Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

“You think then that whoever is behind this is there?”

“I think that their equivalent of Sergeant Maslovic and his team are there, at least. The ones running this operation. I want them. Hopefully, since they know so much about us and we’re still around, they’ll eventually make some kind of pact with us, but me and my superiors are always leery when somebody sneaks out in your back yard and doesn’t tell you about it, and even more suspicious of somebody whose technology is enough ahead of ours that eventually they may decide we’re their inferiors or lab experiment or something. I think that’s the running theory, anyway. Lab experiment.”

“If that’s right, they could take us out the same as they’ve taken everybody else out,” Nagel said worriedly. “There are a lot of crash-landed creatures, human and nonhuman, on these world-moons, and nobody yet makes it back alive.”

“We will see. At least if this power decides to crash us it will be off Balshazzar. A lot nicer place than you were in recently,” Maslovic pointed out.

“I’m beginning to wonder if any place that could sustain us was worse than there,” Queson responded. “What an awful existence. I still can’t sleep on the bed upstairs, or tolerate wearing very much. It’s just been so long and it no longer feels comfortable.”

“I can understand. Let me ask—you haven’t spoken about the small girl. She’s deranged, or injured in the mind?”

“Injured in the mind may be a good way to put it,” Randi Queson agreed. “She used to be tough as nails. She was the head of our company and expedition, and she saw nothing but profits and didn’t give a damn about people unless she needed them. I think she’d had a hell of a hard life before she ever got into salvage but she never spoke of it to us, and it was too removed from any sort of polite society to be easily looked up.”

“You tried?”

“At the start. You want to know who you’re trusting your life to before taking a job out on the frontier. All I got was past salvage experience, but that was enough.”

“And she is… How do I put this?”

“No longer home,” Nagel finished for him. “Not since we made a serious mistake the first time to camp out on Melchior right in the middle of a massive mountain of these damned Magi stones. The cumulative power is enormous. It disrupts, it maddens. You get terrible visions and, with that, become an unreasoning beast. One of our people, a big, tough, muscular type, was butchered during that period, and it blew Li’s mind out. She’s never gotten any better, but the only rational part of her has been her refusal to get near any deposit of those stones. She remembers something, deep down.” He suddenly frowned and then gave what could almost be taken as a snort. “Huh. Funny. I just remembered. When we ran for the shuttle, I grabbed a stash of the stones. Old instincts, I guess. But I passed out in there and came to here. Did you take them and lock them away?”

Maslovic turned and called out to the air, “Chung, did you see to the securing of a bundle of the stones from the shuttle? Did anybody?”

“No, Chief. Sorry,” came Chung’s voice. “I’ll run a search pattern and see. I— what the hell? ”

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s impossible! I am constantly monitoring everything and everybody! It can’t be! ”

“ What can’t be?” Maslovic demanded to know, getting to his feet.

“The shuttle! It’s gone! ”

“ Gone! How could that happen?”

“I—I don’t know. It couldn’t! The security was fail-safe!”

“Personnel check! Fast!”

“Uh-oh. Three missing. Macouri, Joshua, and that girl we picked up on Melchior.”

“You mean Lucky Cross?” Queson asked. “She’s a damned good shuttle and tug pilot…”

“No, no! Cross is asleep! The little one! An Li!”

“Full alert!” Maslovic ordered. “I’m heading for the command center. I want Darch and Broz there on the double!” He looked at the two others in the wardroom. “Come along, too, if you want.”

“Yeah, I think we will,” Jerry Nagel said.

“Cheer up! At least it’s only a shuttle!” Randi Queson noted. “Last time we went through this we had the shuttle fine, but they stole the whole damned mother ship!”

Even Joshua was astonished at the ease of their escape. “Where to, sir? We are approaching Balshazzar now.”

Georgi Macouri looked at the viewing screen and made his adjustments. “Beautiful. It is the Garden! And the serpent is always the master of the Garden, is it not? Park in a stationary orbit over the center of human habitation, Joshua. If we go down there now we will be simply two among them. We must prepare the way before achieving the scepter of rule from our Master!”

He went aft where An Li lay on the floor, tied-up hands and feet like some kind of animal, her mouth sealed with medical tape.

She saw him, and writhed, trying to get loose, but he was too much the expert at this sort of thing. Not that someone as tiny as her could have done all that much against even a man of Macouri’s modest size, let alone Joshua’s massive bulk.

“Well, little one! The Master saved you for us!” Macouri told her, as she tried to wriggle from his grasp and found herself far too bound for that. “Now we shall give you to Him and make meaningful your miserable, worthless life and, with your blood, open the Way to my ascension! The die is cast! The time has come!”

Most medicine for centuries now had been via computers and specialized machines, but on a shuttle or similar small craft where all the wonders of modern medicine could not be expected to be carried, there was still a basic old-fashioned medical kit. He found it, opened it on the cushions, and came up with several small surgical knives that were intended to be used in minor emergencies. They were never intended for what he had in mind, but they would do just fine.

There were quite a number of drug capsules for the injectors, and a portable diagnostic computer, but he ignored them. She had to be awake, to feel and therefore radiate the pain, in order to make the sacrifice worthwhile. It would be her screams, along with her blood, that would consecrate the sacrament, not her miserable worthless life.

He reached around and looked on the floor and under things and eventually came up with a large, almost meter-long sack made of tree growths from Melchior. They had whispered that it would be here, told him to hunt for it, and now he had it. Confirmation!

Although resembling purplish palm fronds, the leaf turned out to be a bulblike affair useful for carrying things. He forced open one end and poured the inside contents onto the couch seat.

Stones! Perhaps a hundred or more! He couldn’t believe how many there were in one spot, or how great the variety of colors. And they all pulsed with energy, with life of a sort. These were not the ancient souvenirs sold as objects d’art to the rich back home; these were fresh, pulsing in the same way as the girl’s heart now pulsed, waiting, waiting for her blood to be poured over them still warm.

He laid out all the things he needed, then stripped naked, so that there would be nothing between him and them, him and her…

Her innocent eyes showed fear, and he drank it in and let it wash over him like a luxurious aphrodisiac. He was already turned on, harder and more irresistibly than he’d ever been, and it was time to begin.

“I am going to free you now,” he told her in a soft, almost erotic tone. “You must lie there and stay like I put you. Do you understand that? If you do not, if you kick me, I will break your legs. If you hit or fight me, I will twist your arms out of their sockets. If you just lie there, and do exactly what I say, and let me do what I want, then nothing bad will happen to you. Do you understand?”