Maslovic wasn’t buying anything until he had the full story. “Sanchez, Nasser. Cover the shuttle when it docks in Bay One. Take no guff from anybody. Understand?”
The truth was, neither they nor he did understand. Why quit and give up when you walked through security and a cyberlinked ship without being noticed? Did Joshua kill Macouri? Had they misjudged him? Or what?
The truth, such as it was, was soon plain when the shuttle docked and the hatches hissed and then opened. Joshua emerged first, and was clearly both unarmed and no threat. In fact, he looked to the marines as if he had suddenly grown very tired and very old and beyond any of this.
Nasser gestured for Sanchez to keep a watch on Joshua and went inside. He wasn’t gone long, and when he emerged he had a look that no marine had shown for a very long time.
“It’s a butchery in there,” he told his partner and by extension the others waiting above. “I’ve been in a few nasty fights, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”
Behind him, a tiny figure emerged, dark, weathered like the others of Melchior and, like them, almost a stick figure in spite of long and still messy-looking matted hair trailing down its back.
The one who was once An Li looked neither shocked nor traumatized in any way, although she did have a little bit of that pissed-off look she’d had from the start.
“I may have to get used to this for a while,” she said, “but I don’t have to sacrifice. Anybody on this tub smoke cigars?”
“That’s not Li,” Nagel commented. “It may be her body, but that’s not her. Not even before. The face, the walk, the movements, all different.”
“Wake Murphy up and get him up here,” Maslovic instructed Broz. “We may just be making a first contact here and, if so, this is definitely right up his alley.”
* * *
The one in An Li’s body sat there in the ward room looking at the rest and somewhat enjoying it. Even Murphy hadn’t been able to come up with a cigar, but he did have some Irish-style whiskey that the little one seemed to find very much to her liking.
“Well, I see you all gathered round and hovering like scavengers over dead meat, so we might as well get this over with,” she said. “I admit right now I expected to feel a lot better than I do. I think I’ve got bruises in places where until not long ago I didn’t have places.”
“Needless to say, you are not An Li,” Randi Queson attempted a more casual beginning.
“No, hardly. But I’m not the folks I suspect you’re looking for, either. Let’s just say I’m from Balshazzar, or at least I’ve been there a very long time. This is a trick we’d discovered and practiced quite often down there over the years, although it’s no mean trick to do, let me tell you, even face-to-face, and from surface to orbit—well, I’m surprised it worked. Whether I’m pleased I don’t rightly know. I’m not used to being this, well, diminutive, let’s say, or to be assembled in quite this fashion. However, when the watchers below observed the ship and zeroed in on it and immediately saw what was about to go on in it, we just had to do something. Much good came of that decision, which was made in quite a hurry. Karl Woodward, the founder of the group below, was dying, and dying ugly. By millimeters. Slow and painful. Mostly it was age, together with a lot of things that we carry with us. He could have used this method. Young people were willing to give their bodies to save him, but he wouldn’t have it. Now he’s got one. Not as young as it should be, but younger, and in better overall condition. And I have performed an excellent operation and surgically removed an extremely evil man from this plane of existence. Karl would be shocked to hear me say that, particularly in that manner, but it’s true nonetheless.”
“And An Li? What of her?” Randi asked.
“I don’t know. There was precious little home when I moved in, I can tell you that, and it had noplace to go so it’s still here. I can access it, and there really isn’t anything there. You thought it was trauma, but I think the old An Li was too tough for that. I think you all went to bed in that mountain of Magi stones and in the mental seizures it caused, she either was wiped clean or, maybe like me being here inside this shell, she went somewhere else. Where? Who knows? But it gives me some peace that I didn’t destroy or force a cohabitation with anyone to pull this off.” She looked around. “Pretty small crew for a ship this size.”
“We’re the suicide brigade,” Maslovic told her. “Mostly automated. A shuttle couldn’t have made it, and it was too risky to bring through the fleet. That left us.” Quickly, he introduced everyone. “And you are…?”
She thought a moment. “The old one was Li, so let’s just call me Ann. I think maybe it’s best that way. There’s no going back, and I’m not sure I could ever get up the emotion and total commitment it took to do this sort of thing again. I can tell you though, seeing, feeling that terror and that evil I had no hesitation whatsoever. The moment he thought he was in complete control and cut her bonds, I moved. Even then, without all those stones all heaped up and arranged around the rapist’s bed, I wouldn’t have had the power. As it was, it just happened. That’s what we have found gives the most power with these things. Pure emotion. You don’t think, you act. I suspect that’s why we’re going to stay second-tier citizens. I think they can control the power through reason and will. We need rage or lust or something equally base to really do the impossible.”
“Were you one of the ministers there in the cul—religious commune?” Randi pressed.
“Please! No more! Who I was I will never be again and that is for the best. That person is now dead. Who this person was,” tapping her chest, “is the same, or so I suspect. If she shows up again and demands it, I couldn’t deny her entry, but I suspect that she and I will never meet in this life. I suspect that Doctor Woodward will tell you the same. On the other hand, here I am, off Balshazzar. That’s something nobody has managed to do before in any incarnation.”
