Love and Intrigue Under the Seven Moons of Kordea

by Helena Puumala

  “And you people didn’t bother to go down there to shoot or capture the invaders?”

  Even Nance could hear the contempt in the Elite’s voice.

  “Well, there’s not that many of us, minding the store, like I said. Morri said that the people that trooped in are probably Agency people, and well trained, and we’re just peons, because everyone else left to go for some rest and rec. We’ve sent out calls for help; you’re the first one to answer.

  “We’re depending on the energy-reflector in the lab to keep itself safe; it’s pretty good at that. And since the Agents didn’t bring any Witches with them, they’re all stuck outside the barrier around the lab.”

  “They’d be stuck out there anyway, only more so, if they had brought Witches with them,” chuckled the Elite Neotsarian.

  He cut the connection on his com, and gleefully rubbed his hands together.

  “As they will be once we get this girl into the lab to augment the reflector’s power further,” he said.

  *****

  “That room you saw me go into,” Jeb said to Jillian when he returned to where the others were. “It’s a small lounge, maybe supposed to be for the lab workers. The only unlocked door around here. There were a couple of spy cams, but I zapped them, and it occurred to me that if we dragged the three entranced people in there, we could make them more comfortable than they can possibly be on the hallway floor. There are a few couches in the room.”

  “If we can drag them through the narrow passage,” Jillian replied, looking slightly dubious.

  “Oh I can do it,” Jeb protested, “and I think that you can, easily enough. The bigger guys would have more trouble, though Roge is wiry enough—his height is irrelevant.”

  “All right, it’s probably a good idea to get them out of sight anyway, in case someone comes poking their noses into what’s happening here,” Jillian conceded, having made a quick decision. “Roge, can you haul Jaime, please; Jeb will take Sarah, and I’ll drag Dian.”

  The job was done quickly, even though the draggers tried to take care not to damage the entranced bodies. Jillian found herself wondering whether the out-of-body mentalities were aware of what was happening. Were they disturbed in any way by the manhandling of their physical forms through the narrow passage, and then into the room on the other side of the barrier bulge? Or by the process of Roge and Jeb lifting each of them onto one of the three couches in the room; Jillian was glad that there just happened to be three such, although even the longest one was a bit short for Jaime. Jeb settled the Scientific Advisor’s knees into a bent position, once he was on the sofa, hoping that it was a natural enough pose to keep Jaime from unduly stiffening up.

  “Definitely better than sprawled on the hard floor,” was Jillian’s final comment. “Though, I suppose, even under the best circumstances they’re going to be a bit worse for wear when they wake up.”

  *****

  Coryn had set three communicators on alert, so that he would know immediately if any reports were routed to him from The Mission, or if the Witches at Ferhil Stones wanted to get in touch with him. His Office com took care of the working hours, the Official Residence com was primed to wake him up during his sleep cycle, and the personal com he carried on his body filled in the times when he was not near either one of the other two.

  After the attack on his person by the Hounds, Port Security had, to his frustration, assigned two body guards to accompany him any time that he ventured into either Trahea proper, or the Trade City. He had to admit that there was cause for this caution, but he found it hard to give up the privacy of walking the streets alone. His duties as the Liaison Officer involved meeting with people in the City, and he had, in the past, used the walks back and forth as an opportunity to get to know Trahea better, and, if using a route already quite familiar to him, to think about things, and to work out solutions to problems. The knowledge that there were two burly security officers following him dampened his enthusiasm for exploration and problem-solving both—wryly he recalled Sarah’s complaints about always having to be accompanied by someone during even the shortest venture into the Trade City. Now he understood her irascibility, and acknowledged that she had had reasons for it. Not that he regretted having tried to keep her safe, any more than he faulted the Port Security for their efforts on his behalf.

  Word had come to him that the members of The Mission had decided to speed up their operation after hearing about the Hound attack on his person. Shortly after that he had received a quick word stating that the troops were going in, and asking if he could warn Marlyss to have her Circle ready for action. He had immediately communicated with Ferhil Stones, passing on the request; only now, hours seemed to have elapsed while he wore down the carpet of the Official Residence, unable to sleep. Nothing further had arrived, not from The Agency, nor from the Circle of the Twelve.

  What was going on? How was The Mission faring?

  *****

  Rickon piloted the fancy flyer into which the Elite Karil herded Nance. The flyer was inside the space ship, and at some signal from the pilot, a roof hatch in the storage compartment opened up, and Rickon, with a sneering glance at Nance who was trying to cover her surprise at this, lifted the flyer directly outside. Behind them, the hatch closed up again.

  “Take us right into the compound, Rickon,” the Elite Karil ordered. “By the back entrance. That’s only a short distance from the laboratory, outside of which the Agency idiots should be, dulling their claws on the barrier. Won’t they be surprised to see me arrive with their prize amarto-sensitive, whom they had tried to stash in their crate of a ship. Guarded by only an old man with no guts.”

