That got the sergeant's interest. "Indeed? Exotic stones from-where?"

"The Three Kings, man! Everybody's heard of the Three Kings. They may not be real, or if they are they're almost certainly not what folks think they are, but they're the stuff of legend, just like the three originals. Of course, you probably ain't heard of them, either."

"Not particularly. I wish I had my complete reference databases handy, though. I hate being the last to know when somebody throws in a curve."

"Well, I can only tell you what everybody seems to know. Three planets around some gigantic ringed star, supposedly discovered during the Age of Exploration a couple hundred years ago by one of the missionary monks who was half man and half scouting ship. Sent back the news of great treasure and miraculous living and all that stuff, and he said there was lots of evidence of advanced alien life. Named 'em after the three kings who brought gifts to the baby Jesus. Said anybody who could get there and keep clear of the snake would find riches beyond compare."

"Pardon? The what?"

"The snake, man! Serpent. The incarnation of the Beast who got humanity to sin and heaped that sin upon all its descendants. The devil, if you will. The sort these three girls claim to be their god or whatever."

"Interesting. There are so many mythic religions I admit I know little of any. Doesn't seem relevant unless it's a key to solving something practical. Still, it sounds like I could do with some information on this sect."

"'Sect' he calls it!" Murphy muttered, genuinely appalled at the dismissal. "Faith of me fathers it is, boy. You navy boys know Vaticanus and its influence and orders, I think."

"Ah! That one! I know a little. Enough, I think. Sorry, no offense meant. It's just not in our nature to take seriously old men in the sky and stuff like that. Okay, so this missionary and scout reported riches on three worlds, lots of powerful aliens, and so forth. Why didn't somebody follow up and see if anything was really there instead of making it some kind of fairy tale?"

"Aye, that's the rub. The coordinates for stabilizing wormgates were jumbled. Made no sense. And only part of the detailed information came through. Enough to make it a riddle, not enough for even the best minds and computers and all to solve. And the old boy was never heard from again."

"So now we have cults like this one the girls belong to because of some lost colonial coordinates? Amazing!"

Murphy shook his head from side to side. "No, it ain't that simple, y'see. Somebody a long time ago thought they solved the riddle and went off in one of them big scientific and speculative expeditions. Fancy ship, fancy equipment, well heeled. Nobody heard from it until after the Great Silence. Then, one day, it suddenly reappeared from someplace in the Draco Sector. The Dragon, another of the devil's disguises. The whole ship was in perfect shape, but there wasn't anybody aboard and all the data records had been wiped clean."

"You mean erased?"

"Or maybe just fried. Who knows? But it had pictures of some pretty worlds, a bunch of really oddball little mechanical thingies, some sort of artifacts of alien design and unknown purpose and origin, and it had a stash of them gems. The very gems like the ones around these three girls' pretty necks."

Maslovic gave a soft, low whistle. "And did they later find more of them?"

"Oh, 'twas said that somebody did, and that a few more fell into the hands of a big-time evangelist-a protestant one at that! And he went off chasin' 'em a few decades ago and they never heard from him no more, neither. Which leaves us with just the hundred or so from that original mystery ship, unless there's ones nobody knows about. Rare, beautiful, and among the most expensive gems in the known universe. And three of 'em seem to have wound up around our darlin's pretty necks."

"You're sure they're real and not fakes? Imitations? I imagine there's a lot of those considering the legends and the rarity."

Murphy nodded. "Oh, tons I'm sure. But 'tis said you always can tell a fake one from a real one. Not just the quality, but the effect."

"The what?"

"The effect. 'Tis said that when you look into 'em you get visions and weird feelin's and all. Nothin' specific, mind. And eventually you get an overload and somethin' scares you. Somethin' that lives inside the gems or somethin' like that. In any case, no fake has that!"

Maslovic leaned back and thought a moment. "Tad, Tod, and Tip. Three demons in three gems. If they are real, then if you or I stare into one, we should meet someone, eh?"

"You meet 'em. I'm perfectly content to be ignorant this time," said Murphy.

Irish O'Brian never seemed any smarter than the other two, just far more suspicious of everything and everybody. She also wasn't all that happy to hear how much Mary Margaret had told them just sitting around, although she seemed more disgusted than surprised.

"Why does it bother you that we talk to the others?" Maslovic asked her in that same friendly conversational tone he'd used so successfully on the other.

"It just does, that's all," O'Brian responded. "We're a team. A sisterhood. It's not good that we blab about to strangers without the rest of us bein' there, so to speak."

"What're we gonna do, lass? Trick ye into the secrets of the universe or somethin'?" Murphy put in. "We're just as bored as everybody else. You always was friendly to me, so why not to them, too? It's all goin' your way."

She looked over at the sergeant with a look of distrust. "I dunno, Cap. I just don't trust 'em no farther than I can throw 'em, that's all. They ain't like us, y'know. They'd probably get along just fine with the folks back home. If them stuffed brains could figure out a way to have kids without sex they'd jump on it. But to really do it… You ain't real human if you don't got no sex."

"I can't know how different we are, really," Maslovic admitted. "I've never been somebody like you or the captain, so how can I? But I feel human."

"Well, you ain't. Got to be cold inside with your balls chopped off and all. And that weird one up front. Don't she never move?"

"Lieutenant Chung's the pilot. She monitors everything on the ship and gets us safely where we're going," the sergeant explained. "To do that best, she actually plugs in and becomes part of the ship. In a way, we're kind of riding inside her now."

O'Brien made an ugly face. "Ugh! That's what I mean. You don't know what's human and what's machine. It's all the same to you 'cause you don't feel inside. Not like people. I mean, the captain here, he never was connected up like that to his ship."

"That's true enough," Murphy responded. "But that's 'cause I never got the implants in me head to make it all work. If I had one big, fancy ship with all the modern stuff I might'a done it, but them old junkers… Who'd want to become one o' them?"

O'Brian looked around the lounge from eye level to ceiling. "So can your pilot see us now? And hear us?"

"Absolutely," Maslovic told her.

"And in the back, too?"

"She's the ship, like I told you. She and the ship are one. You wouldn't want the gravity to go funny when you flush the toilet in the head, would you? Or have the air go bad, or any one of a million things that she can keep in her head and do something about because she's part of the ship? Space will never be anywhere that's really safe, you know. You're always one tiny thing wrong from death."

O'Brian shivered. "I don'na wan'ta think on it."

"Well, that's why she's doing what she's doing. So we don't have to think about it or worry about it. And, unlike some people who actually become permanently part of their ships, she can disconnect when we're in port and become a real person again."