Chalker, Jack L. – Well of Souls 06

He’d almost gotten used to a kind of local telepathy with the two women, so he wasn’t completely thrown by the way the authorities spoke to him, only their attitudes. It was telepa­thy, but very much on the surface. He could no more read their true thoughts than he could have read those butterfly things’ thoughts back in that entry place, yet the communi­cation was clear. It was a combination—another hybrid!— involving the sending of a specific (or, if you wanted to address many, a broad) audio signal that acted as a carrier for the thoughts, which were perceived much like words and sentences. And it was clear from the start that this communi­cation method left no room for weaseling or error. You understood exactly what the speaker meant.

Not that the two cops had been all that communicative. He’d just swam down on the main line for the city and they suddenly materialized on either side of him.

“Hold! What is your name?” one asked flat out, the “tone” conveying the kind of arrogant authority he expected of cops.

“I—” he began, and stopped. Hell, just which name did he use when he felt like neither? “I am Ari Martinez,” he finally responded, picking the one that was most correct in the basics, although he didn’t really exactly feel like Ari Martinez. “I was—” He hesitated, but his mind sent the req­uisite mental holograms showing him and his former com­panions being pushed into the void of the Gate. “I awoke on an island above in a terrible storm and my impulse was to come down here.”

“Smart impulse. That’s a hurricane up there. We just hope it doesn’t knock off the electricity plant,” the other cop said. “Well, you may have suddenly become like us, but that doesn’t make you one of us. Just ask the Crown Regent of Chalidang, for one.”

As he tried to make sense of that cryptic remark, the other cop snapped something tight around his neck, just below the gills. “Hey! What’s that?”

“It is an electric collar. You will come with us and do as we say, or either of us can press one stud on our wrist con­trollers and you will be shocked at whatever level we choose up to unconsciousness. Don’t make us do this. Sometimes you don’t move much after you get the big shock, and you just got here.”

He knew just the type of device, if not the thing itself, and he had no desire to test it out.

Their wrist controllers, not something he had paid much attention to before, were interesting little gadgets. There was a series of buttons, some small readouts in tiny windows, and they flanked a circular section that looked like a speaker. By locking down one of the buttons, they could beam their report in, presumably broadcast to headquarters; they also seemed to receive information back through it, but the signal was obvi­ously so localized that it could only be heard or understood by the wearer.

Just as the water gave fully three-dimensional movements, so, too, had the city been designed for those who could simply float around and glide about and needed no surface roads, elevators, or much else. Buildings rose twenty stories yet had entrances on each floor, while vast tracts of apart­ments looked like great stylized obelisks and mounds with holes all over. All of the structures and even the layout of the city was clearly designed to keep water flowing, and there were large domed structures whose sole purpose was to either warm or cool the water passing through, and thus create the patterns. It kept the water fresh and oxygenated even when one of the denizens was not moving.

And yet, for all its alien strangeness, many aspects of the city were common to most communities of any size. There was municipal lighting, and inside lighting as well, with energy bands marking an incredible pattern of colorful routings. Ari suspected it was like the corridors back in the entry place; the streets had both a color and a frequency to iden­tify them. Along them would be numbers. The colors from this illumination identified broad categories, like east or north, up and down, but the bands also carried frequency information that his mind accepted and differentiated from all the others. He was sure that if you knew the system, as he did not, you could easily navigate the whole thing.

That was one thing he missed from his brief union with the two women: knowing what it was like to be a genius, to quickly deduce and file away information as effortlessly as you’d scratch an itch. He knew that together they could have figured out this system just by looking at it, and that there was no way he could do it on his own. Still, he realized that certain bands, apparently all associated with yellow, were for commercial traffic only. This traffic involved some fairly large containers being “driven” by heavy duty motors and a driver with long rods for steering, while others were small rounded containers pushed by beefy tradesmen.

It was a sophisticated, modern culture, probably as much as some of the water breathing worlds of the Realm. There were electric water scooters lined up outside what could only have been the police building, ready to supply all the added power and speed a cop would need to answer an emergency. Since there didn’t seem to be any private ve­hicles allowed save for the commercial types, it would be easy to patrol the place.

