“We will do nothing of the sort,” Beta told them firmly. “We will die to protect the Master.”
“Then you will die,” the voice answered, unconcerned. “We do not care about you one way or the other. However, if you do exactly as we say, there may be one chance to save the dying one, but you will have to obey, and now. Time is something it does not have and it may already be too late. It is also a moot argument, since we do not care about him or you and if we have problems we will simply shoot you and be done with it. You will find that your weapons will not work here. Ours will.”
There was hesitation on her part, but there was also still a connection, albeit not as strong and direct as she would have liked, to Alpha, and Alpha basically was telling them to do it. There was also the unalterable logic of what the thing was saying. Pragmatically, there wasn’t anything else to do.
They stripped themselves down completely and threw it all over the rail, then carefully they stripped Jules Wallinchky as well. Ari didn’t lose any of his attitude and feeling for the old S.O.B. under this condition, but he tried to suppress such thoughts, knowing she might take offense and punish him. With the kind of control she had over his mind and emotions, he could become Gamma in seconds if she had a mind to do it.
The old boy was flabby, and parts of his body were almost covered with scars of one kind or another. None of those should have been there; clearly he’d been through something since the rejuve that he hadn’t talked much about, which contributed to his current situation.
What was the old adage? The wages of sin is death! When you could be the most self-indulgent person in the galaxy and lived in a time when everything you could need, even medical aid, was always there, you tended to get a bit sloppy…
“We will transport the one who is dying,” the chief butterfly told them. “You two will proceed along the walk in the direction your friends went and we shall be covering you.”
“We cannot!” Beta insisted. “Our sole purpose is to serve our Master. We cannot abandon him.”
“I weary of this,” the creature responded, sounding disgusted. “Both of you start walking now or I am going to kill you.”
“For God’s sake! Do it!” Ari screamed at her. “How can you serve him if you die for nothing?”
That logic already had occurred to the woman, who turned and stepped onto the next section, and he found himself following and slapping the control to activate the walkway. One of the creatures followed, rifle pointed at their backs. There was no question that it would use it, and no doubt that the two of them together could not move faster than it could fire.
It was decided that Ari might try and reason with it, either to gain an advantage or simply to gain information. These things looked pretty in a bizarre sort of way, but not like the kind of folks you’d sit down with in other circumstances and buy each other beers.
“What race are you?” he began, trying to get a frame of reference.
“I am of the Yaxa.”
Well, that was a start.
“Did your people come here like us?”
“We are native here. All races are native here, but I was born here.”
“I am called Ari Martinez. Do you have a name?”
“Yes,” was the cold reply.
Ooooo-kay… “You say all races are native here. What do you mean? Have you seen our sort before? I mean, native on wherever this is?”
“Your people originated here. Some are here, yes, but they are a bloodthirsty and unpleasant lot and we have little or nothing to do with them.”
“Then—why are you bothering with us now? Are we being marched to a firing squad?”
“No. This is the ambassadorial region as well as Well World ingress and egress. All civilized races take their management turns here, and we are on this watch.”
“Ambassadorial region you say. But that means even enemies talk here without shooting. So why the guns?”
“Outsiders are already causing a great deal of suffering and hardship on the world. Until that is resolved, all outsiders are suspect. You do not have an embassy here.”
There was the whoosh of great wings to their left, over the vast chamber, and they both turned and saw the other two Yaxa flying, pushing an apparently levitating but still comatose Jules Wallinchky in front of them. They were making good speed and going off at an angle, although it was clear that both he and Beta would catch up with them in a few minutes.
So outsiders were making trouble. That certainly brought up a nasty thought, considering that the only outsiders likely to have been teleported here of late were certain water-breathing monsters. “Those outsiders now causing hardship and suffering—one of them is not by any chance named Josich, is it?”
“The one of that name is involved, yes. You know that one?”
“I only know of him, but his reputation where we come from is just as ugly as he seems to have wasted no time in reestablishing here. He is no friend of ours, and the large man who seems half machine who went with the rest of our party to find help has devoted his life to finding and killing Josich. He’s on your side.”
There was a pause, and then the Yaxa asked, ominously, “Why do you assume that we are against the powers this Josich has joined?”
Uh-oh. “Because you used the words ‘suffering’ and ‘hardship.’ I would have expected a different slant if you were on his side.”
“You make assumptions that other races think like you. It is a mark of the arrogance that seems always in your race.”
“Then the Yaxa are with Josich’s forces?”
“I did not say that, either. I merely told you to refrain from assumptions. None of this will likely make any difference to any of you. Josich is a very rare exception in making any impact at all, let alone a large one. I have no doubt we are about to hear the last of your group, although if the one who lives to kill is as determined as you say, he may be the exception. Or not. You will not find your spaceships and spacesuits here.”
After a half hour, maybe longer, they reached a section where corridors branched off and away from the walkway. They were internally lit so that they essentially glowed, but were clearly hewn out of whatever this place was made of, and they had that same odd shape as the doorways of the Ancient Ones’ city. There were some symbols embedded in the floor and where each corridor started and at each intersection, but they were of a sort impossible to divine. Beta assumed them to be numbers, since that would be the most likely common element in a place with a variety of races. Numbers could be agreed upon and then used in conjunction with maps and directories in local languages.
Although basically a helpless onlooker, the link to Beta’s brain did bring with it some respect as well as discomfort to Ari. He realized she was using all of it, and at a speed faster than he could imagine. He seemed to remember from school that the human brain’s speed and capacity was established early on, and maintained by constant stimulation and the building of dense clusters of neurons. Had they somehow been able to build densities that simply wouldn’t happen in nature? And had the constant linkage to that supercomputer in the house provided constant stimulation even when they were doing nothing at all? Her own speculation and deductions concerning this place, just based on what she could see and hear and what they were being told, was filling in quickly and building a very complex picture that he would never have accomplished on his own.
If that was the case, whatever else his sadistic uncle had done to Angel and Ming, they were both among the greatest geniuses the human race had ever produced. Even more, that concept of the Oneness while keeping an identity was becoming clearer. If she needed it, and they were in this kind of proximity, she could use the unused areas of his brain to augment hers! Temporary storage. The telepathic link was probably agonizingly slow to her, but think of the possibilities…