Jimmy had extra equipment that was of interest only to him, but which made him feel far more comfortable. One was a small medal suspended from a short chain around his neck on which was embossed a cross centered over the Seal of Solomon. The other was a cross, almost as large as a pistol but small enough to fit in his utility pouch, made out of a lightweight material with a golden finish.
Gun Roh Chin was amused by it. “The ancient cross, I see. I never could understand a religion that so worshiped death and whose highest state of grace was to die a martyr.”
“It’s not death but redemption this symbolizes,” McCray replied. “We may have the demon in all of us, but this reminds us that it needn’t control us. We cannot help being born with Adam’s sin, but someone else paid the price for all who would but take it. There’s only one not born in sin I ever addressed in prayer, yet someone high and not of this universe said I had talked to Him. And a martyr dies in joy in the sure and certain faith that he or she will be reborn with all the corruption expunged, in new and perfect flesh. No, Captain, it took a descent into Hell literal and Hell personal, but I’ve laid to rest my doubt.”
Chin said nothing in reply. He didn’t want to argue theology with the little man. McCray might have a simple and parochial faith that events had left a curiosity, but faith he had, and that was important here—perhaps the most important thing of all to have. Anyone could draw a simple pentagram; it took certain faith to activate its interdimensional properties. Six-pointed stars abounded, but in the hands of one with faith in their use they could be incredibly powerful in the same realm. Who was to say that the cross was not another of those geometric symbols of a rules set beyond known physics? Faith was a powerful thing in interdimensional geometry; he wished he had a lot of it himself. He certainly was not going to attempt to argue the little priest out of it.
The air had cooled to a “mere” forty-four degrees on the centigrade scale by the time they started out near dusk. There was no sign that anyone was searching for them or suspected their presence. Some, like Krisha and Modra, were actually more worried about the lack of attention; it seemed far too easy no matter what the physical conditions. The men, for their part, seemed relieved; to Chin and Josef in particular, it pointed out how totally secure the Quintara felt against mere mortal opposition.
That would not help them, though, once they were inside the hive. Even if the Quintara there didn’t sense them, they were there to cause attention, to destroy and even kill the demons. It didn’t matter that the demons would not truly die; the information in Chin’s mind told him that the shock of death on this plane was great enough that it would be many months, perhaps years, before a “killed” Quintara could refashion another body to walk this plane again. In essence, the Quintara were not the problem to be solved here, even though they were dangerous and deadly. With the Engineer at large, miracles were possible; miracles of the darkest sort. With the Engineer gone, the Quintara could then be hunted down and, if killed, the great computer that controlled the linkage between their city and the other plane could be reset so that their new bodies, which could form only inside the crystals, would emerge to be trapped once more where they were born.
The Rithians saw poorly at night, and kept to their well-lit dome-shaped houses scattered here and there across the landscape, but now and then they did run into drols patiently turning water wheels or switching irrigation channels. At Josef’s urging, they ignored the drols, and the drols, after looking at them for a moment, ignored them when they neither approached nor said anything to the poor creatures. To drols, there were only drols and nodrols; all nodrols were the same. Up close, the male drols looked even more grotesque; muscles almost on top of their muscles, squat, square-headed with little neck, but with the most gigantic—
“Oh, my heavens!” Modra whispered. “It’s big as a sausage and goes almost to their knees’.”
As Josef warned, the females, when they saw them, horrified them even more. As hairless as the males, they were incredibly obese and could hardly walk, with elephantine legs but very tiny arms and hands, and with two pairs . of breasts, the second pair enormous and hanging down to their crotches. Josef casually explained that the Rithians had hit upon the design when they discovered they had a taste for Terran milk. It was a mild but pleasantly addicting narcotic drink to them.
The two women weren’t the only ones who wanted to throw up.
And this, Modra thought, this was the Mycohl, enemies of the Quintara. No wonder the other two empires hated them and thought them evil. They were an evil society, who had betrayed the Quintara because they didn’t want to take orders from the demons, not out of any sense that the Quintara were in themselves morally abhorrent. Josef, at least, had the excuse that he was brought up to think that this was normal and right; Tobrush, though—kindly, wise Tobrush—toured around this and who knew what other depravities, encouraging innovation in evil and enjoying every minute of it.
It was becoming easier to see why the Guardians and the Exchange had tried everything to avoid contact with the Mycohl. A mind-link with the Mycohl must seem like throwing yourself into a barrel of excrement.
Finally, they reached the area of the great crystal, the station stop to Hell.
“You can feel its power,” Jimmy whispered to them. “It’s pulsing, twisting this way and that, with a great deal more energy than I remember.”
“You are not misremembering,” Gun Roh Chin told him. “Before, the station was in automatic mode; now the full network is turned on.”
“I wish we could turn that one off,” Modra said. “One alarm and you could be up to your neck in Quintara, and we’re supposed to make enough fuss to sound that alarm.”
“It is only in phase for a nanosecond or so every two seconds,” Chin told them, again saying facts he hadn’t known until he was saying them. “During the entry walk you are in phase with it for that brief blink, but it is enough to carry you out of phase with here. It phases with an unimaginable number of other stations during its two-second cycle, and the center region resets your phase to the destination. That’s how it works. An eternal, programmable tesseraet. Amazing. And that’s how the Quintara got it here. They used their own database to locate this place and then picked one of the countless other points it would touch in the pattern. Fix it to that and you can walk to this!”