Moving through the open archway that led inside the police building, he felt a tingling all over and decided that there were doors of a sort here. He assumed that this big one was a one-way door; anybody could get in to the station, but that big old fellow over there had to push things on a control board in front of him to let you back out again.

The building was impressive; a kind of hollowed-out de­sign with a vast but well-lit atrium, and on the main floor various signs leading to areas where there were officers and clerks and, to his surprise, flat screens that looked like com­puter screens, although he was surprised to see they mostly contained meaningless squiggles and that those working on them used massive input pads with an impossible number of buttons, rows and rows of them. Couldn’t they just talk to their computers and get replies?

The central area was a big horseshoe-shaped depression with a series of clerks at desks. He was brought up to one of them by his captors.

“What’s this one?” the clerk asked, sounding more bored than interested.

“New one,” the cop on the right replied. “Apparently just made through the Well from aliens processed through Zone. You want to run him through the system and confirm that such people did arrive? Can’t be too careful these days.”

“Don’t need to,” the clerk responded. “I’m surprised, though, to see this one. Looks just like the other one. Don’t usually get two in the same hex.”

“You have another like me here?” he asked, suddenly excited.

The clerk gave him a nasty look and responded, “You are not to be involved in this discussion. Just keep quiet.” She turned back to the booking cop. “I suppose he doesn’t re­member his name?”

“Says he’s—okay, you can talk. What was that name again?”

While taking in all this and thinking of this new other, his mind had wandered from the immediate business of book­ing him.

“Ming—sorry, Ari Martinez.”

“Ming Ari Martinez. Well, that’s a lot.”

“Just Ari Martinez. Sorry. I was thinking about one of my companions.”

“Suit yourself.” She looked on the screen, punched some­thing up, then swiveled it around so he could see it. “Which one are you?”

He was startled to see a still picture of them sitting in the small lecture hall, all together. Jeez, he looked awful! Not as bad as Kincaid looked, though—or his uncle, if the old bas­tard made it. His hand went out and toward Beta’s eerie gaze, but then he pointed to the one and only original Ari Martinez. “That one.”

He really did have a dual nature. He had just about all of Ari as well as all of Ming inside his head. They weren’t meshing— they were too clear and distinct for that—but keeping one up and the other in background required effort. He told himself that he had better find some way to manage them and deal with it. Otherwise he’d go to sleep and the next day wake up thinking he was Ming, and that wouldn’t do at all.

They took some sort of holographic photo of him by run­ning a hooplike device over him. He only understood what it was because he saw the image form on a little disk next to the booking clerk’s screen. It was an interesting perspective in about one-fifth scale. A series of squiggles was written under it, it was rotated and checked, and then it vanished, presumably into the central police computer records.

“Take him to Interrogation 302,” the clerk told them. “Detective Shissik will want to question him, and a link with the Interior Police is already established there.”

He didn’t like the sound of “Interior Police.” Still, he wondered if he hadn’t been incredibly stupid. If he’d told them he was Ming and let that personality come up, it would have been cop to cop!

“Interrogation 302” meant that they swam up from book­ing to the fourth level, entry being “Ground,” and then to and through one of the doorways there. He assumed the squiggles gave the room number.

Inspector Shissik was already there, and there was a small oval object in front of him that looked like a speaker.

Nobody sat; the only furniture was the table on which the speaker rested, and only it was needed.

The Inspector looked up at the two cops who’d brought him in. “You may go,” he said officiously.

“But—” the first one protested, and stopped when the Inspector gave him a withering glare. They left, and Ari heard an ominous buzzing sound indicating that if he tried to leave, it would be a bit different.

“Please relax,” the Inspector said. “I am with the Interior Police. If that term is not familiar to you, it simply means the national police force that sees over the whole of Kalinda. You’re now a Kalindan whether you want to be or not, and there won’t be a third transformation, so you should get to know your new people and new home. You are here to answer some questions about yourself, your erstwhile com­panions, and a few other things. Then we’ll process you in as a citizen, find you quarters, and test you out for a job. Everyone in Kalinda works at something. If you cannot find a job you enjoy and are good at, we’ll find you a least com­mon denominator one. I do not mean to suggest we’re a slave labor camp, but we do expect everyone to do their part. Is that understood?”

He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Now, I want to know all about you. What you did where you came from, how you wound up here, and, most particu­larly, I want you to tell me all that you can about those who came in with you. Just go ahead, and I will interrupt if I have a question.”

