She didn’t want to give up the child, not Tris’s child, to possibly a fate no better than hers right now, but she knew she’d be forced to. Without money there was no way she could provide anything at all. As the man had said, she needed charity just to eat and be sheltered and guarantee as much as possible a live, healthy child.
She was totally alone.
The demon’s words came back to her under the hot sun on the lonely stone walkway in front of the spaceport. “/ am the only one who can help you, if you are sincere. If not for me, for the sake of your family and your child to come.”
And what if she did? Would the demon resurrect her family? Restore her money and position? Legitimize her child?
<Pray, and you shall be permitted to raise the child and the child will prosper as one of mine. >
“No, you son of a bitch,” she muttered. “I’ll sell myself first. I’ll do anything I have to, but you’re not getting me and you’re not getting my baby!”
She started walking along the lonely, desolate street when she thought she heard shouting far off. “Break the seal!” a familiar voice was saying, but it didn’t seem to be in Kor. “That’s it! Just break—got it!”
The street vanished. The sun went dark. She was suddenly lying in an e-suit drenched with so much sweat that the suit couldn’t keep up, and it was night.
A hand pushed an external control and her helmet slid back. Memory flooded back into her mind, and with it awareness of reality.
“Got you!” said Gun Roh Chin happily.
“No he didn’t,” she muttered. “He was never even close!”
“Is it me, or is the gravity suddenly lighter?”
Josef grinned in the darkness. “It’s all that explosive now in its proper place instead of on our backs. How many charges do you have left?”
Jimmy checked. “Two.”
“So do I, and I know just the place to put them. All that we’ve done will do a lot of damage but it won’t structurally damage the main building. There’s four pillars, though, that support the great hall and its trusses. With the others pushing on all sides, if we can blow those pillars we might get the whole building to implode.”
Jimmy checked his watch. “I hate to tell you, old man, but we’ve got a bit under half an hour until they go, with or without us inside.”
“Plenty of time. Come on—for the basement area.”
Jimmy sighed. “All right, but we’ve left a pretty big load of Rithian bodies about. Somebody’s bound to miss them or find one sooner or later.”
There were four more bodies before they reached the lower level, all felled by crossbow bolts into the area between their shoulder blades where the Rithian brain case was located. Jimmy was beginning to like the weapons; silent, deadly, and undetectable by instruments or hearing even when fired.
“What’s down here? Dungeons?”
“A few for special prisoners,” Josef told him, “but they’re nowhere near where we’re going. There’s a number of rooms used for storage and maintenance, a medical lab,
master controls for the security robots and such, but the area under the great hall is mostly generating equipment, backup electrical, that sort of thing.”
The place bristled with all sorts of automated alarms, but they were simple to either bypass or go over, under, or around. Still, by the time they reached the central basement almost ten minutes had passed, even though it had taken little time once there to plant the charges. Concealing and setting the explosives wasn’t much of a problem. Touching a contact from the e-suit to the small computer module on each unit caused them to be in absolute synchronization with the others. The whole lot would go not simultaneously but in rapid series.
Jimmy checked the time. “There’s only twenty minutes! And I sense Quintara nearby. Maybe we missed an alarm. We can’t afford to run into one or more of those buggers right now! Not with the clock running.”
Josef hesitated. “We don’t dare draw a pentagram! Not inside here\ With the Quintara all about there’s no guarantee we’d reach the roof instead of someplace a lot uglier, and even if we did we’d probably be instantly traced and stuck, trapped mere for them.” He looked around. “That stair, there! It leads to a concealed access entrance to the hall. If there are no Quintara up there we might be able to get out the main gate.”
“Worth a try,” Jimmy agreed, and Josef led the way up, crossbow at the ready.
“The hell with defenses,” Josef whispered at the top. “I don’t care if I trigger every alarm in this place. Shoot anything that moves and just get out!”
A clever latch system slid the panel to one side and they stepped into the main hall. It was in fact a truly great room, but both stopped a moment, taken aback at the changes in it. Braziers blazed with a combination of fire and eerie changing colors; just in front of them, blocking the view of their entrance from anyone in the hall, was another massive altar with its grotesque half-god half-Terran idol, and in front of it the great seal of the Mycohl, set in mosaic in the floor, had been marked off, the five points of the pentagram inside the five-pointed star adorned with elaborate candles and golden paraphernalia of unknown use.
