Kaspar's Box tk-3

by Jack L. Chalker

  “Being a secular Jew I had a bit less taste for the theology,” Nagel told him, “but they never pushed it. Some of them were pretty damned smart, too, in a lot of areas. Their guru or whatever was a missionary and a former astrophysicist if you can believe it. Some had military backgrounds. Maybe from the old days before you had a more closed society. All I know is that one of them who called himself Cromwell had done something really nasty in his past and had turned to religion as, I guess, some kind of penance. But you could tell just talking to him that he wasn’t as changed as he liked to think himself. The old whoever he was wasn’t far below the surface. It was still conversation, though, not mind reading, even if we were using funny little stones across a distance of almost a half-million kilometers.”

  “They at least said it was a peaceful world there. That several intelligent species of vastly different biologies and cultures managed to get along or at least tolerate each other without going into battle. That’s something,” Queson noted.

  “I’d be interested in knowing more about those creatures,” Maslovic told them, “and about the rest as well. We looked up the names in the computer history files here. Karl Woodward’s group was one of the largest ever to vanish while hunting for the Three Kings, but that was a very long time ago and he was already an old man. If he’s still alive, he has to be truly ancient. Your Cromwell—well, we know who he is. He would have been right at home with some of our more disreputable guests. He had the blood of millions, perhaps more, on his head. Our records show him as long dead, but that’s often the case when someone is cast out. Normally he would have been executed for such breaches, but he was a general. Unfortunately, that’s how things work here.”

  “Really? I’ve never seen a lieutenant defer to a sergeant anywhere else,” Nagel noted.

  Maslovic chuckled. “Well, technically she does outrank me. In terms of official stuff I’m actually a chief warrant officer. That’s below lieutenant and above everybody else. But sergeants and chiefs have really run the military since time immemorial, and I find it more comfortable this way. In a way, even in a small society, I’m like an actor. I change my face, my name, my rank, I’m a different person. It hardly matters so long as my team knows who’s boss and I have the backing of higher-ups.”

  “So what now?” Nagel asked him.

  “Now we try to set up some contact with your friends on Balshazzar. I need to know as much as possible before heading for Kaspar.”

  “You think then that whoever is behind this is there?”

  “I think that their equivalent of Sergeant Maslovic and his team are there, at least. The ones running this operation. I want them. Hopefully, since they know so much about us and we’re still around, they’ll eventually make some kind of pact with us, but me and my superiors are always leery when somebody sneaks out in your back yard and doesn’t tell you about it, and even more suspicious of somebody whose technology is enough ahead of ours that eventually they may decide we’re their inferiors or lab experiment or something. I think that’s the running theory, anyway. Lab experiment.”

  “If that’s right, they could take us out the same as they’ve taken everybody else out,” Nagel said worriedly. “There are a lot of crash-landed creatures, human and nonhuman, on these world-moons, and nobody yet makes it back alive.”

  “We will see. At least if this power decides to crash us it will be off Balshazzar. A lot nicer place than you were in recently,” Maslovic pointed out.

  “I’m beginning to wonder if any place that could sustain us was worse than there,” Queson responded. “What an awful existence. I still can’t sleep on the bed upstairs, or tolerate wearing very much. It’s just been so long and it no longer feels comfortable.”

  “I can understand. Let me ask—you haven’t spoken about the small girl. She’s deranged, or injured in the mind?”

  “Injured in the mind may be a good way to put it,” Randi Queson agreed. “She used to be tough as nails. She was the head of our company and expedition, and she saw nothing but profits and didn’t give a damn about people unless she needed them. I think she’d had a hell of a hard life before she ever got into salvage but she never spoke of it to us, and it was too removed from any sort of polite society to be easily looked up.”

  “You tried?”

  “At the start. You want to know who you’re trusting your life to before taking a job out on the frontier. All I got was past salvage experience, but that was enough.”

  “And she is… How do I put this?”

  “No longer home,” Nagel finished for him. “Not since we made a serious mistake the first time to camp out on Melchior right in the middle of a massive mountain of these damned Magi stones. The cumulative power is enormous. It disrupts, it maddens. You get terrible visions and, with that, become an unreasoning beast. One of our people, a big, tough, muscular type, was butchered during that period, and it blew Li’s mind out. She’s never gotten any better, but the only rational part of her has been her refusal to get near any deposit of those stones. She remembers something, deep down.” He suddenly frowned and then gave what could almost be taken as a snort. “Huh. Funny. I just remembered. When we ran for the shuttle, I grabbed a stash of the stones. Old instincts, I guess. But I passed out in there and came to here. Did you take them and lock them away?”

  Maslovic turned and called out to the air, “Chung, did you see to the securing of a bundle of the stones from the shuttle? Did anybody?”

  “No, Chief. Sorry,” came Chung’s voice. “I’ll run a search pattern and see. I—what the hell?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “It’s impossible! I am constantly monitoring everything and everybody! It can’t be!”

  “What can’t be?” Maslovic demanded to know, getting to his feet.

  “The shuttle! It’s gone!”

  “Gone! How could that happen?”

  “I—I don’t know. It couldn’t! The security was fail-safe!”

