For her part, Jaysu had no idea where all this was coming from, but she couldn’t avoid saying it, and knew the moment it passed her lips that it was right. It was as if something inside her was somehow able to reach all the way down inside them and yank out their feelings and even their self-delusions, strengths, and weaknesses.
She looked at the High Commissioner. “Not everyone is here. Two are still missing, including one who is essential. You cannot hope to defeat the evil that so threatens the world without the Avenger.”
“Indeed? And who is this ‘Avenger?’ ” Dukla replied, not sure himself what to make of her. He couldn’t help placing a mental bet that her own people would love to see her get interested in being anywhere but home, though.
She shook her head. “I do not know. I suppose it is one of those who is not here.”
Nakitti felt relieved. “Then you don’t know everything!” She looked around. “Well, I guess it’s either Uncle Jules, that muscle-bound detective, or the robot monster.”
Jaysu shook her head in puzzlement. “Please—say the names again. Slowly. One at a time.”
“He means,” Ming told her, “Jules Wallinchky, the man who turned the both of us into slaves for a period just for the fun of it, and who may or may not still be alive somewhere—”
“No, not him. I do feel that he is still alive, but I feel nothing more about him now. What is the next, please?”
“Genghis O’Leary, a detective I once knew, and the guy who almost nabbed Josich back in the Realm and saved this world a lot of grief—”
“He is here! Somewhere here!”
Ming nodded. “On the Well World? Sure he is. We knew that.”
“No, I mean here. In this place. Not in this room, but not far. Who was the third?”
“His name is Jeremiah Wong Kincaid, and he is like nobody else,” Ming told her.
“He is here, too! He is the one! But—he does not see himself leading an army for good, but as an assassin. So long as he believes and acts that way, he will fail. If he cannot adapt and face evil out of something other than pure revenge, he will fail, and if he fails, then everyone fails. He is the key. The Avenger. I do not know how.”
At that moment the door behind her opened and another creature walked in and suddenly stopped dead at the sight of all of them, and particularly of the glowing Jaysu.
He had clearly never seen an angel before, and none of them had ever seen what looked for all the world like an enormous hooded snake with wings.
“Saints preserve me!” exclaimed Genghis O’Leary.
“Good to see you finally made it, O’Leary,” the High Commissioner said. “We are having quite a religious experience ourselves here. Come, join the crowd. I believe you will fit.”
“So where is Kincaid?” Ming wondered. “And what is Kincaid?”
“We’ve not had any real contact with him,” Dukla explained. “If he is here, he has not told us about it.”
“He is here,” Jaysu insisted. “I feel him. Not close, but here. He is filled with hatred and fury that he cannot control, but it makes him stand out in my mind. He is not here for us, although he should be. He is here to kill someone.”
That stopped them for a moment. Finally, Ari asked, “Commissioner, can’t you locate him, try and talk him in here?”
“Under normal circumstances, yes, but under the conditions imposed by this conference, with fifty times the normal complement here and all that to-and-fro traffic— impossible. We don’t even know what he is, and we have tried to discover it. It appears that everything about your entry seems to have caused the Well to do things it simply has never done. The results have been unprecedented. The Czillians—the plant people you have seen around the podium here with the leaf on their heads—are a race devoted to scholarship and analysis. They have a great computer complex of their own and created it as a gigantic resource, a university, if you will, with no restrictions as to nationality or use by anyone. They maintain the records that allow us to know our histories and not reinvent the wheel, as it were. You would think we would then use it to learn something about cooperation, but we never seem to.”
O’Leary moved as carefully as he could into the hall, and they saw that he was a large and powerful creature indeed. The eyes, the mouth with its nasty-looking fangs, its undulating movements—all screamed “giant snake.” But the large hood, which seemed ribbed on the underside, proved to be much more than that. The ribs in fact were small blue-white arms ending in soft, mittenlike claws, dozens on each side. They were certainly arms and not legs, but while it was easy to see that they could do a lot of tasks performed by more normal hands or even tentacles, it was impossible to figure out how those reptilian eyes could see what it was doing under there. The body was about four meters long and as thick as O’Leary had been as a Terran male, and it slithered slowly but quite firmly into place and curled itself up, leaving only the head and hood resting on top. Unlike a snake, its tongue did not go in and out constantly; there was a sense that it had both a keen sense of smell and ears buried somewhere in the head or hood.
