The Sea is Full of Stars

Ochoa

The creatures flew over the seas at an altitude of almost a kilometer, yet their bony heads were on the ocean and not each other, and their large eyes angled down as if they could see beneath the seas, which, in fact, they could. Not so precisely, of course, but they weren’t looking for a particular fish; they were looking for signs of lunch.

The wings were broad but leathery, the tail almost serpentine until it flattened out into a fan shape at its end. The heads were triangular, almost perfect right angles, except for a slight crest at the top rear behind the eyes, each of which had independent movement. Ears were mere cavities in the back of the head that seemed made of something very solid indeed. The lower jaw, which ran the length of the head, had a leathery sack beneath it which, in those whose sacks were empty, seemed to flap slowly back and forth. Those who had some prior catch appeared to have somewhat larger jaws.

The extremely long legs were up flat against the body now, their long talon-tipped fingers and opposable “thumb” locked up and out of the way to increase streamlining. Looked upon from above, they were quite colorful and distinctive, with patterns of randomness in reds, yellows, blues, grays, and browns; their underside, however, was a blue-white, and in either sunlight or clouds they were extremely difficult to see from the ground.

“Big school! Sandrums! Three o’clock, thirty-two-degree angle!” one of them called, its voice harsh, birdlike.

She saw it, the slight pattern of silver just beneath the waves, and with a built-in sense of where any other of his kind was, she dove with them down on the unsuspecting school of fish.

The entry into the water was unhesitating and effortless. Eye lenses flattened, sensing the electricity and magnetism in sea life as by seeing, the group continued flying, underwater, in formation, as if they were still high in the air. The tail, so suited to flying and balance, split apart and turned opposite, providing two paddles that were as effective as tail flippers and gave them the same kind of control a sea mammal might have.

The poor fish, some up to sixty centimeters long, didn’t have a chance. The ravenous horde pounced on them, huge mouths open, and began scooping them in from the rear before the front of the school was even aware they were under relentless attack. She quickly had her jaw pouch filled with four lively fish, which quickly calmed down as juices in the pouch flowed around them, knocking them out and acting as a preservative. She gobbled a fifth and last one straight down for her own gratification, chopping it to bits with her impressive range of teeth, then angled up and leaped right out of the water and into the air. The tail reformed as an avian device, and the leathery wings began to move. Reforming above, all with full pouches, they circled and headed for home.

This is a hell of a way to make a living, she thought sourly, and not my ideal for a new way of life.

She looked down over the hex, which was composed of a vast network of islands, all apparently of ancient volcanic origin since none seemed active. They formed an amazing series of bays, harbors, and protected coves right in the middle of an ocean that had no other land, or so she’d been told, for a thousand or more kilometers in any direction.

It was a semitech hex that might have fooled anybody into thinking it a nontech one, and precisely because of its isolation, it was a well-visited one. The Ochoans were worldly and aware, and liked their little amenities, particularly cigars, some wild scents, and various drugs and brews, little of which they could make themselves, even if they’d had the organization and urge to do so. The islands had tons of birds and insects and some reptiles and a few what-the-heck-are-they-anyways, but the Ochoan was the dominant and basically the only important creature on any of them. When you could walk, fly in the air, and fly underwater, not to mention seeing quite well in darkness or in daylight, you tended to dominate things. They even made some occasional delicacies out of fruits and grains, which they pretended were luxuries but actually needed to keep themselves. They mainly ate fish, all sorts of fish, alive, dead, or stored in their pouches until needed, and they did some harvesting of native fruits for commercial trade as well as their own brand of art, both drawing and carving, which on the whole was bizarre, but popular in some places. There were some small steam engines about, mostly commercial ones bought from other hexes and modified to Ochoan physiology for operation, but these were mostly used for pumping water from one point to another, as in irrigation on the dry side of some of the islands or in sanitation.

And, being the only land and shelter in all that distance, they traded. Ships from all over stopped there, took on fresh water, fruit, sometimes even salted fish if the Ochoans trawled for them.

