Ghost of the Well of Souls

Sanafe

The borders between clans were not something the average outsider could see, but they were apparently as real as hex boundaries to the natives. It might well be a scented marker, or even a planted pattern, and to Ari and Ming, as well as the Chalidang force, there was no difference at all between the last reef that was considered Clan Tusarch’s sacred property and the next, which was Clan Paugoth. Still, the two escorts from the Lord of Tusarch stopped dead at the edge of that last reef and would go no farther.

“From the next reef on, you are in Paugoth territory,” one of them warned.

“Yeah, and you better fight ’em, too, ’cause our whole clan’s gonna be gathering to see. If you beat ’em, you’re welcome to whatever you’re here for, and then leave the remains to us. If you lose, we will be waiting for you.”

In fact, Mochida was planning to wipe out the winner no matter who that might be, but he let it go. As far as he was concerned, Clan Tusarch was totally irrelevant. He was relieved that he hadn’t had to waste men and resources fighting his way there, but was satisfied in any event to be here.

No welcoming party, Ming noted. Looks like nobody talks to anybody around here. You’d figure that by now we’d be common knowledge.

Up above, following the small markers that Colonel Kuamba sent up every kilometer or so, the dark shadow of a very large vessel continued to slowly follow. It could not be ignored by anybody. Even more interesting, at the release of the next small buoy there was additional activity above. Three smaller vessels seemed to be accompanying the big ship, possibly put over the side by that ship, but equally possibly they’d simply joined it unnoticed. Still, they followed silently, going away now and then if the wind or waves were wrong, but tacking back without much of a problem and generally keeping formation. Those guys are good sailors, Ari noted approvingly to himself.

But what else were they? Supply ships? Certainly not reinforcements, since what would have been the purpose of the cryogenic stuff? But they were there for some reason, all right.

As the large V-shaped formation of Chalidangers moved into the targeted clan’s territory with a steady but slow and cautious pace, two small forms went over the side from the smaller boats above and swam down a bit and then across. They were not Chalidang, Kalindan, or any other race that Ari and Ming had yet seen, but seemed a kind of large animal designed for the water, yet almost certainly air breathers from the way they moved. They fanned out, took a good look at the situation, and then one headed back up and into one of the small boats once again, while the other paced the large formation about halfway between the reef and the surface.

“Friends of yours?” Ari asked the General.

“Yes, as a matter of fact. Although there are panels in the small boats and even in the large ship that allow one to look down here, the hard substance necessary to ensure that they don’t break and sink introduces some distortion and also has a limited field of view. The Imtre have exceptional vision as well as other senses, and they also have a great deal of experience in this kind of campaign in nontech environments. They aren’t much good at real fighting, but they’ll coordinate our surface forces with our combat line here.”

“Looks pretty complete. You don’t think the locals are gonna notice?” Ming asked him.

“Oh, they’ll notice. It’s just irrelevant. The only thing that can cross us up is if the clan does not come out for a fight like the last one did. And if they don’t, they’re finished here anyway and might as well commit suicide. No, they’ll come, and soon. Within the next few minutes, I’d say. Otherwise, I’m going to start blowing up their precious reef gardens, one by one.”

He didn’t have to bother, nor even explain how he could blow things up down here. The Clan Paugoth was suddenly there in full force and radiating irritation, if that was the word for it. Fury, maybe, was a better one.

“Who dares desecrate Paugoth lands?” thundered the local lord imperiously. If anything, his Voice of God impression was even better than the last one, both Ming and Ari agreed.

This time Mochida didn’t allow a mere lieutenant to answer. To the surprise of the Kalindans, and possibly even some of his men, the General decided to do his own talking, and rose up to be level with that huge fanged mouth flanked by bizarre eyes.

