Ghost of the Well of Souls

Yabbo

General Mochida happily demonstrated his unique method of ensuring that he now had two loyal traveling companions. It was, in fact, a small spiny sea creature that seemed to have too many eyes and not much else but which, by its markings, clearly showed that anyone or anything thinking of eating it should think twice or be poisoned. It was not, however, a creature that Ari and Ming had seen before.

“It’s a gunot,” the General explained cheerfully. “They freeze rather nicely and revive just as quickly—rather simple little things, really—and we have a lot of them here because they are so useful around Kalindans. It seems that the poison the little creature gives off, and, in fact, is just full of, is toxic to all the creatures in its own native hex but not to others. It was discovered, though, quite by accident, that instead of killing Kalindans, it gave them a marvelous boost. The chemistry is very near but not identical to a key enzyme in the Kalindan brain, and when it is introduced into the Kalindan bloodstream, it actually replaces that enzyme. Do not be alarmed. It does a better job than nature, and when it moves into the brain it makes everything feel very, very good. That was the key to its long-ago discovery, in fact. Kalindan medical personnel were looking for a drug that would aid in the cure of certain psychological illnesses. It worked, but was never introduced because, you see, in about twelve hours the body’s defense mechanisms expel the foreign substance. Unfortunately, it takes about three days for that same body to make more of the natural type, and I have had it described to me that those three days are as close as you can come to a descent into Hell. You see where this goes, of course. There was quite a black market in the stuff long ago, until the gunot were almost threatened with extinction, but then they developed an easy test for its presence and managed to stamp things out.”

Holy shit! He’s gonna addict us to a drug! Ming exclaimed to Ari.

Can’t work! Only a true designer drug from the best of labs can addict somebody in one shot!

Maybe for Terrans, but we ain’t Terrans, remember?

There wasn’t that much that could be done about it in any event.

The sergeant major approached with a gas-powered injector that would work in the semitech environment. It was already filled with a very unpleasant-looking yellow bile-colored liquid, and with no hesitancy whatsoever he injected it right into the tail at the hip.

There was a slight sting but nothing major, but they held their breath waiting to see what the stuff would do to them.

“It’s too bad, really, that there are so few of these little devils left, and they refuse to breed in captivity. We’ve tried cloning but the power’s diluted, and we’ve tried mixing the stuff in the lab but it can take dozens of shots before any addictive qualities appear. If we could just make it at will as we do other substances, we could have every single Kalindan under our complete control in a matter of months without a shot being fired. Still, it’s useful when you want to turn someone from enemy to ally, or to keep someone close.”

You can only tense up for so long before you relax after nothing apparently happens. This was what was going on with them, at least as far as they could tell. If it supposedly went to work quickly, then something was wrong.

In fact, all the tension, all the fear, seemed to be ebbing from them, and small sensations of pleasure and contentment, like small waves on a pond, came at them one after the other. It finally occurred to both of them that this indeed was the drug, but it felt so good, the ripples almost orgasmic, that they could not bring themselves to resist, nor did they want to.

“It’s working quite well,” the sergeant commented. “You can see how relaxed they are, sir.”

“I can’t tell one of those fish faces from another, Sergeant, let alone tell what constitutes a happy demeanor, but I will take your word for it. You may go back and assist the colonel in final inventory and preparations for executing Operation Grail. I have to get our friends to send a few dispatches home and then pick up our mail, but I have a very good feeling about this.”

“I’m not worried, sir,” the sergeant told the General. “These people, all these races, seem woefully naive when it comes to any sort of covert action, and they are disunited.”

“They gave our forces a pretty good whipping at Ochoa, Sergeant,” Mochida reminded him.

“Yes, sir, but there were no Chalidangers engaged there nor on site to provide competent generalship. Besides, they have to win every time. We only have to win once in each engagement. I’ve been in the service thirty years, sir, and I’ll always take conditions like that!”

They had a blissful semi-sleep for an hour or two, and then began to awaken and come out of it. Not that they didn’t still feel very good, but they were beginning to think on their own again.

It does work, doesn’t it? Ari sighed.

I’m afraid it does. I wonder how much willpower and pain threshold we have? That’s what he’s gonna find out, you know. My feeling is, if we can’t stand it the first time, with only one dose of the crud, then we’re stuck. You know it and I know it and so does Mochida.

Yeah, Ari responded, knowing just how little of a threshold he’d always had before for such things. If he’d been more tolerant of pain, he might well have risked not working for his dear, departed uncle and turned out to be a much better person, but he knew that for him pain avoidance took precedence over character building every time.

Ming was a lot stronger on that score, but she knew that she’d never experienced something like this before. Intoxicants? High? Recreational drugs? At one point or another she’d had them all, usually but not exclusively in the performance of her duties as an undercover cop. Still, the ease with which Jules Wallinchky had turned her into a robotic bimbo had, deep down, shaken her self-confidence to its core, and Ari’s presence was no great help in rebuilding it. Taking risks was one thing, but something like this… She’d seen too many good, kind, decent people enslaved by this sort of dependency. When it was just willpower, she was always confident, but when it was also biochemistry, that was a very different thing.

