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THE HIGHER RACES

“LOOKS LIKE A BLOODY CITY DOWN THERE!” Jimmy McCray exclaimed.

“Or a military camp,” Josef noted.

“I feel a tad underdressed for that sort of company,” Modra commented.

“How the hell are we gonna get through that mob?” Grysta chimed in.

“Get into the trees there and get out of sight,” Jimmy told them. “Tobrush and Josef will remain with you, and that will keep everyone in contact. We were timed for minimum exposure to get out here, but we need to move fast or there’ll be a mob of military minds upon us. They can shield all of you from detection for the present.”

“Yeah? What about you and Modra, then?” Grysta asked.

“We’re going to go down there. This is, after all, our government, God help us.”

The others had barely gotten into the woods when a large contingent of scientific types, flanked by a squad of security police in full combat suits, began walking up to the crystal along the well-worn walkway.

Neither Modra nor Jimmy even consciously thought about it, any more than they thought about blinking or scratching an itch. Instantly they projected a wide hypnotic field and stepped to one side and the entire contingent passed by them without even looking, one soldier so close Modra had to resist the urge to tap him on the shoulder, and entered the station.

If the combined mental powers of the four, including Tobrush’s far stronger and wider abilities, had little to fear from an individual demon, they had even less concern about anyone of their own known hundred races.

<You know, this could get to be fun,> Modra noted.

<Dorit get kinky, lass,> Jimmy warned. <There’s bound to be cymols down there and possibly a null or two, and I’m not sure we can do much against that sort.>

But it wasn’t that difficult to avoid them, since the identities and locations of such ones were all known to somebody down there, and, despite the fact that there had to be a thousand people of a good forty-odd races in the camp, they found it simplicity itself to pick out just what information they needed from anyone, without even knowing who, including some very powerful talents with impossibly strong shields.

The Exchange Frontier Fleet had arrived within three days of their own arrival and found what they had found, as well as unoccupied shuttles from all three empires. Cymols had read out the account in the dead one’s cymol brain, just as Tris had done, and also processed the information in the destroyed research ship and even managed to recover about eighty percent of the blasted records below. In one sense they knew what they were dealing with, but, somehow, they still considered it a local outbreak. If the new cymols sent to the rescue knew any more about the Quintara than Tris had, they hadn’t revealed it to the military—a bad sign.

There were security monitoring devices all over the place, just in case some of the folks from the shuttles or, perhaps, the demons showed up anywhere around, but it was simplicity itself to fool them. They could sense the energy going to and from the devices, and trace it mentally to its master relays just as they could divine the programming in the crystals. From that point, it was child’s play to simply ensure that the digitally encoded signals did not include them when they got to a viewing or recording source.

While the ability to walk, stark naked, through such a high-tech and security-conscious assemblage had a certain thrill about it, it was also sobering. Aided and augmented by their master and the other plane, as well as vast experience, the Quintara could do almost anything they could do. The best security, weaponry, and personnel in the Exchange were as wide open to those for whom they searched as if they were savages squatting before fires with their stone-tipped spears.

In the vast prefabricated supplies building, bristling with security devices, they found spare environment suits with no difficulty and high-energy power packs. How much easier it would have been if they’d been allowed the military-grade power packs at the start!

Although, they knew, the end result would have been the same.

<I look a fright and smell worse,> Modra noted, <but it’s better than nothing.>

<Well, I’ve got this wild man’s beard as well,> he noted. <And I’ll toss you for stench. I think it’s time we hunted up a cymol and talked to the important folks, don’t you? But not before we do a bit of artwork.>

Although Terrans were the largest single racial group in the Exchange, they were singularly under-represented in the camp. Their decision to deal first with one of their own wasn’t based on any attitudes toward other races, though, but on the more practical consideration of speech. The vast majority of all races had no appreciable talents; dealing with them through translators risked both mistranslation and eliminated intonation, and, for now, they preferred not to deal with telepaths until they were certain that they would not inadvertently betray the rest of the party hiding nearby.

Captain Ibrim Mogod was a dark-skinned, craggy-faced man with bushy black hair that could be detected as a wig only upon the most minute inspection. Intent on reviewing recent reports of security breaches in the camp, he barely noted that someone had entered his office. Clerks and other junior subordinates were always coming in to drop off one thing or another.

“Colonel, I believe talking to us will be far more informative than those reports,” Jimmy McCray said conversationally.

The security officer frowned and looked up, then put down the reports and stared at the newcomers. “Who the hell are you? And why are you as filthy as my grandfather’s goats?”

“I’m Team Leader Modra Stryke, and this is Exploiter Agent McCray.” She paused when she saw no immediate reaction. “From the Widowmaker. Tris Lankur’s team. We’re two of the people you’re looking for.”

“You’re raving lunatics! How dare you come in here like this! Who let you in here in the first place?” The colonel reached for the intercom to summon the guards, but the thing didn’t react.

“Colonel,” Jimmy said impatiently, “the Quintara still run.”

The colonel stared blankly at them. “What are you talking about?”

