"Kaspar's Box" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L.)

IX: OF CABBAGES AND KINGS

"Inventory?" Lieutenant Commander Mohr still wasn't sure if he was happy or panicked to have the girls back on board, let alone the others. Maybe both.

"Thirty-two of the so-called Magi stones, all of which are secured, all recovered from the bush lodge area," Lieutenant Chung reported. "None of the subjects has been allowed near them, and they are in a secured vault."

"I find it interesting that none of the stones were being worn by the principals when they were taken."

"No, sir. They were carefully stored like precious objects. There may be many more at the city compound, but we felt it prudent not to return there, and particularly not to allow Macouri, Schwartz, or the two employees to return there. There is simply no telling what sort of mischief they could cause if they were able to get to controls that we could not."

"I see. Yes, that's probably best for now. You remained with the van after modifying it?"

"Yes, sir. That is my function, after all, in this sort of team."

"But you were the one who surveyed the entire compound after it was secure and the principals moved?"

"Sir?"

"What I'm asking, Lieutenant, is for anything you might have found that you would not have expected to be there."

"Nothing, sir. Oh. You mean, like… babies?"

"Or something like that."

"No, sir. Nothing. Haven't the young women told you what happened?"

"No, as a matter of fact they haven't. Nor have the others. Nor has our hospital unit."

"Sir?"

"Lieutenant, if we can believe the incredibly thorough going-over that they've gotten, then, except for the obvious stretch marks, there is no sign that any of the three were ever pregnant. Even their breasts, while large, are not engorged or overly distended as the medics say should be the case in such well advanced pregnancies."

"What do they say, sir? Or can't I ask?"

"You can indeed. They look rather blank, if you must know, and all our sensor readings indicate that the feeling is genuine. They simply don't remember."

"What happened to the children?"

"No, being pregnant. I should think that would be difficult to forget, yet it's a hole. Our psych people say that they've never seen such a perfect selective mindworm."

"A what, sir?"

"Mindworm. Psychs use it all the time. It's quite similar to the ones used on computers and other positronic devices when they have problems. And, in our business, both for long-term psychological health and occasionally for security purposes, there are things that simply shouldn't be recalled, even subconsciously. High pressures, bitter memories, breaking points. But using them always leaves gaps, things that you can find and pin down if you really dwell on them. Not these three. They have a perfectly consistent memory of the entire period with Murphy and with us and down there, and it simply isn't the one we know and saw. It's quite frightening, really."

"Frightening?"

"Consider that whatever did that with them also was in our own main computers and memory banks and even had access to the Admiralty in a limited way. Suppose that power also rewrote or redid some things there? We would never know. Our original medical scans when they were first aboard do say that they were all three undergoing normal pregnancies, but now it's not absolute that those scans were or remain correct."

"Well, sir, I'm sure Maslovic and the others can tell you that they were as distended when they left the town house as they were here, so whatever happened happened in a relatively short time after that. And we were out there doing reconnaissance within hours of their arrival."

"And that is the mystery, Commander. The physical evidence we have says that they were pregnant when they were here and when they got out there, and the stretch marks confirm it to a fair degree. Yet not just their memories but their physical state and even their hormonal balances say that they were not. And that leaves us with the big question."

"Sir?"

"If they were not carrying children, then just what the hell were they carrying?"

"I still believe that you are acting in a most uncivilized and brutish manner not even to allow me to send for my clothing!" Georgi Macouri said almost petulantly.

Maslovic gave him a wicked smile, remembering the blood on that altar or whatever it was inside the town house.

"Well, you see, Mister Macouri, we're military. We're not personally or individually brutish, but we're professionally brutish. Nothing personal, you understand."

"Yes, but to force me into this loutish, crinkly uniform, and these ill-fitting skivvies. That, sir, is going too far!"

Maslovic leaned back and took another look at the man opposite him. Macouri wasn't a particularly impressive figure. He wasn't handsome or charming or debonair like the people in commercial dramas, and he had a particularly irritating way of saying everything through his nose in a relatively high-pitched tenor. He had nothing that would mark him as brilliant or dangerous, nothing charismatic that would draw any attention to him. That, of course, was the case with all the best agents and spies in history, but Georgi Macouri wasn't particularly interested in blending in or not being noticed. He had money and he flaunted it. It was, in a sense, his only real attraction, but it was more than enough, apparently.

