Quest for the Well of Souls - Jack L. Chalker [8]
At first, Ortega had kept her under wraps and out of the Well because of the war. Then, when it all came apart in Gedemondas, there she was—thanks to the Olbornians a freak, a one-of-a-kind creature on a world with 1560 types of creature. And yet he still had to keep her from the Well, which would have cured her physical problems, because he had no say in what she would become. She might easily awaken as a creature under the control of a Trelig, or a Yulin, or some ambitious third party who suddenly realized what a prize it possessed. Or perhaps she'd turn into a water-being, unable to pilot when the need arose, or something that could not move or had no individuality.
There were too many variables.
So he did the only thing he could do. There was the awful possibility that Antor Trelig or Ben Yulin, or someone they could enlist, would find a way to the North—and a way through the diplomatic tangle—to get that ship moved to a high-tech hex and properly set up for a takeoff. Against that, he had to keep her under his control, in that wretched condition.
He had made life somewhat easier for her. He'd put her down in Glathriel, the hex of the primitive, tribal humans. It had a tropical climate, and was watched over by the friendly but wary Ambreza, who resembled large, cigar-smoking beavers. She had her own specially designed compound, and once a month a ship brought supplies in forms she could manage. He had also hypno-burned her, so that she considered her current form natural and normal.
Ortega had hoped for a solution to the Northern-ship problem long before now, hoped that it would be solved or that the ship would be destroyed. Neither had happened, however. He had condemned Mavra to life as a thing, not for the short period originally intended, but for a long, long time.
He took out the thick folder with her name on it to add the new brief form to it. As always, he couldn't help glancing through the file.
She had been born on a frontier world that had gone Com. Her parents had fought the conversion and been condemned. Only the tiny five-year-old Mavra, so small she was easy to smuggle out, had been rescued by friends of the family. They had surgically altered her appearance to resemble the Oriental features and coloration of her stepmother, the freighter captain Maki Chang. After a lonely eight-year childhood in space, she'd been abandoned on a primitive, savage world at thirteen when her stepmother was arrested. She had coped, becoming a beggar—by sixteen, the queen of the beggars—and totally self-sufficient.
She had been raised in a freighter, though, and craved a life in space. Trying to raise enough money to get out, to get to Pilot's School and earn a rating, she'd sold her body in spaceport dives. In due course, she'd met and married a spacer captain who made his real money at sophisticated burglary. He'd given her that life in space, a ship, a rating, and a career in burglary along with a thin veneer of culture. When sponge syndicate bosses killed her husband, tiny, beautiful Mavra Chang tracked down and killed them all, one by one. She then continued alone on her freighter and on her burglaries.
Because of that record, she was picked by a moderate Comworld to represent them at Trelig's unveiling of Obie's powers. Hired was the better word—she was hired to get Nikki Zinder out, in order to break Trelig's hold over the older scientist.
Trelig had run all the spectators through Obie, giving them all horse's tails so they would be living proof of his power. But Obie had also given Mavra the means and methods to allow escape with Nikki. She almost made it, getting away with Nikki, a ship, and even the computer's formula for an arresting agent that would break the sponge syndicate's stranglehold on its addicts.
But Trelig had moved up the test, whereupon they had all been translated to the Well World along with New Pompeii, and there they crashed.
A tremendous tribute to her ancestors, Ortega thought approvingly. She always coped with adversity, never quit in the face of