“Have you done a lifescan of the big three moons there?”
“No sweat. Now, understand, there’s a ton of moons around this baby, but only three that could sustain our kind of carbon-based life. That and the Macouri pictures identify those three as the Kings. They’re not all resort spots, but I can tell you that all three are just teeming with life. The one that gives the weirdest readings is the little cold one. I’m not sure that the majority life-form there is carbon-based, but it’s within our biological understanding. If there are any devils or even angels around, then they’re made of something our sensors don’t know about.”
“What about humans?”
“I don’t get any signs of our folks on any one except the middle one. Not real surprising, I don’t think, if we’re the smart ones. A land of milk and honey. Rich atmosphere, mostly warm to hot on all the land masses, vegetable life that might well produce stuff we can eat, all that. We’re by no means the majority population there, but there’s a lot of our kind. I don’t get any close matches on the other two, which means that if any of us are there we’re in numbers too small to register. Just what is there, well, we’ll have to go and see, I guess. Not human. Not consistent types, either. I’d say at least twenty different major life-forms on the big volcanic one alone, and a couple on the little cold one, although in that case one really stands out. I think, though, Chief, we’ve broken the old puzzle. I don’t know how intelligent they’ll turn out to be, but I’ll bet you pretty good that we’ve got not one but several thinking alien types out there.”
“Well,” Murphy muttered, “there goes the neighborhood.”
“Let’s go see,” Darch suggested.
Maslovic wasn’t quite as eager. “We aren’t the first ship from our species to make it this far,” he reminded them all. “And none of them got back. Murphy may be right. That may be a gigantic flytrap. It’s definitely well baited.”
“But we can’t just sit here,” Darch noted.
“True, but we may be able to take a bit of a lesser risk. Captain Chung! I believe it’s time to tighten up all security at all points,” he said in a particularly loud voice. “And then you and I will get some of the jewels out of the vault.”
“What are you going to do?” Murphy asked, still feeling a bit protective of his wards.
“They, whoever they are out there, came and looked us over uninvited and without saying a word. Macouri seemed to think that the girls were a unique conduit to whatever’s here. Let’s see.”
* * *
They were delighted to get their “jewels” back. Maslovic was careful to match each girl with the color of the stone she’d been wearing in the earlier encounter so that things would be replicated as much as possible. He did hope, though, that they wouldn’t have to go through a long and boring ceremony painting their naked bodies and chanting over a pentagram. Nothing he’d seen indicated that what people like Macouri and his group had come up with or interpolated into this business had anything to do with what was really going on. He was, however, prepared to gather together Macouri and his bodyguard Joshua with the girls if he had to and endure almost anything.
Right away the girls all seemed to notice something different and tried to figure it out.
“They’re talkin’ to us, like as always,” Irish O’Brian noted, and the others nodded. “Kind of funny, though.”
“Yeah,” Mary Margaret McBride responded. “None of the ceremonies done, and you can still sort of hear ’em. Like tiny voices.”
Maslovic looked over at Darch who shook his head briskly in the negative. Nothing was being picked up on the instruments, although if his “simulation” was correct about the third stabilizing force in the system, then by now they were well within its range and influence.
Darch in particular seemed somewhat relieved by this. The observable phenomena was consistent with his model even if he had no way to actually detect this third force, and things like physics and practical sense didn’t seem all that violated, either. These might well be some kind of alien transceivers, but they were of very limited range and power. He had theorized, though, that somehow there was an exponential power growth when these stones were combined. If so, this trio should be able to get increasingly clearer signals. They might well even be overwhelmed and dominated by whatever was out there, as had happened to a degree back on the Thermopylae.
“There’s somebody talkin’, or tryin’ to,” McBride commented. “Only they’re still so far away I can’t make out what they’re sayin’.”
“It’s speaking in English, then, or Gaelic, or what?” Murphy asked them.
They all shrugged. “It’s inside your head, y’see,” O’Brian tried to explain. “It’s like talkin’ only it ain’t. I don’t think what tongue they use would have anything to do with what I understood, if that makes any sense.”
“Telepathy?” Maslovic asked his people.
“I don’t think so,” Broz told him. “At least not the way we think of it. It really is more like radio. The earliest radios were created with crystal sets, and could be made simply by poor people even without any local source of power for reception. Like this, reception wasn’t very good, but you had it if the transmitter had enough power to vibrate that crystal from far off. We all build one as part of our training classes. In this case, though, acting as both receiver and amplifier, the transmission isn’t through vibration of the air but of something inside the brain. The question is how they have enough power from this end to send back from that area, but I think they do. In some ways, it’s the old basic crystal radio principle. In others, it is to us what a hyperspacial tight-beam com signal would be to those early crystal set people who were our ancestors. It’s close enough that I can understand what it’s doing, but far enough ahead of our technology that I can’t for a moment imagine how it’s doing it.”
“They ain’t talkin’ to us!” Brigit Moran muttered, sounding disappointed. “It’s some guy and some girl talkin’.”