"Civilized simply means living in cities," the intelligence man pointed out. "You are, right now, in a rather good-sized city in space and it functions. Hence, we are civilized. More civilized than most. We have no crime here, and nobody wants more than they have or can have. Everything is provided, including a skilled job that is perfectly suited to them. The competition they do have is friendly and meretricious. Improve your skills, do it better, advance in rank which means not only position but respect. That's the only currency here. Respect. We save our violence for training and for the occasionally necessary missions. You can search all you wish on this vast ship, and you won't find a single solitary altar nor sacrifices to any deity. We believe in what we see, what we know, what we can smell and touch and measure, and we don't mind that. We don't need any altars."

"Bull! Everybody needs something greater than themselves!" Macouri snapped, showing Maslovic that he'd finally hit a rare nerve. "Why, I bet you have more shrines aboard this tub than they have on Vaticanus. Not to Saint this or that, but statues of past great military types, memorial plaques, honors lists of military achievers, and so on. Your own uniforms have these little marker things and I suspect that each one means something. Service someplace dangerous, perhaps, or best shot, or something for bravery and valor. They're all shrines. And the larger and more lasting ones are almost temples. It's simply a matter of culture in how you label or approach these things. I've never seen a military of any size that didn't do it that way."

"Point taken. But you know it's not the same."

"It's precisely the same! As for blood, well, what's the thing that all combat types like you value most and are taught to value most? Self-sacrifice. Taking the bullet for your comrade. That's who gets the biggest shrines and is talked about in all the classes to the young to inspire them. Who shed the most blood. It must be ten, a hundred times more important in this sort of setting when most of you spend your whole lives as nothing more than glorified tax collectors."

"And what do you believe in, Mister Macouri?"

The rich man gave a self-satisfied smile. "The same thing as you do, Sergeant. Power. In my culture money can be the means to power, and I use it, but it's not everything. But all religious beliefs come down to a worship of power, sir! Your superiors have power over you. You have power over your specialists. Your organization has a certain kind of power over the remaining world governments, until at least they collapse. The Hindus among others worship many gods because each represents a certain aspect of power. The god of Abraham, whether it be Christian or Moslem or Jew or whatever, represents the ultimate power. That's what makes the old boy God, isn't it? All that guff about love thy neighbor and charity and all that is mere window dressing. You accept and live by the Seven Pillars or you go to Hell. You obey the Law and the Commandments or God will strike you down. Accept Jesus as the Son of God or roast forever in the Lake of Fire. Eat a hamburger and be reincarnated as a flea. Do it the military way or you'll wind up in the brig or worse. It's all the same."

"And you feed your own power god with innocent blood."

"Nobody is innocent! And one can always look on those others as having been destined for just such a role. None that we have ever selected has ever had a higher purpose, or much of any purpose, until we gave them meaning. Poor, ignorant, backward, at best mercilessly exploited, at worst forgotten and ignored. They're born, abandoned, manage to survive for a relatively short life doing nothing but scrounging to stay alive, and then they die in squalor and are cremated and dumped in a nameless grave kept out of sight and out of town just for that purpose. Your kind doesn't care about them, nor does anyone else. But we care. Oh, don't look so shocked! The military of humankind has a history as well as a present day incarnation. How many innocent civilians have died in bombings, strafings, shellings, and for just being in the way of military operations? You justify them as mistakes, or, my favorite, 'collateral damage.' If you get the chance, you say a little prayer for them or apologize to the survivors but you push them out of your mind. Unavoidable. Accidental. As if guns shoot themselves. We never treat people like that. No, Sergeant, it won't do. You'll hang me and hold your nose and categorically refuse to accept that there's really not a blade of grass difference between us in the end."

"And those three young women? Were they going to be sacrifices?"

Macouri shrugged. "Possibly. Probably not. They have other potential."

"What was in their bellies, Macouri? If not babies, then what?"

The little man gave him almost a smirk in return. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you, nor would it matter very much. But it wasn't any natural breeding project like I suspect you all believed at the start. No, no. Nothing as crass as that. We would hardly need the girls to do that now, would we?"

Maslovic decided that he'd had about enough for now. "Let's take a break, Georgi old pal. We'll see if the others had anything more to say."

Macouri yawned and stretched. "Captial idea, old boy. But you'll get nothing out of them. The girls don't really know much, and the others would never give it voluntarily and we've all had our little heads wired so that you can't dig it out. And you won't be able to cajole them, either. You see, they are much more frightened of what happens if they tell than of anything, even death, that you might threaten them with. And we've already demonstrated, I believe, that we're hardly helpless even in this monster ship of yours."