“We’re back from Hell, and we need to talk to the Guardians. Right now we’re being set up for a demonic attack beyond any of our abilities to withstand. And if your cymol programming doesn’t cover the Quintara, you are the wrong man in this job and the Guardians are dead,” Modra told him sharply.

The colonel sat back in his chair and looked at the pair hard. “That phrase is a part of an ancient series of emergency signals. The first time I’d ever heard it uttered was on the recording of the dead cymol in that alien structure up there. You’re not cymols. How do you know it?”

Jimmy McCray sighed. “Damn it, Colonel, we’ve been far beyond that ‘structure,’ as you call it. Those creatures that broke out are an ancient Higher Race, the Quintara, imprisoned by the billions for thousands of years. They’re free now. Their combined power and knowledge is beyond anything you can imagine. We’ve been there and seen them. A report must be made. Action must be taken.”

Mogod thought a moment. “I believe that both of you should be given a very thorough debriefing. Then you may make your report.”

“I don’t think we’d like the kind of debriefing you have in mind, Colonel,” Modra told him.

Instantly, from Tobrush far back in the woods, came the knowledge and power they required.

The colonel started to get up again with the obvious intent of calling in guards, but suddenly he was pushed back into his chair as if by a great unseen hand, and his body froze and locked into place.

Jimmy had always wondered how the remote levitators did what they did in the face of little things like gravity; telepathy, empathy, even the hypno powers were all matters of transmitting and receiving information on various wavelengths common to the majority of species, but levitation had always seemed some kind of miracle. Now he simply raised his hand and directed the power with his mind and both saw and felt the lines of plasma-like energy spring from him like Julki tentacles, picking up and tossing to one side the security officer’s wig and revealing the contact spot on the skull.

Now the tendrils from both Modra and him combined, reinforced by Tobrush and Josef who might as well have been in the same room, and the plasma tentacle touched the contact point.

Information flowed out from Mogod through them to Tobrush so fast they couldn’t grasp it, nor were they intended to. Only a Higher Race would have the capacity to absorb and correlate all the information given at such a speed and in such a manner, although, once done, the three Terrans could draw upon it. Idly, both Jimmy and Modra realized that what they were doing to the colonel was precisely what the more brutish Quintara had done to the cymol back in the crystal before killing her.

Somebody tried the door in back of them, but it wouldn’t open. After a moment they went away; it wasn’t all that unusual for Mogod to lock himself in for periods of time.

<I have it,> Tobrush told them. <He has little more than I do, curse it! And nothing more we haven’t found out for ourselves! I’m going to reverse it, give him a thorough record of where we’ve been and what happened. He’ll have it as a sealed security packet—even he won’t know what’s in it, but he’ll download it for us to his operators, whoever or whatever they are.>

It took only a couple of minutes to do the job with the Terran pair standing there as conduits.

Finally Tobrush said, <We have been gone over six weeks. There are now six battle groups in the region facing down a massive buildup of Mycohl forces along the frontier, and a concurrent buildup is occurring on the other side with the Mizlaplan. There is diplomatic hell at the moment and the Treaty itself is on the verge of shattering to bits, and there are war scares, rumors, and unreasoned belligerence at the highest levels. We needn’t lose time guessing over who is already at work behind it. A sweep of the system flushed out both the captain’s ship and yours, and I’m afraid the ones left aboard went through their own hell, but the Gurusu has now been returned to the Mizlaplan minus its records and yours is interned along with your man, Kose. They haven’t yet found our ship, which has nothing living aboard and is designed to avoid sweeps. Our friend here has the codes we need. It’s done. Now exit through the private route.>

They broke contact with the colonel but kept him in a frozen, trance-like state. Modra and Jimmy moved to a clear place on the smooth floor and she took out a marker from the e-suit kit and drew a basic circle around them both with the two of them inside, then a five-pointed star within it. Then they closed their eyes and visualized another drawing they knew elsewhere. Both instantly vanished from the office.

At that moment, a clerk tried the door again, entered, and found the colonel sitting in his chair looking puzzled.

“Sir? Are you all right?”

Mogod frowned for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, yes. Leave me for five more minutes. I have some top-security information to deal with. I’ll signal when it’s clear to come in.”

“Very well, sir. Funny, though—I thought—I could swear there were two Terrans who came in here.”

“If so, they obviously had the wrong office and left. That will do, Sergeant!”

“Yes, sir. I—what’s that?”

“What’s what?”

“On the floor here. Some kind of design.”

The colonel got up, came around his desk, and examined it. “Curious. I didn’t notice it earlier. Have a crew come in when I leave and clean it up.”

“Y-yes, sir.” The sergeant left, but not without a lot of questions still in his head. He clearly remembered two Terrans passing on the way in, and, although there was no other way out, they hadn’t come out past him and they weren’t in the office. He shrugged. Well, they certainly had the proper clearances and credentials—otherwise they’d never have gotten this far. If the colonel wanted to play spy games, that was all right with him. Cymols never told anything to anybody.


For Modra and Jimmy, it was as if the colonel’s office had just winked out and they were now standing once more in a dark corner of the warehouse where they’d gotten their e-suits.

“As easy as that,” he breathed.