He did in fact understand, and he gave the Inspector a fairly whitewashed version of Ari Martinez’s life and times, jobs and relations, and something of an account of who the others were and how they all wound up here. He even admitted that his uncle was a master criminal and a sadist, but managed to give the impression that he wasn’t a part of that. He hoped he sounded convincing.

For a while the Inspector didn’t respond, then he said, “Why did you give the female Ming as an identity downstairs?”

He shrugged. “We—all three of us—were telepathically linked. It appears some of it came with me.”

“It appears that much of it came with you,” the Inspector responded. “The other one, which you weren’t supposed to be told about as yet but know anyway, is quite an amnesiac. It is genuine; we’ve gone through the usual verification steps— drugs, that sort of thing—to convince ourselves. She arrived here a few days ahead of you, although I must tell you that such a time spread for simultaneous processings isn’t all that unusual. It will be interesting to find out where the third is, and in what mental condition, but that will be days, even weeks, unless she, too, comes here. You say you have nearly complete memories?”

“Yes. I can’t say how complete, but if I reach back to com­mon experiences, when we both were there, it is extremely easy to recall it from her point of view. It is almost like both of us were in here, somehow. I didn’t think that was possible with this Well of Souls thing.”

“Well, even the Ancient Ones could not be expected to think of everything. Apparently you and she were both physi­cally and mentally connected when you entered?”

“Yes, she basically was operating me like a puppet.”

“Apparently the Well couldn’t tell the two of you apart, or perceived three consciousnesses in two bodies, and yet was running on the knowledge of your old species. This leads me to the rather interesting question it all raises. Are you certain that you are Ari and not Ming?”

It was a disconcerting question. “But—I’m male, aren’t I?”

“Doesn’t follow at all, for two reasons. Number one, the Well has never let that stand in its way before, nor even in all cases in the recent past. And second, we Kalindans are a bisexual race, it is true, but we’re designed primarily as sur­vivors under almost any circumstances. When you woke up above, you could breathe, couldn’t you?”

“Yes. I wondered about that.”

“You have a blowhole in the back of your head and some rudimentary lungs that are sufficient up top. We’re quite a rarity in races—we can exist in two of the four elements, and we are well-insulated along a lot of temperature extremes. We’re also omnivores and can eat most anything, although there’s much we would not enjoy eating. And we’re born as neuters. Our children have no sexual differentiation at all. Upon puberty, we tend toward one sex or the other, but this can change. If the population falls below healthy levels, males will change over a period of weeks to females. When the popula­tion tends to get a bit too large, then a large number of females become males. Everyone’s not changing gender all the time, but if one hasn’t had it happen to them, one knows others that have. One’s gender is basically irrelevant here, you see, but whatever is needed to keep our population in balance, we do. This is why we all look rather feminine and have these breasts. The young are born live and carried in sacs—your sac is along here, as you might notice. They are nursed like mammals, although we are a rather unique species outside of here, and if you live with someone who has a nursing baby, even if male, you’ll discover that hormones will be triggered and you can hold and nurse as well. We prize personal honor and relation­ships over gender. It is another adaptation that helps us thrive.”

He thought it over, and decided it was a neat concept. It might be fun to be both. “I assume that the sex act itself is as fun as it used to be?”

“It is certainly not something we shy away from,” Shissik admitted.

And then it hit him, just what the Inspector meant. “So I really could be Ming. Or Ari.”

“Or both. That suggests a fascinating duality I’ve never had to face. You might be both a police officer and a criminal. Please relax—you are a criminal no more, nor, of course, are you an officer. Whatever you become starts now. We like to use the knowledge and experience you might have if it’s handy, but it is traditional that no newcomer to a race here is held at all accountable for past deeds. Inner natures do tend to emerge over time, and that might be inter­esting in your case. One might expect you to commit a criminal act and then arrest yourself.”

He realized that Shissik was being funny, but he didn’t share the joke.

“So what happens now?” he asked the Interior Policeman.

“Now? Nothing immediately. We will get you a good meal and then I want to propose an experiment to my supe­riors. They now have a recording of this conversation, so we’ll see if they are satisfied from their point of view. We are in the city of Mahakor, a medium-sized city in the northeast of our nation. The other is in the capital of Jinkinar. I’d like to take you up there eventually and get you together with this other one. We simply cannot be totally trusting of new­comers for a while, you see, and we do have this nagging question about the other far more than about you.”