"We'll see. But nobody's going to get close to those crystal devices, not this time," the intelligence man warned him. "And thanks to that demonstration, your money's worthless here. It's not a game any more, 'old boy.' The very best you can hope for here is to live the most unremittingly boring and lonely life imaginable. Lonely, but never alone."

Macouri laughed. "Rather melodramatic of you, I think. Would it surprise you to be told that all of us, at least all but the young guests, can get out of here any time we choose? And it's beyond your power to stop us?"

"I know you could trigger that little bomb in your brain. It so happens I have a somewhat similar device in mine, just in case," Maslovic responded. "But I won't unless there is absolutely no hope, nor will you."

"My dear boy! If I triggered it now, it would join me to the greatest power in the universe!"

"You're no martyr. Deep down, at the very bottom core of your being, is a highly educated man who can not rid himself of that one last shred of doubt. And if I'm wrong about that, well, then, if you're going to tell me nothing, then you are nothing but a burden and a waste. Killing yourself would be just fine with me, and would simplify the paperwork. You see, you've finally done it, Georgi my lad. You've put yourself in a place and situation by your actions where you can't possibly win. You're either here, like this, forever, or you cease to exist. I'll see you in a bit. Have a bland lunch."

And, with that, the sergeant got up and walked out of the room, making sure that the brig's first security door closed with as much sound and finality as it could muster.

Within a few minutes his intelligence team, along with Murphy, were in fact eating a bland lunch together. Murphy wasn't complaining about it simply because Maslovic had insured that he could still get that very, very good stout.

"Okay," the sergeant said between bites of a large sandwich, "did anybody get anything?"

"Pretty much the same stuff, only not as good speechmaking as you report your boy had," Chung told him. She had taken Magda. "The old girl was a lot more belligerent, a lot more threatening of dire consequences from her employer and maybe supernatural or alien sources unstated but implied, and she could drop names like mad. It is true that a lot of our own security stuff came from the firm where she's a senior vice president. We should keep an extra close watch on her for that reason alone."

"Done. And the two employees?"

"The cook's nothing more than a thug with a ton of loyalty and no other morals whatsoever," Broz reported. "I'd swear to that."

"There's more to this Joshua than that, but I can't give you anything concrete," Darch told Maslovic. "We've run him through all sorts of databases and tried remote colonial files using tight beam and nothing really comes up. I think he's a good man in a fight, and had some sort of military training or background even if not in our sort of culture."

"Colonial defense, maybe? Many of them went freelance or pirate over the years. Still do. And they shouldn't be underestimated," Maslovic noted.

"Could be. If so, he's not under any of the usual colonial records. Doesn't mean much."

"Any luck on figuring out the girls' role in this?" the sergeant asked them.

One by one they shook their heads. Nobody had given the slightest clue, although all but the cook who, if she knew, probably hadn't paid attention and didn't give a damn now, seemed to be amused by the constant questioning about that.

Finally, there was near silence as each of them thought over the reports of the others and reflected on how little it had profited them.

Finally, Captain Murphy took a last drain of stout, put down the makeshift mug, and said, "Wheelbarrows."

All the other heads suddenly turned in his direction. "Wheelbarrows?" Maslovic repeated.

"Sure. You know what a wheelbarrow is?"

"Not exactly."

"It's a device for manual labor haulin' and such. One wheel in the front, two stands and two handles in the back so one man can get behind it, lift it up on the wheel, and rush it and its contents to wherever it's needed. There's an ancient joke, origins unknown, about a fellow who was known to be a smuggler on some world and there was this security perimeter or somesuch which you had to pass and who was lookin' for blokes what might try to sneak things over. And every day this laborer who worked on one side would come up to the guards with a wheelbarrow full of dirt. Now, they knew the fellow was sneakin' somethin' by 'em, but they didn't know what.

"They did him a full scan, analyzed every bit of dirt, did a full inside-and-out analysis of the wheelbarrow, you name it. Never found nothin', so they had to let him through. Did this for months, he did. Finally he quit, and was ready to make his exit with some money that was a lot more than he'd made as a laborer. Guard sees him, knows he's leavin', and begs the fellow to tell him what he was smugglin'. Promises no penalty. So, finally, the smuggler, he smiles and says, 'I was smugglin' wheelbarrows, of course.' "

They all looked at him blankly. Finally, Darch asked, "But why would he need to pass wheelbarrows through security?"

Murphy raised his eyes towards heaven and sighed. "It ain't worth explainin' a joke. The point is, you can do it with container modules on a space freighter. Fellow keeps bringin' in empty ones, and it's only later that they figure out he was smugglin' in the containers themselves to folks that needed 'em but couldn't buy 'em cheap where they was. You see? The point is, what was bein' smuggled was in plain sight. The container was the booty!"