“I am Colonel General Anchun Mochida of the Imperial Chalidang Army,” he announced in tones that sounded not quite as impressive as the lord’s but good enough. “In ancient times an object of great value was stolen from His Majesty’s family and people by massed armies including the Sanafe, which received a piece of it as some sort of war trophy. I am commanded by His Most August Majesty to pay any price, fight any fight, do whatever needs to be done, to retrieve what is and was always rightfully ours. We are here to get the piece you still possess. If we receive it, your people and mine will be friends forever in the coming reorder of power in the universe and we shall go in peace, and quickly. Will you return it to us by your authority, wisdom, and leadership?”

The old lord seemed taken aback by this, and confused. “War? Stolen treasures? What nonsense is this? Even if any of that blather you just said is true, I have no knowledge of the object of your quest. Why do you search for it here?”

“But you do have it,” the General responded. “It is the Indestructible Trophy, that which marks a clan for the next year as the Clan of Clans.”

The Sanafean leader seemed amazed. “What? That old ugly stick? Its only worth is what it represents to the winners; it has no other value. You must be mad to come here with an army and a navy to take that, and your Emperor or whatever must be crazy, too, to send you on such a quest!”

That didn’t sit well with the Chalidang soldiers. There was a great deal of tensing up, and weapons were being fitted into tentacles and brought to bear. As the rumbling subsided, Ari noted that the Imtre above had gone and another had slipped off the third boat but was sticking very close to it.

“Silence!” the General commanded, and the troops did as they were ordered, but were very ready now, almost a coiled spring.

“If it is of no intrinsic value to you, then what will you take for it, or will you just give it to us and we will go?” the General pressed, knowing where things were leading, as everybody else on both sides did.

“If it has no intrinsic value then it cannot be priced,” the Lord of Paugoth responded logically. “Therefore, I cannot take anything for it, nor, because of what it represents to us and to no one else, may I give it away. There is only one way the Indestructible Trophy can ever change hands.”

“Very well, then, sir. It is by your choice that what follows follows,” the General said in a menacing tone. “Company formations!” he yelled crisply to his men, who began to reform in an impressive manner into five fighting groups. Above, the Imtre tensed and virtually surfaced, keeping only its head below water.

Ari and Ming decided that the better part of their own valor was to rise as close to the underside of the big ship as they dared and use its shadow and substance as protection. They had nowhere to run and couldn’t see much any other place, but they didn’t want to be in the middle of what had to be coming.

I got a bad feeling about this, Ari commented.

Me, too, but not for the same reason. They’ve looked over these tentacled fighters with their fancy armor and nasty weapons and they haven’t blinked. No species survives for long if they’re that stupid. Conclusion: they’re not that stupid.

Huh?

You know the limitations of intelligence. I’ll bet you that the General’s seen a million full-blown three dimensional recordings of the clans fighting each other, but when s the last time the clans fought somebody else?

Uh-oh. You think we’re better off maybe on the ship?

Probably, but I just got to see this.

The Chalidangers were totally confident of victory, and tended to regard the Sanafeans as backward primitives unable to sustain a coordinated attack. Clans, too, were relatively small, generally no more than five or six hundred individuals, with only the two hundred or so adult males actually fighting for blood.

Mochida’s tactics, probably run through a million computer simulations back home in his capital, seemed for a while to go quite well. The Sanafeans showed unexpected quickness and a nasty ability to stun even an armored Chalidang with some kind of natural electrical charge if they could touch the enemy, but their weapon was basically a large and ornately carved and sharpened sword wielded by the hand from underneath. The Chalidangers’ harpoons and hooked nets tore through the clan ranks and began to fill the water with blood.

Mochida took no direct part in the fighting, although he had full battle armor on and a nasty harpoon that could fire four bolts in a spread all at once. He was content to let his professional force do the minute by minute adjustments, which showed him to be a very smart commander.

There was no doubt about it; at least four Sanafeans were falling—wounded or dead—for every Chalidanger in similar straits. The unexpected electric charge took its toll, but unless the Sanafean could get close enough to apply it without getting killed, and then thrust the sword up into the tentacles, slashing away at the arms and mouth of the invaders, there wasn’t much damage their swords could do against that high-tech armor.