Even in her short time here she’d seen more creatures than the old Realm ever had, and some pretty bizarre and scary ones as well. She wanted to leave this dull paradise for a number of reasons, but as a newcomer she had no funds to blow on a ship’s passage, which was the only way in or out. Although master of land, sea, and air, individual Ochoans could generally range no more than about hundred kilometers, and the denizens under the waves of the neighboring hexes would not ignore a nice, fat, juicy Ochoan floating on the surface or swimming a bit below it.

There was a government of sorts, both a loose hereditary nobility and a parliament elected by the local councils and set up as a kind of national assembly, but it met only rarely, and then to set quality standards and appoint inspectors for goods going out and coming in, and to appoint ambassadors to Zone. The councils, under chairmanship of a local noble, handled minor disputes, mounted rescues when needed, and saw to the education of the young, little more. If you needed something, somebody would lend it to you, and you might pay back the favor with some other favor sometime. About the only violent crimes were crimes of passion, and those were dealt with and hard and fast by the whole community.

There was also a method of ordering goods, and catalog sale was quite popular, particularly for manufactured goods of mostly no particular use except showing off.

Ochoan men had the real racket. They were big and egocentric, full of very bright colors, even on their heads, which they brought out even more with waxes and polishes. They had incredibly fancy crests and sexy deep calls using hollow parts of the crests as amplifiers, and spent most of their time primping, preening, showing off, and playing macho-type contests with each other. The duller-looking and more pragmatic women did almost all of the hunting and most other work as well, as well as bearing the young, though the men actually hatched the eggs. But even then, they mostly sat around, complaining about not getting enough to eat, how stuck they were, and so on. For them, it was a seller’s market—there were five females to every male, and other than hatching the eggs, they did one other thing well, or so she’d been told. She was trying to not wind up attached to a nesting, at least not until she had to.

Still, if she couldn’t get on one of those ships and see this whole weird world, it seemed to her unfair that she at least hadn’t been reincarnated as a male Ochoan. It suited her nature perfectly. Coming out female at all was a twist, but coming out female in a society where the women did all the work was adding insult to injury. She’d never much liked work in the first place. Next time I’ll hide down in the damned jewelry, she thought sourly.

Although entering the Well World from an alien existence, she was considered by the Ochoans as basically an orphaned female, a status not high in the local pecking order. She’d found a couple of natives of about the same status, and at their invitation moved in with them in a makeshift rookery overlooking the harbor and provisioning station below. Haqua and Czua at least weren’t pushing her toward one of those preening idiots, she thought with relief, and while resigned to eventually winding up as part of a nesting, they, too, would rather delay it as long as possible.

She landed, stretched, folded her wings, then walked into the hut of bamboo and leaves they’d built as a shelter against the bad weather. “So, Nakitti! At least you never starve in this place, eh?” Czua greeted her. The added “tee” sound at the end of the name was required for the language to describe the feminine, although “feminine” was not exactly how one would describe the tough old scoundrel now suddenly different in an outward but not inward sense. Ochoan women did not have two names as such, though; they had basic titles like “Wife Ghua” or “Cook Chai.” Since “Tann” was meaningless, they ignored it. Nakitt kept it in her own mind, though, because it was a central part of her identity, a link back to the old.

“True, there’s always food and I love the flying and the swimming, but this is still getting old fast,” Tann Nakitt responded. “I was proud to be a Ghoma; I enjoyed sneaking in and stealing the most valuable of all things in a high civilization from under their noses—secrets, information of all sorts. This is kind of like the fun things I might have loved to be able to do on my days off or between assignments, but as a living, it lacks—well, it lacks.”

Both girls, neither much past puberty, were fascinated by this stranger who looked like them but talked like nobody they knew and came from an exotic place off in the stars that they could never have imagined and now couldn’t get enough of. Tann Nakitt suspected that if they ever got into the real Realm, they’d be frightened or bored or victimized at best, but so long as it remained a romantic vision, one that was easily and eagerly fed by their sophisticated roomie, well, that was fine with her.

“Good catch today?” Czua asked.

“It almost always is,” the newcomer grumbled. “Nothing much ever happens around here from the looks of it.” She looked down at the natural harbor below. “Hmm… Big ship coming in. Think I’ll go down and take a look at it.”

“You’re always looking at the ships. You just want ’em to take you away from here, that’s all.”

“You bet. In the meantime, I’m gonna see what I can see.” She went to the edge of the cliff and jumped off, gliding down to the dock and minor port town below.