Maslovic was suddenly doubly interested. “They’re definitely people? Like us? You can tell that?”
“Yeah, sure’n she’s right,” O’Brian agreed. “It’s a kind of gab fest. And from the few words I can make out, it ain’t even dirty or romantic.”
“Do they know you’re listening in?”
All three shook their heads. “Don’t seem to,” Mary Margaret told them. “It’s like we’re just eavesdroppin’ on the extension.”
“What about our mysterious friend who always seems to lurk around the other side in those gems? Any sign of him?”
“What? You mean the demon? He don’t usually show up for a while. Sometimes he don’t show up at all,” O’Brian said. “I don’t get much sense of him yet, at least not in this stuff. I don’t think he’s in the same place as the talkers. Come to think on it, it don’t seem like these two are anywhere near close, either. That’d make sense, though. If they was close, why would they need these to talk?”
Maslovic looked up at the main screen, which showed the subsystem view and highlighted the three huge planet-sized moons that had life-sustaining atmospheres. “Now, let’s see. Kaspar, Melchior, and Balshazzar?”
“You have the last two backwards,” Broz told him. “Kaspar’s the small cold one, all right, but the pretty one in the middle is Balshazzar, the one in and belching smoke into warm oceans is Melchior. If your guess is right, and the controlling force or group or whatever is on Kaspar, then maybe these two aren’t. Best bet is that they’re on separate continents on Balshazzar, since that’s where the people are.”
“Them three worlds, they’re the Kings?” Mary Margaret asked, looking at the same picture.
Maslovic nodded. “Yes. You saw their pictures at Macouri’s big place in the city.”
“Yeah, I remember. I can tell you, and I dunno why, that the guy I’m hearin’ is on the one in the middle and the girl’s on the big one closest in. That help?”
“On Melchior! Yes, that does help. Darch?”
“Okay, okay. So we have people on at least two of them, and they can contact each other. Now, if our watchers are on Kaspar, that could mean that they don’t even pay attention to that kind of local traffic.”
“No,” Captain Murphy said, thinking in his usual bent way. “But you and I both know, Sarge, that they’d be lookin’ at us right this moment.”
Maslovic nodded. “I agree. Girls, still no sign of your mysterious friend?”
“Shush!” responded Brigit Moran. “We’re tryin’ to put ourselves together so we can really eavesdrop!”
The marine put his finger to his lips and made sure the others in the room saw it. If the girls wanted to chant a little and hold hands and get in sync to boost their power, that was exactly what he wanted this time.
The girls, as usual, started off in anything but unison, but within a few minutes the chanting—not just the words, which were mostly nonsense, but the pitch and meter—seemed to come together, first as a sort of harmony, and finally as if a single voice, even though the three voices were very different normally. All three had their eyes closed and seemed lost in a world of their own.
This was the most dangerous time for the experiment, they all knew. The last time these three had achieved this level of unity they’d managed to almost literally take over a starship.
Maslovic decided they were far enough into their self-induced hypnotic trance that speaking was no longer a problem, although he kept his voice quiet and low.
“Anything, Captain?”
“I felt several weak probes of my systems,” Chung responded, keeping that quiet tone and localizing it as much as possible on the science control panel. “Nothing threatening at all, though. They’re casting out, but it’s strictly one-way. Nobody or nothing’s yet trying to come through them at me or us.”
“Stay alert. It might come in the twinkling of a star and those folks know their system a lot better than we know how to stop it.”
“I’ll let you know. If they do break through, at least I feel confident at this point that I could warn you about it.”
Maslovic turned and looked over at Murphy. “Cap, you want to give it a try? They still seem to trust you, for some reason.”
The old man shrugged. “Well, I’ll give it me best. The big problem may be gettin’ through to ’em.”
He walked over to where the three had stopped chanting now but were standing together holding hands with eyes closed.
“Hello, darlin’s, this is Captain Murphy. Can you hear me?”
No response.
“C’mon, darlin’s! Speak to the old captain, now.”
Still no reaction. He was just about to give it up as a bad bet when all three voices as one said, “Captain?”
There was something in the way they said it that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. It didn’t sound like them or anybody else he knew at all.
“Yes? And who might ye be?”
“You have an accent. It is hard to make it out.”
“I doubt if it’s me accent that’s the problem. Just who might I be speakin’ to through these girls?”
“I had no idea you were speaking through others. Are you on Balshazzar?”
“Goodness, no! I’m on a ship in space.”
There was no reaction for a moment, then the voice said, “You are in a spaceship? From the colonial sector?”
“Yes. We’re just comin’ insystem now.”
Maslovic gave him a frown at that, but he figured that any possible enemy around who hadn’t noticed a naval destroyer approaching inbound by this time wasn’t much of a threat.
“How about you?” he asked the voice. “Are you human, or one of them peek-a-books from the stones?”
“I’m human. Just barely any more. It’s been very hard here.”
