Shadow of the Well of Souls

Kzuco

Three day out from Gekir, while still inside Ogadon waters, the small ship its passengers discovered was called the Star Runner met up with its transfer ship.

Whatever illegal cargoes were involved in this mysterious underworld, they were both valuable and dangerous, and it was nearly impossible for those paid to find out about such shipments that were in fact taking place. Even deep beneath the ocean waters in Ogadon, where this particular trade originated, there were civilization, law, and effective agencies trying to stay on top of things. The one thing the authorities could not do was fully determine the when and the where across a hex that was, after all, almost four hundred kilometers wide, such activity took place, but it was always a battle of wits.

Even though it would be sheer luck to locate and stop a transfer in progress, once it had been passed off to a surface vessel, the fact became known. The Star Runner’s job wasn’t to pick up the cargo but rather to meet the pickup boat, which was a relatively local one well known as legitimate to the authorities, and then take aboard the contraband at sea. Ships like the Runner were built to all the latest specifications but were particularly intended for speed, speed, speed. As a vessel legally registered to handle charter and consignment jobs, it always had some specific legal mission of its own, although nobody was particularly fooled about its true purpose.

The smugglers’ defense was a variation on the shell game; several ships like the Runner would take off from various ports on seemingly legitimate missions at roughly the same time. Each would head for a different place, but only one or possibly two would actually pick up transfer loads of contraband. Consistently stopping and boarding the wrong ones could prove embarrassing for the interhex authorities, who were in many ways privateers not much different from the crooks they chased except that they’d chosen a lesser return in exchange for doing things the legal way.

Several large waterproof containers had been taken aboard by the Runner from what appeared to be a small and seedy trawler, although it was hard to say just what the other ship really looked like in the nearly total darkness in which it was done. It was now the Runner’s job to get those containers to another ordinary and familiar coastal vessel that would take a detour at some secluded part of the coast and transfer them once more to small boats to go into shore and from there to a distribution point.

Mavra Chang was fascinated by the process. Once they were under way under full steam, she went over to Zitz, the friendly mate who’d always liked to chat, and commented, “I don’t see how you manage it.”

“Eh? What?”

“Linking up with a specific small boat in open ocean, in either direction. I don’t see how you can find her unless she sits there like a sitting duck waiting for you, and I’m sure she doesn’t.”

“You’re right,” the Zhonzhorpian admitted. “It’s actually quite simple. No state secret except for the specifics of every operation. Before we set out, we get a very fine customized grid of the entire hex. Thousands of tiny little squares. The rendezvous ship is a scheduled carrier; we know its route in advance, and we know in which of a range of squares along its route the pickup will be made. She doesn’t stop, not even, you’ll notice, for the transfer. We just find her and match her course and speed.”

“It was impressive—and quick,” Mavra admitted. “Then we proceed to our destination hex, which has another hex map, another customized grid, and another series of scheduled local carriers. We plot them at all times. Once I’m there, I determine where the best one is located, head for it, and reverse the process. Unlike the pickup, I will always have a choice of two or three ships, and even they won’t know which one of them will receive the goods from us, so there can’t be any leaks ahead of time. Similarly, there were several ships similar to this one, any one of which might have picked up the cargo from the first vessel. They didn’t know it would be us, and it might not have been. If anything went wrong, if someone else got there ahead of us, or if they were being shadowed, they would alter their course slightly from the grid and we wouldn’t have seen her.”

“I see,” she commented. “Very slick.”

“There are so many spies and agencies out there that it’s impossible to keep them from infiltrating one ship or another on the two ends,” Zitz told her. “What is possible is, since not even the captain knows if he’s the one until he passes the pickup point, we control access to the goods. They pick up; they transfer to one of a number of similar vessels. What does the spy report when he, she, or it finally makes port? And most of the next ports are nontech hexes, too, by design. My crew stays with me, so I know them all. Our rendezvous ship even now does not know it will be the one, so there’s no rumors or leaks from its crew. When we do the transfer, same rules applying, they will take it on and proceed immediately to a point offshore in a nontech or semitech hex and transfer it again, being met by crews who pick the position themselves, then proceed into port on schedule. By the time anyone aboard can get the word out, the cargo and pickup people are long gone. As soon as I make the transfer, I destroy the grid maps. My counterparts will eventually intersect the pickup freighter back there, by the way, see that there is no coded sign that anything is to be picked up, and proceed on as if they had picked up something anyway.”

“So this is your point of maximum vulnerability,” she noted. “You have the cargo and maps aboard.”

“True, but for all of that we have ways of dropping the cargo even under pursuit. The captain only needs to remember one grid position and the code number of the grid map no matter where along the route we might be forced to drop it. We would not then bring it in, but once he transferred the grid location and grid code upon making port, someone else eventually would.”

“Sounds almost foolproof.”

“It’s very good,” he admitted. “I think it might not be improved upon. It is, however, still a risky business, particularly in high-tech water hexes like Kzuco. We try and stay out of them as much as possible, but it’s not possible on this run. That makes the money much better, but the risks are far greater. That’s why we’re running the short side of Kzuco along the Awbri coast. Awbri’s nontech, not the best vantage point, and once we’re across the border into Dlubine, we’re back in semitech and safer. From that point we can remain in non- and semitech water hexes. I do worry about Dlubine, but not as much as here.”

“Dlubine has local conditions that create problems?”

“Several. For one thing, it’s crawling with patrols, sandwiched between a high-tech land and a high-tech water hex and with a lot of islands with small harbors and hidden coves. Also, in Dlubine it’s easier to run by day than by night. You’ll see what I mean the first night we’re there. The water’s lit up like a high-tech city, making it easy to spot you. Easier by day, yes, but murder on us.”

“Huh?”