Worse, the natives fought mostly as individuals, with no apparent organization or leadership, and this allowed them to be split again and again.

The Chalidang soldiers seemed so filled with blood lust and so confident of an easy victory that they didn’t even realize that the mantalike Sanafeans had been drawing them slowly down, at great cost, to the reef below.

Suddenly, as a large number of Chalidangers swooped in to finish off some bleeding stragglers just above the reef, the coral reef itself seemed to erupt. Shapes—nasty, vicious, with huge jaws, wide eyes, and pointed teeth—lashed out from holes and hideaways within the living rock. They looked almost comical, but they were incredibly fast and they ignored the armor and started chomping on the Chalidangers’ tentacles. Soon the thirty or so invaders who were close enough had gaping wounds, and tentacle parts and blood began floating about, yet every time the Chalidangers tried to harpoon or net or otherwise grab one of their large serpentine assailants, there was nothing there. As quickly as they struck, the giant sea snakes could withdraw into the protection of solid coral, only to emerge somewhere else when the victim was right.

Withdraw! Get away from the damned reef! Mochida screamed at them. “Keep your position at least five meters from the reef, damn it! Shoot down, don’t chase!”

It was hard for his men to obey him, though, when targets were so easy and so apparent, and some others got parts of themselves bit off as they went after apparently helpless Sanafean stragglers.

Told ya they had some surprises, Ming commented smugly.

For all that, Chalidang still had the edge, and even though it suddenly faced a foe that had gone from disorganized savages to pretty tightly ordered and disciplined units, it was clear that at this rate the Chalidangers would still win. It would just be more costly than they’d anticipated, something that troubled Mochida very little and his masters not one bit.

“Form dynamo!” the Lord of Paugoth commanded from somewhere in back and over his troops. “Press in, main body, now!”

The Sanafeans formed into one of the oddest formations any of the others had ever seen. Half had turned over, so they lay chest-to-chest, doubling their apparent size and making themselves look like weather balloons. They then had joined with another pair, and another, and another, until they were densely packed together, all of their hands clenched in the center. The original pair was the driver; everybody else just came along for the ride, but there was a sense that they were somehow linked, somehow interconnected. But for what? They made much better targets for Chalidang harpoons this way, and were no apparent threat to the invaders.

They came at the main body of Chalidangers, two regrouping companies still a bit dizzy from the reef and extricating themselves and others from it, and they came very, very fast. So fast, in fact, that the reforming group had no time to dress ranks and deal with it. They started to move away, but the mass of Sanafeans struck them, and every Chalidanger who was struck was suddenly screaming in agony, its armor actually melting, the occupants badly burned or stunned or even dead.

They’ve got a massed electrical field there, all from their own bodies! Ming noted. My God! I don’t even think they can feel pain when they’re like that. Look at those bolts go right into them, almost like a pincushion, but they’re coming on!

Mochida was alarmed, particularly when he saw three other such “dynamo” formations being put together in front of him. Half his men were dead or wounded, and even though there were probably no more than a hundred Sanafeans left who could fight, they were all fighting, and without fear and or sense of giving up.

Mochida shot up to where one of the Imtre was waiting just below the surface. “Bomb the reef. Indiscriminate,” he ordered.

The Imtre hesitated a moment. “Through your own troops?”

“They’ll get out of the way. Now, do it!”

The Imtre was gone topside, and Mochida moved over the largest concentration of troops. “Spread out, unified V at ten meters depth! Form on me! Do it now!”

As many Chalidangers as could do it disengaged instantly and rose, forming once more that perfect V shape, this time at a very shallow depth, and, considering their reduced numbers, fairly wide apart.

New bolts were being distributed for the harpoons from cartons in the small boats above by Imtre, who were moving quickly and nervously.

