Ghost of the Well of Souls

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.”