Chapter 81

"You've got to be kidding?"

That was Ben questioning what I was showing him. Hope had moved us south and to the west of our last location. We were now in what could be considered the deepest, darkest part of Africa. We were to the west of a large body of water that I knew as Lake Victoria and we were looking down towards it from high up on a jungle covered mountainside, using binoculars to actually see what was happening down on it.

We were there for three reasons. The first was because of a man called Ali Armin. Ali was on the list of badass bastards that Victoria and her people had told me about. He was a big black man who on his world had lived the life of a mercenary and bit of a tyrant. On Game World he had become a warlord in the central African jungle. He controlled a village of a few hundred locals and he commanded a small army of about fifty men. When he was bored he would raid a village and kill whoever he wanted to and when he was really bored he would wipe out whole areas. The people he didn't kill he exported as slaves. Slave caravans from the coast routinely showed up on the east side of the lake and Ali would deliver his catch there in exchange for gold, booze, and drugs. He was a very bad boy and he deserved to die and I was willing to make that happen.

The second reason we were here was because just before I had shutdown the networks operations Sahara Network had teleported in several hundred outworlders and they had dropped them down smack dab in Ali's lap. What made these people special was what Hope had detected through her analysis of all the information that she'd been going through since I had asked her to find me a few viable targets. It appeared that almost all of the people teleported in had come from one world. That was unusual in itself because that certainly went against the standard operating procedures of the networks, but even stranger was the fact that Ali had kept everyone of the outworlders instead of selling them off.

The third reason was what had made Ben question me in disbelief and it was probably the main reason we were sitting up on a hill in the jungle looking down at an encampment on the shores of Lake Victoria. The reason was the space ship.

It was lying in the water about twenty feet off of the shore. There was a wooden bridge built into the lake that led from the shore out to the ship and there was a wooden walkway that went from the bridge around the outside of the ship. There was even scaffolding erected on the walkway that was built up the sides of the ship so that workers could get to the surface of the vessel to work. It was an impressive sight and a frightening one as well.

The reason that it was frightening was the fact that there were guards everywhere and from the look of it they weren't armed with bows and arrows or simple spears. A few of them were carrying rifles but most were carrying short handheld tube shape items that didn't look like anything other than some kind of high tech weapon.

"I thought you said firearms were banned on Game World," Jake muttered after he'd taken a look at the scene below us.

"I did," I replied without hesitation, "and they are. The rifles look like a mix of military and commercial gear so they could have been found by Ali and his boys over the last couple of years. The networks were constantly tossing vehicles onto Game World without concern whether that vehicle might have a weapon in it. The tube things the others are carrying are something else altogether. They're probably a weapon but I wouldn't classify them as a firearm. I've encounter laser pistols before and my bet is that those rods are some sort of energy weapon. I'm also betting that they came from that ship. Even if I'm wrong, they aren't firearms so if a network gave them to Ali then nobody probably said boo about it. Besides with all the networks gone along with the agency that oversaw them, who are you going to complain to?"

It was a point that no one could argue about, but it still annoyed everyone and the sight of the shiny tubes being waved about by the men guarding the population down in the camp had all of us worried. I knew I needed to have a look at them before we tried to storm the encampment and before I actually confronted Ali and his little army.

The spaceship looked nothing like anything I'd ever seen in a movie before. It certainly wasn't a flying saucer. It looked more like a rectangle with an elongated snout at one end and a series of small boxes attached along the sides of the vessel's main body. There were eight of the boxes spaced evenly along the side facing our view and I was pretty certain that another eight were on the other side of the vessel. As to what the boxes were, your guess would be as good as mine. Size-wise the vessel looked to be at least two hundred feet in length and at least forty feet in width. It also stood at least thirty feet out of the water it was resting in. Considering the distance from the shore and the pylons sunk into the water to support the bridge and walkway that ran about the vessel, I figured there was between six to ten feet more of the vessel under the water.

We spent another half hour looking over the area from where we were hiding. I had Luther with me along with Ben and Jake and Suzy. The four of us checked out everything we could see and we wondered aloud about what we couldn't see. The encampment below us was behind a palisade. Ali and his band of bad boys had thrown up a wall that enclosed their camp on three sides. The only side not enclosed was the one on the shoreline. In addition to a wall of pointy tree trunks they had also put up two watchtowers. These stood in the two corners of the enclosure and they were roughly ten feet higher than the wall. The towers were open to the environment and were actually only temporary platforms that had a railing put around it to keep people from just walking off of it. There was a single sentry in each of the towers and these guys were changed every hour. From where we were it was obvious that they were armed only with what looked like bolt-action hunting rifles.