She liked the town; it reminded her of a backwater in the Realm, with a variety of creatures there on long-term contracts to help service the various vessels that made port. It wasn’t easy work; as a semitech hex, maintaining a practical drydock for the size of vessels coming in just wasn’t practical, nor could any high-tech damage be reliably repaired.

They could replace some radar and navigation modules, but nobody would know if they worked until they crossed a border into a high-tech region. Sorry, no refunds.

The large commercial ships that plied the oceans of the Well World were unique hybrids since they had to regularly cross vast stretches where the technology was limited. Thus, they tended to be large three- or four-masted clippers, some with steel hulls, most with wooden hulls often clad in copper or similar alloys because of the weight an iron hull or frame added. They were ungainly but workable as pure sailing ships under the hands of experts, which ocean crews had to be. For that reason and the expense of the ships’ maintenance, interhex freight was expensive and passenger fares even more so.

The ships also tended to either have twin side paddles or large screws, and one or two central stacks for boilers that, in all but the nontech hexes, could propel the great ships forward regardless of the winds. Some had small and efficient high-tech engines, some on nuclear models, for high-tech hex sailing when you could make speed, but these were costly enough that most relied entirely on steam power even in the most advanced regions.

This one was an older vessel, with the great side paddles, two stacks in between three great, tall masts, wooden hull; but its high wheelhouse and instrumentation atop suggested that, when it could use them, the ship could sail confidently using radar through foggy seas and low visibility. Not here, though.

The ship, however, was threadbare. It needed a full scrape and paint, there were potential problem cracks on the decks, and some portholes appeared taped together or nailed shut. In fact, some heavy tape ran across more than one of the large windows out from the bridge, suggesting that the glass was by no means comfortable there.

It wasn’t until the pilot brought the ship around and eased it into the dock that Tann Nakitt saw the bullet holes. Maybe not high tech—you could do a gunpowder-based machine gun, she knew, that would work with just a hand crank—but definitely more than one shooter. Could some of those damaged windows and portholes have been shot to pieces?

She rose up into the air to take a closer look at this sad-looking ship and immediately saw the signs of some kind of battle. The aft upper cabin deck had a nasty gash in it that had clearly been hastily patched up at sea. Closer looks revealed others. Cannon fire. And on the decks, and peering from those portholes and windows, like a vacuum-packed can of sardines, were people from quite a number of races. They had scales and feathers and hair in all the wrong places, tentacles and claws and even flowers, but they were all people and they all radiated a hopelessness and terror you only saw in refugees from a horror.

What the hell could this be? Tann Nakitt asked herself. And if it was possible to have a war in this boring and most provincial of worlds, how the hell could she get into it?

She circled back and landed near the Port Authority Building—a kind of joke, since it was basically an overly large one-room thatched hut. It seemed that half the small town was there watching the sight, and possibly thinking some of the thoughts she’d been thinking. They were a grim and sober crew.

Lord Kassarim was there, looking resplendent in his necklace of authority as Chief of the Port Authority, and, more telling, he had his favorite wife, the Lady Akua, with him. Tann Nakitt had had some dealings with these people before; Kassarim was a good sort, if a bit more lazy and full of self-importance than the usual men here, but Akua also held the rank of captain and was head of the local port militia. Not big except for ordering people about now and then in normal times, but this was clearly in a military person’s interest.

Tann Nakitt approached them casually. This was a laid-back royalty so long as you didn’t want to marry into the family, and they knew she was a newcomer, and much of her story—at least the version she’d told and stuck to.

“Good afternoon, my lord. That seems a sad and strange ship,” she greeted him.

Lord Kassarim cocked one eyeball in Nakitt’s direction. “So, Nakitti, you see the bullets?”

“Yes, my lord, but more I see the refugees. Where is this ship coming from, if I may ask, that it would be so attacked? I see no weapons aboard her. Whoever shot had to be bent on nothing less than murder.”

“Indeed so,” the Lady Akua put in. “This is the first such to put in here, but not the first in our small nation, and I fear it is simply the latest in an increasing tide. One wonders if so many are reaching us, just how many others lie at the bottom of the sea.”

