“Buckle in or hold on,” the voice of the pilot came at them over the intercom. “Five… four… three… two… one… Launch!”
Murphy and the sergeant both hoped that the girls were holding on as well, as the ship suddenly shot forward and away from the big frigate like a cannonball with too much powder, pushing them back and to the side. Murphy’s thankfully empty cup of ale sped off the table and hit the wall just to the left of the aft hatch. They both could feel the thrust pinning them against the bulkhead. Then, suddenly, the acceleration cut off, and they had the rapid and uneasy feeling of weightlessness.
“Engaging gravitational field at slowly rising rate to fifty percent of norm,” the pilot announced, and almost immediately they could feel weight returning to them, although not at the level that it had been before. Assuming the girls hadn’t all just gone into labor at the shock of the launch, though, it would be a lot easier on them for the rest of the run to be at half weight, and might minimize some potential complications. Still, the pilot had taken a risk with that launch.
Murphy let out a deep breath and rubbed the back of his neck for a moment. The launch was surprise enough, and he hadn’t been too gentle in meeting that bulkhead because of it. He was also finding it harder to get used to the sudden half gravity than he should have. Maybe it was the ale, he told himself, or maybe he was just getting old after all.
“Girls! You all right?” he called out as soon as he got his wits back. “C’mon, girls! Show yourselves! We got a long way to go here, and we don’t want any mishaps!”
For a while it seemed as if nothing happened, and Murphy grew worried that perhaps they hadn’t been in the room, or, if they had, that they’d been knocked about too badly by the takeoff. He hoped not. It wouldn’t only be messy, it would make them madder than hell.
“Girls?” he called out, growing suddenly worried.
Maslovic gestured to the center table in the lounge with his head and eyes, and Murphy looked and saw what the sergeant had noticed.
Slowly, deliberately, somebody was using some kind of paint or marker to draw a crude design on that shiny clean tabletop.
At first it was more or less a closed circle, and then inside of it a five-pointed star with some odd symbols that looked mostly like swashes inside the outer portion between each star point.
Murphy and Maslovic both stared hard now, not at the design but inside it, and above it, and, to their mutual surprise, they could actually see the three witches, sort of. They seemed to flicker in and out, and parts of them flashed here and there. Finally, though, they attained a more permanent solidity, and the two men could hear them chanting in some unknown tongue.
They looked bedraggled and downright filthy, their hair in tangles, their bodies stained with not only whatever they’d used to paint themselves a day or so earlier but also grease and all sorts of other stuff. There were some fresh scrapes, too, and the red-haired one had a cut on her leg that was still bleeding slightly. Others had small cuts and scratches all over that had healed, and were in a few cases already beginning to bruise.
They also stank of piss and shit and body odors and more. Clearly they hadn’t cleaned themselves up in any way since they’d gone missing, and it was going to make them tough company unless they decided to do so on their own here.
Now all three were standing within the ancient symbol, eyes closed, as the chant came to a rhythmic but definite end.
It was as if they were suddenly out of a trance and back to normal. They let go holding hands, opened their eyes, and looked around. “Ew! Something stinks!” said the red-headed Irish O’Brian, her nose up and contorting her face.
“You said it,” Mary Margaret, the brown-haired one, agreed. Brigit, the blonde, simply said, “Bleah!” in a tone that left no doubt as to her meaning.
“Ah, girls! So happy to see you again!” Murphy said effusively. “But I’m afraid that the stench you’re smellin’ is your own ordinarily sweet selves.”
Mary Margaret looked at each of her companions and then at as much of herself as she could see. “Oh my gawd!” she exclaimed.
“Jeez!” Irish chimed in. “We need baths, and bad!”
“No baths here, darlin’s,” Murphy told them, “but there’s a shower here and a place to clean up and make yourselves presentable again. If you wanted more you shoulda come in while we was still on the big ship, but this is what you asked.”
“Shit! How was we to know?” Irish O’Brian responded. “Well, look, if you two can help us down off this thing, at least we can try and clean up!”
The sergeant got to his feet. “Allow me,” he said pleasantly. In turn, each of the trio came towards him and he picked them up like they weighed nothing at all and put them down on the deck.
“Wow! Feels like I don’t weigh nothin a-tall,” Mary Margaret commented, sort of stomping up and down with her bare feet on the deck. “Neat!”
“It’ll be more comfortable this way,” Murphy assured them. “Now, look, I’ll show you where the toilet is, and you go back there and get clean and nice, and then we’ll all sit here and have somethin’ to eat and talk a bit. We got a long while to go to get to Barnum’s World yet. Three days most likely. No rush.”
For him, though, they couldn’t get there fast enough.
It did not bother either of the military people aboard that the three girls wore just about nothing on the trip, but it made Murphy uncomfortable and he couldn’t even say why. Certainly he wasn’t sexually attracted to them; even if they weren’t so hugely pregnant, he found himself more frightened of them than anything else, something he hadn’t even thought about before being intercepted by the navy. Possibly it was that demonstration of power they’d done; but, he reflected, it was more like being uncomfortable because he felt helpless and surrounded by three idiots with loaded weapons.
Interestingly, though, they barely remembered the experience, and could not explain how they’d done what they’d done. It did not, however, bother them much. Ignorance was true bliss sometimes, even when you didn’t know that what you did was so remarkable.
At least with all that time to Barnum’s World they didn’t have much to do but eat, sleep, and talk. It was tough to get them to stay on that or any subject for long, but slowly Maslovic began getting some information from them that seemed useful, and Murphy got more than he thought was healthy for him. There was, for example, the eerie feeling in his gut that, even in this small shuttle, what everyone was saying and doing was somehow being monitored and recorded and analyzed. Not by the navy—he expected that, and did not fear it one bit. No, by someone or something else, the ones behind this strangeness.
It’s them damned medals, he decided. I don’t care if they’re worth a fortune or what, there’s something unnatural about ’em.
They had allowed the trio to eat, and they’d had really massive appetites, although for some combinations that not even Murphy could tolerate thinking hard about, and then they’d slept for ten solid hours each. They seemed to sleep a lot, which Murphy put down to their condition. He was most frightened that one or more of the young women would decide to have her kid then and there. He knew the two military people weren’t prepared for such a thing, and he was damned sure he wasn’t.