The Shaman of Karres

by Eric Flint

  Then things took a turn for the worse for the prosecutor…and for Stratel. That wasn’t surprising seeing as the Daal’s Bank on Uldune were the insurers. The insurance assessor had actually taken a fast ship to look for the wreck of the Moria—and to the coordinates Pausert had supplied for the hulk of the pirate ship.

  “We wished to recover the cargo if possible,” he said, primly. “The vessel Moria on which Councilor Stratel traveled was disabled by having her stern tubes shot out. The damage was consistent with an atomic Mark 17 ship atomic cannon. This was the type of weaponry found on the wreck of the pirate vessel, which was struck amidships, causing the munitions pod for class ADE ship-to-ship missiles to self-destruct. The damage to surrounding areas was consistent with a single nova-gun discharge. An extensive search of both vessels failed to find the goods we had insured. However, we were able to find the serial number on the pirate vessel, and to track it back to the original manufacturers. We obtained the identifying serial numbers of the lifeboat, which was missing.”

  “Objection, Your Honor,” protested the prosecutor. “This is irrelevant.”

  “It does not seem so to me,” said Judge Amorant. “Please continue.”

  “The lifeboat was tracked to the port records of Cinderby’s World. A business associate of the insured was listed as on board. We are thus declining payment on the basis of probable fraud. That is all, Your Honor.”

  If he’d dropped a bomb on the court it might have had less effect. Eventually the judge had to order the court cleared, and a recess until after lunch. The prisoners were led out…and into a waiting transport. They were underground on a little carrier within minutes, being kitted up for outside—just in case.

  “We’ve still got some distance to go. The rock has been hardened,” admitted the lead driller.

  “Can you get us onto the surface?” asked Pausert.

  “Already got an exit. But there is a guard on patrol up there. Me’a said we weren’t to kill anyone.” He sounded puzzled by that.

  “I will deal,” said Ta’zara, calmly. “Can we get close to them?”

  “Yeah, I’ll show yer. But they’re armed, and they got orders to shoot to kill. And there are lots of porpentiles out there. Y’ got to be careful.”

  Ta’zara nodded. “I will deal.” He was careful—because he was officially in prison and unarmed. But it seemed like a man of Na’kalauf was never really unarmed. He selected two pieces of rock and waited for the patrol to come past the little gully they were hiding in. Pausert was ready to act, cocooning…but he never got the chance. The rock was a distraction and the two hired guards were not expecting trouble. Nor did they see it coming, or were likely to remember it. They were tied up and left in the gully, while Pausert and Ta’zara donned the guards’ jackets and walked out onto the exposed rock above the store caves. There were other patrols in the distance, and in front of the cave doors, according to Me’a’s information, the main cavern which joined all the individual Consortium members’ caves came very close to the surface here.

  Pausert cocooned a tube of rock with klatha force. He hoped that would be enough to break through, that he and Ta’zara could push it in.

  He wasn’t prepared for Ta’zara to jerk him off his feet and haul him backward as from the rocky ground came a whistling shriek and a wild dust storm, full of sand and small rocks. As an attempt at “quiet” it was a complete failure.

  He and Ta’zara retreated from the rock-and-sand gale as the normal human-space air and pressure escaped. It was a challenge—because they had to dodge a steady stream of porpentiles eagerly undulating toward the dust plume. Then, obviously, the entire tube of rock fell in and the atmosphere from the caves gushed out, some freezing into a white mist. A mist full of surging porpentiles.

  “I think we’d better get out of here,” said Pausert through the breather mike. “Me’a is not going to be pleased.”

  “Neither are the Consortium—those porpentiles are going into the store caves. They must be able to smell the granules or something. It’s going to be a big cave system full of little tumbleflowers by the time they open it.”

  “They’ll start climbing out too, I should think. Remember, they have those sucker-feet.”