Equally striking was the back of the creature, which was mottled and gave a false but clear impression of having feathers on a part of it, and, just below the hood, sported a bizarre set of upfolded wings that looked leathery, more like an Ochoan wing than an Amboran’s, but with the same multicolored, featherlike pattern. Its underside was bluish-white and quite uniform. If it weren’t for the wings and the extra length, it would have reminded some of the water types of a large land manta ray.
“I know, you’re all wondering what the devil I am,” O’Leary said conversationally. “Well, we’re called Pyron, it’s what’s called a nontech hex, we’re not reptiles but warmblooded, it’s a bisexual race, and I’m a man. Truth to tell, there are some real interesting qualities to this body and this race, although I wouldn’t have chosen it myself, and the thing I miss most is what I’ve been finding here—the comforts of technology.”
“Do those wings work?” Nakitti asked, fascinated if a bit nervous, considering the relative size of the creature to herself.
O’Leary chuckled. “If you mean can I fly like a bird, no. Can I fly like an Ochoan, even? No. Can I push off from a rock and glide at a fair speed in any sort of headwind? Yes. It’s rather difficult to explain the other uses, but let us say I don’t float in the air.”
“How long have you been here, O’Leary?” Ari asked him.
“Since before the conference began. I’ve been in the offices here trying to trace you all down, truth be told, and see what became of you. Rather an odd lot compared to how we arrived, I’d say.”
“More important to us is where this Pyron is,” Nakitti noted. “If you’re on the other side of the world from the rest of us, you’re no help.”
“Yes, I thought of that,” he admitted. “In fact, I’m southeast of you all and one hex away from the Overdark, although the hex between is high tech and inhabited by giant dancing jack-o’-lanterns, and as we’re not partial to vegetables, we get along quite well, you see.”
They let that one pass. Those who understood the jack-o’-lantern reference simply didn’t want to know.
“Are you poisonous?” the Ochoan pressed.
“Of course! But of more importance, I can swallow a good-sized cuttlefish whole.” And, with that, he gave a huge yawn, revealing a mouth as much like a great cat’s as a snake’s, but clearly able to swallow a large animal. “I have a cuttlefish that slipped my net and I don’t like it. I think that’s why I’m here. I want to finish this job, and if that means goin’ fishin’, then so be it.”
Nakitti nodded and turned back to the High Commissioner. “Sir, what do you know about Josich? I don’t mean the gory details of her rapid rise, but beyond that?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Dukla replied. “Explain.”
“I think you do, to some extent. I think that’s why you called this gathering. You’ve seen the entry recordings that I have seen, and
heard the comments. From the indoctrination lecture as well as what we’re told in the hexes we’re assigned to, we’ve been drilled with this system, this history, all of it. But we aren’t the only ones where some of us broke the rules. You said that it’s a one-way trip here, yet Josich clearly knew precisely where he was when he got here. That implies that either he was here before or that somebody left and told him. Now he appears with this knowledge and manages to wind up pretty much the same sort of creature he was when we knew him. About the only thing different is he’s a woman here, and that seems to have actually made it easier for him to rise quickly. His four half brothers haven’t been here but are still under some kind of orderly plan, and they wind up in key hexes very close to Chalidang. This is quite a coincidence when you consider what happened to us. Look around. Pyron, Kalinda, Ochoa—what was yours, dear?”
“Ambora,” Jaysu responded.
