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impeded his tri-umphal 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 assas-sins 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, per-haps 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 gen-eral 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.
Ochoa, at the Zone Gate
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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 tem-perature. In
the center, though, was a single unnatural fea-ture, 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?
Opposite, on the western wall, was the Great Hall of the Council, where the
elected representatives met a few weeks out of every year to decide what
needed to be decided, and which was home to a surprisingly small bureaucracy
that mostly issued permits and saw to it that fees for ships' provi-sionings
and for transit of goods were in order.
In one sense, the palace was the most vulnerable position of any important
structure in the kingdom, but the Royal Guard was housed within the castle,
and the National Guard which primarily handled Customs duties, chased down
disputes in-volving multiple districts, and the like, had received some
military training and retained a military style structure was headquartered in
a village along the eastern slopes below the
Grand Hall. Under normal circumstances, about 2,500 regular troops of the army
and perhaps 1,500 of the
National Guard were at hand, the largest single force anywhere in Ochoa and
probably the only one that trained for the job.
Ochoans had fairly good eyes, but the Baron and Grand Duchess Comorro, General
in Chief of the Royal
Guard, as well as General Zaida, who ran the National Guard, wore special
goggles with easily adjusted binocular lenses, and they could see quite well
across the expanse of the crater. The Baron stood outside some small buildings
just north of the Well Gate used for customs; the Grand Duchess was in full
resplendent war paint and medals on the battlement atop the palace, the
General on the flag court just above the entrance to the Great Hall. Each had
a signalman with him or her, and each was in constant contact, all being more
or less in line of sight.
A dark shape came in toward the palace below the clouds, only a few meters
above the highest of the terrain, flew into the crater and landed on the
Duchess's parapet. About thirty seconds later the semaphore flashed, "The most
reassuring thing about the enemy is that he follows our script."
The Baron laughed. He wasn't going to kid anybody that he wasn't scared to
death, but if they were forced into a fight, then so be it. The others felt
the same way. In Ochoan culture it was the women who did the fighting, but he
was determined that they would sing no songs of battles and bravery without
his name included, even if he didn't know whether he had the nerve to stand.
The King sure hadn't. He and half his entourage were cowering deep in the lava
caves right now over on Island Biana.
He eased himself back into the special chair atop the cus-toms house and
raised his feet, which were also for all intents and purposes his hands, and
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placed them on the con-trol bars and twin triggers of the rapid-fire,
air-cooled machine gun. He'd had only a couple of days' practice on one, and
they ran hot and noisy and smoky and smelled awful, but he could say it didn't
take an expert to hit something with them when they put out a hundred rounds
per second in a spread pattern.
The portable emplacement was similar to the permanent ones along the whole
chain of castles and fortresses, de-signed specifically for the Ochoan anatomy
and easily ro-tated a full 360 degrees with just a shift in body weight. In a
smaller chair below him, but on the same pivot, Gia, daughter of the Lady Akua
(and his) fifth wife, sat ready to feed the strips of ammunition along the
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