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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
car-ried 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 in-sisted. "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 aeri-als, 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 his-tory's
full of such things. I suspect the history of any race strong enough to carve
civilization out of a hos-tile 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."
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"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 re-sponded. "I think the terrain
brings the odds down to, say, five to one. Only a few hundred of them will
fin-ally 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 fool-ishness, 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
vol-unteers, 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."
"But that's exactly what I've been doing my whole life," the Hakazit
responded. "I could never really belong to my own Chugach society. I was the
out-sider, the misfit. My family had wealth, position, and no real
responsibilities so I never really had to do anything. I studied, I read, I
immersed myself in non-Chugach things as well. I wanted to see the universe
when the bulk of my race had no desire to see the next town. I was the
ultimate hedonist, I suppose anything I wanted and no price to pay, and I
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