by Eric Flint
“Energy bar,” said Me’a. “Do you need one, Goth? I have a few stored in the chair.”
“Let her eat them,” said Goth. “I haven’t done much. What are you calling for? Are you winning?”
“For now,” said the Leewit in a spray of crumbs. At least it might have been what she said.
“Swallow and tell me what you called for.”
So the Leewit did. A drink, provided by Me’a, and she was at least audible. “Goth, there’s some of those seaweed flakes on my table on the Venture, ones that I was feeding to Tippi. You know, the ones in that funny-shaped bottle. I know it’s far, but the Arerrerr needs them. Or rather, it needs selenium. Its body chemistry is kinda like Tippi’s. That’s why the rochats thrive and breed on Cinderby’s World, but don’t on Na’kalauf. And the poor Arerrerr has been short of it for a long time. There’s some selenium here, but not enough and it’s been here a long time. The lack is slowly killing it, and I need some for repairs.”
“I’ll try. It’s long range.” Goth knew exactly what the object looked like, exactly where it was in the Venture, even if she had no idea where the Venture 7333 was.
But as it turned out, ’porting it was almost ridiculously effortless. Either the Venture was much closer than they realized, or she had suddenly grown in teleporting ability. She did know that progress with klatha use was usually like that. It wasn’t linear progress, but sudden steps. Sometimes people just never climbed up that next step. Maybe she had. After the stress of the last while, it was a nice thought.
The rochat was headbutting her hand and giving her its odd growl in its attempt to get the bottle—so she nearly dropped it, passing it to the Leewit. The Leewit looked sternly at Tippi. “One flake. It needs it more than you.”
By Tippi’s behavior, the rochat didn’t care how badly the Arerrerr wanted it. She wanted it herself. But the Leewit ignored her complaints and went and reached up and into a stalactite-fringed opening above them—and pulled her hand out quickly. “Huh. Nearly ate my hand too,” she said. “I guess it was really hungry. I still am. You couldn’t ’port me some pancakes with Wintenberry jelly, could you, Goth?”
“Nope. Not unless you left a bunch ready made outside the robobutler, you greedy little bollem. Eat some more of Me’a’s energy bar.”
“Hush,” said Me’a. “I’m picking up something from the bugs I seeded behind us.” Then she beamed widely. “Ta’zara. He’s giving a war chant. I feel sorry for any Soman people that run into him.”
“We have the door between us and them,” said the Leewit.
“The captain will sort that out,” said Goth, confidently.
And indeed, he did. Minutes later a piece fell out of the door, cocooned and cut off from the rest of the metal, and the captain and Ta’zara pushed it open.
* * *
Pausert was prepared for an enthusiastic greeting, but not quite the rapturous one he got. Goth seemed to be literally bouncing off the cliff wall in quite her old lithe, lively way. And she kept stopping and kissing him again. The Leewit had hugged him and Ta’zara, but was now all business. “Right, Captain. We need to take Arerrerr out of here. They’ll just abuse her. And they haven’t been feeding her properly.”
“Arerrerr?” asked the captain, warily.
The Leewit patted what he had taken for a natural rock formation, limestone perhaps. “This is Arerrerr. The Soman Consortium have been using her to condition the slaves.”
“What?”
So they had to explain. It was a confusing explanation, but Pausert had had years of making sense of the Leewit, and Goth, and both together. He looked at the vast creature. At the small cave opening they had just come out of. “Um, can it move?”
“Quite slowly. But she won’t fit in that hole. Not anymore. She was put in here when she was little.”
“For safekeeping,” added Goth. “She was going to be fetched. Only…they never came back.”
“Who never came back?” asked the captain, still trying to get this all sorted in his head.
“Captain! We’ve gotten something big coming up the passage,” interrupted Me’a. “The bugs are picking up some serious power fans. It must be some kind of tank!”
“I can hide us in no-shape,” said Goth.
“I’d rather blow their front end off, shoot their rear end off, and ram them in the middle!” said the Leewit. “Have you still got some of your exploding rockets, Me’a?”
