07. Ghost of the Well of Souls (35 page)

They were new sorts of creatures for her, like giant bipedal bugs with shiny chocolate-brown exoskeletons, feelers, and, as incongruously as the Alkazarians, some sort of uniform. Both also had nasty-looking rifles in their hands, and they were both pointed directly at her.

"Come down and tell your associates to come out as well," the creature on the left instructed.

"I will come down, but I believe that if you wish the others, you will have to go up there and get them," she told the pair. With that she began walking straight toward them.

"Halt! That is far enough!" the one on the right snapped, rifle up and primed.

She kept walking toward them.

They both fired at the same time, point-blank, at a range of two meters and using weapons that had a range of one kilometer.

Their claws kept clicking on the leverlike trigger but nothing happened. She walked right up to them, then between them and past them. Then she stopped, turned, and looked at them both along with the car.

"They can't
both
be broken!" one of the creatures snapped. "Not at the same time!"

"If you will just walk away, this will be a closed incident," she told them. "I have already forgiven you."

"Like Hell I will!" one snapped, and whirled and ran right for her, close enough to touch her. Only it didn't. It somehow veered to the left of her, stumbled and fell.

She looked down at the thing. "Such violence! 1 shall not permit it!"

The other one clung tightly to its malfunctioning weapon and stared at both her and its companion yet did not move. It was so confused that it didn't realize there were now two Pyrons behind it, looking down on it, hoods flaring.

"Jirminins," Har Shamish said disgustedly. "They won't spook. They'll just keep trying and trying until it kills them."

As if to confirm this, the confused soldier still standing turned and with one motion tried to use the rifle as a club against the nearest Pyron.

Har Shamish's huge mouth opened, came down on the hapless Jirminin and swallowed it whole. Jaysu was sickened by the sight, yet she knew that the diplomat had spoken the truth. She nodded and turned to the other, just now getting up.

"I am very sad when anything dies, particularly on my account," she told her companions, "but better for food than for nothing." In truth, it had been and might remain for a while a crisis of conscience for her, but it had all happened too fast for her to react.

While she was still in semi-shock, O'Leary was on the other soldier in a flash.

"Bleah!"
Har Shamish said, making a strange and ugly face. It sounded as if he were going to throw up, but what he extracted with a tentacle to his mouth was the rifle he'd swallowed along with the creature.

He studied the rifle. "Tell me—is it broken, or will it work?"

"It will work, I suppose," she answered. "But you know I have the same constraints on you as on them."

"That's all right. A weapon used in anger is one that failed its job. It's the threat of it that counts." He looked around and discovered they had been observed by a whole gallery of Alkazarians, both uniformed railway workers and some security personnel. He picked out the security officer with the highest evident rank and pointed with the rifle.
"You!"
he shouted menacingly.
"Come here!"

The officer came, mumbling apologies and excuses with abandon.

"Oh, shut up!" Shamish snapped. "
Nothing
here goes on without the security police knowing and approving. And aliens with
guns,
too! Now, would you like to show your appreciation that you backed the wrong side in this matter, or would you rather I had
dessert
?"

The Alkazarian's sharp intake of breath, and the eyes, which looked like somebody having a stroke, gave the answer.

Shamish used the rifle, whose panel said it was fully armed, as a pointer, much to the security officer's terror. It was nice to put the little bastards on the other side of the fear barrier now and then!

"Now, some answers from you. How did those two Jirminins get here? Who allowed them here with weapons to engage in an act of war?"

"N-N-N-No, Your Excellency! You misunderstand! It was no act of war! They came across the border with their guns! Some took control of the station, then sent these others for you!"

"That's crap and you know it!" O'Leary started in. "They couldn't
move
around here without permission. The whole damned Alkazarian garrison in this area would have been on them with everything they had." The serpent's head came down to within centimeters of the security officer's nose.

"Look, Excellencies! I'm not a high officer! I follow orders! My orders came from my commander, who received his orders from local governmental command! We do not question our orders! We didn't even
like
this! Foreigners allowed to have weapons, to
use
them, within
our
country! But you must understand—if I am ordered, I must do it or it is I who will be eliminated and replaced by someone who
will
follow the orders!"

"He is telling the truth," Jaysu told them. "He does not know anything else."

Shamish's head bobbed a moment, then he asked, "All right, then. These two weren't alone. Who were the others? What did they look like, and where did they go?"

"I— Oh, my! I have a family! I am being watched even now!"

O'Leary had a sudden thought. "Jaysu, could you do for all the cameras around here what you did for the lights in the car?"

"I can try. It may give me a headache. There are a lot of them."

She closed her eyes again, and almost immediately there was the sound of small explosions all around, like large light-bulbs bursting one by one. As each sounded, one of the small mounted cameras seemed to explode and fly apart.

She was right. There were a lot of cameras. O'Leary sympathized with her headache problem.

"All right, now we can talk and nobody can ever prove it," Har Shamish said to the official. "The others—what did they look like?"

"One was a spider!" the terrified little creature almost squeaked. "A big, huge spider. The others were normal size, but very unlike anything we know here. Bent over, hairy, but in some ways like her."

Jaysu realized that "normal size" to the officer was
his
size. "They had wings? And were covered with fur?"

"Yes, yes! That's it!"

"Wally. Wally and his companions."

"Figures," O'Leary muttered. "So, what did they unload from the car in back?"

The little man was so terrified that it never occurred to him to ask how they could have known about any of this.

"Big crates. I don't know what was in them. They were consigned here, to be transshipped to Quislon. They loaded them on a motorized cart and went away, south. The border is only about ten kilometers due south of here."

"You have no idea what was in them?"

"No! I swear! They did not open them!"

O'Leary looked around. "Anything powered and reasonably fast available that we can take to the border? And I mean
now
!
Before the army shows up to find out why they can't see us?"

