“Is that true?” I asked.

  No one seemed to have heard my question. They kept staring at the distorted holoimage, glued to the Karg’s words.

  “I know your mission, Lokhar. It is to reach what you call the portal planet. Do you think you can slip past hundreds of Karg invasion torcs? No. We know you, Admiral Venturi. We have the composition of your frail dreadnoughts imprinted on our sensors and we will obliterate your craft on sight if you dare approach near enough to the portal. The others here have your patterns. There is no chance you will successfully land one legionnaire onto the portal planet’s surface. If we find you before that, we will storm your ships, capturing you for our amusement.”

  His words troubled me deeply. Maybe we should have stood and fought to protect Glory. I hadn’t foreseen this.

  “You have once chance for life, Admiral Venturi. Come to us begging on your stomachs and we will let you live as slaves. You will be the last to perish in your universe. Yes, you will tell us everything you know and earn your final days, or you will linger in extreme agony for untold years if you persist in your useless quest.”

  “That’s important,” I said. “We still have things he wants. That’s why he sent this message. He wants us to surrender because he’s afraid. I certainly don’t believe all his boasts.”

  Venturi turned haunted eyes upon me. I had the feeling I hadn’t heard the worst.

  “Surrender to me, Lokhar, for I am Abaddon. I am the bane your worlds have feared for many millennia.”

  Venturi shuddered. So did Sant and the tiger guards.

  “I have arrived at last,” the Karg calling himself Abaddon said. I seemed to have heard the name before, but I couldn’t place it. “I have brought my multitudes with me. I have returned from the locked pit and my wrath shall not be appeased. You cannot win. You cannot harm me. Nothing can. Surrender, Supreme Admiral, and I will teach you the meaning of power as I rend your space-time continuum into smaller and smaller pieces of death and destruction. Abaddon has spoken, and my word is a promise of destruction.”

  Abruptly, the holoimage went blank. A second later, Admiral Venturi clicked a switch and took his glass flake from it.

  “Who is Abaddon?” N7 asked.

  “This is a coincidence, nothing more,” Ella whispered.

  “What is?” I asked her.

  “His name,” she said.

  “You’ve heard it before?” I asked.

  “It is written in the Book of Revelation,” she said. “Abaddon is the name of the chief demon let out of the pit.”

  “The Karg spoke about a pit,” I said. “Does he mean their universe?”

  “You have heard the name before?” Venturi asked in shock. “This is astonishing. We, too, know that in the last days as spoken in the ancient writ Abaddon will reappear to bring death and destruction. His name means ‘destroyer.’”

  I sat back, stunned. The Kargs had a leader named Abaddon, and both the Lokhars and we had that name written down from long ago? This seemed a little more than coincidence to me.

  I recalled then walking across the old cathedral in Germany. I’d squatted beside a stone gargoyle. The statue’s face had resembled Claath’s far too precisely. Could the Jelk have more to do with the Kargs than any of us realized it did?

  “Okay,” I said. “We have to break this down one thing at a time. A couple of items strike me as important.”

  “No, no,” Venturi said. “Don’t you understand that our mission cannot succeed? We have failed. We are doomed, and our universe will perish with us.”

  “I don’t accept that,” I said. “We have two ships filled with soldiers. I breathe. You breathe. We’re far from doomed, and the Karg’s message proves it.”

  Venturi shook his head. “You are mad, Earthman. Here is the evidence before your eyes and you cannot see. We have failed the Great Maker and He has unleashed the great evil against us.”

  “That’s one way to view it. I prefer to believe we’re here to stop the evil by fighting harder than any of us ever has before.”

  “How?” Venturi asked. “I had one hope: to fly through Karg formations, to use boldness to reach the portal planet. Now Abaddon has blocked the route. The Kargs know us by sight and sensor, and will destroy our ships if we get too close.”

  I found it hard waiting for the tiger to finish talking. When he did, I said, “That’s point one in my reason for thinking Abaddon is bluffing. Why bother sending the message if we can’t do anything to him anyway?”

