by Edward Lee
“That’s what you would think at first glance.”
“The answer…must be in the pamphlet itself.”
“Uh-huh.”
She was getting flustered. “So, what was in the pamphlet?”
“Gobbledygook. It’s about ten pages of intaglio text, just line after line of random letters.”
“A cipher?”
Tom nodded. “A Scytale Cipher. Ever heard of it?”
“Of course!” she complained, hoping for something more thrilling. “It’s one of the oldest ciphers known, and one of the simplest. The ancient Greeks used it!”
“That’s true, and the real laugh is it took Federate Intel months to break it.”
“I can’t believe that. They have the best decryption programs ever devised.”
“Call it human error. A Scytale was the very first program they ran on it, but it still came up the same gobbledygook…until several months later when someone decided to run it in reverse. And the result was the simplest cipher of them all.”
“The pages of the pamphlet were bound in reverse?”
“Right. Backward.”
Sharon sat on the edge of her grav-chair. “So, what was in the pamphlet? What did it say?”
“Nothing you haven’t heard before. It was just the Red Sect’s crackpot motto: ‘Under heaven lay umbra—’”
“‘Hiding the chosen,’” Sharon finished. “Major-Rector Matthew said that Federate Intel thinks the ‘umbra’ may be an astronomic allusion, that ‘the chosen’ are hiding within some sort of planetary or cosmic shadow. But, back to the pamphlet. It was just their credo in it?”
“That’s right, over and over. Nothing else.”
“And the only reference to Kilukrus was on the pamphlet’s cover?”
“Yeah, the title. The Order of Kilukrus.”
Another possibility popped up in Sharon’s sense of deduction. “Maybe Kilukrus isn’t a demon at all. Maybe it’s a place, or a person’s name—in code.”
Tom seemed impressed. “You’re right, it’s another cipher, but it is a demon. The Scytale cipher was easily broken once they took into account that the pages were bound backward. So—”
Sharon mulled it over, came to the most logical conclusion. “The Red Sect exist in secrecy, so it’s clear they want to keep the actual name of the devil they worship a secret too. The demon they name can’t be found in any demonological text. The pamphlet’s printed backward. What happens when we spell the name—Kilukrus—backward?
Sharon re-input the name, KILUKRUS, and inverted it. Now the screen read:
SURKULIK
“Surkulik,” Tom finished.
“Now that’s one I’ve heard of,” Sharon recalled. But it seemed disappointingly obscure. “The demon of falsehoods, something like that, right?”
“The demon of false identities,” Tom corrected. “And the demon of inversions, which is why they called him Kilukrus, the inversion of his genuine name.” Sharon re-accessed the mythology banks and ran a search. Instantly, the holoscreen produced:
Surkulik: lesser-known demon from old Judeo-Christian myth, first described in Deniere’s Compendium de Hel, as simply a ‘demon in abséns.’ Later, in the far more comprehensive The Demonocracies by Douleth, Surkulik is defined as a ‘devil of the seventh order of the Infernal Empire,’ and the ‘demon of inversions, puzzles, and false faces.’ [No illustration available.] See Appendices.
“That’s certainly strange,” Sharon remarked. “And not very much information.” Next, she tried to access the noted appendices but instead got the message:
:original text deleted:
“That’s maddening!” she complained.
Tom agreed with a nod. “The original texts have been removed from the computer.”
“Why?”
“Either because it’s considered minutiae, or it’s classified beyond the compartmentalizations of the data archives.”
“I just can’t believe this,” Sharon smoldered. “Without a scan of the original text, how can we find anything out about this?”
Tom gave her a stolid look. “Maybe somebody on this ship doesn’t want us to.”
— | — | —
PART FOUR
“These things saith he that holds
the seven stars in his right hand…”
—Revelations 2:1
— | — | —
(I)
She knew she shouldn’t.
But she did.
Brigid had long-since trained herself to remote-view short distances without the need of sensory-dep or acetylcholine jumpers. The ship would be going into retros soon; she had some time to play with. It was always so difficult to resist.
Physically, she lay nude on her bunk in the new dom. Psychically, though, she let her vision fly.
Simply by thinking.
Almost like God, she thought.
Through bulkheads and pressure doors. Along accessmains and serviceways. Up lev-shafts and wiring conduits and vent ducts and even through the ship’s hull. Brigid’s vision soared.
It was not like telethesy or OBE-ing. She simply saw. Her eyes were part of a mentally propelled camera, so to speak, registering images but not feelings. Her feelings, she knew, would circuit back to her physical body through the ethereal tether that connected them. She thought of General-Vicar Luke, and suddenly she was looking at him as he changed into his flight gear, grumbling some unheard complaint. She thought of Sharon and suddenly there she was, poring over holoscreens in the Library Unit with the tall securitech she’d met in the galley. She thought, quite errantly, of power, and next her psychical eyes were watching some engineering techs in the aft prep bays bolting a small nuclear-thrust charge to the ship’s as yet un-deployed inertial disk.
She thought of—
Men.
—and saw them in various uniforms moving about the ship, and then—
Naked. Men.