Maslovic thought it over. "But under that logic, the girls themselves would be the object of the exercise. But there are lots of young women down there on Barnum's World and, in fact, the one thing we don't have any shortages of are people. So why smuggle them in? What possible value could they have?"

"I been thinkin' about that, and I come up with a theory. Maybe them girls got a talent. They sure ain't got a lot of education, and I ain't sure how much brains they're hidin' or if they're hidin' any a-tall, but you don't need to be a mental wizard if you got a useful talent. Somethin' you're just better at, or somethin' you're born with. I been tryin' to figure out what the hell Tara Hibernius had that would be worth this kind of trouble to smuggle someplace in that little an amount and I can't come up with nothin'. But pregnant girls-hell, they're the most helpless, least threatenin' folks you'll ever find. Nobody's gonna be scared of 'em but they're gonna be a lot safer travelin' out in the real world. It may even be just some kind of tricky gizmo or substance that made even them believe it, which would give 'em real reasons like I told you that first time to make 'em want to run like hell and get on an old tub with an old reprobate like me."

Maslovic thought it over. "You know, Macouri said something like that. He said that the way you insure people's absolute faithfulness is to have them be scared of something so awful that even death and torture are preferable. So if those three were really put in danger of their lives, in fear of even staying among their own people, it would make it far easier for them to turn their backs on family, friends, the only land they ever knew. Makes sense. And you said that young girls weren't the usual travelers?"

"Nope. Mostly men. Some women, but not them type."

"Then that has to be it. Which begs the next question: what makes those three unique enough and valuable enough to go to all that trouble and expense?"

Chung looked over at the sergeant. "You did the research on those weird alien stones?"

"Enough, after I got the captain's lead," Maslovic told her. "Why?"

"Any reports of people with them coming up with strange powers? Any revolutions or crimes of the century? Any major suicides or murders, for that matter, out of statistical norms?"

"No. None that I can think of. Darch, you did a lot of that. Anything?"

"Nothing."

"We're all ears, then, Lieutenant."

She shifted in her seat, a loner unused to this kind of central role. "I am, as much as anything, more than just a human. I'm a human cyborg interface module. I am only truly whole and one when I'm united with a ship or other piece of piloted hardware like the van. But if we put those controls on any of you, even with extensive training, the best you'd do would be okay. You would never combine as one with the machines as I do almost as a matter of course. You would simply use the interface to give orders faster, to control the machinery. The captain, I think, knows what I mean if you all do not."

The old man nodded. "Aye. I've handled them things now and then but I don't like 'em."

"Well, aren't there a fair number of rich people like Macouri with those stones? Some sort of status symbol?"

"Yes, okay."

"And even more, I bet, in the hands of government and scientific researchers. Brilliant people, I'm talking about. And not a one of them, or any three of them, could take over and control a naval cruiser's main computer. A computer using proprietary languages and codes, impossibly complex, and a device for which they'd have no knowledge of nor understanding of how it worked. And these three illiterate farm girls from nowhere just do it like it's second nature. You see what I mean? Even I would have a lot of trouble handling that kind of complex interface, not to mention disabling all the protections, breaking through all those complex firewalls and security traps. Only the Admiralty together manage that, and they knew what it is and how it works and all the codes and bypasses."

"Power," Maslovic muttered aloud, thinking.

"Huh?"

"That's what old Georgi said it was all about. Power. I wonder how they found out that these girls had that kind of gift?"

Murphy had an idea. "You got plenty of money in this devil cult, and you felt that presence, that whatever it is, slowly emerge when you studied the stones. So did I. It's so real, so scary, you could easily see demons and build a cult out of it. So their recruiters bring one or even a few with 'em, all paid for with the rich leadership's money, and they go to the strictest, most fundamentalist, socially repressive places in the colonies. Why, hell, they'd have no trouble finding converts among the young malcontents and with that effect from them stones, well, you see what happens and how it goes. And maybe one gets left with the leader of the cult or coven or whatever they call it so they'll always have their own demon."

"Sounds reasonable," Maslovic said. "Go on. You're doing fine."

