Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

She looked absolutely scared to death, but she managed to nod.

“There is nowhere you can run, nowhere you can hide, so just relax. Yes, that’s a good girl. Lovely, just lovely! ”

She lay there, legs spread, arms stretched out on either side of her head, with all the Magi stones placed around her on the big mat, and then he approached her for what had to be the first part of the ritual, the part that established him once and for all as the master. She lay quite well for this, like she knew what was to come, and she made no effort to resist him as he slid on top of her and into her.

It was a violent but sublime rape, the best of the countless number he’d had, and the kind he had despaired of ever doing again. Now, even as he gave of himself to her, he reached out for the twin knives, one on each side of her just above her head, and, as he did, he touched the plane of the Magi stone outline he had created.

There was a sudden, sharp, violent shock running through him, knocking him almost senseless, and she acted quickly, wrapping herself around him. The shock immobilized him; he could not move, even as she seemed to grow larger somehow, to grow and grow and wrap herself around him and engulf him. She now was holding him, and he felt as much confusion as fear. He had somehow lost control of the situation, and he did not know what to do next nor how to do it.

He felt her physically and yet he also felt her mentally; not the feeble, retarded figure but one of great power, someone or something that simply had not been there before. It held his mind as well as his body, and it was filled with a kind of fury and power that he could never even have dreamed of. He fought against it, suddenly terrified, as it wrapped around him, and within him, inside of him, and attacked, as if it were trying to drive him out of his own body.

“ JOSHUA! ” he managed finally to scream, but it was one last scream, a scream that came from the primordial self he would never have thought was there, and it was answered by a sense of falling, falling, falling through the mat, through the very shell of the ship and out into the vacuum of space, and then down, down, towards the pretty blue planet below at a speed and violence that was surely fatal.

Joshua heard the scream, a scream like no other he could remember, beyond even the terror of his own loved ones dying at the hands of those long ago pirates, and he immediately unhooked himself, put the shuttle on auto, and rushed back to help his master.

What he saw was not too different from what he expected to see, with a few startling differences.

There was blood all over. There always was. The place had the look and feel and stench of a slaughterhouse. The difference was that there were two bodies covered in blood and excrement in the center of the cabin, and it was Georgi Macouri who was on the bottom, clearly dead, the look of abject terror in his wide open but unblinking eyes and on what was left of his face giving no doubt. The small girl had seemed dead on top of him, her long hair caked with blood and her tiny form covered with it, but, slowly, carefully, she backed off and away from Macouri’s dead form and sat back in a kneeling position. Her face was all too intelligent, and all too filled with a look of pleasure. It was as if, as if…

As if it was the face of someone possessed by demons.

The two surgical knives she’d used to make such a mess of Georgi Macouri were in each hand, held the way one would hold them before stabbing a victim.

An Li was no more than a hundred and fifty centimeters high and, combined with the weathering and semistarvation of the months on Melchior, she could not have weighed more than thirty-five kilograms or so, yet there was an energy and force inside her that made her seem like a giant to the nearly two-meter-tall muscular man, who easily had a hundred kilos on her, and who now stood there gaping at this sight.

“You need to clean up this mess,” she said with a firm tone. “Or would you join him now?”

“He is dead. There seems no point to joining him,” Joshua commented. “I pledged my service to him, not to his causes.”

“Will you pledge yourself to me, now?”

“I do not know who I am addressing,” he told her. “If it is for my life, I would prefer to simply die quickly.”

“You are many times my size. Do you think I can do it to you?”

“He was larger than you as well. I suspect that you might. You are not the girl we brought here.”

“No, I am not. I am going to clean this body up in the back while you do what you can here. Once we have tended to the basics, turn this thing around and head back for the destroyer. I have much business there.”

“I will do it,” Joshua told him. “Not out of fear, but out of respect.” And perhaps a bit of curiosity as well, he added to himself. If the soul did exist, he had long ago forfeited his. If this indeed was who held claim to it, then it was time they got to know each other.

“Very well. And collect the stones. Don’t worry, they won’t do much to you if you just collect them and put them out of the way.”

Joshua nodded and gave a slight bow. It was going to take a lot more than he had to make this cabin presentable, but he would do the best he could.

The creature in An Li’s body went back to the showers and took a look at herself in the mirrored reflection before beginning what was obviously going to be quite a chore washing this stuff off. Well-toned, superior reflexes, but this was going to take some getting used to.

As it turned out, it wouldn’t be much of a trip back to the Agrippa . As soon as the missing shuttle was discovered, Chung had initiated a close-in search of the immediate vicinity and had no trouble finding it parked in orbit around Balshazzar. It was a curious thing to do, after all this time and trouble, but she lost no time in pursuing it with the intent of bringing it back aboard or shooting it if need be.

Maslovic didn’t want it damaged, since after the stripping it was the only space-capable vehicle that could handle more than two people, but neither was it any good to him in enemy hands.

They approached cautiously, but saw no signs of the shuttle building up power or taking any action at all.

“I don’t like it,” Darch commented. “Macouri’s crazy, but why steal it and get away, however the hell he managed it, and then just park? He’s a sitting duck.”

“Could be a trap,” Maslovic warned. “You never know.” He was very much concerned with the fact that Macouri now had a defenseless young woman with him. The little man had only one history with that kind of person.

Randi shook her head. “Somehow, I just don’t think so. It’s hard to explain, but when you’ve been practically saturated by those stones for so long you get a kind of sense of them. Something’s wrong. Not for us. For them. I can sense it.”

Before they could close to capture range, Darch turned and called, “We’re being hailed!”

“Put it on.”

“This is Joshua. I am bringing the craft back and will dock. Do not fire on us, please,” came the somewhat familiar voice of the big man.

“Joshua, where is Macouri? Put him on.”

There was a pause. “I don’t think that’s possible, sir. In fact, I doubt if that will ever be possible again, unless he is correct about an afterlife.”

“He’s dead?”

“Yes, sir. It is difficult to explain. Far easier for me to just bring the craft back. I simply cannot imagine how I personally could clean this up. It will have to be your ship’s maintenance systems.”

Randi was suddenly alarmed. “What about An Li? Did he hurt her?”