<So one of you was a true Mycohl! That explains much as to why you have lived so long outside our grasp. It even explains much of your escape. It does not explain how you came to be here nor why you come with this other, who wears Mycohl colors yet is of the Exchange. Why don’t you know? WHY?>
The energy rope tightened, cutting through the nearly impenetrable e-suit, and Josef screamed in agony.
<You are too ignorant and too stupid to be of any use to me, even as amusement. > With that the demon reached into Josef’s chest with his left hand and penetrated the suit and the flesh and bone beneath. Josef screamed again in what Jimmy knew was a death agony as he dropped to the floor, leaving organs and entrails in the demon’s hand from the gaping wound.
Horrified, Jimmy watched as the demon popped the grisly mess into his great mouth, chewed, and swallowed. He even licked the blood off his hand with a long, black serpentine tongue.
His attention now turned to Jimmy, who expected to face the same fate, or to be plunged into another, deeper demonic-induced hell.
The Quintara belched. <You fear needlessly, priest, > he said after a moment. <I have no intention of giving you what you most desire, after all, and becoming a martyr in the fight against us would certainly be that. Nor will I subject you to any more horrific visions. In your state, having undergone them once in the city, you would simply will yourself to die. No, I have no more intention of doing that than of nailing you to a cross, up or inverted. You understand, of course. >
Jimmy sighed. “Yes, I can see your point. And I also admit that, failing martyrdom, I shouldn’t like to die before I know how in heaven’s name I happened to be in this place—and in what seems a Mycohl uniform.”
<I find that fact most disturbing, as is the mere fact that you are here at all. Why? What did the two of you hope to accomplish? Or are there more than two of you, perhaps? Six came out of the city. >
“You know my mind better than I do. You tell me.” He felt something odd stabbing him in the side and almost without thinking reached into the outside utility pocket to see what it was. He was as surprised as the demon to find the cross there, and he pulled it out.
The demon prince laughed. -<Do you think that that worthless piece of metal can do anything against me? With faith energizing the thing it is still a minor irritant. >
The mere comment gave Jimmy energy. He held up the cross and began to recite the liturgy of exorcism.
<Oh, stop that, McCray! I’m not possessing or controlling anyone! I’m here! We’re not talking supernatural here, we’re flesh against flesh.>
Still, Jimmy could sense discomfort in the creature, and even if it was a bit of indigestion, it was something.
The demon walked over, reached out, and took the cross. There was a sizzling sound like water on a hot pan for a moment, but the demon ignored the pain, took the cross, and looked at it with some amusement. <You’ve lost most of your faith, McCray, and what little you’ve gained back through your experiences isn’t enough. You’ve seen enough to know how it works. It’s geometry and mathematics and a physics created in a plane outside this. There’s no real magic. There never was. And you are far too smart a man not to realize that what remains in you is merely a vestige of your upbringing. You are a priest of a church of losers, worshipers of martyrdom and death, appalled by my own dietary habits even as you practice ritual cannibalism. A tiny little backwater faith these days, offshoot of an even smaller and more obscure one.> Almost contemptuously the demon handed the cross back to him.
Jimmy McCray smiled. “You’re right, of course, at least about some of it. Just because I’ve seen beyond the veil and find that other, higher cosmos doesn’t negate anything. It confirms instead. And the fact that my Church survives at all defies the odds so greatly one almost is forced to believe in miracles.”
The logic disturbed the prince. <I was on your planet more than once, you know. I know your people and your origins well. Before great Cathay, I was. Before Egypt, I was. Before Babylon, I was. While a scruffy tribe of slaves turned nomads wandered baking in the desert, I was worshiped in great Egypt and later in Babylon. Supreme Nimrod was my servant; even those tribes in the desert deserted their god and built idols to me. My legions rode with those of Alexander, and noble Greece and Rome worshiped us by other names. I have ten thousand names, but those of ancient Egypt called me Baal. Do you know why you lack faith, priest? Because my seed is in you. Because you are more of me than of that abstract set of bizarre ideals you worship.>
McCray, devoid of his experience with The Ship, reduced to his state before his inner self was reborn with new conviction, nonetheless found something stirring within himself beyond that which he’d ever thought was there. Baal! Before him stood one of the ancient enemies of God in the flesh, and if he was the embodiment of evil, it was still as if a great Presence from the Bible itself had stepped out of the book to meet him.