The Sanafeans broke from their dynamo formations when this happened and spread out in a column of fours, lowering themselves close to the reef and staring up at the high invaders. The old lord was still there, too, and didn’t sound much like giving in.

“You fight well, you invading bastards, but you must come to us now! Come down to our reef, if you dare, and retrieve your trophy, and don’t mind the gathering sharks!”

The blood had in fact attracted a lot of very large sharks, all of whom looked capable of eating anybody there and more than willing to do so, although they were first starting off by scavenging the dead and the severed limbs.

Mochida was also not in a defeatist mood. “Give us the trophy, Lord Paugoth, and the clan will survive. If I must take it from this point, and hunt for it, I shall leave no Sanafean of the Clan Paugoth alive. No male, no female, no infants, no children. One by one I am going to destroy your reefs and all that they contain until you yield or the sharks and the other clans pick your bones.”

Almost on cue, since it had been prearranged by the Imtre with those above, there were a series of splashes at the surface, and slowly descending past the Chalidangers came sleek-looking cylinders with some sort of marking on them. They went down so slowly that the Sanafeans weren’t sure how to take the things and simply watched them fall, not even noticing that the Chalidangers had turned so their armored bodies were facing down toward the reef and their tentacled part was almost straight up.

A great saucerlike Sanafean detached itself from the group at the reef and approached the nearest of the cylinders. It reached out its “hand,” touched the thing, and simultaneously gave it a full charge.

It blew up with an enormous bang, and the concussion flung Chalidangers all the way to the surface and smashed a suddenly deafened Ming and Ari against the hull of the ship.

Four others struck the reef and went off in sequence, throwing up more concussion, more noise, and more brute force energy than had ever before been seen in this nontech hex.

As soon as the Kalindans could regain their senses, they headed for the surface, popped up, and saw a nearby longboat with four Imtre and three insectlike Jerminins in it, loading up a mechanical rack with five more of the depth charges. The trouble is, they looked pretty full and pretty busy, and the two other boats were moving to other locations and preparing for more of the same.

Ari didn’t have to wait for an invitation. They swam quickly to the big ship and found a rope ladder leading to an open compartment where supplies had been unloaded as called for to the smaller boats. It was above the surface and it was inside a big ship. That, for the moment, was all the Kalindans cared about.

While the initial battle had been going on, Imtre scouts knowledgeable from intelligence as to the Paugoth boundaries had placed small surface markers denoting both ends of each Paugoth reef. These red markers, hobbling up and down, were now the objects of the small boats, each of which chose one and moved to a position in between. Using Imtre and the “glass” bottoms as confirmation that they were where they wanted to be, they waited for their Imtre to be out of the water and then released a rack of depth charges.

Hanging for dear life from the rope ladder and trying to pull themselves up, the Kalindans found that the explosions were just as spectacular if not as damaging on the surface.

After the loads were dropped on three more, though, an Imtre who went down to check damages came rushing back up and they could hear him shout, “Cease fire! Cease fire! They’ve had it!”

What do you think? My brain s been scrambled and I know we’re gonna hurt like hell from those whacks against the hull, but I’d rather be down there than up here if it’s over, Ming commented.

I agree, on everything, including the scrambling, Ari came back, and with that they dropped back into the sea.

Couldn’ta stood it long up there anyway, Ming noted. That hot sun was peelin’ our skin off.

Still, the scene below was not easy to look at even when you could see anything through the still swirling dust and debris.

As it cleared enough to see the reef below, as through a fog, the sight was one of horror. There were dead Sanafeans all over, some torn to shreds but others looking remarkably like they were just sleeping, but with no life inside them, but there were also dead and dying sea creatures. The coral reef itself seemed shattered, scarred, and gashed, the living top layer scorched and motionless. Here and there the vicious giant spotted sea snakes that had been so effective could be seen, some decapitated, half out of their holes and burrows. Sharks, too, lay dead and dying in mad twisting frenzies, as well as countless other fish who had depended upon the reefs for everything from protection to food.