The General was a Chalidanger, born and raised, who’d risen to this very high level, which almost certainly meant that, in addition to all his culture, breeding, good taste and education, he was also totally without conscience and probably as much of a sadist as Jules Wallinchky had been.

The sergeant basically hand-fed, or at least tentacle-fed, them during this period, and otherwise everybody seemed to ignore them completely. They were still bound, though, which meant that the Chalidangers weren’t yet certain that the drug would do their dirty work. The General, in fact, was nowhere in sight, and appeared to have done what he had taken great care not to do before: left the dark protective dome.

To Ari and Ming that could only mean that whatever was being planned was in its end stage and concealment was no longer a primary objective.

There were no timepieces around, and the two of them could only lie there and amuse each other with word games and such to pass the time, or reflect on anything except their current plight. Still, in the back of their minds the impending twelve-hour mark was never completely banished from their thoughts, nor the frustration of knowing that Core had been properly warned of all this yet had dismissed them and their reports. Had Core acted, they might not be here and in such danger now!

Mochida was gone a very long time, but finally there was a sound, and a dark shape reentered the dome.

“It is on schedule,” he announced to the other two. The supply ships will be in position in eleven days. As far as can be determined from our spies down here and at Zone, the ships and their cargoes have not been linked and are under no particular watch. We’ve also been in constant contact with the embassy of Sanafe, and they appear more likely to see things our way after noting just how many of their own neighbors are falling under our sway. They’re too proud to just give it away, unlike those spineless Pegiri, but it shouldn’t take much more than a forceful demonstration under their own home conditions to convince them that being our friend is far better than being our enemy.”

“So we might not have to fight, sir?” The sergeant sounded disappointed.

“Oh, I think we’ll have to undergo a minor action. The good citizens of Sanafe are themselves something of a warrior class, albeit on a lower, more tribalized level. I think they may give us a good scrap, but they aren’t organized enough to give us a war and overwhelm us. No, I think it’ll be quite a good battle, yet a symbolic battle, a demonstration, as it were. Get their respect and they’ll deal.”

“Aren’t you afraid that somebody back home is going to take over your job while you’re stuck out here in the boondocks, General?” Ari called to him.

The General turned and trained one eye on them. Clearly he wasn’t interested in them as yet, but he felt he had to answer.

“I think not. Don’t get your hopes up, anyway. Anyone who could replace me would be far worse than me in every respect, including toward the likes of you. Besides, what’s the difference who’s doing what at home? Either I’m going to be killed in this operation or, more preferably and likely, I’m going to be something of a heroic figure and, at the same time, in possession of something the Royal Family wants very, very badly. Although it’s a Chalidang tradition, I see no evidence at the moment that my primary threat is to my back.”

He then proceeded to ignore them once more while working with the other two. Watching a general doing heavy lifting, and moving around huge crates with the others, impressed them both. There was nobody comparable that they could think of in any of the armed forces back in the Confederacy, let alone in Kalinda or in the other forces they’d seen on the Well World, who would be at that rank and level and yet do that kind of work. It just wasn’t done.

Clearly, whatever this operation was, meant everything to the General and his Emperor and Empress. So important that a failure in this enterprise meant that the General would suffer the fate of all who failed the Royal Family. Why wind up being eaten alive while waiting back in some office in Chalidang, then? Better to succeed or die in the field. That much they could understand.

The fact that General Mochida was clearly enjoying himself in this was a little harder to comprehend. Warrior class be damned, generals didn’t put themselves on the firing line, and security chiefs didn’t do the operations they planned themselves. Mochida had clearly missed being out in the field.

They didn’t need a clock to tell them that the twelfth hour was looming. They could feel it, and just that sensation and the fear it raised was enough to undermine their confidence.

I hate to say this, Ari commented ruefully, but I think the old bastard really knows his business.

The sensations began as waves of nausea that increased in power and frequency with each incidence. When it seemed that the nausea was so awful you couldn’t imagine it getting any worse, the pains started, first in every joint, then joined by regular but not constant muscle spasms that caused their tail to jerk and their back to twist.

It wasn’t a fast descent, but a slow one, taking quite some time to build but making you aware of every second of it and dreading the next wave of horrors, which you knew would be worse.

They held out as best they could, but after another long period the hallucinations started. They were every nightmare either of them had had as a Terran or a Kalindan, every fear made apparent flesh, every guilt suddenly rising from the deepest of two subconscious minds and attacking them both jointly and individually. Every negative thought was recalled, every negative emotion relived and doubled and redoubled.

There was no question in either of their minds that the continual build of this round would come close to driving them both mad. Couple it with whatever had to come next, considering it took days to replace the missing enzymes, was the greatest fear of all.