—and was in one of the barracks vapor showers. Unlike the showers for female personnel which were never shared by more than two, at least eight strong muscular men stood within the cleansing fog. They conversed with nonchalance as the sublimation jets washed their bodies. But—
Another blink of a thought—sex—took her discorporate eyes into a valve cove, where one man desperately sodomized another.
Another blink showed her a young woman in a green admin uniform. She was on her knees in a service closet, fellating a man.
Brigid stared with her psychic eyes, licking nonexistent lips and knowing that her physical body back in her dom would be trembling.
Women, she thought in a hot gush. Having sex.
Two women, sweat-slicked and nude floated in a human ball, having turned down the grav in their dom to zero. White thighs vised close-cropped heads, faces pressed to groins, tongues churning in mutual cunnilingus.
Go back, she thought in a squirmy desperation. Yes, she wanted to yank the psychic tether and slip back into her real body of flesh and sensation and let her fingers rub out a volley of clenching pleasures, but—
A final thought first, an uninvited flash in her mind.
Death.
And then she saw—
(II)
General-Vicar Luke strapped himself in behind his flight techs. He always hated this part.
God, he prayed, please don’t let us get killed.
It had never happened on a sub-light excursion but the cynic in the ship’s commander supposed there was always a first time.
The techs recited their ready list.
“Flight Cove to Nuclear Prep, requesting commo check, over.”
“Roger, Flight Cove, commo check affirmative.”
“Stand by for Inertial Dish displacement.”
“Inertial Dish and assembly ready.”
“Abort advisory check.”
“Abort advisory is satisfactory. Fuselage pressure reading?”
“Green at one hundred kilopascals.”
“Green on INHIBIT and ATM PRESS CONTROL.
”
“Circuit test for radiation- and fire-suppression.”
“AV Bays One and Two, circuit-test positive. Cabin and payload cove, circuit-test positive.”
Just get on with it! Luke thought.
The pilot turned to look at Luke. “Pilot Station green, sir! Request permission to activate all nuclear-drag assemblies, sir!”
General-Vicar Luke felt nauseous. He simply waved a consenting hand.
“That’s green for go!”
Luke could feel the grating vibrations as the Edessa’s counter-inertial shield extended.
“All gravity systems off.”
“Roger.”
“EM deflection envelope systems on.”
“Roger.”
The pilot refaced Luke. “Permission to detonate, sir!” One pulse short of vomiting, Luke nodded. “Ooo-RAH!” the co-pilot shouted.
“Glory be to GOD!” the pilot tech countered. He flipped up the red safety shroud on the console, then flicked the simple toggle.
In the center of the ship’s rear inertial disk, the .5-megaton nuclear-implosion device detonated. Approximately one-half of the fissile thrust expended uselessly into space. The other half was caught in the ship’s retro disk, bringing the Edessa to something close to a complete stop in its fixed trajectory. The ship tremored, inboard lights fluttering for only a moment.
The entire operation took less than ten seconds.
Which seemed like a full hour of horror to Luke. “Sir, are you all right?”
I guess that means we’re still alive, Luke reasoned. “Yes, yes,” he choked.
“Forward lox thrust, green for go. Go for point-two seconds.”
“Roger.”
Now the laws of normal inertia returned. General-Vicar Luke spectacularly vomited up his last all-liquid meal when the ship jolted forward at a mere 17,000 miles per hour.
“MADAM display re-engaged.”
“Tracking. Point zero zero six parallel milliseconds from Utility Station Solon. Pre-prep for automatic dock.”
“Roger.”
One of the comm techs came immediately to Luke’s aid, wiping up the mess in his lap. “There you go, sir. Just an accident. Can happen to anyone.”
Luke fumed, humiliated. Thanks a lot, God. He turned around to see if Major-Rector Matthew had caught the spectacle. Matthew always joined him in the command cove during launches and retros. He’s probably sitting behind me right now, laughing it up.
But when Luke fully looked around, he saw that Matthew’s flight chair was empty.
(III)
The accessmains hustled with activity, as the ship’s intercom blared: “This is the C.F.S. Edessa requesting permission to dock at Threshold 6.”
“This is Custom’s Corp, free-drift utility station Solon. Welcome, Edessa, and thanks be to God. Permission to dock granted. Autoguides are activated.”
“Roger, Solon.”
During all sub-light launches and retros, most of the regular crew strapped themselves to flight chairs in one of the ship’s four launch coves. Sharon had sat with Tom for the short turbulent duration, but her mind seemed diverted. All this strange stuff all of a sudden. Attacks on the ship, bombs planted in cadavers, elemental data-relays from the Extrasolar radio telescope, and now this bizarre business with the Red Sect’s cryptic deity.
Surkulik, she thought.
A demon of inversions.
A demon of false faces.
What puzzled her most was the simplicity in deciphering the demon’s true name: a crude reversion. It seemed to defy the very nature of the Red Sect itself. For hundreds of years they’d kept every aspect of their terrorist agenda secret. No one knew their base, their leaders, their official formation. Beyond random murder and destruction, no one even knew their objectives. Yet the name of the deity they worshiped was deciphered with ease.
And now this most recent crux.
