Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

Woodward took the thing, examined it, and nodded. “It’s just as the old stories say. There’s supposed to be some of these on Vaticanus, but of course a lot of the physical evidence was suppressed. There was always the hope that they could find the place again while convincing everybody else it was just a legend.”

He stared into it as Robey had, and for him, too, a vision coalesced, although clearly not the same one the younger man had seen. He looked at it, seemingly transfixed, fascinated by its image which seemed revealed to him alone.

Suddenly, he broke away, as if awakening from a trance. “What did you do to get this, Sapenza? Murder the crew?”

“Nothing of the sort! She’d been dead and so had the small crew of that ship for a century and a half before we lucked onto her, and that was only because we’d just had a professional disagreement, let’s say, with a former partner over some financial matters and then discovered he had bigger guns than we did even though we had a faster ship. We went through gate after gate at top speed, so scrambled even we didn’t know or care where we were going. We gave ’em the slip somewhere in the system, and came out an old gate and almost crashed into the wreck. Who knows how long it was there, or how many other ships might have gone past without even noticing it? Sheer luck, or chance. We did a salvage and strip, and the first thing we did, of course, was retrace its course to see if the colony was worth a look. As you can see, it wasn’t, but that last shot we’d taken and the stress of all that gating at speed caused the bubble to burst. We’ve been stuck here ever since. The Curse of Mother Tymm, you might call it. What with all the informational stuff, the Three Kings artifacts, and the Reverend Mother’s own personal possessions we were able to convince the yokels that we were the guardians until the dear Mother returned. She won’t, of course. Not in this life. Besides, she’d be almost four hundred anyway. A bit old for anybody’s taste.”

“Why did she die? And why did she leave the colony here?” Cromwell asked.

“I can tell you that there’s no gate at the Kings. It’s a free wormhole and its got a lot of energy. You’d need shields ten times stronger than what that old bucket of hers had. I think they tried it, but they found out in time that if they went through they’d wind up as the galaxy’s smallest neutron star. So they dropped here, figuring it would support the colony for years until she could get what she needed to go through, and she left. The thing must have been half torn to pieces by the first attempt. It was imploded. Ugly. But, at least, intact for all that. If it had exploded we’d never have figured out what it was.”

And there was the whole story. It rang true, felt true, sounded true. And it had one particularly problematical side effect.

Maybe these soulless and evil people really did know the way to the Three Kings.

“There’s no way we could take them under those conditions he laid out,” Cromwell noted on the secure channel. “We’d wind up killing all of us, and destroying the full Mountain as well. I say we go with our original plan. Then we’ll see what sort of bargain can be struck at the point of our weapons!”

Woodward continued to finger the egg for a few moments, then he sighed and seemed to nod to himself. After a moment, he took out another cigar from his pocket and lit it. As he puffed, he stepped back a bit from the others.

“Okay, boy, this is it! On my count, it’s shoot and run! Three… two… one…” And then, shouted loudly, “Now!”

It might have been that after all this time, Captain Sapenza was just too rusty, but he’d clearly made an amateur’s mistake and now he was going to pay for it. With the security team sweep having made certain that there were no unwelcome snipers about as had been planted the day before, the primary danger came from who and what they could see and from the single entrance/exit they already knew about.

From the moment Doctor Woodward had signalled the “Go ahead” with his cigar, things pretty much automatically happened. As the Doctor stepped back, Cromwell’s combat suit sent a strong stun charge straight into Ziggee, dropping him before the little man even was aware that anything was wrong. At the same moment, Robey tapped the small button just inside the sleeve of his robe and felt the pistol shoot into his hand. He didn’t have Cromwell’s computerized super accuracy but he didn’t need it; his job was to shoot Eve at maximum stun.

Even as she took the force of the blast and seemed to collapse like some kind of marionette whose strings were swiftly cut, Cromwell had swiveled and fired a series of strong blasts directly at the cave opening. Large rocks and part of the shattered door blew up and out with a bang.

Woodward now crouched and ran forward, picking up the limp Eve as if she were a rag doll and then running back towards the ship. By this point, he was under protective cover from three of Cromwell’s snipers and from Archangel orbiting above.

Neither Cromwell nor Robey stopped. They both went forward, Robey behind the armored Cromwell for protection, making as fast as they could for the opening to down below. Reaching the still smoking spot, Cromwell jumped into the hole as Robey undid the sash of his robe in order to remove the portable ferret monitor strapped to his chest, put it on the ground and activate it.

“ Damn! ” he heard Cromwell swear, and knew that not everything was according to plan.

“Problems, sir?”

“It’s Englar. Will Englar. The bastard was using him as a secondary remote! I’d hoped to see Sapenza, but he’s rusty, not dumb. All right, I’m going to bring the boy out. He’s probably under control, like your girl, but he’s also hurt bad here. Get him back to Olivet as fast as you can!”

“Sir? You don’t need me for the ferrets?”

“Come on, lad! Take him! My people are coming in to reinforce as we speak! Your job’s over!”

Even as Robey struggled with the big man’s limp body, he heard the sounds of explosions off in the distance. The other teams were in and probably ahead of them.

It was obvious to him that he just couldn’t get Englar back to the ship alone. The guy was bigger than he was, limp, and bleeding from several wounds. Eve was a lot easier to handle.

“Need help with a wounded man here!” he radioed on the general frequency. “Bleeding, time of the essence!”

Within a couple of minutes, even as the rest of Cromwell’s team was going in, two brown-robed Chief Ushers were at Robey’s side, one with a litter. With that, and a man on each end, Robey realized that he had nothing else to do.

Well, the black-clad security people didn’t have those fancy Cromwell-type suits on when they’d gone down that hole, he thought. Cromwell wanted the combat suits spread out among the different teams going in all over the area.

“Archangel, hook me into Secured Tactical,” he called. “I’m going in.”

“That’s not authorized, Brother,” the monitoring security officer responded.

“Look, I’ve just about had it with these people and the only one I’ve been able to shoot so far is my partner. I’m going in. If you don’t patch me in, they’ll probably shoot me thinking I’m a bad guy, but I’m going in!”

“Very well. We’ll patch you in, but this will be reported to the Doctor.”

“Fine. I’ve been with him the last day and a half. He may not approve but I think he’ll understand. Going in!”

He jumped down into the hole.

It was clear almost immediately that they’d jury-rigged some kind of comm link using the two captured and controlled Arms as the last links. That way, Sapenza was in no immediate danger from the kind of move they pulled, and their own people had taken the brunt of it. So be it.