“Which is?”

“Well, if she doesn’t know who she is or what she was, then aren’t we merely assuming that she’s your Ming? Per­haps she’s the other one you were linked to, the onetime cultist or whatever it was. Or perhaps she is neither of them but someone else. Ari’s uncle was near death. If he survived and was processed, who is to say what his mind might have been like by that point? Suppose it’s Ari’s uncle Jules that we have? And even if his memories were turned to mush, as I said, inner natures have a tendency to begin coming out over time. I think we need to know for certain.”

Jesus H. Christ! he thought in panic. What if it is Jules Wallinchky? That would be just what I needed here! A whole new body, a whole new race, a whole new life, and they would be putting me right back where I started . . .

Ochoa

THE CREATURES FLEW OVER THE SEAS AT AN ALTITUDE OF ALMOST a kilometer, yet their bony heads were on the ocean and not each other, and their large eyes angled down as if they could see beneath the seas, which, in fact, they could. Not so precisely, of course, but they weren’t looking for a particular fish; they were looking for signs of lunch.

The wings were broad but leathery, the tail almost serpen­tine until it flattened out into a fan shape at its end. The heads were triangular, almost perfect right angles, except for a slight crest at the top rear behind the eyes, each of which had independent movement. Ears were mere cavities in the back of the head that seemed made of something very solid indeed. The lower jaw, which ran the length of the head, had a leathery sack beneath it which, in those whose sacks were empty, seemed to flap slowly back and forth. Those who had some prior catch appeared to have somewhat larger jaws.

The extremely long legs were up flat against the body now, their long talon-tipped fingers and opposable “thumb” locked up and out of the way to increase streamlining. Looked upon from above, they were quite colorful and distinctive, with patterns of randomness in reds, yellows, blues, grays, and browns; their underside, however, was a blue-white, and in either sunlight or clouds they were extremely difficult to see from the ground.

“Big school! Sandrums! Three o’clock, thirty-two-degree angle!” one of them called, its voice harsh, birdlike.

She saw it, the slight pattern of silver just beneath the waves, and with a built-in sense of where any other of his kind was, she dove with them down on the unsuspecting school of fish.

The entry into the water was unhesitating and effortless. Eye lenses flattened, sensing the electricity and magnetism in sea life as by seeing, the group continued flying, under­water, in formation, as if they were still high in the air. The tail, so suited to flying and balance, split apart and turned opposite, providing two paddles that were as effective as tail flippers and gave them the same kind of control a sea mam­mal might have.

The poor fish, some up to sixty centimeters long, didn’t have a chance. The ravenous horde pounced on them, huge mouths open, and began scooping them in from the rear before the front of the school was even aware they were under relentless attack. She quickly had her jaw pouch filled with four lively fish, which quickly calmed down as juices in the pouch flowed around them, knocking them out and acting as a preservative. She gobbled a fifth and last one straight down for her own gratification, chopping it to bits with her impressive range of teeth, then angled up and leaped right out of the water and into the air. The tail re­formed as an avian device, and the leathery wings began to move. Reforming above, all with full pouches, they circled and headed for home.

This is a hell of a way to make a living, she thought sourly, and not my ideal for a new way of life.

She looked down over the hex, which was composed of a vast network of islands, all apparently of ancient volcanic origin since none seemed active. They formed an amazing series of bays, harbors, and protected coves right in the middle of an ocean that had no other land, or so she’d been told, for a thousand or more kilometers in any direction.

It was a semitech hex that might have fooled anybody into thinking it a nontech one, and precisely because of its isolation, it was a well-visited one. The Ochoans were worldly and aware, and liked their little amenities, particularly ci­gars, some wild scents, and various drugs and brews, little of which they could make themselves, even if they’d had the organization and urge to do so. The islands had tons of birds and insects and some reptiles and a few what-the-heck-are-they-anyways, but the Ochoan was the dominant and basi­cally the only important creature on any of them. When you could walk, fly in the air, and fly underwater, not to mention seeing quite well in darkness or in daylight, you tended to dominate things. They even made some occasional delica­cies out of fruits and grains, which they pretended were lux­uries but actually needed to keep themselves. They mainly ate fish, all sorts of fish, alive, dead, or stored in their pouches until needed, and they did some harvesting of na­tive fruits for commercial trade as well as their own brand of art, both drawing and carving, which on the whole was bizarre, but popular in some places. There were some small steam engines about, mostly commercial ones bought from other hexes and modified to Ochoan physiology for opera­tion, but these were mostly used for pumping water from one point to another, as in irrigation on the dry side of some of the islands or in sanitation.

