“Was it a Faustian bargain, then?” Captain Murphy put in. “Did you sell him your soul in exchange for them services that saved the others?”
“No. I appreciate that you are both attempting to understand what can only be understood in my personal context. To have sold him my soul would have been easy. He buys many, and is generous to those who sell. But as I do not believe in souls, I could not sell him mine. It would be meaningless. No. We were on a far colonial outpost. Most of my family was barely making ends meet. We were attacked by pirates, and Mister Macouri happened to be nearby doing some more normal business. He answered our call, and asked me what I would give for salvation, since his own beliefs preclude charity involving risk. I offered my humble services for soever long as he needed them, and my unquestioned obedience in life. He accepted, and hired local mercenaries to rescue us. He then put a reward on each pirate head, and they were tracked down and their heads delivered to his representative for payment. I had the will but not the resources to do that. Does that answer your question?”
Maslovic nodded. “I believe so. I’m not sure, though, that you won’t have to make a choice that is as ugly as any you’ve made before.”
“Why are you so disturbed, Maslovic? We are the same,” Joshua said to him.
“I beg your pardon?”
“We are the same. Your code—it says you obey orders. That you serve your mission as given by your superiors regardless of whether or not you, personally, believe it is right or wrong. You do it for family, for personal honor, and because it is your function in life. The rest do the same, except, perhaps, for the man Murphy here, who may do what is right and honorable, or not, depending on how he feels that moment, and those young women.”
Maslovic didn’t want to travel that road. “What about Magda Schwartz?”
“She is in highly profitable sales. Security equipment and all the peripherals that are needed. Most of her clients might be considered insane in one way or another. Great fortune and no responsibility does that more than not I have learned. She makes them happy and does not judge them. When she makes them happy, they give her big orders that make her rich by commissions. She, too, thinks that our part of the universe is falling apart. Her solution to it is to amass sufficient money so that she can at least be very comfortable until it ends or she dies happy. It is not something I would like to do, but I can understand it.”
“As can I, Joshua. As can I. Tell me, though—Macouri’s beliefs? Did he come by them himself, or did he get something through those stones?”
“I do not use the stones. He does. I do not think he gets any messages, but he does get the effects. They excite him and conform to his cosmology. But I believe he envies the young women. They can speak and understand. They have no need of cosmology.”
“And they couldn’t pronounce it anyway,” Murphy noted.
“Then why is he so frightened to be here?” Maslovic asked the bodyguard.
“Mister Macouri is a powerful man. He places power where I place honor and you place duty. That is more than sufficient where we live. But here, in their part of the universe, what is he? Without his power he is nothing. Without his power he is the potential victim.”
“Well, go on back and help him prop himself up,” the marine said. “We may yet need him.”
After Joshua had left, Maslovic turned to Murphy. “You’ve been around more than I have with these types. What do you think?”
“I dunno. If honor is so important that you promise to obey every command and the bastard commands you to strangle children, are you honorable? I don’t trust folks like that. They got no questions. This is a man who will unhesitatingly butcher the innocent because he promised a madman he’d do whatever the madman asked. Them’s the kind that put women and children in ovens and turned on the gas in past history. They give me the creeps.”
“Point taken.”
“You better watch it yourself, though, Sarge. Your own folk have a history of openin’ up on innocent kids if some crazy general or admiral says to. You got the real rock and a hard place. You expect your team to obey instantly, to die for you if need be, ’cause if they don’t it could be too late for everybody. That don’t make your kind evil like that fellow—he has a choice and he already decided it—but it does open up the same result. None of you are no better than the folks what give you the orders. That’s why I’m me own man. ’Cause everything I do is my responsibility, my decision, and I’m the only one what decides if I sleep good nights or not.”
“You continue to amaze me, Murphy. I thought you were just a drunken old sot.”
“Oh, I am. But there’s worst things to be. If I was real smart I’d be rich and retired with scantily clad girls peelin’ and feedin’ me grapes while I reclined in me garden. But I’m clever enough to have done somethin’ that most folks in me line of work rarely get to do.”
“Yes?”
“I’m old, Sergeant. I got old and I’m still here.”
* * *
The computers were of little help in figuring out a method of isolating and picking up the Stanley survivors, and they soon realized that the only hope they had was the same sort of contact system they’d used to speak in the first place. Somehow the waves or particles or whatever sort of energy linked all the Magi stones would have to lead them to one another.
“We’re going to have to use the shuttle, not any of the fighters, to have any sort of chance here,” Broz said. “That means making contact while inside, and hoping that we can somehow use that link to ride the beam, as it were, down to the people.”
“No probes?” the sergeant asked.
“Many probes, sure, and I still got some good ferrets, too, but what good do they do? They can’t identify and latch on to this broadcast connection, and they can’t be one end of it, either. It seems to work only with a brain at each end.”
“I don’t like it. That means taking the girls, who seem to need to be all together on this. Add a pilot and a couple of people to aid in getting the survivors aboard, and we’ve got a significant group of exposed personnel. What if it’s a trick? What if nobody’s down there and they nail our people? We’d have no practical way to rescue them, considering how stripped the old girl is here.” Maslovic shook his head. “I don’t like it.”