“You can almost make soup with the water, it’s that warm, and the air temperature in the middle of the day is close to lethal for many life-forms. It averages more than half the point to boiling. Even the islands seem like water kettles. Still, it is a lot of sea to find us in, and we do it all the time. Each hex has its problems, so I don’t want to minimize any dangers, but we are used to them. You are not.”

She nodded. “We’ll stay out of your way. If it comes to a flight, though, you well know I have no stake in being arrested and returned to Gekir.”

“Yes. You understand, though, that none of you can be allowed to leave this vessel until after the transfer has taken place and we are well away.”

“We understand,” she assured him. She did not press him on the nature of the cargo; in truth, she already knew what at least some of it was just from overheard conversations among the crew. It was a drug, an extremely addictive drug, that worked on a large variety of warm-blooded creatures. Called by many names in many hexes, it was apparently some kind of deep underwater fungal growth. Alive, one could actually eat it without harm, although it supposedly had a terrible taste. Out of the water, though, it died in minutes and dried out quickly, causing its natural internal fluids to undergo a chemical change, crystallize, and become a very sweet and addicting drug that could be eaten, injected, or who knew what else? Tolerances varied, but apparently for some races one ingestion could be enough to hook a user.

Lori had come up to get some night air, finding it difficult to sleep below, and had been listening to the conversation. When it was over and Mavra had moved away toward the rail to stare out at the black sea, he went over and stood beside her.

He’d found this business with the Runner both disgusting and unpleasantly familiar. “It’s the same here as back on Earth,” he growled. “It’s as if there’s no way and nowhere to escape drugs and the predators who sell them.”

“The universe is composed of predators and prey,” Mavra responded, not sounding cynical but rather as if she were reciting the obvious. “Everyone is one or the other, sometimes both in a lifetime.”

Lori’s realization that this was a ship in that sort of business and that all the crew were the same sort of creatures as the ones who ran and guarded Don Francisco Campos’s jungle operation, which now seemed not merely a million light-years but also a million real years away. He couldn’t help but wonder if Juan Campos hadn’t already found his niche in this sort of operation here. It was a natural for him.

He often wondered what had become of Campos. How he’d like to meet the little weasel now, not rat to woman but rat to man. They said that when a sexual change was done, nine out of ten times it was to a female, to which poor Alowi and Tony, too, attested. He’d often thought how he’d love to discover that Juan Campos had become an Erdomese female. It would be real justice, but while Mavra said that the Well was sometimes perceived to have a sense of humor even though it shouldn’t and theoretically couldn’t, both Julian and Tony were proof that there wasn’t a whole lot of justice as he would think of it built into the system. The bastard was probably nine feet tall with four arms and sharp teeth and more rotten than ever as befitted his personality.

He still wondered about Campos, and not just him. Where was poor Gus, for example? Had he even survived the transfer and transformation? He’d been such a gentle, quiet soul, it was hard to see him outside his element, his cameras and video equipment and other high-tech toys.

He also wondered about Terry quite often. What was she doing now? Still back there with the People in that rain forest? He knew when she’d decided to be the diversion that she would get the worst of it. Such a bright, educated career woman, highly competent, courageous… There were few superlatives for Terry that he didn’t think she deserved. To be shut off for good in the jungle would be intolerable to her, he was convinced. But to emerge, tattooed all over, with bone jewelry threaded through her ears and nose… She’d be a freak. A news story herself for a while, then just a freak. There was no way she could ever lead a normal life like that, and the amount of removal and the cosmetic surgery on her beautiful brown skin would give her a choice between being a painted freak or looking like a burn victim. What kind of a life could she have like that?

In the end, she’d probably stay in the jungle, perhaps leaving the People and joining a true tribe but remaining anonymous otherwise, or she’d find a convent, become a nun, and remain cloistered for life. Damn it, it wasn’t fair! Terry would have loved this place no matter what she wound up as!

He finally talked it out with Mavra. “I know it’s a hell of a thing she did for us. I owe her, that’s for sure. When we get into the Well, I’ll see what, if anything, can be done about her. There’s got to be some way to influence it, even though the only direct controls available that I know of from last time are on people here. Funny, though. You jogged a memory. When I got information on Brazil and his party from Zone, there was mention of someone coming in alone who appeared from the pictures to be of our race—or so they said; I never saw them. Somebody who came in after us, snuck by them all, and went through the hex gate before they even knew anyone was there. They said the other one resembled us.”

Lori was excited at the idea. “You think maybe she—?”

“Don’t get your hopes up. She was diverting the guards, and I know just how they planned to do that. The Well Gate would have closed and self-destructed after I—we—came through because Nathan and the other two had arrived long before. I don’t think there’d be time. No, what I’ve wondered is whether one of the other women, one of the perimeter guards, might have watched us go through and decided to follow her goddess. It would be just like Utra or maybe Rhama to do just that. Poor darlings! What if one of them wound up in a high-tech hex? It’d be bad enough for them to turn into anything else, but a nontech hex they might handle with a lot of work. Still, there was no word of anybody else being reported, so it’s hard to say anything for sure. I do think that if Teysi had come through, she’d have gotten word to us somehow.” She sighed. “No, I’m sure she’s still back on Earth, and I’m pretty sure she’s still in the jungle. Unlike you, she found something in the jungle that she loved. I think she didn’t want to come because she’d already found her version of the Well World. I think she really wanted to stay just as she was.”

“You didn’t know her. She’d go nuts living in there like that forever.”

