The Sea is Full of Stars wos-6

by Jack L. Chalker

  “I will see to it,” Dukla promised. “I know they will not like it, but after all, it is only here in Zone, and, of course, any attempt to go through a Gate will wind up with him back in Kalinda. It does not seem a great risk, and the Kalindan government is now demanding many resources to look into solutions for its problem, which is also serious. I believe a trade-off is possible.”

  “Is there anything we can do to help?” Ari asked Nakitti.

  “I—I can’t see it. I could use you all back home, but not here. Bird Lady, do you see anything any of the others could do? Or any reason not to borrow this one’s mind?”

  Jaysu was actually meditating, the discussion having gone into areas she found boring and of no interest to her or her people, but she came out of it when addressed and looked at them. “The issue,” she said, “is in doubt. It will depend on your people most of all,” she told Nakitti, then looked at Core. “This one can help but there is something very wrong with it. It is an enemy of Josich, as are we all, but beware. You can win a battle and have no effect on the war. You may win a war, and lose worse than that which you defeat. Things are not as clear as they seem. And you will win no war without the Avenger and all of us gathered, and we will not do this soon again. I will pray for you all. It is the greatest contribution I can make to you for now.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Nakitti proclaimed. “For now, if I don’t get by the devil I know, the devil I don’t is irrelevant.”

  Ochoan Embassy, Three Days Later

  “There is your answer,” core told them, pointing to the computer screen. The Baron and Nakitti stared at it and their jaws opened almost in unison in surprise. They had been unnerved that the creature had learned their language well enough to be understood in about a day and a half, while working on the problem.

  The screen showed a photograph of a huge creature, sleek, glossy black, with a proboscis and two enormous, padded forward eyes on a small, rounded head that receded to form a near perfect triangular shape.

  “What in all the Hells is that?” the Baron asked him.

  “It is called a zi’iaphod. It is a native of a hex called Hovath, and is not sentient in the sense of being a dominant race. It is, in fact, domesticated. The nontech hex uses them to fly people and freight all over. You cannot get scale here, but one could certainly place a four hundred kilogram supply container on them plus, oh, fifteen or twenty armed creatures the size of the Baron here with full packs. That is a very light but incredibly tough exoskeleton; my data suggests that while cannons would get them in direct hits, gunpowder-based rifle and machine-gun fire would mostly bounce off it. The eyes are a weak spot, as is the center of the proboscis, and a very small spot in the rear, but the likelihood of hitting those before the creatures were down and their passengers and cargo disgorged is slim, and they certainly have some kind of armor rigged to make that even harder. The zi’iaphods’ range is close to two hundred kilometers if the winds are right, and that would certainly be sufficient to carry them from ships’ decks to the Ochoan center. Indications are that the Chalidangers have essentially rented them and their drivers for the duration and much promised wealth to come, and that they have or will soon have—let me see—close to two hundred aboard specially adapted ships. They will eat most anything, so provisions for four or five days is not nearly as much a problem as simply transporting them.”

  “They’ve got those things? And they can transport a couple of thousand soldiers with added supplies?” The Baron was aghast.

  “I believe it is at least that,” Core agreed. “I also believe they know that some will be killed and in fact are counting on it. They win either way. Once dead, they have a tendency to sort of crack open. Pressure internally, perhaps. The fragments of exoskeleton will make excellent armor for temporary fortifications, and if the invaders are Quacksans and Jerminians, as seems likely, the insides of one of these alone could feed a thousand for a few days. They are almost the perfect aerial assault device for this sort of operation.”

  “It sounds like you’re saying they’re an invention, not a creature,” Nakitti noted.

  “They basically are. They were bred for this sort of thing, and variations are bred for all sorts of other things in their home hex. What they were like originally, only a study of fossil DNA of their ancestors would give us a clue. Still, there it is. Thousands of airborne troops dropping around and near the Zone Gate. Those that are not killed take off and bring in more. The first waves will be experienced and fanatical specialists, the very best soldiers they have. Wager on the second wave to land in other areas and on other islands, generally above your forts. They will secure your food and force you to attack them or keep you from sending reinforcements to the center. If you pull back, they will attack from above and the coastal ships will come in. This is very efficient, and these are commanders who do not care how many they lose if they attain an objective. And they are not above accepting a surrender and then eating the prisoners.”

  “By all the gods! What can we possibly do against such creatures?” the Baron wailed, his despair all too evident.

  “We wipe them out, of course,” Core replied. “The advantage of knowing their entire plan cannot be overstated. I am not saying that you will not take heavy losses, but I can assure you that you can break and wipe out this center force. If you do, the mountaintop forces will be militarily irrelevant and can be mopped up if they do not withdraw at will. Without the center, he has no siege. Without the land-based force pinning you down, he runs out of supplies for his ships, food for all those logistical and support personnel and the rest of the invading army, most of which will be land-based creatures. Then your position will put you in control. They will withdraw. One defeat of this force and it will galvanize others here who so far refuse any real aid or cooperation. The same ones who would embrace Chalidang as inevitable winners will tell you that they were really on your side all along.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Nakitti commented. “What’s the plan?”