The Chalidangers hadn’t weathered things that well, but at least they were alive, for they’d known what was going to happen and had been as prepared for it as they could be. Even so, a number who’d apparently been in the path of the concussion’s upward force seemed stunned and only slightly alive, their armor, which Mochida had bragged could stop the harpoons and even some much higher tech energy weapons, cracked, in one case shattered, by the forces their General and their allies had unleashed.

“Sweet Jesus! Is there anyone left alive down there to surrender?” Ari cried.

General Mochida saw them, possibly heard the comment, and approached.

“Sorry, my guests, but I fear I will be slightly deaf for a while. I hope not forever, but even if so, it would be worth it. Victory is worth any price.”

“It looks like the price was real high, particularly among the Sanafeans,” Ming noted.

“Yes, they put up a much tougher fight than we hoped. Fortunately, we had contingency plans for such eventualities, and this is the result.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that you won anything, General,” Ming replied. “I mean, the object wasn’t to kill, it was to get that whatever it was you wanted to get, or did I misunderstand you?”

“No, you’re quite right. They are bringing it to us now. There were a half-dozen or so survivors, and they gave me their word and went to get it. That is what we are waiting for.”

“You really think they’re gonna come back and bring you this trophy?”

“I do. The price is that I do not blow up the rest of their reefs. You see, they can’t survive without their reefs. The reefs not only are at the heart of their food chain, it’s where they bear and nurture their young. 1 daresay we probably killed quite a number of the clan’s children today, before they could ever taste the freedom of the open sea.”

“Some deal! And as soon as we’re gone, the other clans’ll come in and wipe out the rest of them and take over here anyway.”

“Not my problem. Ah! I see that this affair is close to a conclusion…”

Coming from a valley between two blasted reefs was a small contingent of Sanafeans. Most were adults, but there was a difference you couldn’t quite pin down in some of the larger ones in the rear.

The wives and mothers, I bet, Ming guessed, shaking her head.

In the front of the group, and bearing in his hand an odd-shaped piece of, well, something, was a young male, perhaps too young to have yet been a warrior in the big contests like this one.

The young creature stopped just short of the Chalidang line, and General Mochida, sensing the hesitancy, descended to the young one’s level.

“I am Colonel General Mochida. You have brought what we came for?”

The young male quivered, as if summoning up courage, but he replied, in a shaky yet clear voice, “I am Kirith, High Lord of the Paugoth. In the name of all our sacred gods, take this cursed thing and depart our lands.”

Ari and Ming both had a sudden sense that there was more meaning to this sad scene than merely surrender with honor. It was unlikely that the old lord had been the father of someone this young; he was too big and too old for that.

Most likely Mochida’s bombs had killed his grandfather and his father, and possibly his older siblings as well. A second look at the remains of the carnage below showed harpoons with expanding heads in almost every intact body.

The Chalidangers who’d recovered first had descended and finished off those of the enemy still living.

Mochida extended one of his two extra long tentacles and took the object, then immediately moved up and away.

He moved toward the large ship, tapped on the side in what seemed to be a code, and a panel slid back noisily to reveal a water-filled central compartment aboard the vessel.

“Put the medical people and the wounded inside the ship,” he instructed. “We’ll sail into Kalinda and get the benefits of modern medicine, at least. The rest of you form up and prepare to follow the ship.”

“You’re going into Kalinda now?” Ari asked incredulously. “There’s no way you’re fit or in any numbers to resist internment!”

“I have no intention of being interned,” the General responded. “We are going to go in unarmed and request the right to fair return under the Neutrality Treaties. We will be escorted directly to the capital and we will then be unceremoniously thrown out through the Zone Gate. There are only… oh, I’d say 115 or so of us. I should think that word of this should make your people more relaxed about us. We have what we were after. I hope to receive word from Quislon that we have another shortly. If so, that will leave only one piece of the Straight Gate left to acquire. If not, we’ll have another bloodbath at some point before it is all gone. Our air-breathing agent has proven extremely capable.”

