“Engaging gravitational field at slowly rising rate to fifty percent of norm,” the pilot announced, and almost immediately they could feel weight returning to them, although not at the level that it had been before. Assuming the girls hadn’t all just gone into labor at the shock of the launch, though, it would be a lot easier on them for the rest of the run to be at half weight, and might minimize some potential complications. Still, the pilot had taken a risk with that launch.
Murphy let out a deep breath and rubbed the back of his neck for a moment. The launch was surprise enough, and he hadn’t been too gentle in meeting that bulkhead because of it. He was also finding it harder to get used to the sudden half gravity than he should have. Maybe it was the ale, he told himself, or maybe he was just getting old after all.
“Girls! You all right?” he called out as soon as he got his wits back. “C’mon, girls! Show yourselves! We got a long way to go here, and we don’t want any mishaps!”
For a while it seemed as if nothing happened, and Murphy grew worried that perhaps they hadn’t been in the room, or, if they had, that they’d been knocked about too badly by the takeoff. He hoped not. It wouldn’t only be messy, it would make them madder than hell.
“Girls?” he called out, growing suddenly worried.
Maslovic gestured to the center table in the lounge with his head and eyes, and Murphy looked and saw what the sergeant had noticed.
Slowly, deliberately, somebody was using some kind of paint or marker to draw a crude design on that shiny clean tabletop.
At first it was more or less a closed circle, and then inside of it a five-pointed star with some odd symbols that looked mostly like swashes inside the outer portion between each star point.
Murphy and Maslovic both stared hard now, not at the design but inside it, and above it, and, to their mutual surprise, they could actually see the three witches, sort of. They seemed to flicker in and out, and parts of them flashed here and there. Finally, though, they attained a more permanent solidity, and the two men could hear them chanting in some unknown tongue.
They looked bedraggled and downright filthy, their hair in tangles, their bodies stained with not only whatever they’d used to paint themselves a day or so earlier but also grease and all sorts of other stuff. There were some fresh scrapes, too, and the red-haired one had a cut on her leg that was still bleeding slightly. Others had small cuts and scratches all over that had healed, and were in a few cases already beginning to bruise.
They also stank of piss and shit and body odors and more. Clearly they hadn’t cleaned themselves up in any way since they’d gone missing, and it was going to make them tough company unless they decided to do so on their own here.
Now all three were standing within the ancient symbol, eyes closed, as the chant came to a rhythmic but definite end.
It was as if they were suddenly out of a trance and back to normal. They let go holding hands, opened their eyes, and looked around. “Ew! Something stinks!” said the red-headed Irish O’Brian, her nose up and contorting her face.
“You said it,” Mary Margaret, the brown-haired one, agreed. Brigit, the blonde, simply said, “Bleah!” in a tone that left no doubt as to her meaning.
“Ah, girls! So happy to see you again!” Murphy said effusively. “But I’m afraid that the stench you’re smellin’ is your own ordinarily sweet selves.”
Mary Margaret looked at each of her companions and then at as much of herself as she could see. “Oh my gawd!” she exclaimed.
“Jeez!” Irish chimed in. “We need baths, and bad!”
“No baths here, darlin’s,” Murphy told them, “but there’s a shower here and a place to clean up and make yourselves presentable again. If you wanted more you shoulda come in while we was still on the big ship, but this is what you asked.”
“Shit! How was we to know?” Irish O’Brian responded. “Well, look, if you two can help us down off this thing, at least we can try and clean up!”
The sergeant got to his feet. “Allow me,” he said pleasantly. In turn, each of the trio came towards him and he picked them up like they weighed nothing at all and put them down on the deck.
“Wow! Feels like I don’t weigh nothin a-tall,” Mary Margaret commented, sort of stomping up and down with her bare feet on the deck. “Neat!”
“It’ll be more comfortable this way,” Murphy assured them. “Now, look, I’ll show you where the toilet is, and you go back there and get clean and nice, and then we’ll all sit here and have somethin’ to eat and talk a bit. We got a long while to go to get to Barnum’s World yet. Three days most likely. No rush.”
For him, though, they couldn’t get there fast enough.
* * *
It did not bother either of the military people aboard that the three girls wore just about nothing on the trip, but it made Murphy uncomfortable and he couldn’t even say why. Certainly he wasn’t sexually attracted to them; even if they weren’t so hugely pregnant, he found himself more frightened of them than anything else, something he hadn’t even thought about before being intercepted by the navy. Possibly it was that demonstration of power they’d done; but, he reflected, it was more like being uncomfortable because he felt helpless and surrounded by three idiots with loaded weapons.
Interestingly, though, they barely remembered the experience, and could not explain how they’d done what they’d done. It did not, however, bother them much. Ignorance was true bliss sometimes, even when you didn’t know that what you did was so remarkable.
At least with all that time to Barnum’s World they didn’t have much to do but eat, sleep, and talk. It was tough to get them to stay on that or any subject for long, but slowly Maslovic began getting some information from them that seemed useful, and Murphy got more than he thought was healthy for him. There was, for example, the eerie feeling in his gut that, even in this small shuttle, what everyone was saying and doing was somehow being monitored and recorded and analyzed. Not by the navy—he expected that, and did not fear it one bit. No, by someone or something else, the ones behind this strangeness.