  “Maybe because instead of destroying us, he wants our dreadnoughts,” Ella said.

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Why would Abaddon want or need our paltry ships?” Venturi asked.

  “The answer is obvious,” Ella said. “He boasted, as Commander Creed suggests. He didn’t get to Glory’s core, but captured enough Lokhars to have learned about hyperspace rips separate from the portal planet. Now he needs our ships intact to get the drive.”

  Venturi sat like a statue until finally his eyes began blinking. “If you are correct,” he said, “we must self-destruct at once.”

  “Come on!” I said, exasperated. “Will you listen to yourself? That makes no sense. If we fail, the portal planet will open a route into our universe anyway. He doesn’t need our dreadnoughts. His fear must be that of our successfully closing the portal. That’s the victory. That’s the game winner here. The message has one reason and one reason only: to discourage us. Besides, did you ever stop to think that maybe there are others with him?”

  “What are you suggesting?” Ella asked. “I do not understand what you’re saying?”

  “He broke his captured Lokhars,” I said. “We saw the evidence. Did he do that for pleasure? I don’t believe it. He must have done it in order to discover what they knew. Maybe these Kargs are swift-thinking bastards. In their questioning, they found the name Abaddon and his legend of the end of time. That sounds close enough to what they’re doing, right? So the Karg figured: I will call myself Abaddon in order to paralyze their will—our will. Such a thing has happened before, you know.”

  “Are you mad?” Venturi asked. “This has never happened anywhere. We are discussing the end of everything.”

  “I mean the general principle of the thing. On our world, there was a man named Cortes. He sailed to the New World with higher technology than the Aztec Indians. Early in his march inland, he got hold of an Indian woman named Dona Marina. She told him all the Aztec legends and beliefs, and she helped him trick the Indians who had sold her into slavery. They thought Cortes was Quetzalcoatl, the legendary light-skinned god who was supposed to return out of the sea. Cortes played off the Aztec legends and thus weakened their desire to fight back against him until it was too late.”

  “Yes,” Ella said. “Thank you, Commander. That makes perfect sense. I think that is exactly what has happened here. The Karg acts a part by calling himself Abaddon. That makes more sense than…than the other possibility.”

  Venturi glanced from Ella to me. “I do not understand you humans. The evidence is before you. To attempt talking yourself into believing otherwise…” He groped for words.

  “No,” I said. “We’re right. The Karg isn’t Abaddon. He’s using your old legend about him to weaken your resolve to fight.” And if the Karg really is Abaddon, how does it help us fight him if we believe we’re already doomed?

  “I wish to add a comment,” N7 said.

  “Go ahead,” I told him.

  “If the Karg is pretending to be Abaddon,” N7 said, “then why is the name in both Lokhar and human holy books?”

  “Yeah,” I said quietly, not liking the coincidence. “That’s an interesting point.”

  “No it isn’t,” Ella said. “Abaddon simply means Destroyer. It makes perfect sense for two different supposedly holy books to talk about a destroyer obliterating the world at the end of time.”

  “This is a useless conversation,” Venturi said. “No matter if Abaddon is Abaddon or a pretending Karg, they have blocked the way to the portal planet. Surely, hundreds of the biggest Karg vessels now ring it. They will know what to look for—us. The moment they see our dreadnoughts, they will unite and overpower our paltry force.”

  That did seem to be a problem, however… “Maybe we have a bit of time before that happens,” I said.

  “Explain,” Venturi said.

  “Radio transmissions can’t go as far or fast in hyperspace as in our universe,” I said. “Maybe the Kargs at the portal planet haven’t yet heard the news.”

  “Surely they have relay ships passing the information from vessel to vessel,” Venturi said.

  I snapped my fingers. “I have an idea. We can still slip onto the portal planet even if this Karg has broadcast about us. Well, we can at least slip past the patrolling Kargs.”