Mavra smiled. “Maybe you didn’t know her. I looked at you over a period of a week or two, and I saw somebody willing to play jungle Amazon and go along because that was better than death, but you were always playing at it. Once you got over your fear and your natural feeling that rescue was at hand, you got into it, but it was always a game with you. You didn’t ever belong there. I looked at her, though, and I saw somebody hiding one hell of a lot of inner pain. I don’t know what it came from, but it was there. And once she got over the same two hurdles you did, she didn’t accept things like you did, she embraced them. I’ve seen the same thing in countless girls who came to us over the years. Like some kind of horrible burden had been lifted, removed from inside them. You fell into a trap; she escaped one. I wouldn’t be surprised if she went totally, completely native.”

“We saw totally different people,” Lori said, shaking his head. “I wonder which one of us saw the right one.”

Mavra sighed. “Well, you’ve seen it happen with Alowi, and I would have bet you that Julian Beard would never have flipped out like that. We’ll probably never know for sure about her. At least I’ll try to find out once I’m inside. If I can, and she’s still alive, where and what she is back there will kind of settle it and what I do for her—if I can do much. That jungle was already disappearing at a horrendous rate. I wish I knew how long any of those tribes can continue to exist as they want to exist. It’s a real shame, but it’s the way that whole planet went. Right from ancient times they called it ‘progress.’ I guess it is—if you’re doing the chopping and not being chopped.”

That brought Lori back to his original train of thought. “What about this drug trade right here? It makes me feel sleazy. Worse than that, it depresses me. Here, all this time, all this civilization, and they wind up like we were going in my old corner of civilization. The whole damned world seemed to be falling into the hands of the Camposes and their ilk.”

“Well, having used drugs of a sort in the jungle, and earlier in other places, and having done a little smuggling in my time, I can’t be too judgmental about these people. In a sense, they’re the kind of people I was born and raised with. And I can’t really say I’m surprised that this exists here; rather, I’m surprised that it didn’t seem to exist when I was here last. At least not in anything that wasn’t species-specific and too localized to notice. The biggest problem you have if you’re born and raised on the Well World is that you have to face the fact that it’s meaningless. I mean, what can you hope to do? These are the descendants of the leftovers, the last races tested out here. They’re managed from on high—or, rather, from on low—and on the whole, things don’t change very much. That’s why they don’t keep a lot of the kind of history here that we do, on the whole. Even the Erdomese, on their own planet, might discover electricity, might discover radio and video and research biology, and might even figure out a way to get to the stars. They just have less to work with, and it might take them longer. They might not, but it’s possible. Not here.”

“Well, yeah, but it’s not that bad, I don’t think.”

“No? You were a scientist. I’ll bet you know enough to create a small renaissance in scientific knowledge in most hexes here, including Erdom. But it’s all useless knowledge, isn’t it? Useless because nothing except muscle and some water and wind power works there, and even then, if you generate a current, it’ll die before it reaches anything that might use it. That was Julian’s problem. Just about every bit of the knowledge she has and the talents she possesses are useless in Erdom. Permanently. She can’t even swagger around and be Senor or Senora Macha. Everything in Julian Beard’s life was denied him as an Erdomese by itself and by being an Erdomese woman in particular. Build things? Paint? With rock-hard mittens for hands? In a land and culture where anything she might do intellectually is considered deviant behavior and women are virtual property—forget it. On top of that he had a ton of guilt over being less than a wonderful human being by his own lights. And his mind-set was so much Mister Macho that he was finally faced with the ultimate problem and it tore him to bits.”

“You mean he just couldn’t handle being a woman?”

“No, he couldn’t handle falling in love with a man, you idiot! Even if it was with a man who used to be a woman and still has, I think, a woman’s soul.”

“Julian? In love with me? I mean, really in love?”

“Sure. Plain as day. But Julian couldn’t be in love with a guy, just couldn’t handle it, and Julian wasn’t useful in any meaningful way from this point on. So Julian goes, Alowi enters. Call it a split personality if you want, but one of them won. The one who could be in love with you and be of use to you and not go bonkers because of what she could no longer be or do.”

Lori sighed. “Well, ain’t that a kick in the head. Mavra, I swear to you, even though I never thought it for real until just now, I really did fall in love myself! But with Julian, not Alowi. Not that I’m not still, but, well, it’s not the same.”

Mavra shrugged. “Well, you have a problem maybe unique in romance, don’t you? I seem to attract the unique in that department. The thing is, though, you’ve got the Julian problem kind of the way he had it.”

“What? Now you’ve lost me again.”

“The Well World changes bodies around. That’s not unique, you know. It’s technology. The same principle as the matter transmitter. I once knew somebody who’s a distant ghost to me now who discovered the same principle on his own. An Earth-human type. It’s not magic. It’s physics and mathematics, and enough of an energy source to do it and enough of a computer to manage all that information. It also does some physiological adjustment so you don’t fall over trying to walk on those legs of yours or upchuck when you wake up as a creature that eats live prey or the like. But the process doesn’t really change the mind, the personality, the soul, as it were. You can’t keep the memories and such and wipe out the rest. You lived too long as Lori Sutton. Somewhere here Juan Campos is still a slimy son of a bitch. Julian completed her own transformation. She became a woman to the soul. Tony—well, that’s a different personality. I think he was a tough guy but very gentle underneath. With all he’d gone through and his double suicide plans for himself and Anne Marie, I think he considered himself dead, anyway. He got an easier break in a better culture to be a woman, even though that one, too, has its sexual divisions and problems. Still, in spite of cultural hang-ups, I think he was one of those rare guys who really liked and respected women. At least he doesn’t see it as a negative. I think he feels he lived a full and decent life as a man and now he’s got a chance to live a second life as a woman. That’s the attitude to take. Like the Hindu belief that we’re reincarnated alternately male and female. To her it’s a whole new life. I’m afraid Anne Marie’s more a problem than a continuing love story for him.”

“Makes sense.” Lori nodded. “But what about me? You said I still had a woman’s soul. I sure haven’t felt much like it; even my thoughts sometimes would have made the old me very mad.”