It’s them damned medals, he decided. I don’t care if they’re worth a fortune or what, there’s something unnatural about ’em.
They had allowed the trio to eat, and they’d had really massive appetites, although for some combinations that not even Murphy could tolerate thinking hard about, and then they’d slept for ten solid hours each. They seemed to sleep a lot, which Murphy put down to their condition. He was most frightened that one or more of the young women would decide to have her kid then and there. He knew the two military people weren’t prepared for such a thing, and he was damned sure he wasn’t.
It was easiest when one or another of them would come to the lounge leaving the other two still asleep. This happened quite a lot after that initial sleep-off, although if it was the blonde-haired Moran, you couldn’t get a full sentence out of her if you tried. O’Brian never stopped talking, which was quite typical of people who had little to say, and McBride seemed the most normal of the bunch although no brighter, willing to engage in small talk or not as needed. She also seemed the most curious about the navy pair, which allowed for a give-and-take exchange of information. Over a few sessions, Maslovic in particular was able to get pretty direct with the brown-haired self-described witch.
“Where’d you learn to do that magic spell that caused the vanishing trick?” he asked her casually as she ate. Murphy sat away from them, curious but not exactly motivated to join in.
“Tip told us how,” McBride responded with that slightly off-kilter view of conversation they all shared and which had nearly driven the senior officers of the Thermopylae nuts.
“Tip? Who’s Tip? A kind of spirit?”
She nodded, munching on a potato pancake and sipping very dark tea mixed half and half with cream and sugar. “Tip can’t do things in our plane without us, we can’t do nothin’ neat here without him and his friends givin’ us the power and all.”
“Ti
p talks only to you, then? Not to Moran or O’Brian?”
“See? There y’go again! Why do you and the driver up there always use only the family names? Don’t you have another name?”
“What? You mean like you?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I mean, I got three names, and only one isn’t just me. And there’s Brigit Maureen and then there’s Colleen Megan, and she even has a name all her own that everybody uses instead of them.”
“Irish, you mean? Why do you need all those names?”
She shrugged. “ ’Cause I guess there’s only so many names and we don’t want to have nobody else’s, that’s why. Don’t always work even then. I mean, I can’t count the number of Mary Margarets back home. I always thought I wanted me own name, like Irish done, only I never come up with none I really liked.”
“We have ranks and we have numbers,” the sergeant explained. “The numbers are never the same so we can always be ourselves. The rank changes if we do a good job, but the number is unique. The number’s all we really need, but it’s just too much of a mouthful to say, particularly when you’re in a hurry. Easier to say ‘Sarge,’ or, if there’s more than one of my rank, ‘Maslovic,’ instead of, oh, ‘Hurry up, M2174-34K77-41CK!’ See what I mean?”
She laughed. “That’s funny. But we gets our family names from our das. When we was goin’ ’round your big ship, we saw lots of you folks with none of them fancy if borin’ clothes on, and you don’t have no das or mums. How could you?” She sighed. “I’ll be glad when the wee one comes out and I can wear pretty clothes again.”
She was starting to drift away from the thread, so he brought it back.
“Oh, we have parents, if that’s what you mean. We just don’t know who they are. But the family name of my parents is Maslovic, which is why the name’s there. Some of my looks, and I guess more, come from them. I’ve met other Maslovics aboard and we kind of look similar.”
“But how can you have close family when you ain’t got no dicks or wombs? Don’t make no sense.”
“It’s done by doctors and machines,” he told her. “It’s less dangerous and completely controlled, so there’s little chance of us not coming out right.”
“And a damn sight less fun, seems t’me,” she muttered, finishing her food.
Murphy had always thought that as well, like the military types were more machines than humans, unable to feel the same emotions as “normal” people. Now he still wasn’t sure what their lives were like internally, but he was beginning to wonder if others like the girls weren’t just as much manufactured to somebody’s order and requirements.
Hell, it almost made you paranoid thinking that maybe somebody actually made you, too, and he wasn’t thinking about God when that awful idea crept into his mind.
Maslovic had no such worries. He and Chung not only knew that they were designed, they felt great comfort in that. It was who or what was perverting the same technology that had them worried here.
“You were telling us about Tip,” the sergeant said, as breezy and conversational as if he were just killing time.
“Yeah, well, what’s to tell?” she responded. “I mean, like, Tip is just Tip, that’s all.”
The security officer looked around. “Well, now, let’s see. Is he some sort of invisible entity? Some kind of creature who speaks only to you?”
She giggled. “Of course not, silly! Little kids got make-believe little friends. Tip’s different. We’re kinda like, married, in a way. Y’know, like Irish’s got Tad and Brigit’s got Tod.”
“So there are three of them? And where are they if not in the air like spirits of old? Inside your body?”
“This is gettin’ borin’, it is. I don’t wanta talk about this no more right now. I’m just so tired. I think maybe I should sleep some more. How much longer to this world you’re takin’ us to?”
“We’re better than halfway there,” Maslovic assured her. “Not much longer now.”
