The Sorceress of Karres

by Eric Flint

  … Anyway, they tell me to find them a cat-burglar. So I got Mirkon for them. He isn't the best, but he was available for a bit of rough stuff-and I wanted him involved see. He owes me. And I thought maybe, seeing as they're looking this hard, it must be really valuable, see. Only now Mirkon's doing ten to twenty in Kaba, so I guess I am not going to get that money," he said disgustedly. "Anyway up to then, they'd been being very cautious. Ruthless but cautious. And then this woman arrives. Marshi. Seems like it was Marshi, not Mebeckey, that was in charge. And once she got here… well, she stopped at nothing."

  "Not at first. She was cautious at first."

  He nodded. "Scary woman. Even before she tried to kill me. Almost not human. There is a sort of desperation to her, like I've seen with drug-addicts who can't get their drug." He shrugged. "I wouldn't cross her. She didn't really care about anything else. She just wanted that map."

  "My organization has a history of dealing with desperate and dangerous people," Goth had reassured him.

  He'd looked warily at her. "How did you get in here?"

  He'd earned some sort of misleading comfort-which would help to protect her too, Goth decided. "Your bathroom window."

  He'd actually looked faintly relieved. "So… What are you going to do to me?" he asked warily, the little weasely eyes looking for a way out.

  "Tie you up and leave. You have told me what I wanted to know. Or rather confirmed it. We'll deal with the rest of them. But just one word of warning. You take one step out of line with Pausert or his mother, and… " she drew a finger across her throat. "He has some very powerful relations." That was the best word she could come up with on the spur of the moment.

  Franco took "relations" as meaning something entirely different to the grand-nephew of Captain Threbus. "Oh. I didn't know," he said sweating anew. There were some powerful crime families in the Empire. The Shinn-Borozo were almost a law unto themselves.

  "Now you do. Leave him alone. We'll be watching. Now turn around and put your hands behind your back."

  He did. Goth tied his hands with some rope from his own stock. She did a good job of it, and gagged him with a piece of cloth, before tying his feet. She then went through his pockets. By the way his eyes bulged he assumed he was going to be robbed, but all she did was to remove his blaster and the key. She unlocked the door. "You should be able to wiggle your way over and kick it," she said. "At the moment you are worth more to us alive than dead. Better hope neither I nor my friends have come to see you again, because that may mean that that has changed."

  She stepped into the noisesome bathroom and assumed no-shape. Franco was already frantically wriggling his way across the floor to the door.

  It took a little while to get clear of the building-she had to wait until the bodyguard left to go and fetch someone to repair the bathroom window-and then she still had to walk home. But she felt that it had been an evening well spent. And she had got part of the way through the set-work book! Tomorrow she would be the good little school-girl Vala again. But for tonight, she was back to being Goth of Karres. All that was missing the captain.

  Then… she'd have to brave the Nikkeldepain central records office. She had a feeling that dealing with that creep Franco might be easier. She was getting some idea of Nikkeldepain's obsessive bureaucracy by now.

  Chapter 17

  "What do you mean by 'alien values of wealth'?" asked the Leewit. The Leewit had a healthy interest in treasure, and finance. Goth was good at it too, the captain recalled, rather nostalgically. He remembered her delight at figuring out the Venture 's cargo values for the Daal's officials, and working out cargo and passenger rates-and searching for the Agandar's loot.

  Mebeckey shrugged. "Things which were valuable to an alien species. That had collector's value, but were of no use to humans. Much of it we didn't understand. But it was plainly a mixture between a fortress and a palace. There were no jewels. If there were ornaments they were things that looked like lumps of coal. There were many bones. Everything was very uniform, very ordered. There were thousands of patterned long planting-beds of dusty earth, all the same. There was alien machinery. Weapons not designed for human limbs. There were freighter loads of stuff that did have a value. Rare metals. The treasure of dozens of worlds that they'd conquered-some of it they had plainly understood as little as we understood them."

