Kaspar's Box

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.”

“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 wonders 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 could 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.”

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 mahogany,” 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.