“Sounds awkward,” he responded. “If I’m not a captain any more, ‘Gunny’ is just fine. I have to tell you, though, that I don’t feel like a priest. I feel like an old reprobate freighter captain out of a job.”
“Well, there wasn’t as far to go with you as with most people,” she noted. “And I was instructed that nothing should change you in any way that would impair the way you work or think or do things. Things would have been quite different, horrible, if you hadn’t beaten that terrible Ming at her own game, though.”
“I had a lot of practice with her sort with Manya, among others. But you—what do I even call you now? I’ve never met a Saint before.”
“You call me Krisha,” she told him firmly. “/ may never get used to others calling me ‘Most High’ and ‘Sainted Mother.’ It’s embarrassing, but I guess I’ll get used to it, but I don’t want to hear you ever say it. I want somebody around who’ll treat me as a normal person. Even if I am the boss and don’t you forget it!” she added playfully.
“No, Ma’am,” he responded with a grin.
“I’ve discovered I have a lot of influence around here, too.” She reached into a pocket sewn into the inner folds of her robe. “No Terran has ever worn the gold, so they had to make some specially for me and I got to design in a few things, like a pocket,” she told him, pulling out three large cigars.
His eyes widened. “Where’d you get those’?'”
“A freighter docked here and when I found he was a Terran captain I sent word. They said he knew you. Zha Chu, I think the name was.”
“Oh, yes! Chunky fellow. Got to be as wide as he is tall. Haven’t seen him in years.”
“Now, don’t you smoke in here! And not around me, either! I never could stand the smell of those things. You do it outside or in private.”
“Aye, aye, skipper,” he shot back. “But are priests supposed to have vices! I thought we weren’t supposed to sin.”
“Well, it’s not a socially approved practice, but I had the lord chamberlain look it up and nowhere is it a sin.”
Krisha was quite pleased with herself, and quite relieved. The capt—Gunny—was very much his old self, yet he was a priest and would keep his vows. What had been done was very subtle, and mostly on the subconscious level. They had taken his love for her and turned it into a sense of commitment, a marriage, rock solid, firm, unshakable. He would never again be tempted by other women, nor betray her in any way. It simply would never occur to him. Unlike a conventional Mizlaplanian marriage, though, it was he who was subordinate to her. He might debate with her, try and change her mind, but it would never occur to him to disobey her any more than she would ever disobey her masters, the Holy Angels. Her sole reason for existence, all her heart and soul, was to serve them, to obey their every wish and command. All the great blessings she now had, had come as gifts from them, and were they to take them all away, even Gunny, she would obey and serve them just as fervently, nor would she dream of asking them for anything/.
“What is the situation outside?” he asked her, oblivious of any changes within her.
“Bad. Getting worse. The High Ones have something akin to the mind-link among themselves; they can commune even across vast distances. They’ve been communing for some time. Normal communications are spotty. A great deal of effort has had to be expended in keeping the Inquisition in line. Holy Angels are commanding whole Arms and staffs to audiences, and finding much corruption within them. What is within can be expelled, but often at great cost to the infected individual. Our own greatest contribution seems to .be in awakening in the Most High how isolated they have become. Some have now mind-linked and possessed the bodies of priests and gone out among the Church and the people and seen firsthand what is happening.”
“That is heartening. Anything from the other empires?”
“The Mycohl appears to be fragmenting, and they are such a violent people that the stories are hideous. Cults of ancient demon worship with full sacrifices are springing up everywhere. Some are impossible to believe, such as the one in which a loyal Lord brought his forces to bear on a rebellious planet and who, along with all his troops, was turned into one of those pitiful drol slaves by a warrior sorceress.”
He thought about that. “Sounds like Kalia. And drols are made as well as born. They have a whole preprogrammed technology of nanomachines that can reprogram every cell in the body. That’s how they deal with some political enemies and make examples. The drols are such simple creatures there are probably only two programs, male and female. If they had the programs, and could bring enough of that filth through to blanket an army not having those programs, it wouldn’t be unthinkable. The kind of power that would take, though, would be beyond any mere Quintara.” He suddenly sat up in bed. “That’s if! He’s there!”
