waves of your hand,” he said calmly. “Why don’t you just wave two hands?”

“Heard about that, did you? And you knew it was me! How delightful! But it’s so draining, darling, and I did tell you I’ve grown lazy. And, of course, there are limits. Even I can’t be everywhere, and there are so many drols. Instead we’ve been mass-producing this. I’m told they’re something between an artificial virus and a computer so teeny-tiny that billions and billions are packed into every dose. They are injected, go round and round, duplicate again and again, until they’re in every single cell of the body, and then they take over, reprogramming you and working with amazing speed. You eat and eat and you can see changes in just a matter of days. In a few weeks you’re more drol than human. In a couple of months you are a drol, inside and out.”

“I know the process,” he said uneasily. “The Lords have used it now and then to get rid of traitors and rebels, then kept them around as drols as examples to others.”

“How nice. Then you already know what’s in this injector. Not just drol stuff, darling—female drol stuff. And when you’re bald and fat and slow and obedient and bent over by the weight of four humongous tits, deep down, you’ll still know. And I’ll keep you around, ageless, always nearby, so you can appreciate my destiny.”

She brought the injector up to the side of his head. He felt sheer panic and tried without success to shy away. She was delaying triggering the injection, basking in his total horror and revulsion.

Suddenly there was a hand at her throat and another grabbing the hand with the injector, bringing it down. She was shocked but she struggled to turn and see her attacker and finally managed a glimpse.

You!” she managed, then whirled with the professional’s slick move, bringing up her left boot hard into Jimmy McCray’s crotch. The shock of the blow unbalanced him briefly, but did nothing else, and he used her own sudden confusion as to why he wasn’t writhing in pain and her resulting imbalance to bring her to the floor.

Kalia had unbelievable power at her disposal, but it did not undo years of training and reaction to attack, nor did she have the luxury of concentrating, of summoning forth the powers she needed. So she fought with him, and they rolled, Jimmy holding her in a vise-like grip, her hand with the injector held tight. She was good, but she had been seduced by the power and her timing was way off.

He was pretty good, too.

She finally made a desperation move, a quick twist and push off him with her left hand that would have freed her long enough to act, but she telegraphed it, and when she spun out he let everything loose except the right hand, which twisted behind her. Without even thinking, he brought the injector barrel to bear against her back and pressed the trigger by forcing her finger back. There was a nasty pop, almost like a firecracker, and she screamed and got away from his grip, the injector falling with a clatter to the floor. Where it had been fired there was a big tear in her thin uniform and some blood oozed from an area of raw skin.

She no longer paid any attention to him; instead, she rolled on the floor, screaming, foaming at the mouth, clutching for the wound on her back but unable to reach it, and changing, changing from beauty to hag to beauty to hag again, almost with every roll and gyration.

At the same time Josef felt himself freed from the paralysis. “Quick!” he shouted. “Where that drol came from! There’s got to be a way around this!”

They both ran for the doorway on the right; Jimmy got there first and tried to open it. “It won’t open, damn it!”

“Maybe it only opens from the other side!” Josef shouted. “Try clapping like she did!”

There was a sudden deep, ominous rumbling from below, so powerful that for a moment they thought that the explosives had gone off early. Then they turned to look back into the room and froze.

In the center of the mosaic stood a demon prince; almost three meters tall he was, and with a muscular bulk that made him seem even more of a giant. He was dressed in fine robes of crimson and deep purple satin, with a flowing cape that only added to his authority.

Instantly Josef and Jimmy found themselves standing there very confused. The last thing either of them remembered was resting on that beautiful, tranquil world after escaping from the demon city. Now, suddenly, they were here, in this big hall, face to face with a demon prince, wearing full e-suits. And was that Kalia over there whimpering inanely?

Kalia stopped her writhing, stabilized on her attractive self, and looked up at the great creature, reaching out a hand to him. “Master! Cure me!”

<You are becoming a disappointment to me,> the Quintara prince commented. <Calm your panic and be patient. I will deal with you in due time.>

“No! Master! Now! Please!