A small but ornate balcony surrounded the scene on three sides, the supports for it creating two effective narrow corridors from back to front.
Two Rithian guards armed with high-energy rifles guarded the door on either side, looking outward, but too far away to ensure two well-placed shots. Josef gestured to Jimmy, who understood and went to the far right, crouching low and going down the corridor under the balcony while Josef broke to the left. Stealthily, both men crept to near the guards, wishing they dared link to fire simultaneously.
Jimmy got into position, crossed himself, and raised the crossbow. The additional second wasted in the motion, however, left him slightly behind Josef, who jumped up and fired point-blank into the left guard’s brain case.
The other guard reacted instantly to the hit, turning ever so slightly so that Jimmy’s bolt struck its shoulder muscle instead of the casing. It roared in eerie, high-pitched agony, the sound echoing through the hall, freezing Jimmy for a moment while Josef bolted for the great open double door, tossing away his crossbow and shooting the wounded guard with his pistol as he ran.
The big man struck the apparently wide-open door as if it were solid stone, and, stunned, fell back.
“Josef! How delightfull I just knew it would be you!”
Her voice, coming from the top of the balcony, reverberated again and again around the hall.
Jimmy froze for a moment, then ducked down below the bunting that helped create the corridor. For a terrible moment he thought they both were caught, but now he realized that she hadn’t actually seen the shots and was fixated on Josef alone. She apparently gave the big man credit for more fighting ability than he actually possessed.
Josef climbed unsteadily to his feet and shook his head as if to clear it, then looked up at the small figure on the balcony. “Kalia,” he said.
“You surely didn’t think we’d leave the front gate wide open, did you?” she taunted. “I mean, even you didn’t come in that way.”
He looked at the apparently open escape route and understood. “Force field,” he muttered. “It wasn’t there a second ago.”
“No, of course not, darling Josef,” she responded, enjoying this moment as if she’d dreamt of it over and over again in her mind. “In case there were any neutralizers or disrupters, it was designed to be either triggered by a guard or by any triggering of energy such as your pistol within fifty meters. Don’t blame yourself, though. When the first guard fell outside the station lines there it went up.”
“You’ve come a long way, Kalia,” Josef noted icily. “Still, I didn’t expect you to be here, not in this place. You never were too fond of Rithians.”
“Oh, but darling, I can be anyplace. With the power of the Great Ones, and a proper pentagram, I can be almost anywhere in the Qaamil almost instantaneously. We have some nice drols just sitting about playing with themselves whose only job is to lock us in phase when we materialize. You have no idea of the power you’re playing with. Look!”
The floor of the hall suddenly erupted in front of him, a thin bead of liquid fire emerging, spreading, encircling him, coming together to form a perfect flaming pentagram in just over a second. His perspective switched; now, suddenly, he was not in the fiery shape but instead in the center, in front of the altar, within the large mosaic, trapped and out of phase.
“Don’t go away, darling!” she shouted, and vanished from the top of the balcony.
Josef tried to switch the prison, activating and ordering himself to the pentagram on the roof, but nothing happened. He looked at his watch. Fourteen minutes! Get out of here, McCray, if you can! Don’t try for me! he thought to himself. At least I’m going to take that traitorous bitch with me!
The first burning pentagram vanished, leaving not even a burn mark, but another suddenly appeared just outside the big one that held him, and Kalia appeared in the middle carrying something in her right hand. She smiled, clapped her hands, then said, “Impressive, isn’t it? Throw a little harmless smoke bomb ahead of you and it looks like you appear in a cloud of smoke. Impresses the hell out of people.”
An ugly, misshapen drol emerged from a doorway to the right of the altar, obviously in response to the clapping, came over to her, and stamped on the fire with bare feet. It went out all around, and Kalia smiled, petted the creature, and walked over to Josef as the drol retreated back to its post.
