Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

She felt a slight chill. Just the idea that that… thing inside there that she’d touched on some plane for just a few brief moments was doing some kind of mental readout made her feel more violated than a physical rape. It was that disturbing a sensation when she’d connected with it.

She began to understand just what the Doc had been feeling locked in the C&C talking to that worm.

“Why did you show me this, Mr. Sanders?”

He gave her a wry smile. “I thought you might be tempted to do a little prospecting.”

She stared at him. “Where? And with what?”

“I’ve been using some of my off-time for several seasons looking for just the right combination of people to do this sort of job,” he told her. “I told you I was going to look you up if we hadn’t met here, and I meant it. You and your people seem almost uniquely qualified for this sort of thing.”

“And ‘this sort of thing’ is what, exactly?”

He took a deep breath, then said, “I am almost positive I know how to reach the Three Kings. No kidding, no joke, no fake theatrical gimmicks. I’m too rooted in reality to believe in all that paradise guff, but I do know this: just a handful of these Magi’s Stones and you could buy yourself your own paradise. There are other things as well that are associated with the Kings that could be worth even more. It’s not a salvage job exactly, but that’s why I came here. Salvage people might be able to go get these riches, figure out what was what, and do something nobody else has so far managed to do: get back in one piece.”

“I was wondering about that,” she told him. “Everybody’s heard of this magical realm, and there are all sorts of stories about wrecked ghost ships being discovered with treasures from them inside, and even one in good shape with nobody in it, but I never heard anybody who claimed they’d been there and come back, even the drunk and stoned braggarts of the universe. It’s a deathtrap, if it exists at all. And now that I’ve met your little buddy in that green hellstone, I think the Kings are probably a scam. Not our scam, maybe. His scam, maybe. Send pretty little baubles to the barbarians so a few would come and become his pets or lab experiments or something like that. That’s a one-way trip, mister.”

“Perhaps. But the stones are real. The artifacts are real. The detailed scouting reports from the Three Kings’ discoverer, with the locations unfortunately damaged in transit, were real enough to prove that these are real worlds. Moons, most likely, from what I can tell. Big, planet-sized moons around a massive gas giant. Three of them warm enough and with atmosphere enough to support life as we understand it. I’m pretty sure I know how to get there, and I’m just as sure I know why nobody’s made it all the way back yet, at least why most ships are wrecked if they try. You have to get there using a wild hole. No wormgates, and a wild and totally uncharted and unpredictable ride there and back. Not many ships could take the punishment, and even fewer captains could. But nobody since the first scout so long ago has been a cybernetic ship, a living ship, and I think your captain, the Stanley ’s captain, is uniquely qualified to do it successfully. She’s ridden a couple of wild holes before. I looked up her history. And you, you and your current crew, they’ve met an alien intelligence and they beat it. You all beat it. You know salvage, you know value, you’ve got the guts, and you’re virtually unique in having outthought and outfought an alien mind. If this ship and crew couldn’t make it in and out, then I don’t know who could.”

“You can can the flattery, but I’m beginning to see your point here. The question is, first, why should we chance it? The odds were almost nil that we got back in one piece this last time. The odds on this one are much, much smaller.”

He gave a Cheshire Cat-type grin. “You’ve got only two choices. You all find whatever little menial jobs you can and dream of what might have been, or you do this and maybe wind up owning a world or two. You are certainly holding the bag if nobody else is. You won’t get the money for that ID change here. It would take months driving a tug to make that kind of money, and on a place like this, one of the universe’s assholes, selling yourself would bring in even less. You don’t even have passage to anywhere the syndicate goons won’t find you in a matter of days anyway. You know what’s going to happen. If you don’t kill yourself or make them kill you, they’ll take you back, jack into your brain, and make you a conspicuous slave to feed their egos, with decades of public exhibition and humiliation as an example with no way out. But you’ll make them kill you first, if you can, won’t you? I’ve heard excerpts of the conversations you had ship to ground on that ghost world. There’s only room for you in your universe; you’d have let them die if they’d tried to get out without bringing back all the shit, or if there was any chance of bringing up the worm. If the computers had given you any odds at all of success you’d have tried to salvage that anyway, even if it meant all their lives. Excuse me for being blunt, but you’ll do it because you’ve got nothing left to lose.”

All at once she hated him. She’d killed once for not much more of that kind of smug assholery than he’d just given her. The problem was, in his case, he was trying to make her do a deal on his terms, and in that she almost admired him for that same insulting toughness. It was so much like, well, her .

“So, if we could make a deal, what makes you think I could get the others?”

He smiled broadly. “Let’s all meet for lunch tomorrow in my suite at the Stellar. I can be very persuasive.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” she warned him.

He nodded sagely. “You do that. You think about it a great deal.” And, polishing off his beer, he got up and left, saying no more.

They had all come.

Somehow, that had surprised An Li, although it didn’t seem to surprise Sanders at all. She had an idea that very little surprised the slimy weasel.

Just overnight, she’d discovered a lot about him. That he was, in fact, a rich producer of thrillers, and that a percentage of the net was a joke in his industry about akin to saying “when pigs fly.” With some good accounting even the most successful productions somehow never saw a profit; nobody, it seemed, ever had produced a single thing that had made one single penny. Funny about that. Buy cheap, make a fortune, and, through creative bookkeeping, keep said fortune. Show business sounded like the same sort of thing as the kind of folks who’d loaned her the money for the earlier expedition, only Sanders and his types were always legal. What a racket!

She’d also fingered his traveling associates, a young, muscular guy and a woman with a face and body to die for. She hadn’t put them together until she saw them both at Sanders’s hotel suite, setting up things for a working lunch, as it were.

All the time she’d spent sizing him up as a mark, and they were already on her tail and reporting to the boss on her movements. He dangled his bait and she’d taken it, thinking she was conning him .

The penthouse of the Stellar was sumptuous, even for Sepuchus. There probably weren’t but one or two like this on the whole planet, and they were here only for the kind of people who were outfitting a city or a fleet. Its sheer opulence was testament to what a knowledgeable designer could do even with salvaged parts.

The table was real polished wood, not synthetic, polished so perfectly that you could use it like a mirror, and the chairs were firm but plush, made of wood and natural fabrics. Sanders himself had not yet made an appearance, but they expected him to emerge from behind massive bronze doors at some point. The two assistants were now acting as host and hostess; the man, who seemed barely out of boyhood, introduced himself as “Jules, Mister Sanders’s personal assistant,” whatever that meant, and the sexy young woman with more than ample everything and a voice that was higher than An Li had ever heard before said she was Mister Sanders’s secretary, Suzy. Neither spoke or revealed very much, but they didn’t have to. The few present who hadn’t seen these types in their natural habitats still knew what they were. Randi Queson had tired of rolling her eyes, Lucky seemed amused by them, while Sark and Jerry Nagel betrayed their hormonal directions even as they pretended to be strictly business.