And all at once it came to him. Once he was told how to do it, it was amazingly perfect for their purposes.
“Of course!” he said.
“What’s that about?” Jimmy asked him.
“We five are the instruments through which the combined knowledge and wisdom of the Three Races may be focused. We can reprogram it, to a degree! Or, rather, they can, through us! A simple order—skip this phasing in the cycle. It’ll throw the whole thing off. It’ll touch slightly different points. Imagine the effect when they find out that someone’s been able to reprogram a station in their own back yard! If you were the Quintara, suddenly faced with that fact, and with long memories of past defeat, would you rush in to re-establish the link?”
“Not them. Not when it’s their necks,” Modra agreed. “They’d scream for Daddy.”
“All right, so how do we do it?” Josef asked.
“Unfortunately, the only way is to go into it. The contact, the control point, is in the center, where the Quintara were imprisoned. It’s the power fulcrum, whatever that means.”
“Yeah? But won’t we go bye-bye with it?” Jimmy asked worriedly.
“No. The program will be effective when we exit. We keep walking through afterwards, and in spite of going in a straight line, we will wind up at the entrance again. It’s the only way to tell which point to eliminate.”
“Then we’ve got a problem,” Krisha told him. “First of all, didn’t any of you notice that very familiar-looking structure opposite the station? And if you scan the area, I make several animated machines, which I assume are the security robots, and one Quintara within the area of that altar and the crystal.”
“Visors down, group your thoughts on me,” Chin said in a determined tone.
The Five became Three became One.
Sensors sought out the first of the security robots. At the moment they found one of the huge gleaming black ‘monsters, the robot also sensed them, but robots could only act and react near light speed; they could use a route the robot did not comprehend to be faster.
Input . . . image of the five . . . friendly forces. Assist if requested, otherwise ignore. Silently summon other units.
One by one the black behemoths came, two from the area of the crystal, one from behind the altar. Instantly they were seized and reprogrammed in a mathematical language, codes and all, that none of those doing the reprogramming knew or understood. The Three could not have known, either; apparently it was child’s play.
Ascertain location of all Quintara in vicinity.
The location showed on a grid in the robot’s “brain.” Just one within the immediate area, doing something between the statue of the goat-god sitting there in the lotus position facing the crystal and the sacrificial altar itself.
Approximate number of Quintara in hive.
Two hundred and thirty-four! They were having a convention!
A demonic face appeared behind the altar, eyes glowing, as it sensed a powerful Presence.
Too powerful. They caught but could not block the Quintara’s mental call.
<Something odd at the station. Strong presence. >
<Another Mycohl come skulking in the dark to take you on,> was the scornful and less than sympathetic reply. <All right. Smoke the creature out and hold it if you can. We’ll send the rest of the detail.>
They had the sense that a Quintara detail numbered six. They sensed that the Quintara on the altar was nervous, a sensation they’d never felt in one of them before and a heartening one, but the nervousness was more than overcome by the embarrassment of having called for help in the first place. When you think of yourself as a demigod, the loss of face from such a thing when you don’t even have a clear enemy in sight was enormous.
Suddenly enraged by his self-inflicted wound to the ego, the Quintara stood and walked confidently to the side of the platform, its hooves making a clicking sound on the hard surface. They could see it clearly now—a female! That made her sense of shame ‘all the more intolerable, because she did not wish to have the males think of her as weaker
than they. As she moved to the side of the platform, two robots came and flanked the down stairway.
<Who comes to face me?> she sent, then opened her mouth and gave a terrible roar that echoed across the landscape.
<What is your name, demon? Give me your name or I will kill you.> It was sent in a calm, businesslike tone meant to unnerve. It wasn’t only the Quintara who could play games.
<Who dares speak thus to me?>
<We do. > They stepped out in a row from their place of concealment, since once they had revealed their presence the Quintara knew their location anyway.
The demon looked at them, saliva dripped from its open mouth, its huge, sharp teeth anxious for a morsel of living flesh. She looked at them and laughed.
<Your name or you die, to be sent back in disgrace to that darkness from which you sprang to be reborn as the lowest of the race.>
<Big talk!> They felt the sudden Quintara onslaught and it was nothing to just brush aside, but neither was it so powerful that it could not be handled, deflected, neutralized.
She was startled, even amazed, at the action, but far too enraged to back down now and wait for help to arrive. She saw only five Terrans—Terrans!—and if one was a strong Mycohl inside, that only made it regrettably inedible.
The demon came down the small stairs, her eyes fixed on the five. Her protected body was in and of itself an armored fighting machine, and nothing she saw could stop her physical progress.
As she reached the bottom of the stairs, the robot to her left turned suddenly and struck its entire arm, lance-like, into the area under her breasts.
She roared in agony from the unexpected blow; writhed and twisted, and so powerful was she that she managed to break off the robot arm and with a shove send the rest of it hurtling through the air to crash to the ground five meters away.