“Oh, you’re obvious. You—just like in the jungle—never got to that point. You’re having a lot of guilty fun playing at being a man. But you’re not. Physically, yes, but not deep down. It’s always easier for women to adjust to other roles and accept them than it is for men.”

He thought about it. “Well, it’s true that when you see two guys kissing, you have a whole set of reactions, maybe depending on your own feelings about sexuality, but everybody has reactions because it’s not done. Women kiss each other all the time, and nobody thinks anything of it. And I know women dress more for each other than for men. I can’t remember a boyfriend I ever had who ever noticed that I had had my hair redone, and most of them didn’t notice new clothes or perfume or whatever until I pointed it out to them.”

“But you still notice. Even in Erdom.”

“Yeah, I guess I do. But a lot of that is how they’re brought up, too, isn’t it? I mean, competitive sports, competitive grades, competitive businesses, everything’s competition. Even in Erdom that’s true.” He thought of the sword fighting and other such activities. “I wasn’t brought up like that. What competition I did was on a different level. All appearances and comparing possessions. Men fight or they get the crap beat out of them. Women try to reach a consensus, and a fight between two girls, when it happens, is real scandal or real news. Yeah, I see what you mean, I guess. I stopped seriously competing real early. I was always the consolation prize, if I ever got invited to the dance in the first place, and the kind of life a business career offered never appealed to me. I just wanted to be a scientist. I wanted to find out how things worked and why they worked. I was good at math, and girls weren’t supposed to be good at math. I loved computers, and girls were supposed to hate them. I guess I figured that so long as 1 was already a social geek, I might as well be a total one. I just decided to do what I loved doing. I’d love to do it here, too.”

Mavra nodded. “Yeah, I understand that. That’s another problem with coming through the Well. The high-tech types already know what you know, and more. The others either don’t or can’t use it. Coming from the tech level you do and the occupation you do, you not only would have to learn from scratch, you’d have to unlearn half of what you learned as gospel. The very fact that you stand here as an Erdomese man says that better than I could. The same went double for Julian. Pilots of any sort, and particularly jet and space pilots—well, they’re useless here, aren’t they? So it decided you were useless and dumped you in low-tech. You’d have had a better shot at high-tech if you hadn’t been as smart, frankly. Doesn’t take brains to learn how to push buttons. Same goes for Tony—airline pilot. I think somewhere there was a theory built into the Well that said that if your skills were useless, you should be put in a spot where they couldn’t be used so that you might adjust and use that brain power where it would do some good. Just a hunch—no inside information there. But it kinda holds, doesn’t it?”

“Could be. But in Erdom the knowledge that might be useful is held by that damned priesthood and the price is much too high, and the guilds leave me out of most of the other trades that might be of any interest. It seemed like the best I could be would be some kind of glorified night watchman or street sweeper or something else menial. I mean, like much of the population there, even though I know seven languages and have a universal translator implanted, I’m still a total illiterate in Erdom, and having looked at that language, I probably will remain so. I think that’s why I jumped at your note even though I was under that hypnotic drug’s spell at the time. Cut off or not, I knew when I had an opportunity for something better rather than facing my alternatives there.”

“Well, I never figured on the hypnotic drugs, but I kind of hoped that either curiosity or ambition or both would bring you. Just a few days more and we’ll be ashore in uncharted realms for both of us. I need you. Do the job for me and I’ll make sure you have a future you’ll like. If we lose this race, you’ll have seen something of the world and won’t be any worse off. Fair enough?”

“Fair enough. But thinking about those priests’ drugs brings me back to what kicked off this talk. I still feel uncomfortable with all this. Did you really do this yourself once?”

“Sure. Okay, that shocks you, but as I said, this is a place with 1,560 tiny worldlets with no future and no past, more or less. They’re kinda stuck here. They know there’s a possibility that their kids might be worse off than they are but won’t be better off. Mostly it’ll be hard to tell one stagnant age from another. Deep down most know that or at least feel or sense it. It’s why life can be cheap here, and it’s little wonder some turn to chemical escapes. You mean you never tried some drugs out of curiosity or boredom or depression or whatever?”

“Me? Not much. Some marijuana now and then—I did it heavy in college, I admit, but less once I got a job—and some alcohol but nothing hard. I tried cocaine once at a party and darn near choked. Never touched it or anything else again. Why?”

“And these were all legal substances?”

“No. Alcoholic drinks, yes, but not marijuana or cocaine. Not in my lifetime, anyway. But it’s not the same.”

“It is the same. Even legal, it’s used for the same purposes. Illegal just feeds the whole business. The same ones who got your illegal drugs in also brought in the rest, of which you disapproved. Your money went to help them finance the ships and men like this one. I’ve not only been with them on this level, I’ve fought the ugly side of the business, too, against the thoroughly rotten people at the top. You might say that far back in the distant past I saw the future of this as well, and nothing you see here can compare to the depravity of what lies ahead.”

“But it’s a matter of degree. Some is harmful, some not.”

Mavra Chang sighed. “I remember a people once in east Africa. Two tribes, same ancestry, all that, but one of them lived by a great river and tilled the land and mined gold and such from the nearby mountains that served as a barrier separating them from the others. Those others, they lived on the other side, a lot of the same geography and possibilities, but their home was in a virtual cannabis forest. They were a far happier tribe and more content, but for generations they remained no more advanced than the People of the upper Amazon. I don’t judge. The tribe that remained in the forest was probably happier than the other one that built a great city, but the happy ones were stagnant, stuck, just like the Well World.”

“You’re one to talk!”