And, being the only land and shelter in all that distance, they traded. Ships from all over stopped there, took on fresh water, fruit, sometimes even salted fish if the Ochoans trawled for them.

Even in her short time here she’d seen more creatures than the old Realm ever had, and some pretty bizarre and scary ones as well. She wanted to leave this dull paradise for a number of reasons, but as a newcomer she had no funds to blow on a ship’s passage, which was the only way in or out. Although master of land, sea, and air, individual Ochoans could generally range no more than about hundred kilometers, and the denizens under the waves of the neigh­boring hexes would not ignore a nice, fat, juicy Ochoan floating on the surface or swimming a bit below it.

There was a government of sorts, both a loose hereditary nobility and a parliament elected by the local councils and set up as a kind of national assembly, but it met only rarely, and then to set quality standards and appoint inspectors for goods going out and coming in, and to appoint ambassadors to Zone. The councils, under chairmanship of a local noble, handled minor disputes, mounted rescues when needed, and saw to the education of the young, little more. If you needed something, somebody would lend it to you, and you might pay back the favor with some other favor sometime. About the only violent crimes were crimes of passion, and those were dealt with and hard and fast by the whole community.

There was also a method of ordering goods, and catalog sale was quite popular, particularly for manufactured goods of mostly no particular use except showing off.

Ochoan men had the real racket. They were big and ego­centric, full of very bright colors, even on their heads, which they brought out even more with waxes and polishes. They had incredibly fancy crests and sexy deep calls using hollow parts of the crests as amplifiers, and spent most of their time primping, preening, showing off, and playing macho-type contests with each other. The duller-looking and more prag­matic women did almost all of the hunting and most other work as well, as well as bearing the young, though the men actually hatched the eggs. But even then, they mostly sat around, complaining about not getting enough to eat, how stuck they were, and so on. For them, it was a seller’s market—there were five females to every male, and other than hatching the eggs, they did one other thing well, or so she’d been told. She was trying to not wind up attached to a nesting, at least not until she had to.

Still, if she couldn’t get on one of those ships and see this whole weird world, it seemed to her unfair that she at least hadn’t been reincarnated as a male Ochoan. It suited her nature perfectly. Coming out female at all was a twist, but coming out female in a society where the women did all the work was adding insult to injury. She’d never much liked work in the first place. Next time I’ll hide down in the damned jewelry, she thought sourly.

Although entering the Well World from an alien exis­tence, she was considered by the Ochoans as basically an orphaned female, a status not high in the local pecking order. She’d found a couple of natives of about the same status, and at their invitation moved in with them in a makeshift rookery overlooking the harbor and provisioning station below. Haqua and Czua at least weren’t pushing her toward one of those preening idiots, she thought with relief, and while resigned to eventually winding up as part of a nesting, they, too, would rather delay it as long as possible.

She landed, stretched, folded her wings, then walked into the hut of bamboo and leaves they’d built as a shelter against the bad weather. “So, Nakitti! At least you never starve in this place, eh?” Czua greeted her. The added “tee” sound at the end of the name was required for the language to describe the feminine, although “feminine” was not exactly how one would describe the tough old scoundrel now sud­denly different in an outward but not inward sense. Ochoan women did not have two names as such, though; they had basic titles like “Wife Ghua” or “Cook Chai.” Since “Tann” was meaningless, they ignored it. Nakitt kept it in her own mind, though, because it was a central part of her identity, a link back to the old.

“True, there’s always food and I love the flying and the swimming, but this is still getting old fast,” Tann Nakitt responded. “I was proud to be a Ghoma; I enjoyed sneaking in and stealing the most valuable of all things in a high civi­lization from under their noses—secrets, information of all sorts. This is kind of like the fun things I might have loved to be able to do on my days off or between assignments, but as a living, it lacks—well, it lacks.”

