Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

They didn’t need to complete the journey before Captain Sapenza knew he was licked. The ship was already well out of sight over the horizon, and the captain had no planetary tracking equipment or orbiting satellites to tell him just where the fleeing quarry was nor how far it could go.

“They blew up the arsenal at the same time,” Gregnar told him. “That lift shot so far in the air it came down five kilometers away in the middle of a maize field.”

“Figures,” Sapenza commented in an almost disinterested tone.

It was only when Almarie, his longtime chief woman, started nattering that he showed what was going on inside him.

“Yeah, sure. Kidnap ’em. The Holy Joes’ll freak and give us our ticket. Torture a few to make ’em scared. They scared real good, didn’t they? You couldn’t have tried it straight with them first? Maybe cut their throats later if it didn’t work? No! You hadda screw ’em from the start! Now we’re stuck here! You happy now?”

Sapenza sighed and said nothing, but he took out a small pistol and shot her at point-blank range on maximum blast. Her whole form shimmered and then there was only the smell of burnt flesh and a little pile of gray powder where she’d stood.

Gregnar and the rest moved back several steps.

The Captain turned towards them and they all froze, half expecting this to be their last moments anywhere. Instead, he said, “Can we still contact them?”

“Yeah, boss. They use standard frequencies. You just call them and if they’re out of range it’ll be intercepted by their orbiting ship and passed along,” somebody told him. “But, boss—you start broadcasting, you tell ’em just where we are.”

“Who the hell cares now? ” he asked them. “Get me to a transceiver.”

They quickly brought him to a communications terminal inside one of the camouflaged gun emplacements. Not a shot fired, he thought ruefully. Maybe their God really is somebody. Or maybe we just blew it.

“Captain Sapenza to Doctor Woodward,” he called. “Patch me through if he’s available, please, anyone who picks this up. Repeat, Captain Sapenza to Doctor Karl Woodward.”

“Just a minute,” came a young man’s voice over the speaker. “We’ll hail him and see if he wants a patch.”

Woodward did indeed.

“Well, Captain! If you hadn’t killed so many innocent people I might well be in a very good mood right now,” the Doctor responded. “As it is, I’m royally pissed.”

Sapenza couldn’t help but smile. Who’d ever have thought that his match would be a pot-bellied white-bearded evangelist? He almost felt like the whole damn universe was sniggering behind his back.

“Good to talk to you directly, Doctor,” he responded in his calm, businesslike but friendly tone. “I don’t suppose we can talk repentance?”

Woodward did manage a chuckle. “I would and could discuss it with you all day if need be, but it’s between you and God. It doesn’t cut quite so much ice between you and me at the moment, though. Problem is, unlike the Almighty, I don’t have any way of knowing the sincerity of repentance.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m sorry I tried it this way, or that anybody got hurt, but I have to admit that I’m mostly sorry it didn’t work.”

“Well, honesty is a good starting point,” the Doctor noted. “So, what can I do for you now? If you want to tell me who you’ve been scared would find you all these years I’ll be happy to go look him or her or them or it up and give them your regards. I think a more fitting punishment would be to simply blow the genhole gate controller by timer after we leave. What do you think?”

“And isolate forever this colony population, so they’ll never have a crack at their utopia?” the Captain responded. “Could you really live with that on your conscience?”

“Quite easily, considering their easy and facile collusion with you and your people against us,” the Doctor replied. “We came here and delivered a good bit of the truth to them. We also have left a great deal of study materials, Bibles, written and computer material and the like for those whom the spirit might call to discover and perhaps build upon here. The rest—they had their choice, us or you, and they clearly parked their ethics and morality at the door and listened not to me or the truth in the Word. No, Captain, I would not lose a single minute of sleep doing that. Those who might accept the truth won’t need the return of their dead matriarch or the Three Kings; they will have a better deal. The rest don’t deserve any better than this.”

“You sound like you’re serious.”

“I am quite serious, sir! While I would have liked to have reached the rest of these people directly, I can no longer afford to do so. I can’t know what goodies you’ve booby-trapped near and far, or who is who and what is what. I depend on the Word to get there the way God intended. It will spread, and be heard by those who have ears to hear. Faith comes by hearing the word of God.”

“Faith…” Sapenza repeated, more to himself than to the Doctor. He was thinking. “You know something, Doctor? I will propose a deal to you, in spite of this, um, unpleasantness. It’s a good one, I think.”

“What can you possibly propose that we could take seriously, Captain?”

Sapenza sighed deeply, then said, “I really have got the Three Kings, Doc. You saw the stone. Mother Tymm’s ship broke apart, it’s true, but on the way back . She was a nun, a Mother Superior or whatever they call them, you know. Catholic nun. She somehow got or solved part of the puzzle. She got there. She even sort of broke with her church, or at least didn’t let them know. She took her group and she was going to ferry them to Paradise. She got there, but getting back killed her. Divine justice, maybe, or maybe she just didn’t have quite enough faith.”

“I’m not going to take you out of here, Sapenza,” Woodward warned him. “Nor any of your people. The corruption after my own folks see these poor souls would be too great, and we couldn’t watch our backs often enough even if we stuck you in space suits and hung you on the outside. You all get to live, which is more than you deserve, but not to move.”

“I understand that, Doctor. All I’m asking is for a reset to the previous status quo.”

“A what?”

“I give you the Three Kings. You leave and do with that knowledge what you want. Go there, give it to somebody else, destroy it—it’s all up to you. The Kings are even a little in your theology. See? I did too listen! You’re better off and better equipped than Mother Tymm. Hell, you’re better equipped than the Colonial Navy from the looks of it! You might make it there, and back. You might make it there and want to stay. I can’t use it. I can give them to you.”

“In exchange for what?”

“Well, as much as we could get, I suppose. At the very minimum, you leave, don’t mention this place to anybody, leave the gate as it is, and simply go your own way. We’re worse off than we were by a long shot, having lost most of our weapons and all of our creature comforts, as it were. This way, at least, we won’t be at the mercy of anybody else and we won’t be so cut off that, one day, we might not still get off this giant turd.”

“I could just say ‘yes’ and then roll out the welcome mat,” the Doctor pointed out.

“Yeah, you could, but you’re not like me. You’re a man of honor. If you swore an oath to God that you’d keep your word, you’d keep it. That’s the minimum price.”

Karl Woodward was still thinking about it when the engineering computers decided that they were far enough away to launch on a south trajectory and safely attain orbit with no vulnerability to the big guns.