"You've been asleep the better part of several days, and under the medical computer's treatment. During that time, we've taken a closer look at the problem of Balshazzar."
"Give me a few of those stones and we can talk," she told him, "but that's about it. They taught me a lot. It was going back and forth with them that kept us close to sane, or at least gave us hope. They were a huge Christian religious commune of some kind and they somehow managed to keep their own values. I was raised Catholic, but the nuns never taught anything like that."
"Being a secular Jew I had a bit less taste for the theology," Nagel told him, "but they never pushed it. Some of them were pretty damned smart, too, in a lot of areas. Their guru or whatever was a missionary and a former astrophysicist if you can believe it. Some had military backgrounds. Maybe from the old days before you had a more closed society. All I know is that one of them who called himself Cromwell had done something really nasty in his past and had turned to religion as, I guess, some kind of penance. But you could tell just talking to him that he wasn't as changed as he liked to think himself. The old whoever he was wasn't far below the surface. It was still conversation, though, not mind reading, even if we were using funny little stones across a distance of almost a half-million kilometers."
"They at least said it was a peaceful world there. That several intelligent species of vastly different biologies and cultures managed to get along or at least tolerate each other without going into battle. That's something," Queson noted.
"I'd be interested in knowing more about those creatures," Maslovic told them, "and about the rest as well. We looked up the names in the computer history files here. Karl Woodward's group was one of the largest ever to vanish while hunting for the Three Kings, but that was a very long time ago and he was already an old man. If he's still alive, he has to be truly ancient. Your Cromwell-well, we know who he is. He would have been right at home with some of our more disreputable guests. He had the blood of millions, perhaps more, on his head. Our records show him as long dead, but that's often the case when someone is cast out. Normally he would have been executed for such breaches, but he was a general. Unfortunately, that's how things work here."
"Really? I've never seen a lieutenant defer to a sergeant anywhere else," Nagel noted.
Maslovic chuckled. "Well, technically she does outrank me. In terms of official stuff I'm actually a chief warrant officer. That's below lieutenant and above everybody else. But sergeants and chiefs have really run the military since time immemorial, and I find it more comfortable this way. In a way, even in a small society, I'm like an actor. I change my face, my name, my rank, I'm a different person. It hardly matters so long as my team knows who's boss and I have the backing of higher-ups."
"So what now?" Nagel asked him.
"Now we try to set up some contact with your friends on Balshazzar. I need to know as much as possible before heading for Kaspar."
"You think then that whoever is behind this is there?"
"I think that their equivalent of Sergeant Maslovic and his team are there, at least. The ones running this operation. I want them. Hopefully, since they know so much about us and we're still around, they'll eventually make some kind of pact with us, but me and my superiors are always leery when somebody sneaks out in your back yard and doesn't tell you about it, and even more suspicious of somebody whose technology is enough ahead of ours that eventually they may decide we're their inferiors or lab experiment or something. I think that's the running theory, anyway. Lab experiment."
"If that's right, they could take us out the same as they've taken everybody else out," Nagel said worriedly. "There are a lot of crash-landed creatures, human and nonhuman, on these world-moons, and nobody yet makes it back alive."
"We will see. At least if this power decides to crash us it will be off Balshazzar. A lot nicer place than you were in recently," Maslovic pointed out.
"I'm beginning to wonder if any place that could sustain us was worse than there," Queson responded. "What an awful existence. I still can't sleep on the bed upstairs, or tolerate wearing very much. It's just been so long and it no longer feels comfortable."
"I can understand. Let me ask-you haven't spoken about the small girl. She's deranged, or injured in the mind?"
"Injured in the mind may be a good way to put it," Randi Queson agreed. "She used to be tough as nails. She was the head of our company and expedition, and she saw nothing but profits and didn't give a damn about people unless she needed them. I think she'd had a hell of a hard life before she ever got into salvage but she never spoke of it to us, and it was too removed from any sort of polite society to be easily looked up."
"You tried?"
"At the start. You want to know who you're trusting your life to before taking a job out on the frontier. All I got was past salvage experience, but that was enough."
"And she is… How do I put this?"
"No longer home," Nagel finished for him. "Not since we made a serious mistake the first time to camp out on Melchior right in the middle of a massive mountain of these damned Magi stones. The cumulative power is enormous. It disrupts, it maddens. You get terrible visions and, with that, become an unreasoning beast. One of our people, a big, tough, muscular type, was butchered during that period, and it blew Li's mind out. She's never gotten any better, but the only rational part of her has been her refusal to get near any deposit of those stones. She remembers something, deep down." He suddenly frowned and then gave what could almost be taken as a snort. "Huh. Funny. I just remembered. When we ran for the shuttle, I grabbed a stash of the stones. Old instincts, I guess. But I passed out in there and came to here. Did you take them and lock them away?"
Maslovic turned and called out to the air, "Chung, did you see to the securing of a bundle of the stones from the shuttle? Did anybody?"
"No, Chief. Sorry," came Chung's voice. "I'll run a search pattern and see. I-what the hell?"
"What's the matter?"
"It's impossible! I am constantly monitoring everything and everybody! It can't be!"
"What can't be?" Maslovic demanded to know, getting to his feet.
"The shuttle! It's gone!"
"Gone! How could that happen?"
"I-I don't know. It couldn't! The security was fail-safe!"
"Personnel check! Fast!"
"Uh-oh. Three missing. Macouri, Joshua, and that girl we picked up on Melchior."
"You mean Lucky Cross?" Queson asked. "She's a damned good shuttle and tug pilot…"
"No, no! Cross is asleep! The little one! An Li!"
"Full alert!" Maslovic ordered. "I'm heading for the command center. I want Darch and Broz there on the double!" He looked at the two others in the wardroom. "Come along, too, if you want."
"Yeah, I think we will," Jerry Nagel said.
"Cheer up! At least it's only a shuttle!" Randi Queson noted. "Last time we went through this we had the shuttle fine, but they stole the whole damned mother ship!"
Even Joshua was astonished at the ease of their escape. "Where to, sir? We are approaching Balshazzar now."
Georgi Macouri looked at the viewing screen and made his adjustments. "Beautiful. It is the Garden! And the serpent is always the master of the Garden, is it not? Park in a stationary orbit over the center of human habitation, Joshua. If we go down there now we will be simply two among them. We must prepare the way before achieving the scepter of rule from our Master!"