  “Personnel check! Fast!”

  “Uh-oh. Three missing. Macouri, Joshua, and that girl we picked up on Melchior.”

  “You mean Lucky Cross?” Queson asked. “She’s a damned good shuttle and tug pilot…”

  “No, no! Cross is asleep! The little one! An Li!”

  “Full alert!” Maslovic ordered. “I’m heading for the command center. I want Darch and Broz there on the double!” He looked at the two others in the wardroom. “Come along, too, if you want.”

  “Yeah, I think we will,” Jerry Nagel said.

  “Cheer up! At least it’s only a shuttle!” Randi Queson noted. “Last time we went through this we had the shuttle fine, but they stole the whole damned mother ship!”

  * * *

  Even Joshua was astonished at the ease of their escape. “Where to, sir? We are approaching Balshazzar now.”

  Georgi Macouri looked at the viewing screen and made his adjustments. “Beautiful. It is the Garden! And the serpent is always the master of the Garden, is it not? Park in a stationary orbit over the center of human habitation, Joshua. If we go down there now we will be simply two among them. We must prepare the way before achieving the scepter of rule from our Master!”

  He went aft where An Li lay on the floor, tied-up hands and feet like some kind of animal, her mouth sealed with medical tape.

  She saw him, and writhed, trying to get loose, but he was too much the expert at this sort of thing. Not that someone as tiny as her could have done all that much against even a man of Macouri’s modest size, let alone Joshua’s massive bulk.

  “Well, little one! The Master saved you for us!” Macouri told her, as she tried to wriggle from his grasp and found herself far too bound for that. “Now we shall give you to Him and make meaningful your miserable, worthless life and, with your blood, open the Way to my ascension! The die is cast! The time has come!”

  Most medicine for centuries now had been via computers and specialized machines, but on a shuttle or similar small craft where all the wonder
s of modern medicine could not be expected to be carried, there was still a basic old-fashioned medical kit. He found it, opened it on the cushions, and came up with several small surgical knives that were intended to be used in minor emergencies. They were never intended for what he had in mind, but they would do just fine.

  There were quite a number of drug capsules for the injectors, and a portable diagnostic computer, but he ignored them. She had to be awake, to feel and therefore radiate the pain, in order to make the sacrifice worthwhile. It would be her screams, along with her blood, that would consecrate the sacrament, not her miserable worthless life.

  He reached around and looked on the floor and under things and eventually came up with a large, almost meter-long sack made of tree growths from Melchior. They had whispered that it would be here, told him to hunt for it, and now he had it. Confirmation!

  Although resembling purplish palm fronds, the leaf turned out to be a bulblike affair useful for carrying things. He forced open one end and poured the inside contents onto the couch seat.

  Stones! Perhaps a hundred or more! He couldn’t believe how many there were in one spot, or how great the variety of colors. And they all pulsed with energy, with life of a sort. These were not the ancient souvenirs sold as objects d’art to the rich back home; these were fresh, pulsing in the same way as the girl’s heart now pulsed, waiting, waiting for her blood to be poured over them still warm.

  He laid out all the things he needed, then stripped naked, so that there would be nothing between him and them, him and her…

  Her innocent eyes showed fear, and he drank it in and let it wash over him like a luxurious aphrodisiac. He was already turned on, harder and more irresistibly than he’d ever been, and it was time to begin.

  “I am going to free you now,” he told her in a soft, almost erotic tone. “You must lie there and stay like I put you. Do you understand that? If you do not, if you kick me, I will break your legs. If you hit or fight me, I will twist your arms out of their sockets. If you just lie there, and do exactly what I say, and let me do what I want, then nothing bad will happen to you. Do you understand?”

  She looked absolutely scared to death, but she managed to nod.

  “There is nowhere you can run, nowhere you can hide, so just relax. Yes, that’s a good girl. Lovely, just lovely!”

  She lay there, legs spread, arms stretched out on either side of her head, with all the Magi stones placed around her on the big mat, and then he approached her for what had to be the first part of the ritual, the part that established him once and for all as the master. She lay quite well for this, like she knew what was to come, and she made no effort to resist him as he slid on top of her and into her.

  It was a violent but sublime rape, the best of the countless number he’d had, and the kind he had despaired of ever doing again. Now, even as he gave of himself to her, he reached out for the twin knives, one on each side of her just above her head, and, as he did, he touched the plane of the Magi stone outline he had created.

  There was a sudden, sharp, violent shock running through him, knocking him almost senseless, and she acted quickly, wrapping herself around him. The shock immobilized him; he could not move, even as she seemed to grow larger somehow, to grow and grow and wrap herself around him and engulf him. She now was holding him, and he felt as much confusion as fear. He had somehow lost control of the situation, and he did not know what to do next nor how to do it.

  He felt her physically and yet he also felt her mentally; not the feeble, retarded figure but one of great power, someone or something that simply had not been there before. It held his mind as well as his body, and it was filled with a kind of fury and power that he could never even have dreamed of. He fought against it, suddenly terrified, as it wrapped around him, and within him, inside of him, and attacked, as if it were trying to drive him out of his own body.

