Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

“Wait,” the Doctor ordered. “We can’t get everybody at once, so our best bet is to let them make the first move. Still, I want as much information on what’s down there as possible. We’ve been looking all over for the caves; we knew they had to be someplace . Now we know. Put some probes down as relays and then send in some ferrets and let’s see what we’ve got. In the meantime, everybody’s going to have to pretend that there’s nothing going on in the congregation, so I’ll give them my usual. That will service the needs of the people not involved in this, and also pin down any who are from interrupting the ferret operation. When you’ve got information, we’ll talk again. You can act on your own, using your best judgment while I’m on, but if there’s any shooting, any injuries or deaths, I want to hear about it even if I’m in mid-sentence, you understand?”

“Yes, sir! I’ve got a couple of likely openings spotted. When you start, we should be pretty clear outside and able to commence operations.”

At that a door hissed open behind Grady. He turned and saw Thomas Cromwell himself standing there in full battle armor, with the cross of Saint George on his front and back. The armor was standard Navy tactical; it was smart and able to act on its own to protect its wearer if need be, and nobody was going to get a sleep dart through it, that was for sure.

“You heard, Brother Cromwell?”

The big Tactical chief nodded. “I’m going down with a small team now. You put me where we can most likely get some information fast. Doc’s good, but the whole service is under two hours complete with music. I don’t want that mob letting out while we’re right in the middle.”

“Very good, Brother,” Grady responded. “We’re pretty sure they’ve been taken to some sort of central location, but it’ll be fairly deep. Still, if you drill and drop a line probe into a ferret hole it should reach at full power.”

Cromwell nodded, turned, and walked back out and down to the shuttle site. The rest of his team were already there in suits similar to his but without the cross front and back. The cross was Cromwell’s own trademark, although it could vanish very suddenly if it singled him out as a target.

In the twenty-six minutes it took to land the team and its equipment, the rocky plain had been pretty well cleared of people, which was just fine with Cromwell. He knew that there had to be guards posted but he didn’t care. If any humans were around and attempted to flee or suddenly vanished down a hole, they would regret doing so very quickly.

The “ferrets” were a land-based version of the “fish” used at the lake, better suited for going along solid ground than through liquids. They were small and made out of the same malleable material as the combat suits, so they could morph quickly into shapes and sizes needed to get through very tight places, cling to the tops rather than the floors of buildings, ships, caves, or whatever, and take on characteristics useful for camouflage. Like the fish, they were best monitored with screens and then taken over and run by direct hookup to a human brain, and the tactical unit used a set of small screens for this purpose. The suits could link with the ferrets for a full virtual reality experience, transferring the consciousness of the human to the ferret, but Cromwell did that only when necessary. It took somebody out of the fight here, and if there were armed enemies around, that might be fatal to them or to those protecting the one linked in.

In the security command center on Olivet , in back of the stage, they were gathered around watching the same thing on bigger screens, which were also being uplinked to the orbiting Sinai .

The five-member tactical squad referred to itself only by Greek letters—Cromwell, of course, was Alpha—to save time and make no mistake as to who was talking to whom. They had jumped from the shuttle and set up their gear even as the shuttle rose rapidly into the sky and vanished. Nobody was going to take one of those things if it could be helped, and the computer pilots would kill any unauthorized passengers or even destroy themselves and their vehicles before allowing anyone to endanger Sinai .

The natural “at rest” coloration of the suits, originally made more than two centuries ago for Navy special teams like the one Cromwell had once run, was the usual gun metal gray, and so were the ferrets. In the darkness, away from the just starting “teaching,” or service, they were virtually invisible and, thanks to the suit, they gave off no heat signatures. They did, however, have to have a place to go, and until now there was no evidence of the hidden part of this society no matter how obvious it was that it had to be there. Now they did.

Cromwell just wished he had more than half a dozen, and he prayed that the ones he had would return safe and sound. While there was some self repair built in, if these went there was no way to get more and little in the reference as to how the things worked anyway.

There was no question that this was one of the openings even though it didn’t register from space or from any appreciable distance. Standing on it, you got a fairly steady anomalous energy reading that generally meant a steady-state power grid below. Great shielding, though, Cromwell thought, then took out what looked to be a large pistol. He put its barrel flat to the edge of the area now showing energy below and said, “Gamma, bring me a probe terminator.” One of the others reached into a pack and then handed him a disc-shaped object perhaps thirty centimeters across which he clamped to his suit. He then fired the pistol.

There wasn’t any sort of explosion; instead, there was a whirring sound and when he felt the bit fall free of the covering he relaxed the pistol and pulled it slightly back. A black snakelike line continued to issue from the barrel as the probe dropped as far as gravity would take it. When it stopped, Cromwell twisted the barrel and removed the other end of the snake, then took the disc and attached it to the line, then let it go. The disc provided a solid anchor for the probe, which now was acting much like a real snake, moving around until it acquired the best signal. When it seemed satisfied, the center of the disc glowed a dull red for a few seconds, then went inert again.

“Good signal,” one of the team reported.

“Very well, then,” their commander responded. “Release ferret.”

From the probe a small, cigarlike shape seemed to flow out like liquid mercury, then started speeding ahead down the tunnel, which appeared to be lit by those glowing stripes similar to the ones used in the arsenal cave.

“Good visibility, good audio, but not much of a clue as to where anybody went,” Beta commented.

“Give it time,” their leader said soothingly.

“Junction!” Gamma called out. “Split ferret?”

“No, not until and unless we have to,” Cromwell told them. “Best guess, leave it up to the ferret. It has better sensors than we do.”

The ferret unhesitatingly chose the right tunnel and went on at maximum speed. Those little things could really move , Cromwell reflected, not for the first time.

“Observers! Two in the bush to the left, one sixty!” Delta called to them in the way only they could really hear.

Cromwell wasn’t about to go for subtleties when his people were being grabbed. He turned and looked straight at the interlopers using full night vision and saw the pair, a man and a woman, both middle-aged and both butt-ugly, he thought, but not otherwise distinguishable from the rest of the settlers. Except, of course, they both had standard military issue energy pistols in their hands.

“Take ’em both on my command,” he instructed. “If they’re going to take our people then maybe we should have a few of theirs.”