The figure stopped, staring for a moment at the huge, looming creature only half-visible in the darkness, its red eyes blazing. “That you, Marquoz?” he called.
“Yeah, it’s me,” he replied. “Come ahead. We were beginning to give up on you.”
All fires had been extinguished on the sound of the alert, but now they were being restoked. He stepped up to the nearest one, shivered slightly in the slight chill, and nodded in satisfaction.
He was dressed in a pea-green tunic and trousers and wore sandals. His hair was extremely long, down past his shoulders, and he looked slightly weather-beaten and somewhat older than Marquoz remembered—but, then, he’d been here awhile.
Marquoz guessed that the real Brazil probably looked exactly like this one, even to the clothing.
“Any problems?” Brazil asked casually.
“Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Marquoz told him. “You wouldn’t like Glathriel. It’s pretty unpleasant. Plantation slavery. But, still, we got through without a shot fired, much to the disappointment of some of the boys. I’ll give you a rundown later.”
Brazil nodded. “Well, we’ll have a fight now. If I were the opposition, I’d try and get a force in between ours and Mavra’s before we can link up. Might be hairy if we can’t make time.”
Marquoz stared at him suspiciously. For a moment he found himself wondering, wondering if this was, indeed, Gypsy. The mannerisms, the tone and accent, they were all consistent with Brazil. Could it be . . . ?
And then Brazil reached into his tunic and pulled out a cigarette, reached down for an ember and lit it.
Marquoz felt better.
Brazil made a face as he inhaled. “Local stuff,” he muttered grumpily. “Almost all cigar and pipe tobacco. Not really good for cigarettes.”
“We all have to make sacrifices in war,” Marquoz responded with mock sympathy.
At that moment the humans in the party could not be restrained and started running for the small figure by the fire. He looked up at the commotion, his face a mixture of shock and revulsion.
They prostrated themselves before him and cried out, “Nathan Brazil! Master! We are your servants! Speak and we shall obey!”
He looked at them, a whole range of conflicting emotions passing across his face. Finally he went up to the leading humans.
“Look up at me,” he said softly, and they did.
He studied their young faces and forms thoughtfully. Finally he said, almost to himself, “Maybe this god business has some advantages after all. . . .” He looked over at Marquoz. “How many?” he asked.
“Eighteen female, two male,” the Hakazit responded.
Brazil nodded. “Maybe this trip won’t be such a holy terror after all,” he murmured. “Eighteen . . .”
Gypsy, Marquoz thought, was showing through a bit.
Zone
“brazil’s been seen.”
The report startled Serge Ortega. Somehow he hadn’t quite expected it to be this easy.
“Where?” he asked sharply.
“With the Southern force. Apparently he’s been on a ship on the Sea of Turagin all this time. Rowed ashore and joined them just south of the Ginzin border.”
Ortega frowned suspiciously. “Are you sure it’s him? These are tricky bastards we’re dealing with, and he’s the trickiest.”
“It’s him,” the messenger assured him. “Some of our people with the force have seen and talked to him and the Entries in the group are acting like God Himself just paid them a call.”
The Ulik nodded absently and switched off. Brazil. Visible, easily located, ripe for the plucking, with over three-thousand kilometers left to go to the nearest Avenue. It smelled wrong, somehow. It was too obvious, too blatant, too much a dumb mistake in an operation that had been, so far, beautifully planned and executed. It was as if, with everything going his way, Brazil had suddenly popped up and shouted, “Here I am! Come and get me!”
And he was vulnerable. Except for death, he wasn’t immune to anything that could happen to anyone else. He suffered pain and torment, and he was wide open to everything from hypno devices to magic.
He punched in a communications code. “Central Command,” answered a translator-pitched voice.
“This is Ortega. Now that the information about Brazil has come in, what does Commander Sangh intend?”
The communications officer hesitated. “Sir, I don’t think we can give that out right now. Not even to you, sir.”
He growled. “I’m coming down there. Something’s very wrong here, and I want to make sure there are no slip-ups.” He switched off angrily and slithered from behind his great U-shaped desk and out the door.
It was still bad in the corridors; there seemed no end to the Entries, and he knew he couldn’t protect them much longer. If Brazil were captured, or even if they thought they had him, a lot of restraints would suddenly ease around the world.
