Love and Intrigue Under the Seven Moons of Kordea

by Helena Puumala

  From somewhere behind him came the sound of a door’s rusty hinges creaking, although the light did not increase, but then, it was pretty brutal already. He could not prevent the shudder which passed through his body at the noise.

  “Hah, he’s awake, finally!” someone shouted.

  Or maybe it was not a shout, it just sounded like that to ears sensitized by the abuse he had been through.

  “Got a dose of that talkie-med ready, Jacko?” the voice continued.

  Yes, the Hounds. Of course, who else? No doubt they knew that they did not have all that much time to make him talk; Authorities of one kind or another would be zeroing in on them, soon. How had they managed to elude detection this long; the emergency communicators were supposed to lead the Port Security right to the victim. Unless, of course, the Hounds knew that, and had had the smarts to ditch the contents of his pockets on the street before they carried him off. Yes, that must have been what had happened, otherwise a Security Team would have found him long before he had regained consciousness.

  He had to think clearly, in spite of the headache.

  He knew about the “talkie-med”. Its other colloquial name was “babble-juice”; the respectable term was “truth serum”. It was designed to lower a person’s inhibitions to telling strangers about things he or she would normally not talk about. Ironically, it’s main ingredient was a plant that grew only on Kordea, although the drug itself had been created in a Terran laboratory, on some Space Station or another.

  There were ways to defeat it, of course. That was easier said than done, however, when you were suffering with a massive headache. Which was probably why he had not been stunned, merely, but had also suffered a blow on the head.

  He felt the prick of the injector on his neck. The Hounds were very keen to get him blabbing.

  The simplest way to keep from spilling beans under the truth serum was to just refuse to talk. He started with that, using the fact that his throat was drier than Kordean dust as an excuse, coughing and sputtering when the questions came.

  “What did you do with the detectors you stole from us?”

  “Where did you send the pretty Terran amarto-sensitive? We know that you were hiding her in plain sight; she was working in one of the stores on Main Street, for crying out loud; what was with that, anyway?”

  Cough, cough. Rattle, rattle.

  “Creepers, Jacko, get a bottle of water. We’re not going to get anything out of him unless we get his throat working?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want his throat to be working,” muttered Jacko, but he went off, and returned, moments later, with a water bottle.

  His companion thrust the nozzle between Coryn’s teeth, and ordered him to suck the liquid down, which he did, grateful, in spite of himself, for the water.

  “Now,” the same man said when Coryn had imbibed enough that his throat felt less raw, “you better start talking. What did you do with the detectors you stole from us?”

  “Gave to the Witches of the Circle of the Twelve.”

  It was not the whole truth, but it was close enough that his nervous system, primed by the drug to answer questions honestly, should be okay with it, and not push him to explain further, at least not if the Hound did not think to voice follow-up questions on the topic.

  “Cripes, Limpo!” exclaimed Jacko. “The Witches must have used them somehow to figure out what our guys were doing with the Lina-trap! They’re too wickedly brilliant those women! I sure don’t like working against them!”

  “If we get enough of them working for us, you won’t have to work against them, Jacko,” Limpo commented. “So don’t lose your frigging lunch, for crying out loud!

  “Now, Liaison Officer, Coryn Leigh, recently a male whore on Space Station RES.”

  He paused to let the insult sink in.

  Coryn gritted his teeth, determined (in spite of the headache) to not take the bait. That was how the talk-med was usually used, especially by people who were not experts with it: an emotionally wrought person was more susceptible to the impulse to spill information which it created, than a calm one.

  “Where did you send the girl, Sarah Mackenzie, who for a time was working as a store clerk in a shop on Trahea’s Main Street?”

  The man was trying to be precise, obviously, to make it impossible for Coryn to weasel his way out with half-truths. He must have been a step above the least of the Hounds, and have realized that the Agents were taught to reveal as little as possible under the truth-serum. He meant to drive Coryn into a corner where he had to tell what he knew. What he did not realize, apparently, was that he had the facts wrong, and was therefore giving his victim more, rather than less, leeway.