She nodded. “And the Quintara have whole cults to draw symbols for them to use and feed them their addresses.”

“I don’t get it, though. If they can travel like that, why do they need the stations?”

<You are wasting time,> Tobrush said impatiently. <They can’t use this method freely—they don’t have exact locations as you did. Someone has to call them to one they have drawn and prepared. Call them by name, I suspect.>

They started to move from the pentagram they’d pre-prepared, and it was as if they had hit a maximum-security force field.

<Hey! We’re locked in this thing!>

<That, of course, is the other reason,> Tobrush noted calmly. <Josef is nearby and will break the barrier from the outside for you. When you activated it and created the interdimensional wormhole it sensitized your destination. You are not totally in sync with space-time, and to sync it something from our continuum must breach and touch yours.>

“Live and learn—fast,” Jimmy sighed. “I hope nobody else comes along before Josef.”

But the big, burly Mycohlian was there almost immediately and simply put his foot on the crude drawing. Although there was no visible effect, they crossed over it without trouble but with much relief.

“Great trick, but not as useful as we’d hoped,” Modra commented.

Josef shrugged. “Not bad even for all that. Draw another around the three of us.”

“What? Again?”

“Yes,” he responded. “After I get a few more of these suits. Any model here that would come close to fitting Tobrush?”

Modra thought a moment. “Try the quammir. That bin over there. They’re very different but very roughly the same size and shape, so long as Tobrush doesn’t use his tentacles.”

“Got it. Oof! Heavier than I thought! All right—start drawing.”

It was in the nature of their union that as soon as the question was formed in their minds as to what good it would do to wind up trapped again, they knew the answer.

As soon as the pentagram was closed, they concentrated, and were suddenly in a small clearing well back from the camp. The receiving pentagram was drawn in the dirt but it worked, and a single one of Tobrush’s thousands of tendrils was sufficient to sync it.

“I wish we had time to clean up,” Krisha commented, still happy to have an e-suit again, even if it was an ugly blue. The internal controls were also quite different in their layout and design, but she had no trouble figuring which did what with a little guidance from Modra.

“Now what?” Krisha asked them.

“Now we wait half an hour or so, until Colonel Mogod issues all the proper security codes and clearances for us to pass,” Jimmy told her.

“Without ever knowing he did it,” Modra added.

Gun Roh Chin frowned. “You can do that! To a cymol!

Jimmy nodded. “Tobrush says that it’s child’s play. He could do it before if he’d been in the same room with the colonel. The only thing we added was the mind-link conduit. Kind of lets you know why they’re the bosses, doesn’t it?”

The captain nodded. “And he and the Angels, Guardians, and Quintara are further below your mystical Crew than we are from them. It does become rather humbling.” He sighed. “Still, if our friend can be believed, we’re still missing a vital piece of the puzzle. Clearly the only possible deduction covering all this is that the Higher Races once fought and defeated the Quintara; that they were created, or introduced, or possibly mutated into their current management roles, and that, having done it once, they can defeat the Quintara again. Clear?”

“I’m with you so far.”

“So,” the captain continued, “why doesn’t Tobrush know anything more about the Quintara than we ourselves have discovered? Particularly when his particular form of life has such a superb crack at true ancestral memory? Why did your Guardians not immediately spot the danger and swing into action when the first reports of the discovery of a Quintara station came in from the scout who discovered it? Why, in fact, did they allow apparently unbriefed and unprepared scientists, without even military backup—for all the good it might have done—to poke, probe, and eventually initiate the very events that have led to this point? And why, once it was done, didn’t they immediately initiate measures to control the damage before the princes and their master were released? In particular—why didn’t the cymols on the scene, personified by your Captain Lankur, or even now with this mob scene here, their own security chief know as much as we do? I could go on and on.”

“Yes, there are lots of missing pieces,” Jimmy agreed, “but the litany you recite asks the most important one.”

“Indeed?”

“All right, we’ve got some knowledge of at least what the bad guys are doing, and we’ve got some power now and some defenses, but within very local limits. We can’t take on the whole bloody demonic army. He as much as said so. So where does that leave us? Just what the bloody hell do we do now?”

“We get out of here,” replied Gun Roh Chin. “We get Tobrush to his own people with the same information so they’ll at least be as informed as we’ve now hopefully made the Guardians. Then, if possible, we do the same thing with the Holy Angels. When we’ve done that, either the process of combating the attacks to come will be put into motion and it will be out of our hands, or we are going to be scrambling just to stay alive.”

“We’ll be doing that anyway,” Jimmy said nervously. “It won’t take that demon prince long to put two and two together when he discovers we’re not in the city. Most likely he can trace us through the network. Some records must be automatically maintained. You saw the level of technology in the city. Not to mention the ones who broke and ran for the city after our encounter in the other plane. If I was a Quintara, I’d make bloody sure that our descriptions were everywhere, that there was no reward too high to ask for our heads, and simultaneously attempt so much disinformation about us to our own people that we’ll not be received.”

“I thought of that,” Chin replied. “Indeed, I’m much more worried about the implications if that isn’t already in motion.”

“Implications?”