  “No,” Venturi said. “It is impossible. We are doomed.”

  “If you mean attacking the Kargs head-on, I agree with you,” I said. “But we’re not going to do that. Instead, we’ll go around and come through the portal like other Kargs.”

  “What do you mean?” Venturi asked.

  “We have hyperspace-ripping equipment,” I said. “So we use it to break into the Karg universe. Then we join the other Karg vessels on their side going through the portal into hyperspace. We’ll have to hope Abaddon’s message hasn’t gone through the portal back into their universe. As those other ships pass the planet, we unload and attack.”

  “The other Karg ships—the ones already in hyperspace—will see and destroy us anyway,” N7 said.

  “They wouldn’t have any reason to do that,” I said. “They’re watching for us to come in to them, not waiting to see us come from their universe. Look, according to what Admiral Venturi originally learned, only Kargs live in their space-time continuum. If they think anything at all upon seeing us, it’s that we’re a new design, or an old one, for all I know.”

  “You are making blind leaps of speculation,” Ella told me.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but that’s better than giving up.”

  For several seconds, we all stared at each other.

  Finally, Admiral Venturi made a low growling noise deep in his throat. It reminded me an old time muscle car on Earth, one that caused the car to shake with doglike anticipation. “You humans are mad with a hope that doesn’t exist. Your wordplay means nothing. You cannot see the truth, so you foolishly persist in trying.”

  “And how is that worse than giving up and letting everything go to hell?” I asked.

  “I do not know,” the Lokhar admitted.

  “Yeah,” I said, “neither do I. So how about it, Prince? Let’s give this bastard a run for his money. Let’s fight until we’re dead or lying on a cot with a Karg knife spilling our guts. What I’m not going to do is stop any iota sooner than that.”

  “I begin to perceive how you defeated your Jelk overlords,” Venturi muttered.

  “Let me ask you a completely different question,” I said to Venturi.

  “I am still,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That means the prince is listening,” Doctor Sant said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Do you believe there’s a connection between the Jelk and the Kargs?”

  Venturi considered that. “Both come from different space-time continuums. Apart from that, I do not think so. The Jelk do not possess such murderous technology as the Kargs.”

  “What are you implying?” Ella asked me.

  “I saw something in Germany,” I said. “Claath looks like a devil, a small one to be sure. Abaddon is a devil, as well.”

  “A demon,” Ella corrected. “In the Bible, in any regard, the devil refers to Satan. He is one. The demons are his servants and they are many.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Claath looked like a stone gargoyle I saw on a cathedral. I’m wondering if that’s just a coincidence or if it happens to mean something.”

  “I highly doubt it means anything significant,” Ella said.

  “I know your worldview doesn’t want to accept such things,” I said. “But it doesn’t even have to be supernaturally related. What if ancient men saw space travelers and wrote about them?”

  “Are you referring to Chariot of the Gods?” Ella asked in a mocking tone. “The ridiculous book scorned intelligent scientific study.”

  “I guess,” I said. “But suppose some of what it said actually is true. Then you could trust old eyewitness accounts written in the Old Testament or in Revelation about Abaddon or demons.”

  “You are reaching, Commander,” Ella said.

  “Enough of this,” Venturi said. “We must decide now what we are going to do. Either we must destroy our ships to prevent our technology from falling into enemy hands or—”

  “No one is destroying Indomitable,” I said.

  “That is not your choice,” Venturi told me.

  I silently counted to three, working to hold my temper. Threatening to try to storm his dreadnought wasn’t going to help us. I had to convince the prince to go the last mile.

  “If there is even one small particle of hope for victory,” I said, “we should take it. The oracle told you to get us. Now you know why. We humans fight to the finish. We don’t quit. Do you want it said that the Lokhars lacked the fire to keep fighting when the rude Earthmen still had the guts to try?”

  “Who will say this in a destroyed universe?” Venturi asked.

