They were beginning to sink, to fall away from this place of wonders, unable to hold for long against the enormous pull.
<Wait!> Tobrush called. <Even if we can get Him back under lock, what about the Quintara?>
“Consider the squimish,” came the reply, growing more distant as the darkness came up at them like a wall. “Or, for the others, the common cockroach.”
<No! Wait!> Jimmy McCray called to the Being as the blackness came up like an ominous wall. <Who are you? Are you the Captain?>
“Not exactly,” came the distant, almost amused reply. “You know who I am. Jimmy. You might call me the Executive Officer. …”
The blackness enveloped them, then they were through, far faster than they’d arisen.
Oddly, they did not sink further. The current, the pull, was still there, but it was manageable, nothing to fear or even particularly notice.
<What—what did he mean, we’d win if we deserved to?> Modra managed.
<There are only four ofus,> Tobrush explained. <Even together we can do little. All we can do is sound the alarm,
find those who know how, and, as the Being said, mobilize out defenses. If those who can do so fail to unite, fail to have the will to finish the job no matter what the cost, as we ran our marathon, as it were, then our common people will have forfeited their right to survive. They will deserve what they get.>
<Even Jesus had twelve!> Jimmy McCray exclaimed, wondering if they had even a ghost of a chance.
<There’s something coming! Something dark!> Josef warned.
They had never seen Quintara in this plane before, and they were even uglier and more frightful than in solid flesh, although on a level that could not be explained. The arrogance, the cold evil that radiated from a darkness that was beyond the common dark of the plane, a darkness that shone in some odd way and could engulf and perhaps devour, was pure and undiluted.
There were six of them, and they were moving something that appeared as a vast bulk of eternally twinkling golden lights in an amorphous bubble.
There was no question of flight. They couldn’t go back up, not now, and they couldn’t exit without going almost through the six, who were suddenly quite well aware of their presence.
<Together as one!> Tobrush snapped. <No hesitation, no doubts, no reservations! We are one!>
They opened their minds to one another and flowed together as a single force that seemed to blaze with that same energy that had gotten them through the barrier to The Ship itself.
They did not run, they did not counter the threats and insults that suddenly came their way like some dark, wet blanket from the six demonic presences.
They attacked.
Brilliant white light, the purest of energies, struck out at the nearest demon and engulfed its darkness. It screamed, it writhed, and then it fried, melted, dissolved into nothingness, consumed by the light it could not tolerate.
Three more blobs of shimmering darkness came at them in fury at what they had done to their companion, and they stood their ground and waited, letting the creatures smash right into them.
It was so—easy. Easy to enfold them, separate them, crush them in the brilliance of their radiance.
The other three, three mighty Quintara within their element, broke and fled back in the direction of their city with all the speed the gravitational current would allow them.
The demons were not pursued. There was more important business to do, and a greater foe to face, one who could not be dissolved by such a minor light as they. Still, they understood the lesson in their collective consciousness. Alone, any one of them, even, perhaps, Tobrush, would be no more than an even match and probably far less for any one of the Quintara. Together, collectively linked, the Quintara hadn’t a prayer, for it was in their very nature and their very culture that they could never unite.
It had not been six to four. It had been four to one to one to one to one to one to one.
The four moved as one toward the abandoned thing that the Quintara had been moving and probed and examined it. What it was they could not be sure, but the implication was clear. The giant crystals, before being outfitted for station use and control, had to be moved and positioned and linked somehow through this medium. Quite possibly it was just ~ that: a crystal in transit to a new spot, one convenient to the demons’ ultimate plans. It didn’t matter; the implication was clear. Inanimate matter could be transferred to this medium and extracted from it.
Resonances. Resonances and topological patterns.
And, quite suddenly, as if in a burst of inspiration, they knew how it was done, knew all the patterns and resonances and, of course, their limitations. They didn’t understand it, not a bit, but they knew how to do it.
They had not been sent defenseless back into their universe after all. >
Suddenly they were aware that something, perhaps many things, were within the shimmering mass. Living things. Disgusting, dark things.
It was already slowly drifting back under the pull of the great pool at Chaos Keep; they unhesitatingly gave it a great shove! It went back at ever increasing speed, back from whence it had come. With any luck it might crash and take some unwary Quintara with it.
The lessons were clear and learned and accepted. It was time to go back.
They separated, but the effect was not to create four individual presences, each apart and distinct, but rather a net-like effect in which each individual was connected to the other three by a thin but firm thread of energy.
He was a priest once, and a son of priest again, but he was also a ruthless hypno of the Mycohl, and an attractive, red-headed woman, and, yes, even a Mycohl master in a great body that no longer seemed at all alien and whose capabilities he understood quite well, although his mind could not grasp the thought processes and frame of reference of the parasitic colony within; it was just too alien. Still, he had a viewpoint of things that was so bizarre and incomprehensible to him that he felt he could truly understand what the term Higher Races really meant.