“They’ve had some time now to evaluate the situation here. What if they aren’t hunting for us? What if they don’t care? What if they consider us to be totally irrelevant?”

“There is no chance of that, my captain,” Krisha put in, having stood in back and listened to the discourse. “You have seen them only from afar, never from within your mind as the rest of us have. It would not matter to them if we could truly hurt them or not. They have an ugly code of honor, as it were, and that is that they always keep their word. We may or may not be high on their list of priorities, but they want us. Of that I am certain. They want us badly, and alive. They have made promises—ugly, evil promises—to many of us. The rest have still thwarted their will. And particularly now that we have spilled their blood, they will not rest until we are dealt with. It is their way.”

The captain stroked his chin, thinking, then chuckled. “Isn’t it ironic that we find our own so incomprehensible, yet we understand the Quintara so very well?”

Jimmy suddenly looked up and away, his expression distant. Then he said, “All right, it’s time to get off this dirt ball. Just follow our lead, act like you belong here, and say nothing. It is better to walk out of here than to have to try and fight our way out.”

They walked down into the camp, Chin, Krisha, and Grysta flanked by the four, their blue uniforms and confident manner causing not a ripple of attention. Other than one of the three not mind-linked panicking or saying something wrong, the only worry was that someone would take a very close look at Tobrush, since the Julki were not a shared race but existed in the Mycohl alone. Still, with so little of him exposed in that amorphous blue environment suit, and with so many varied races around, it would take a real expert in race and nationality to identify him as one who didn’t belong in this company, let alone as a Julki.

They approached the first parked shuttle. The two guards, rather bored and none too bright Zamigls, anthropoids noted for big, round, black eyes and hair that grew naturally as uneven spikes all over their faces and bodies, snapped to attention. “Orders?” one barked, trying to sound important.

“You should have received orders from your superiors on our party,” Jimmy McCray said confidently. “Security code alka grefart.”

The guards relaxed. “Oh, yes, sir. You may board.”

“Thank you,” responded the little Terran and, just like that, they all walked aboard.

Modra went forward to take the controls, with Josef taking the jump seat next to her. He surveyed the manual controls with disdain. “Very inefficient. We do things much better in the Mycohl.” 

She shrugged. “When you steal a design you have the advantage of improving on a few things.” She reached up, closed the hatch, and pressurized the cabin, then flicked up the small speaker built into the e-suit. “Shuttle ready for departure, security code alka grefart,” she reported routinely. “Ground, let me know when I’m clear to lift.”

“Timer linked,” came a gruff, guttural voice in her ear. “Lift off at rundown, shuttle.”

The panel came on, with a sixty-second countdown. Krisha and Gun Roh Chin were both holding their breaths during the entire procedure, and both at one point or another became convinced that the count had either slowed or stopped. After a minute of eternity, Modra began throwing switches and then took the stick. The shuttle came to life and lifted off straight up, the screens giving a combined three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view now coming on and showing the correct egress path to orbit.

Gun Roh Chin breathed again. “I was sure we’d get stopped at any moment,” he admitted aloud.

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Jimmy cautioned. “We’ve got this far only because security is so hush-hush it is designed to work without anybody questioning it. But if a higher-up with the fleet decides to challenge our actions, we’ll be for it in a hurry.”

“If you’ve got all your codes right they won’t,” Krisha assured him. “She used to be in intelligence, you know.”

Josef looked at the screens. “That’s quite a fleet they’ve got around here,” he commented. “Well away, too. They’re not ready to be caught in orbit like the research vessel was.”

They were challenged not just once but a half a dozen times by military watchers whose job it was to check out anything odd. Each time a password got them through, although the passwords did change with each level. They reached orbit, passed the security point, received their new clearance vectors, and headed out-system, away from the demon gate and its star.

“Here we go,” Modra said under her breath. “Josef, call your ship.”

Far off, in the massive belt of asteroids so dense it created a ring that encircled the solar system, something dark, something as cold and apparently dead as the rocks among which it hid stirred to life, powered up, checked its systems, and moved out on a vector to meet them. Almost instantly, hundreds of locator beams from the fleet pickets zeroed in on the intruder as well.

“Security code hakah smarsh,” Modra called. “This is a security mission. Please do not interfere.”

Somebody couldn’t accept that. Somebody always hated security. “But we are registering a Mycohl frigate closing on your position!”

“We know,” she informed them calmly. “And if you’ll check your scanners you’ll see that there is no one aboard. It’s taken an awful lot of people a very long time to figure out the codes to activate it without it self-destructing or going into automatic attack mode. Will you kindly not give it any such ideas while we are out here? We are supposed to board it, not be blown to bits by it. This is going to be tricky enough as it is.”

There was a long silence, then, “Oh.”

The sleek, black frigate sped toward them at a rate no shuttle could hope to match, but it slowed to a crawl just beyond visual range and seemed to pull to a stop.

“Wrong shuttle,” Josef explained for the benefit of the three who weren’t linked. “Tobrush can override.”

There was a sudden blast through the ship-to-ship radio of what seemed like static mixed with ear-splitting tones, then silence.

“Shuttle, what is your status?” the perimeter controller asked. “We just received a series the battle computers identify as Mycohl military code.”