  His expression got a little dreamy. "For a little while I had made the greatest find of xeno-archeological treasure any one ever has, and I was rich beyond my imagining. But we kept going deeper. Looking for the source of the radio-signal. We should have loaded the Kapurnia and got out. But greed kept us going deeper."

  "And what did you find down there?" asked Pausert, warily.

  "We found a stasis box of some kind. I cleared the area. Wanted to send the Waldo-robot down. "

  He sighed. "My associates were perhaps less scrupulous than they should have been. One of my assistants sneaked back. Or hid herself and remained behind. She opened it as soon as we were out of sight."

  He sighed again. "We heard her scream. And we ran back. But by then it was too late."

  "Why?"

  "She'd opened the stasis box."

  "And… "

  "It had been full of the dust-and she was covered in it."

  "Dust," said the Leewit. She'd plainly, by the tone of voice been expecting treasure.

  "Everything thing becomes dust eventually, child. I expect their stasis box hadn't worked," said the captain, faintly relieved.

  Mebeckey shook his head. "It had worked perfectly. It had preserved viably what it was meant to preserve. We just didn't recognize it for what it was. "

  "So what was it?"

  "Seeds of a kind," said Mebeckey, his voice quavering slightly. "Or spores, perhaps. Everything was so different that we should have guessed that the aliens were not an animal life-form. We are animals that eat plants and other animals… These were plants that used animals to grow in, and to disperse their spores. I say 'plants' but really they were all one plant. One vast telepathically linked plant, with various lifestages, with only one vegetative goal: to cover all, to harvest, to bring back to the mother-plant, to breed, to create more seedlings in the motiles, to spread, to cover all, to harvest, to bring back to the mother-plant, to breed, to create more seedlings in the motiles to cover all, to harvest, to bring back to the mother-plant, to create more seedlings."

  His voice had become a monotone, his eyes glazed, and he was was plainly caught in the hypnotic repetitive chanting. The captain interrupted. "We get the point. But how do you know all this?"

  "And what were the bones from, if it was a plant?" demanded the Leewit.

  He looked calmly at them. "Because I too became part of the mother-plant. The haploid stage takes over animal life. Marshi got most of the spores, but the rest of us must have breathed in a few. She was the dominant plant. It grew in us, spreading hyphae through us, taking over our nervous system and then our bodies. That's what it does, until it is ready to sporify. Then it begins to grow rapidly, devouring the host, using the animal for nutrients and produces millions of spores, haploid spores, that then mix and make new mother-plants-which are all part of the great mother-plant."

  "What?" Pausert had his blaster out, pointed at Mebeckey. "Are you telling me you're full of some alien parasite?"

  The man shook his head. "Not any more. I was. It controlled me. But at least one of my crew may still be. My assistant Marshi, the woman who got most of it. Except she was not part of my crew any more. She'd just become part of the plant."

  "You mean this plant out there, spreading?"

  "No," said Mebeckey. "Well, they must have some spores with them. But they need Melchin to finish the life-cycle. The species they co-evolved with, that they used as reproductive hosts. They can live in other animals, but not finish the breeding cycle. They left me there, left me to seek for the Illtraming. I don't know if they survived."

  "I get the feeling that there are big gaps in this stor
y," said Pausert. " And I don't like it. Who or what is the Illtraming?"

  "The mother-plant used its motiles-Melchin that had been infected with the haploid stage, to colonize other places, then continents, then planets. Only, somewhere… the Melchin hosts were infected by some disease before sporification. It killed the mother-plant haploids in the hosts. It did not kill the Melchin hosts. They survived. And bred. They are the Illtraming. The Melchin who are no longer ruled the mother-plant. They are the Mother-plant's most deadly enemies, with a fear and hatred of the mother-plant as deep as the universe. And also the Mother-plant's only hope of survival. The bones we found… the bones are all that is left of the hosts, the Melchin. The haploid mother-plant can manage with a female human host. But to produce viable spores they need a male Melchin. And then more Melchin to breed for hosts. My crew-or what used to be my crew-left me so they could go and search for Illtraming."

