Now they hovered in formation, divided into squads and companies, waiting for inspection in turn by their lieutenants, captains, and majors, as the General and his colonels looked on.
They looked good.
“Soldiers of the Empire!” the General shouted to them, pride obvious in his voice. “You have suffered much in training, and risked death from an experimental cold process, and now you’ve been shot here in great tubes. Now you are outfitted, and the enemy is not five kilometers to the north. This evening, we will train in full gear here on this plateau. This night you will eat of the best Chalidang can offer. Then you must rest, for tomorrow we will meet one more time like this, just at dawn, and we will go together into Sanafe and glory! We have but one true objective. To attain it, we will require from you a victory. You are ready. The enemy knows we are here but not who we are nor what we can do. Tomorrow, we will show him.”
“Yes, sir!” they all responded as one, sounding eager.
“To your commanders, then! Dismissed!”
As they broke into their component units and set off for their maneuvers, the General shot back over to them. He looked grand in his battle armor, but his men knew that he did not expect to need it.
“What about our battle armor?” Ari asked him.
The General chuckled. “I’m afraid you are observers in this. No weapons, no participation. Just try and stay out of the way and do not interfere in this matter. You know nothing of Sanafe nor who and what is a major threat there, nor do you understand what we are doing and why. You understand that it is dangerous. That’s sufficient.”
“Yeah? Well, what happens if things go bad and we don’t have anybody around who knows to give us that stuff the next time we need it?”
“Then get to the surface and board the ship up there. It might not take you where you’d rather go, but it will have what you require and know what to do with you.”
I’m not sure I liked the way he put that, Ari noted.
Yeah. Me, neither, Ming agreed.
Watching the battle tactics and maneuvers did them little good in figuring out how things would come off in the real world. After all, neither of them even knew what the place five kilometers north looked like, nor anything at all about the inhabitants.
But they knew they would know, perhaps a few hours after dawn tomorrow morning.
* * *
The looming Well boundary was becoming familiar to them now, but it never ceased to amaze them anyway. They knew that it didn’t stop at the surface but went all the way to some point perhaps a hundred kilometers up in space, and that these energy walls actually sealed in each of the 1,560 hexes on the Weil World. Inside each, almost any limitations might be placed, and also inside each, the entire biosphere might be radically different from just on the other side of the barrier.
Cold, hot, salty or brackish, even the middle of a vast ocean here could hold almost anything, both in environmental and in dominant species terms.
They kept well to the rear and close to the General and the two colonels, who, they knew, would fight if they had to but otherwise would direct from the rear. Not that these guys looked like they needed direction; they were smart and sharp, the really scary kind of soldiers that you knew instinctively were very good at their job. If the rest of Chalidang’s army looked like this, it was no wonder everybody was scared shitless of them.
They pierced the opaque curtain in front of them and swam into Fairyland.
The hex was either quite high in elevation or designed to simulate a continental shelf, since it was relatively shallow and required an immediate steep climb to get to the “level” of the place, even though they’d begun atop a high plateau in Yabbo. Anybody wanting to secure the borders could certainly use that shelf and drop to good advantage, particularly if it held all around.
The land that stretched out before them was linked more closely to the sun than any other underwater realm they’d encountered before. The whole sea floor was a riot of sunlit shapes and colors, twisting, turning, some places with crevices, others with craterlike holes or caves, but all of it just covered in life.
The land itself was made up of things that had once been alive. When they died, they died in place, and were soon covered by the next generation of living things, which then died and were covered, and so on. Now rising hundreds of meters from the sea floor, the bottom layers, tens of thousands of years worth or more, had been compacted into rock that retained much of the color and texture of the living stuff on top.
“Be careful and stay out of contact with the reefs themselves,” the General warned them. “Coral is an animal, a carnivore, in fact, and there are lots of surprises even uglier living among and within the stuff. Nothing here may be what it seems, and all of it is dangerous.”
Wow! Now that was a real confidence builder! Ari commented. I’m going to sleep better tonight knowing everything here is out to eat me.
Coulda been worse, she reminded him.
Huh?
Core wanted us here on our own, remember, and I don’t recall her sending us a briefing book.
They saw many demonstrations of what Mochida warned them against as they traveled along and just above the reefs that seemed to stretch out forever in front of them. Nasty heads of very large creatures full of teeth emerged from concealed holes in the reef and gobbled up fish as they swam past. Even schools of big fish weren’t immune; things that looked like the gently waving but at least permanently planted coral suddenly moved, showing themselves instead to be all poisonous tentacles, grasping and paralyzing and then drawing in fish half their size.
The beauty was not merely skin deep, it was a deliberate trap for the unwary.
Still, thousands of fish and crustaceans and creatures they couldn’t classify darted in and out of the coral, used it for protection, or even fed off the smaller creatures, down to plankton-sized levels, and off some of the coral itself in a few cases.
