The valley ranged from twenty or more kilometers across to less than fifty here at the Borgo Pass. Large rock and mudslides had closed it in over the ages to such an extent that, from a practical standpoint, there was only two-or-three-meters clearance on the Ellerbanta side, even less on the Verion. The walls of the canyon, however, were not sheer and never less sheer than now, at the pass; craggy outcrops every ten or so meters on both sides of the narrow section made ideal emplacements and outposts.
Serge Ortega surveyed the scene from almost ground level with some satisfaction. Things were getting set up pretty good; as darkness fell there was little left to do.
Marquoz walked up to him and looked around, admiringly. “It’s damned good organization,” he told the Ulik. “I’m impressed.”
Ortega turned and gave an odd half-smile. “I am always this way,” he told the Hakazit. “Even more, now, at what might be the climactic point of my life.” He settled back on his huge tail and smiled fully now, eyes looking beyond the other, toward places only he could see. “Consider the life I lived,” he reflected. “It’s been a damned full one, an important one, I think. Rebel, privateer, smuggler, soldier-of-fortune, star pilot—you name it, I’ve done or been it. Then I came here where, in a very short time, I became a politician, then ambassador, statesman, and, ah, world-coordinator. I’ve romanced thousands, drank, fought, generally had one hell of a good time doing it all, too. Now I’m tired and I’m bored. The only thing I haven’t done is die.”
“You picked a hell of an exit,” the Hakazit noted good-naturedly.
“Hah! Think I could end a life like mine rotting away in some retirement home? A nice, peaceful death propped up by some nurses so I could gaze lovingly at the stars? Bullshit on that! No, sir! Never! When I go out it’ll be like Asam. They’ll make up songs about me for generations. The bards will tell the tales by firelight and my enemies and their children and their children’s children shall drink toasts to my glorious memory!”
“And use your memory to scare hundreds of races’ children into being good little kiddies,” Marquoz cracked. “Hell, man, you’ve been around so long they won’t believe you’re dead when they see your body.”
Ortega considered it. “That would take the cake, wouldn’t it, now? Marquoz, I want you to pass the word. When I go, they’re to burn my body beyond recognition, beyond any hope of even identifying what sort of creature I was. I want nothing of me left. That’ll scare the hell out of the bastards for two generations.”
The Hakazit chuckled. “It’ll be done,” he assured the other. He looked out and down the dark pass. “How soon do you think we’ll have company?”
“Advance scouts and patrols any time now,” Ortega told him. “No main force until dawn, though. A fly couldn’t get through this pass at night against those heat-ray generators up there. The cliff face and slides are in our favor, too. They can’t get a clear shot at any of them without exposing themselves.”
“In fact, I would come now,” Marquoz came back. “A small force, one traveling light and with skill and silence, with a large part nocturnals and the rest with sniperscopes and computer-guided lasers. I’d do it between midnight and dawn, positioning them just so, knocking out emplacements one by one and quietly. Then I’d charge up here with everything I had at dawn.”
“I’ve already considered that possibility,” the Ulik replied. “If there’s any hint of movement, we can hit floodlights throughout the fifty or so meters in front of us, radar controlled and tracker types, too. Some of my boys see just fine in the dark, too, and they’re up toward, on the watch. We’re cross-coding our emplacements, too. Every position fires a slightly changing code to its neighbors every ten minutes. No signal, we light up the place anyway and investigate. There’s challenge and reply codes, too, from one point to another. Now, Gunit Sangh probably assumes this, so he’ll try it anyway, not to expect anything but just to test out our defenses a little and keep us all awake until dawn when his well-rested troops will make the assault.”
Marquoz, who was somewhat nocturnal himself, looked again at the pass. “Hell of a thing, though, asking t oops to march up that. If there’s another way, he’ll take it.”
Ortega chuckled. “What are troops to him? He knows the score pretty well, too. Two thousand against sixty-six counting you and the Agitar.”
“I know, I know. The terrain is a leveler, but it’s not that much of a leveler. Not thirty to one. Not when you’ve got nice, mobile high-tech weapons carried by creatures that can climb sheer cliffs and others that maybe could swim right up that deep current there in the middle.”
Ortega shrugged. “The high-tech favors us,” he insisted. “They have only what the. brought with them and could drag through that gap. No armored vehicles, for example, that could really cause trouble. No aerials, not in this confined space. A full frontal attack through that little gap is what he can do best. He can’t even go over and around, as Nate found out.”
“But thirty to one…” Marquoz said doggedly.
“This is similar to a number of situations in my own peoples history,” Ortega told him. “My old people’s —and Mavra’s, and Nate’s, too, I think. Not the flabby, engineered idiots of the Com you knew. The ones who started with a flint in caves and carved out an intersellar empire before they’d run their course. The histories were full of stuff like that, although they probably don’t teach it any more. Six hundred, it was said, held a pass wider than this for days against an army of more than five thousand. Another group held a fortress with less than two hundred against a well-trained army of thousands for over ten days. We need only two. There are lots of stories like that; our history’s full of such things. I suspect the history of any race strong enough to carve civilization out of a hostile world has them.”
Marquoz nodded. “There are a few such examples in the history of the Chugach,” he admitted. “But, tell me, what happened to those who held that pass after their time limit was reached? What happened to those people in that old fort after the ten days?”
Ortega grinned. “The same thing that happened to the Chugach in your stories, I think.”
“I was afraid of that,” Marquoz sighed. “So we’re all going to die at the end of this?”
“Thirty to one, Marquoz,” the snake-man responded. “I think the terrain brings the odds down to, say, five to one. Only a few hundred of them will finally make it through, but they will make it. Too late to stop Nate, though, if we do our jobs right. But, tell me, Marquoz, why are you here? Why not with them? You could enter the Well with them, get immortality if you wanted it, or anything else you might wish. I think he’d do it for you—it’s a different situation than last time. He made you the offer, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” Marquoz replied. “He made the offer.”
“So why here, in a lonely pass on an alien planet? Why here and why now?”
Marquoz sighed and shook his massive head. “I really don’t know. Call it stubbornness. Call it foolishness, perhaps, or maybe even a little fear of going with them and what I might find there. Maybe it would just be a shame not to put this body and brain to important use. I really can’t give you an answer that satisfies me, Ortega. How could I give one that would satisfy you?”
Ortega looked around in the darkness. “Maybe I can help—a little, anyway,” he reflected. “I bet if we went around to every one of our people here, all volunteers, remember, we’d get the same sort of feeling I got now. A sense of doing something important, even pivotal. I think that in every age, in every race, a very few find themselves in positions like this. They believe in what they’re doing and the rightness of their cause. It’s important. It’s why they still tell the stories and honor the memory of such people and deeds even though their causes, in some cases their whole worlds, are long dead, their races dust. But you’re not stuck in the position, Marquoz. You put yourself directly into it when you could have sat back and made a nice profit.”