  “Come. I will describe it to you in detail. Then you will take it to your people. In the meantime, keep getting all the ammunition, guns, anything you can from here. See if you can get hold of some ultra-high-pressure gas canisters and possibly some good rockets. There is also a useful weapon involving jellied petroleum. I will give you the specifications and sources. Remember, you are still fighting in your homeland. They, on the other hand, have a very long supply line and cannot easily nor quickly replace what they lose. It is a gamble on their part that Ochoa will be ill-prepared, ill-equipped, ill-led, and will be totally surprised.”

  Nakitti sighed. “Well, two out of three…”

  Both the Baron and Nakitti stayed on an extra day and a half getting things set up. If Core was looking for redemption, which Nakitti doubted, it certainly was doing some good things so far. The plans, the assessments, were brilliant.

  If, of course, the Baron and his concubine were correct that Ochoa was the target. If not, the Baron’s future was very bleak indeed in the social hierarchy he was bucking, which Nakitti knew would mean that her own future would be even less comfortable than his.

  With the support of the High Commissioner, and with some carefully applied paranoia to both the King and the Premier, the Baron was getting his way and his budget, but his neck was all the way out.

  The last day of the conference, however, helped him considerably. The Cromlin ambassador rose to speak in the concurrent session that was maintained for the water breathers. They watched from the embassy on the video feeds as a creature that looked like a nasty cross between a clawed lobster and a giant scorpion faced the delegations and the cameras and launched into a more than two-hour diatribe of viciousness, hatred, and arrogance against the conference and all who took it seriously.

  “One true incarnate god, one true family!” it concluded, giving the slogan of what it had called the “Movement to Restore the World.”

  “This has been ordained from the start, that the childr
en of this world would return from the stars to reassume their legacy and lead all who would have the intelligence and devotion to recognize truth and power to cleanse this world of its parasites and establish a new order, first throughout the world, then back to the stars, this time as the associates of the gods themselves! You are the weak, the decadent, who have forgotten how to struggle, have forgotten the glories of power that is taken, not accepted. Soon you will see the length of our claws and know that only by joining with us shall you attain eternal glory!”

  “Lays it on thick, doesn’t he?” the Baron commented, unmoved.

  “Well, he’s a half brother,” Nakitti noted. “You won’t find him in the first wave showing us the length of his claws.”

  A buzzer sounded on a device in the main office, then began to print out a series of pages, very fast, written in the commercial language of the Well World. When it stopped, the Baron beat the clerk to it, read it, and seemed to gain strength and stature. “Ha!” he cried. “The idiots have saved me!” He rushed back into the quarters and wrapped his wings around Nakitti, then stepped back, almost dancing. She’d never seen him like this.

  “What is it, Highness?” she pressed.

  He pulled the papers from his belt and waved them in his right claw. “This message. It’s from our friend, there, the Cromlin ‘policy adviser,’ as he calls himself. He has given us seven days to join his glorious alliance or he will order the total genocide of the Ochoan race.”

  She was appalled. In spite of the fact that she’d predicted it, to have the evidence right there made her sad and nervous. It meant war. “And this brings you joy?”

  “Of course!” he responded, carefully putting the papers back. “I go immediately to the Council and to His Majesty with this. We’ve been getting our way, but grudgingly, up until now. This—This is absolute confirmation. The gall of this—this—creature! With this it is I who will be able to replace the worst of them, and it is I who will ensure that a lot of corrupt and stupid cousins are in the front lines when the invasion comes! This is not bad news! This is salvation!”

  Underwater Zone Gate, Later That Same Day

  Colonel General Sochiz of Cromlin was feeling cocky and arrogant as he left the embassy and made his way through the crowds toward the Well Gate, pushing aside anybody who did not yield and barely paying attention to the stares. He did not care what anybody thought of him, and his great claws could cut steel rods if he were so inclined.

  Josich would be so proud of him! The way they had looked as he had spoken! The way they had simply melted away as he’d strode off the platform and through the hall and out. That was fear, fear of power, and it felt most excellent.

  When it was clear who he was, the others along the route to the Well Gate gave way and no one, not even those who were larger and looked meaner than he, impeded his triumphal march.

  He turned the corner and saw the utter blackness of the Gate directly ahead, its hexagonal shape unmistakable. He was almost to it when he realized that, for this last, short stretch, there was nobody in the corridor.

  He stopped suddenly, suspicious. This was the way assassins worked. Well, let them come! Let them see he was not afraid of them!

  A noise caused him to turn to the wall to his right, perhaps five meters in front of the Gate. It had no form at first, but then took a humanoid shape that seemed to extrude right out of the wall. It looked like nothing even research had shown him, like a moving idol from some primitive tribe, made completely of dull, rough granitelike stone, a car-toonish, idiotic, and simplified face carved into it. Only the eyes said it was something more, the burning fire-orange eyes in the tranquil water, and the fact that it walked to him.