  “I didn’t...send her...anywhere.”

  “Where did she go? She’s left her job, and no-one seems to know where she’s gone.”

  “Ask the Witches.”

  That one cost him. The babble-juice, as had been explained to him, made it physically painful to speak an untruth. His head pounded painfully; sweat poured from his body. Yet, he hadn’t told a lie, exactly, only what amounted to a noncommittal statement.

  “Ask the Witches!” Jacko cried. “What kind of an answer is that?”

  “They know, maybe.”

  Coryn desperately hoped that his interrogators were finished with him. If not, the only thing that he could manage any more was to zip his lip as tightly as possible. The medication was coursing through his body which had been weakened by the blow to his head. Maybe if he allowed himself to lose consciousness, again.... Would that help, or would his mouth just open at the next question, and start spilling out stuff about The Mission? He bit down on his lower lip to prevent that.

  “Cripes, Limpo, he’s having a reaction of some kind to the talkie-med, or maybe to that whack on the head that Rammer caused!” he heard Jacko screaming from a distance. “Limpo, jeepers, we’re gonna be in trouble if he dies on us! The City pooh-pahs like him a lot; they’re gonna accuse us of murder if they get hold of us!”

  “Jacko, for crying out loud, don’t be such a wimp! We’ll dump him on a shady street; they’ll think some tiger-dust artist rolled him for his cash! We’re leaving anyway; just have to make our way to the ship outside the city. We can’t take on the Witches bare-handed; somebody else is going to have to finish the job here on Kordea.

  “I’d kill him if I didn’t think that it would make things half-way impossible for whoever comes in after us; like you said, the idiot City pooh-pahs do like the dork!”

  Coryn heard no more. He did lose consciousness. Maybe he was having some kind of a reaction to the babble-juice. It was his first direct experience with it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When Coryn awoke he was in the Port Medical Facility, a woman in a lab coat, and a black-haired woman in Kordean dress hovering over him. His headache seemed to have eased into a dull discomfort, and the sense of having an unpleasant drug coursing through his veins and arteries had abated. He was, in fact, surprised how not-ill he felt.

  “How are you feeling?” the lab-coated woman asked him.

  He squinted to read the name tag pinned to her coat. Dr. Mary Jonas. He had sent people to her, but had never before had to rely on her care.

  “Actually, pretty good,” Coryn replied. “Considering. I should be feeling like a wrecked space ship.”

  “You can thank Mora, here, for feeling as well as you do. Your Office Manager, Karan, called Ferhil Stones as soon as she heard that you had been brought in. She had informed Witch Marlyss of your disappearance, and Witch Marlyss had asked to be kept posted on developments. She recommended that we find Mora in Trahea; she’s a Stronghold-trained Healer with an excellent reputation. She used her skills to ease your hurts, and to pull the drug out of your system. Our Terran methods would have been much more time-consuming, had we had to rely on them.”

  “Then I thank you, Healer Mora,” Coryn said formally. “You have, indeed, performed a service.”

  Mora smiled at him.


  “However, Mary and I both recommend that you don’t get up quite yet,” she said. “That was a nasty whack on the head, and your system reacted rather badly to the drug they used on you.”

  “What was it, do you know?” Dr. Jonas asked, as Coryn relaxed into the pillows. “I sent a blood sample to the lab, but they haven’t reported back yet.”

  There was no panic. He hadn’t given away much, under the talkie-med.

  “Truth serum, of course.”

  “So it was the Hounds who had you? I’ll have to let Karan know. She tells me your boss, Marcues, has been on the com, asking about that, getting more agitated by the minute.”

  “Tell Karan to get Marcues to relax. The Mission is safe; the Hounds didn’t get much out of me.”

