Jack Chalker - Ghost of the Well of Souls

“Think you can handle it?” the vice-consul asked the agent.

“I don’t think it’s a problem. All set?”

“Yes, as much as we can be.”

“All right, here goes!”

The front panel lit up, and he pushed the top of the two buttons and eased the joystick forward. The thing moved, slowly, out of the loading dock area and into the warehouses beyond. They could see the street on the other side, and were to it in a moment. Then, abruptly, they stopped.

“Something wrong?” Shamish asked him.

“Yeah. Which way is south?”

There wasn’t much sky to get a solar fix, and they couldn’t read the local signs. Worse, all of them abruptly realized that they’d never asked the little creature if this in fact was where they were supposed to be.

Had to be, they finally decided. Otherwise why would Wally have been here?

Har Shamish said, “To your right! See the hex marker?”

“Yes! Oh—I see! International border sign. How thoughtful!”

And they were off into the night, feeling all right, but knowing there were enemies in front of them and, almost certainly, Alkazarians heading toward them from the rear who would be no pushovers.

“It’s time to get out of this rotten, stinking place,” Har Shamish muttered, as much to himself as to Jaysu. “Besides, on top of everything else, it’s too cold!”

The rail head wasn’t much of a town, and they were soon out on a smooth, paved, but narrow road. If the hex sign and arrow could be believed, it would bring them to the hoped-for Quislon border.

Jaysu could hardly see in this darkness, but she looked back and also up worriedly. “Do you think they are actually pursuing us?”

“Not vigorously,” Shamish replied. “If they really wanted to catch us, they’d have air units here now harassing us and blocking our progress. That makes me think that the little bastard—pardon—will be all right. They all put their necks out to lay this trap for us at this end, and I suspect our friend Wally paid handsomely to allow it to happen here. The Alkazarian government certainly has been helping them, but they’re too nationalistic and too paranoid to bring it to this deliberately from the national level. They didn’t have to do it at all. No, our buddies up front bribed some local big shot who will now be far more concerned with covering his rear end than in coming down hard on anybody, even us. By the way— that was a slick trick and a lifesaver, what you did. Do you have any more powers we don’t know about?”

“I do not think that I have these powers, since I have not known of them until I needed them,” she answered. “Rather, I believe the divine is working through me.”

He sighed. “Suit yourself. But I sure wish we knew what dear old Wally got shipped all the way up here, so big and so bulky that he needed to import some soldiers with him to do heavy lifting.”

“Might they be some sort of terrible weapon? I do not think anything is beyond him if it is in his assignment. He is not evil in Mr. O’Leary’s sense, I do not think, but he is totally, absolutely, the most completely amoral individual I have ever encountered. Life to him is a game, and he plays it with great joy. He does not care who he works for, or who he hurts or helps, nor how many might be injured or killed, but he does not deliberately seek to do that, either. He lives life as a series of challenges, the more impossible the better. Right now, I believe he is having a great deal of fun.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be a weapon,” Har Shamish assured her. “At least not anything on the scale we’d think of if the challenge was in Alkazar, say. Quislon is a nontech hex, like your own. Nothing will work there that wouldn’t work in Ambora.” The great head shook slowly from side to side. “Big crates. What in the world would he be taking into a nontech hex that would be that huge or complex? And for what?”

“We know one thing, at least,” O’Leary called back from the driver’s seat. “We know he’s after the piece of the Gate, and we know the only time and place that he can reasonably get access to it. I’ve been there. Talk about impossible! If that spidery son of a bitch can pull this off there, with half the population of Quislon looking on, and us there expecting something at every turn, then maybe he deserves to get it!”

The road ended in a large circle with a great deal of room for parking. Inevitably, there was a substantial Customs station there as well, and it looked well-lit. O’Leary pulled over just short of getting into easy viewing range by the station and stopped the cart.

“Well, we might have known that ,” he said. “So, what do we do from here? Walk?”

“They’re certain to have a major fence system along here, maybe with robotic sentinels,” Har Shamish said. “I think our best bet is just to ride up there, present our documents and demand to go through.”

O’Leary stared at him. “You’re kidding! They’ll have to know what we did back there, and these guys won’t be so loyal to the local government. You really think they’re just going to let us out?”

“I do. Or, at least, better we are trying as aliens to leave than to stay. I think they’ll be glad to be rid of us. If they know, if they’ve been notified, then we’ll have to deal with them some other way.”

“I say we just use the rifles and blast through,” the cop said, reaching down for his.

“I suspect they’d repel any weapons fire. No, I think we just go through and that’s that. These guns are no good once we cross the border anyway, so I say we just toss ’em.”

Jaysu looked out at the station only a half kilometer away. “I could fly over that thing,” she told them. “And over the border, too.”

“You probably could, but the question is, would their automated equipment target you and shoot you down if you tried? Or could it?” O’Leary was beginning to wonder about her powers.

“Possibly. Possibly not. I do not know. However, I agree with Har Shamish. Throw the rifles away. I do not believe that these ahead will be any different in kind or nature than the others. I simply will not permit them to act against us.”

O’Leary sighed. “I hate to do this, but…” He flung the rifle off into the night. After a moment, Har Shamish did the same. They were now effectively dependent on the priestess, but they had seen what she could do. O’Leary put the cart in drive and headed toward the station.

There was no point in driving through to Quislon, since the cart would be nothing more than a lump there. He parked it neatly in the parking area, and all three of them got out and walked toward the gate, which had all sorts of ominous-looking warnings none of them could read. It also had the universal hex symbol, though, and a twin cut through the bottom segment a bit to the west of center.

You are here, O’Leary thought. He hoped that it was indeed Quislon on the other side. With the hex boundary there and little starlight, what he could see through and across it could have been just about anywhere.

Neither of the Pyrons were too confident relying on Jaysu’s newfound powers, but they also didn’t think they had much choice. And if she was confident of them, then they had to go along, since she was the reason they were there.

She looked around at the complex before following them up to the passage through to the border, then caught up to the pair. “How does this power get out here?” she asked them.

Shamish looked around. “Broadcast is the most common method, but I don’t think these characters would use it. Too paranoid. Underground cable would be my best guess.”

She focused on it for a moment and saw it in her mind’s eye, coming down beside the road, a living snake of flame.