"And along come these three unhappy farm girls, probably gonna be forced into arranged marriages and break their backs with work and havin' babies and all, and for some reason the stones react to them and them to the stones in a way nobody's seen before. Maybe they have, but I bet it's really rare. Power they can't tap in these not terribly bright but terribly unhappy young lasses. But the recruiters, the leaders, they know what it's all about. You stumble on the ultimate weapon, but the thing's on automatic and just fires randomly in all directions. Dangerous to all. But if you pick it up and treat it good and point it careful like, then it's your weapon. Sarge, you give most of the prisoners a whole bag of them stones and I bet not much happens. But you give one each to the three, and you put 'em together in the same room so they can act as one, and I think you got, well, some kind of biological amplifier. Now your three young ladies, under your control, can take over whole damned planets."

"Okay, but why Barnum's World?"

"Well, possibly just because Macouri was livin' there and already had a lot of influence and knew the lay of the land and who in the authorities can be counted on to look the other way. And when you got a city maintained by central automated computers, much like a ship like this one is, it's a wonderful test. Let's take over and reprogram the computers. Let's become the sole authority and power in Port Bainbridge. If it works, then you go on. Lots more worlds out there with far more people."

"Then why get them out of town so quickly?" Broz asked him. "It seems to me you'd want them there."

"Not until you had them under your control, and with them three I think it would take a while for anybody to get 'em under control. Until then, you risk tippin' your hand early, like discoverin' who it was that was chargin' all sorts of fancy stuff on invalid but accepted credit accounts. Their power's so natural they hardly even realized they was doin' it. No use in alerting the smart boys in authority until you were ready to take over their city. But you get 'em off in the swamps with folks like the woman in charge of much of the computer security for New Bainbridge, and you practice. Now you can spread your filthy religion and your naked power in a nice, safe, controlled progression. It was wheelbarrows they had me smugglin'. You put it to 'em. Macouri and his gang, that is. I bet they'll give it away if it's you tellin' them."

Maslovic looked at the others. "What do you think? Honest answers, please. If we put this to them, it'll have to be from total conviction. We want them to believe that one of the others cracked and bragged so they'll feel free to fill in the blanks. Darch?"

"Smacks a lot of mysticism to me," the tech responded. "All my life I been hearing friend-of-a-friend stories about telepaths and telekinesis and all sorts of psychic powers. Never actually met one myself, nor seen a convincing demonstration. The idea that three stupid little twits can just waltz in to where one of these stones is and suddenly cause it to be the amplifier to enormous power… I don't know."

"But you've seen it! We all saw it!" Broz pointed out. "Right here. It took our best efforts for days to execute a parallel system switch without crashing the ship. Otherwise who knows what nasty little worms they might have left in our main computers. And Captain Murphy said it, too-that a city like that one back there isn't much different than a ship like this."

"But the kind of specialized knowledge and skills needed to hack the system are way beyond what I can accept as intuitive. Nobody gets that kind of information from evolution," Darch maintained. "Those systems are so complex they're designed by computers even larger and more complex than the ones they build. If not a conscious plot against us, where did it come from?"

"Possibly from the devices, for that's almost certainly what they really are," Maslovic replied. "Or from the intelligence that made them. Possibly more machine than animal itself. Not from Hell, which I am not at all sure exists, but from someone, somewhere. Too faint to be more than a jolt to us. Our brains interpret the attempt at feeding into us, controlling us, as some kind of presence, some kind of powerful and, yes, evil presence, but no more. It shows up randomly and it looks back at you, or at least that's what it feels like it's doing. Something in the girls' brains, maybe only when they're all together, is more sensitive. It can amplify what's coming through. And thus the 'demon' connects in the same way the lieutenant here connects to her ship. Where do they get it from there? Who knows? Possibly from us. Possibly from our machines, constantly communicating through the very air and empty space we occupy. I don't know how those things work, but whoever or whatever is behind them has been waiting for the likes of those three for some time. Magic, mystical stones of power made in a way we can't duplicate even now. Magic is science we haven't figured out yet."

"So what now?" the lieutenant asked.

"I'll have to feed this through higher command," the sergeant replied, "but it seems that there can't be but one possible answer to this, and one response. The question is, do these people know what we need to know?"

"And that is?"

"These stones, these-things-first showed up on a derelict spaceship. More, according to records, have appeared in wrecks mostly connected to this Three Kings legend. We saw the displays and pictures in Macouri's place back in New Bainbridge. If they weren't the Three Kings I can't imagine what they might be. It all comes down to the legend of the Three Kings. People go there but none come back. Their ships occasionally do, but they're ghost ships running on automatic or wrecks. How convenient that we keep finding them, considering how impossible this place is alleged to be."

"You think they exist, then?" Chung asked him. "And that the answers, the ones behind this, are operating from there?"

"The evidence is pointing that way. And who do the records identify as going there over the past couple of hundred years? Visionaries and missionaries and greedy mercenaries. Not the kind of people best suited for facing a potentially hostile alien force using them to probe and possibly control us, bit by bit."

