Ghost of the Well of Souls

enough to be incapable of becoming a threat.”

“Indeed? Then you know what Kincaid is?”

The ambassador hesitated a moment. “Yes, I do. And Chalidang will either dig it out or figure it out as well. Not that it will give Josich any comfort, but it may make her even more impatient and desperate. Kincaid is a hell of a threat to the Emperor, perhaps more than we are, but as they gain knowledge, they may be able to contain or even trap him.”

“So? What is he?” O’Leary and Nakitt asked almost as one.

“That remains a secret for now, in the hope that it will cause Chalidang to remain nervous for a while longer. Eventually they’ll figure it out, but until then it keeps them on their guard and perhaps throws them off. We made an agreement with Citizen Kincaid. He does no more revenge in Zone, and we few keep his secret.”

“You can’t trust his word,” O’Leary warned. “He’s a lunatic with only one mission in life.”

“He’ll keep his word to us. Otherwise, we’ll exchange his invisibility for a very large target and drop him at the Chalidang embassy.”

Abudan, Capital of Yabbo

Now that was a ride! Ming’s enthusiasm was not matched by Ari, who shared everything with her except her soul.

I feel like I’ve been beat up, stuck in a garbage disposal, and run through a grinder, Ari grumped.

The steam-powered cars had pretty obviously not been built for Kalindans, but even if they had been, he doubted that he’d have liked them. He had never been much for simulators, roller coasters, or anything else that wasn’t extremely comfortable. While he’d always understood why people like pilots had to go through stuff like that, he’d never understood why others thought people like him would enjoy such things just for laughs.

Party pooper! I sure won’t get any fun sharing a body with the likes of you!

Maybe not, but you’ll grow older and also keep your dinners down.

Traveling in the cars was like being packed into an aerated tin can and shot from point to point out of pressurized guns, and it was fast. Abudan, the capital city, was almost in the dead center of the hex, or roughly two hundred kilometers from the border. Under normal circumstances that was quite a swim. With all this murky soup they called water, it would have been several days of slow and miserable work. Now, here they were in only six hours, although the aches and pains were beginning to show.

Nor were they the only Kalindans to take this route. Possibly because of the slow going and low visibility, almost all the neighboring hexes seemed to use it. Since the Kalindans were fabricating and assembling a good deal of both the large and local systems, there were a lot of them around.

The city itself was huge, at least on the scale of Kalinda’s own capital of Jinkivar. It seemed even larger because it was low to the ground. Few buildings rose more than four stories, yet the population was approaching a million of the lobsterlike Yabbans. They were by no means reclusive, either, going to and fro in such great numbers that they seemed a steady stream filling the streets. They tended to keep to the bottom. Rising only as required allowed fish and related creatures who preferred swimming—a group that included Kalindans— the upper reaches.

Where are they going? Ari wondered.

Maybe it s rush hour, Ming responded, taken aback herself. The place seemed so damned busy, even by the most active and crowded of Terran standards, let alone Kalindan ones.

“First time in the city?” a voice asked them. They turned and saw a portly Kalindan with both a backpack and large travel case emerging from the station.

“Yes,” Ming responded. “It’s all so—overwhelming. What do they all do?”

The other laughed. “That is a question no one dares ask, not because it’s any mysterious plot but because one of them might stop and try and explain it all to you. I assure you, after that you will be totally confused. I think our translators and certain common traits involving commerce and trade blind us to the fact that all of us are truly alien species to the others. Cheer up! They’re friendly!”

She laughed. “I gathered that much.”

“Where are you staying? Do you know your way around the city?”

Ming hesitated. They had no plans. “We hadn’t really thought of it. The budget is tight, though.”

“I see! You young people! I suppose the parents decided while you waited for some university slot you should see a bit of the world, eh?”

“Something like that.” It was also hard getting used to having a teenager’s body—albeit a very different body than the ones they’d grown up in. The Well World essentially reset newcomers, not to a child—that would have insulted their intelligence and been another hurdle to handle—but as a postpubescent young adult. The others had been similarly deaged, as it were, although with a few races it was hard to tell.

“Well, this is certainly the direction in spite of the problems. Come with me! There’s a sort of Kalindan colony here under a filtered dome. I’ll take you there. If worse comes to worse, you won’t be the first or last to sleep at the top of the dome!”

They followed the Kalindan, wondering about the friendliness of their fellow country people.

I don’t remember folks back in Kalinda being all this friendly and helpful, Ari noted.

Me, neither. I have memories of being tossed around and locked up a lot. It might just be that we’re all in a foreign land, or it might be something else.

You think we’re being led?

Maybe. Or maybe both of us have just been in the undercover business too long. Either way, it gets us where we need to go.

“You lead and we’ll follow, Citizen… er?”

“Mitchuk. I’m an engineering technician specializing in epoxies.”

“Epoxies?”

“Glues. Cements. Sealants. Things that stick to one another forever. You just rode one of the trains. Can you imagine what would happen if any of those seals had come apart in transit?”

You mean they didn’t? “Uh, yeah. I suppose. I never really thought about it.”

“Well, that’s the part of my job that’s both satisfying and a bit frustrating. I know if I did it right, lives are safe due to my work. Still, if I do it right, nobody ever notices the work, which is quite difficult and demanding. If you do it wrong, of course, you lose all that satisfaction and, well, you wind up heading the news in at least two hexes.”

Like the other Kalindans who worked in the hex, Mitchuk swam much faster and more confidently than they did, but they managed to keep up, going perhaps ten meters over the roofs of the tallest structures in the city and avoiding much of the mob below. The site of those vast hordes packed in and going this way and that on unknown missions reminded them less of underwater denizens than, again, of an insect colony. It was also noisy, but the din was steady and at a reasonable level. They quickly learned to tune it out.

They went right through the center of the city and found the only point where Yabbans weren’t densely packed. It was a large hexagonal building with a domelike roof. Even though they couldn’t see inside, they knew what had to be there. Just as in all the other hexes, there was a single large hexagonal opening of impenetrable dull black, made of nothing and built into nothing. It simply—existed.

The Zone Gate.

Passing through it or any Zone Gate would take denizens of the Well World to an entry point in South Zone appropriate for the life-form in terms of atmosphere, pressure, and so on. It would take them nowhere else, and the other Gates within South Zone—save the one to North Zone that only the experts dared—would bring them back home to their own hex through its Zone Gate.