“Three. But they have limited facility against armor. On the other hand, we have what’s probably the most valuable hostage in the place. I don’t think they’ll come in shooting.”
They didn’t come in shooting. They came in stinking.
Me’a had wheeled to the opening and focused a scope from the arm of her wheelchair down the passage. “If I can get in range I can get a spy ray on them…oh, it is a tank. A Mark 7 Sirius. They’re pretty well shielded against everything. And they have a range of target detection equipment that is second to none. We’re in trouble.”
Ta’zara, looking over her shoulder at the screen display of the tank which barely fitted down the tunnel, said, “We can drop the tunnel on them. But then we’d be stuck here too.” He sniffed. “What is that smell!”
Goth smelled it too, and laughed. “Sea-squill-cocoon exudate. They think we’re enslaved to it, will love it. It’s the job the Arerrerr was set up to do when we came up here.”
“Uh,” said the captain, swallowing. “That’s some perfume! I hope it didn’t work? I’d hate to put that on after shaving.”
“The Leewit stopped it,” said Goth.
“Thank Patham! But even hiding in no-shape is going to be hard. I feel I might have to throw up.”
“I have gas-filter nose plugs,” said Me’a.
“Good,” said Goth. “Put them in quick, because I doubt if they have any. They’re in an airtight tank. Let’s see how they like their own medicine.”
And when she ’ported an open sea-squill-cocoon exudate vial into the tank…it proved that they really couldn’t live with their own medicine. Less than twenty seconds later, the hatch on the top flew open and several gasping, gagging and vomiting Soman soldiers scrabbled out. Of course, seeing as they had a vial of the stuff outside, it wasn’t a lot better in the passage. Still, they were in no state to resist Ta’zara. They would have been in no state to resist a newborn.
“Well,” said Me’a. “I think we have transportation.”
“The Arerrerr won’t fit,” said the Leewit. “We need to take her to the Venture. We need to get her away from here.”
“I get the feeling that we’re going to have to bring the Venture to her,” said the captain, looking at the strange misshapen rocklike creature. “I could probably set the ship down on the plateau above us, and then we could use our tractor beam to load her into the hold. It would depend on her weight, but that is the best I can think of, at the moment. Which means we need to get back to the Venture.”
“I suppose so,” said the Leewit reluctantly. “Okay. I’m going to put her into a healing trance. At least she won’t know we’ve left her. And they won’t be able to abuse her. I’ve fixed her, gotten rid of the plug they put in, but they would probably do it again.”
“Why hasn’t the Arerrerr just made us all love her?” asked Goth, suddenly wary about her little sister’s “fixes.”
The Leewit grinned. “She thinks she has. I’ve put in a little nerve shunt for now. It’s temporary, but we’re safe enough. Just give me a minute or two.”
So they did. The Mark 7 Sirius was brought forward and turned around, and a few minutes later, with all of them aboard, they set off back down into the Soman caves. Fortunately, Me’a was as adept at driving the tank as she was driving the wheelchair which was now strapped onto the back. They used one of the rear guns to bring down the rock at the entrance to the tunnel, blocking it, and went looking for trouble.
They didn’t have to go that far to find it, but the “trouble” had expected the tank to be
on their side. And they didn’t expect a vial of sea-squill exudate to get ’ported high up into the cave above them and to smash in their midst. It was, Goth reflected, a small payback for all those who had been sent to work on the Mantro barges.
“I have accessed the tank’s data and mapping system,” said Me’a. “It’s got the entire Soman cave system in it. Including holding cells, their living quarters, armories, ammunition stores and storage caves. The passages which are accessible to the tank are marked. So where are we going? Straight out by the shortest route?”
“I think we may as well clean up this rat’s nest properly. And certainly free any other slaves we find,” said the captain. “We should head for the main living areas. That’s where most of them will be, I suspect.”
