Kaspar's Box

"I-I have no explanation, Commander. None. One moment they were there, the next they weren't. You can play back the recording yourself. The alarm went off as soon as the subjects vanished from the surveillance. We immediately did a visual of the entire cabin area and found no signs of life, and the guards were still in place outside the door. We immediately ordered the lead guard in with the other blocking the door with weapon drawn. The marine went through every centimeter of the cabin. They weren't there. We immediately initiated a shipwide comparator search. No unknowns or unauthorized persons came back. None of the three showed up in a general search, either. It's as if they vanished into some other dimension or something."

"Bullshit! Those girls couldn't spell 'dimension,' let alone find a new one. Has the captain been notified?"

"Not yet. We were waiting for you."

The exec nodded. "Yes, well, I'll notify him in a bit. He's sleeping at the moment and it won't do any good to wake him until we have something to tell him beyond the fact that these girls pulled a magic trick on the most secure location in what's left of the known galaxy. What about Murphy?"

"Murphy, sir?" Because the sexes were so irrelevant to this crew, all officers were "sir."

"The old freighter captain."

"Oh, him. He's still in his cabin, sleeping off the effects of whatever that horrible crap he swallowed so eagerly was."

"Hmmm… We may have underestimated his story, or at least his fears. What about the freighter? We don't have sensors everywhere on it."

"We thought of that, sir, but we do have visuals on every pressurized area on it as well as constantly monitored seals on the entrance. All show no activity."

The exec thought frantically for a minute. Finally, she asked, "Who is your best security analyst aboard? Someone who can figure these kinds of problems out if need be?"

"I'm not sure anyone has ever had any experience with this sort of thing, but Sergeant Maslovic has been excellent at solving the most subtle security breaches. He's the one who found the missing neutronium, or at least accounted for it."

"An enlisted man? And a marine at that? Very well, I'll go along with you on this, but he better be good. Get him up here now, with every bit of data and clearances he requires to start on this right away. And bring Captain Murphy up here as well. Sober him up as best you can-check with Medical, they should have something. On the double!"

Both Captain Murphy and Sergeant Maslovic had at least one thing in common. Neither of them wanted to be there and stuck with this knotty problem, and neither of them had the slightest idea where to start. Still, Murphy, who was the most sour not only from the news that his "witches" had flown the coop, as he called it, but also that he was suddenly as sober as he'd ever felt in his adult life, was probably in the worse frame of mind.

Still, he had that deep-down sense of "told you so" satisfaction that he was more than willing to shove up these robotic martinets' noses. He looked at Maslovic with a familiar nod, recognizing him from the squadron that boarded the freighter. Clearly the man was more than just a mere guard if he was here.

"So the little girls took a powder and now the whole navy's in a panic," he said with a wry smile. "And old Murphy's been called up to help pull you out of the mess you made when you didn't listen to him in the first place!"

"And you did so much better with them, by your own account," Sittithong shot back.

"Well, you got a point there," the old man admitted. "But if it wasn't for you buttin' in like you did, they'd be where they wanted to be and I'd be rid of them by now. Even I had no idea that they could do this!"

Maslovic was less inclined to trust the old captain. "This is quite a level of sophistication for three airheaded young things who can hardly walk, isn't it?"

" 'Sophistication' he says! 'Tis the black arts, m'boy! Nobody can teleport themselves off a ship by chantin' usin' some kind of gizmo!"

Maslovic nodded. "And there I agree with you. Not in the black magic, but in the fact that nobody can will themselves elsewhere. If these girls really could do that, why did they need you?"

"Invisible, then! Maybe they made themselves invisible!"

"Not likely. We don't just track by vision. Every living thing aboard gives off heat and makes noise and has all sorts of nonvisual emanations that we can use for detection. They show up on none of them, even though small pests in the deepest holds do. No, they didn't teleport anyplace and they didn't become invisible or any such thing. There's only one explanation that makes any sense here, and it's highly sophisticated. Let me see the replay again, if you please, Commander."

All eyes went to the screen, which blacked out for just a moment and then came back up with a recording of the trio sitting there inside the pentagram chanting.