  “JOSHUA!” he managed finally to scream, but it was one last scream, a scream that came from the primordial self he would never have thought was there, and it was answered by a sense of falling, falling, falling through the mat, through the very shell of the ship and out into the vacuum of space, and then down, down, towards the pretty blue planet below at a speed and violence that was surely fatal.

  Joshua heard the scream, a scream like no other he could remember, beyond even the terror of his own loved ones dying at the hands of those long ago pirates, and he immediately unhooked himself, put the shuttle on auto, and rushed back to help his master.

  What he saw was not too different from what he expected to see, with a few startling differences.

  There was blood all over. There always was. The place had the look and feel and stench of a slaughterhouse. The difference was that there were two bodies covered in blood and excrement in the center of the cabin, and it was Georgi Macouri who was on the bottom, clearly dead, the look of abject terror in his wide open but unblinking eyes and on what was left of his face giving no doubt. The small girl had seemed dead on top of him, her long hair caked with blood and her tiny form covered with it, but, slowly, carefully, she backed off and away from Macouri’s dead form and sat back in a kneeling position. Her face was all too intelligent, and all too filled with a look of pleasure. It was as if, as if…

  As if it was the face of someone possessed by demons.

  The two surgical knives she’d used to make such a mess of Georgi Macouri were in each hand, held the way one would hold them before stabbing a victim.

  An Li was no more than a hundred and fifty centimeters high and, combined with the weathering and semistarvation of the months on Melchior, she could not have weighed more than thirty-five kilograms or so, yet there was an energy and force inside her that made her seem like a giant to the nearly two-meter-tall muscular man, who easily had a hundred kilos on her, and who now stood there gaping at this sight.

  “You need to clean up this mess,” she said with a firm tone. “Or would you join him now?”

  “He is dead. There seems no point to joining him,” Joshua commented. “I pledged my service to him, not to his causes.”

  “Will you pledge yourself to me, now?”

  “I do not know who I am addressing,” he told her. “If it is for my life, I would prefer to simply die quickly.”

  “You are many times my size. Do you think I can do it to you?”

  “He was larger than you as well. I suspect that you might. You are not the girl we brought here.”

  “No, I am not. I am going to clean this body up in the back while you do what you can here. Once we have tended to the basics, turn this thing around and head back for the destroyer. I have much business there.”

  “I will do it,” Joshua told him. “Not out of fear, but out of respect.” And perhaps a bit of curiosity as well, he added to himself. If the soul did exist, he had long ago forfeited his. If this indeed was who held claim to it, then it was time they got to know each other.

  “Very well. And collect the stones. Don’t worry, they won’t do much to you if you just collect them and put them out of the way.”

  Joshua nodded and gave a slight bow. It was going to take a lot more than he had to make this cabin presentable, but he would do the best he could.

  The creature in An Li’s body went back to the showers and took a look at herself in the mirrored reflection before beginning what was obviously going to be quite a chore washing this stuff off. Well-toned, superior reflexes, but this was going to take some getting used to.

  * * *

  As it turned out, it wouldn’t be much of a trip back to the Agrippa. As soon as the missing shuttle was discovered, Chung had initiated a close-in search of the immediate vicinity and had no trouble finding it parked in orbit around Balshazzar. It was a curious thing to do, after all this time and trouble, but she lost no time in pursuing it with the intent of bringing it back aboard or shooting it if need be.

  Maslovic didn’t want it damaged, since after the stripping it was the only space-capable vehicle that coul
d handle more than two people, but neither was it any good to him in enemy hands.

  They approached cautiously, but saw no signs of the shuttle building up power or taking any action at all.

  “I don’t like it,” Darch commented. “Macouri’s crazy, but why steal it and get away, however the hell he managed it, and then just park? He’s a sitting duck.”

  “Could be a trap,” Maslovic warned. “You never know.” He was very much concerned with the fact that Macouri now had a defenseless young woman with him. The little man had only one history with that kind of person.

  Randi shook her head. “Somehow, I just don’t think so. It’s hard to explain, but when you’ve been practically saturated by those stones for so long you get a kind of sense of them. Something’s wrong. Not for us. For them. I can sense it.”

  Before they could close to capture range, Darch turned and called, “We’re being hailed!”

  “Put it on.”

  “This is Joshua. I am bringing the craft back and will dock. Do not fire on us, please,” came the somewhat familiar voice of the big man.

  “Joshua, where is Macouri? Put him on.”

  There was a pause. “I don’t think that’s possible, sir. In fact, I doubt if that will ever be possible again, unless he is correct about an afterlife.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Yes, sir. It is difficult to explain. Far easier for me to just bring the craft back. I simply cannot imagine how I personally could clean this up. It will have to be your ship’s maintenance systems.”

  Randi was suddenly alarmed. “What about An Li? Did he hurt her?”

  “No, ma’am. Not that he didn’t try. It is simply going to be much easier to show you. There is no threat here that I can determine, except for an incredible number of those execrable stones.”

  “Shit! The portable stash! I don’t even know why I bothered,” Jerry Nagel said, mostly to himself. “I’d forgotten all about them.”