Nakitt nodded. “Looks like a tech level similar to ours. I seem to remember that those around us are either unlimited or no technology, so they must have steamed and sailed quite a distance like that.”

“Possibly fourteen hundred kilometers, from the look of some of those aboard, Nakitti,” Lord Kassarim replied. “You mean to say you don’t know what’s going on out in the West?”

“No, my lord. If my lord recalls, I just got here.”

“Humph! Quite so, quite so.” His Lordship reached into a pouch and took out a gigantic cigar using the “fingers” on his right leg as a hand, biting off the end and sticking it in his mouth. He then reached in and took out an enormously long sulfur-based match, struck it on the side of his head, then reaching up, lit the cigar and began puffing away. Tann Nakitt had been startled the first day here, seeing one leg lock as solid as an iron bar while the other twisted with a limberness that seemed almost impossible and could be easily used as a hand, but now she was so used to doing it herself it hardly registered.

“Well, Nakitti,” His Lordship continued at last, “one of yours from back in wherever it is you come from is behind it. Damnedest thing we’ve seen in thousands of years. Chalidang was always rather ugly a place; it’s run by a kind of pirate nobility that keeps its whole population in thrall, as if everybody, even the children, are in the army, and treated that way. They’ve been a scourge to their neighbors for some time, and nobody’s liked them much, but they’re a high-tech hex with a fair amount of resources and a collective mindset that can figure out an infinite number of ways to rob and kill you using the most common tools and implements. Still, they breathe water and they’re far away from here, so nobody’s much worried about them. Then in pops this creature reprocessed as one of the Chalidang, and with a totally new form and no briefing nor much else, the damned thing manages to disarm its captors, kill several of these folk who are lifelong professionals at it and know everything about their race, and before it even knew the name of the place, it had taken over and totally commanded a village halfway to the capital. It’s a meritocracy of sorts, up to the born nobles. You kill the sergeant, you’re the sergeant, and everybody else is conditioned to obey authority without question. So if you can’t kill ’em, you swear allegiance. Then you kill the lieutenant, you get all the sergeants, and so on. If you keep offing the chain of command, you’ll be running things in no time. If any superior officer nails you, game over, you see.”

“Pleasant sounding place,” Tann Nakitt commented. Sounds like where I just left, only cruder.

“Oh—yes, quite. Well, this sort of thing impressed the nobility, so they brought down an army of their best and laid siege. When it was clear no victory was possible, this new person surrendered and swore allegiance to the Baron, becoming in effect a body slave to the victor. Within three months the Baron had a new favorite concubine and pulled a deucedly clear ploy at a royal event, wiping out most of the highest members of the royal family. Some say it was poisons, some say electricity, some new methods not seen before. Who can say, since only the winners are left and they don’t write manuals. All that can be said is that the Baron is now Emperor, he’s defied all law and tradition by proclaiming this new chief concubine Empress, and they are picking and choosing and reorganizing their forces in all new ways, starting with the execution of any noble who doesn’t accept the new Empress. Seems, too, that some of the new Empress’s relations wound up in hexes not far away and there is now coordination. There’s never been the like of it in sheer speed to the top, let alone audacity in action. Gossip says that Baron, now Emperor, Chojitz has never been known as particularly bright or ambitious. A good soldier but not a creative one. Seems he was bright enough to recognize a true genius in love, war, and politics.”

“With that lot, he’ll settle for war and politics,” the Lady Akua noted bitterly.

“And this ship?” Nakitt prompted.

“Chalidang is adjacent to Quacksa, a land hex on a fair-sized island. It’s a nontech hex full of some very nasty tribal savages with some remarkable and dangerous powers. It’s said that they don’t hunt game, they just walk up to it, stare into its eyes, and the game follows them home and then does its own slaughtering. They’ve been friendly with the underwater Chalidang for some time. The Chalidang can handle some high-tech manufacturing and such, and the Quacksans have little tricks that can ferret out traitors and instill true loyalty. The present Empress is said to be immune to them, which is why she had an easier time, and she’s been using them now, probably as much on the Emperor and courtiers as on any possible enemies. The Quacksans go down in advanced breathing suits; a reverse kind of suit allows Chalidang folk to act on the surface, although, of course, they can’t use the suits in a low-tech hex. Still, in just a bit over a year this—person—has gone from literally nothing to ambitious co-ruler of a dangerous hex, and is even now planning expansion.”