"I agree, Chief, the Three Kings is where the answers lie," Broz put in. "So let's go there and see."

"Slight problem with that, isn't there?" Chung responded. "I mean, if there were any maps to that route, it would have been overrun by now. We don't know where they are or how to find them."

Maslovic gave a wry smile. "But I have a sneaking suspicion that at least one of our new guests here does. This might get to be very interesting and profitable after all."

And, with that, he got up and headed back for a second round with Georgi Macouri.

"Tell me about the Three Kings, Georgi," said Maslovic.

Macouri laughed. "A superstition by an outdated religion that won't go away."

"You know what I'm talking about. You have portraits of them in your house, surrounding your happy devil."

The little man seemed surprised and irritated. "You were in the building? You saw all that?"

"How else did I know of the blood sacrifices?"

"True, true. Hadn't connected the two. There are other ways to find that out if you really want to look. Not prove it, mind, but find it out. How do you like the looks of my god, Sergeant? Does he look like the Lord of Terror?"

"I couldn't care less. It's what frames his statue that I want to know about. Those huge pictures."

"Well, you must know something of the history in order to recognize them at all. Those aren't artist renderings or educated guesses, you know. They're exquisite digital blowups of actual frames. Those are in fact the Three Kings. Not exactly the worlds of everybody's dreams, are they?" He chuckled some more.

"If that's so, how did you get hold of them? They're not supposedly available to the public, although I have no idea who has the originals at this point."

"Oh, my family got them back. I assume you know the legend?"

"I didn't, but I do now," Maslovic told him.

"Couldn't do much about the names, but my grandfather was quite the explorer in his time. His hobby was going into unknown areas and mapping and charting them. He was certain that, somewhere out here, there just had to be some creatures, some civilization, if not contemporaneous to us at least one or more that had been here long ago, and he was going to find it. He wasn't crazy. That was his chosen field, and he did it in style. Made some really major discoveries in that super luxury yacht of his. Then he got this data that convinced him that he could locate the legendary and missing Three Kings. Something in that old fool of a priest's truncated survey caught my grandfather's eye and he was convinced that there might well be traces of ancient alien civilizations there. He went off, and he found them. The pictures prove that, as does some of the survey information that survived. You know the rest, though. The yacht came back but not any human or AI device that could tell us anything about it. Worse, no trace of how to find those three worlds or what my grandfather discovered. But inside-inside that perfectly good, working luxury spacecraft were the pictures, the strange little artifacts like nothing ever seen before and, of course, what came to be horribly misnamed as the Magi stones. I think you're aware of them and their peculiar, shall we say, properties?"

Maslovic nodded. It was all finally falling into place. "And because it was your family's property, when all was analyzed and said and done much of it came back to the Macouris. Your father put the artifacts in traveling shows and gave many of the stones out to rich and influential people as the ultimate status symbols. And he let some get sold at auction by the finest art houses, didn't he?"

"You're smarter than you should be," Georgi Macouri told him, in the closest thing to a compliment he could muster. "I'm impressed. We didn't need the money, of course, but the legend that went with them, that was the important thing. That silly El Dorado stuff. My father was convinced that somewhere, someone had my grandfather's papers, his research and calculations, that would give away the location of the Three Kings. What better way to find it, when the best detectives in the known universe couldn't, but to make it a contest, a quest for the Holy Grail, the magical place of dreams. And good legends really help sell status symbols, you know, and they grow in the retelling. We never did get the pictures back, and a lot of the data recordings, but we got copies of the interesting stuff. There was still a semblance of interstellar government then; it hadn't begun to break down. I assume that just as this ship and its crew are all leftover relics of that past time, somewhere out here there's still a bunch of folks who think they're the intelligence service of some big, monolithic government who are still classifying everything Top Secret and pretending that the Silence never happened. It doesn't matter."

"Odd that after all that, and such a clever plan, nobody ever found the stuff, though," the sergeant commented. "You'd think something would leak after all this time."

"Oh, it has. Your pitiful pretense at being part of some vast navy has blinded you to subsequent history in many areas. I think there's been a slow but steady progression of people and ships out there as the location turned up. I've traced many. The trouble is, just like my grandfather, nobody who goes comes back. Or, if they do, they come back very, very dead."

Maslovic sat up very straight. "You do know where the Three Kings are, then, don't you?"

Georgi Macouri gave his Cheshire Cat smile. "Who? Me?"

