Finally Tobrush said, <We have been gone over six weeks. There are now six battle groups in the region facing down a massive buildup of Mycohl forces along the frontier, and a concurrent buildup is occurring on the other side with the Mizlaplan. There is diplomatic hell at the moment and the Treaty itself is on the verge of shattering to bits, and there are war scares, rumors, and unreasoned belligerence at the highest levels. We needn’t lose time guessing over who is already at work behind it. A. sweep of the system flushed out both the captain’s ship and yours, and I’m afraid the ones left aboard went through their own hell, but the Gurusu has now been returned to the Mizlaplan minus its records and yours is interned along with your man, Kose. They haven’t yet found our ship, which has nothing living aboard and is designed to avoid sweeps. Our friend here has the codes we need. It’s done. Now exit through the private route.>
They broke contact with the colonel but kept him in a frozen, trance-like state. Modra and Jimmy moved to a clear place on the smooth floor and she took out a marker from the e-suit kit and drew a basic circle around them both with the two of them inside, then a five-pointed star within it. Then they closed their eyes and visualized another drawing they knew elsewhere. Both instantly vanished from the office.
At that moment, a clerk tried the door again, entered, and found the colonel sitting in his chair looking puzzled.
“Sir? Are you all right?”
Mogod frowned for a moment, then nodded. “Yes, yes. Leave me for five more minutes. I have some top-security information to deal with. I’ll signal when it’s clear to come
“Very well, sir. Funny, though—I thought—I could swear there were two Terrans who came in here.” 1
“If so, they obviously had the wrong office and left. That will do, Sergeant!”
“Yes, sir. I—what’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“On the floor here. Some kind of design.”
The colonel got up, came around his desk, and examined it. “Curious. I didn’t notice it earlier. Have a crew come in when I leave and clean it up.”
“Y-yes, sir.” The sergeant left, but not without a lot of questions still in his head. He clearly remembered two Terrans passing on the way in, and, although there was no other way out, they hadn’t come out past him and they weren’t in the office. He shrugged. Well, they certainly had the proper clearances and credentials—otherwise they’d never have gotten this far. If the colonel wanted to play spy games, that was all right with him. Cymols never told anything to anybody.
For Modra and Jimmy, it was as if the colonel’s office had just winked out and they were now standing once more in a dark corner of the warehouse where they’d gotten their e-suits.
“As easy as that,” he breathed.
She nodded. “And the Quintara have whole cults to draw symbols for them to use and feed them their addresses.”
“I don’t get it, though. If they can travel like that, why do they need the stations?”
<You are wasting time,> Tobrush said impatiently. <They can’t use this method freely—they don’t have exact locations as you did. Someone has to call them to one they have drawn and prepared. Call them by name, I suspect. >
They started to move from the pentagram they’d pre-prepared, and it was as if they had hit a maximum-security force field.
<Hey! We’re locked in this thing!>
<That, of course, is the other reason,> Tobrush noted calmly. <Josef is nearby-and will break the barrier from the outside for you. When you activated it and created the
interdimensional wormhole it sensitized your destination. You are not totally in sync with space-time, and to sync it something from our continuum must breach and touch yours.>
“Live and learn—fast,” Jimmy sighed. “I hope nobody else comes along before Josef.”
But the big, burly Mycohlian was there almost immediately and simply put his foot on the crude drawing. Although there was no visible effect, they crossed over it without trouble but with much relief.
“Great trick, but not as useful as we’d hoped,” Modra commented.
Josef shrugged. “Not bad even for all that. Draw another around the three of us.”
“What? Again?”
“Yes,” he responded. “After I get a few more of these suits. Any model here that would come close to fitting Tobrush?”
Modra thought a moment. “Try the quammir. That bin over there. They’re very different but very roughly the same size and shape, so long as Tobrush doesn’t use his tentacles.”
“Got it. Oof! Heavier than I thought! All right—start drawing.”
It was in the nature of their union that as soon as the question was formed in their minds as to what good it would do to wind up trapped again, they knew the answer.
As soon as the pentagram was closed, they concentrated, and were suddenly in a small clearing well back from the camp. The receiving pentagram was drawn in the dirt but it worked, and a single one of Tobrush’s thousands of tendrils was sufficient to sync it.
“I wish we had time to clean up,” Krisha commented, still happy to have an e-suit again, even if it was an ugly blue. The internal controls were also quite different in their layout and design, but she had no trouble figuring which did what with a little guidance from Modra.
“Now what?” Krisha asked them.
“Now we wait half an hour or so, until Colonel Mogod issues all the proper security codes and clearances for us to pass,” Jimmy told her.
“Without ever knowing he did it,” Modra added.
Gun Roh Chin frowned. “You can do that! To a cymol!”
Jimmy nodded. “Tobrush says that it’s child’s play. He could do it before if he’d been in the same room with the colonel. The only thing we added was the mind-link conduit. Kind of lets you know why they’re the bosses, doesn’t it?”
The captain nodded. “And he and the Angels, Guardians, and Quintara are further below your mystical Crew than we are from them. It does become rather humbling.” He sighed. “Still, if our friend can be believed, we’re still missing a vital piece of the puzzle. Clearly the only possible deduction covering all this is that the Higher Races once fought and defeated the Quintara; that they were created, or introduced, or possibly mutated into their current management roles, and that, having done it once, they can defeat the Quintara again. Clear?”
“I’m with you so far.”