  Nance wanted to warn The Mission members via Jeb, but did not quite dare to pull out the tiny com and talk into it. The Karil character would certainly confiscate it if he saw it, and where would she be then? No, it was better to keep the com a secret, and simply deal with things as they happened. The Mission members were no doubt expecting someone to come and ruin—whatever there was to ruin. Nance and her jailer might be entering the premises from a direction which the Agency people did not expect them to come from, but hadn’t Coryn said that an Agent always expected the unexpected?

  Thus, all she did was sit tight, while the Elite fool sat next to her, his eyes on her neckline and cleavage most of the time. Let him look, she thought, but if he tries to touch I’m going to slap and scream! Since I’m supposed to be a Witch, he’s got no business interfering with my person, whatever he thinks about possibly being able to control the amarto-sensitives with his machine!

  Rickon was a good pilot, and he apparently enjoyed manoeuvring the fancy vehicle. The flight to the Facility took very little time, and once there, he set the flyer gently on the tarmac at the back of the building, avoiding the electrified fence adroitly.

  “Do you want me to come in to watch your back, Elite Karil?” he asked, once he had the hatch open for his boss and the prisoner.

  Elite Karil pulled out a laser pistol from his pocket and displayed it.

  “I don’t think any of the Confederation fools will bother me as long as I have this pointed at their lovely Witch,” he said. “And once I’m through the barrier, they’re not a threat at all.”

  “You have your little gadget which opens a temporary hole in the invisible wall?” Rickon asked. “You did take it with you, from the ship?”

  Nance had to bite back a guffaw. Rickon obviously had not much more faith in the intelligence of his Elite superior than she did. Still, he was willing to take orders from the man, a fact which in Nance’s estimation put him at the level of a Kordean of the Servant Class, such as she herself had been. Well, perhaps the perk of being able to pilot fancy flyers was a reward enough for unthinking obedience.

  “Got it. Elite Morgon told me to guard it with my life, since we’ve only got a couple of them. Have to get those guys in the lab to put together more of them, but they’re bastards, drag their feet every chance they get. Even Jerold, who’s one of us, if
from some obscure corner of our part of the galaxy. Why is it that the guys who can do brilliant work are always such stubborn fools; they don’t want to follow the rules?”

  Rickon did not bother to answer, merely closed the hatch behind Karil and Nance, remaining in the flyer, to wait for further orders, Nance assumed. Karil drew another little object from one of his pockets, and used it to unlock the door through which he herded Nance. The door opened directly into a hallway of the building; there were no anterooms, apparently, at the backdoor of the Facility. Nance, used to the much more complex architecture of Kordea, was surprised by such austerity; it seemed purposeless.

  *****

  The Mission members in the hallway were expecting Nance’s arrival, although they had expected her to be accompanied by more Neotsarians than just the one. Roland had messaged Jeb from Hera’s Hope as soon as Nance had been taken, to prepare the troops for the possibility that she would be brought to the laboratory.

  “The fools are convinced that she’s Sarah,” Roland had said. “They were not about to listen to reason when they imagined that they had managed to capture the prize amarto-sensitive. Nance went with them peacefully when they threatened to blast down the Hope’s hatch. I don’t know how she’s playing the game—whether she’s accepted the Sarah role that they’re thrusting upon her, or is insisting on her own identity.”

  “I trust Nance to do what strikes her as the smartest way to play this thing, but I guess it means that The Organization fools have no idea that Sarah and Dian are astrally in the laboratory already,” Jillian muttered when Jeb relayed the news. “And we haven’t heard anything from them since they went in, which worries me. I wonder if the machine can keep them from contacting us, or from contacting the Witches on Kordea. Or are they just so busy figuring out a way to dismantle the miserable piece of equipment that they’ve completely forgotten about keeping the rest of us in the loop?”

  Jillian was aware that time was slipping by while the people under her command seemed to be on a treadmill going nowhere. Moving the entranced three into the lounge had been their last bit of useful action; since then they had been waiting, and prowling the bit of real estate that was available to them on both sides of the impassable bulge surrounding the laboratory door. Why no-one had tried to attack them she did not understand, and found herself wishing that the Neotsarians would try something, if only to show that they were not totally confident in the ability of their amarto-reflecting mechanism to protect itself and everything around it. The more time slipped by without anything happening, the more likely it seemed to her that perhaps the machine was capable of deflecting anything that the two Witches might have tried to throw at it.

  “Maybe,” she had murmured to Jeb, only moments before the door at the end of the hallway had suddenly opened, “we’re going to have to start to develop a plan B, one which does not depend on the abilities of our amarto-sensitives.”

  “Roland is communicating with Director Marcues about that,” Jeb had replied, without explaining how the contact was happening. Did it involve Jeb and his implants, or did Roland and Elli have some kind of an emergency com system which they had activated?

  “The trouble is, that the Plan B is going to involve battleships, according to Marcues’ thinking,” he had added. “Pulling in the Military is going to be tricky at best, and will have some far-reaching political consequences. So Roland’s holding him off for now, hoping that the Witches can pull off a miracle, or two.”

  Jillian had had time to wonder if, perhaps, her bosses were as big idiots as the Neotsarian Elites seemed to be. Damn, but she missed Coryn’s presence! Of all her superiors, he was the most resourceful, imaginative one! He would have come up with a workable plan to worm their way into the laboratory, and to destroy the infernal amarto-reflector!

