Ghost of the Well of Souls

we say, a friendly neutral. It is understood, though, that if you betray me, if you do things against our interests, there will be a price. In that case I may ask you to kill someone, or betray someone, or something equally unpleasant to you. And if you screw up my operation in any substantial way, I will cheerfully nail you to the nearest wall and watch you go completely and utterly mad, and then I’ll send you home as an object lesson. Clear?”

“Clear,” Ari responded.

“Now, the reason for all this is that, obviously, I haven’t the personnel nor the method of restraining you. I need to let you go but to be able to count on your presence here and your friendly cooperation. Even when we are a much larger force, which will be quite soon now, I will not be able to guard you. Now, you may be the type to take a chance. Get out, take the pneumatic express back to Kalinda, hop a speeder, get to a central hospital, and plead for help, all in twelve hours. It would be difficult, but you might make it, and we’re not going any farther from your capital than we are now. If you did get there, they’d hook you up to all these dehydration and liquid feeding tubes and such and then they’d put you unconscious for a week or so until your system was back to normal. It might work, but that three-day period can have strange effects on the brain. Misfirings, permanent memory loss in some areas, all sorts of things. You’ll certainly lose something, but you’re almost certain to wind up merging into a single individual. When the brain is forced to rewire, it is hardly going to maintain this neat division. It’s up to you, but I offer it to you as a sporting man. I won’t spare anyone to chase you down, but if you lose your nerve, you’ll get nothing more from me if you fail.”

General Mochida was a very good security chief indeed. Hit us right where it hurts the most, Ari noted.

You said it, Ming responded. Damn it! It’s not fair, at least not to me, she grumped. I mean, I was already violated in just about every way by your damned uncle, and now here I am, a victim again!

Hey! I’m in the same boat, remember!

Yeah, but you deserve to be! If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t have had to go through all that shit the first time!

Like I could have done anything about it? Besides, you were the cop, the big hero type. It was your job to stop him. And remember, no matter what, if I hadn’t knocked you out and gotten you into that lifeboat, you’da been dead when it blew up!

This is supposed to be an improvement? It’s more like a continuation of the same thing! I mean, for all we know your uncle’s still out there someplace cutting throats for fun, and there’s old Josich apparently right on his, her, or its schedule for whatever the bastard had planned in the first place, even if he did get rushed a bit. And here we are, still the victims.

Yeah, Ari agreed, giving a mental sigh. Here we are, all right.

A couple of hours later they finally got around to undoing their bonds, and they’d been restrained so long and undergone such a physical ordeal in the forced withdrawal that it was very hard to get moving again and regain full control of their muscles. They knew they were going to ache for days.

Mochida was either supremely confident in his judgment of them and their willpower, or he didn’t care anymore. They watched as the three large soft-shelled creatures shifted carton after carton until they seemed to have them in a definite order.

In a way, this is almost funny, Ari noted.

I don’t see the humor.

Consider—what would we be doing if we hadn’t been captured? Trying to find an easy way into Sanafe to find out what Chalidang was up to, right?

Yeah? So?

And what are we doing now? Watching the Chalidangers prepare to move to Sanafe and pull whatever they’re going to pull. And for all that drug business, what could we tell Core even now that we haven’t already told her?

It did seem ironic, but considering their situation, Ming could not feel amused.

Two days later they assisted in returning some frozen calamari to life.

“The process isn’t all that unusual,” the sergeant major explained to them. “The difference is that we had to adapt to a semitech hex where the normal computer controls just weren’t going to work. We used the highest tech cryogenic gear to create their state of suspended animation, but instead of putting them in the normal storage cells, our design team came up with these. The materials and workmanship are beyond anything a semitech hex could produce, but they weren’t produced here. The same way as you Kalindans have built that pneumatic railway of yours, we can make things there and, if they don’t require any of the forbidden technological sources to work, they come in and function just fine. Now, though, comes the tricky part. We’ve tapped into the steam vents used in the pneumatic system, and by doing so we’ve got fairly good control of our storage water temperature, but each of these must still be warmed slowly to a precise point, then the liquid drained into tanks and replaced with regulated steam.”

“Do you think this kind of thing will work?” Ming asked skeptically.

“Oh, yes. It worked on me, didn’t it?”

There was no good reply to that, so they did what was asked of them in hooking up various hoses and pushing forward needed equipment, and let the sergeant do his business.

Still, Ming was skeptical. “Even if this works,” she noted, “it’s gonna take weeks to properly thaw out this crowd.”

“Not at all,” the General responded behind them. “Once we get a few out and restored to functionality, they will be able to handle more of it, and so on. We allowed an extra two days over training for full recovery from the process, but other than that we were able to have everyone treated and functional within five very crowded or seven much less crowded days. We will do it as quickly as we can for the simple reason that we have limited supplies and even more limited space here. These are among our best, but they are not among our nicest folk, and while they can go hungry for days and days under highest stress conditions, that level in a hex like this, full of easily available and totally vulnerable food, would make it difficult to control them. No, we move as quickly as possible. We must be in Sanafe in seven days.”

To their fascinated observations, the process did indeed seem to work. It was amazing how large a creature they could get out of those boxes, considering that they all had rigid exo-skeletons, but these were soldiers born and bred, and probably genetically engineered. And if Mochida and the others had nasty mouths and cold, huge eyes, this crew, once it regained full consciousness and movement, seemed to hate everything and everybody they looked upon, even each other.

But they clearly feared General Mochida.

“Let me make a few things clear here,” he told each group after a dozen or so at a time were being thawed out and put into recovery exercises. “First, you eat rations, you eat nothing else. The Kalindan over there, for example, is my personal assistant in this region. Anyone who eats her will discover that she will be extracted from his gullet—through the shell. Other lapses in discipline should recall not only our military traditions in such matters but also those of your families back home. This is not a game. You were chosen because you were right for this job, but none of you have really gone head-to-head against an alien foe before nor spent much time in alien nations. Our allies lost thousands dead battling in a strategically placed semitech hex, and they lost. We are but three hundred when we are done, and this is a semitech hex, and our objective is a nontech environment. Our task is hard enough. We don’t need you adding to the burden. Follow orders and this could be an easy task that covers us all with glory. Decide that the enemy is a bunch of silly, soft, inferior primitives who couldn’t possibly do you harm, and you will join the dead of Ochoa. Believe me. As many exercises, war games, and simulations as you have been on, and as long as your training was, it pales before the real thing. I do not believe you can be beaten if you stick together, work as a team, and follow orders precisely. I do believe you can just as easily beat yourselves. Understand?”

“Yes, sir!” they would chant, and go off to help thaw out the others.

The reason for the infiltration method was clear: the Yabbans would never have permitted a large military force to come through their domain. The Yabbans were trying to play both sides and hope to stay out of it, but