“Don’t try your evil eye on me any more,” she warned him. “It doesn’t work with me.” She walked around the outside of the symbol, examining him as if he were some sort of specimen.
“You look good, Kalia,” he noted. No trace of the hideous burns or even the scar remained; she was a stunningly beautiful woman.
“You’re looking good yourself, Josef. This is when I want to look my best and impress the handsome young officers. Still, when one of them forgets his place, he finds himself hugging this.”
She changed. Not slowly, but all at once, in the blinking of an eye, and she was hideous: a rotting, foul, animated corpse with charred and flaking skin and upper teeth protruding from a skull-like head from which dangled wisps of snow-white hair.
As soon as she saw his revulsion, she was back to her beauty once more. “What’s the matter, Josef? Don’t want to kiss me any more?”
“No, I think the other way suited you just fine, Kalia,” he retorted. “It lets the true ‘you’ shine through.”
She ignored the sarcasm. “You should have joined me, Josef. I admit it’s a little bit of a letdown to see how it’s done. Sort of like finding out how a sleight-of-hand artist palms coins. Still, the power is so awesome it might as well be supernatural. You have no idea what you are dealing with, even after all that in the city and before. You know what those things we passed through were, darling? Not worlds—templates for worlds, and workshops in between. Workshops to build the worlds of this entire galaxy. And there’s more than we can count beyond those, as many as there are galaxies. And you sneak in here, skulking around, thinking in your supreme male ego that you can take on that. And I have that power! More power than any Terran ever dreamed existed!”
“So long as you bow and scrape to your horny masters,” he retorted. “I thought your goal in life was to be nobody’s slave.”
She shrugged. “So did I. But then I realized that everybody’s lower than somebody. I rose to be—what? Your subordinate on a two-bit packet ship under your absolute command. You’re under a whole string of officers, then the High Command, and under every single Lord of every single Realm or Hive in the Mycohl. And they were under the masters of the Mycohl. Even the Quintara take orders. We aren’t a Higher Race, let alone the highest. It’s not how many are above you that matters, it’s how many are below. So what that I can’t own the Qaamil? I rented it and it’s mine!”
“That much power must get boring as hell after a while.”
She laughed. “I. admit I am getting lazy. For instance, before I’d show off my fighting skills against you. Now all I do is this.” She came over, stepped on the pentagram, and threw up her left hand. Although suddenly in phase with her, he found himself paralyzed, unable to move, yet able to speak. “It’s not as much fun, darling, but it’s ever so satisfying. I might get bored, but we have the Three Empires to conquer, and then the rest of the galaxy, and even beyond yet!”
“Even the Quintara’s master has masters,” he pointed out. “Sooner or later it will end.”
“And so what? The Day of Reckoning is billions of years from now. Billions! By then I’m sure we’ll all be so bored we’ll be ready to pack it in. In the meantime, we can always be creative. Do you know what this is?” She held up the vaguely pistol-shaped device in her right hand.
Still eleven minutes! Time was crawling by! “I’m sure you’re just itching to tell me.”
She smiled. “I thought of it almost immediately when I saw you. I knew the moment I found out about it quite a while ago that if I ever got this chance it was exactly what I wanted for you. We’re changing the drols, darling. Standardizing on the model you see here. No more of the kind we had way back when at the Celebration that were so close to us I could pretend to be one of them. Security, you see. Nobody is going to be able to pass themselves off as one of these creatures.”
“I heard you turned a whole infantry unit into them with a few waves of your hand,” he said calmly. “Why don’t you just wave two hands?”
“Heard about that, did you? And you knew it was me! How delightful I But it’s so draining, darling, and I did tell you I’ve grown lazy. And, of course, there are limits. Even I can’t be everywhere, and there are so many drols. Instead we’ve been mass-producing this. I’m told they’re something between an artificial virus and a computer so teeny-tiny that billions and billions are packed into every dose. They are injected, go round and round, duplicate again and again, until they’re in every single cell of the body, and then they take over, reprogramming you and working with amazing speed. You eat and eat and you can see changes in just a matter of days. In a few weeks you’re more drol than human. In a couple of months you are a drol, inside and out.”