Both girls, neither much past puberty, were fascinated by this stranger who looked like them but talked like nobody they knew and came from an exotic place off in the stars that they could never have imagined and now couldn’t get enough of. Tann Nakitt suspected that if they ever got into the real Realm, they’d be frightened or bored or victimized at best, but so long as it remained a romantic vision, one that was easily and eagerly fed by their sophis­ticated roomie, well, that was fine with her.

“Good catch today?” Czua asked.

“It almost always is,” the newcomer grumbled. “Nothing much ever happens around here from the looks of it.” She looked down at the natural harbor below. “Hmm . . . Big ship coming in. Think I’ll go down and take a look at it.”

“You’re always looking at the ships. You just want ’em to take you away from here, that’s all.”

“You bet. In the meantime, I’m gonna see what I can see.” She went to the edge of the cliff and jumped off, gliding down to the dock and minor port town below.

She liked the town; it reminded her of a backwater in the Realm, with a variety of creatures there on long-term con­tracts to help service the various vessels that made port. It wasn’t easy work; as a semitech hex, maintaining a practical drydock for the size of vessels coming in just wasn’t prac­tical, nor could any high-tech damage be reliably repaired.

They could replace some radar and navigation modules, but nobody would know if they worked until they crossed a border into a high-tech region. Sorry, no refunds.

The large commercial ships that plied the oceans of the Well World were unique hybrids since they had to regularly cross vast stretches where the technology was limited. Thus, they tended to be large three- or four-masted clippers, some with steel hulls, most with wooden hulls often clad in cop­per or similar alloys because of the weight an iron hull or frame added. They were ungainly but workable as pure sailing ships under the hands of experts, which ocean crews had to be. For that reason and the expense of the ships’ maintenance, interhex freight was expensive and passenger fares even more so.

The ships also tended to either have twin side paddles or large screws, and one or two central stacks for boilers that, in all but the nontech hexes, could propel the great ships for­ward regardless of the winds. Some had small and efficient high-tech engines, some on nuclear models, for high-tech hex sailing when you could make speed, but these were costly enough that most relied entirely on steam power even in the most advanced regions.

This one was an older vessel, with the great side paddles, two stacks in between three great, tall masts, wooden hull; but its high wheelhouse and instrumentation atop suggested that, when it could use them, the ship could sail confidently using radar through foggy seas and low visibility. Not here, though.

The ship, however, was threadbare. It needed a full scrape and paint, there were potential problem cracks on the decks, and some portholes appeared taped together or nailed shut. In fact, some heavy tape ran across more than one of the large windows out from the bridge, suggesting that the glass was by no means comfortable there.

It wasn’t until the pilot brought the ship around and eased it into the dock that Tann Nakitt saw the bullet holes. Maybe not high tech—you could do a gunpowder-based machine gun, she knew, that would work with just a hand crank—but definitely more than one shooter. Could some of those dam­aged windows and portholes have been shot to pieces?

She rose up into the air to take a closer look at this sad-looking ship and immediately saw the signs of some kind of battle. The aft upper cabin deck had a nasty gash in it that had clearly been hastily patched up at sea. Closer looks revealed others. Cannon fire. And on the decks, and peering from those portholes and windows, like a vacuum-packed can of sardines, were people from quite a number of races. They had scales and feathers and hair in all the wrong places, tentacles and claws and even flowers, but they were all people and they all radiated a hopelessness and terror you only saw in refugees from a horror.

What the hell could this be? Tann Nakitt asked herself. And if it was possible to have a war in this boring and most provincial of worlds, how the hell could she get into it?

She circled back and landed near the Port Authority Building—a kind of joke, since it was basically an overly large one-room thatched hut. It seemed that half the small town was there watching the sight, and possibly thinking some of the thoughts she’d been thinking. They were a grim and sober crew.

Lord Kassarim was there, looking resplendent in his neck­lace of authority as Chief of the Port Authority, and, more telling, he had his favorite wife, the Lady Akua, with him. Tann Nakitt had had some dealings with these people be­fore; Kassarim was a good sort, if a bit more lazy and full of self-importance than the usual men here, but Akua also held the rank of captain and was head of the local port militia. Not big except for ordering people about now and then in normal times, but this was clearly in a military person’s interest.

