Jack Chalker - Ghost of the Well of Souls

Mochida’s tactics, probably run through a million computer simulations back home in his capital, seemed for a while to go quite well. The Sanafeans showed unexpected quickness and a nasty ability to stun even an armored Chalidang with some kind of natural electrical charge if they could touch the enemy, but their weapon was basically a large and ornately carved and sharpened sword wielded by the hand from underneath. The Chalidangers’ harpoons and hooked nets tore through the clan ranks and began to fill the water with blood.

Mochida took no direct part in the fighting, although he had full battle armor on and a nasty harpoon that could fire four bolts in a spread all at once. He was content to let his professional force do the minute by minute adjustments, which showed him to be a very smart commander.

There was no doubt about it; at least four Sanafeans were falling—wounded or dead—for every Chalidanger in similar straits. The unexpected electric charge took its toll, but unless the Sanafean could get close enough to apply it without getting killed, and then thrust the sword up into the tentacles, slashing away at the arms and mouth of the invaders, there wasn’t much damage their swords could do against that high-tech armor.

Worse, the natives fought mostly as individuals, with no apparent organization or leadership, and this allowed them to be split again and again.

The Chalidang soldiers seemed so filled with blood lust and so confident of an easy victory that they didn’t even realize that the mantalike Sanafeans had been drawing them slowly down, at great cost, to the reef below.

Suddenly, as a large number of Chalidangers swooped in to finish off some bleeding stragglers just above the reef, the coral reef itself seemed to erupt. Shapes—nasty, vicious, with huge jaws, wide eyes, and pointed teeth—lashed out from holes and hideaways within the living rock. They looked almost comical, but they were incredibly fast and they ignored the armor and started chomping on the Chalidangers’ tentacles. Soon the thirty or so invaders who were close enough had gaping wounds, and tentacle parts and blood began floating about, yet every time the Chalidangers tried to harpoon or net or otherwise grab one of their large serpentine assailants, there was nothing there. As quickly as they struck, the giant sea snakes could withdraw into the protection of solid coral, only to emerge somewhere else when the victim was right.

Withdraw! Get away from the damned reef! Mochida screamed at them. “Keep your position at least five meters from the reef, damn it! Shoot down, don’t chase!”

It was hard for his men to obey him, though, when targets were so easy and so apparent, and some others got parts of themselves bit off as they went after apparently helpless Sanafean stragglers.

Told ya they had some surprises, Ming commented smugly.

For all that, Chalidang still had the edge, and even though it suddenly faced a foe that had gone from disorganized savages to pretty tightly ordered and disciplined units, it was clear that at this rate the Chalidangers would still win. It would just be more costly than they’d anticipated, something that troubled Mochida very little and his masters not one bit.

“Form dynamo!” the Lord of Paugoth commanded from somewhere in back and over his troops. “Press in, main body, now !”

The Sanafeans formed into one of the oddest formations any of the others had ever seen. Half had turned over, so they lay chest-to-chest, doubling their apparent size and making themselves look like weather balloons. They then had joined with another pair, and another, and another, until they were densely packed together, all of their hands clenched in the center. The original pair was the driver; everybody else just came along for the ride, but there was a sense that they were somehow linked, somehow interconnected. But for what? They made much better targets for Chalidang harpoons this way, and were no apparent threat to the invaders.

They came at the main body of Chalidangers, two regrouping companies still a bit dizzy from the reef and extricating themselves and others from it, and they came very, very fast. So fast, in fact, that the reforming group had no time to dress ranks and deal with it. They started to move away, but the mass of Sanafeans struck them, and every Chalidanger who was struck was suddenly screaming in agony, its armor actually melting, the occupants badly burned or stunned or even dead.

They’ve got a massed electrical field there, all from their own bodies! Ming noted. My God! I don’t even think they can feel pain when they’re like that. Look at those bolts go right into them, almost like a pincushion, but they’re coming on!

Mochida was alarmed, particularly when he saw three other such “dynamo” formations being put together in front of him. Half his men were dead or wounded, and even though there were probably no more than a hundred Sanafeans left who could fight, they were all fighting, and without fear and or sense of giving up.

Mochida shot up to where one of the Imtre was waiting just below the surface. “Bomb the reef. Indiscriminate,” he ordered.

The Imtre hesitated a moment. “Through your own troops?”

“They’ll get out of the way. Now, do it !”

The Imtre was gone topside, and Mochida moved over the largest concentration of troops. “Spread out, unified V at ten meters depth! Form on me! Do it now!”

As many Chalidangers as could do it disengaged instantly and rose, forming once more that perfect V shape, this time at a very shallow depth, and, considering their reduced numbers, fairly wide apart.

New bolts were being distributed for the harpoons from cartons in the small boats above by Imtre, who were moving quickly and nervously.

The Sanafeans broke from their dynamo formations when this happened and spread out in a column of fours, lowering themselves close to the reef and staring up at the high invaders. The old lord was still there, too, and didn’t sound much like giving in.

“You fight well, you invading bastards, but you must come to us now! Come down to our reef, if you dare, and retrieve your trophy, and don’t mind the gathering sharks!”

The blood had in fact attracted a lot of very large sharks, all of whom looked capable of eating anybody there and more than willing to do so, although they were first starting off by scavenging the dead and the severed limbs.

Mochida was also not in a defeatist mood. “Give us the trophy, Lord Paugoth, and the clan will survive. If I must take it from this point, and hunt for it, I shall leave no Sanafean of the Clan Paugoth alive. No male, no female, no infants, no children. One by one I am going to destroy your reefs and all that they contain until you yield or the sharks and the other clans pick your bones.”

Almost on cue, since it had been prearranged by the Imtre with those above, there were a series of splashes at the surface, and slowly descending past the Chalidangers came sleek-looking cylinders with some sort of marking on them. They went down so slowly that the Sanafeans weren’t sure how to take the things and simply watched them fall, not even noticing that the Chalidangers had turned so their armored bodies were facing down toward the reef and their tentacled part was almost straight up.

A great saucerlike Sanafean detached itself from the group at the reef and approached the nearest of the cylinders. It reached out its “hand,” touched the thing, and simultaneously gave it a full charge.

It blew up with an enormous bang, and the concussion flung Chalidangers all the way to the surface and smashed a suddenly deafened Ming and Ari against the hull of the ship.

Four others struck the reef and went off in sequence, throwing up more concussion, more noise, and more brute force energy than had ever before been seen in this nontech hex.