  She had just come to the conclusion that it was she, herself, who was going to have to step into the breach, and wrack her brain for a solution which did not involve the launching of a thousand—or even just a few—battleships, when the door at the back of the hall slid open, allowing entry to a cocksure Neotsarian man who had a firm hold on Nance’s upper arm. Her face was blank.

  “I’ve got a laser pistol aimed at the back of her head,” the man shouted to the people in the hallway, and Jillian did not doubt for a moment but that he was telling the truth.

  She stole a glance at Texi who had turned into a statue, as he stood on the other side of the barrier bulge, looking through its two walls at his wife. Beside Jillian, Jeb mumbled:

  “I hope that she still has the com I pressed on her.”

  “She does, I’m certain of it,” Jillian responded, a tiny smile creasing her face. “Slipped into the crack of her cleavage, no doubt. That’s where she stored the stunner she carried in Trahea.”

  “Then, if that fool takes her into the lab, he’s doing us a favour,” Jeb continued in a low tone. “She’ll be able to contact us, just as soon as the dork turns his back on her.”

  The Neotsarian let go of Nance’s arm when the two of them reached the invisible barrier, but he kept the laser pistol trained on her nape. She waited, very still, while he fished a device from a pocket, and used it to unzip an opening in the strange wall. He herded Nance inside the barrier, and then re-zipped the hole he had made, grinning ferally at the Agents on its other side. Then he entered the lab, making Nance precede him, the laser pistol threatening her.

  “Damn!” cursed Texi, once the lab door had closed behind the two. “To think that I have to stand here helpless while my wife is herded around like a prize browhorn cow by that arrogant shit!”

  “Relax, Texi,” Jillian said, her small smile having widened into a broad grin. “That arrogant shit just took a communicator which Jeb can link with, into the lab, along with your wife.

  “I think that we just lucked back into the game.”

  *****

  Jaime and Dian studied the astral counterpart of the amarto-reflector-refractor in as much detail as was possible, under the circumstances. They asked questions of Anya, who passed these to the three men in the laboratory. Apparently, these designers had begun with mere slivers of keyed amartos with which their jailers had provided them. They had had little understanding of the power they were thus unleashing, especially once a full-sized Stone, bonded to a sensitive woman became available to the gadget. Janelle, untrained though she was, and keyed to a pebble of an amarto bought from a gem-merchant, had, when she had been connected to the first primitive, portable amarto-detector, been capable of zeroing in on Sarah, and the Stone cache that she had stumbled upon, on the Planet of the Amartos, from across half the galaxy. The Lina-trap had required the more sophisticated machine, and the addition of Anya’s considerable talents. Anya had, however, for quite a time, determinedly resisted the pressure to use her energies against her former home planet, only to be forced to capitulate in the end.

  Now Dian and Sarah had inadvertently added their considerable powers into the equation, thereby making the problem much worse.

  Sarah had, in the meantime, mentally tackled an issue which had her seriously upset, and which, she suspected, was important for her to understand, under the circumstances. How was it that these people, with their very limited view of what humanity ought to be, had succeeded in bending amarto-power to their will? Much of what she had learned at her lessons as an Apprentice Witch, had had to do with the energies that underlay and made possible the human civilization of the galaxy. These energies were benign ones, the Teachers (Witches and not) had stressed time and again; they nurtured all living things, and supported even those which humans considered not alive. They challenged the complex creatures that people were, but never needlessly destroyed them. Although, as Sarah wryly noted to herself, they did not stop people from destroying each other or themselves; the challenge in that was that they ought to learn to value, and to protect, not only themselves, but everyone and everything around them.

  “Maybe I’m just a naive young woman,” she subvocaliz
ed to herself at one point, “but I don’t quite understand what lessons The Organization people—or Neotsarians, as they call themselves—are learning by threatening the world Kordea, and the whole of the Confederation. They seem totally bound to their notions of hierarchy, an elitism that may, at one time, have been a meritocracy, but which, obviously, long ago deteriorated into just another hereditary class structure. Worse than the one which exists on Kordea, and I thought the Kordean caste system was bad enough, what with their Witches, the landed gentry, the servant class, and so on.

  “And suppose the Neotsarians win this round? Suppose that they get to try to subdue all the humanity of the galaxy to their way of doing things? Don’t they realize that they’ll have a thousand rebellions on their hands; do they actually think that the people who have grown used to the loose structure of the Confederation will gladly set all that aside, and take on the yoke of being oppressed by the class structure of The Organization?”

  These may have been philosophical questions, Sarah acknowledged, but they were also practical ones, since she needed to find a way to make the energies of the universe work with her, instead of against her, as they were doing while the amarto-reflector was sapping her Stone power. Part of the problem was that she could not roam the universe (or other realities) while she was bound to the Neotsarians’ machine. So, again, she came to the question of how they had succeeded in doing such a thing, which basically amounted to the leashing of a natural force to serve their own, limited, and in Sarah’s opinion, misdirected, ambitions?