The wall obscured a lot of what was set up in the enclosure. It was obvious from where we were looking at it that there were at least a dozen or more buildings in the camp, all of them looking a lot like a long house, but what each of them were was a guess. In the time we sat there watching, it became clear that people moved about from one structure to another with no rhyme or reason. They just went where they had to go and did what they had to do and that was that. While there were guards throughout the camp, none of them really interacted with the rest of the population. It looked to me that they were there more as a deterrent against something happening than they were to oversee the population. It made me wonder more about the people that were there and what they were doing on the ship.

There did look like there was a couple of storage buildings that people went into to get something that needed to be carried down to the ship and there looked to be a structure that could have been some sort of smithy. It was hidden by the palisade closest to our position, but we could see smoke coming up from it and the quantity suggested that it was definitely something bigger than a cooking fire.

Eventually we worked our way back into the jungle and we headed back to our own encampment. We took care to obscure our tracks as best we could. While we were watching Ali's encampment, we'd spotted a hunting party returning so it was obvious that Ali and his boys got out of the camp from time to time and I certainly didn't want him tripping over us before I was ready to take him on. Once we were back at camp, I called a meeting to discuss what we seen.

"I just can't believe that it's an alien spaceship," Jake muttered once we'd settled down around our campfire.

"Well believe it," I told the man and those who were listening in to our discussion. "The intelligence from Hope shows that the ship wasn't teleported in like everything else around here. While the communications satellite that the networks had employed to transfer their signals back to their Earth was nothing more than a giant transmitter / receiving unit, Hope was able to recover some archival information from the Sahara Network that showed the craft entering our atmosphere and working itself down to where it is resting right now. While Hope reported that the vessel had carried out a controlled descent and landing, she also reported that the craft appeared to have sustained damage at some time or other before it landed. From what we observed today it is clear that Ali and his boys are trying to fix the ship."

"But why the hell would they want to do that?" Ben asked shaking his head. "I mean just look at the ship and look at the people working on it. Do they really think they'll be able to get it in the air again using the technology available to them? It's impossible."

"I don't think it's impossible," I declared boldly, "although I do believe that it is improbable given what we've seen today. The thing is, based on what Hope has dug up out of the video feeds from Sahara Network, the craft landed here almost a year ago and the crew when they did make it to shore found people waiting for them and those people weren't locals or any of Ali's bad boys. They were in fact representatives of Sahara Network."

"So are they behind what we're looking at down there?" Dave asked before anyone else could.

"They were," I admitted, "and from what I've been told, they were the one's who brought Ali and his men into this whole situation. Ali's actual headquarters is about fifty miles to the south of that encampment that we were looking at and it was very unlikely that they would have ever learned about the ship without Sahara Networks interference."

"So you think that it is Sahara Network who wanted the ship fixed, don't you?" Suzy suggested pointedly.

"I think somebody there did at one time or another," I stated without hesitation, "but I don't know what has been going on since I took out the networks. Right now my money is on the probability that Ali is just carrying on with whatever was asked of him by the networks when they pulled him in. Unless he had direct communications with the networks, which would have been unusual, but not unheard of, then he probably doesn't know what has happened on the alternate Earth."

"You're probably right," Suzy acknowledged with a thoughtful sigh, "but all that happened more than two months ago."

"True," I said in response, "and if I had been the network, I would have been in contact with Ali on a routine basis and considering that the network teleported in all those people from that one Earth and they made sure that Ali didn't just sell them off, it suggests that they were providing direct support to fixing the ship. That means that Ali is probably worried about what has happened to his bosses."

"So what are your intentions?" Ben asked me directly.

"Well," I said in reply, glancing at Ben first and then everyone else, "I'd like to take a look at one of those tube weapons Ali and his men are carrying before I do anything else. Once I've done that, then I need to consider how we are going to take out that encampment."

"Okay," Ben nodded in response, "I'm game at trying to get hold of one of those tube weapons to have a look at it. It makes sense and I know you and your boys are pretty good at ambushing people so it shouldn't be that hard of a job. I just want to know right now whether you intend to take the encampment the easy way or the hard way."