“Why do they keep you there, but not us on Melchior?” Nagel wondered aloud. “I’ve been trying to figure that out since the start.”
“We’re huge down there, and we multiply. The other races down there are about as alien as you can imagine, but in many ways they’re the same. Breeders, high technology types, who got snared here just like we did. They are all threats, or maybe just enough to gum up the works a bit, and all are from civilizations that would come swarming in here. You, you were a few stranded prospectors nobody would miss. Nothing personal. And none of the other races on Melchior seem sensitized to the stones.” She looked straight up at Maslovic. “You know what you have to do.”
The sergeant, who had a mild suspicion that he might have indirectly known the person now in the tiny woman’s body but who decided not to press it, nodded. “We have to go to Kaspar.”
Murphy sighed. “The one pretty one in the bunch and we got to go to the cold, dark place.”
“We’re still here, Captain,” Maslovic responded. “It appears that, of all the ones who have come here before, for any and all reasons, we have been invited.”
* * *
It must have been odd, Randi thought, to look through the stones and see yourself somewhere else down there on the planet, but that’s what Ann was doing.
The figure that appeared in their minds as they spoke with the leader on Balshazzar was of a huge man in a pink robe and a tremendous gray-white beard and long flowing hair, the very picture of a prophet or perhaps Moses getting the Ten Commandments.
“I am still getting used to this,” Karl Woodward said. “You are all right with all this, my old friend?”
“It is actually quite practical,” Ann assured him. “And it beats the DNA makeover that never really did the full job which you have now inherited. It is you who have the really difficult job now, Karl. You have to continue to sit there and lead. I, on the other hand, get to finally go where common sense should have told us to go so long ago.”
“It was Kaspar who always traveled, says the legend, with a finely hewn box of the most exquisite mahogan
y,” Woodward reminded him. “And all who saw it marvelled at the box and wondered what great mystical treasures it contained. And when the baby Jesus reached out to the box, only then did they discover that inside was where the old astrologer kept his candy. You won’t find candy in Kaspar’s box this time, you know.”
“I know. But perhaps we will find truth, old friend. If we can get back the word, we will do so.”
“Take care. Go with God, and keep the temper in check until it’s necessary.”
“But give ’em Hell when required,” Ann responded, completing some private joke of theirs. “Yes, I remember. Perhaps not yet farewell, but it is time.”
“I agree. It is time.”
Ann broke contact, and Chung prepared to secure the ship and break orbit. Randi Queson wandered back to the wardroom and sank down in a chair next to Jerry, Murphy, and Broz.
“You are worried,” Nagel said. “I’m worried, too, but I expected to be dead and done to a turn back there by now, so at least we’re going to go in full steam and of our own free will. Who knows what we’re going to find?”
“I know, I know. But with all that, I keep going back to the nightmare.”
Nagel nodded. “I know. I can’t get it out of my mind, either.” Randi, Jerry, and even the less sociable Cross, had all used the stones to share the nightmare with the others, a nightmare they had experienced only once, yet could not forget.
She had been flying, flying through some strange, alien greenish sky with pink and yellow clouds.
Although it had clearly been a point in some kind of atmosphere, she could see through it to the stars beyond, the whole starfield laid out before her, not in the usual visual spectrum but through some other means. It was almost as if she were viewing some kind of photographic negative of the sky, an alien sky she’d never seen before filled with all the stars and formations of a globular cluster, but where light was dark and black was a kind of bright, soft pink.
Looking below, she saw a vast world that was heavily developed but long past its prime. Great domed cities stretched in uncounted number to the horizon, encapsulating ancient and dying masses whose shape and other details could not be determined from this height.
It would have been awesome if she hadn’t felt permeated with a sense of awful hopelessness, a feeling that all those billions plus billions down there were in total despair, creating so much unhappiness that it collected and beamed from every individual and every dome and perhaps every centimeter of the planet, and beyond, going to and right through Randi Queson. She felt tremendous sorrow for them, all the more because she knew that she could not help them in any way, only watch their decline into despair and death.
The others were all with her. She could feel them, sense them in a hundred inexpressible ways, yet she could not see her companions. They were wraiths, flying over a planet of the dead, but they were still wraiths, as helpless as any spectre.
And now they were off the world, and into the strangely inverted and bizarrely colored void.
There were others out here as well. Many others, but wraiths just like themselves, able to witness but only to witness, as they went from world to world, system to system, in a flash of darkness, instantly going from world to world and finding only the feelings of horror, despair, and death.
There were Others, as well, on some of those worlds, and going between them. It was no more possible to tell anything else about them than it had been to tell details of the first and subsequent civilizations, but this was a different realm, a different sort of sensory perception, and they were clear as could be.
These were the Bringers of Despair, hatching from the dark, hidden places and wrapping themselves around the worlds they found and helplessly sucking the life out of them. The ones the Others attacked wanted to fight back, wanted to push back this horror, but they could not. Once attacked, they progressively lacked the energy to push against this overwhelming darkness, a darkness that seemed both infinitely collective and yet of one mind and attitude.