Central Command was located in the Czillian Embassy, simply because Czill had the best, most sophisticated computers and records and it provided easy access. The machines in the embassy were compatible with the ones in Czill, and information could quickly be traded back and forth by simply having the Czillians take the computer storage modules between home and embassy.
It was crowded, though, with many races, all with forces in the critical area. For one of Ortega’s bulk, he had to watch it or get injured by accident by some spiked or poisonous or other lethal creature just trying to keep out of the way.
He spotted Sadir Bakh, the Dahbi second-in-command who was Gunit Sangh’s alter ego in Zone. Ortega didn’t like the Dahbi much, although with his racial command policies he was dealing here with only half a dozen. Had Brazil gone the other way, Sangh wouldn’t have been the commander, but Dahbi would have been in the path of march.
“Bakh! What’s the commander going to do about all this? Where the hell is he, anyway?”
The folded Dahbi turned, looking more like a ghost than ever, and sighed. “His Holiness flew to Cebu with the Cebu commander as soon as the Ambreza situation was resolved,” he said coolly. “He is there now. We have a mixed force of about twenty thousand ready to go in the area, and another force of almost twelve thousand is currently being ferried across Laibir from Conforte to Suffok, which should be sufficient to cut off that route and the Ellerbanta-Verion Avenue. The enemy is currently split into three parts, the Awbrian part consisting of about six thousand natives and roughly two thousand others. Parmiter is remaining officially neutral, but we believe a large part of it has been bought off by the enemy and will supply the technological weaponry the Awbrian force needs.”
“Why doesn’t he bomb the damned factories from Cebu?” Ortega growled.
“As the Ambassador must know, Parmiter is officially on our side. Do we turn probable collaboration into active opposition on a suspicion that some Parmiters—they are a rather anarchistic group, you might recall—are doing us harm?”
Ortega nodded glumly. Damn it, the cards were always stacked on the wrong side.
“You’re forcing them toward the Yaxa-Harbigor Avenue, then,” he noted, looking at the situation map.
“All ours, all armed, all ready and well equipped. It is our feeling that they will go north along the Sea of Storms to avoid as much as possible the high-tech hexes. Once they are north of Boidol, there will be a solid wall of us while they will be in hostile hexes with their backs to the sea at all points. That will effectively isolate the southern and eastern forces from those in Awbri, who will have to break through heavily defended border positions over a long distance to link up. By that time our own forces will be able to move from the Ellerbanta-Verion area to engage them, and that will be that.”
He studied it, then decided it was a good, reasonable, rational plan based on current information—and one that seemed absolutely foolproof. That worried him. The other side read maps and had a fair amount of intelligence itself and would know exactly this. The more he looked at it, the more he thought that he was missing something, he wasn’t sure what. Something wrong. A joker.
He turned to the intelligence chief sitting in front of a computer console. “You have anything out of the ordinary away from the battle lines?” he asked uneasily. “Any reports of any odd occurrences or movements?”
“Nothing much,” the chief told him. “We traced that ship Brazil used on Turagin. He owned it—at least, it was bought with a hell of a lot of money, about nine times the going price. Bought at least two weeks before he got here and outfitted with a nice crew of multiracial freebooters and cutthroats.”
Ortega considered that, too. “Where the hell are they getting the money for all this?” he wondered aloud, and not for the first time. There was no common currency on the Well World—many hexes didn’t use any—and much of it was in large-scale barter-type trade.
The intelligence chief shrugged. “Gold, diamonds, you name it—they got it. Even a bunch of trade goods, food, manufactured items. We can’t trace it, frankly, but I’ll tell you this. Whatever they need they ask for, and whatever price is demanded they pay.”
“I’d like a general intelligence summary for the past two weeks,” he told the intelligence officer. “Somewhere here, I don’t know where, there’s a joker. Somewhere somebody’s laughing at me, and I don’t like it.”
Mowrey, in the Ocean of Shadows
“sail ho!”
Feet rushed in all directions around the deck of the brigantine, everyone going to their alert post.
It was a large ship, and well put-together. Although it had only a small auxiliary engine for aid in emergencies, becalming, and the like, it was primarily wind-powered and well designed for that purpose.
The crew was the usual racial mix, but it had a disproportionate share of one race, a race never seen before in the memory of the Ocean of Shadows, and one which had no reason for being there now.
