Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

“We’re going to have to use the shuttle, not any of the fighters, to have any sort of chance here,” Broz said. “That means making contact while inside, and hoping that we can somehow use that link to ride the beam, as it were, down to the people.”

“No probes?” the sergeant asked.

“Many probes, sure, and I still got some good ferrets, too, but what good do they do? They can’t identify and latch on to this broadcast connection, and they can’t be one end of it, either. It seems to work only with a brain at each end.”

“I don’t like it. That means taking the girls, who seem to need to be all together on this. Add a pilot and a couple of people to aid in getting the survivors aboard, and we’ve got a significant group of exposed personnel. What if it’s a trick? What if nobody’s down there and they nail our people? We’d have no practical way to rescue them, considering how stripped the old girl is here.” Maslovic shook his head. “I don’t like it.”

“Still and all, we got to try,” Murphy said flatly.

The sergeant sighed. “Yes, we do. The girls okay?”

“Yep. Don’t remember a thing ’cept that for a while they felt hotter’n Hell and everything smelled bad. Got to smell like sulphur down there, and if they’re in the mid latitudes, north or south, what’d we figure? Forty-five, forty-six degrees Celsius? They felt and smelled what the speaker told ’em. Kinda sounds like what you’d expect from a demon at that, don’t it?”

“Don’t you start on that! They willing to try it?”

“Sure. It’s somethin’ to do, and it gets them their pretty baubles. They’re still pissed we took ’em back before they woke up.”

“Okay, then. Cap, you with the girls. We’ll let Sanchez and Nasser handle the rescue, and Broz, you fly it manually. No merging, you’re just not trained for it.”

“Got it, Boss,” she said. “Don’t worry. If we can get the coordinates, we’ll get them. Man! Is that one ugly place down there, though! I’d take breathers.”

Everyone was nervous except the girls, who thought it was a big adventure. As far as the others were concerned, once the people on the surface were located, it was going to be quick in and out just as fast as possible.

The shuttle was launched from high orbit, and Broz decided to take it in a broad series of spirals covering as much of the northern hemisphere as possible from a decent altitude. If they found nothing, she was prepared to climb and do the same at the south.

“You gals ready to get into your magic circle or whatever?” Murphy asked them.

“Don’t need to,” Irish O’Brian told him. “I can almost smell ’em now.”

“Me, too!” piped up Brigit Moran. “And they don’t smell good, neither!”

“Well, I hope they’re away from them seaside colonies,” Murphy commented. “You see the sucker mouths on them things? I don’t think I want to introduce meself to them right now.”

“They’re not near the big ocean,” Mary Margaret McBride said. “Oh, I wish I could really see down there! I can feel ’em when we get close!”

“Take your time,” Broz told them. “You tell me when we’re close and when we’re going away. I’ll try and narrow it down.”

It took much of the day to do it the hard way, but finally they were able to zero in on one particularly large and active island whose interior had a series of jungle outcrops amidst what seemed to be blowing dust and steaming ground.

“There! Right down there!” McBride announced. “Oh! You’re goin’ past ’em again!”

Broz slowed to a crawl and then backtracked a bit. All sensors were deployed now, and they were at such a low altitude that she felt sure she could locate individuals if they got close enough. The trouble was, they were getting pretty exposed to whatever other hostile elements might be down there, including the creatures Murphy had christened the Big Suckers. Still, this location made sense if you wanted to avoid that kind of contact. The Suckers weren’t averse to going in the ocean, but they didn’t seem to stray more than a few kilometers inland.

“Got ’em!” Broz announced. “I have absolutely no idea how we just did this, but we got ’em! Right down there, just ahead and below us to the right. And they see us!”

Murphy and Sanchez checked the screens. “I only see three of ’em,” the marine noted.

“Well, we’re not staying around here long. I’m putting down. Cap, you and the girls come forward into the pilot’s compartment. I’m going to seal us off and keep us pressurized here, so we won’t have to eat that dust. Sanchez and Nasser will have the suits and breathers, and medical kits as well.”

The people who came out to meet the shuttle were burned black by the sun, but their hair had turned almost snow white. They were all thin enough to count ribs from afar, but still they looked in reasonably good shape. It was in their eyes that you saw the length and depth of their ordeal. These people had been camping out in Hell for several lifetimes.

Even with the breather and the protective suit it was no place the others, even the marines, wanted to linger. The air was thick with volcanic dust and gasses, there seemed tremors that vibrated everything and everybody coming every minute or two, and with just breathers on there was no way to completely avoid the stench.

The girls hadn’t been joking. Hot as hell and it stank.

It was only when the marines were helping the castaways aboard that they could see the signs of injuries on the leatherlike skin: scars and missing or chipped teeth, and places where they’d been both punctured and sandblasted with nothing in a kit to help.

Nonetheless, the one man in the group carried something in a kind of sack made from the leaves of one of the jungle outcrop tree fronds.

Over the howls of the wind outside, Sanchez yelled at him, “Where’s the fourth person? We can’t stay!”

“We don’t know! She’s around! We haven’t had much of a way to control her!” Jerry Nagel shouted back.

“Well, we’ll give her a few minutes. Otherwise we’ll just mark the spot and see if we can come back later.”

“Li! For God’s sake! Get in here!” the smaller and older of the women yelled.

Suddenly, from the thick brush beyond, a tiny figure raced for the shuttle and almost jumped on board.

Nasser hit the bay door closed the second she’d cleared it, and even before it was all the way shut, Broz had begun to lift off. The wind and coming storm were actually buffeting the shuttle, and she wanted up and out of there as quickly as possible. The moment the aft compartment was sealed and pressurized, she took it up at full speed.

Most of their new passengers were out cold the moment they hit the deck inside, but one, a nearly skeletonlike figure of an older woman, kept looking around at them and muttering, over and over, “Thank God! Thank God!”

The Voices were there and they spoke to him in the same soothing, cajoling, wondrous way that they’d first reached out to his mind. He was afraid he’d lost them, or that they no longer needed him once they were here, in their domain, but they had not let him down in the end.

It was all so… simple . He’d never demonstrated any special powers to the others, so they had been content to keep a ship’s watch on him and restrict him to an area where they thought he couldn’t cause any trouble. Little did they know!

Now, though, the demons had come again to him, and spake unto him, and this time they had unfolded his destiny.

They already knew how to fool these primitive ship’s systems. It had been so simple and, of course, they’d had the download from the minds of those simpleton girls. Now, though, it was time to put away childish pettiness and fulfill his dreams.