“Right. Very different, rather random, and with the hexes spread over Hell and gone. I think we’re all within reach of the Overdark, but the Overdark’s six thousand kilometers wide! Never mind the amnesia and the two-in-ones, it’s mostly as advertised anyway. Not Josich. His brothers wind up close, as an armored, semitech water civilization that’s almost a natural ally to Chalidang; another is a high-tech hex of those who live in water but breathe air. A third is land-based, somewhat like giant bugs, and can march right up rock walls. The fourth are the sea slugs that can hypnotize you into marching right into their bellies. The only thing he missed was a flying race, and you get the feeling he only missed that because either he was rushed or because not all the party he was transporting here made it, thanks to Inspector O’Leary and his friends. He stole that device to deliberately trigger the Gate. He just was a tad premature, or the gods know what we’d be facing now!”
For a while the High Commissioner said nothing, but finally he responded, “Yes, we do see the same things. I hadn’t been as aware of the circumstances as you have outlined, but I noticed from the recordings and from his and his brothers’ actions that they seemed to be rather well-organized for those who just drop in here. It’s not unprecedented to wind up in the same race, provided such a race is still one of the active ones here and also certain very strict conditions are met. Usually it’s when someone has a well-established pregnancy. The Well is programmed to safeguard life, and adapting someone to a whole different race while also adapting a still developing fetus is simply not done. But the Haduns were all male when they arrived. Josich is the only female after processing, in fact, although the Quacksans are asexual. I had to believe it was coincidental, but there were always those doubts deep down, no matter how much I didn’t want to think on it.”
“Josich was definitely born a Hadun in the pre-Realm Confederation,” O’Leary assured them. “His birth and upbringing, his entire history, was quite well known.”
Core was equally skeptical. “Josich could not have interfaced with the core computer of one of the worlds of the Ancient Ones,” it maintained. “I was as well-equipped as any in all creation to do so, and the basics of it were so far beyond anything our advanced civilization understood it bordered on magic.”
“You were a computer,” Ming pointed out. “Maybe you still are, I think. You can’t believe in magic!”
“Magic,” Core responded, “is anything observable and perhaps repeatable that cannot be explained in terms of any existing knowledge on the part of the observer. To your own ancestors, all this would be magic. To us, well—we have an excellent example right here. The Amboran is magic. Some of her remarkable abilities are easily explained, of course— a natural telepathy, an uncanny ability to identify an individual from the data in our own minds and then identify him in a vast location like Zone, and who knows what other attributes? The radiant glow—hardly a defensive condition, but one that can inspire fear, awe, respect, if that one does not need a defense. A unique multigenerational evolutionary advance in her species? Perhaps. But since all of this is conjecture and leaves some holes, right at the moment she is magic.”
The point was taken.
“Well, enough of this,” Nakitti said grumpily. “It’s good to see you all, but none of you have the enemy at your gates and a native population where most of them are so fat and corrupt they won’t even realize they’re conquered when they lose. We had military commanders who refused to test-fire coastal guns because it would make the guns dirty! Can you imagine such a thing? I tell you, if I had more time I know enough chemistry that I have a whole raft of nobles I could cheerfully poison in the old-fashioned Ghoman way! Instead I’ve got the ear of the only man with common sense in the whole damned kingdom, and he and I have two weeks to come up with a defense against a concerted land-sea assault.”
“You seem convinced they are coming your way,” Dukla noted. “Others do not think so.”
“One look at the map and the composition of the enemy so far, not to mention all those shiploads of refugees passing through who now have established nice fifth columns in friendly other countries all over the Overdark region, and you’ll see it can’t be anywhere else. It’s far enough, and Chalidang so far has conquered only neighboring hexes, so others can’t see it. It is an ancient game, but very much in the traditions of great generals. Josich has her most dedicated forces. Now she takes control of all shipping on the world’s largest ocean. The few Well Gates here can’t handle but a trickle of supplies. Most of the high-tech hexes are so comfortable by now that they can’t even repair breakdowns. They import what they need. But they can produce massive quantities of gas-powered crossbows and ultralight machine guns and billions of bolts and bullets for them, so that semi-tech and nontech hexes don’t need to make them. Cut all that off, and everybody can be absorbed at will. Those who won’t, fall into line and embrace the new conqueror and yell ‘Comrade! Lover! I was always with you!’ Then, with their agents mixed in with the real refugees and now well-established, they can reach out to the mainland.”