“Still and all, we got to try,” Murphy said flatly.
The sergeant sighed. “Yes, we do. The girls okay?”
“Yep. Don’t remember a thing ’cept that for a while they felt hotter’n Hell and everything smelled bad. Got to smell like sulphur down there, and if they’re in the mid latitudes, north or south, what’d we figure? Forty-five, forty-six degrees Celsius? They felt and smelled what the speaker told ’em. Kinda sounds like what you’d expect from a demon at that, don’t it?”
“Don’t you start on that! They willing to try it?”
“Sure. It’s somethin’ to do, and it gets them their pretty baubles. They’re still pissed we took ’em back before they woke up.”
“Okay, then. Cap, you with the girls. We’ll let Sanchez and Nasser handle the rescue, and Broz, you fly it manually. No merging, you’re just not trained for it.”
“Got it, Boss,” she said. “Don’t worry. If we can get the coordinates, we’ll get them. Man! Is that one ugly place down there, though! I’d take breathers.”
Everyone was nervous except the girls, who thought it was a big adventure. As far as the others were concerned, once the people on the surface were located, it was going to be quick in and out just as fast as possible.
The shuttle was launched from high orbit, and Broz decided to take it in a broad series of spirals covering as much of the northern hemisphere as possible from a decent altitude. If they found nothing, she was prepared to climb and do the same at the south.
“You gals ready to get into your magic circle or whatever?” Murphy asked them.
“Don’t need to,” Irish O’Brian told him. “I can almost smell ’em now.”
“Me, too!” pip
ed up Brigit Moran. “And they don’t smell good, neither!”
“Well, I hope they’re away from them seaside colonies,” Murphy commented. “You see the sucker mouths on them things? I don’t think I want to introduce meself to them right now.”
“They’re not near the big ocean,” Mary Margaret McBride said. “Oh, I wish I could really see down there! I can feel ’em when we get close!”
“Take your time,” Broz told them. “You tell me when we’re close and when we’re going away. I’ll try and narrow it down.”
It took much of the day to do it the hard way, but finally they were able to zero in on one particularly large and active island whose interior had a series of jungle outcrops amidst what seemed to be blowing dust and steaming ground.
“There! Right down there!” McBride announced. “Oh! You’re goin’ past ’em again!”
Broz slowed to a crawl and then backtracked a bit. All sensors were deployed now, and they were at such a low altitude that she felt sure she could locate individuals if they got close enough. The trouble was, they were getting pretty exposed to whatever other hostile elements might be down there, including the creatures Murphy had christened the Big Suckers. Still, this location made sense if you wanted to avoid that kind of contact. The Suckers weren’t averse to going in the ocean, but they didn’t seem to stray more than a few kilometers inland.
“Got ’em!” Broz announced. “I have absolutely no idea how we just did this, but we got ’em! Right down there, just ahead and below us to the right. And they see us!”
Murphy and Sanchez checked the screens. “I only see three of ’em,” the marine noted.
“Well, we’re not staying around here long. I’m putting down. Cap, you and the girls come forward into the pilot’s compartment. I’m going to seal us off and keep us pressurized here, so we won’t have to eat that dust. Sanchez and Nasser will have the suits and breathers, and medical kits as well.”
The people who came out to meet the shuttle were burned black by the sun, but their hair had turned almost snow white. They were all thin enough to count ribs from afar, but still they looked in reasonably good shape. It was in their eyes that you saw the length and depth of their ordeal. These people had been camping out in Hell for several lifetimes.
Even with the breather and the protective suit it was no place the others, even the marines, wanted to linger. The air was thick with volcanic dust and gasses, there seemed tremors that vibrated everything and everybody coming every minute or two, and with just breathers on there was no way to completely avoid the stench.
The girls hadn’t been joking. Hot as hell and it stank.
It was only when the marines were helping the castaways aboard that they could see the signs of injuries on the leatherlike skin: scars and missing or chipped teeth, and places where they’d been both punctured and sandblasted with nothing in a kit to help.
Nonetheless, the one man in the group carried something in a kind of sack made from the leaves of one of the jungle outcrop tree fronds.
Over the howls of the wind outside, Sanchez yelled at him, “Where’s the fourth person? We can’t stay!”
“We don’t know! She’s around! We haven’t had much of a way to control her!” Jerry Nagel shouted back.
“Well, we’ll give her a few minutes. Otherwise we’ll just mark the spot and see if we can come back later.”
“Li! For God’s sake! Get in here!” the smaller and older of the women yelled.
Suddenly, from the thick brush beyond, a tiny figure raced for the shuttle and almost jumped on board.
Nasser hit the bay door closed the second she’d cleared it, and even before it was all the way shut, Broz had begun to lift off. The wind and coming storm were actually buffeting the shuttle, and she wanted up and out of there as quickly as possible. The moment the aft compartment was sealed and pressurized, she took it up at full speed.