  “How about the Creator when your soul stands in front of Him?” I asked.

  That made Venturi squirm.

  “Do you guards want to quit?” I asked the two tigers in back.

  Venturi turned around.

  “Lord Prince,” the smaller guard said. “These humans insult us. Let us kill them and die with honor.”

  Venturi’s big shoulders slumped. With an old man’s slowness, he regarded me. “I hate you,” he said in a listless voice. “I do not understand you at all. But you will never march farther than a Lokhar. Where you go, we will go, too. We will prove ourselves greater than you in all things.”

  “That’s good to hear,” I said, and I began to outline the specifics of my idea.

  -22-

  Before we were ready to break into the Karg universe, Admiral Venturi made a few adjustments. He strengthened the link between our two command centers, making this an emergency bridge just in case the worst happened. He thus provided us a link to the interior portion of the dreadnought. I mean we heard Venturi talk to the priests in the sealed portion of the ship that held the artificial black hole. They spoke in the High Speech of the ancients then. It meant we would have to bring Ulmoc in here in order to communicate with the priests—if the time came where we needed to try.

  Ella spent even more time with the Esteemed One. He began to show her the artifact. I figured I’d get a better look at it, too, by studying the video. That’s when I discovered the equipment wouldn’t record. It simply went blank whenever the adept took out the Forerunner object.

  I was beginning to like certain aspects of this less and less. Angels, demons and old prophecy…what did any of that have to do with space battles? Nothing, I kept telling myself. This wasn’t anything what I’d expected outer space to be like.

  Our two-ship flotilla began to tiptoe through hyperspace, even though time was against us. We kept waiting for another broadcast from Abaddon. The devil, demon or Karg kept silent, though.

  From my extended video battle watching, I decided the moth-ships were indeed structures with crews. Even with full magnification, it proved impossible to gain conclusive evidence. But some of the debris struck me to be floating crewmembers. What did the Kargs look like? What kind of soldiers would we face on the planet? Could they use graviton rays in rifles? That might cut through our bio-suits with pathetic ease.

  Time passed as we trained, watched and waited. Finally, Admiral Venturi said over the link, “The technicians have found a weak spot in hyperspace. The problem is that they cannot assure me it will lead into the Karg universe.”

  “Can they give us odds?” I asked. Venturi was on his bridge and I was in mine.

  “That is not the Lokhar way,” Venturi said.

  “How far are we from the portal planet?”

  “At these speeds?” he asked.

  “If we rushed there as fast as possible,” I said.

  “Three days journey from here,” he said.

  “Well, let’s suppose that proximity to the portal means we’re near the Karg universe.”

  “Hyperspace travel does not correlate so easily.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do it anyway.”

  Venturi was silent for a time. Finally, he said, “Yes. In an hour, we will make the attempt.”

  Before the dread hour came—were we going to make a rip into Hell? I didn’t know. In any case, before the attempt, Ella walked into the control room. She didn’t walk with her usual confidence. She moved in a dazed manner. I knew she’d been with Ulmoc.

  “Keep me posted concerning any new developments,” I told N7. Then I intercepted Ella and took her by an elbow. I steered her to the hatch, walked down a corridor and brought her into my office.

  Ella Timoshenko didn’t say a word as she stood like a zombie. I poured her a cup of coffee, adding plenty of cream and sugar, as she liked it. There were even stale pastries, a close approximation to Earth norms. I chose one with a pink jelly center. She finally sat in a stuffed chair, with her butt on the edge as she kept staring at the floor. Well, not staring, her eyes were blank. I handed her the items, and she automatically took them and held them out from her body.

  “Ella,” I said gently.

  “Hmm…?” she asked, while holding her stiff pose.

  “Eat,” I said. “Drink, and tell me what happened.”

  She glanced at the pastry, nibbled on the edge and slurped coffee. After gulping the liquid, she switched gazes from the floor to me.

  “I cannot believe what I just saw and heard,” she said.