Jack Chalker - Balshazzar's Serpent

Robey frowned. That was odd. It was one thing to have services or classes, but these kinds of announcements were pretty much saved for initial briefings after taking off on a new long mission or before coming into a major port. It was very rare to have this kind of required mass meeting while underway in midmission, as rotten as this one had been up to now. The Doctor was known to be displeased with the assembly for its depression and lagging faith under these conditions, but that wasn’t handled like this.

One thing for sure: it would be the only topic of conversation aboard until the appointed time, and there would be few not present or glued to a screen.

And when it came, it was vintage Woodward plus.

He spent the first twenty minutes just haranguing those who’d doubted or given up during the battle of wits on the planet. He was careful to note those who stuck with him and his decisions and those who helped make the hard choices, but he was very upset that many, if not most, of the youngest and “best taught” had talked compromise with evil or had simply conceded the victory. So many of these were in the parts of the Arm of Gideon that was not taken hostage. Gideon had slain thousands with a mere three hundred warriors because they had the power of faith, he reminded them. Complacency and lack of faith had done the damage here.

“We came out of this with several positives, however, which I will now put to use,” he told them. “First, we triumphed over a festering and ruthless evil force because enough of us had faith enough to believe that God would not allow us to fail. We are tougher and better for it as well, for we’ve been slapped down and shown the cost of taking it all for granted. We are constantly being tested, because we’re the last hope the remnants of humanity have, and not many of them will awaken in New Jerusalem. Nowhere in the Bible does it say that things will be easy,” he reminded them. “It only says you’ll be able to win if you’re willing to put your body where God requires it to be.”

Old stuff, mostly, but essential as a pep talk for what was coming. Everybody knew that this was merely a prologue.

And, finally, he came to the subject of the gathering, and it gripped them when they saw it.

“Ever since a monk discovered them, the location of the Three Kings has been closely guarded, lost, or in the hands of evil men whom God would not permit to reach them. They are there for us. Remnants of the holy empire that was, and the one that will spread and become part of God’s universe once more. Prophecy told us long ago that we were the inheritors of the Three Kings, and that we would eventually be shown the way. Now that prophecy has been fulfilled. I intend to go claim that promise, which will require an ultimate test of faith. Let me show you why that is so, and the price of coming up a bit short.”

The old video of Mother Tymm’s ship, battered and derelict, with the grotesque vacuum-preserved corpses of some of that crew, opened the second phase of the talk. It was sobering stuff.

To navigate via wormholes required precision computers and a ship whose systems were in top condition. Genholes tended to be “easy” in that they were either artificial or artificially enhanced and maintained; their paths internally tended to be straight, their courses predictable and mapped. Short of a catastrophic failure, the genhole system established by the old Combine and still in use at least on this side of the Great Silence was almost like a railroad network of centuries past, and no more dangerous.

“Wild” holes were something else again. They were natural; they expanded and contracted without warning, they were not a consistent internal shape, and they weren’t all that consistent in how or where they emerged. A very strong one such as the one charted in the Three Kings data recordings made it certain that it would be a very nasty, rough, and perilous ride to the end, but that it would wind up where you wanted to go, in the Three Kings system.

The pressures on such a hole, though, and particularly the forces that came to bear on the ends, made it much like a dangerous serpent. They writhed and wriggled and danced, and particularly within a strong solar system which would tend to concentrate the pressures and forces of nature trying to close or tame such a hole, much like a hose left on the floor or ground as the pressurized material streamed out.

If a ship merely grazed by a hole wall, the forces returned on the ship might be enough to destroy it and would certainly be enough to damage it. That was why your systems had to be in excellent shape, always adjusting to keep the ship centered in the tunnellike hole. Shields could help lessen the damage, but they were like cardboard in terms of really being able to protect a craft that made such mistakes.

Even so, if your ship’s systems were good enough, if your guidance and navigational computers were the best and properly programmed, trained, and maintained, and ifthat wriggling end wasn’t pointing too close to something solid or the heart of a star, you had a chance of making it to the system. The original Vaticanus scout, Mother Tymm, and perhaps others had done that much.

“Our computers and engineers have done a full analysis of these recordings and all the relevant data accompanying them and then compared them to the last status checks of our own ship and equipment,” Woodward told them. “They tell me there is a seventy percent chance of making it through with no serious problems.”

It sounded reassuring, but the only alternative to getting through was to die like those in that first video, and a thirty percent chance of the loss of all aboard was more sobering.

And getting back— there was an even greater challenge.

“It appears that the hole is very nondescript at this end,” Woodward continued. “In fact, while it’s in the middle of nowhere, it’s one of hundreds of such in that region actually on the charts. It’s listed as a dead-end anomaly because no probe sent into it ever sent data back from a position beyond it. It’s apparently an easy entry but gets very rough very quickly. It is also, apparently, quite long. We shall have to maintain ourselves inside it for almost six days.”

That caused some gasps and murmurs within the groups watching. Most genholes bypassed our universe and its laws almost entirely, curving away into something far different and then coming back. Raw holes were always much longer, sometimes minutes, hours, days, even weeks or months. There was no way to tell, but six days in an environment that was constantly trying to murder you… That was another thing to be very uneasy about.

“Back should be no more difficult than going, except that this is a system dominated by gas giants and the forces that create the other end of the hole are part of the physics of the system itself. Gravity is in a delicate balance in all such systems, but when you’re dealing with one this complex you often have a hole that drains away or adds just enough for it all to work. That is our spitting, wriggling hose. Appropriately, our serpent, keeping us on one side of the gate. To enter, we would have to be perfectly centered inside a constantly moving and probably not wholly predictable target. Miss, and you die. Go in even the slightest bit off center, you spend six days bouncing off the hole walls. You saw the results in the opening sequence to that . And that brings me to the challenge to this congregation.”

Most of them were uneasy at this, many were appalled, and only a few seemed ready for this sort of challenge and that may have been bravado. Still, there it was, all laid out, leaving only the Doctor to put it in the starkest, simplest terms.