Mavra shrugged. “We used some drugs from the native forest, you know, and not always as a practical thing. What can I say? After being kicked around for a few thousand years I called a halt. I didn’t like Earth much, Lori. I didn’t like it much at all. It was uglier and more primitive than I could have imagined in ways I never dreamed it could be. I’m sorry, but that is my perspective. I left it. I escaped where it wasn’t so ugly, and I remained there rather than come out to face more ugliness. One day things would be different. There would be what I considered real progress and advancement, and they would discover interstellar travel. By that time the rain forest would be cut down, and I’d be able to get off that miserable planet. I do know that I’m not going back there. Or if the Well somehow forces me back there, I am not going back as Mavra Chang or anything remotely like her. If I can, I’m going to be something else.”

“Yes? What, if I may ask?”

“I don’t know. If what I believe is true, I won’t have to face that problem. If not—I don’t know, but I’ll think of something.”

Since Mavra was in a talkative mood, there being little else to do aboard the ship, Lori was about to go into just what Mavra thought of men—at least, men who hadn’t been changed into women and vice versa. It seemed to him as if she hated them in general, on a gut emotional level, even if accepting them intellectually. That Portuguese ship and crew must have been a holy horror, but had it, after so much experience elsewhere and even before, in some former lifetime, driven her over an edge she hadn’t been over before? Or had she never liked men? Why had she separated from this Brazil guy so long ago, and why did she seem to both hate and fear him now? According to Tony and Anne Marie, this Nathan Brazil sounded like a pretty nice guy. He’d saved two lives out of clear compassion; Mavra had put lives in jeopardy, ruined one or two maybe, and waxed nostalgic for the days when she’d been a drug runner.

He never got the chance. “Ship! Port, fifty-one degrees,distance nine kilometers and closing at flank speed!” came a sharp shout from the bridge, where, in this high-tech hex, all the technological gear was active.

The captain was in the wheelhouse in moments, looking at the scope. “I don’t like this. It’s got the size and speed to be a privateer. How far is it to the Dlubine border?”

“Twenty kilometers, sir!”

“Damn! So close and yet so far! Any attempt at communications?”

“None yet, sir. Instructions?”

Captain Hjlarza thought for a brief moment. “Zitz! Hail them, then. Ask them who they are and why they are bearing down on us. Warn them that we are an armed ship and that we deal mercilessly with pirates.”

The Zhonzhorpian was on the radio immediately, barking a challenge and sounding doubly mean. With that crocodilelike throat and mouth, he could make it sound very menacing indeed.

“No reply, sir!”

“They’re stalling! Okay, we’ve given them a legitimate reason for us to turn and run! Kill all lights! Starboard thirty degrees! All ahead full! Zitz! Man the weapons board! Others to arms stations! If they get in range, give ’em all you got! If they call us now, you know the routine!”

“Aye, sir!”

Lori looked alarmed. “I think we better clear out and give them some room,” he said nervously.

Mavra returned a wry smile. “Just don’t get in their way. These are pros.”

The captain kept looking at his scopes. “They’re closing a little, but they’re only a hair faster than we are. At this heading and speed, we should still have a good two kilometers on them when we cross the border. As soon as we cross it, I’m going to give a sharp turn to starboard and full speed into whatever’s there. We’ll still be out of visual and off their instruments. When I do, I want everybody at their sailing positions. Engines, I want full until I tell you, then I want a dead stop. We will put on sail the moment after I order an engine stop. Understand?”

There was a chorus of “Ayes,” and the crew went to station.

“They’re calling us now, sir!” Zitz reported.

The captain gave a low chuckle. “They’ve just figured out they won’t catch us this side of the border. You know what to say.”

Zitz, however, was already saying it. “If you were truly legal authorities, you would have responded to our first call with an identification signal,” he told the pursuing ship sharply. “We’ve been suckered by pirate ploys before. No, sir, we would be derelict in our duties if we yielded to you now.”

They could hear only one side of the conversation, but it was clear that the gunboat had issued an ultimatum and a threat.

“Well, sir, if you can catch us, then do so. If you are a legitimate naval vessel, we will lodge charges against your captain for failure to respond to a legitimate identification check. If you are not, we will have to fight. If we are fired upon, however, we will take that as confirmation that you are pirates and will respond accordingly and without hesitation.”

The captain was just looking at his scopes, throttle wide open. Suddenly he snapped, “Engines, we’ve just had two guided torpedoes launched against us. I will probably have to turn if they don’t both buy the decoy. Be ready.” He leaned out the open window. “Torpedoes! Let go aft decoys!”

One of the spider creatures hit some levers, and there were loud splashes behind them in the water. A minute or so later, well in back of their wake, there was a tremendous bright flash and the sound of an explosion.

“One of ’em bought it; the other’s still coming,” the captain reported. “Launch antitorpedo from aft tube and reload as quick as you can!”

There was the sound like that of a torpedo being fired, and then the spider creature opened a hatch and went halfway down into it, clearly doing something with its forelegs out of sight of the deck. Before it was finished, there was another bright flash and explosion behind them, much, much closer to them than the first one had been.

“Got it!” the captain called with satisfaction. “Zitz, give ’em two rockets! I don’t care if you hit them or not, but it’ll keep ’em back and make ’em think twice about us!”

Lori’s sense of boredom had vanished, but it was replaced with a little bit of fear and concern. Still, all of it seemed somehow unreal, distant. I feel like I’m in the middle of a cheap thriller, he thought wonderingly.

The two rockets went away with a twin thump! thump! sound, and they saw them quickly rise on small jets of flame and disappear into the darkness behind them.

“I hope the folks who live in the water here aren’t the kind to get too pissed off at people blowing up things,” Mavra commented dryly.

“One minute!” the captain shouted. “Everybody brace yourselves and be ready to alter course!” He paused, watching the scopes carefully as the stack billowed black smoke and the wind seemed even chillier.