And yet he was still Jimmy McCray, albeit a changed one, a McCray with purpose again, and vision, and a new certainty. The dangers of a true telepathic merger had not come to pass; the other personalities were distinct and themselves as was his. Instead, they were, somehow, inextricably linked together, all four, in a way no telepaths had ever been linked, and through a plane that did not understand distance or time as theirs did. There was nothing hidden, nothing left to understand. Each took the others for granted as if they had been inside the others since birth.
For better or for worse, only death could separate them now. They would never, any of them, be alone again.
It was, in a way, an unsettling thought, but it had compensations, too. Besides, pragmatically, what could they do about it?
Unfortunately, he discovered almost immediately that a mental expansion and even a conversation with a god didn’t mean that his body didn’t ache like hell from lying on this crap.
He groaned, got to a sitting position, stretched, and tried
to work some of the kinks out. There was no telling how long they’d been in there—wherever “there” was. The others, of course, were going through the same sorts of things.
“Well?” asked a familiar-sounding male voice from nearby. “Did you find out what the devil this was all about or didn’t you?”
They all whirled, and, having just all decided that they could never be surprised again, were all four as astonished as they had ever been.
Gun Roh Chin sat perched on a stubby crystal growing from the floor, wearing, of all things, a crimson-red Mycohl environment suit, and smoking the last of a cigar.
“Where did you come from?” Jimmy asked him. “How did you get here!”
He shrugged. “I knew you’d have to come here sooner or later. At least, I hoped you would. As for the how, well, I simply walked back. I was up at the edge of the garden, and I saw all sorts of energy activity down in the city and then I spotted a couple of Quintara from my vantage point a bit down on the bridge. At least, they were large and weren’t any of us, so I knew what they had to be. I knew that nobody with any sense at all would stick around while the city was reoccupied, so I gambled that you’d find a way out, turned, and retraced our path, from the substation in the hillside beyond the forest through the long cavern to here, gambling that the presets on the destinations were still in effect. They were.”
“That was quite a gamble, though,” Jimmy noted.
The captain shrugged. “I never gave it a second thought. What, after all, were the alternatives? Since that time, I’ve been here. I had plenty of spare time to hunt up the scattered energy packs and discarded suits, and, with judicious use of power, I’ve managed to get some basic food and water from the suit synthesizers as needed, although it’s running out now. Mostly I shuttled back and forth between the forest garden region and here for provisions, although I was beginning to get very nervous that I’d somehow missed you.” He paused a moment. “Sorry. I forgot that this place
disturbs you, and I don’t want to send you back off there again. Should we move out of the chamber?”
Jimmy shook his head slowly from side to side. “It’s no longer relevant.”
That surprised the captain. “Then you know what this is all about?”
“We know how little we know!” Modra put in. “My God! If the Higher Races are mere cockroaches, what does that make MS?”
The captain frowned. “Cockroaches? What’s all this about cockroaches?”
Space had defeated the rat, and most other scourges of ancient Earthbound commerce, but, somehow, not the roach. Of all the creatures from the mother planet, not one, but many varieties had somehow made their way into space, and from there to most or all Terran, and many non-Terran, worlds that would support life. The captain knew the term, as did the others, and the insect itself.
As carefully as possible, Jimmy told the captain of their experience, their discoveries, even their conversation with something far beyond their true understanding. He listened patiently, asking an occasional question, then sighed.
“Normally, when one has a religious experience, an encounter with a god, one’s personality is radically transformed,” he noted. “You have changed—all of you—but not in that way.”
“He wasn’t exactly a lot of help,” Modra noted. “And we didn’t even get to talk to the Captain. It isn’t as if we had our faiths, such as they were, confirmed, or were offered an eternity in the Garden of Heavenly Delights.”
“It was damned depressing,” Josef growled. “The whole damned universe just an unintended byproduct of an engine start, a speck of polluted debris. Gods and devils both mere crewmembers on a gigantic scow, not even the rulers of the place!”
Gun Roh Chin shrugged. “What you saw and heard was for your own benefit,” he noted, “and on a level you all could understand. I find the concept of a great Ship moving through an infinite cosmos somehow reassuring. In fact, beings so powerful that they even know of our existence, let
alone intervene in individual lives, are every definition of a god I ever heard. They must .have been quite active, too, since just about any religion I can think of going beyond sun and nature worship incorporates some of the elements of what you interpreted. I, for one, expected far less.”
“Tobrush believes that we risk only exposure here,” Josef noted. “I think it is time we left this place.”
Gun Ron Chin sighed. “Well, this is my last battery pack and it reads essentially empty. Might as well toss it away anyway. The girls are asleep over there—a natural one, I could tell, not like yours. We’ll wake them and take our leave if you now know the way.”
“How did Krisha take seeing you?” Modra asked him. “And you her as she is now?”