But by this time Mary Margaret McBride had forgotten even the question, and she was on her feet and making her way back aft to the bunks.
When she’d gone, Maslovic looked over at Murphy. “You’re the expert on these people,” he said. “Is she crazy?”
“Most probably, although who’s to say if it’s them or us?” the old captain retorted. “Still and all, I think there’s somethin’ to it. I been goin’ nuts starin’ at them jewels the girls got round their necks. They’re not just good-lookin’ gems cut right, they’re more than that. I seen their like before. Not for real, I don’t think, but in pictures and such. Some museums and real rich folk got ’em. Them’s Magi stones. The livin’ gems said to come from the legendary Three Kings.”
That got the sergeant’s interest. “Indeed? Exotic stones from—where?”
“The Three Kings, man! Everybody’s heard of the Three Kings. They may not be real, or if they are they’re almost certainly not what folks think they are, but they’re the stuff of legend, just like the three originals. Of course, you probably ain’t heard of them, either.”
“Not particularly. I wish I had my complete reference databases handy, though. I hate being the last to know when somebody throws in a curve.”
“Well, I can only tell you what everybody seems to know. Three planets around some gigantic ringed star, supposedly discovered during the Age of Exploration a couple hundred years ago by one of the missionary monks who was half man and half scouting ship. Sent back the news of great treasure and miraculous living and all that stuff, and he said there was lots of evidence of advanced alien life. Named ’em after the three kings who brought gifts to the baby Jesus. Said anybody who could get there and keep clear of the snake would find riches beyond compare.”
“Pardon? The what?”
“The snake, man! Serpent. The incarnation of the Beast who got humanity to sin and heaped that sin upon all its descendants. The devil, if you will. The sort these three girls claim to be their god or whatever.”
“Interesting. There are so many mythic religions I admit I know little of any. Doesn’t seem relevant unless it’s a key to solving something practical. Still, it sounds like I could do with some information on this sect.”
“’Sect’ he calls it!” Murphy muttered, genuinely appalled at the dismissal. “Faith of me fathers it is, boy. You navy boys know Vaticanus and its influence and orders, I think.”
“Ah! That one! I know a little. Enough, I think. Sorry, no offense meant. It’s just not in our nature to take seriously old men in the sky and stuff like that. Okay, so this missionary and scout reported riches on three worlds, lots of powerful aliens, and so forth. Why didn’t somebody follow up and see if anything was really there instead of making it some kind of fairy tale?”
“Aye, that’s the rub. The coordinates for stabilizing wormgates were jumbled. Made no sense. And only part of the detailed information came through. Enough to make it a riddle, not enough for even the best minds and computers and all to solve. And the old boy was never heard from again.”
“So now we have cults like this one the girls belong to because of some lost colonial coordinates? Amazing!”
Murphy shook his head from side to side. “No, it ain’t that simple, y’see. Somebody a long time ago thought they solved the riddle and went off in one of them big scientific and speculative expeditions. Fancy ship, fancy equipment, well heeled. Nobody heard from it until after the Great Silence. Then, one day, it suddenly reappeared from someplace in the Draco Sector. The Dragon, another of the devil’s disguises. The whole ship was in perfect shape, but there wasn’t anybody aboard and all the data records had been wiped clean.”
“You mean erased?”
“Or maybe just fried. Who knows? But it had pictures of some pretty worlds, a bunch of really oddball little mechanical thingies, some sort of artifacts of alien design and unknown purpose and origin, and it had a stash of them gems. The very gems like the ones around these three girls’ pretty necks.”
Maslovic gave a soft, low
whistle. “And did they later find more of them?”
“Oh, ’twas said that somebody did, and that a few more fell into the hands of a big-time evangelist—a protestant one at that! And he went off chasin’ ’em a few decades ago and they never heard from him no more, neither. Which leaves us with just the hundred or so from that original mystery ship, unless there’s ones nobody knows about. Rare, beautiful, and among the most expensive gems in the known universe. And three of ’em seem to have wound up around our darlin’s pretty necks.”
“You’re sure they’re real and not fakes? Imitations? I imagine there’s a lot of those considering the legends and the rarity.”
Murphy nodded. “Oh, tons I’m sure. But ’tis said you always can tell a fake one from a real one. Not just the quality, but the effect.”
“The what?”
“The effect. ’Tis said that when you look into ’em you get visions and weird feelin’s and all. Nothin’ specific, mind. And eventually you get an overload and somethin’ scares you. Somethin’ that lives inside the gems or somethin’ like that. In any case, no fake has that!”
Maslovic leaned back and thought a moment. “Tad, Tod, and Tip. Three demons in three gems. If they are real, then if you or I stare into one, we should meet someone, eh?”
“You meet ’em. I’m perfectly content to be ignorant this time,” said Murphy.
* * *
Irish O’Brian never seemed any smarter than the other two, just far more suspicious of everything and everybody. She also wasn’t all that happy to hear how much Mary Margaret had told them just sitting around, although she seemed more disgusted than surprised.
“Why does it bother you that we talk to the others?” Maslovic asked her in that same friendly conversational tone he’d used so successfully on the other.
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