Lori looked forward and thought he could see some lights off in the distance, but everything looked hazy and distorted. Almost as they reached it, he realized that he’d been looking through a hex barrier at night.

They could feel the tingle of the hex barrier as they crossed it, and suddenly all the electronic gear on the bridge failed as if someone had pulled the plug, and the heated air of the new hex hit them like a solid, hot wet carpet, causing some momentary disorientation. The ship, however, continued at full steam.

Without further warning, the captain brought the Runner around hard right, so hard that loose things on deck shifted left and Lori felt himself being thrown against the rail, then pitched back, falling to the deck.

It seemed as if the ship would never stop its turn, that it would go on forever, but after a while the vessel, which had itself been leaning to the right, steadied itself and came back to a straight-on course. The captain was counting quietly, estimating the speed of the pursuit and the amount of time it had taken them to make the dramatic turn.

Suddenly he shouted, “Sail crew aloft!”

Expertly, the two great spiders scuttled up the masts virtually to the top, and long tentaclelike legs adjusted the holding straps, while Zitz left his dead command console aft, where the two centauresses were watching the show with a mixture of awe and concern, and moved forward to the sail control position.

There was another long pause, then the captain shouted, “All engines dead stop! Boilers to standby! Disengage engines from drive shaft! Lower center board and deploy mainsails!”

There was a sudden, almost deathly quiet save for the noise of the sails being squeakily lowered and fixed into position.

“Rig full, no jibs,” the captain commanded, and first the topsails and then various subordinate sails sprouted, making the transformation to quiet sailing vessel almost complete. The boilers were not out, but since they had been disengaged from the drive shafts, there was a sudden cessation of the steady rhythmic vibration that the engines had sent through the ship.

Mavra went over to Lori and offered a hand. “You okay?”

“Yeah, I think so. Probably gonna have a hell of a bruise on my hip, but it’s no big deal. The hardest part is getting back on my feet.” He made it with her help but needed to lurch forward and hold on to something. “Great body for running, particularly in sand or gravel, but it’s just not good with the casual stuff.” He was calming down now and took stock of the surroundings. “Wow! Feels like home, only worse! This is really hot!”

“It’s at least as hot as Erdom,” Mavra agreed, “but with an ocean’s humidity. Will you be all right here? I want to check on the girls in the back.”

“Yeah, sure, I’ll be okay. I’m just trying to get steady enough to go down and check on Alowi.” He gave a long, relieved exhale. “At least we made it!”

“Don’t feel so confident yet,” Mavra warned him. “They’re still back there, and they’re close. If we don’t lose them, we’ll have to fight, and we’ll be well within their gun range here. This is semitech, remember, not nontech. Cannons do their usual nasty job here.”

He stared after Mavra as she went aft to check on the Dillians, then said aloud, under his breath, “Yeah, thanks for telling me that cheery set of facts.”

The air felt wet and sticky, and there seemed to be a light rain or mist falling that did nothing to cool things off. He looked to the right of the ship and thought he saw some kind of shimmering, a distortion even of the night fog and mist.

The captain was running directly down the hex barrier, just inside the Dlubine side.

He shook his head and decided ne’d better put his trust in the ones who knew what they were doing and tend to his own business, which was going below.

It was a mess there; the turn had spilled more down there than up on deck, but Alowi seemed all right and relieved to see him.

“I—I was afraid something happened to you up there,” she told him.

“I fell. Hip’s gonna feel like hell later, but I’m all right. What about you?”

“I rolled over, but once things straightened out, I was all right. Everything was flying or rolling around… I just did not know what was happening. Come—let me heal your pain.”

“I’m all right for now.”

“Please! Now is the best time. The last time you almost died from a bad bruise. Let me give you what you need to keep it from happening again!”

It suddenly struck him. The key to the entire Erdomese way and why things were more dangerous for him than he’d realized.

The male Erdomese’s weakness, its Achilles’ heel, was that he and all the rest of them had a kind of hemophilia. The females, in that second set of breasts, carried more than spare water; they carried a clotting factor. The women’s nearly total dependence on the men for most things was counterbalanced by the men’s absolute need to have that which only the women could make readily available. They hadn’t told him or warned him about it. Why would they? Between their customs and their beliefs, and with such a huge proportion of females to males, they took it for granted. No wonder the men traveled with as many wives as they could afford to support!

For the first time he realized just how vulnerable he actually was to things that others took for granted. Even without cultural codes or his feelings for her, he would have to protect Alowi with every ounce of his strength and life. If anything happened to her, if they were even separated, out here, so many miles from Erdom, he was dead meat.

“My, that was positively thrilling,” Anne Marie gushed. “Almost like one of those James Bond thrillers.”

“I could do with a little less of that, particularly out here,” Tony responded. Although Dillians had a natural ability to swim, it took a lot of muscle power to do so, and they wouldn’t have much of a chance out here in the middle of the ocean, any more than a common horse might have. Sufficient to keep them from drowning in a river or enabling them to make a quick swim to shore or a raft, but considering their forward center of gravity, out here they’d be dead ducks.

“Well, I’m glad to see that you two are all right,” Mavra told them. “They’re slick, these guys. We’re outside any capability the gunboat might have to spot us electronically and out of range of any of his fancy weapons, too. Hugging this hex boundary, we’re in the natural mist and fog that’s usually at such a border, and under sail, there’s little noise.”

Tony didn’t feel as confident. “Wouldn’t they know that, too? And couldn’t they really bear down on us if it were steam against sail in this little wind?”

