corridor or whatever it is, with more limited resources. God knows he was bad enough even under that sort of handicap considering the evil, misery, and destruction of all the histories we know! Krisha said it when she talked about the demon princes, who are, after all, in many ways reflections of their master. Here, in our little corner of the universe, is where they nipped him, hurt him, pushed him back, gave him a bloody nose and a black eye. All his thoughts for these thousands of years have been directed at us, at getting even, at becoming the supreme power and punishing those who bloodied him. It’s a point of honor with him. He might even show kindness or mercy to others far off, for gods are always capricious, but here—here, he wants to drop into a Hell of his worst imaginings.”
Gun Roh Chin nodded. “It all makes a horrible, twisted sense. Worse, it’s consistent with the ancient legends of countless races and the varied ones of our own common mother world. The Hindus perhaps had the best appreciation of the grandiose cosmology, the Jews and their siblings the Christians and Moslems the best appreciation of the local situation. Right now, however, I see more immediate problems.”
“Indeed? What?” Jimmy asked.
The captain pointed to the screens. “This is the only way from world to world without spending several lifetimes in space. What’s the energy blister that maintains our own dimensional environment here to such as that! If that many can be mustered over so vast an area in this short a time, think what a few more weeks, or months, might bring. If he’s a good strategist, as his reputation indicates he is, the worlds will be the last to be fully attacked, save some priming. Think of it! No one will be able to move through subspace without encountering one of those things. They will control travel, commerce, even communication between the worlds. All worlds. They will be cut off, surrounded like white stones on a Go board. All three empires are organized similarly; the glue that holds them together is a level of interdependence. Cut off that trade and you have whole worlds who must submit or die.”
“It is diabolical,” Krisha said, horrified at the picture.
“Indeed. And, in a way, reassuring.”
They all looked at the captain quizzically. “Reassuring?” Jimmy prompted.
He nodded. “He’s living up to his reputation. By doing so, however, he is also approachable. We understand him precisely. What he is doing and why. He has become so corrupted that he is at our level, in a sense. It is a game we can play.”
Jimmy snorted. “I’d rather have his pieces than ours at this point.”
“Perhaps. Have you ever played Go?”
“Don’t know it. Chess was my game, along with cards.”
“Each player places a stone, one at a time, on a very large grid. When an area of opponent’s territory, as it were, is completely surrounded, it is taken. But it is possible to be outnumbered by a massive amount and still win, since no territory is safe no matter how many stones it contains if it can still somehow be surrounded by the enemy. It takes far fewer stones to surround than to fill an area. The trick is not in having the most stones while the game progresses but to have the best position.”
Jimmy refused to feel optimistic. “Yeah? Well, take a look around. Those are just a tiny fraction of his stones. Now look at the contents of this modest ship. Here’s our stone supply.”
Gun Roh Chin nodded. “Then we must get more stones before we play.”
“We’ve got trouble,” Josef reported. “We’re fine as long as we run along a course keeping us within Exchange space, but whenever I attempt an adjustment and attempt to plot a turn into the Mycohl the stuff just builds up like a wall. I realize they can’t possibly be covering tens of thousands of light-years of border, but how old do you want to get before we manage a breakout?”
“Can you shoot your way through?” Chin asked him. “This is a warship, after all.”
“Designed to take on other warships,” the Mycohlian replied. “Nothing I have would work in subspace against subspace material. It’s designed to blow the energy blisters around other ships of our sort.”
Chin thought about it. “Any way to measure the thickness of the barrier?”
“Not meaningfully, no. Again, the instruments are designed to detect our kind of matter and energy. There isn’t supposed to be anything native to this environment.”
The captain considered that. “We have to assume it’s relatively thin, that there’s a limit to how much can be made and programmed within our time frame. I don’t think this concentration is likely to be new material; most likely it’s old stuff, pulled, as someone pointed out, from the far reaches of the universe to concentrate on us. If they could really make and program the material this quickly and in this quantity their captivity would have meant little, since they could still program it even penned up. No, more likely there is either a finite amount of it, period, which would be consistent with some logic, or they cannot make it by themselves and must use what is available.”
“Odd,” Krisha commented. “If you are right, then there may be vast civilizations out there somewhere now undergoing peace and perhaps a golden age.”
“Until they are done with us,” Jimmy muttered.
“Tobrush!” the captain called. “What about using your group abilities to punch that hole for us? You think it is possible?”
“Possibly,” responded the Mycohl master hesitantly, finally able to speak directly to those without telepathic abilities or a knowledge of the Mycohl tongue via his own translator module. “But the price might be too high. No matter what happens, we will attract attention, perhaps all of of attention, and point arrows directly at our position and identities. Right now, I tend to believe that our best interests require us to be as anonymous as possible.”
The captain suddenly frowned, a quizzical expression coming over his face. “Wait a moment! We’ve been going at this the wrong way! These things have no access into our space; they can’t even survive our environment without protections such as the idols and cross-dimensional geometry. Why don’t we just exit as close to them as we dare and go flat out in sublight within our normal universe?”
