Shadow of the Well of Souls

Somewhere Between Galactic Clusters

The Kraang had good reason to be complacent. After so long, so very long, its plans were coming to a head, and with each passing day its link to and power within the Well Net grew. It could already send within the field and could receive and track and monitor as well. While none of the principals in the drama it had concocted were directly addressable—unless they were in a full Well field such as traveling through and between hex gates and Zones—and the Watchers were outside its direct monitoring abilities, the others whom it had identified as they were processed by the system were far easier to track.

When the Kraang’s ship itself was not in the slingshot gateways, it was now possible to see through the eyes and hear through the ears of the others who had been processed, and that was more than sufficient to monitor the Watchers’ track, while both Watchers and their monitors were unaware even of its very existence. And although unable to send to them under normal circumstances, it could do more than merely receive; it knew them. It knew their innermost thoughts, their loves, hates, fears, and nightmares. It knew that little band better than they knew themselves. That not only allowed the Kraang to filter out subjective impressions from the raw data, it also provided such deep individual knowledge of them that when more was possible, when they finally opened the gate that would bring it to them, they would be as soft clay, as easily remolded inside as they had been outside to serve the Kraang’s purposes.

It had been nothing less than the remaking of the cosmos that had allowed the Kraang’s liberation, although close to a billion years had passed until chance had ultimately given it access to the net once again, access the Ancient Ones believed had been denied it for eternity. The rest of the system had provided just a moment, mere nanoseconds, when the program that had bound it for billions of years could not control its destiny. That tiny moment had been sufficient for the Kraang to alter the system, however slightly, without detection by the net or the Watchman, so that when the program was reimposed, it was flawed. Afterward it had been a mere matter of waiting, suspended of activity, until eventually chance would place the Kraang and its prison within distance of possible direct contact with a Well Gate. The Well computer became aware of the flaw only when that contact came, and then it was too late: the Kraang had access to the net. And the Kraang could be disengaged from the net only by the Watchman, since the Well was powerless in and of itself to do harm to one of its creators. Only another Maker could do that.

So the Kraang had done what it had to do. The world upon which the Watchman lived was still primitive; there was no space travel of consequence, no way to create a situation by which the Watchman could be drawn to a gate. The gate, then, had to come to the Watchman by the crude but effective method of sending Well Gates down to the planet of the Watchman as meteors.

But there had been two Watchers instead of one at this juncture, the second created by the original Watchman when the cosmos was reset. Multiple gates were required because the two were separated. And so the gates had fallen, remaining open until the Watchers were collected, operating in their normal manner until the Well could safely close them. During that period it was almost inevitable that others, natives of the planet, would fall through, and it was amazing how few had actually done so.

Few, but enough.

The newspeople—Theresa Perez, the producer; Gus Olafsson, the cameraman; and Dr. Lori Ann Sutton, the university astronomer tapped as the expert for the newspeople—had been captured by a primitive Amazonian tribe deep in the jungles of Brazil. A tribe whose mysterious leader was the female Watcher, who had taken them through with her to the Well World, along with the Peruvian gangster and drug lord Juan Campos. And, before them, two of the always-inevitable investigators of the meteor, Colonel Jorge Lunderman, Brazilian Air Force regional commander, and Julian Beard, U.S. Air Force scientist-astronaut. Those two had been taken while posing for photos atop the “meteor,” perhaps as an object lesson for all others to stay away.

The other, the original Watchman, had also been in Brazil, but on the civilized coast, taking a sort of holiday in the nation that shared his name. Only two natives had been taken in with him, both at his invitation: the blind former airline pilot Joao Antonio Guzman and his dying British wife, Anne Marie.

Eight natives who were processed by the Well, each becoming something else, another creature, another race, yet with their memories and essential selves, their souls as it might be colorfully put, intact, for good or evil. The Kraang had no influence over what they had become, but it ever after had been along for the ride.

During the processing, a link could be and was established.

Even communication with the Watchers was possible during that period, but it was dangerous to go too far. Surface thoughts and surface memories triggered by the experience had been available even though the Watchers themselves remained essentially out of the Kraang’s control. One thought, however, one memory, one weakness, particularly on the part of the newer Watcher, was sufficient. Had been sufficient.

Now the game was commencing. Now one of them certainly would open the way. Now one of them, at least, would be the unwitting agent freeing the Kraang and summoning it home. Home to the Well. Home to become God.