“Of course you did,” she responded. “What is your name and rank, anyway? Are you stupid enough to think that a Mycohl ship’s computer would speak Durquist?

There was a silence from the challenger, but they monitored several snickers from other controllers. It had been the correct response for the situation.

The two ships closed, and the shuttle hovered just beneath the main airlock on the frigate. The two airlock systems were incompatible, of course, and deliberately so, unlike merchant vessels which were standardized no matter what the nationality.

“Helmets on!” Modra called to them. “I’m rotating to match our exit hatch with the Mycohl ship, but we’ll have about three meters to go. Captain Chin, make sure that Grysta’s sealed and on internal, will you? Everyone report when they’re ready and I’ll depressurize.”

“All set.”

“Tobrush will go first,” she told them. “The lock’s only big enough for one of him or two of us at a time.” She paused. “Depressurization in effect . . . Done. Opening both airlock hatches. Watch yourselves!”

Tobrush managed to get to the hatch, looked at the distance, then gave himself a push and floated out the shuttle’s main door and up into the open hatch of the Mycohl ship. The frigate’s hatch closed.

“I hope he doesn’t just take off and leave us,” Krisha muttered, as much to herself as to anyone else.

“He won’t. He needs us,” the captain responded, sounding more confident than he felt. This was back in the real universe now, the one he knew, and these were not only Mycohl, that was a Mycohlian master up there.

About a minute later, the frigate’s hatch slid silently back open again. This time Jimmy went up, taking Grysta with him. Having never been independently in space before, let alone operating a suit in a vacuum, she needed a lot of help and there was some apprehension to overcome. Still, the part of her that was Molly calmed her and allowed a smooth ascent.

“Captain, you and Krisha next,” Modra instructed. “Josef and I will go last.”

Neither of the Mizlaplanians felt all that confident about leaving Josef alone with Modra, either, but they obeyed. Modra, however, wasn’t the least bit concerned. For one thing, there was precious little anybody could do in two e-suits in a vacuum, and, for another, neither of the others could know what the mind-link was like. Josef still wasn’t all that admirable a human being, but there could be no surprises between at least three of the four, and the fourth would take any attempts at surprise very badly indeed.


The frigate was spartan by Exchange standards, but it was like a luxurious home to all of them after what they’d been through.

“There’s even a shower on the tower deck!” Krisha enthused.

Josef frowned. “Of course there is. Why wouldn’t there be? This ship is designed to be self-sufficient for several months if need be.”

She shrugged. “Somehow, all the views of the Mycohl we were taught didn’t allow for that sort of thing,” she admitted honestly.

“Well, we envision your ships as like prison ships, full of tiny monastic cells,” he countered.

She sighed. “Well, you’re closer there than I was to this.”

“Enough of this!” Modra snapped. “Josef, you and I have to have to get us out of here yet.”

They took their positions on the command bridge. Josef switched off his intercom as soon as pressurization was complete and depressurized his suit, removing the helmet, and put on his familiar captain’s connector helmet. It felt good to be back and in his own ship; he frankly had never even hoped to be here again once they’d lost their suits on the way in.

Modra clicked on the Exchange military frequency. “Control, we have examined the ship and disarmed its self-defense mechanisms. Our expert believes he can fly it. That being the case, we are going to take it where much smarter people than we are can take it apart and really find out what’s lurking under the shell. Please give us clearance to exit system, then arrange to pick up the shuttle.”

“This is Captain Orgho, Fleet Intelligence,” came an unfamiliar and mean-sounding voice in reply. “Why wasn’t I notified of this? Or even that the Mycohl ship had finally been located?”

“Uh-oh,” Jimmy said aloud.

<Tell him he has no need to know,> Krisha sent. Although without talents, she was smart enough to realize that Modra could read her thoughts and she hadn’t forgotten how to send clearly.

“You have no need to know,” Modra repeated.

<Captain? Am I to understand that you are interfering with a top-secret security detail in the performance of its assignment on your own authority?>

Modra couldn’t resist a smile as she repeated the line in an indignant tone. She knew next to nothing about the military except what she’d gleaned from Josef’s mind and memories and she’d discovered nothing she liked about it. As such, she was grateful to have an expert coach. Hierarchies, it seemed, transcended race and nationality.

The captain did not reply immediately, giving them some nervous moments. Finally he said, “No, I am just doing my duty. The Mizlaplanian and Exchange vessels were examined here before being sent back. I must know for my own records why this procedure is not being followed with this ship.”

Again, Krisha was the coach although Modra said the words.

“Captain, those were commercial vessels. This is a military one. We do not know its capabilities and are praying at the moment that we can pilot it without it killing us. Our fleets are massing along the boundary with the Mycohl at many points, as you surely know. This is only a frigate, but it may give vital clues as to the construction, capabilities, and weaknesses of their larger vessels as well. It is important that it be gotten to a point where the best minds and machines can do just that with minimum risk. If we try anything fancy here, we might just break a security barrier and wind up with this thing in automatic attack mode. You know what would happen if we suddenly started an attack run on you.”

“You would be vaporized before you got close enough to fire anything!”