  Nevertheless, Coryn sighed. Marcues had the mentality of a bureaucrat; not always the best mindset for the Head of a spy organization. Things did not always run smoothly at The Agency.

  “You were able to resist, even with that blow on the head?” Dr. Jonas’ eyebrows had shot up. “I find that a little hard to believe. You’re not a miracle worker, no matter how well-trained you are.”

  “It was more like they asked the wrong questions. They were in a bigger panic than I was; the Circle Witches have them running scared.”

  “Marlyss will be gratified to hear that,” Mora said with a smile.

  “Look,” she added when Dr. Jonas had left to use the com, “I’ll give you another once-over, and then I’ll leave to attend to other matters in Trahea, like an imminent birth. Mary is perfectly qualified to look after you, and it seems to me that this infirmary, as she called it, is pretty lightly used. I’ll report to Marlyss in my own fashion, but I’m sure that she’ll want to get in touch with you as soon as you can make it to your office. She is not happy that the situation is such in Trahea that the Liaison Officer is hit on the head and abducted from the Trade City streets.

  “She told me that she warned the City Authorities that she’d turn their security functions over to the ‘professionals at the Port’ if they didn’t start doing a better job.”

  Mora was performing the “once-over”, even as she spoke, cupping her Stone in one hand while the other one hovered over Coryn’s head.

  “Uh, that probably has the City fathers running around in panicky circles.”

  Mora smiled.

  “You’ve got that right. You’ll have some more work to do, oiling troubled waters, when Mary lets you out of here, ” she said.

  I’ll have to calm down Director Marcues first, Coryn mused. Can’t have him pulling The Mission out for no good reason. The state of the Hounds’ nerves when they had done the interrogating, suggested that The Organization people in charge of the amarto-business were in a bad way. Clearly, they had not expected the degree of resistance that the Witches, augmented by Sarah, and Jaime, had shown when the moon, Lina, had been threatened.

  That boded well for The Mission; this was a fact in which he could take comfort.

  *****

  “Damn it,” said Joe, “can’t we just approach these nose-in-the air jokers who drop into this gravel pit in their fancy space ships, and then flit or fly off to their god-forsaken installation in the deep woods, to sell us some vehicle parts? Or trade parts for the foodstuff that the Settlement hands over to them! They can get more the next time they go out into the galaxy out there, for crying out loud! It would make so much more sense than us having to take our ship to... where? I don’t even know what the nearest place to buy parts is, though there have got to be enough of them in the universe!

  “What does the Settlement get for all that food, anyway? I bet it’s something piddling, compared to what they pass over to those snots!”

  Joe had allowed Texi to raid the Hera’s Hope’s equipment cupboards for the stuff he needed to fix the Settlement’s vehicles, and, as a result, those cupboards were getting bare. Bare enough, that Joe, a diligent ship mechanic, was fretting. Besides, he and Sarah had already been emptying them in order to make the old ship in the lot space-worthy, and they weren’t even close to finishing that job.

  “We better talk with the group members before we do anything,” Sarah sighed. “We need to have a meeting, anyway, we haven’t all gotten together for too many days, what with the Settlement Elders monopolizing Roland most of the time.”

  “Yeah, and the greenhouse women are keeping Elli and Jillian so busy that it seems like I hardly see my wife any more, and when I do, she’s exhausted.” Joe was clearly in a mood to be morose. “I told her that if she didn’t make a little more time for me, I was going to make a play for you, Sarah, and she just rolled her eyes. I thought that I’d at least get a slap for that, but nothing doing.”

  Sarah giggled.

  “Yeah, something will have to be done,” she agreed. “If you’re desperate enough for Jill’s company that you’re angling for slaps, life has gotten tough. We’ll have to start getting the real job done, instead of just helping to prop up a town at the end of the universe. Right now it feels like we’re treading water.

  “Hm. Could we use your notion of asking our uppity neighbours for mechanical supplies as a passage into their mysterious facility?”