“They do, and yeah, they could overtake us, but they have 180 degrees of possibility. They’ll overshoot coming in and have to turn when they see they lost us, and they’ll do it gently. It takes time. Then they have to decide which way to turn. They’ll have to cut their engines and run silently to see if they can hear us, and when they don’t, they’ll know we’re under sail. From that point they’ll be farther behind and have a fifty-fifty chance of tracking us or missing us entirely. If they don’t fire up their boilers, they’ll be slower than we are in this slight wind, since they’re a heavier boat, and if they do, we’ll hear them and have a straight free shot at their bow from the stern gun. I don’t think they’ll risk that. They’ll pick a direction and run slowly along it until dawn, which is still many hours away. By that time the captain will have slipped away.”

The captain in fact was waiting until they ran into the edge of one of the local storms, and when the first one was spotted, not too far from the border position, he took a chance and eased out of the cover of the boundary mist and, when nothing was obviously in sight, headed for it.

It made for a rough introduction to Dlubine, but they were alive, the ship was in good shape, and they were free of pursuit by dawn and able to engage the boilers once more and proceed in the heat regardless of the wind.

By midday there was some debate among both passengers and crew as to whether it was worse up top or below. Most chose to be on deck and relaxed under whatever cover they could rig up. Ultimately, it became too hot for anyone to even handle the boilers, and they went to sail and more or less just drifted along, taking four-hour shifts at the wheel.

All five of the passengers remained under the makeshift canvas shelter of the centauresses on the afterdeck. All had removed whatever clothing they’d had on; it was too hot to be wearing anything if one didn’t have to.

It was a particular shock for the two Erdomese, who were used to extreme heat, but theirs had been basically a desert environment and their bodies were designed to retain and recycle moisture. Both were as miserable as could be.

“I got a reading from the wheelhouse thermometer when I went forward for some water,” Lori managed. “Doing a rough conversion, assuming that the top of the mark with the big line is boiling and the black line on the bottom is freezing, I’d say well over 50 degrees Celsius—somewhere over 120 Fahrenheit, Anne Marie.”

“Goodness! How do people survive here?” she responded. Dillians at least could perspire over most of their huge bodies, but they required a lot of water.

“Because the people are a mile or so straight down,” Mavra reminded her. “Down there it’s probably a nice, comfortable day, although from what I can tell they’re nocturnals, like the captain.”

“I wish I was,” Lori groaned.

There wasn’t much more conversation after that. It was too hot to do just about anything.

Still, there was a moderate breeze, which helped slightly, taking them almost due west. Again, it was the short leg about twenty kilometers off the Agon coast, a bit too close to avoid the risk of more intercostal patrols but comfortably far enough out not to be seen or detected from shore. The only hope was to make full speed once night fell and be out of this boiling hotbox by sunup the next day. For all any of them cared at this point, Fahomma would be welcome even if it had icebergs and blowing snows.

Several times in the distance one ship or another would be sighted, but none of them ever closed with them, and such traffic was to be expected in this region. Some were even under steam, demonstrating clearly that whatever was stoking their fires might possibly have Satan as a relative but definitely bore little genetic kinship with anybody on the Star Runner.

Who was doing what became moot after a while as all of them drifted into varying degrees of uncomfortable sleep.

Nightfall wasn’t exactly cool, but it definitely had a psychological effect on everyone. The captain took the wheel, and the weird creature who usually took care of everything below decided it was cool enough to fire up the engines. The job wasn’t physically taxing—whatever fuel they used appeared to be a syrupy liquid stored in large tanks deep in the hull and moved to the engines by some sort of vacuum system—but the boilers got hot, and steam was always dangerous and needed constant monitoring and occasional release and regulation.

Captain Hjlarza wasn’t very friendly or communicative, but Mavra had managed to establish at least a working relationship with the vicious-looking Stulz, who reminded her of nothing more than a gigantic fruit bat although she doubted he could ever fly no matter what the leathery wing material might do otherwise.

“How long to the border?” she asked him.

“Dawn. Perhaps a bit longer if nothing happens to delay us. There are always patrols about in these waters, and a full day is long enough for word to have been passed along a pretty good chain, I’d suspect. Still, I expected if we were going to be chased it would have been during the day, when we’d have no chance of running, boilers down, and everyone at their worst. No, I’d say at this point our most probable roadblock would be a series of storms. It always rains at night here. All that ocean went up during the day and has to come back down.”

“What’s this Fahomma like, then?”

“Oh, not too bad. Nontech, which really helps us. Under sail there’s nothing that can catch us that might be able to hurt us. Warm, but cooler and more comfortable than this, but it tends to rain steadily for weeks at a time over parts of it. We will transfer our cargo there if all goes well and thus be free of patrol worries.”

“Off Agon? They’re smuggling into a high-tech hex?”

“Who knows? It goes to another freighter, and it’s off here. Where it goes from there is not my concern.”

“Well, it can’t be soon enough for us, either. I think everybody except me is ready for dry land at this point.”

Everyone, from Mavra to Lori, Alowi, and the Dillians, was entranced by the colorful underwater lights that became quickly clear as darkness fell.

“Those can’t be electric- or nuclear-powered, can they?” Lori asked, as always as curious about how things worked as about how pretty they looked.

“Not likely,” Tony responded. “I rather think they are chemical. Still, the layout, like a vast city-state deep under the water, makes you wonder what kind of creatures they are and what their lives must be like, does it not? I have tended to just regard the ocean as ocean very much like back on Earth. I suspect most of us have. But it takes something like this to remind us that there is an entire alternative set of people, species, and cultures down there. How sad that much of the contact between us up here and those down there involves drugs and crooked elements.”

“Well, we know there are centaurs here, don’t we, dear? One must wonder if there are also, somewhere, mermaids.”

The night was still hot but bearable to a degree, although nobody felt all that energetic. At least there were some very pretty things to look at and a few impressive if less than welcome thunderstorms as well. Still, both captain and crew seemed well satisfied with the progress and also with the fact that the only thing that really was approaching them was dawn.