“Yeah? And what good is even that if you can’t get the last piece?” Ari asked him. “And, if I remember, that’s the one nobody could find.”

“Oh, I am pretty certain where it is,” the General responded. “And I think you might be as surprised as everyone else when you find out. And you will. I would love to take you to Chalidang to meet Their Majesties. I’m certain that they would be thrilled to have you for dinner. But now you’re my native guide. What happens from this point is going to depend on who is or is not waiting for me when I reach Zone. And you, both of you, shall accompany me. I and my men will soon be strangers in a very strange land. We appreciate our native guide.”

One of these days, somebody is going to kill that asshole squid, Ari commented. He reminds me of my uncle Jules.

Don’t they all, Ming sighed.

An Imtre who had splashed down into the water approached the General.

“Yes?”

“Sir, beg to report that General Kusdik and Minister Krare are both dead. Assassinated.”

“What! But Kusdik was aboard this very ship! And Krare was supposedly waiting at the Kalindan border!”

“They were, sir, but—well, something got them. Just like they got the others.”

A nervous chill radiated from the General in spite of his triumph. All the deaths he’d seen, all the deaths he’d just caused, and these two were the ones that affected him.

“Kincaid?”

“Yes, sir. At least we assume so in the case of the minister. On the ship, well, er, he left a note.”

“He did what?”

“Y-Yes, sir. It said that we were all to tell the Empress that she would be the last, and that there were only two to go. And he—he added something. Something for you.”

“For me? But I’m not from his damned universe! What concern of his am I?”

“He said, well, he—”

“Come on! Out with it!”

“He said that you should be told that he didn’t like genocide no matter who did it. That he was very busy now but that he expected he would get around to you sooner or later.”

“Figures. Has my great staff and would-be replacements figured out yet what the devil Kincaid is that he could get this close to us? And I mean, the minister would have been in a water-breathing atmosphere, like here, not air like the others. How can he do that?”

“I don’t have word on it, sir, but I’ll have them send queries as soon as we’re in high-tech. If they know anything now, they’ll tell us and I’ll tell you.”

“Very well. Go! Let’s get moving here!”

“Problems, General?” Ming asked, not sounding worried about his health and welfare.

“You know Kincaid. Or knew him anyway. Tell me what you know.”

“Not much, really. Just the usual. Josich was Emperor, and he went to war very much like you do and at one point suffered losses severe enough to set back his plans for months. In fact, it turned out to be such a loss of momentum that it cost him the war. He took it out on the planet that had fought so hard and stalled him for so long, and he blew the entire planet up, along with over four billion sentient creatures. Just like you did this afternoon, only on an imaginably larger scale. Kincaid’s whole family was on that world, but he wasn’t at the time. He’s been out to get Josich and every single high-level individual regardless of rank or position or power ever since, fanatically so, to the exclusion of all else. He won’t even be deterred by hostages. He’s a machine, General, as well as a madman, and if he says he’s going to get you, he’ll get you. He followed Josich and the remnants of the Hadun court here, and from the sound of it, he’s gotten far more than the one in Zone that we knew about.”

“Yes, that’s true. Of the more than twenty people who came in with the Empress, we’re down to just two, including Her Majesty. It will make for an interesting situation if our agent is present in Zone when I come through holding another piece of this jigsaw puzzle. I am convinced that so long as Josich remains in Chalidang and in the palace there, she can not be gotten, even if someone were invisible. The controls and security are just too perfect. But if she comes out, well, then it is a different story. So far nobody has been able to protect anyone outside of that level of security. And Josich will have to come out if we have the Quislon piece.”

“Have to?”

“Yes. Again, you will see, when it is time.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t be counting too much on him stopping with your Empress,” Ari noted. “He’s added you to his list now.”

“And that should worry you,” the General responded ominously.

“Oh?”

“You see, I have given orders to every single one of my people. If I should die, for any reason, they are to kill you immediately.”