The coral was set up in colonies, with relatively barren gaps of lower rock and sand between, but it was more continuous than a set of islands. The gaps were brief, and it seemed only the larger fish and good-sized predators left one to go to the next.
Nor were any two beds exactly alike; some creatures were found only in one area and not in another, while the colors and even the types and shapes of coral changed as well.
It was easy to be mesmerized by the beauty and complexity of it all, but so much kill or be killed was going on that it kept jolting you back to reality.
So which are the Sanafeans? Ari wondered, and received a mental shrug from Ming.
Ahead, the commando squads fanned out, forming a nearly V-shaped formation with top officers inside the V. It was clear from the lack of serious attention they were paying to the pageant unfolding below them that the natives were not these pretty carnivores or concealed sea snakes.
“What do the natives do here that requires thinking at all, on more than the survival level?” Ming wondered aloud. “It doesn’t seem like there are any built structures, no roads, no signs of what we think of as civilization at all.”
“They manage the place, more or less,” the General replied. “Oh, they cultivate their own reefs and try and outdo each other in artistic skills, something that is certainly lost on me, and they herd and cross-breed to ensure species survival and balance, and the rest of the time they fight each other, except when they’re meditating upon and worshiping their gods. They don’t quite make sense to the likes of us, but I’ve learned to accept that as just the way things are between many species. I doubt if we make any sense to them, for example.”
“So why do you have to fight them? Respect, by their rules?”
“Something like that. In fact, one of their trophies for beating another clan in a fight is something we require. They don’t know the significance of it beyond the trophy stage, but we do.”
“Ah! I see! So you beat them and they give you the thing, huh?”
“Something like that. Ho! Stay back
and be careful! We’re about to be challenged!”
He broke off and darted back to his position just behind the colonels in the V, which had now come to a sudden, tense halt and was clearly waiting for something to happen.
I don’t see anybody. Do you?
Ming was amused. Like I can see what you don’t? I—uh-oh! Wait a minute…
The Sanafeans were not coming from the riot of coral below, but from the near surface above. Big black shapes that seemed to be huge oval mouths with wings on them.
“Send up the buoy!” the General ordered, and immediately one of the colonels removed something from his pack and pulled a tab. It inflated with compressed air and rose to the surface, trailing a long thin line which the colonel now hammered into the nonliving coral base below with just one blow.
“Sweet Jesus! How many of those things are there?” Ari wondered aloud. The Sanafeans seemed to suddenly fill the field of view above and in front of them. Ten, twenty… maybe a hundred or more of the things.
They could now see that they resembled not winged mouths, but giant manta rays. The mouths, though, protruded and had vicious-looking fangs on both sides, leaving little to the imagination as to what else might be hidden inside. They also had long, very thin prehensile tails the equal of their body length, and at the end of each tail was a spread of what might be called three “fingers,” with an extended and controllable opposite “lip” that worked like an ultrawide thumb.
“Stop and turn back, invaders, or we will destroy you!” the huge, leading Sanafean thundered. Through the translator, he sounded supernatural and authoritarian; the voice of the underwater god.
One of the junior officers at the point of the V responded: “Who speaks like this to the forces of mighty Chalidang, Empire of the Overdark, lords of all they wish to rule?”
The kid was pretty good at this, they had to admit. Rehearsed or not, it was the proper response.
“I am Kobilo, High Lord of the Tusarch, invader. These are our lands and no other, not Sanafean nor foreign. We kept to our lands and demanded nothing of you or yours. You are the invader here. You must turn back or we must destroy you.”
“We have no fight with the Tusarch,” the lieutenant responded. “We regret that we must pass through and disturb their lands. It is necessary, but only to reach the Paugoth. We know of no other way to get there. Will you permit us passage over your lands to theirs?”
“Paugoth? Paugoth?” The clan leader seemed insulted. “What would you want with the likes of them!”
“We wish to challenge for the Trophy. They have it, you do not.”
That forced the old ray to think a moment. “What makes you think you could beat them? We couldn’t, last games, nor could anybody else. And you’ll need more than that fancy armor and smart parading to take them, too. Why, I don’t even believe you can take us.”
“We will fight you if we must, for there is no honorable way to do otherwise, but we do not wish to do it, and it might harm our strength even if we do prevail here, so that the Paugoth may well win because of the demands of the Tusarch. This is your choice. We fight here, now, and the survivors either press on, if it is us, or turn back, if it is you who prevails. But you must be told that the Chalidang can neither give nor accept quarter. Even if you win, how long will it be before there are enough Tusarch again to seriously challenge other clans? Let us pass and, win or lose, it will be the Paugoth who will have this problem.”
That was a wrinkle the old boy hadn’t thought of. In a no-quarter fight, he was outnumbered here, and facing a foe he didn’t know with weapons he was unsure of. If he lost, and he might, he’d just been told that the fight wouldn’t be like a clan fight; these aliens would kill all. If they were the suicidal fighter type—and they looked the part—then even winning would be very costly. He also noted the black shape that was closing in on that released buoy on the surface. If they had surface ship support, it could get really ugly and maybe even mess up the coral.