“I was thinking along the same lines,” Josef responded.
“However, it brings up a number of other risks. If there are any Exchange warships in the region, we’re sitting ducks, and if that stuff is thicker than our sublight speed can take us before we’re intercepted, we’ll have to submerge right into that gook.”
“Those are better odds than staying here or taking them head-on,” the captain noted. “I say we do it. Now.”
“It is worth a try,” Tobrush agreed, and Josef calculated the bare minimum egress trajectory to take them over the dark wall and then placed the ship on automatic.
The engines revved up, they strapped themselves in, and then the screens began to fill with the mass of dark plasma as they approached until there was nothing to be seen but solid obstruction. From the slowly pulsing mass a tentacle formed with astonishing speed and lashed out at them, brushing the ship and going through it as if it weren’t solid at all but rather some sort of ghost. . . .
For a moment the mind-link broke, and Josef felt a lustful, violent rage rise within him. . . .
At the same moment, Modra felt a near crushing weight of guilt conflicting with a near animal lust. . . .
Jimmy felt a horrible, hollow, agonizing despair. . . .
Tobrush repressed a sudden urge to kill everyone aboard. …
Krisha felt naked, defenseless, totally exposed and alone. …
Grysta felt a total animalistic carnality and snapped one of the restraints as she tried to move toward Jimmy. . . .
Gun Roh Chin felt a bit dizzy and his skin tingled for a moment, but otherwise he felt nothing at all.
An alarm sounded on the pilot instrumentation board and snapped Josef back to normal. The link, briefly broken, was restored almost instantly, bringing to all four of the team an awareness of what the other three had felt but also lessening its afterimages in their minds.
“We’re being scanned. About two parsecs distant, no more,” Josef reported. “Definitely an Exchange signal.”
“Automated?” Chin asked worriedly.
“I’d say so, or we’d have had targeting on us by now. They’re probably spread pretty thin through this region, I’d
expect. It’ll send a report, but with all this gook I’m not certain anything will be received.”
“They’re sending in, away from the wall,” Chin pointed out. “I’d say it depends on both how close real help is from the monitor probe and also how smart those things underneath really are. If they’re bright, they’ll let these kinds of messages through loud and clear.”
Modra shivered. “I don’t care how smart they are. So much for taking them on directly. Those feelings … All of us. And so personalized.”
For the first time, the captain realized that they hadn’t cleared the barrier completely and that there had been effects. Carefully, he polled the others. Finally he said, “I don’t think, from what I’m hearing, that they were personalized at all. Whatever field they generate is designed to suppress inhibition and unlock the primitive parts of the mind, where we store both our worst animal impulses and our darkest fears.”
“Yes, but it was a mere touch,” Krisha breathed, still a bit shaken. “If we’d gone full into it …”
“And it broke our connection at the same time,” Jimmy noted. “Switched it off briefly like a flickering light, turning us from allies to predators against one another. Whatever it is, it’s too strong for the likes of us.”
“They are machines,” Gun Roh Chin insisted. “Not machines as we understand them, but machines nonetheless. Machines designed and programmed with the likes of us in mind.”
Krisha stared at him. “And you felt nothing?”
“A touch of vertigo, a tingling, no more. It works through the t-band, as do the Quintara themselves, and I have virtually no sensitivity there.”
“In a way, I envy you,” she told him. “I think we all do, just a little.”
He shrugged. “Don’t. I could never have gotten out of the crystal stations, let alone off that world back there, except perhaps in chains. And in front of an idol or a Quintara, perhaps my mind could not be so affected, but it would be simplicity itself for one of them to simply order a follower to shoot me or a mob to bum me at the stake.”
“I believe you could actually stand in the presence of a Holy Angel without effect,” she told him.
“Perhaps, but the same thing applies. Even if I were able to get past all the security, fool everyone, and get taken into such a presence, an Angel could summon all the help it needed while I would be unlikely to be able to even converse with it.”
“My instruments state that we’re across the border,” Josef reported. “How long should we go before we try going back under?”
“I wouldn’t submerge until absolutely necessary,” the captain responded. “We simply must minimize the risk of going under and winding up right in the middle of one or more of those things.”
Alarms began sounding once again. “We have an R-class cruiser just surfacing behind us!” Josef reported. “I think they’re going to launch fighters, border or no border!”
“Go under now!” the captain shouted. “We can’t take on that kind of power!”
“We dare not! We haven’t made any real distance yet! We ’11 need at least an hour to have any safety margin at all!”
“I think they’ve figured that out,” Modra commented dryly. “I don’t know anything about fighting or military vessels, but I’d say we have maybe five minutes.”
A HELL OF A MESS
THE CAPTAIN CAME FORWARD IN A HURRY. “Transfer command to me and get back there, both of you! Strap in, take sedatives, anything you want! Just move!”
They immediately saw his point, although they didn’t like it, and Josef and Modra immediately moved to the rear. Gun Roh Chin slid into the seat, strapped in, and put on the command helmet, which was so large for his head that it almost rested on his nose. At this point, he didn’t care.