A young woman, Type 41 human, ran from the wheelhouse back to the crew’s cabin area behind, bare feet padding against the wooden planking. She reached the first door, hesitated a moment, then knocked.
There was a muffled response, and she called out. “Master, there is a ship out there, a big one!”
There was another muffled response, then the sound of someone moving around. After another half-minute or so, the door opened.
“What is it, Lena?” Nathan Brazil asked blearily, rubbing his eyes to get them fully awake.
“A ship! A ship!” she said excitedly, and pointed.
He sighed, went back in for a second and took some water from a bowl, splashing it in his face. “Damn! Just get to sleep and the phone always rings,” he grumbled, then rejoined the girl on the deck. Together they walked back to the wheelhouse.
At the wheel was an enormous, jellylike mass, seemingly engulfing the steering mechanism. It was mostly transparent, but veinlike strands ran all through it and in its middle was a pulsating pink mass.
“What have we got, Torry?” he asked the mate.
Two stalks oozed out of the top of the creature; eye-like nodules formed on the end and it put one on him and one on the sea in front of him. “Steamer,” the mate replied. “Looks like a regular merchantman, but you never can tell. The glasses are over there.” A tendril oozed out of the mass and pointed at a table.
Brazil went over, picked up the binoculars, and peered out. It was still too far to make much of the ship, but they were definitely closing from the looks of the smoke.
“Steady as you go,” he instructed. “Looks like we’ll pass her, so anything out of the ordinary would just arouse suspicion—and this is a high-tech hex, remember. Just the usual. I’ll let Henny do the fronting as usual.” He walked over to one of the speaking tubes, blew into it, then called, “Henny, get up here on the double! Company’s coming!”
By the time the full lines of the big freighter could be made out, Henny was topside and ready, although bitching more than a little. After a duty tour, she had just settled down in her pool below decks when the call had come.
She was an enormous creature, with rolls of fat hanging not only from her huge, brown body but also from her face, or what there was of it. Two tiny little black eyes peered out of the bulk, and it took some close inspection to find the equally tiny black button nose and see that one of the folds was actually an enormous mouth. Sharp dorsal fins protruded from her back, and she pulled herself along on two monstrous front flippers that turned out to be made of a number of long, prehensile flat fingers—two rows of them, in fact. She was the only creature he had ever seen that had six fingers and six opposing long, flat thumbs. Again he reflected that Henny gave new meaning to the term “ugly,” although she insisted that back in Achrin she was considered a real beauty. He had no way of checking the truthfulness of that statement.
She peered out, and he knew that her weak eyes were being augmented by some sort of inborn natural sonar that worked both in air and water.
“Seems routine,” she noted.
He nodded. “Routine, maybe, but any contacts are a danger at this point. You know that.”
“Signals, sir!” Tony called. “I make it as what SHIP AND WHERE BOUND?”
Brazil turned to the woman, still waiting patiently. “Lena, get on the flasher,” he ordered, then sat down on the deck of the wheelhouse, an action that would put him out of sight of any curious onlookers on the approaching ship while still leaving him in a command position.
The woman went out and lit the lamp, waiting a moment until it reached sufficient intensity. She looked over at him then, expectantly.
“Make the following signal,” he ordered. “Windbreaker, Achrin registry, Betared-bound.”
She flipped the signal lever for a little more than a minute, sending out the required pulses, then stopped.
“Add who are you?” he instructed.
That was done quickly, being a standard signal.
“Queen of Chandur,” Torry relayed to Brazil. “Makiem-bound.” He froze for a moment. “I think it’s carrying troops!”
Brazil nodded. “It’s to be expected. Some specialist troops and a lot of war materiel. Wish we had something to sink her with, but it’s a gnat trying to kill a giant here.”
“I might be able to do something,” Henny suggested. “The Mowrey aren’t all that friendly, but they aren’t all that mobile, either. I could probably get a message through to our people to hit them, say, in Kzuco.”
He shook his head. “Uh uh. Too risky. All we need is one word of that and they’ll be out to sink us even if they don’t suspect I’m here. Let it ride. It really doesn’t make much difference anyway.”
She turned and looked at him. “Except that what that ship’s carrying could kill a few thousand people, perhaps ours.”
He shrugged. “Henny, they’re asking me to pull the plug on several quadrillion, maybe more.” He let it go at that.