07. Ghost of the Well of Souls (32 page)

Damn it!
They
might be super warriors born, bred, and trained, but
we
aren 't!
Ari grumbled.

Itsure ain't the restaurant on the
City of Modar,
is it?
Ming agreed.

Not only did breathing sting, but it also stung their eyes and any open sores they had. It was damned uncomfortable.

The water was murky, too, not from organic creatures, but from turbulence and minerals escaping from hot fumeroles and, here and there, red-hot seeping lava vents.

There was a surprising amount of life around the vents, and even the life-forms that gathered around the heat and steam seemed like little monsters rather than genuine creatures of the sea.

They mustered on a plateau overlooking the hell, where the water had surprising cold spots but the sulfur was less. It was here that the functional but skeletal end of the line had brought them, operated on this end by just a couple of nervous Kalindans who seemed anxious to finish up and get the hell out of there.

The Chalidangers were very impressive in their own way, hovering in formation, precisely in line in three full dimensions: 302, including the General and his staff, warrant officers, captains, lieutenants, sergeants, and 244 commandos. They looked tough, sounded tough, but without weapons, they still represented only the largest potential squid fry on the Well World.

To Ming and Ari's surprise, they saw the sergeant major select out four enlisted men and bring them to a large crate out of which they pulled several thin, lightweight environment suits, or at least that's what they looked like.

How'd they get sophisticated stuff like those, do you suppose?
Ming wondered.
And, more to the point, without electrical power or energy packs, how the hell are they gonna operate the suckers?

As it turned out, they had large backpacks attached, which appeared to circulate and filter properly mineralized water through the suit without using a power plant. The movement of just a few of the tentacles, and the natural pulsing of the Chalidang body, was sufficient to force the water through the filters, so cleverly were they designed.

You realize those things mean that they can walk on ships or land?
Ari commented, amazed.

Yeah. Just like back home. Only I doubt if the same principles would work for strictly air breathers or most others unless they had all that designed for kinetic energy power. It gives them a major advantage if they need it.

It didn't take long for them to vanish above, and within a few minutes two of them were descending once more with strong cables. A winch was set up on the rock floor and bolted into the rock by sheer muscle power. Within less than an hour, supplies were being gently lowered on the makeshift system from another ship parked above.

Then came the armor and the weapons.

Extremely nasty-looking harpoons in spring-loaded barrels and stocks designed for Chalidang tentacles; barbed netting that could also be shot from a specially designed spring-loaded gun and expanded when it struck something. There were other equally vicious-looking things that they didn't recognize but could see that the purpose was lethal.

The Chalidangers had large spiral-shaped shells that undulated regularly back and forth as well as inflated and deflated to meet certain demands. They could even stand some misshaping, but the consistency, while not chitinous, was like the thickest leather and tough enough to resist anything but very direct blows. These shells now received a hard outer shell of some lightweight plastic or polymer material that, Ming wagered, was at the very minimum bulletproof, each "suit" emblazoned with their rank and the Imperial seal of Chalidang. Only the eyes, still protected by their own small compartments on either side, had any exposure at all. The tentacles were the weak point, but someone would have to get an object directly into the mouth to hurt one of them, and while these guys were big, they were also fast and agile in the water.

Now they hovered in formation, divided into squads and companies, waiting for inspection in turn by their lieutenants, captains, and majors, as the General and his colonels looked on.

They looked good.

"Soldiers of the Empire!" the General shouted to them, pride obvious in his voice. "You have suffered much in training, and risked death from an experimental cold process, and now you've been shot here in great tubes. Now you are outfitted, and the enemy is not five kilometers to the north. This evening, we will train in full gear here on this plateau. This night you will eat of the best Chalidang can offer. Then you must rest, for tomorrow we will meet one more time like this, just at dawn, and we will go together into Sanafe and glory! We have but one true objective. To attain it, we will require from you a victory. You are ready. The enemy knows we are here but not who we are nor what we can do. Tomorrow, we will show him."

"Yes, sir!" they all responded as one, sounding eager.

"To your commanders, then! Dismissed!"

As they broke into their component units and set off for their maneuvers, the General shot back over to them. He looked grand in his battle armor, but his men knew that he did not expect to need it.

"What about
our
battle armor?" Ari asked him.

The General chuckled. "I'm afraid you are observers in this. No weapons, no participation. Just try and stay out of the way and do not interfere in this matter. You know nothing of Sanafe nor who and what is a major threat there, nor do you understand what we are doing and why. You understand that it is dangerous. That's sufficient."

"Yeah? Well, what happens if things go bad and we don't have anybody around who knows to give us that stuff the next time we need it?"

"Then get to the surface and board the ship up there. It might not take you where you'd rather go, but it will have what you require and know what to do with you."

I'm not sure I liked the way he put that,
Ari noted.

Yeah. Me, neither,
Ming agreed.

Watching the battle tactics and maneuvers did them little good in figuring out how things would come off in the real world. After all, neither of them even knew what the place five kilometers north looked like, nor anything at all about the inhabitants.

But they knew they would know, perhaps a few hours after dawn tomorrow morning.

*     *     *

The looming Well boundary was becoming familiar to them now, but it never ceased to amaze them anyway. They knew that it didn't stop at the surface but went all the way to some point perhaps a hundred kilometers up in space, and that these energy walls actually sealed in each of the 1,560 hexes on the Weil World. Inside each, almost any limitations might be placed, and also inside each, the entire biosphere might be radically different from just on the other side of the barrier.

Cold, hot, salty or brackish, even the middle of a vast ocean here could hold almost anything, both in environmental and in dominant species terms.