<Silence! Or I will leave you as you are and let that potion take its course! Now release me at once!> She pulled herself up to the central pentagram, crawling to it, and touched the inner line, then retreated and just stared at him, whimpering.

Great hooves clattered against the smooth floor as the demon walked over to the two men. Josef did not wait; he acted, but, like Kalia, he acted instinctively, without the knowledge of how a Quintara might be killed. He dropped, rolled, and came up firing full power right at the great creature.

The beam, strong enough to have put a hole in a stone wall, darkened the fabric of his robe but didn’t even set that on fire, let alone slow him down. A taloned hand stretched out and from it sprang a whip-like bolt of energy, grabbing Josef and picking him up off the floor as if it were somehow solid and stronger than steel; then, coiling, it brought him up face to face with the creature, Josef’s own boots almost a meter off the floor.

<So one of you was a true Mycohl! That explains much as to why you have lived so long outside our grasp. It even explains much of your escape. It does not explain how you came to be here nor why you come with this other, who wears Mycohl colors yet is of the Exchange. Why don’t you know? WHY?>

The energy rope tightened, cutting through the nearly impenetrable e-suit, and Josef screamed in agony.

<You are too ignorant and too stupid to be of any use to me, even as amusement.> With that the demon reached into Josef’s chest with his left hand and penetrated the suit and the flesh and bone beneath. Josef screamed again in what Jimmy knew was a death agony as he dropped to the floor, leaving organs and entrails in the demon’s hand from the gaping wound.

Horrified, Jimmy watched as the demon popped the grisly mess into his great mouth, chewed, and swallowed. He even licked the blood off his hand with a long, black serpentine tongue.

His attention now turned to Jimmy, who expected to face the same fate, or to be plunged into another, deeper demonic-induced hell.

The Quintara belched. <You fear needlessly, priest, > he said after a moment. <I have no intention of giving you what you most desire, after all, and becoming a martyr in the fight against us would certainly be that. Nor will I subject you to any more horrific visions. In your state, having undergone them once in the city, you would simply will yourself to die. No, I have no more intention of doing that than of nailing you to a cross, up or inverted. You understand, of course.>

Jimmy sighed. “Yes, I can see your point. And I also admit that, failing martyrdom, I shouldn’t like to die before I know how in heaven’s name I happened to be in this place—and in what seems a Mycohl uniform.”

<I find that fact most disturbing, as is the mere fact that you are here at all. Why? What did the two of you hope to accomplish? Or are there more than two of you, perhaps? Six came out of the city.>

“You know my mind better than I do. You tell me.” He felt something odd stabbing him in the side and almost without thinking reached into the outside utility pocket to see what it was. He was as surprised as the demon to find the cross there, and he pulled it out.

The demon prince laughed. <Do you think that that worthless piece of metal can do anything against me? With faith energizing the thing it is still a minor irritant.>

The mere comment gave Jimmy energy. He held up the cross and began to recite the liturgy of exorcism.

<Oh, stop that, McCray! I’m not possessing or controlling anyone! I’m here! We’re not talking supernatural here, we’re flesh against flesh.>

Still, Jimmy could sense discomfort in the creature, and even if it was a bit of indigestion, it was something.

The demon walked over, reached out, and took the cross. There was a sizzling sound like water on a hot pan for a moment, but the demon ignored the pain, took the cross, and looked at it with some amusement. <You’ve lost most of your faith, McCray, and what little you’ve gained back through your experiences isn’t enough. You’ve seen enough to know how it works. It’s geometry and mathematics and a physics created in a plane outside this. There’s no real magic. There never was. And you are far too smart a man not to realize that what remains in you is merely a vestige of your upbringing. You are a priest of a church of losers, worshipers of martyrdom and death, appalled by my own dietary habits even as you practice ritual cannibalism. A tiny little backwater faith these days, offshoot of an even smaller and more obscure one.> Almost contemptuously the demon handed the cross back to him.

