He grinned. “You’ve been out quite a long time. A day or more, I’d say, by the usual reckoning, although I can’t really tell. The clock in this thing only works when you’ve got «nergy reserves. We spent a considerable amount of time getting reacquainted.”
Krisha in fact had been terribly disappointed not to have undergone what the others had. It was confirmation that her talents were gone, probably for good, and on one level this frightened her. Her nightmare, wandering, naked, her innermost thoughts exposed to all, was still very much there, and, at the moment, not far from the truth. Only the reappearance of Gun Roh Chin had lifted her spirits and given her some of her old confidence back.
“I want out of here,” she told them honestly, “but I can’t go back. Not to the Mizlaplan. The first one in Holy Orders who finds me will read both my memories of her and what is my mind now and I shall be sent to total indoctrination. I cannot accept that. I would rather die than accept that again.”
“You will go back,” Jimmy told her, “but that will not happen to you. You are the only access we have to the Holy Angels without a lot of problems. Don’t worry about your own mind or what they can do, though. We won’t let that happen.” / won’t let that happen, he added to himself. Not again. Not to anyone.
Grysta looked around. “Which way?” she asked them.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jimmy told her. “That way is a more conventional station, though.”
“Hey! We can’t go out that way!” she protested. “That’s a direct line to the fire world!”
“It can be,” he agreed. “But it doesn’t have to be. Captain, remove everything you have on. As you surmised long ago, this route moves only animate matter randomly. It’s how it’s programmed. Inanimate matter must be moved . . . differently. Fortunately, the Quintara are shifting a lot of materiel that other way. I doubt if we’ll meet any through here.”
“Then the crystals are machines after all?” the captain asked.
“Not quite. They are a form of life, a silicate form, but rather primitive. Their properties arc such, though, that they can perceive and thus move through far more dimensional levels than we, and a program can be imposed upon them.”
“Fascinating,” Chin responded. “How do you know that?”
The question took all four of them momentarily aback. Then Jimmy replied, “We can—read them, I guess is the best way to put it.” He frowned. “Odd. It was so simple, so obvious, that it just never occurred to any of us that we couldn’t do it before. Good Lord! Perhaps the Four Apostles got more help than we thought!”
The patterns were incredibly complex math established in a series of topological patterns, sufficiently huge and complicated to have required a very good computer to work them out in the past, were the computer able to read and understand the patterns at all. To Jimmy, who had never even managed to correctly add up the proceeds in a collection plate, it was as simple as one plus one equaled two.
“Just in case we do bump into some demons,” Josef noted, “you three get as far back and away as possible and let us handle them.”
But there were no Quintara in the station, and they walked briskly through to the other side, and out into the antechamber.
There were a number of power cables rather suddenly
running along the floor, and the walkway was still there. They proceeded on and out into the sunshine and looked down upon the encampment they’d left what seemed like lifetimes ago.
THE HIGHER RACES
“LOOKS LIKE A BLOODY CITY DOWN THERE!” Jimmy McCray exclaimed.
“Or a military camp,” Josef noted.
“I feel a tad undepressed for that sort of company,” Modra commented.
“How the hell are we gonna get through that mob?” Grysta chimed in.
“Get into the trees there and get out of sight,” Jimmy told them. “Tobrush and Josef will remain with you, and that will keep everyone in contact. We were timed for minimum exposure to get out here, but we need to move fast or there’ll be a mob of military minds upon us. They can shield all of you from detection for the present.”
“Yeah? What about you and Modra, then?” Grysta asked.
“We’re going to go down there. This is, after all, our government, God help us.”
The others had barely gotten into the woods when a large contingent of scientific types, flanked by a squad of security police in full combat suits, began walking up to the crystal along the well-worn walkway.
Neither Modra nor Jimmy even consciously thought about it, any more than they thought about blinking or scratching an itch. Instantly they projected a wide hypnotic field and stepped to one side and the entire contingent passed by them without even looking, one soldier so close Modra had to resist the urge to tap him on the shoulder, and entered the station.
If the combined mental powers of the four, including Tobrush’s far stronger and wider abilities, had little to fear from an individual demon, they had even less concern about anyone of their own known hundred races.
<You know, this could get to be fun, > Modra noted.
<Dorit get kinky, lass,> Jimmy warned. <There’s bound to be cymols down there and possibly a null or two, and I’m not sure we can do much against that sort.>
But it wasn’t that difficult to avoid them, since the identities and locations of such ones were all known to somebody down there, and, despite the fact that there had to be a thousand people of a good forty-odd races in the camp, they found it simplicity itself to pick out just what information they needed from anyone, without even knowing who, including some very powerful talents with impossibly strong shields.
The Exchange Frontier Fleet had arrived within three days of their own arrival and found what they had found, as well as unoccupied shuttles from all three empires. Cymols had read out the account in the dead one’s cymol brain, just as Tris had done, and also processed the information in the destroyed research ship and even managed to recover about eighty percent of the blasted records below. In one sense they knew what they were dealing with, but, somehow, they still considered it a local outbreak. If the new cymols sent to the rescue knew any more about the Quintara than Tris had, they hadn’t revealed it to the military—a bad sign.