They kept well to the rear and close to the General and the two colonels, who, they knew, would fight if they had to but otherwise would direct from the rear. Not that these guys looked like they needed direction; they were smart and sharp, the really scary kind of soldiers that you knew instinctively were very good at their job. If the rest of Chalidang's army looked like this, it was no wonder everybody was scared shitless of them.

They pierced the opaque curtain in front of them and swam into Fairyland.

The hex was either quite high in elevation or designed to simulate a continental shelf, since it was relatively shallow and required an immediate steep climb to get to the "level" of the place, even though they'd begun atop a high plateau in Yabbo. Anybody wanting to secure the borders could certainly use that shelf and drop to good advantage, particularly if it held all around.

The land that stretched out before them was linked more closely to the sun than any other underwater realm they'd encountered before. The whole sea floor was a riot of sunlit shapes and colors, twisting, turning, some places with crevices, others with craterlike holes or caves, but all of it just covered in life.

The land itself was made up of things that had once been alive. When they died, they died in place, and were soon covered by the next generation of living things, which then died and were covered, and so on. Now rising hundreds of meters from the sea floor, the bottom layers, tens of thousands of years worth or more, had been compacted into rock that retained much of the color and texture of the living stuff on top.

"Be careful and stay out of contact with the reefs themselves," the General warned them. "Coral is an animal, a carnivore, in fact, and there are lots of surprises even uglier living among and within the stuff. Nothing here may be what it seems, and all of it is dangerous."

Wow! Now
that
was a real confidence builder!
Ari commented.
I'm going to sleep better tonight knowing everything here is out to eat me.

Coulda been worse,
she reminded him.

Huh?

Core wanted us here on our own, remember, and I don't recall her sending us a briefing book.

They saw many demonstrations of what Mochida warned them against as they traveled along and just above the reefs that seemed to stretch out forever in front of them. Nasty heads of very large creatures full of teeth emerged from concealed holes in the reef and gobbled up fish as they swam past. Even schools of big fish weren't immune; things that looked like the gently waving but at least permanently planted coral suddenly moved, showing themselves instead to be all poisonous tentacles, grasping and paralyzing and then drawing in fish half their size.

The beauty was not merely skin deep, it was a deliberate trap for the unwary.

Still, thousands of fish and crustaceans and creatures they couldn't classify darted in and out of the coral, used it for protection, or even fed off the smaller creatures, down to plankton-sized levels, and off some of the coral itself in a few cases.

The coral was set up in colonies, with relatively barren gaps of lower rock and sand between, but it was more continuous than a set of islands. The gaps were brief, and it seemed only the larger fish and good-sized predators left one to go to the next.

Nor were any two beds exactly alike; some creatures were found only in one area and not in another, while the colors and even the types and shapes of coral changed as well.

It was easy to be mesmerized by the beauty and complexity of it all, but so much kill or be killed was going on that it kept jolting you back to reality.

So which are the Sanafeans?
Ari wondered, and received a mental shrug from Ming.

Ahead, the commando squads fanned out, forming a nearly V-shaped formation with top officers inside the V. It was clear from the lack of serious attention they were paying to the pageant unfolding below them that the natives were not these pretty carnivores or concealed sea snakes.

"What do the natives
do
here that requires thinking at all, on more than the survival level?" Ming wondered aloud. "It doesn't seem like there are any built structures, no roads, no signs of what we think of as civilization at all."

"They manage the place, more or less," the General replied. "Oh, they cultivate their own reefs and try and outdo each other in artistic skills, something that is certainly lost on me, and they herd and cross-breed to ensure species survival and balance, and the rest of the time they fight each other, except when they're meditating upon and worshiping their gods. They don't quite make sense to the likes of us, but I've learned to accept that as just the way things are between many species. I doubt if we make any sense to them, for example."

"So why do you have to fight them? Respect, by their rules?"

"Something like that. In fact, one of their trophies for beating another clan in a fight is something we require. They don't know the significance of it beyond the trophy stage, but we do."

"Ah! I see! So you beat them and they give
you
the thing, huh?"

"Something like that. Ho! Stay back and be careful! We're about to be challenged!"

He broke off and darted back to his position just behind the colonels in the V, which had now come to a sudden, tense halt and was clearly waiting for something to happen.

I don't see anybody. Do you?

Ming was amused.
Like I can see what you don't? I
—
uh-oh! Wait a minute. . .

The Sanafeans were not coming from the riot of coral below, but from the near surface above. Big black shapes that seemed to be huge oval mouths with wings on them.

"Send up the buoy!" the General ordered, and immediately one of the colonels removed something from his pack and pulled a tab. It inflated with compressed air and rose to the surface, trailing a long thin line which the colonel now hammered into the nonliving coral base below with just one blow.

"Sweet Jesus! How many of those things
are
there?" Ari wondered aloud. The Sanafeans seemed to suddenly fill the field of view above and in front of them. Ten, twenty . . . maybe a hundred or more of the things.

They could now see that they resembled not winged mouths, but giant manta rays. The mouths, though, protruded and had vicious-looking fangs on both sides, leaving little to the imagination as to what else might be hidden inside. They also had long, very thin prehensile tails the equal of their body length, and at the end of each tail was a spread of what might be called three "fingers," with an extended and controllable opposite "lip" that worked like an ultrawide thumb.

"Stop and turn back, invaders, or we will destroy you!" the huge, leading Sanafean thundered. Through the translator, he sounded supernatural and authoritarian; the voice of the underwater god.

One of the junior officers at the point of the V responded: "Who speaks like this to the forces of mighty Chalidang, Empire of the Overdark, lords of all they wish to rule?"