She grinned, although he couldn’t see it. “Exactly my point. Now, we’re both busy enough and nervous enough here as it is. We have no more time for this. Either clear us to attempt to fly, give the counter-signal for aborting our mission, or interfere on your own direct authority, in which case I assure you you will answer to an Admiralty Board.”

Orgho didn’t like letting them go, but he also was enough of a security organization man, with understandable ambition to one day become an admiral, to know that one does not get to be an admiral by countermanding security missions on your own authority unless you have clear and direct evidence of enemy activity.

“Very well. Transmit course and speed.”

“I most certainly will not!” Modra responded. “I want no Mycohl surprises between us and our destination, and the destination must remain secure. We will clear the fleet. Just give us clearance to jump to subspace.”

“Oh, very well, you’ve got it. But I’m filing a complete report on this to Admiralty, along with a transcript!”

“You do that, Captain. Thank you. Leaving now.” She couldn’t suppress a chuckle, which, fortunately, was with transmitter off. I wonder what rank he’ll be when Admiralty gets that transcript? she wondered.

Josef put the ship into motion, checked the traffic, calculated his best freehand exit, and accelerated to full sublight speed.

<They’ve just locked on all targeting computers!> Josef noted.

<Jump! Now!> Tobrush ordered, and there was a shudder, a feeling of vertigo, and the screens now went blank.

<What happened at the last minute there?> Jimmy wanted to know. <Why did they lock on?>

<Precaution, perhaps,> came Tobrush’s reply. <We did, after all, become melodramatic over the possibility of the ship going wild. Perhaps something else. At any rate, we are now in subspace and far away from them and their fleet. Josef is adept at taking the kind of maneuvers to ensure us not being easily followed. Still, let me check . . . What the . . . ?>

The subspace monitoring screens showed no signs of a ship within any reasonable tracking range. Although that wasn’t an absolute guarantee that nobody was following, it was as good as you could get. Still, the monitors were not totally blank as they otherwise should have been.

As Tobrush watched them, the other three linked with him saw them too. Saw them and recognized them. Amorphous, almost liquid shapes that changed and writhed in a slow and evil dance as they watched.

“Sweet Jesus! They’re all over the place!” Jimmy cried.

Gun Roh Chin released his restraints and went forward to see the screens. What he saw startled him as well. “I’ve seen that phenomenon before,” he told them, “although never so many or so large.”

“That’s no phenomenon!” Modra responded anxiously. “That’s just what we saw in the other plane, minus the grids. The evil . . . those horrid things that live in the muck and cling to the sides!”

“They appear to be growing,” Chin noted.

“Yeah, they are,” Josef agreed. “I can avoid them, unless there’s some kind of attack, but I never saw them here before, and they didn’t teach me anything about those in pilot’s training.”

Krisha, who’d seen them once, stared at the screens and was appalled. “Don’t you see? That’s how it’s done!” she exclaimed. “Subspace—parallel universe, other-dimensional plane, whatever you call it. It’s the same place!. They move, they float within, they attach to a wall and somehow ooze their slime into our universe!”

The captain frowned. “What? How?”

“I don’t know. Through idols, perhaps, and other icons of evil. By being called by those who worship them. Hundreds of ways, I suspect. It’s the physical realization of pure, unadorned evil!”

Jimmy stared at the slowly pulsing, plastic shapes. “He said they did experiments. That’s the mechanism, I’d wager. Program one of those things the way we program computers and send it to a specific point on the grid, small enough for a local area or huge enough to envelop whole worlds. Responsive now only to the Engineer. They said that he alone refused to give up playing with us like toys. Now he’s moving them, concentrating them, perhaps making and programming more. My God! He could cover the Three Empires! And with the Quintara active and free, and all those who’ve always followed evil and the ancient evil ways on world after world, race after race . . . It’s monstrous! It’s the ancient Enemy setting up his pieces to strike at will and without warning! And with ninety trillion Fausts out there being propped for seduction and damnation.”

“Jeez,” Grysta said under her breath, listening to the conversation, sounding more amazed than contrite. “I helped do all that?”

Gun Rob Chin stared at Jimmy. “Who’s this ‘Faust’?”

“An ancient tale of a scholar who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty years of anything he wanted,” Jimmy told him. “It was fun—until the end of the twentieth year. The message is that everybody has a price, but selling out has its own price as well. This Engineer, he’s a god for all intents and purposes, just as the others are as well. But, unlike them, he lacks compassion, or any sense of ethics over lower races. Any at all. He probably ran their experiments in the early days. Perhaps there were even bets.” He thought of Job but decided not to have to explain the Bible to the Mizlaplanians in one easy lesson. “Then something happened. Either they went too far, and everyone but the Engineer was appalled, or they were caught playing by the Captain, who ordered a stop to it. The rest did, but not the Engineer. He was having too much fun. It was probably like a drug to him. He couldn’t give it up, couldn’t halt playing God. In a sense, he was the first Faustus, the model. He traded being a god as long as it lasted to thinking about the consequences of mutiny in some far-off time.”