“You were all those things,” he admitted, “yet you lost. Somebody locked you up in a deserted and desolate city removed from the universe. Imprisoned you and your brethren from that time to this. But that scruffy tribe has a world of its own in the Old Sector and still worships its God, and my own faith, in many forms, still lives even if it no longer dominates. Where is Babylon now, or ancient Egypt? Where are the statues of Baal erected not at your direction but because they worship you without seeing?”
The demon prince was not irritated. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying this.
</ have better monuments than that. Even though I stood withdrawn for these past eye blinks of time, I was not unaware. Your people did so very well without me that they made me proud. Visigoths, Vandals, the Mongol Horde. Your precious Church setting up inquisitions to torture and break, while it dispatched the best of its people in mindless crusades to kill and rape and maim in the name of the Prince of Peace. Was there not a conqueror who did not pray before ordering his legions to genocide? Was there a colonial power who did not see its subjugation of whole continents and its domination and pillage of who and what it seized as proof God was on its side? Oh, I think you have done very well in my brief absence. It makes a father proud of his children! >
“If the journey be not hard, then the victory is not worth the winning,” Jimmy said, a bit ashamed at the record himself.
The demon prince tired of the banter. <Enough of this! I am diverted from the problem at hand.> He thought a minute. <Diverted . . . Diversion. That’s it, isn’t it? Diversion. You and your late comrade are here to divert me. It was you, and the others, who came in that ship we blew up. No one sacrifices such lambs as you without a reason. No one creates a diversion unless it is to do something else. Where are the others?> Baal reached out and grabbed Jimmy by the waist with just one powerful arm, lifting the little man close to eye level with the demon’s burning, deep-set eyes. <And why have you no memory of this? No power in this universe can wipe you so clean so fast without totally destroying the mind! To do this your recent memories would have to be spooled off to a remote location instead of being stored within your brain.> Something caught his eye: a tiny shining object, not much larger than a pin, embedded in the skull just at the hairline.
<The Guardians!> Baal exclaimed, a sudden understanding dawning in him. <That’s it! The Gathering has taken place! You are diverting my attention while the others lure the master to this place!> He shifted his mind to all-band broadcast. <My legion! Attention! We are under direct assault! Tell the—>
At that moment the bombs so carefully placed around the foundations and pillars began to go off, one after another. The building shook; the balconies began to cave in, and the very floor started to shift. <What . . . ?>
For a fleeting second Jimmy suddenly knew again, understood again, what was going on. As Baal dropped to the floor he brought the little man down with him atop his massive chest. With a single motion, Jimmy took the cross that was in his right hand and shoved it, bottom first, into, the demon’s soft spot with a strength and fury that drew upon everything the little man had.
The demon prince’s cry of agony and horror was so great and so pervasive that it obliterated the sounds of Jimmy McCray’s triumphant laughter and almost masked the sounds of the entire castle caving in upon them.
THE RED QUEEN’S MARATHON
MODRA SUDDENLY STARTED, WITH A SHARP intake of breath. “Josef’s dead!”
Gun Roh Chin nodded in the darkness. “I felt it, too.” He stared out from the trees toward the station entrance, which had far too many Quintara around it for them to possibly contend with.
“But Jimmy’s still in there! You said we’d go to their aid if they got caught!”
“It would make no difference except to render their deaths meaningless to do so at this point,” he said sadly. “We’ve just got to wait for the bombs to go off and do what we came here to do. It is all or nothing now.”
“But you said we needed a Mycohl to face the Engineer, and he was the only one! We may be trapped in the other plane with him, unable to lock the door!”
