Kaspar's Box

"Oh, I am. But there's worst things to be. If I was real smart I'd be rich and retired with scantily clad girls peelin' and feedin' me grapes while I reclined in me garden. But I'm clever enough to have done somethin' that most folks in me line of work rarely get to do."

"Yes?"

"I'm old, Sergeant. I got old and I'm still here."

* * *

The computers were of little help in figuring out a method of isolating and picking up the Stanley survivors, and they soon realized that the only hope they had was the same sort of contact system they'd used to speak in the first place. Somehow the waves or particles or whatever sort of energy linked all the Magi stones would have to lead them to one another.

"We're going to have to use the shuttle, not any of the fighters, to have any sort of chance here," Broz said. "That means making contact while inside, and hoping that we can somehow use that link to ride the beam, as it were, down to the people."

"No probes?" the sergeant asked.

"Many probes, sure, and I still got some good ferrets, too, but what good do they do? They can't identify and latch on to this broadcast connection, and they can't be one end of it, either. It seems to work only with a brain at each end."

"I don't like it. That means taking the girls, who seem to need to be all together on this. Add a pilot and a couple of people to aid in getting the survivors aboard, and we've got a significant group of exposed personnel. What if it's a trick? What if nobody's down there and they nail our people? We'd have no practical way to rescue them, considering how stripped the old girl is here." Maslovic shook his head. "I don't like it."

"Still and all, we got to try," Murphy said flatly.

The sergeant sighed. "Yes, we do. The girls okay?"

"Yep. Don't remember a thing 'cept that for a while they felt hotter'n Hell and everything smelled bad. Got to smell like sulphur down there, and if they're in the mid latitudes, north or south, what'd we figure? Forty-five, forty-six degrees Celsius? They felt and smelled what the speaker told 'em. Kinda sounds like what you'd expect from a demon at that, don't it?"

"Don't you start on that! They willing to try it?"

"Sure. It's somethin' to do, and it gets them their pretty baubles. They're still pissed we took 'em back before they woke up."

"Okay, then. Cap, you with the girls. We'll let Sanchez and Nasser handle the rescue, and Broz, you fly it manually. No merging, you're just not trained for it."

"Got it, Boss," she said. "Don't worry. If we can get the coordinates, we'll get them. Man! Is that one ugly place down there, though! I'd take breathers."

Everyone was nervous except the girls, who thought it was a big adventure. As far as the others were concerned, once the people on the surface were located, it was going to be quick in and out just as fast as possible.

The shuttle was launched from high orbit, and Broz decided to take it in a broad series of spirals covering as much of the northern hemisphere as possible from a decent altitude. If they found nothing, she was prepared to climb and do the same at the south.

"You gals ready to get into your magic circle or whatever?" Murphy asked them.

"Don't need to," Irish O'Brian told him. "I can almost smell 'em now."

"Me, too!" piped up Brigit Moran. "And they don't smell good, neither!"

"Well, I hope they're away from them seaside colonies," Murphy commented. "You see the sucker mouths on them things? I don't think I want to introduce meself to them right now."

"They're not near the big ocean," Mary Margaret McBride said. "Oh, I wish I could really see down there! I can feel

'em when we get close!"

"Take your time," Broz told them. "You tell me when we're close and when we're going away. I'll try and narrow it down."

It took much of the day to do it the hard way, but finally they were able to zero in on one particularly large and active island whose interior had a series of jungle outcrops amidst what seemed to be blowing dust and steaming ground.

"There! Right down there!" McBride announced. "Oh! You're goin' past 'em again!"

Broz slowed to a crawl and then backtracked a bit. All sensors were deployed now, and they were at such a low altitude that she felt sure she could locate individuals if they got close enough. The trouble was, they were getting pretty exposed to whatever other hostile elements might be down there, including the creatures Murphy had christened the Big Suckers. Still, this location made sense if you wanted to avoid that kind of contact. The Suckers weren't averse to going in the ocean, but they didn't seem to stray more than a few kilometers inland.

"Got 'em!" Broz announced. "I have absolutely no idea how we just did this, but we got 'em! Right down there, just ahead and below us to the right. And they see us!"

Murphy and Sanchez checked the screens. "I only see three of 'em," the marine noted.