"But you haven't ever gone out looking. Your father's great dream, and his clever plan uncovered the coordinates, yet you never used them. Why not?"

"You assume too much not in evidence," the little man responded. "Why, just a few years ago a group of brave men and women got the address from a third party and went off to mine the riches and return. They haven't yet. Nothing. Not even a trace of their ship, either, although its wreckage, perhaps in tiny pieces, may be all over a half a light-year-wide region out there."

"But you never made the try."

Macouri shrugged. "Sergeant, I inherited everything. The money, the power, the influence, the excellent wine cellars, you name it. I even enjoy the thrill of risk. I bathe in it sometimes. But if it's not to be even odds, then the odds must be on my side. I seem to lack the recklessness."

"So you just have manipulated and sent others over and over, and to no avail."

"Oh, there's been some profit. Some of the wrecks that made it back-and not all do-have some goodies in them. Magi stones in several varieties and types, enough to depress the market if anybody else knew. Soil samples including tons of those funny little enigmatic machined thingies, too. Stuff like that. Stuff that survives being twisted and flattened and turned inside out inside a wild wormhole. No, Sergeant, I've gotten some things back. Not this last batch, but half the time. Why should I risk it until I can speak with someone who's made the return trip?"

It was Maslovic's turn to smile. "So I was right about you, you see. Deep down, there's that hollow spot in your brain, that secret place called Doubt. As deep as you can go, you really don't have faith in your religion. It's just a game. Otherwise, you'd be overjoyed with the idea of going off to meet your masters at the Three Kings and you'd not even worry about a return. And if by some stretch you really do believe in them, then you don't really trust them. Not a good position for somebody serving a god, is it?"

Macouri didn't like this direction, and his face showed it. "I think we end this for now. It's not any fun any more."

"You can't end it until I say we end it," Maslovic pointed out. "You're stuck here, Georgi, as long as we want you. Now we've established a new level, though, that may be working to your advantage."

"Indeed?"

"Now it's not just that I have you. Now you, in fact, have something I want. For the first time, there is a basis for negotiation."

Macouri sat up and stared at the big, bald man in uniform sitting there across the table from him. "And what do I have that you truly want, Sergeant?"

"We want the Three Kings. We want the address and anything else you might have on them."

"And if I give them to you? What do I get?"

"Out of here. Off this ship. As a permanent prisoner here, you're a liability. You consume but do not contribute. But you must believe this, Georgi: If we don't get what we want, if you don't give us what we want freely and accurately and willingly, then you will stay here. For years. For decades. For what will pass for forever to you. And you'll do it in a padded room, a little box, with nothing even to write with or do yourself or us harm. Alone. Forever."

Maslovic got up and started towards the security door, his back to the prisoner. He had delivered his ultimatum and now it was up to the other man.

"Sergeant?"

Maslovic stopped but didn't turn around. "Yes?"

"Your word. On the official record, endorsed by all your superiors. You will not take this information and then just discard me or throw me back in the hole?"

"I guarantee you that you'll not die here, and that we're not going to do you harm. If you want off this ship, that is the only way."

"And the others?"

Maslovic turned around and faced the little man who was still sitting at the table. "I don't see any grounds for holding the cook, and I'm going to allow this Joshua of yours to make his own choice. The three girls aren't your worry or responsibility any more. That's basically it."

"Why do you want to go there? You won't get back, you know. I understand that much now."

"Well, we can say we're looking for a little payback for what was done to our own operations here," the intelligence man said. "Or maybe we think there might be answers to questions out there that can stop this drift of humanity into oblivion. At least we might find out the answer to the greatest philosophical question of our time."

"Yes?"

"Whether or not we were locked out or locked in," Maslovic told him.

"I-I shall have to think on this somewhat," Macouri said after a pause. "There may be the basis of an arrangement here."

"Take your time. We're not going anywhere off the schedule right now and, as for me, I'm home."

With that, Maslovic walked out through the security doors and back down the hall to get a drink and wait for the others to reassemble. Still, unlike before, he felt quite good at this point.

Maybe someday soon he would gaze into one of those damned crystals and that thing, whatever it was, would eventually show up to peer back at him as before. Only this time, that creature would discover that Maslovic would be standing right behind him…

"So, Sergeant, what do you plan to do if he does give you the key to the front door?" Captain Murphy asked.

"I plan to go through it, kicking it down if I have to, and see what this is all about."

"Might be a real letdown," Darch put in. "The remnants of some machine doing its automated thing, or maybe even just some kind of broadcast into areas of the brain common to most organic life-forms. You might wind up standing there, freezing or boiling, with nowhere to go and nothing to do."