  They went back to the others, who wanted to know what had happened. Pausert explained as they made their way back through the tunnel to the little tracked carrier, and back to their nice comfortable, safe holding cell—where the chief inspector was waiting to hear it all again and to tell them they had very little time before court resumed. Pausert was expecting Me’a to be rather unhappy about the way the break-in had occurred. He was sure the smuggler had planned to share the loot from inside the store caves with the porpentiles. But she hadn’t planned for an all for the porpentiles, none for her sharing, of that the captain was sure. She’d changed, but not that much.

  The chief inspector, however, was rubbing her hands in glee. “Best of all possible outcomes,” she said. “I’ve been getting reports in already. They haven’t quite worked out what happened. They think part of the roof collapsed. The entrance has an airlock door—and they sent their people in to secure the granules. Only when they opened the inner door, the airlock flooded with dust-bunny size tumbleflowers. They had to open the outer door to not be packed solid with them, and now they’re rolling out of the entrance—and the hole—like smoke. It couldn’t be a worse outcome for the Consortium…or for that smuggler-woman. The Consortium just went broke. And the insurers won’t pay Stratel, and I’ve got enough to arrest Bormgo. Now it’s time you got back in court. I’ve been feeding and housing a lot of witnesses to cancel out the two Stratel bribed to repeat his lie.”

  * * *

  The stories of some of the other rescued slaves were not quite all the same, unlike the coached accusers had been. But they were believable and at times tearful. They would have given great entertainment to the court, if the gatherers and quite a lot of other people hadn’t been brought some whispered news and started leaving at almost a run.

  “What is going on?” Judge Amorant asked eventually.

  “I believe there’s been some kind of natural disaster at the granule store caves, Your Honor. I’ve had to deploy some of my people to keep order,” explained the chief inspector.

  “Hmm. Well, let us continue,” said the judge. So they did. But the prosecutor had given up even trying to cross-examine anyone.

  At the end of the witnesses’ testimony he stood up and said, “Your Honor. I would like to move this case be dismissed.”

  “You should have done so a while ago,” said the judge, dryly. “In fact, it should never have been entered onto my rolls.”

  The judge proceeded to be rather flattering about their rescue, Pausert thought. As he hadn’t ever had anything but trouble in his encounters with the officers of a court before, this was a welcome change.

  The Leewit gave the prosecutor one last whistle, and one for Stratel as well. It honestly didn’t look as if it made any difference to him. He was looking sick and green.

  “So,” said the captain to the chief inspector once they were out of the court. “If you’re done with us, we’d like to get back to the spaceport. I’d rather not have to have another meeting with Me’a.”

  The chief inspector smiled. “I hope she is very angry with you, Captain. I still want to know why you were consorting with her, and why you have a very expensive bodyguard for your niece, and just how you got the caves open, as I know they had some serious armoring. But I think I owe you enough to forego getting those answers. I believe I have a few riots to deal with—the Consortium owe quite a lot of people money—and some arrests to go and effect. I neglected to tell you that Bormgo was charged with piracy this morning. We’re searching for him. Stratel is likely to face a few charges himself. But I think being bankrupted on a planet where he has made himself hated may be worse than anything I could do to him.”

  However, any daydreams that the captain had of avoiding meeting Me’a again before
they got away on the Venture were doomed to fail. She was sitting in the Venture’s control room, waiting for them. “I do have some employees who are rather skilled at working out airlock opening codes,” she said, calmly. “But that proved unnecessary. Your ship was refitted in the shipyards on Uldune. As a precaution, the Daal’s instruction is that an override code be fitted.”

  “I see,” said the captain. He was coldly angry. “Do tell your master that I wonder how Hulik will find being married to Sedmon of the Five Lives. This is the second time the Daal of Uldune’s little tricks have given Karres trouble. I know the hexaperson is a man of power, but this has to be stopped.”

  Me’a grimaced. “I suspect the Daal would be just as angry and certainly a lot more dangerous to me if he knew that I had obtained and used that code. Judging by what he said about avoiding any conflict with you, and giving you my full cooperation, I suspect he did not know that you were one of the witches of Karres, when this was done. But I mean you no harm, and will leave if you order me to.”

  She sounded quite apologetic. Pausert wasn’t that easily fooled. Neither was the Leewit, by her tone. “What do you want, Me’a?” she demanded.