By the twenty-nine Hells, let ’em mess up Paugoth’s coral!
“All right,” the Elder said at last. “I’ll give you passage in to Paugoth. But if you’re pulling a fast one, if you do not fight them, then we will join with other clans and ensure that you have a far bigger fight. Understood?”
“Yes. The terms are acceptable. We can go on our own, but we would appreciate a guide to smooth things through to the Paugoth, and who would also ensure that we do not somehow trespass on your property nor do it harm.”
The Elder seemed impressed, and even Ari and Ming were giving even more respect to the General’s scouting and homework.
Two Sanafean warriors, sons of the elder, were delegated to escort them through without delay. It appeared that the clan boundaries weren’t all that big, and that the next one over was where they wanted to be. More good scouting from the General.
Mochida was in fact very pleased by it all. He drifted back to them and said, “Well, we got by that one. Had I not gotten all this force here surreptitiously, we’d have had to fight for every millimeter of ground. As it is, we’re going to be where we want to be with no losses and no problems in under two more hours. Right about midday, 1 would say.”
“He sure caved fast when he saw that ship up there,” Ari commented.
“Oh, it wasn’t the ship. Remember, they only just gave their word that they would get us to the lands of the Clan Paugoth without interference and let us fight them. They didn’t say anything about letting us back out.”
Alkazar—Quislon Border
It was one of the largest elevators anyone had ever conceived to build, and it went up inside the great granite mountain from the near-sea-level jungles, not to the top of the great mountain peaks, but to a point where it was practical to bore in an exit tunnel.
The ride itself was surprisingly smooth, with just a little bit of vibration, although there was no question that they were moving, and that someone or something was actually driving the tractor-trailer-sized car, because you could feel it slow down and then speed up again. When it finally slowed for good, eardrums of those who had them had popped several times, but, more interesting, the pressure inside also seemed to be varied.
“As an old pilot, I’d say they slowly pressurized us to the exit pressure before they started,” Genghis O’Leary noted. “Or, at least, they did most of it then, and gradually lessened it still more as we rose. It’s pretty slick.”
“Makes you wonder why they didn’t build it at Kolznar, though, and save all the upriver shipping and jungle transit,” Har Shamish put in.
“They probably took advantage of some ancient caves and lengthy cracks or faults,” O’Leary surmised. “I think they put it where the engineers said they had to. More to the point is why they wouldn’t run a railroad or good automated shipping road from the port to here.” He sighed. “Well, I suppose they had good reasons. Anybody who can design this would have better reasons than I could come up with for doing most anything!”
That thought was disquieting to all three of them, for they didn’t like this hex one bit, and, bribes and favors or not, it didn’t like them much, either. It was a reminder that the whole society was very much like the appearance of the natives: it looked small, weak, insignificant, often comical, but it masked a very nasty reality.
Unlike below, where the passengers walked, there was enough distance above that some kind of transport was needed. What the Alkazarians had built was a kind of small train sized for Alkazarians. Still, by kneeling, Jaysu managed to get uncomfortably ensconced aboard one of the small, spartan, open-air cars all to herself, while the two Pyrons were able to share another. The crew in yellow were busy shepherding the containers off, then hooking up small motors of some sort to them so they floated along the grooved path paralleling the train, driven by just one of the creatures per container. The rest, apparently, awaited a new shipment to bring back down.
There had been an exit station, and, like the one down at the bottom, this one took another
blood sample and comprehensive picture and apparently compared it to what it already had. At least they managed to pass through fairly quickly, although Har Shamish wondered how, if there were any hitches, he was going to bribe a machine.
Although the train was fairly fast, it was bouncy and things were not well-lit. More than once, Jaysu, in a miserable crouching position, felt as if she were going to be flung off. She would have screamed at the train driver except there didn’t seem to be one. It was all automated.
Just when she was so cramped and bruised she felt she couldn’t stay on the little train a moment longer, it burst into the open, revealing the interior of Alkazar spread out before them.
It was as ugly as sin itself. Vast regions were covered with industrial complexes belching all sorts of gases into the air; dreary buildings were covered in soot, and even the new ones were painted drab colors; and the whole thing reflected against the clouds like a vision of Hell from almost any religion.
At the small platform where the train ended, two Alkazarians in black with gold trim awaited, their sleeves sporting an emblem resembling crossed lightning bolts. They were clearly waiting for them.
She needed some help getting out and to her feet, and the waiting creatures moved not at all to help her. It was left to one of the Pyrons to offer a tentacle and a pull.
Har Shamish went up to the nearer of the two officials. “I am the Pyron vice-consul,” he said, “and this is Citizen O’Leary, in the service of the king, and Jaysu, an Amboran who is under our diplomatic umbrella. I assume there are no problems in clearing us to the border as quickly as possible?”
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