Jack Chalker - The Sea is Full of Stars

Nakitti sighed. “Well, two out of three…”

Both the Baron and Nakitti stayed on an extra day and a half getting things set up. If Core was looking for redemption, which Nakitti doubted, it certainly was doing some good things so far. The plans, the assessments, were brilliant.

If, of course, the Baron and his concubine were correct that Ochoa was the target. If not, the Baron’s future was very bleak indeed in the social hierarchy he was bucking, which Nakitti knew would mean that her own future would be even less comfortable than his.

With the support of the High Commissioner, and with some carefully applied paranoia to both the King and the Premier, the Baron was getting his way and his budget, but his neck was all the way out.

The last day of the conference, however, helped him considerably. The Cromlin ambassador rose to speak in the concurrent session that was maintained for the water breathers. They watched from the embassy on the video feeds as a creature that looked like a nasty cross between a clawed lobster and a giant scorpion faced the delegations and the cameras and launched into a more than two-hour diatribe of viciousness, hatred, and arrogance against the conference and all who took it seriously.

“One true incarnate god, one true family!” it concluded, giving the slogan of what it had called the “Movement to Restore the World.”

“This has been ordained from the start, that the children of this world would return from the stars to reassume their legacy and lead all who would have the intelligence and devotion to recognize truth and power to cleanse this world of its parasites and establish a new order, first throughout the world, then back to the stars, this time as the associates of the gods themselves! You are the weak, the decadent, who have forgotten how to struggle, have forgotten the glories of power that is taken, not accepted. Soon you will see the length of our claws and know that only by joining with us shall you attain eternal glory!”

“Lays it on thick, doesn’t he?” the Baron commented, unmoved.

“Well, he’s a half brother,” Nakitti noted. “You won’t find him in the first wave showing us the length of his claws.”

A buzzer sounded on a device in the main office, then began to print out a series of pages, very fast, written in the commercial language of the Well World. When it stopped, the Baron beat the clerk to it, read it, and seemed to gain strength and stature. “Ha!” he cried. “The idiots have saved me!” He rushed back into the quarters and wrapped his wings around Nakitti, then stepped back, almost dancing. She’d never seen him like this.

“What is it, Highness?” she pressed.

He pulled the papers from his belt and waved them in his right claw. “This message. It’s from our friend, there, the Cromlin ‘policy adviser,’ as he calls himself. He has given us seven days to join his glorious alliance or he will order the total genocide of the Ochoan race.”

She was appalled. In spite of the fact that she’d predicted it, to have the evidence right there made her sad and nervous. It meant war. “And this brings you joy?”

“Of course!” he responded, carefully putting the papers back. “I go immediately to the Council and to His Majesty with this. We’ve been getting our way, but grudgingly, up until now. This —This is absolute confirmation. The gall of this—this— creature ! With this it is I who will be able to replace the worst of them, and it is I who will ensure that a lot of corrupt and stupid cousins are in the front lines when the invasion comes! This is not bad news! This is salvation !”

Colonel General Sochiz of Cromlin was feeling cocky and arrogant as he left the embassy and made his way through the crowds toward the Well Gate, pushing aside anybody who did not yield and barely paying attention to the stares. He did not care what anybody thought of him, and his great claws could cut steel rods if he were so inclined.

Josich would be so proud of him! The way they had looked as he had spoken! The way they had simply melted away as he’d strode off the platform and through the hall and out. That was fear, fear of power, and it felt most excellent.

When it was clear who he was, the others along the route to the Well Gate gave way and no one, not even those who were larger and looked meaner than he, impeded his triumphal march.

He turned the corner and saw the utter blackness of the Gate directly ahead, its hexagonal shape unmistakable. He was almost to it when he realized that, for this last, short stretch, there was nobody in the corridor.

He stopped suddenly, suspicious. This was the way assassins worked. Well, let them come! Let them see he was not afraid of them!

A noise caused him to turn to the wall to his right, perhaps five meters in front of the Gate. It had no form at first, but then took a humanoid shape that seemed to extrude right out of the wall. It looked like nothing even research had shown him, like a moving idol from some primitive tribe, made completely of dull, rough granitelike stone, a car-toonish, idiotic, and simplified face carved into it. Only the eyes said it was something more, the burning fire-orange eyes in the tranquil water, and the fact that it walked to him.

“Who are you who would block we?” the Cromlin general shouted. Both of Sochiz’s forward claws went up. One snatched at the creature while the tail reared up and the syringelike point at the end struck at its head.

And broke off.

The creature reached up and, with a stony hand, held the claw immobile, then it grabbed the other as the pain of losing the stinger hit the Cromlin’s body, ripping off the right claw and discarding it.

“You know my name,” the creature said in a tone that could only mean it had a translator. “Let it be the last thing you or any of your brothers hear.”

“What name?” the creature screamed. “ Who are you?”

“Jeremiah Wong Kincaid,” came the reply, just before the second claw was ripped away and the stone right hand of the idol-like creature punched through the face of the Cromlin right between the protruding eyes and extended antennae, and just kept going all the way into the brain.

It was a slow and messy way to die. The thing was still wriggling in its death throes long after Kincaid had stepped through the Gate and when the first of the curious traffic that had held up for now dared to look around and see what had happened, but not who the perpetrator might have been.

It was cloudy, not only at the middle levels but across the entire sky, casting a gloomy pall over the whole central island.

The island of Bateria was dead center in the middle of Ochoa, and appeared to be one massive volcanic peak. Even underwater, where it went down almost seven kilometers into the sea bed, the great mountain called Sochi Makin, or the “Yawning God,” resembled an ancient peak of the sort that truly created the others and occasionally created new ones. It came up into the air and rose across an almost sixty kilometer stretch to a collapsed crater twenty kilometers across. Inside was still a volcanic moonscape, colorful but desolate, baked in the hot sun of the day and plunging to icy cold at night, when the elevation alone controlled its temperature. In the center, though, was a single unnatural feature, a hexagonal area planted horizontally inside the crater and resembling a bottomless hole, as indeed it was.

The Royal Palace had been hewn into the side of the crater facing the rising western sun. Its spires and colorful rock made it seem a part of the mountain itself, and it stretched several kilometers across the eastern wall and rose up above the level of the crater itself, in a departure from the Ochoan norm. The way up on that side was steep and rugged, and who would dare attack the residence of the King?