“I know the process,” he said uneasily. “The Lords have used it now and then to get rid of traitors and rebels, then kept them around as drols as examples to others.”
“How nice. Then you already know what’s in this injector. Not just drol stuff, darling—female drol stuff. And when you’re bald and fat and slow and obedient and bent over by the weight of four humongous tits, deep down, you’ll still know. And I’ll keep you around, ageless, always nearby, so you can appreciate my destiny.”
She brought the injector up to the side of his head. He felt sheer panic and tried without success to shy away. She was delaying triggering the injection, basking in his total horror and revulsion.
Suddenly there was a hand at her throat and another grabbing the hand with the injector, bringing it down. She was shocked but she struggled to turn and see her attacker and finally managed a glimpse.
“Your she managed, then whirled with the professional’s slick move, bringing up her left boot hard into Jimmy McCray’s crotch. The shock of the blow unbalanced him briefly, but did nothing else, and he used her own sudden confusion as to why he wasn’t writhing in pain and her resulting imbalance to bring her to the floor.
Kalia had unbelievable power at her disposal, but it did not undo years of training and reaction to attack, nor did she have the luxury of concentrating, of summoning forth the powers she needed. So she fought with him, and they rolled, Jimmy holding her in a vise-like grip, her hand with the injector held tight. She was good, but she had been seduced by the power and her timing was way off.
He was pretty good, too.
She finally made a desperation move, a quick twist and push off him with her left hand that would have freed her long enough to act, but she telegraphed it, and when she spun out he let everything loose except the right hand, which twisted behind her. Without even thinking, he brought the injector barrel to bear against her back and pressed the trigger by forcing her finger back. There was a nasty pop, almost like a firecracker, and she screamed and got away from his grip, the injector falling with a clatter to the floor. Where it had been fired there was a big tear in her thin uniform and some blood oozed from an area of raw skin.
She no longer paid any attention to him; instead, she rolled on the floor, screaming, foaming at the mouth, clutching for the wound on her back but unable to reach it, and changing, changing from beauty to hag to beauty to hag again, almost with every roll and gyration.
At the same time Josef felt himself freed from the paralysis. “Quick!” he shouted. “Where that drol came from! There’s got to be a way around this!”
They both ran for the doorway on the right; Jimmy got there first and tried to open it. “It won’t open, damn it!”
“Maybe it only opens from the other side!” Josef shouted. “Try clapping like she did!”
There was a sudden deep, ominous rumbling from below, so powerful that for a moment they thought that the explosives had gone off early. Then they turned to look back into the room and froze.
In the center of the mosaic stood a demon prince; almost three meters tall he was, and with a muscular bulk that made him seem even more of a giant. He was dressed in fine robes of crimson and deep purple satin, with a flowing cape that only added to his authority.
Instantly Josef and Jimmy found themselves standing there very confused. The last thing either of them remembered was resting on that beautiful, tranquil world after escaping from the demon city. Now, suddenly, they were here, in this big hall, face to face with a demon prince, wearing full e-suits. And was that Kalia over there whimpering inanely?
Kalia stopped her writhing, stabilized on her attractive self, and looked up at the great creature, reaching out a hand to him. “Master! Cure me!”
<You are becoming a disappointment to me,> the Quintara prince commented. <Calm your panic and be patient. I will deal with you in due time.>
“No! Master! Now! Please!”
<Silence! Or I will leave you as you are and let that potion take its course! Now release me at once!> She pulled herself up to the central pentagram, crawling to it, and touched the inner line, then retreated and just stared at him, whimpering.
Great hooves clattered against the smooth floor as the demon walked over to the two men. Josef did not wait; he acted, but, like Kalia, he acted instinctively, without the knowledge of how a Quintara might be killed. He dropped, rolled, and came up firing full power right at the great creature.
The beam, strong enough to have put a hole in a stone wall, darkened the fabric of his robe but didn’t even set that on fire, let alone slow him down. A taloned hand stretched out and from it sprang a whip-like bolt of energy, grabbing Josef and picking him up off the floor as if it were somehow solid and stronger than steel; then, coiling, it brought him up face to face with the creature, Josef’s own boots almost a meter off the floor.