“So,” the captain continued, “why doesn’t Tobrush know anything more about the Quintara than we ourselves have discovered? Particularly when his particular form of life has such a superb crack at true ancestral memory? Why did your Guardians not immediately spot the danger and swing into action when the first reports of the discovery of a Quintara station came in from the scout who discovered it? Why, in fact, did they allow apparently unbriefed and unprepared scientists, without even military backup—for all the good it might have done—to poke, probe, and eventually initiate the very events that have led to this point? And why, once it was done, didn’t they immediately initiate measures to control the damage before the princes and their master were released? In particular—why didn’t the cymols, on the scene, personified by your Captain Lankur, or even now with this mob scene here, their own security chief know as much as we do? I could go on and on.”
“Yes, there are lots of missing pieces,” Jimmy agreed, “but the litany you recite asks the most important one.”
“Indeed?”
“All right, we’ve got some knowledge of at least what the bad guys are doing, and we’ve got some power now and some defenses, but within very local limits. We can’t take on the whole bloody demonic army. He as much as said so. So where does that leave us? Just what the bloody hell do we do now?”
“We get out of here,” replied Gun Roh Chin. “We get Tobrush to his own people with the same information so they’ll at least be as informed as we’ve now hopefully made the Guardians. Then, if possible, we do the same thing with the Holy Angels. When we’ve done that, either the process of combating the attacks to come will be put into motion and it will be out of our hands, or we are going to be scrambling just to stay alive.”
“We’ll be doing that anyway,” Jimmy said nervously. “It won’t take that demon prince long to put two and two together when he discovers we’re not in the city. Most likely he can trace us through the network. Some records must be automatically maintained. You saw the level of technology in the city. Not to mention the ones who broke and ran for the city after our encounter in the other plane. If / was a Quintara, I’d make bloody sure that our descriptions were everywhere, that there was no reward too high to ask for our heads, and simultaneously attempt so much disinformation about us to our own people that we’ll not be received.”
“I thought of that,” Chin replied. “Indeed, I’m much more worried about the implications if that isn’t already in motion.”
“Implications?”
“They’ve had some time now to evaluate the situation here. What if they aren’t hunting for us? What if they don’t care? What if they consider us to be totally irrelevant?”
“There is no chance of that, my captain,” Krisha put in, having stood in back and listened to the discourse. “You have seen them only from afar, never from within your mind as the rest of us have. It would not matter to them if we could truly hurt them or not. They have an ugly code of honor, as it were, and that is that they always keep their word. We may or may not be high on their list of priorities, but they want us. Of that I am certain. They want us badly, and alive. They have made promises—ugly, evil promises—to many of us. The rest have still thwarted their will. And particularly now that we have spilled their blood, they will not rest until we are dealt with. It is their way.”
The captain stroked his chin, thinking, then chuckled. “Isn’t it ironic that we find our own so incomprehensible, yet we understand the Quintara so very well?”
Jimmy suddenly looked up and away, his expression distant. Then he said, “All right, it’s time to get off this dirt ball. Just follow our lead, act like you belong here, and say nothing. It is better to walk out of here than to have to try and fight our way out.”
They walked down into the camp, Chin, Krisha, and Grysta flanked by the four, their blue uniforms and confident manner causing not a ripple of attention. Other than one of the three not mind-linked panicking or saying something wrong, the only worry was that someone would take a very close look at Tobrush, since the Julki were not a shared race but existed in the Mycohl alone. Still, with so little of him exposed in that amorphous blue environment suit, and with so many varied races around, it would take a real expert in race and nationality to identify him as one who didn’t belong in this company, let alone as a Julki.
They approached the first parked shuttle. The two guards, rather bored and none too bright Zamigls, anthropoids noted for big, round, black eyes and hair that grew naturally as uneven spikes all over their faces and bodies, snapped to attention. “Orders?” one barked, trying to sound important.
“You should have received orders from your superiors on our party,” Jimmy McCray said confidently. “Security code alka grefart.”
The guards relaxed. “Oh, yes, sir. You may board.”
“Thank you,” responded the little Terran and, just like that, they all walked aboard.
Modra went forward to take the controls, with Josef taking the jump seat next to her. He surveyed the manual controls with disdain. “Very inefficient. We do things much better in the Mycohl.”
She shrugged. “When you steal a design you have the
advantage of improving on a few things.” She reached up, closed the hatch, and pressurized the cabin, then flicked up the small speaker built into the e-suit. “Shuttle ready for departure, security code alka grefart,” she reported routinely. “Ground, let me know when I’m clear to lift.”
“Timer linked,” came a gruff, guttural voice in her ear. “Lift off at rundown, shuttle.”
The panel came on, with a sixty-second countdown. Krisha and Gun Roh Chin were both holding their breaths during the entire procedure, and both at one point or another became convinced that the count had either slowed or stopped. After a minute of eternity, Modra began throwing switches and then took the stick. The shuttle came to life and lifted off straight up, the screens giving a combined three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view now coming on and showing the correct egress path to orbit.
Gun Roh Chin breathed again. “I was sure we’d get stopped at any moment,” he admitted aloud.
“We’re not out of the woods yet,” Jimmy cautioned. “We’ve got this far only because security is so hush-hush it is designed to work without anybody questioning it. But if a higher-up with the fleet decides to challenge our actions, we’ll be for it in a hurry.”
“If you’ve got all your codes right they won’t,” Krisha assured him. “She used to be in intelligence, you know.”
Josef looked at the screens. “That’s quite a fleet they’ve got around here,” he commented. “Well away, too. They’re not ready to be caught in orbit like the research vessel was.”
They were challenged not just once but a half a dozen times by military watchers whose job it was to check out anything odd. Each time a password got them through, although the passwords did change with each level. They reached orbit, passed the security point, received their new clearance vectors, and headed out-system, away from the demon gate and its star.
“Here we go,” Modra said under her breath. “Josef, call your ship.”
Far off, in the massive belt of asteroids so dense it created a ring that encircled the solar system, something dark, something as cold and apparently dead as the rocks among