Most of their new passengers were out cold the moment they hit the deck inside, but one, a nearly skeletonlike figure of an older woman, kept looking around at them and muttering, over and over, “Thank God! Thank God!”
XI: INVITATION TO THE DARK
The Voices were there and they spoke to him in the same soothing, cajoling, wondrous way that they’d first reached out to his mind. He was afraid he’d lost them, or that they no longer needed him once they were here, in their domain, but they had not let him down in the end.
It was all so… simple. He’d never demonstrated any special powers to the others, so they had been content to keep a ship’s watch on him and restrict him to an area where they thought he couldn’t cause any trouble. Little did they know!
Now, though, the demons had come again to him, and spake unto him, and this time they had unfolded his destiny.
They already knew how to fool these primitive ship’s systems. It had been so simple and, of course, they’d had the download from the minds of those simpleton girls. Now, though, it was time to put away childish pettiness and fulfill his dreams.
He had been limited here because of the lack of sufficient stones, but now there were enough, more than enough. That was why the others had to be rescued. He understood that now. But he saw that they had brought him not only sufficient stones for him to commune and transfer the vast power they offered him, but they had brought him his sacrifice as well. They had kept the useless thing alive so long, under such miserable conditions, until she could be bled out alive to their greater glory.
Now it was time.
“Joshua!” he whispered, shaking the big man slightly so as to awaken him without startling him.
“Huh? Uh… Sir?”
“Joshua, you are to proceed to the shuttle and do a systems check,” Georgi Macouri instructed. “I shall be along shortly. I have someone special to collect.”
“The shuttle? But that’s going to be under full security, sir!” the big man whispered back, awake now.
“They will not see you nor notice you. You will be as if invisible to them. Trust me. We are both called to glory this time, and this time no one shall interfere!”
Joshua had no faith, but his code required obedience in these matters. He had seen enough in his service of his master that he was prepared to accept almost anything as possible, yet he didn’t believe that this was more than delusion. It didn’t matter.
“Do you have a chronograph?”
“I have a watch, sir. Three thirty-seven ship time.”
“Good, good. I will synchronize. Yes. Are you awake enough to go now? I do believe we must operate within a window here.”
“Yes, sir. As you wish. Anyone else accompanying us?”
“How I would like it to be so! But, no, the voices have instructed that we carry only one, the one who fits the situation of sacrifice. Leave her to me.”
Joshua rubbed his eyes and got as awake as he could, then stood up. “As you wish, sir.”
Macouri went to the door, his eyes glowing with the vision of the fanatic. “This is Destiny. My family, now me. This is the climax to my life and the reason all of us have been born. I feel ashamed to have doubted it, but I shall never doubt again!”
In another part of the ship, a far different scene was taking place.
“You should be asleep,” Maslovic told Randi Queson.
“Yeah, I should, but, the fact is, I did more of that than anything else. I’m now beginning to feel some energy come back into me. Hope will do that. I looked at myself in the face, though. I was never much of a beauty and it’s been a long time since I was a child, but I truly look ancient.”
“It will pass, or much of it will. You just need to get some weight back on and get a solid reconstruction medical program going. The same with the others.”
“Lucky—that’s Cross, the other woman like me—she might actually come out of this ahead. She weighed over a hundred and sixty kilos at standard one gravity, which is why she spent so much time in low gravity situations. Now—well, she was always tall, but she’s as skinny
as me. I know she never gave a damn about her own looks, but I suspect that if she doesn’t thoroughly relapse she’s going to look radically different and that’ll change some of her future life.” She paused. “Um, we have a future life, I assume?”
“Hard to say. Your ship never made it back, either. Just like the others.”
She nodded. “I heard someone say that. Hell, maybe we won’t be able to go back. We may wind up enlisting or whatever it is you do to join the services.”
“Nobody joins the services anymore,” Maslovic told her. “You are born into it, period. We have changed just enough from you that it’s no longer possible—or necessary.”
Someone else entered the wardroom and they turned. It was Jerry Nagel, looking over the spartan machinery for a snack.
“You get pretty much what it decides, rather than you,” Maslovic called to him. “This is the navy, after all.”
Nagel took what he fervently hoped was some coffee and a rectangular bar of the nearly tasteless vitamin cakes that were kind of standard fare here and came over to them. “Hello,” he said, more to Queson than to Maslovic. “I’m surprised you can still get coffee.”
“Synthetic, like everything else,” the sergeant responded. “But it’s traditional. There is always coffee in all wardrooms.”
“After God knows how long eating leaves and tasteless fruit and berries and drinking mostly water, I can tell you that even this helps.”
Queson turned the conversation towards the practical. “So what are you going to do now?”
“You’ve been asleep the better part of several days, and under the medical computer’s treatment. During that time, we’ve taken a closer look at the problem of Balshazzar.”
“Give me a few of those stones and we can talk,” she told him, “but that’s about it. They taught me a lot. It was going back and forth with them that kept us close to sane, or at least gave us hope. They were a huge Christian religious commune of some kind and they somehow managed to keep their own values. I was raised Catholic, but the nuns never taught anything like that.”
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