Krisha stared stonily at the milling Quintara. “We will do what must be done,” she said simply.
“But—”
“We must have commitment,” Gun Roh Chin told her. “Without all three of us, all this and our cause is lost. I would have preferred it not come down to this, but there it is. Ninety trillion, Modra. We three hold ninety trillion lives and countless generations yet unborn in our hands.”
“But we don’t even know if we can do anything!”
“Better to try than to not try, Modra,” Krisha said stonily, as if this whole thing were but some terrible dream. “I could not live, would not want to live, watching them destroy so much, and most of all cover the future with darkness, wondering if it was all due to my single lapse.”
“As soon as the way is cleat, group on me,” Chin told them. “Helmets down, full shields, full instruments. The time for hiding in secret is over. It shouldn’t be long now.”
A series of tremendous explosions shook the ground even where they were, almost knocking them off their feet.
For a fleeting moment the connection was re-formed; they saw the face of the demon prince, saw the hand with the cross, saw it plunge deep into the core of the chest of Baal. …
The Quintara were in a state of near panic, heightened even more by the terrible psychic scream of Baal dying within the ruins of the collapsed castle. For a second it seemed as if the mob mentality would dominate and that they would flee into the station, but fear of what might await an accounting of such an action overrode their terror at that monstrous death agony and they bolted as a group instead for the city.
Two demons, dazed and confused, remained, staring back at the sound of the explosions whose echoes still rippled across the plains beyond like peals of thunder.
<Group on me! Now!>
For a precious moment Modra hesitated.
If you deserve it if you deserve it if you deserve it if you . . .
She grouped with Chin and Krisha and the three bolted from the woods straight for the station.
One of the remaining pair of Quintara turned and saw them and from Chin came a blast of white energy that knocked it back off its feet. The other, confused and disoriented, seemed unable to act and in a moment they were inside.
The entry chamber looked the same as always, but the inner great room no longer had the rubble of broken pillars in the center. Instead the pentagonal crystalline shapes stood
like podiums, with a matched set descending from overhead. To one side, neatly stacked in piles, was enough Quintara clothing to outfit an army of the creatures.
The upper and lower parts of one set of crystals began to glow and pulse, and between the two apparent terminals flowed a field of black plasma. Before their eyes, a Quintara was being reborn.
They ignored the process and made direct contact with the station. A stream of equations, fed from a source a thousand and more light-years from them, was fed into the station master controller, which accepted them with the speed of thought and sent an acknowledgment.
They turned and headed quickly by the still forming Quintara, through the rear passageway to the exit chamber and then to the doorway beyond. Although they had walked in a straight line, they emerged at the same point they had entered.
There were more Quintara now, returning as the wiser ones took charge, far too many for them to deal with. One of the Quintara spotted them emerging and called to the others, who turned to see the three tiny figures in full suits walk from the station, slowly and deliberately, toward them.
The station behind them shimmered a moment, then vanished as if it were never there, leaving them suddenly lit only by torchlight.
The effect on the Quintara of the station vanishing was greater than the explosions or death cry of their leader had been. It was impossible. Either these tiny and insignificant slaves could do the impossible or, more terrifying to them, they had been abandoned by their master. They had little doubt that the three frail-looking figures moving so eerily in unison had something to do with the death of their prince; the fact that the minds of this trio were a blank, a cipher to them, only increased their sense that something was afoot, something not at all in their interests, something that was making everything go suddenly and terribly wrong.
They stopped and stared at the demons, amazed. They are frightened of us! They are actually frightened of us!
It would not last forever. Fright would turn to resignation, and resignation to anger and desperation. They did not know what to do next, but they were beyond concealment, beyond hit and run. They could only wait for the combined group mind whom they represented, the entire planet of the Mycohl in its own Gathering, the entire data bank that was the capital of the Exchange, the combined powerful minds of the Angels, to direct them.
<It is only three miserable little Terrans! What have we to fear of such as them?>