“Now I do feel downright inferior and inadequate,” Tann Nakitt commented softly.

“Eh? What?”

“Sorry, Your Lordship. Just thinking out loud. Please continue.”

“Well then, you see, the first step was to help the relatives get positions in their lands, and this is now under way. The port city of Howek in Jerminia to their south is a transit point. This ship flies a Jerminian flag. I suspect that the port was besieged and overrun and these were the ones, both natives and foreign representatives there, who managed to get out. It was either that or look the Quacksans in the eyes, you see.”

“Hard to believe any one person, even a local one, could do this in so short a time, I agree,” Tann Nakitt responded. “On the other hand, if a lot of this was already in the works, maybe as contingency plans by the former Chalidang Emperor, then pushing it into action while you have momentum and to distract everybody from your wiping out the nobility, well, that makes sense. It would still take an extremely uncommon person to do this. What’s the name of the new Empress, my lord? Do you know it?”

“Oh, yes. It is a name they are already cursing as doomed to make world history in a world that doesn’t like history on that scale. The tongue is such that it wouldn’t translate to us—sounds like a series of painful screeches, don’t you know? But in Zone they say that the name coming in was Josich, a creature so mean and vile they had to shoot it and just send it through. They said it woke up in an incredible fury and got worse.”

That’s Josich all right, Tann Nakitt thought, but said nothing about it to the lord and lady, both of whom were now moving forward to oversee the stretchers taking off wounded and injured people to the limited medical facilities, hopefully to stabilize them for shipment to a high-tech land and ward, and to speak with some of the refugees and the ship’s captain, who looked kind of like a giant scorpion with hair.

She knew Josich only by the incredible reputation and the stories and legends back home, but they paled in comparison to what had apparently taken place here. In little more than one year—one year!—Josich had killed a ton of her new kind, married the perfect puppet, wiped out the entire royal family, and co-mounted the throne. It hardly mattered that Josich was now an Empress and not an Emperor; hell, it probably was the only variety the son of a bitch had in centuries of war and revolution.

Had anyone ever succeeded in a war of conquest here on the Well World? Without access to history records, it was impossible to know, but it didn’t seem as if it could be sustained. Even if the Well allowed it, you’d need to be like that ship out there—able to operate in all three mediums of technology and both underwater and on the ground, and preferably the air as well, and in climates probably ranging from desert to glacial, against races—hell, civilizations—born to those conditions and shaped by their original designers and by subsequent evolution to do it even better.

Tann Nakitt wondered how you’d conquer enough of the Well World to say you’d had it, and, when you did, how you’d hold it together over any measure of time. What kind of intervention might this great Well computer do if populations started going down dramatically in a Josich-style war?

Josich was an insane genius, and his relatives were probably much the same, but sooner or later there would be some kind of method in the rage, some kind of long-range objectives. She was already in top form; maybe it had already begun. What would be the prize here? And what would she do with it once she had it?

Still, it might well be all too easy for Josich the Emperor Hadun. These people could conceive of local conflicts but never a war of conquest. They had no officers, armies, joint commands, or training systems to hold back a tide once it reached a certain point, and few from the stars who could even explain to them what they lacked. Josich already had to have greater objectives in mind, particularly if the Empress knew how hard it would be to hold such an empire over time. Although it would cause untold suffering and loss of pride and honor, the worst thing the other nations could do to her was not to fight but to surrender.

So you conquer the island nearby and the immediate ocean, and then maybe you spread out, and within a few years you have the whole ocean and maybe, just maybe, a continent or two. Then what?

The only thing in the whole Well World that Josich needed to fear, the only thing the old Emperor had feared back in the Realm, had at least followed him here. Tann Nakitt wondered if Josich knew. Probably. They would have those kind of records in Zone, although it wasn’t clear how Josich would have had the sheer time to think of that. Sooner or later the new Empress would find out, though. Tann Nakitt didn’t want to face down Josich, but she’d love to have a little viewing camera there when Josich, now the Empress Hadun, found out that Jeremiah Wong Kincaid was somewhere here, too, as single-minded in his dedicated objective as Josich was to hers…

By the gods, she just had to get into this damned war somehow!