Twilight at the Well of Souls

Zone

“Brazil’s been seen.”

The report startled Serge Ortega. Somehow he hadn’t quite expected it to be this easy.

“Where?” he asked sharply.

“With the Southern force. Apparently he’s been on a ship on the Sea of Turagin all this time. Rowed ashore and joined them just south of the Ginzin border.”

Ortega frowned suspiciously. “Are you sure it’s him? These are tricky bastards we’re dealing with, and he’s the trickiest.”

“It’s him,” the messenger assured him. “Some of our people with the force have seen and talked to him and the Entries in the group are acting like God Himself just paid them a call.”

The Ulik nodded absently and switched off. Brazil. Visible, easily located, ripe for the plucking, with over three-thousand kilometers left to go to the nearest Avenue. It smelled wrong, somehow. It was too obvious, too blatant, too much a dumb mistake in an operation that had been, so far, beautifully planned and executed. It was as if, with everything going his way, Brazil had suddenly popped up and shouted, “Here I am! Come and get me!”

And he was vulnerable. Except for death, he wasn’t immune to anything that could happen to anyone else. He suffered pain and torment, and he was wide open to everything from hypno devices to magic.

He punched in a communications code. “Central Command,” answered a translator-pitched voice.

“This is Ortega. Now that the information about Brazil has come in, what does Commander Sangh intend?”

The communications officer hesitated. “Sir, I don’t think we can give that out right now. Not even to you, sir.”

He growled. “I’m coming down there. Something’s very wrong here, and I want to make sure there are no slip-ups.” He switched off angrily and slithered from behind his great U-shaped desk and out the door.

It was still bad in the corridors; there seemed no end to the Entries, and he knew he couldn’t protect them much longer. If Brazil were captured, or even if they thought they had him, a lot of restraints would suddenly ease around the world.

Central Command was located in the Czillian Embassy, simply because Czill had the best, most sophisticated computers and records and it provided easy access. The machines in the embassy were compatible with the ones in Czill, and information could quickly be traded back and forth by simply having the Czillians take the computer storage modules between home and embassy.

It was crowded, though, with many races, all with forces in the critical area. For one of Ortega’s bulk, he had to watch it or get injured by accident by some spiked or poisonous or other lethal creature just trying to keep out of the way.

He spotted Sadir Bakh, the Dahbi second-in-command who was Gunit Sangh’s alter ego in Zone. Ortega didn’t like the Dahbi much, although with his racial command policies he was dealing here with only half a dozen. Had Brazil gone the other way, Sangh wouldn’t have been the commander, but Dahbi would have been in the path of march.

“Bakh! What’s the commander going to do about all this? Where the hell is he, anyway?”

The folded Dahbi turned, looking more like a ghost than ever, and sighed. “His Holiness flew to Cebu with the Cebu commander as soon as the Ambreza situation was resolved,” he said coolly. “He is there now. We have a mixed force of about twenty thousand ready to go in the area, and another force of almost twelve thousand is currently being ferried across Laibir from Conforte to Suffok, which should be sufficient to cut off that route and the Ellerbanta-Verion Avenue. The enemy is currently split into three parts, the Awbrian part consisting of about six thousand natives and roughly two thousand others. Parmiter is remaining officially neutral, but we believe a large part of it has been bought off by the enemy and will supply the technological weaponry the Awbrian force needs.”

“Why doesn’t he bomb the damned factories from Cebu?” Ortega growled.

“As the Ambassador must know, Parmiter is officially on our side. Do we turn probable collaboration into active opposition on a suspicion that some Parmiters—they are a rather anarchistic group, you might recall—are doing us harm?”

Ortega nodded glumly. Damn it, the cards were always stacked on the wrong side.

“You’re forcing them toward the Yaxa-Harbigor Avenue, then,” he noted, looking at the situation map.

“All ours, all armed, all ready and well equipped. It is our feeling that they will go north along the Sea of Storms to avoid as much as possible the high-tech hexes. Once they are north of Boidol, there will be a solid wall of us while they will be in hostile hexes with their backs to the sea at all points. That will effectively isolate the southern and eastern forces from those in Awbri, who will have to break through heavily defended border positions over a long distance to link up. By that time our own forces will be able to move from the Ellerbanta-Verion area to engage them, and that will be that.”

He studied it, then decided it was a good, reasonable, rational plan based on current information—and one that seemed absolutely foolproof. That worried him. The other side read maps and had a fair amount of intelligence itself and would know exactly this. The more he looked at it, the more he thought that he was missing something, he wasn’t sure what. Something wrong. A joker.

He turned to the intelligence chief sitting in front of a computer console. “You have anything out of the ordinary away from the battle lines?” he asked uneasily. “Any reports of any odd occurrences or movements?”

“Nothing much,” the chief told him. “We traced that ship Brazil used on Turagin. He owned it—at least, it was bought with a hell of a lot of money, about nine times the going price. Bought at least two weeks before he got here and outfitted with a nice crew of multiracial freebooters and cutthroats.”

Ortega considered that, too. “Where the hell are they getting the money for all this?” he wondered aloud, and not for the first time. There was no common currency on the Well World—many hexes didn’t use any—and much of it was in large-scale barter-type trade.

The intelligence chief shrugged. “Gold, diamonds, you name it—they got it. Even a bunch of trade goods, food, manufactured items. We can’t trace it, frankly, but I’ll tell you this. Whatever they need they ask for, and whatever price is demanded they pay.”

“I’d like a general intelligence summary for the past two weeks,” he told the intelligence officer. “Somewhere here, I don’t know where, there’s a joker. Somewhere somebody’s laughing at me, and I don’t like it.”