  "Why didn't they just take you too?" asked Vezzarn.

  "I tried to get to them." He held up his scarred hands. "But had I locked myself in, when I started getting the shakes. I was scared they'd think I was infected with some alien disease and kill me. I was scared that they had been infected. I still thought it was a disease. It took a while to become one with the plant, and its control of the nervous system took a while too. And then it takes control. It can't properly read your mind or know what you know. You are just part of the plant. And the plant didn't know how to open the lock. I could have picked it, but the Mother-plant couldn't control enough dexterity or access my memories sufficiently. It tried, but I think I only had one spore, and I think the more plants the more complete the control. Anyway, I was trapped. Then maybe the plant needed something more than my body could supply. It was adapted to parasitize Melchin, not humans-although it could use other animals, just not to breed. The plant mind faded and I was myself again. Alone. Alone!"

  "In the mean time those are some blips on our screen, Captain," said Vezzarn, pointing. "It looks like the Phantom ships are back."

  Mebeckey looked at the screen too, at the fast approaching needle shapes. "Melchin. Or maybe even Illtraming."

  "What?"

  "xeno-archeologists have found Melchin-mother-plant ruins and the wreck of a ship. And there are Nartheby sprite illustrations. That's what their ships look like."

  Chapter 18

  Goth found herself negotiating several morasses. Firstly, there was the morass of high school politics. Yes, she could physically and mentally dominate almost any individual there. But as a group, as a system… well, it was like wading through thigh-deep sticky mud.

  The same could be said of her attempts to make head or tail of the bureaucracy that had enmeshed her father's estate. The locals seemed to delight in paperwork for paperwork's sake. It took her a full week of early morning prowling to find the right file. She found that in between keeping house for herself, and seeing to the demands of schoolwork, she had a limited amount of time that could be spared to peruse the files through the jungle of the Nikkeldepain Central Records Office. Gaining entrance to that had been easy enough. She'd let them lock her in in no-shape one evening, and had then arranged to be able to get back in via the fire-escape door whenever she wanted to. The next difficulty had been that she did not want to switch on lights and call attention to herself-and a paper chase in a huge dark building was impossible. So she'd had to settle for the early mornings, before the office opened, and before she had to go to school. There was a strong temptation to simply set fire to the entire place, except she suspected that would just make for more complications.

  Eventually she tracked the file down. It was a very thick folder. Marked 'confidential'. She decided that she could trust herself.

  She soon discovered, as she dug through it, that the paper-chase society gathered everything, even though it now had computerized records. It had copies of the logs of various expeditionary voyages. It was surprising how far afield he had roamed-even, from what she could work out, into the Chaladoor-before escaping worm weather there. There were reports of various 'misdemeanors'. To Goth they were obvious klatha flares. There were tax returns. Medical details. And a final report on the last voyage. Which went nowhere near the Iverdahl System. Or the Talsoe Twins. An addendum appended to that log did however give Goth pause. It bore the crest of the Imperial Security Service, and took the form of a query about one Captain Threbus. And it related to two things: the prohibited planet of Karres-it appeared Threbus had been seen in the company of a suspected Karres witch, in the Regency of Hailie-where there was no record of his ever having been. The second query in the letter related to the missing Lieutenant-Commander Kaen, a distinguished young officer in the Imperial Space navy married to Pausert's mother. It appeared that he had vanished at much the same time as Captain Threbus. The log data put Threbus's last entry to within a few light-weeks of where Kaen was last known to have been.

  Goth slapped her head in irritation. The log was a forgery, put together, as she happened to know, to lead away from Karres. To lead as far away as possible. The fact that it placed the Venture on the rather troubled and unstable border that Lieutenant-Commander Kaen had been assigned to was pure happenstance. At least, she assumed so. With Karres and klatha sometimes co-incidence wasn't. But no wonder they were suspicious about declaring Threbus dead. Karres was going to have to do something about the ISS, now that it could. And in the meantime, she'd clear out these inconvenient records.