It was heating up pretty quickly when they reached the Fahomma border, and the captain ordered all steam shut down and shifted entirely to sail. The area ahead, through the hex barrier, looked somewhat forbidding, dark and gray, in sharp contrast to the brightness of Dlubine. As they passed through, the temperature dropped but the humidity got even worse—it was raining steadily, although not the hard driving rain and high winds of a Dlubinian storm.

Late that night, while under full sail, they passed a small trawler that gave the correct recognition sign. Captain Hjlarza was both puzzled and alarmed at this break with procedure and somewhat suspicious of it, but he turned and paralleled the trawler’s course. From the deck of the other ship, something big and barely seen in the rain and darkness threw a spear attached to a long rope to the deck of the Runner. Zitz ran to it, removed the small attached tube, and then pried the spear from the deck and tossed it overboard so that the other ship could retrieve it. The mate then brought the tube to the captain, who frowned and opened it, pulled out a sheet of paper, read it, then put it with his grids and had Zitz toss the tube, both ends open, into the sea, where it would fill with water and sink.

“Trouble, Captain?” Zitz asked a bit nervously.

“New orders. Don’t like ’em. Not at all happy about ’em, but orders are orders. They will owe us all for this, though, Zitz. They will owe us a lot. Cost us a damned fortune, this will. Take a look at it when you get the chance and then very quietly pass it on to the crew. I’ll need you all tomorrow night, but if anybody spills the beans, they’re dead meat.”

When Zitz did get the opportunity to look at it, he saw just what the captain meant and liked it even less. It was a new, local grid, a very specific and specialized one, for a new job. Still, there was no question of not doing it. They followed the grids only for a rendezvous, yet the trawler had shown no problems at all finding them in this weather in a nontech hex. Even the authorities had failed to do that except by chance. You didn’t mess with the kind of people who could pull off that trick if you wanted to keep on living.

The next day, the ocean was relatively smooth, although it continued to rain. The steady, light rain didn’t cause any real problems for a sailing ship, and there was always something of a wind but rarely more than you wanted. The air temperature felt almost chilly, although in fact it was twenty-six degrees Celsius or better. The contrast, however, with the neighboring hotbox was dramatic.

Mavra sensed a little difference, perhaps a bit more coldness from the crew, but it wasn’t much and could have been put down to a number of things. She knew they’d gotten a message the previous night, and clearly the message had given them some nerves, but they didn’t really want to discuss what was in it.

About two hours after nightfall Captain Hjlarza swung in more toward the coast, almost without anyone noticing until they were too close to ignore it. They were still off Agon, a high-tech hex, and there were automated lights and electrically illuminated small settlements within view. Sensing that something wasn’t all that right, considering the officers’ aversion to getting in close to high-tech coastlines, Tony walked forward and alerted Mavra and the Erdomese, who were below staying dry. Mavra immediately came up on deck and saw that Tony was quite correct. She went to the captain.

“What’s this all about? I thought we weren’t stopping until Lilblod.”

“Change in orders. Special drop just up here,” the captain responded. “Stick around. You may find this interesting.”

They came in close, perhaps a hundred meters from shore, no more—close enough to see the hex barrier and the illuminated buoy that was just inside Agon. It was a relatively desolate part of the coast; there were a couple of individual lights atop what might have been high cliffs but nothing approaching a pier or settlement.

Two fairly good-sized black launches came out of the darkness just at the hex barrier, then turned so that the Star Runner could come alongside. Zitz and one of the spiders threw down ropes that tied the launches to the larger ship, then lowered rope ladders. Soon four heavily armed creatures climbed slowly up and onto the deck. All four resembled nothing so much as human-sized turtles without shells, wearing black outfits, and they carried what looked like a stylized futuristic automatic rifles over their shoulders and nasty-looking crossbows of equally advanced design in their hands.

Two of them walked over toward the bridge and spotted Mavra. The nasty-looking crossbows lowered and pointed straight at her.

“What is this?” she asked the captain, suddenly realizing that she was the drop.

“Sorry. Orders. Call the Erdomese man up on deck, very naturally. Try anything funny and I’ll kill his wife and the two Dillians. Be nice, no tricks, and I swear that I’ll deliver them to safety.”

“You swore you’d deliver me to safety,” she noted acidly.

“Quickly now. Just the man. And I didn’t give my word on that to you. I was paid to do it.”

“Yeah, and you’ll lose that fortune, too.”

“I hate the idea like the plague, but I’m ordered to give all the stuff back and report that we disposed of the thieves. A fortune’s no use at all to a dead man. Now—call him! Very pleasantly, since there’s nowhere he can go down there and all you can do by pulling anything is get your people killed. Don’t expect the Dillians to the rescue. Zitz and the other Agonese have them covered.”

She sighed. There wasn’t anything to do, and she didn’t doubt for an instant that he’d kill the others with hardly a thought even if she managed an escape. She’d gotten them into this; she couldn’t very well lead them to such an unnecessary doom. But why Lori?

She opened the door. “Lori? Can you come on deck for a minute? Got a problem here I think you can help with.”

“Yeah, sure,” the Erdomese replied from below. She heard him come out of the cabin and come slowly up the stairs, and it wasn’t until he’d squeezed out onto the main deck that he saw the situation and froze. “What the hell is this?” He paused and had that sinking feeling. “They caught us.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think these guys have anything at all to do with any government on this planet.”

“Move out into the open, hands up,” one of the Agonite gunmen hissed. “You! Big man! Bend over against the rail! Yes, that’s it!”

Mavra started forward, but large, extremely powerful hands seized her from behind and put a foul-smelling mask over her face. Gas! She barely had time to struggle and just saw two of them doing the same to Lori before she blacked out.