  “Who are you who would block we?” the Cromlin general shouted. Both of Sochiz’s forward claws went up. One snatched at the creature while the tail reared up and the syringelike point at the end struck at its head.

  And broke off.

  The creature reached up and, with a stony hand, held the claw immobile, then it grabbed the other as the pain of losing the stinger hit the Cromlin’s body, ripping off the right claw and discarding it.

  “You know my name,” the creature said in a tone that could only mean it had a translator. “Let it be the last thing you or any of your brothers hear.”

  “What name?” the creature screamed. “Who are you?”

  “Jeremiah Wong Kincaid,” came the reply, just before the second claw was ripped away and the stone right hand of the idol-like creature punched through the face of the Cromlin right between the protruding eyes and extended antennae, and just kept going all the way into the brain.

  It was a slow and messy way to die. The thing was still wriggling in its death throes long after Kincaid had stepped through the Gate and when the first of the curious traffic that had held up for now dared to look around and see what had happened, but not who the perpetrator might have been.

  Ochoa, at the Zone Gate

  It was cloudy, not only at the middle levels but across the entire sky, casting a gloomy pall over the whole central island.

  The island of Bateria was dead center in the middle of Ochoa, and appeared to be one massive volcanic peak. Even underwater, where it went down almost seven kilometers into the sea bed, the great mountain called Sochi Makin, or the “Yawning God,” resembled an ancient peak of the sort that truly created the others and occasionally created new ones. It came up into the air and rose across an almost sixty kilometer stretch to a collapsed crater twenty kilometers across. Inside was still a volcanic moonscape, colorful but desolate, baked in the hot sun of the day and plunging to icy cold at night, when the elevation alone controlled its temperature. In the center, though, was a single unnatural feature, a hexagonal area planted horizontally inside the crater and resembling a bottomless hole, as indeed it was.

  The Royal Palace had been hewn into the side of the crater facing the rising western sun. Its spires and colorful rock made it seem a part of the mountain itself, and it stretched several kilometers across the eastern wall and rose up above the level of the crater itself, in a departure from the Ochoan norm. The way up on that side was steep and rugged, and who would dare attack the residence of the King?

  Opposite, on the western wall, was the Great Hall of the Council, where the elected representatives met a few weeks out of every year to decide what needed to be decided, and which was home to a surprisingly small bureaucracy that mostly issued permits and saw to it that fees for ships’ provi-sionings and for transit of goods were in order.

  In one sense, the palace was the most vulnerable position of any important structure in the kingdom, but the Royal Guard was housed within the castle, and the National Guard—which primarily handled Customs duties, chased down disputes involving multiple districts, and the like, had received some military training and retained a military style structure—was headquartered in a village along the eastern slopes below the Grand Hall. Under normal circumstances, about 2,500 regular troops of the army and perhaps 1,500 of the National Guard were at hand, the largest single force anywhere in Ochoa and probably the only one that trained for the job.

  Ochoans had fairly good eyes, but the Baron and Grand Duchess Comorro, General in Chief of the Royal Guard, as well as General Zaida, who ran the National Guard, wore special goggles with easily adjusted binocular lenses, and they could see quite well across the expanse of the crater. The Baron stood outside some small buildings just north of the Well Gate used for customs; the Grand Duchess was in full resplendent war paint and medals on the battlement atop the palace, the General on the flag court just above the entrance to the Great Hall. Each had a signalman with him or her, and each was in constant contact, all being more or less in line of sight.

  A dark shape came in toward the palace below the clouds, only a few meters above the highest of the terrain, flew into the crater and landed on the Duchess’s parapet. About thirty seconds later the semaphore flashed, “The most reassuring thing about the enemy is that he follows ou
r script.”

  The Baron laughed. He wasn’t going to kid anybody that he wasn’t scared to death, but if they were forced into a fight, then so be it. The others felt the same way. In Ochoan culture it was the women who did the fighting, but he was determined that they would sing no songs of battles and bravery without his name included, even if he didn’t know whether he had the nerve to stand. The King sure hadn’t. He and half his entourage were cowering deep in the lava caves right now over on Island Biana.

  He eased himself back into the special chair atop the customs house and raised his feet, which were also for all intents and purposes his hands, and placed them on the control bars and twin triggers of the rapid-fire, air-cooled machine gun. He’d had only a couple of days’ practice on one, and they ran hot and noisy and smoky and smelled awful, but he could say it didn’t take an expert to hit something with them when they put out a hundred rounds per second in a spread pattern.

  The portable emplacement was similar to the permanent ones along the whole chain of castles and fortresses, designed specifically for the Ochoan anatomy and easily rotated a full 360 degrees with just a shift in body weight. In a smaller chair below him, but on the same pivot, Gia, daughter of the Lady Akua (and his) fifth wife, sat ready to feed the strips of ammunition along the belt, clear jams, and change and reload ammo canisters. Two others weren’t on the pivot but were on her level on a catwalk, and could jump in and help with any operation as needed or have new canisters ready.

  There were no permanent emplacements here, in the royal center, but there were quite a number of temporary ones.