  “Passage home, for me and my bodyguards, as soon as possible.”

  “We’re full,” said Pausert.

  “Your hold, however, is not. I took the liberty of having loaded not one, but four portable suites, each with four bunks. They will provide considerably more comfort than you were able to offer your passengers. And I have a second air recycler.”

  “Just where is your home, Me’a?” asked the Leewit.

  The smuggler boss sketched a slight smile. “I would have thought it was obvious, or that Ta’zara might have told you. Na’kalauf, of course.”

  Pausert got his gambler’s klatha instinct about that statement. “Very well. Are the Imperials going to be chasing after you?”

  “Your trial and the events with the store caves provided a unique opportunity for them to be too preoccupied to notice. They don’t know we are on board either. So I suggest we depart as soon as possible,” she said coolly.

  The Leewit’s rochat stuck its angular head out of her shirt and hissed dismissively at her, and disappeared again.

  They were able to clear the port quite soon after that. The passengers were all strapped in, and the captain made one of his trademark takeoffs, which might possibly have given Me’a second thoughts about traveling on the Venture.

  CHAPTER 12

  Sitting in the cleared cabin, Goth thought about her situation. They had brought her bag from the hotel, hastily and badly packed. She could wait until they decided to take steps to make her a slave or toss her off the ship into space. She could do her best to see that went badly wrong for them. Or…

  Or she could take steps before they even tried. The best and simplest step, now that she’d established that this was definitely the ship she needed to be on, was not to be there when they came hunting for her. So she stepped into no-shape, and took herself into the gangway—just in time, as the mate came along and locked her cabin door. But she was no longer inside it.

  Goth set off to explore the ship. It was plain to her that it was a space-traveling garbage dump. The crew obviously had no love for it. There were quite a lot of cabins they could have put her in, it turned out, even a long-unoccupied stateroom of dusty splendor, and very little clutter. It even had its own robobutler—in need of restocking, but that she could do, and did, from their stores. The luxurious room would do for a base, and had, in addition to the standard lock, a plain old-fashioned sturdy bolt. Even in a time of hyperelectronic locks, that was hard to beat.

  The ship had a lower crew number than it was built to carry—seven that she’d been able to count. Goth decided they were as dodgy a lot as she’d ever encountered. She checked out the ship’s guns and its missile pods, and found them to be in good order. They plainly expected trouble. She checked out the hold, expecting to find trading goods of some kind, even if it was as useless as a tinklewood fishing rod. But most of it seemed given over to food, drink, building materials and agricultural tools—and weapons. Military grade blasters in one crate, and two crates of power units for various caliber blasters. Any customs inspector might have had a few questions about those, but it was plain this ship had few troubles in that respect.

  Goth spent a happy hour reorganizing the consignment labels. The blasters became canned soup, and the power units became toilet paper. The toilet paper became nails…and so on. There’d be no way of telling what was in the crates without opening the lot. And if they needed power units in a hurry, they were in for a nasty shock.

  No-shape wasn’t as tiring as some kinds of klatha. But Goth was still glad to return to the abandoned stateroom and use the robobutler, which was an excellent, top-of-the-range product. She laid down to sleep on the dusty bed, which made her sneeze a bit, but it was still more comfortable than the cubbyhole they’d put her in would have been.

  She awoke to the sounds of takeoff, and hastily got herself strapped in. Not long afterward, she heard the sound of doors being crashed open down the passage. Some yelling. It seemed like they’d discovered she wasn’t locked up in the cabin they’d put her in. How the Leewit would have enjoyed that!

  Then she heard someone trying the door of the stateroom. It was bolted. “She must be in here!” said a female voice.

  “But…but it’s the boss’s cabin!” said another, shocked voice.

  “Where else could she be?”

  “Lots of places,” said the other voice, plainly uneasy.

  “But this door is locked.”

  “Forz might have locked it. Or the skipper.”

  “Yeah? Well you go and check. I’ll stay here.”