Jimmy McCray smiled. “You’re right, of course, at least about some of it. Just because I’ve seen beyond the veil and find that other, higher cosmos doesn’t negate anything. It confirms instead. And the fact that my Church survives at all defies the odds so greatly one almost is forced to believe in miracles.”

The logic disturbed the prince. <I was on your planet more than once, you know. I know your people and your origins well. Before great Cathay, I was. Before Egypt, I was. Before Babylon, I was. While a scruffy tribe of slaves turned nomads wandered baking in the desert, I was worshiped in great Egypt and later in Babylon. Supreme Nimrod was my servant; even those tribes in the desert deserted their god and built idols to me. My legions rode with those of Alexander, and noble Greece and Rome worshiped us by other names. I have ten thousand names, but those of ancient Egypt called me Baal. Do you know why you lack faith, priest? Because my seed is in you. Because you are more of me than of that abstract set of bizarre ideals you worship.>

McCray, devoid of his experience with The Ship, reduced to his state before his inner self was reborn with new conviction, nonetheless found something stirring within himself beyond that which he’d ever thought was there. Baal! Before him stood one of the ancient enemies of God in the flesh, and if he was the embodiment of evil, it was still as if a great Presence from the Bible itself had stepped out of the book to meet him.

“You were all those things,” he admitted, “yet you lost. Somebody locked you up in a deserted and desolate city removed from the universe. Imprisoned you and your brethren from that time to this. But that scruffy tribe has a world of its own in the Old Sector and still worships its God, and my own faith, in many forms, still lives even if it no longer dominates. Where is Babylon now, or ancient Egypt? Where are the statues of Baal erected not at your direction but because they worship you without seeing?”

The demon prince was not irritated. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying this.

<I have better monuments than that. Even though I stood withdrawn for these past eye blinks of time, I was not unaware. Your people did so very well without me that they made me proud. Visigoths, Vandals, the Mongol Horde. Your precious Church setting up inquisitions to torture and break, while it dispatched the best of its people in mindless crusades to kill and rape and maim in the name of the Prince of Peace. Was there not a conqueror who did not pray before ordering his legions to genocide? Was there a colonial power who did not see its subjugation of whole continents and its domination and pillage of who and what it seized as proof God was on its side? Oh, I think you have done very well in my brief absence. It makes a father proud of his children!>

“If the journey be not hard, then the victory is not worth the winning,” Jimmy said, a bit ashamed at the record himself.

The demon prince tired of the banter. <Enough of this! I am diverted from the problem at hand.> He thought a minute. <Diverted . . . Diversion. That’s it, isn’t it? Diversion. You and your late comrade are here to divert me. It was you, and the others, who came in that ship we blew up. No one sacrifices such lambs as you without a reason. No one creates a diversion unless it is to do something else. Where are the others?> Baal reached out and grabbed Jimmy by the waist with just one powerful arm, lifting the little man close to eye level with the demon’s burning, deep-set eyes. <And why have you no memory of this? No power in this universe can wipe you so clean so fast without totally destroying the mind! To do this your recent memories would have to be spooled off to a remote location instead of being stored within your brain.> Something caught his eye: a tiny shining object, not much larger than a pin, embedded in the skull just at the hairline.

<The Guardians!> Baal exclaimed, a sudden understanding dawning in him. <That’s it! The Gathering has taken place! You are diverting my attention while the others lure the master to this place!> He shifted his mind to all-band broadcast. <My legion! Attention! We are under direct assault! Tell the—>

At that moment the bombs so carefully placed around the foundations and pillars began to go off, one after another. The building shook; the balconies began to cave in, and the very floor started to shift. <What . . . ?>

For a fleeting second Jimmy suddenly knew again, understood again, what was going on. As Baal dropped to the floor he brought the little man down with him atop his massive chest. With a single motion, Jimmy took the cross that was in his right hand and shoved it, bottom first, into the demon’s soft spot with a strength and fury that drew upon everything the little man had.

The demon prince’s cry of agony and horror was so great and so pervasive that it obliterated the sounds of Jimmy McCray’s triumphant laughter and almost masked the sounds of the entire castle caving in upon them.



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