She frowned. “Who? Who is there?”
“The Enemy of Light, the Engineer of Evil! With the Mycohl’s vestigial religions and rituals from the time they were on his side, it’s the place where he’d most likely to be able to concentrate and widen his opening. It is Kalia! I know it! He’s using her to widen his way through, and with her hatred of the Mycohl hierarchy she’s having a wonderful time!” He suddenly stopped short. “Oh, my! That’s where Tobrush and Josef went. I certainly hope they didn’t get too close. A Mycohl master might be a match for a Quintara, but not him.”
“Well, the channels to the Mycohl remain open, even though there have been some bloody clashes,” she told him. “As for the Exchange, without which noting is probably possible—we’ve heard nothing at all. If Tobrush and Josef were corrupted or killed, they’d have the Exchange people, too. What if Modra and Jimmy didn’t make it? Where does that leave us?”
“As dead and beyond hope as Manya, Morok, and Savin, I’m afraid.” He sighed. “Is there a green robe for me anywhere? I might as well get used to it, and I think it’s time I smoked a cigar.”
Modra was in the can and Grysta was fast asleep.
Jimmy did a wide scan over the border region yet another time, then sat back and examined the result. It looked like a solid black wall, and bitter experience had shown them that the wall wasn’t thin, either. Once in a while, pieces of the stuff would break off and start accelerating away at some speed, not toward them but into the Mycohl, but there was so much of it there that the missing mass didn’t seem to make a dent in it.
He sat back and shook his head. They’d traveled an extra three days along the border hoping that there would be a sign of some break in it, but, so far, nothing at all.
He shifted a bit in the e-suit and his thoughts shifted to more personal things. It still felt very—odd—particularly when he shifted. He hadn’t been aware of how omnipresent the—thing—had been until it wasn’t there any more. The medilab under Tobrush’s direction had done a superb job; there were no aftereffects, no pain, nothing. That, of course, was one of the reasons it felt even more bizarre. The Mycohliah knew nothing of human anatomy and trusted the computer; he’d taken everything, rerouting the urinary outlet to just beyond the anus. Jimmy had to wonder what kind of injury program that had been supposed to treat. There was nothing there, not even a scar.
He still had mixed feelings inside. On the one hand he felt real sorrow, along with ego problems about whether or not he was still in any way a man. It was going to be damned hard to adjust to, mentally. Yet, on the other hand, he felt a tremendous sense of relief as well, as if some intolerable burden, some burning insanity, within him had also been excised. He hated it, he inwardly grieved about it, but he also believed that it was the best decision he’d made. Later, perhaps, if they survived all this, if the Engineer was defeated and the Quintara put down, he might well have horrible second thoughts about it, but not now. They could grow anything, of course, if they had a skin sample and your genetic code, but he put that from his mind completely. He had burned his bridge and he would stick to it no matter what.
The Quintara then had nothing left to tempt him with. Life? They could have that, if he could take them with him. Not romance and sex, certainly, and while they might offer to restore, he was resolved on mat. Immortality? He was not absolutely sure, but he believed that anyone who could hear the thoughts of a subatomic particle in a universe wouldn’t let him down.
Modra came out of the toilet and sank back into her chair.
“Sick again?” he asked her.
“Nauseous. Same as yesterday. I put on a space-sickness patch but it didn’t seem to help. Well, if it’s like yesterday, it’ll go away in a while. Anything?”
“No breaks, but more of it is definitely being transferred inward. The Mycohl is obvious fertile ground for them, and they don’t give a fig about the people. They want to wipe out the masters. If what we heard about the Mizlaplan has any truth to it, I expect that the Exchange is also pretty messy. Hell, they could take over whole planets in the Exchange and nobody’d notice. I think, though, they just want to stir things up to a war. The Exchange and the Mizzies takin’ on their old mutual ugliness the Mycohl while they eat at the center of the Mycohl Empire and ensure that they can’t mount a credible defense. They fear the Mycohl the most because they can both travel and hide. I bet that somewhere, right now, in some lab, probably in the Exchange but maybe also over with the Mizzies, some scientists have suddenly been struck with brilliance and have developed absolute tests for detecting a Mycohl-inhabited body.”