There were security monitoring devices all over the place, just in case some of the folks from the shuttles or, perhaps, the demons showed up anywhere around, but it was simplicity itself to fool them. They could sense the energy going to and from the devices, and trace it mentally to its master relays just as they could divine the programming in the crystals. From that point, it was child’s play to simply ensure that the digitally encoded signals did not include them when they got to a viewing or recording source.
While the ability to walk, stark naked, through such a high-tech and security-conscious assemblage had a certain thrill about it, it was also sobering. Aided and augmented by their master and the other plane, as well as vast experience, the Quintara could do almost anything they could do. The best security, weaponry, and personnel in the Exchange were as wide open to those for whom they searched as if they were savages squatting before fires with their stone-tipped spears.
In the vast prefabricated supplies building, bristling with security devices, they found spare environment suits with no difficulty and high-energy power packs. How much easier it would have been if they’d been allowed the military-grade power packs at the start!
Although, they knew, the end result would have been the same.
</ look a fright and smell worse, > Modra noted, <but it’s better than nothing.>
<Well, I’ve got this wild man’s beard as well,> he noted. <And I’ll toss you for stench. I think it’s time we hunted up a cymol and talked to the important folks, don’t you? But not before we do a bit of artwork. >
Although Terrans were the largest single racial group in the Exchange, they were singularly under-represented in the camp. Their decision to deal first with one of their own wasn’t based on any attitudes toward other races, though, but on the more practical consideration of speech. The vast majority of all races had no appreciable talents; dealing with them through translators risked both mistranslation and eliminated intonation, and, for now, they preferred not to deal with telepaths until they were certain that they would not inadvertently betray the rest of the party hiding nearby.
Captain Ibrim Mogod was a dark-skinned, craggy-faced man with bushy black hair that could be detected as a wig only upon the most minute inspection. Intent on reviewing recent reports of security breaches in the camp, he barely noted that someone had entered his office. Clerks and other junior subordinates were always coming in to drop off one thing or another.
“Colonel, I believe talking to us will be far more informative than those reports,” Jimmy McCray said conversationally.
The security officer frowned and looked up, then put down the reports and stared at the newcomers. “Who the hell are you? And why are you as filthy as my grandfather’s goats?”
“I’m Team Leader Modra Stryke, and this is Exploiter Agent McCray.” She paused when she saw no immediate reaction. “From the Widowmaker. Tris Lankur’s team. We’re two of the people you’re looking for.”
“You’re raving lunatics! How dare you come in here like this! Who let you in here in the first place?” The colonel reached for the intercom to summon the guards, but the thing didn’t react.
“Colonel,” Jimmy said impatiently, “the Quintara still run.”
The colonel stared blankly at them. “What are you talking about?”
“We’re back from Hell, and we need to talk to the Guardians. Right now we’re being set up for a demonic attack beyond any of our abilities to withstand. And if your cymol programming doesn’t cover the Quintara, you are the wrong man in this job and the Guardians are dead,” Modra told him sharply.
The colonel sat back in his chair and looked at the pair hard. “That phrase is a part of an ancient series of emergency signals. The first time I’d ever heard it uttered was on the recording of the dead cymol in that alien structure up there. You’re not cymols. How do you know it?”
Jimmy McCray sighed. “Damn it, Colonel, we’ve been far beyond that ‘structure,’ as you call it. Those creatures that broke out are an ancient Higher Race, the Quintara, imprisoned by the billions for thousands of years. They’re free now. Their combined power and knowledge is beyond anything you can imagine. We’ve been there and seen them. A report must be made. Action must be taken.”
Mogod thought a moment. “I believe that both of you should be given a very thorough debriefing. Then you may make your report.”
“I don’t think we like the kind of debriefing you have in mind, Colonel,” Modra told him.
Instantly, from Tobrush far back in the woods, came the knowledge and power they required.
The colonel started to get up again with the obvious intent of calling in guards, but suddenly he was pushed back into his chair as if by a great unseen hand, and his body froze and locked into place.
Jimmy had always wondered how the remote levitators did what they did in the face of little things like gravity; telepathy, empathy, even the hypno powers were all matters of transmitting and receiving information on various wavelengths common to the majority of species, but levitation had always seemed some kind of miracle. Now he simply raised his hand and directed the power with his mind and both saw and felt the lines of plasma-like energy spring from him like Julki tentacles, picking up and tossing to one side the security officer’s wig and revealing the contact spot on the skull.
Now the tendrils from both Modra and him combined, reinforced by Tobrush and Josef who might as well have been in the same room, and the plasma tentacle touched the contact point.
Information flowed out from Mogod through them to Tobrush so fast they couldn’t grasp it, nor were they intended to. Only a Higher Race would have the capacity to absorb and correlate all the information given at such a speed and in such a manner, although, once done, the three Terrans could draw upon it. Idly, both Jimmy and Modra realized that what they were doing to the colonel was precisely what the more brutish Quintara had done to the cymol back in the crystal before killing her.
Somebody tried the door in back of them, but it wouldn’t open. After a moment they went away; it wasn’t all that unusual for Mogod to lock .himself in for periods of time.
</ have it,> Tobrush told them. <He has little more than I do, curse it! And nothing more we haven’t found out
for ourselves! I’m going to reverse it, give him a thorough record of where we’ve been and what happened. He’ll have it as a sealed security packet—even he won’t know what’s in it, but he’ll download it for us to his operators, whoever or whatever they are.>
It took only a couple of minutes to do the job with the Terran pair standing there as conduits.