  Goth could have kicked herself for not thinking this through. As quietly as possible she slid the bolt open, unlocked the door and turned the lights out. She just had time to do that when the sound of several people outside alerted her to their return.

  “It’s a reinforced door,” said a voice she recognized as the mate. “If she’s locked herself in, we’ll have to wait until we get to Lumajo to get a cutting torch.”

  Someone then tried the door. “Great Patham, Felap! What an idiot you are. It’s open.” The door swung open.

  “Ought we to go in, Forz? It’s the boss’s cabin,” said the same nervous voice.

  “If you don’t tell him, I won’t,” said Forz.

  “Yeah. But he might find out…” The whiney voice sounded like that might be a really bad idea.

  “Skaz, shut up. Get in and search.”

  Someone flipped the light on. Goth was safe in no-shape. Then she realized that she should have stayed lying on the bed, because the dust betrayed her. And by the drawn weapons they were planning on tossing her out of that airlock, dead. “Someone’s been here! Jines, you and Felap search the bathroom.”

  They did while the others peered in cupboards and corners and under the bed. Which was quite fun, except for the dust. Goth felt that sneeze building, and building. You can’t stop a sneeze.

  She hastily ’ported a glass into the bathroom and dropped it. And muffled her sneeze as best as possible. Luckily, the breaking glass had had enough effect to make the sneeze irrelevant. “You broke one of the boss’s glasses!” yelled one of the searchers, with the meaty sound of a blow.

  “Ow! I didn’t! Jines, you must have done it. You always blame me! Stop hitting me. I’ve cut myself.” Whiny Felap fled the bathroom, clutching a bleeding hand. “Forz. It wasn’t me. Stop her.”

  “Don’t you drip blood on the carpet! Get out, you fool. Come on, all of you out. She’s not here. I’ll lock it up as soon as you’re out. I’ll bring you back to clean up the glass later, Felap.”

  Goth got out too. That was a little tricky because you could still be bumped into, in no-shape. And you could have someone stand on your foot in their spaceboots, and not be able to yell. Goth did shove the woman really hard, so she fell and nearly shot the mate, Forz
.

  It was all Goth could do, watching the fight, to not betray herself by laughing. She had to bite her sleeve, and retreat a bit, in case they heard her snorting, trying to breathe, not sneeze again, and stop laughing. They’d been all for killing her and dumping her out of an airlock, and had had something to do with the disappearance of Pausert’s mother, at least. They were in for a rough trip, she decided. Besides, they ought to keep their ship cleaner.

  Goth soon had a fairly firm understanding of the crew and the workings of the Bolivar. Getting to know them didn’t help Goth like them one bit more. They had two theories on what had happened to her. One was that she’d fled the ship before takeoff, which was possible. Their watch was not very good; they even admitted that themselves. That worried them a lot. They really didn’t want anyone disturbing their very profitable business. The second idea was that she was still on board, hiding. And, as Forz held by that theory, they searched. And searched. Goth could have followed them around. But it was easier to sit in Forz’s cabin and wait. It was boring, so she whiled away her time making holes in his socks, cutting the stitching on the back of his trousers so they would rip suddenly and soon. It wasn’t a very grown-up thing to do, Goth admitted. But who wanted to be grown-up all the time? She’d had to be, and pretend to look that way, for too much time on this trip. She just wanted to go back to the Venture and back to being herself. And back to the captain. That couldn’t happen, yet. So instead she unpicked stitches.

  When they were done searching, Goth collected her bag from the junk they’d just piled back into the little cabin they’d tried to lock her into… And then had second thoughts. She took her clothes out of that bag, put them into Pausert’s mother’s ship-bag and filled hers with some of the stuff lying around. Then she went back to the cabin belonging to “the boss,” whoever he was.

  As Forz had made Felap clean it generally, as well as just clean up the glass, the stateroom was now less dusty and more pleasant. Goth soon found that “the boss” had a comms link to the bridge and the mess, with a one-way vision set. She could watch and listen to them, without leaving the comfortable cabin. It was locked, now. But, as Goth had the key-bar, that wasn’t a problem for her.