Tann Nakitt approached them casually. This was a laid-back royalty so long as you didn’t want to marry into the family, and they knew she was a newcomer, and much of her story—at least the version she’d told and stuck to.

“Good afternoon, my lord. That seems a sad and strange ship,” she greeted him.

Lord Kassarim cocked one eyeball in Nakitt’s direction. “So, Nakitti, you see the bullets?”

“Yes, my lord, but more I see the refugees. Where is this ship coming from, if I may ask, that it would be so attacked? I see no weapons aboard her. Whoever shot had to be bent on nothing less than murder.”

“Indeed so,” the Lady Akua put in. “This is the first such to put in here, but not the first in our small nation, and I fear it is simply the latest in an increasing tide. One wonders if so many are reaching us, just how many others lie at the bottom of the sea.”

Nakitt nodded. “Looks like a tech level similar to ours. I seem to remember that those around us are either unlimited or no technology, so they must have steamed and sailed quite a distance like that.”

“Possibly fourteen hundred kilometers, from the look of some of those aboard, Nakitti,” Lord Kassarim replied. “You mean to say you don’t know what’s going on out in the West?”

“No, my lord. If my lord recalls, I just got here.”

“Humph! Quite so, quite so.” His Lordship reached into a pouch and took out a gigantic cigar using the “fingers” on his right leg as a hand, biting off the end and sticking it in his mouth. He then reached in and took out an enormously long sulfur-based match, struck it on the side of his head, then reaching up, lit the cigar and began puffing away. Tann Nakitt had been startled the first day here, seeing one leg lock as solid as an iron bar while the other twisted with a limberness that seemed almost impossible and could be easily used as a hand, but now she was so used to doing it herself it hardly registered.

“Well, Nakitti,” His Lordship continued at last, “one of yours from back in wherever it is you come from is behind it. Damnedest thing we’ve seen in thousands of years. Chali­dang was always rather ugly a place; it’s run by a kind of pirate nobility that keeps its whole population in thrall, as if everybody, even the children, are in the army, and treated that way. They’ve been a scourge to their neighbors for some time, and nobody’s liked them much, but they’re a high-tech hex with a fair amount of resources and a collective mindset that can figure out an infinite number of ways to rob and kill you using the most common tools and implements. Still, they breathe water and they’re far away from here, so no­body’s much worried about them. Then in pops this creature reprocessed as one of the Chalidang, and with a totally new form and no briefing nor much else, the damned thing man­ages to disarm its captors, kill several of these folk who are lifelong professionals at it and know everything about their race, and before it even knew the name of the place, it had taken over and totally commanded a village halfway to the capital. It’s a meritocracy of sorts, up to the born nobles. You kill the sergeant, you’re the sergeant, and everybody else is conditioned to obey authority without question. So if you can’t kill ’em, you swear allegiance. Then you kill the lieu­tenant, you get all the sergeants, and so on. If you keep offing the chain of command, you’ll be running things in no time. If any superior officer nails you, game over, you see.”

“Pleasant sounding place,” Tann Nakitt commented. Sounds like where I just left, only cruder.

“Oh—yes, quite. Well, this sort of thing impressed the nobility, so they brought down an army of their best and laid siege. When it was clear no victory was possible, this new person surrendered and swore allegiance to the Baron, be­coming in effect a body slave to the victor. Within three months the Baron had a new favorite concubine and pulled a deucedly clear ploy at a royal event, wiping out most of the highest members of the royal family. Some say it was poi­sons, some say electricity, some new methods not seen be­fore. Who can say, since only the winners are left and they don’t write manuals. All that can be said is that the Baron is now Emperor, he’s defied all law and tradition by pro­claiming this new chief concubine Empress, and they are picking and choosing and reorganizing their forces in all new ways, starting with the execution of any noble who doesn’t accept the new Empress. Seems, too, that some of the new Empress’s relations wound up in hexes not far away and there is now coordination. There’s never been the like of it in sheer speed to the top, let alone audacity in action. Gossip says that Baron, now Emperor, Chojitz has never been known as particularly bright or ambitious. A good sol­dier but not a creative one. Seems he was bright enough to recognize a true genius in love, war, and politics.”

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