“Looked like Balshazzar wasn’t that bad a place to be stuck,” he noted.
“We—we’re not on Balshazzar. We’re on Melchior.”
That caused some consternation among everybody on the Agrippa.
“Melchior! Ain’t supposed to be no folks like me there!”
“There’s not many. Four of us are left. We were marooned when the salvage freighter Stanley deserted us. No way to get off. No human population, no alien population that we can trust.”
“How is it you’re talkin’ to me like this, then?”
“The stones. We can use them like communicators. They grow here. Millions of them, probably. Too many around and they’ll drive you insane, but you can handle a few. Large population of us on Balshazzar. We can talk through these. For God’s sake, if you can come and get us, please do so! Don’t try Balshazzar. Something will let you land but won’t let you leave.”
“Names,” Maslovic hissed. “We need names!”
“Just who are ye, then? Kinda hard to make out when you’re hearin’ yourself this way.”
“I am Doctor Randi Queson, sort of science jack-of-all-trades. With me are engineer Jerry Nagel, shuttle pilot Gail Cross, and team leader An Li. Li suffered a breakdown or seizure or something partly due to the stones and hasn’t been anything but childlike since. We have minimal food we’ve been able to gather, too much water, no supplies.”
Murphy thought a moment. “You say somethin’ keeps folks from leavin’ Balshazzar? What about where you are?”
“Should not be a problem. We went back and forth to the Stanley. My head is killing me now. This only works for short periods. Got to stop or I’ll pass out.”
“Wait! Is there any way we could locate you? That’s a mighty big world down there!”
“We have nothing. Lost everything now in the storms and quakes and always moving. Big oceans, lots of dust and islands. Oh, God! This close! I don’t know how…”
“Do you think you could link up with me girls here again via these alien stones?”
“I dunno! Got to quit! I—”
It was clear from the total slack in the faces of the three young women that there was no longer any contact.
Darch threw his arms up in a gesture of helplessness. “Damn! If we had a conventional signal, anything, I could trace it, but sending and receiving via the brains of morons helps not a bit! How do I find four humans who could be anywhere on a world bigger than the one we left not long ago? It’s impossible!”
“We have time, I think,” Maslovic said. “They’ve survived this long, they can make it another couple of days, and we have a valuable heads-up on Balshazzar. The prettiest one’s always the biggest trap. That’s probably why all the humans are there. Weird, though, that these stones would be formed on a hellhole like Melchior.” He sighed. “Okay, people! We got a couple of days to work out a way to locate these folks. No question we can use some locals aboard, particularly if they’re adults who can use these things without us having to go into chanting rituals and who don’t think everything is magic.”
“Of course, we hav’ta make sure that they’re actually rescued, too,” Murphy noted. “Just gettin’ ’em off there ain’t gonna do much good if we wind up stuck someplace else.”
Murphy looked over at the still-entranced girls. “So what do we do with them for now?”
“I’m not going to sit around and wait for somebody to wake up out there, notice them, and try and take this ship,” Maslovic commented. “I think we get some of the squad up here and strip those stones off them again. That should break the circle.”
But before he could even call down via the ship’s intercom, the trio, as one, suddenly swayed, let go of one another, and collapsed in a heap on the deck.
Maslovic and Broz were there before Murphy could even move a step, quickly taking the necklaces holding the stones off their necks. That done, Maslovic called down for Rosen and Sanchez to come up and take the girls back to their quarters, carrying them if need
be. Sanchez still wasn’t a hundred percent back, but she was more than up to this sort of thing.
Now they could settle back and try and figure out how to locate and extract four humans from a moon almost fifty-six thousand kilometers around at the equator and teeming with hundreds of thousands of representatives of unknown alien life-forms.
* * *
“Why do you still serve this man, Joshua?” Maslovic asked the big bodyguard who had chosen to come with them of his own free will.
“I have sworn a blood oath,” Joshua replied. “I shall follow him into Hell if need be.”
“You might not be far from doing just that,” Maslovic pointed out. “But why? What kind of oath would hold a man like you?”
Joshua turned and looked straight at the intelligence man. “What, precisely, is ‘a man like me’? Do you think I am nothing but a pirate? That I have no honor?”
“It is difficult to tell someone’s innermost self at the best of times. In your case, the only way I have of judging your sincerity and honor is by the company you keep. Tell me this, then: do you believe what he believes? Is that a part of it as well? That is, do you believe that there are actually demons out there, and that we are moving towards them?”
“I believe in evil,” the big man responded without hesitation. “Who commits it or who has it is the only question. I also believe in good. In an evil universe that is crumbling around us all, honor is the only thing one can cling to. That is my code and I cannot vary it. To do so would leave me with nothing at all.”
“You know he’s insane, don’t you? That he hears voices and sees visions no one else does and that he acts upon them without a second thought, even if they are random acts of violence?”
“He saved my life once, and the life of my extended family. Sane or not, I am bound to him.”
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