"What do you mean by that?" I asked pointedly, already certain that I knew the answer.

"Look Charles," Ben turned around and said to me in an exasperated manner, "I know that you're against using the technology you have access to against people here on Game World. I get that you have reservations about escalating things, but the fact is that you do have access to tools that would make taking that camp easy and almost bloodless and I for one would appreciate it if we just did the easy thing and not the hard."

"So what would you suggest?" I asked out of curiosity.

"Simple and to the point," Ben said to me, "you do the same thing as you told me you did when you went up against the networks. You have Hope grab Ali and his band of fifty bastards and you dump them in Lake Victoria. You don't have to kill them if you don't want to do that, but you can put them far enough away from the shore that it will take them some time to swim back and most of them will have to ditch whatever weapons they have to keep from sinking. Then when they get close enough to shore you can take them prisoner."

"It's certainly an idea," I admitted, knowing that it was possible with the help of Hope.

"Sure it is," Ben went on enthusiastically, "and we could be in control of the encampment and the ship in a matter of seconds instead of the time it would take to storm the palisade and overcome whatever resistance we ran up against."

It wasn't the way I liked to do things but I had to admit that Ben had a great idea and from the looks on the faces of the men and women about us, most of them looked like they agreed. As I thought about it I realized that one of the reasons I did what I did was because of what I had been doing for the networks and the consortium. True I still thought that I shouldn't escalate things on Game World too much but using the teleporter in the manner that Ben was suggesting really didn't conflict with my objections. It wasn't as if he had suggested that I arm everyone in our group with assault rifles and grenade launchers.

"I'll think about it," I finally said after a moment's reflection, "but I have to admit it's a good idea. For now however I want to focus on snatching one of those tube weapons and finding out what it is."

We settled in after that. We'd pitched camp in a ravine that was a few miles west of where we'd been watching Ali and his band of bad boys and their prisoners. It was well hidden and out of sight and obscured by jungle and by the ridges of land that made up the western shore of the lake. Still we posted sentries to keep and eye out on our surroundings just in case the neighbours headed our way or just as worrisome some animal tried to drop in on us for a visit. I even posted a sentry out on the ridge where I'd been spying on Ali's encampment.

It was a few miles away but I wanted to keep an eye on things and I figured I had two choices in making it happen. I could either ask Hope to teleport in a wide-screen television with everything I needed to use it so I could watch the Ali the Bad Guy Show or I could post an observer and ask Hope to teleport that person back and forth when it was time for a shift change, or if the person got into any trouble. I chose the latter. It turned out to be a good idea.

The observer reported the next morning that a hunting party had been sent out. The party included two men with the metallic rods that I thought were weapons and four other men who were armed with rifles. Beyond that they were not geared up at all. They had no body armour and the majority of them were only wearing loincloths with sandals on their feet. Once the sentry at the observation post reported on their departure from the camp, I asked Hope politely to start tracking them. My intention was to see where they went and then if it was possible ambush them on their way home.

The hunting party was only one of two benefits drawn from posting a sentry to watch over the encampment. The second one came around noon hour. I was deep in discussions with Luther and Ben on how I intended to take out the hunting party when Adia who was on sentry at the observation post called in a report that a party of people had just arrived at the encampment and that half of the people looked like they were dressed entirely in metal. That simple statement had me asking Hope to teleport Luther, Ben, and me to Adia's location.

Robots! The party that had showed up consisted of four men and four women and eight security robots. From where we were watching the encampment, they appeared to be all standard security robots. While I wasn't overly happy to see them down at the encampment, I was certainly happy that they weren't something worse. Just as interesting were the people with the robots. They all looked nice and clean and important looking and they certainly didn't look like denizens of Game World. They in fact looked very much like they were network people. If they were I was wondering where the hell they had come from. What worried me the most was the fact that this party hadn't walked out of the jungle. As Adia told me, they'd appeared in a flash of light.

I didn't get a chance to find out who these people were or where they'd come from that day. While they were slapping hands with Ali, Hope contacted me about the hunting party. She reported that the hunting party had killed some gorillas that they'd come across and that they were now in the process of butchering the animals for meat. She wanted to know if I wanted to pop in and take them out. I told her yes but I asked her to first teleport me and my people back to our camp so we could prepare for it. Hope did exactly that.