  Or would she? Given the fact that Pausert's mother-and the various lawyers she'd hired, had caused this file to dug up rather often, and that Threbus was well-known and remembered, it could just make things worse. She needed to be a bit more subtle.

  Like coping with high-school's hidden mud-holes, she might get further by not just blundering in. Next big step was going to have to be the Imperial Embassy. If they could add to suspicion Threbus was alive-they could certainly provide confirmation that he wasn't. She just wished that she had the Daal of Uldune's skilled forgers to do it for her, instead of having to try to do it herself. In the meantime there were short-term measures. She'd looked up the Threbus Institute's records while she was at it. She wondered if it had ever occurred to Pausert's mother that she was, in a technical sense, employing herself. Threbus still was the majority owner of the unit. It didn't make a fortune, but it could afford to give her a raise.

  She'd ghosted around in no-shape often enough following the captain with that Sunnat, and kept an eye on him. So figuring out who the Director of the Threbus Institute was, and how their system worked was relatively easy. She helped herself to a staff evaluation form and a recommendation form as a model and soon had a neatly printed instruction awaiting signature in his in-tray. Doing lightshifts on entire documents was difficult, required a lot of concentration. But a name and percentage, those were easy.

  ***

  Pausert was finding this term at school far more pleasant than any other had ever been. For a start, Rapport and his cronies had backed off. Yes, Pausert was sure they were just waiting for a time and place of their choosing. But before this it had been anytime, anyplace. This state of affairs was a distinct improvement. And for a second thing, his luck seemed to changed since the lattice ship arrived. First off, Vala had joined the class. She hadn't done anything hugely obvious. Just smiled at him. But it had resulted in a subtle shift of the power-politics in the class. She was a pretty girl… and the other guys had noticed. He walked a bit taller just thinking about that. He wondered if he should tell them that they often did homework together. But she hadn't, so he didn't. She was smarter than she let on. Smarter than he was and he was smarter at math than the rest of the boys.

  Secondly, mother had got a pay increase! The first in all the years she been there. It wasn't a lot, but it was something extra. And Pausert had the feeling it wasn't just the money. It was the gesture. "They didn't even tell me about it. I had to go and query my payslip. But the increase is there on my file with the director's signature on it! I thought he was
such an old skinflint."

  Pausert still thought so. But it did make the world seem just a little less crushing.

  ***

  She should have actually have used logic and worked out it properly earlier, thought Goth angry with herself now, as she dodged back out onto the street, away from the alarms. It was obvious that the Imperial Embassy would have complex alarm systems. No-shape was not going to be enough.

  She went back in daylight, two days later during her half-term holiday, light-shifted into the grumpy Nikkeldepain housewife but carefully not carrying weaponry or anything to worry their security systems. The visa section of the embassy had, inevitably, long queues. And of course, a bathroom. Goth was horrified to find that it also had a hidden monitoring camera. Probably spy-rays too. Had they no sense of privacy? She thought crossly, before admitting to herself that, realistically, she'd been about to use that privacy to fool them. So she had to evolve another plan.

  Goth visited the Embassy in the Ambassador's aircar. It developed sudden severe vision problems just outside the Embassy gate. A problem that could relate to a light-shift of the air, if anyone understood that. The driver set it down in haste. He got out of his door-and Goth, having studied door mechanisms carefully a little earlier, 'ported a piece of it into her pocket. The driver's door would not close.

  That was enough to cause the ambassador's security detail to hustle him out of the car, quickly, and into the Embassy. So quickly that they didn't even worry about closing the door behind them. It wasn't quite what Goth had planned, but she slipped in through the open door and sat down, and 'ported the piece of the driver's door-mechanism back into place. The driver, left with a door that suddenly worked perfectly on his eighth try, scratched his head, wiped the windscreen, and then walked around the car, closed the Ambassador's door, walked back, got in, and drove to motor-gate, and in through the compound to the garages. He got out, carefully locked the ambassadorial vehicle, put the lockbar in his pocket, and walked to the security card reader, and went up into the embassy.