“He’ll fight if he has to, or when it amuses him to do so,” Krisha agreed, “but he’d much prefer to corrupt and have us march willingly into his horrible slavery. That is consistent with our Scripture.”

“But we—all three empires—are but a slice, and not even a third of a slice, of a single galaxy!” the captain noted. “Why us? We still can’t even count the galaxies out there!”

“Oh, it’s probably nor just us,” Jimmy answered. “We saw the countless galaxies like grains of sand from within that plane. But we’re special. It was while they were playing with us, in our little corner of the universe, that they got caught. Trapped. The demons sealed up, the Engineer forced to work remotely through the other plane, the ship’s corridor or whatever it is, with more limited resources. God knows he was bad enough even under that sort of handicap considering the evil, misery, and destruction of all the histories we know! Krisha said it when she talked about the demon princes, who are, after all, in many ways reflections of their master. Here, in our little corner of the universe, is where they nipped him, hurt him, pushed him back, gave him a bloody nose and a black eye. All his thoughts for these thousands of years have been directed at us, at getting even, at becoming the supreme power and punishing those who bloodied him. It’s a point of honor with him. He might even show kindness or mercy to others far off, for gods are always capricious, but here—here, he wants to drop into a Hell of his worst imaginings.”

Gun Roh Chin nodded. “It all makes a horrible, twisted sense. Worse, it’s consistent with the ancient legends of countless races and the varied ones of our own common mother world. The Hindus perhaps had the best appreciation of the grandiose cosmology, the Jews and their siblings the Christians and Moslems the best appreciation of the local situation. Right now, however, I see more immediate problems.”

“Indeed? What?” Jimmy asked.

The captain pointed to the screens. “This is the only way from world to world without spending several lifetimes in space. What’s the energy blister that maintains our own dimensional environment here to such as that! If that many can be mustered over so vast an area in this short a time, think what a few more weeks, or months, might bring. If he’s a good strategist, as his reputation indicates he is, the worlds will be the last to be fully attacked, save some priming. Think of it! No one will be able to move through subspace without encountering one of those things. They will control travel, commerce, even communication between the worlds. All worlds. They will be cut off, surrounded like white stones on a Go board. All three empires are organized similarly; the glue that holds them together is a level of interdependence. Cut off that trade and you have whole worlds who must submit or die.”

“It is diabolical,” Krisha said, horrified at the picture.

“Indeed. And, in a way, reassuring.”

They all looked at the captain quizzically. “Reassuring?” Jimmy prompted.

He nodded. “He’s living up to his reputation. By doing so, however, he is also approachable. We understand him precisely. What he is doing and why. He has become so corrupted that he is at our level, in a sense. It is a game we can play.”

Jimmy snorted. “I’d rather have his pieces than ours at this point.”

“Perhaps. Have you ever played Go?”

“Don’t know it. Chess was my game, along with cards.”

“Each player places a stone, one at a time, on a very large grid. When an area of opponent’s territory, as it were, is completely surrounded, it is taken. But it is possible to be outnumbered by a massive amount and still win, since no territory is safe no matter how many stones it contains if it can still somehow be surrounded by the enemy. It takes far fewer stones to surround than to fill an area. The trick is not in having the most stones while the game progresses but to have the best position.”

Jimmy refused to feel optimistic. “Yeah? Well, take a look around. Those are just a tiny fraction of his stones. Now look at the contents of this modest ship. Here’s our stone supply.”

Gun Roh Chin nodded. “Then we must get more stones before we play.”

“We’ve got trouble,” Josef reported. “We’re fine as long as we run along a course keeping us within Exchange space, but whenever I attempt an adjustment and attempt to plot a turn into the Mycohl the stuff just builds up like a wall. I realize they can’t possibly be covering tens of thousands of light-years of border, but how old do you want to get before we manage a breakout?”

“Can you shoot your way through?” Chin asked him. “This is a warship, after all.”

“Designed to take on other warships,” the Mycohlian replied. “Nothing I have would work in subspace against subspace material. It’s designed to blow the energy blisters around other ships of our sort.”

Chin thought about it. “Any way to measure the thickness of the barrier?”

“Not meaningfully, no. Again, the instruments are designed to detect our kind of matter and energy. There isn’t supposed to be anything native to this environment.”

The captain considered that. “We have to assume it’s relatively thin, that there’s a limit to how much can be made and programmed within our time frame. I don’t think this concentration is likely to be new material; most likely it’s old stuff, pulled, as someone pointed out, from the far reaches of the universe to concentrate on us. If they could really make and program the material this quickly and in this quantity their captivity would have meant little, since they could still program it even penned up. No, more likely there is either a finite amount of it, period, which would be consistent with some logic, or they cannot make it by themselves and must use what is available.”

“Odd,” Krisha commented. “If you are right, then there may be vast civilizations out there somewhere now undergoing peace and perhaps a golden age.”

“Until they are done with us,” Jimmy muttered.

“Tobrush!” the captain called. “What about using your group abilities to punch that hole for us? You think it is possible?”