"There's a small maintenance vehicle over there! Simple electric, fast. Take it, please!"

O'Leary went over to the other side of the platform and looked at the thing. It wasn't a familiar design but looked straightforward enough. Basically a flat bed, no stakes, about three meters square, and a driver's seat up front that was too small to be comfortable. The thing seemed to work by hitting a forward or reverse button and then steering with an oversized joystick.

"If this runs out of fuel before we reach the border, then you will wish you were executed," he warned the security man. "Because, no matter the risk to me, if you're betraying us again, you will discover what it is like to be eaten alive and slowly dissolved."

The security officer stiffened, then fainted dead away.

Shamish and Jaysu walked over to the little cart and managed to get onto the back. There wasn't much to hold onto except the guardrail separating the driver from the flat bed, but it would do.

"Think you can handle it?" the vice-consul asked the agent.

"I don't think it's a problem. All set?"

"Yes, as much as we can be."

"All right, here goes!"

The front panel lit up, and he pushed the top of the two buttons and eased the joystick forward. The thing moved, slowly, out of the loading dock area and into the warehouses beyond. They could see the street on the other side, and were to it in a moment. Then, abruptly, they stopped.

"Something wrong?" Shamish asked him.

"Yeah. Which way is south?"

There wasn't much sky to get a solar fix, and they couldn't read the local signs. Worse, all of them abruptly realized that they'd never asked the little creature if this in fact was where they were supposed to be.

Had to be, they finally decided. Otherwise why would Wally have been here?

Har Shamish said, "To your right! See the hex marker?"

"Yes! Oh—I see! International border sign. How thoughtful!"

And they were off into the night, feeling all right, but knowing there were enemies in front of them and, almost certainly, Alkazarians heading toward them from the rear who would be no pushovers.

"It's time to get out of this rotten, stinking place," Har Shamish muttered, as much to himself as to Jaysu. "Besides, on top of everything else, it's too cold!"

The rail head wasn't much of a town, and they were soon out on a smooth, paved, but narrow road. If the hex sign and arrow could be believed, it would bring them to the hoped-for Quislon border.

Jaysu could hardly see in this darkness, but she looked back and also up worriedly. "Do you think they are actually pursuing us?"

"Not vigorously," Shamish replied. "If they really wanted to catch us, they'd have air units here now harassing us and blocking our progress. That makes me think that the little bastard—pardon—will be all right. They all put their necks out to lay this trap for us at this end, and I suspect our friend Wally paid handsomely to allow it to happen here. The Alkazarian government certainly has been helping them, but they're too nationalistic and too paranoid to bring it to this deliberately from the national level. They didn't have to do it at all. No, our buddies up front bribed some local big shot who will now be far more concerned with covering his rear end than in coming down hard on anybody, even us. By the way— that was a slick trick and a lifesaver, what you did. Do you have any more powers we don't know about?"

"I do not think that I have these powers, since I have not known of them until I needed them," she answered. "Rather, I believe the divine is working through me."

He sighed. "Suit yourself. But I sure wish we knew what dear old Wally got shipped all the way up here, so big and so bulky that he needed to import some soldiers with him to do heavy lifting."

"Might they be some sort of terrible weapon? I do not think anything is beyond him if it is in his assignment. He is not evil in Mr. O'Leary's sense, I do not think, but he is totally, absolutely, the most completely amoral individual I have ever encountered. Life to him is a game, and he plays it with great joy. He does not care who he works for, or who he hurts or helps, nor how many might be injured or killed, but he does not deliberately seek to do that, either. He lives life as a series of challenges, the more impossible the better. Right now, I believe he is having a great deal of fun."

"Well, it wouldn't be a weapon," Har Shamish assured her. "At least not anything on the scale we'd think of if the challenge was in Alkazar, say. Quislon is a nontech hex, like your own. Nothing will work there that wouldn't work in Ambora." The great head shook slowly from side to side. "Big crates. What in the
world
would he be taking into a nontech hex that would be that huge or complex? And for what?"

"We know one thing, at least," O'Leary called back from the driver's seat. "We know he's after the piece of the Gate, and we know the only time and place that he can reasonably get access to it. I've been there. Talk about impossible! If that spidery son of a bitch can pull this off there, with half the population of Quislon looking on, and us there expecting something at every turn, then maybe he deserves to get it!"

The road ended in a large circle with a great deal of room for parking. Inevitably, there was a substantial Customs station there as well, and it looked well-lit. O'Leary pulled over just short of getting into easy viewing range by the station and stopped the cart.

"Well, we might have known
that
,"
he said. "So, what do we do from here? Walk?"

"They're certain to have a major fence system along here, maybe with robotic sentinels," Har Shamish said. "I think our best bet is just to ride up there, present our documents and demand to go through."

O'Leary stared at him. "You're kidding! They'll have to know what we did back there, and these guys won't be so loyal to the local government. You really think they're just going to let us out?"

"I do. Or, at least, better we are trying as aliens to
leave
than to stay. I think they'll be glad to be rid of us. If they know, if they've been notified, then we'll have to deal with them some other way."

"I say we just use the rifles and blast through," the cop said, reaching down for his.

"I suspect they'd repel any weapons fire. No, I think we just go through and that's that. These guns are no good once we cross the border anyway, so I say we just toss 'em."

Jaysu looked out at the station only a half kilometer away. "I could fly over that thing," she told them. "And over the border, too."

"You probably could, but the question is, would their automated equipment target you and shoot you down if you tried? Or
could
it?" O'Leary was beginning to wonder about her powers.

"Possibly. Possibly not. I do not know. However, I agree with Har Shamish. Throw the rifles away. I do not believe that these ahead will be any different in kind or nature than the others. I simply will not permit them to act against us."