Text deletions in a simple historical data-bank. Why?
And Tom’s observation as to why they couldn’t find out more about Surkulik: Maybe somebody on this ship doesn’t want us to.
Sharon didn’t really believe that; it made no sense. She struggled, though, for an explanation.
“Wow, we sure got here quick,” Tom said, unbuckling his chair straps.
“What did you expect at just under three billion miles an hour?”
As they debarked into the central main, he glanced behind him. “Where’s your new roomie?”
“What?” Sharon came back, distracted.
“The civvie chick with the big—”
Sharon shot him a reproving glance.
“—mouth,” Tom finished.
“I don’t know,” she huffed. Was she jealous? What a preposterous thought! “She must’ve gone to a different launch cove. So, you don’t really believe that Brigid is a remote-viewer?”
The comment left Tom flustered. “Let’s just say that she made some compelling points. I know stuff like that exists…it just gives me the creeps. Besides, I don’t trust Civilian Branch.”
“Why not?”
“They get Federate benefits that regular Army doesn’t. They’re all on the take. She reminded me of one of Federate Intel’s sexual operatives.”
Sharon didn’t understand him. “A sexual—”
“A sex-op. They’ll plant these girls anywhere they want, under a phony occupational cover. They’ll seduce guys, see if they reveal classified info.”
“Have you…ever been seduced?” Sharon asked and immediately regretted it.
Tom’s frown was plain. “Never by a sex-op.”
What did that mean? But irrelevant curiosities burned in her. Tom was handsome, strong. She wondered about his sexual history but didn’t dare ask.
Again, the intercom: “All first- and second-shift personnel may debark at Air-lock 4. Excluding Security Corp personnel.”
“Looks like you have to stay,” Sharon said.
“To hell with that,” he told her. “I have a three-day pass. Let Matthew and the rest of those busted humps walk sentinel duty. Are you going onto Solon?”
“Why not? I’ve never been.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” he said. “Follow me.”
Sharon followed him without much thought. But what was she thinking?
“You find her attractive, don’t you?” she asked, without realizing why.
“Who? Miss Defense Corp? Hell, yeah.”
“I mean Brigid.”
He shot her a quizzical frown. “What’s a little girl like you asking dumb questions like that for?”
An instant flair of anger rose up. She was sick of people mocking her for her age. “I’m not a little girl, you—”
“Asshole?” Tom grinned. “Were you about to call me an asshole? Second time in a day.”
“I don’t use ungodly language like that.”
“Well, you’d be right.”
“Why don’t you answer the question?”
“You sound jealous,” he joked. “Understandable. Chicks stand in line to go out with me, and as good-looking as I am, who can blame them? Especially the real young ones like you, the teenagers.”
Sharon ground her teeth. “I’m twenty!”
“Yeah? Then I’ll bet your birthday was last week.”
“You’re just too bashful to admit that you have a crush on Brigid,” she countered.
“No, not Brigid. Someone else.”
Before she could respond, he took her through another accessmain.
Does he mean me? she wondered.
The placid voice echoed the third-shift blessing: “The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them the light will shine.”
Tom chuckled as he led Sharon into a decidedly dark mechanistics wing. “If they’re trying to encourage us, it ain’t quite makin’ it.”
“Where are we going?” Sharon asked. She felt impatient, and still irritable over his innuendos as well as her recent
brush with temptation.
“My three-day pass entitles me to certain advantages.” Tom proudly held up the narrow plastic chip-card. “That means I can go to the obcove. You’re my guest.”
“I’ve never been in one.” Sharon tried to sound subdued, when actually the prospect thrilled her. The observation cove was the ship’s only dedicated astronomical viewing post. Not a direct window, of course (no technology existed yet to produce transparent panels that were radiation- and heat-resistant enough to hold up against the back-blast of nuclear-drag launch), but the digigraphic beacons on the ship’s skin would transfer a high-definition display into the ob-cove’s reception panels. This would be Sharon’s first opportunity to see deep-space in real time.
“Up here,” Tom bid.
The anti-grav personnel lift took them up to the Edessa’s highest strat. And when Tom opened the access with his chipcard, Sharon grabbed his arm and nearly shrieked.
“Gets ya at first, huh? First time I stepped into one of these, I thought I’d opened an airlock by mistake.”
Sharon was stunned. Her mouth hung open.
God in heaven…
The long-curved cove was lined entirely with photo-recept panels; it felt as though she were standing in space.
The cove offered a flawless view of the quadrant beyond the solar system, a concentrated image that seemed perfect.
“It’s the real McCoy,” Tom said. “Not like the passive panels they’ve got all over the ship. Those are just cyberpegs played over and over.”
Pockets of stars glowed crisp white-blue before a limitless range of black. She was looking at the northern celestial quadrant, the Ursa constellations—the Big and Little Dipper—plus Cepheus and Lyra, the Zuby Cluster, and the ARC 67 quasar.
“It’s beautiful,” Sharon whispered.
“Even the Centirion and the Hubble Six can’t show it like this.” He pointed up to Ursa Minor, the constellation of seven second-magnitude stars known as the Little Dipper. “Gee, and it’s only 300 light years away.”