She looked at him. “You really think so?”
“That’s what I’d do. You think His Nobs couldn’t come up with one? Put that together with the fact that the race that bred or created or whatever the Mycohl has got to know the location of that mother world, the breeding and the library world, and you have a pretty good recipe for eventual genocide. In any event, there’ll be no getting all three together once the donnybrook begins.”
She sat back in the chair and it felt better.
<Tobrush! Josef!>
<We are here.>
<Three days and no break! What are we to do?>
<If you feel that there is no alternative, use the star charts, plot a course for least likely interception, and cross over sublight. If you are detected, surrender. You are not without considerable power. >
That was a point.
<What if we just try and make a run straight through it at top speed? >
<Inadvisable. You do not know what it might do to you, and it probably has your templates, a sort of wanted poster. Even if you manage to go through and expel it, it might well betray your position and, through the link, ours as well. The concentration here in the Qaamil is unbelievable. We dared not bring the ship within even five light-years of the nearest body, and more arrives to expand it almost every time we look. Josef has been in and out of a number of areas and it looks ugly indeed down there. >
<If there’s so much, how did he get in?>
<Come! Come! A region overrun by the Quintara? Do you realize how many wide-open pentagrams there are in a cluster of thirteen solar systems? You don’t even need a destination; the Quintara want quick ins and outs. Not very good for mobility, but excellent for quick glimpses of a thousand places. Access his mind if you like to see what we mean.>
Quick glimpses was right, but the scenes that flashed by, in many cases no more than snapshots, were still startling.
The remnants of human sacrifices and other bizarre and stomach-turning rituals, great idols, burning braziers of incense and fiery substances, faces that looked like the living dead, visions of depravity and worse.
<What about that report of a whole corps of soldiers being turned into drols with some kind of magic spell?>
<Confirmed. They wanted publicity on that one, for obvious reasons. They were apparently lulled by their high-tech combat suits and relay teams and got themselves lured into a gigantic pentagram many kilometers wide. Once in, it was closed, and sufficient interdimensional energy was availbable and bled to work “magic,” as it were.>
<Then nobody’s safe!>
<If they could do that on a true mass scale, I doubt if they’d be consolidating and organizing. Every time they do something on that grand a scale they lose some of the mass—permanently. With hundreds of light-years at best, three empires, four hundred races, ninety trillion people, I don’t think they can manage it, not to mention the problems of a pentagram that large. But they can well afford a few grandiose object lessons like this, and a considerable number of individual demonstrations as needed. Note that, although it would have been a simple thing to wipe out the orbital command ship and short out its systems as those first ones did back on the original frontier world with the science ship, they chose to allow the command ship to withdraw with all recordings intact. That recording will do more to influence highly placed people and military types that they are dealing with godlike power here than a hundred such actual attacks. Already many hives, including an impressive number well away from any current action or immediate threat, have been discovered trying to deal with the Quintara—and the Quintara are more than willing to deal.>
<Fausts, like I said long ago,> Jimmy noted. <You can’t use superior technology or anything else and cover ninety trillion. But if they think you got the power to turn men and women of many races into a uniform set of ugly little drol slaves, then you’ve got the power to grant them good things as well. As you said, they’ve got very grave limitations no matter what they can do, and once they’re operating in this universe they’ve got to contend with laws of physics, energy, mass, ratios and relationships, and our mathematics. Besides, what good are a few thousand more drols to them? But whole systems, whole societies, joining willingly for pay, worshiping them and playing their games”—now, that’s a prize!>
Modra had kept one eye on the screens just in case a fast maneuver was called for beyond the automatic system’s abilities to cope, and now she suddenly saw something so unbelievable she wasn’t sure she saw it. She sat up, nausea forgotten, and looked at it closely.