“But why not just go the other way?” O’Leary asked. “In a sense there are more prizes to his west and to his north in particular.”
“Because Chalidang is a water breathing hex, for one thing, and most water breathing civilizations are the other way—my way,” the Ochoan replied. “But, as important, when you run the hexes and the Overdark trade through the computer here you see how interdependent the whole region has become and how self-sufficient, say, the water hexes to the west are. The only major worthwhile target there is Czill, and it would serve Josich just as well if she could simply blow it up and deny its knowledge resources to the world. The rest? Well, in time, but those will be continental land campaigns. A different sort of fight with real extremes. No, she’s going east because that’s the only logical thing to do. She’s practically advertised her moves and they still don’t see it!”
“And you do,” Ari commented skeptically.
Core shifted in its bath. “The Ochoan is correct. Do not confuse the utter insanity of Josich with the Hadun capability to wage logical war. Even in Realm history, Josich’s campaigns were utterly ruthless, often genocidal, but brilliant. His failure then was in not reading other histories of conquerors, particularly those of other races. When you show this kind of genocidal lack of regard, then those who might normally turn and join you, or at least not oppose you, will fight to the death because they have nothing to lose. He lost almost a quarter of his fleet because desperate people of many races and from many worlds hurled themselves at them with total disregard for life or casualties. I believe he might have learned from that here, but it is difficult to say. I can say, Ochoan, that I believe I can help you.”
“You! You’ve never been in a battle or off a fixed structure buried deep inside a mountain on an isolated and barren planet,” Nakitti noted. “What can you do for me?”
“I cannot explain how Josich knew this world or how to make it all work to advantage,” Core admitted, “but I can already see how he will try and conquer your land. It is absurdly easy if a m
ajor first step, the kind of step you would never plan for, works out. Now that I know the broad outline and consider it logical, I would need to do some research to tell you precisely how Chalidang will do it, but it is more a matter of knowing the enemy’s strengths and limits than the actual method. That is obvious.”
“Yes? And what might that be?” the Ochoan prompted, as skeptical of Core as Ari had been of her.
“A siege. They will take the center of the country, keeping out of range of your coastal defenses but ensuring that you do not harvest from the waters. With the center, they will control the Zone Gate. If you attack them, they will slaughter you. If you defend only, they will reinforce until they can reach your fortresses on the mountains and on the coasts from above. It will be ugly and cost them a terrible number of lives, but that was never a factor to Josich, and those who survive will be rewarded handsomely. You will not be able to afford even lesser losses. They will starve you and bleed you and then, when you are weak and out of ammunition and low on food, your water poisoned, they will conquer.”
It was a terrible vision that stunned them. Finally, it was O’Leary who said, “So how are they going to take the center without a flying race? And seeing that the Ochoans are fliers, too, they’d be hard pressed to get a force down in the middle sufficient to fortify and hold. It doesn’t hold up, you see.”
“I believe it does and will,” Core maintained. “I simply need to do some more research to discover how it will be done. The races themselves are unimportant. Josich never could travel in air without a suit, none of us could be in space without an artificial environment, and we couldn’t get the resources to get at the Hadun for a very long time. Planetary invasions and planetary sieges were a part of his composition. He will do it. I simply need to fill in a few of the blanks. If, that is, the Kalindan government will allow me to do so.”
Nakitti looked at the High Commissioner. “I can use him, or it, or whatever. I don’t care about whether he has another agenda, he’s willing to look at mine, and I don’t have the time to be picky. I believe that bringing in an alien expert who knows Josich from before will carry more weight than I can, even if he winds up delivering my scripts. Can I have him?”
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