“Possibly,” responded the Mycohl master hesitantly, finally able to speak directly to those without telepathic abilities or a knowledge of the Mycohl tongue via his own translator module. “But the price might be too high. No matter what happens, we will attract attention, perhaps all of their attention, and point arrows directly at our position and identities. Right now, I tend to believe that our best interests require us to be as anonymous as possible.”

The captain suddenly frowned, a quizzical expression coming over his face. “Wait a moment! We’ve been going at this the wrong way! These things have no access into our space; they can’t even survive our environment without protections such as the idols and cross-dimensional geometry. Why don’t we just exit as close to them as we dare and go flat out in sublight within our normal universe?”

“I was thinking along the same lines,” Josef responded.

“However, it brings up a number of other risks. If there are any Exchange warships in the region, we’re sitting ducks, and if that stuff is thicker than our sublight speed can take us before we’re intercepted, we’ll have to submerge right into that gook.”

“Those are better odds than staying here or taking them head-on,” the captain noted. “I say we do it. Now.”

“It is worth a try,” Tobrush agreed, and Josef calculated the bare minimum egress trajectory to take them over the dark wall and then placed the ship on automatic.

The engines revved up, they strapped themselves in, and then the screens began to fill with the mass of dark plasma as they approached until there was nothing to be seen but solid obstruction. From the slowly pulsing mass a tentacle formed with astonishing speed and lashed out at them, brushing the ship and going through it as if it weren’t solid at all but rather some sort of ghost . . . 

For a moment the mind-link broke, and Josef felt a lustful, violent rage rise within him . . . 

At the same moment, Modra felt a near crushing weight of guilt conflicting with a near animal lust . . . 

Jimmy felt a horrible, hollow, agonizing despair . . . 

Tobrush repressed a sudden urge to kill everyone aboard.  . . . 

Krisha felt naked, defenseless, totally exposed and alone . . . 

Grysta felt a total animalistic carnality and snapped one of the restraints as she tried to move toward Jimmy . . . 

Gun Roh Chin felt a bit dizzy and his skin tingled for a moment, but otherwise he felt nothing at all.

An alarm sounded on the pilot instrumentation board and snapped Josef back to normal. The link, briefly broken, was restored almost instantly, bringing to all four of the team an awareness of what the other three had felt but also lessening its afterimages in their minds.

“We’re being scanned. About two parsecs distant, no more,” Josef reported. “Definitely an Exchange signal.”

“Automated?” Chin asked worriedly.

“I’d say so, or we’d have had targeting on us by now. They’re probably spread pretty thin through this region, I’d expect. It’ll send a report, but with all this gook I’m not certain anything will be received.”

“They’re sending in, away from the wall,” Chin pointed out. “I’d say it depends on both how close real help is from the monitor probe and also how smart those things underneath really are. If they’re bright, they’ll let these kinds of messages through loud and clear.”

Modra shivered. “I don’t care how smart they are. So much for taking them on directly. Those feelings  . . . All of us. And so personalized.

For the first time, the captain realized that they hadn’t cleared the barrier completely and that there had been effects. Carefully, he polled the others. Finally he said, “I don’t think, from what I’m hearing, that they were personalized at all. Whatever field they generate is designed to suppress inhibition and unlock the primitive parts of the mind, where we store both our worst animal impulses and our darkest fears.”

“Yes, but it was a mere touch,” Krisha breathed, still a bit shaken. “If we’d gone full into it . . . ”

“And it broke our connection at the same time,” Jimmy noted. “Switched it off briefly like a flickering light, turning us from allies to predators against one another. Whatever it is, it’s too strong for the likes of us.”

“They are machines,” Gun Roh Chin insisted. “Not machines as we understand them, but machines nonetheless. Machines designed and programmed with the likes of us in mind.”

Krisha stared at him. “And you felt nothing?”

“A touch of vertigo, a tingling, no more. It works through the t-band, as do the Quintara themselves, and I have virtually no sensitivity there.”

“In a way, I envy you,” she told him. “I think we all do, just a little.”

He shrugged. “Don’t. I could never have gotten out of the crystal stations, let alone off that world back there, except perhaps in chains. And in front of an idol or a Quintara, perhaps my mind could not be so affected, but it would be simplicity itself for one of them to simply order a follower to shoot me or a mob to burn me at the stake.”

“I believe you could actually stand in the presence of a Holy Angel without effect,” she told him.

“Perhaps, but the same thing applies. Even if I were able to get past all the security, fool everyone, and get taken into such a presence, an Angel could summon all the help it needed while I would be unlikely to be able to even converse with it.”

“My instruments state that we’re across the border,” Josef reported. “How long should we go before we try going back under?”

“I wouldn’t submerge until absolutely necessary,” the captain responded. “We simply must minimize the risk of going under and winding up right in the middle of one or more of those things.”

Alarms began sounding once again. “We have an R-class cruiser just surfacing behind us!” Josef reported. “I think they’re going to launch fighters, border or no border!”

“Go under now!” the captain shouted. “We can’t take on that kind of power!”

“We dare not! We haven’t made any real distance yet! We’ll need at least an hour to have any safety margin at all!”

“I think they’ve figured that out,” Modra commented dryly. “I don’t know anything about fighting or military vessels, but I’d say we have maybe five minutes.”



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