The Sea is Full of Stars

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.