Maslovic grinned and looked around at them. "Well, I might have some company. Or would you prefer to break up this happy group?"

"And who else would be with us?"

Maslovic grinned. "The biggest damned ship in the fleet that the Admiralty will allow us to take, of course, with all hands. I want power behind me when I go in if possible. I want to know that, if we can't take control of the planet, well, then at least we can blow it up."

"But you're talking a wild hole!" Murphy noted. "Hell, man, that's tricky enough under the best of conditions with a small ship designed for the task. The records don't show any ship comin' back that's of any size. Biggest is that yacht his grandpa had. We know from the record that some pretty large ships went in, but none of 'em ever came back, and the biggest not even in pieces!"

"Nevertheless, if they allow me to risk such a ship I'm going to take it. What about it, Lieutenant? Think you could run a wild hole with something the size of, oh, the Agrippa?"

She nodded. "I do not see anything against it. The principles of physics are quite different inside a hole, wild or not, than here, but they are still pretty well predictable and their characteristics known. A wild hole is incredibly dangerous, but a competent pilot should be able to get even a large ship through. That is why I believe that some agency interfered with the return of some of the ones on record as having vanished after going. Nothing comes back intact larger than that yacht, which is no larger than one of our shuttles. That is the only danger I would feel threatened by. A good pilot can do that job, but we do not know what we will be up against once there."

"Well, Murphy here and I have been looking over the archives," Broz told them, "and we can't find any military ship on the list. Mostly research and exploration ships, freighters, and similar craft. Even one interstellar small city devoted to Christian evangelism, of all things. I feel confident that if we can keep them out of our control computers, we can handle the rest."

"Then as soon as I get the coordinates I will put the proposal to the Admiralty directly," Maslovic told them. "We will probably be approved with the limitation that we take only volunteers and then only the minimum human crew to do the job."

"And the girls? What of them?" Murphy asked him.

"That's up to the Admiralty. I know that if I had my own choice I'd bring them along. They may be the best, perhaps the only way of getting into direct one-on-one contact with this alien presence, and they have nowhere else to go. Of course, the Admiralty may feel that it would not be just to take them along at their age and experience. We'll see. You, Captain, will be allowed to depart with our thanks."

"The devil I will!" Patrick Murphy snapped. "I ain't come this far to turn and run now, maybe never knowin' what the hell it's all about. No, no. You're stuck with me, Maslovic. Nobody but nobody is gonna keep Patrick Xavier Aloysius Murphy from settin' his old eyes on the Three Kings themselves!"

"Then it's a done deal. I'll go run it past the higher-ups and see what they'll give us."

It took almost a day to get everyone on board. The main points of disagreement were whether or not to try it with the full task force or to send just one element. Maslovic argued for real power, which meant one of the destroyers at the least, but after the Admiralty became concerned that, if everyone wasn't going, there was the likelihood of a one-way trip judging from the evidence, it was decided that the force should be as minimal as possible while still sufficient to get the job done.

Maslovic would get his destroyer, with full weapons, but minimal crew. It would be stripped of all but one fighter squadron, put on as full automation as possible, and full discretion would be handed to the special captain appointed for the mission and to the ground force under Maslovic.

Both would also have the code strings for autodestruct.

By the time the group assembled again, Maslovic had the full set of details.

"Lieutenant Chung, you will take command of Agrippa," he told her, watching her face light up. She was suddenly now, at least with a brevet promotion, about twenty years advanced beyond where she would expect to be. "I am mission commander, and, yes, you can call me Sarge, Chief, Commander, or Hey you! Makes no difference. Captain Murphy, I'm going to put you in charge of your three girls."

"You're takin' 'em along, then?"

"Got nowhere else to put them, and in a pinch they may be our avenue of communication with whatever's out there. We're pretty sure we understand now how whatever it is hacked into the system and that avenue's forestalled. That doesn't mean they might not surprise us, but the captain and I will have personal control of weapons and similar systems outside the primary. No matter what, I feel certain we can blow them to hell if need be. Darch and Broz will handle our involuntary guests. Feel free to call on the rest of the team if need be."

Broz had a wicked smile on her face. "They been told yet?"

"I rather think we'll let old Georgi know just before we jump, in case he's fed us the wrong coordinates or is setting a trap. Until then, both he and his alter ego Joshua are to be given the impression that they are being taken back to a colonial world as part of the bargain. Clear?"

Murphy looked Maslovic straight in the eyes. "It's not much for this kind of thing."

"It's what we've got. Now, let's go do it!"