  Joe plopped his bottom on an upturned metal crate which he had been hauling around the Settlement ship to serve as a seat whenever he needed a rest, after crawling inside some conduit or another on his belly. Sarah, being small, did a lot of the squeezing through tight spaces, but Joe had to do a share of it, and he never balked, not even when he had trouble with his much bulkier form. Ship mechanics were like that; they did what had to be done, and didn’t complain about trivialities. Empty equipment cupboards, and spouses too tired for a little loving, however, were not trivialities.

  “I don’t know,” he said, in answer to Sarah’s question. “Maybe if we could have a brainstorming session—you, me, Jill, Texi, Nance, Dian, and Jaime—we might come up with a workable plan.”

  “Don’t forget Roge and Stu,” Sarah added. “They’re good Agents. And anything we come up with, we will have to pass by Roland and Elli, of course, since they’re in charge of the Mission.”

  “If we can get hold of Roland long enough to put our idea to him,” complained Joe.

  He had reason for the complaint. The Elders of the Settlement had decreed that Roland and Elli should live in one of the communal houses of the Settlement, so that Roland could be more available for giving advice on various matters. The rest of the group were still bunking in Hera’s Hope, though they ate their meals in the shared dining room where food made from the products of the gardens, the greenhouses, and the farms were served to all comers.

  “We’ll have to get Jill to put a bug into Elli’s ear. Maybe our idea will energize her. I don’t think that she’s got the personality to spend days on end talking to plants; that’s probably part of her exhaustion problem. If we can remind her of why we’re here, I bet that she’ll perk up.”

  The trouble was, Sarah thought, that they had ended up too deep inside the roles they were playing, while not seeing any forward progress of The Mission. Their goal was tantalizingly close; yet it might as well have been on the other side of the globe, for all they had seen of it. Roland had insisted that they burrow themselves into the life of the Settlement before taking any action, in order to win for themselves as much leeway of movement, as was possible. A good idea, but..., also, a recipe for frustration.

  Coryn, had he been leading The Mission, would have recognized that. He was more attuned to people than Roland Harmiss was, no matter that Roland was the older, more experienced Agent. Sarah sighed again, and, determinedly, put the fair-haired man out of her mind.

  Now, what about this idea of getting the owners of the fancy-pants space ships to help them refill their equipment cupboards, as well as to take them on a tour of the mystery building? Was there a way to make it work?

  *****

  “Hey, Jill, my girl, wake up!”

  Joe was giving Jillian’s cheeks gentle slaps; she wa
s trying to fend him off half-heartedly.

  “Sarah wants to have a meeting of all of us who still sleep on Hera’s Hope,” Joe continued. “She thinks that you might be pretty crucial to something or other, so you need to be present, in more than just body.”

  Sarah was gathering people into the lounge where Joe had brought Jillian. Texi and Nance were already there, and other members of the group were drifting in, in twos and threes. Dian and Jaime entered together, in time to see Jillian shake herself awake.

  “What’s this? Sarah calling a meeting?” she asked. “This has got to be more interesting than anything I’ve done in the past two—or is it three?—weeks.”

  “Yeah, she wants us all here in the lounge,” Texi said. “All nine of us who are still bunking aboard the ship. I got the feeling that she would have dragged Roland and Elli here, too, if she could have. What do you know about it Joe? You must know something since you and Sarah work together.”

  “Oh, yes, Joe dear, these days you work with the girl with the lovely ass,” Jillian said, sounding almost as venomous as she, sometimes, had, in Trahea. “Did you make a pass at her like you threatened to? No doubt she turned you down flat.”

  “She laughed at me,” Joe confessed. “She said that things were pretty bad when I craved your attention, Jill, enough, to court a face slap. Part of the reason why she wants to get us moving on what brought us here.”

  “She’s got the right idea,” Jillian said while others around her and Joe chortled. “Me for one, I’d be much easier to live with, if I had some real work to do, instead of picking bugs off plant leaves.”