They veered off, swallowing pride, running for their lives, flying through holes and folds in space one after the other, throwing off the pursuer or pursuers. All thought was gone; there was suddenly only panic, only fear, and a sense that they must return together.
And then it was all emotions, rising up like a giant wave and crashing down, washing over them, bathing them in a range so intense they could not bear it.
“Are the ones we head to the Bringers of Despair or those who fight and flee them?” Ann asked her.
“I don’t know. I can’t know. I certainly hope it isn’t the Bringers. If they’re real, and I deep down believe that they must be, then we’re doomed. Ones who sterilize the universe behind their waves of aimed cosmic ray storms… It’s too horrible!”
“Let’s go see,” said Ann, even as Maslovic gave the command from the center to break the ship out of orbit and head towards the small, dark moon of mystery.
XII: KASPAR’S BOX
At one hundred and eighty kilometers above the planet-sized moon, the instrumentation and cameras could do an excellent job. If somebody had stopped off there and left graffiti on a rock, they could read it. The trick was noticing the rock in the first place.
It was a forbidding-looking place in any event. The residual heat from the big and still officially unnamed mother planet plus pressure deep under its oceans, freezing around the coasts but still liquid for most of their expanse, allowed it to maintain a barely habitable temperature during its long semi-night, but it just gave an even more eerie look to the place.
“Not any signs of glaciation,” Nagel noted, feeling a sense of deja vu as he looked once more on the forbidding little world and said much the same to a new but at least more appreciative audience. “It must melt pretty good on the sunward leg. Lots of erosion in the regions against the mountains, but the main land masses have been so chewed up they’re just cold powdery desert. Those dunes and that wind would make it even nastier. And we thought that overrun colony’s choice of worlds was bad!”
“Atmospheric content?” Maslovic asked.
Darch checked the figures. “Very cold at the moment and dry as a bone, but the oxygen and hydrogen mix is within limits. I wouldn’t like to do it without a breather just to keep the grit from choking you, but the air would be okay. I don’t know what we’d eat, though, and any fresh water in those big lakes would take a fission reactor to properly melt for use. It’s probably as ugly but very different on the solar traverse. No way to tell until we can see it, and that’s still almost fifteen standard days, I think.”
“The subsurface scan will show you what we found,” Nagel told him. “Nobody’s dumb enough to live up here, but that’s not the only place to live.”
“It’s honeycombed, a vast cavernous system down there,” Darch noted. “Most of the interior caverns, some of which seem to go way down, appear to be relatively dry, and those figures there just might indicate some running water even at this point. That’s how you survive the cold cycle. Ten to one the caves maintain an above freezing temperature that’s either constant or nearly so. The surface is only comfortable half the year. Odd, though.”
“I’m sure you’ve already seen what we saw in the makeup there,” Nagel commented, kind of needling the tech.
“Yes, I see what you mean,” Darch responded, oblivious to the dig. “Caverns of that signature tend to be sedimentary rock, easily eroded away over time by the underground rivers and streams, and certainly all the makings are there for a classic setup. Note, though, that there are no such caverns within a hundred or more kilometers of the coastlines. They’re away from the oceans and in the highlands no matter where you look. There doesn’t seem to be a major change in bedrock composition in most of those cases that would explain it. The planet’s got a heavy but mostly solid core that’s maintained the gravity and kept the atmosphere, but a lot of the underground water doesn’t seem to obey the laws all that well. It’s probably scrambled data from all this int
erference, but on the face of it, it seems like as many of those deep rivers are flowing upward as are flowing downslope.”
“Yeah, I noticed the uphill flow when we were first here,” Nagel told him. “We never did figure it out. Li thought it was caused by pressure, using some of the caverns like pipes.”
“Interesting. Plumbing for a race driven from the surface? Fascinating concept, but we’re getting heavy organics but nothing that would suggest a civilization or even a big colony that would justify building works like that. If our master aliens are down there, then they’re probably long dead or reduced to a primitive existence. This is a planet you can survive on, it’s not one you ever want to try and live and work on if you don’t have to.”
“That’s why we thought the place wasn’t as interesting as it first looked.”
“Perhaps, but the fact is that the entire Three Kings is an artificial construct.” Darch saw their stares. “Somebody built them, and this whole thing, and is maintaining it. That’s more than enough down there for a maintenance base.”
“We’re coming up on the wreck,” Randi Queson put in. “We were all excited by it, I remember, since we hadn’t seen all the life on the other two yet. It’s still impressive, though. There! See?”
It did look very much like an artificial structure, but not for humans. It also gave off virtually no power signatures, meaning that it either used a power system unknown to them and therefore unmeasurable or, more likely, it was a derelict from times long past, covered and then uncovered by the shifting sands.
It was a huge ball shape, perhaps three hundred meters across, sticking out of the sand. It was light gray in color, and all over its surface it had short probelike protrusions. A close-up didn’t reveal much more about it, but it did reveal at least one clear breach of the hull or exterior or whatever it was. A jagged hole, half in the sand and possibly anchoring it there.
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