The only thing making them hold on was a deep down dedication not to be the first one to break. But as things went on and on and they were writhing and shrieking in terror, and in one case convulsing so severely that one of the locked-down restraining straps actually broke, both of them began to wonder if they weren’t being more than a little stupid.

They were almost at a consensus that this had gone beyond the point where either could tolerate it, and the only choices were death or surrender, when they felt everything melt away and that feeling of pleasantness return. It did not, however, wash away the memory of the pain and terrors they had been undergoing for so long.

They did not lapse into a euphoric state this time, but they did feel much, much better, and they shivered as the effects of the withdrawal ebbed from the physical part of their body.

“Not too bad at all,” General Mochida commented. “I am actually impressed. I suspect that both of you were quite impressive in your original bodies and native habitats, as it were. That’s almost an hour you held out. Most Kalindans who have been introduced to our cute little friend’s bodily juices are simpering fools within ten to fifteen minutes. Still, everybody breaks, you know. There is no such thing as the person who cannot be broken in one way or another.”

“You included,” Ming snapped.

He didn’t take it personally. “Almost certainly, although it’s never been put fully to the test. Maybe it will be, but it will be by some other method. And, from now on, it will not be you who will do it.”

“We didn’t break,” Ari answered proudly. “We might have, but not when the new dose was given. Not by then.”

“Actually, you did,” the General responded. “At least one of you did. You screamed out a plea for it, and as you were in no condition to be rational enough for me to follow it up, I gave what you asked for. I’m very good about that, you see. Just keep me happy and I’ll keep you happy. Nothing major. I’m not talking of enslavement or degrading stuff or even killing your friends. You simply remain with us, you help us out on minor housekeeping matters, and you don’t feed information back to Core or anyone associated with the creature without letting me know first. Otherwise, for now, I want you just as a cooperative observer. I’m not asking that you change sides to mine, only that you switch from the old side to, shall 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 there was a limit after which they would indeed fight, and the math was on their side. Millions of Yabbans, a few hundred Chalidangers. Yabban losses could be massive, and the Chalidangers would still be wiped out.

But now they were here, and with only two exceptions appeared to have survived the process with no ill effects. The two that didn’t make it were from separate causes; one had a container that clearly leaked out the sustaining cryogenic fluid, and the other was botched in revival.

Mochida seemed quite pleased. He had actually allowed for up to fifteen percent fatalities. Two put him well ahead in bodies.

And their presence was now a fait accompli. The Yabban government was informed as soon as the thawing was well enough along that stopping it would have been a moot point. A surface supply ship from Jirminin was directly overhead and had sufficient supplies to maintain the Chalidang force for the period that they required, and also provide a cover and a conduit for the force below.

Faced with this, the natives were not the least bit pleased, but felt they had little choice in the matter. The force wasn’t big enough to threaten Yabbo or its immediate neighbors, and there had been assurances that no weapons would be provided the force until they were leaving the nation. A Kalindan commission, at Yabbo’s request, had actually boarded the ship above and verified that it contained only food and medical supplies of use only to Chalidang. No weapons.

That, and the fact that the general and the Chalidang ambassador in Zone both assured the natives that the entire crew would be out of there in under seven days, won grudging assent. So long as none of this commando force ate any Yabbans, it seemed as if the bastards had gotten away with it.

Ming and Ari had to wonder what Core thought of all this now that it was public.

Proof? There’s your damned proof!

But how were they going to move the two hundred or so kilometers north to Sanafe without both choking on the thick living soup out there or seeming an imperious army marching through towns and villages, raising resentment?

“You already know, don’t you?” the General responded to the question.

“The pneumatic railroad? But there weren’t any plans to run it to Sanafe, as far as we knew, and in any event, how will you, with those large spiral shells, soft or not, fit inside the tubes?”

The General chuckled. “One of the lines does in fact go that way, and it’s got an unusually large tube diameter,” he told them. “You see, the Yabbans have always felt they were the stepchildren of Kalinda, dependent on your people for all those nice tech-type handouts, the materials themselves, even the building of things like the pneumatic train system. Most of them have thought of themselves as working for the Kalindans since they were born, and that’s not far wrong. Kalinda has always treated most of its neighbors like ignorant colonials, markets rather than equal and sovereign races and nations. We offered them an alternative source of what they needed, as well as international funding, with no strings. They’ve been quite tolerant of us so long as they felt we were working only against the interests of Kalinda and not against them. It’s been a fairly happy arrangement. And now we are going to reap some of the rewards of that association. We’re all going to the one neighboring hex that sealed itself off rather than become a Kalindan dependency. It was a conscious decision. They essentially banded together and threw you all out. That is why we can’t just go in there as we did here and make friends. Not yet. We’d get almost to the point where none of this would be necessary, only to discover that, well, yes it was in the end. To them, the enemy of their enemy is not necessarily their friend but maybe yet another enemy. My intelligence research believes we have the way around this roadblock. If I am right, we will attain what we want, and the damage to Sanafe and its people will be negligible. If I am wrong, well, then we’ll all be dead.” Us, too, Ari noted warily to Ming.