Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

“He’s talking about Olivet, ” John Robey gasped. “Sir, he’s got the ground ship targeted!”

In his head, Cromwell, on the secure band, hissed, “Shut up you idiot! Just play along and don’t panic!”

Robey felt properly chastened, but he couldn’t quite figure out why he was being called on the carpet for that kind of outburst. They were trapped, weren’t they?

Weren’t they?

The Doctor thought for a moment, then said, “All right, tell you what. Send me your experts on your ship with the codes and I’ll have maintenance and engineering take a look at it. I assume I can bring a few people down and shoot a few back up to their labs?”

“Of course. But no one from your present ship goes up, including you, and nobody comes down to this area. You have one shuttle. That should be sufficient to get anyone you need over to the lake in plenty of time, and back as well. We’ll be watching.”

“I’m sure you will,” Woodward told him. “So, shall we meet here again tomorrow, same time, same place, and compare notes?”

There was a pause, then, “Yes, that will be sufficient.”

“In the meantime, you will treat my people as your prisoners, not as your property!” the Doctor snapped. “I see what you’ve done to this girl even before you worked your evil on controlling her actions. You will find a cave with one entrance you can guard or close off, you will give them sufficient food and water, and you can post guards to keep them from getting out. If you can’t do that much, then I swear to God that I will blow up your ship, my ship, I don’t care, and no matter what happens you will never be able to turn a back on any of us. Understood?”

The Captain wasn’t used to this kind of attitude, but after counting ten to keep his own temper in check, he then chuckled and replied, “All right. We’ll try it. But if any of them make a break for it or cause any harm to my people, they will pay and it will be on your head, not mine.”

“If you can’t do your part of the job, then send them back!” Woodward said acidly.

Eve turned and woodenly walked off into the field, oblivious of what was lying on the ground, and reached a point about ten meters from them. She then took one more step and seemed to fall into a deep hole. Robey, unable to restrain himself, ran to the spot, only to be unable to find it even though it was so close.

“It’s a rock door, boy!” Woodward called to him. “Relax. I think we are on the way to resolving this.”

Cromwell seemed much more relieved, and, after doing a fresh check for bugging devices in the Doctor’s offices, he seemed almost relaxed. Robey was anything but, with the image of the tortured and manipulated puppetlike Eve fresh in his mind and, he knew, likely to haunt his nightmares.

The Doctor was a bit angrier inside, an anger that bubbled up from time to time, but he, too, seemed more confident.

“At least we know he can’t control most of the hostages,” Cromwell commented. “I’m sure you noticed that.”

Woodward sat back in his big chair and nodded. “Yes, when he began to object to a normal incarceration, it was pretty clear that whatever he did to the girl has severe limits. We’re not going to have to fight some sort of zombie army.”

Robey just shook his head. “Sir, what’s the difference? I mean, if he can target us here in Olivet and he can shoot down the shuttles, then he has us hostage, too.”

“Not at all,” Cromwell told him. “In fact, until now I wasn’t certain of just how much relative power and equipment he might have. Now I know. It’s why he keeps our people. Deep down, even he suspects that we’re in no true danger here. If it wasn’t for them, we could just curse this place and go.”

“Then why deal with him? Wouldn’t they be just as well off passing over to the Lord as being like—like that? ”

“We’re going to try and save them all, or as many as we can, son. That I promise,” Woodward assured him. “Right now, we’re going to play along a bit. Rather interesting that they held out the old Three Kings canard here but never mentioned it out there. I wonder if our pirate captain realizes just what a miserable spot he’s in?”

Robey respected these two men, and if they didn’t seem worried then he saw no reason to stew on their behalf, but he realized that eighty-seven lives were still at stake, maybe a few more on their side. “So what do we do now?”

“We pray, as always, and trust to the Lord,” Karl Woodward told him seriously. “And, later on, our engineers and technicians will go with their engineers and technicians, and maybe by midnight we’ll know just what kind of weapons they had on that ship, which ones they removed, and just what their targeting and energy capabilities are. By morning we should know more about that ship and have its schematics analyzed than the original crew probably knew. And by the end of our meeting tomorrow we should have access to their underground information, particularly if we can reclaim your woman friend. I can’t guarantee we can free her from whatever infernal device they’re using on her, but I do think that we may well be able to listen in on them.”

“And then,” added Thomas Cromwell, “the Lord will enable His terrible swift sword.”

It was difficult to say if Eve was any better or worse than the day before, or even if she could feel such things, but at least the old pirate captain was learning. This time she had her old robe on, and it even looked like somebody had cleaned it. It didn’t take away from the woodenness of her actions, but it did seem to give her a little dignity.

Woodward, Cromwell, Robey, and several others had spent the entire night in the strangest gathering Robey could ever have imagined, a kind of combination prayer meeting, strategy session and technical argument with experts up on Sinai . He was out of his depth from the start and he knew it, so he mostly tried to concentrate on prayer and, as they kept urging him, getting some sleep. He couldn’t do much of either one, though. They had all those comrades, including the outgoing and intelligent Eve made little more than a robot, and they had weapons from an interstellar combination warship and freighter mounted in a defensive ring so that they could blast anything trying to land that they didn’t like—and, of course, anything taking off as well. It seemed like a standoff, and that meant exactly that. The Doctor would never make a serious deal with these evil people, nor could anybody trust them in the first place even if you tried. And they could blow Olivet to hell, or Heaven, or wherever, leaving those on the ground stranded as much as the locals here and those up above helpless to do more than take a measure of revenge.

But if you looked at Woodward, you’d swear that there wasn’t much to worry about. Robey began to wonder if being almost two hundred years old wasn’t pushing the envelope on the mind. They could repair, regenerate, or grow new almost any part of the body these days, but just because you could replace brain cells didn’t mean that you operated like you did in your twenties, or thought as quickly and clearly. Science had moved the bar on longevity and quality of life by a great amount, but there was still a bar there.

Cromwell, somewhat the heir apparent, was different. There was no question the man was a true believer, a fanatic, and in top physical and mental form for taking on all comers. But his own dark and violent side was in some ways as scary as that pirate’s, and there was also some of the same “the end justifies any means” attitude to his actions and beliefs. Everybody at least knew about Karl Woodward, once considered one of humanity’s smartest human beings, a genius in any field that interested him, professor, lecturer, researcher, who, after the Great Silence, one day announced that he had deduced through research and logic the truth of Christianity and embarked on his new crusade, alienating just about every one of his old intellectual colleagues who thought he’d gone over that fine line between genius and madness and also alienating just about all of traditional Christianity by rejecting most of it as “corrupt and stupid.”