The presence of the tank did simplify things. Obviously, news had gotten around, it seemed with extra panic added. The tank had very little opportunity to use its guns. The slave holding pens were next on the list. The captain and Ta’zara had freed some, and those had already freed others. Of course they also ran away from the Mark 7. But they were easy to avoid shooting at, thanks to the one-piece overalls.
Then they went about systematically destroying the Soman Consortium’s armories, assets and stores. It was only when they came to a cavern that was full of boxes they recognized—the cargo of hyperelectronic forcecuffs—that the captain held the Leewit back from her gleeful experimentation with the tank’s varied weapons systems.
“I’ve got an idea for those,” he said. “From what I can work out we’re pretty near the surface, close to the doors. As far away from the conditioning creature—the Arerrerr—as possible really. We’ll use them later.”
“Those doors are something of a problem,” said Me’a. “Looking at the maps on the screen, we won’t be able to access the fortification and the spaceguns with the tank. And we can’t get out without going past them. Two layers of them. With spaceguns. That is something that outguns us, and will destroy our armor.”
“We’ll have to take them out first, before we and the other prisoners try and bust out of here.”
“I guess. But we ought to finish off the slave pens first. There’s another close to here. It’s where they put the slaves after they had been conditioned, preparatory to shipping them out.”
“That could be awkward. I’ve never felt anything quite as intense as what the Arerrerr did to us, and we just got the start of the treatment. The effects are reversible, but I don’t think the victims are going to thank me.”
Security for the treated slaves was plainly less of a priority. Where they’d had to blast through steel bars for the untreated prisoners, these were kept behind a locked door that the tank simply drove through. Unlike the untreated ones, these at least were no longer in forcecuffs, but did wear the orange overalls. There weren’t many in the dormitories right now.
They came rushing out of their quarters—about fifteen of them—and ran straight at the tank. “Are they trying to attack us barehanded?” asked Goth, incredulously.
“They’re not coming to attack. They’re coming to love,” answered Me’a, dryly. “Look at their faces.”
“They’re in love with a tank?” said the captain.
“They’re in love with what we smell of. We never took off that bit of sea-squill exudate that the Somans had on the outside. The tank’s air filtration and purifier has cleaned out most of the smell from in here, but I would guess it is dumping that waste straight into the outside air. So the tank smells even more of it. So do we, probably. You’ll find this lot are the slaves who weren’t desirable for individual buyers, so were gotten rid of by selling them to the Mantro barges on Parisienne.”
“Oh. Well, that’ll stop them wanting to do anything but help us. Hey! Look. We know that one! It’s that long thin drink of water you rescued, Captain. The tall guy who was a captive in the pirate vessel we blew apart. The fellow we gave passage off Cinderby’s World to. Farnal. The one who organized the other prisoners.”
“Well, at least he looks happy now. He was a pretty miserable sort,” said the captain. “Mind you, he tried to do his best for the rest of the captives. I mean he paid their passage, looked after them.”
“At least they won’t want to give us trouble,” said Ta’zara.
“Except by being too clingy,” said the captain. “But what do we do with them?”
“Well,” said Goth. “First off, I think we get rid of the sea-squill stink on the outside of the tank. This lot don’t look like they can think straight with it that close.” So she ’ported it elsewhere. “And then I think we go and talk to them.”
“Yeah,” said the Leewit. “See what can be done, I suppose. I’ll go. It’s healing they need.”
So they got out. That is to say, the Leewit, Me’a, and Ta’zara got out. Ta’zara first, then giving Me’a her chair off the back—which had fans to get her down. Goth and the captain stayed in the tank, on guard.
It was rapidly apparent that Ta’zara’s martial arts skills were not going to be needed. The slaves were still in a state of happy euphoria—and they associated the tank and the people in it with that. They were only too eager to cooperate. They were perfectly willing to let the Leewit draw Farnal aside. He smiled at her, recognizing her.
“What are you doin’ here?” she demanded. “You managed to get captured twice! Did you think we’d always come to your rescue?”
“No, young lady. To be captured was always my mission, my service to the Church of Irad. We had studied the routes preyed on by the slavers and pirates selling to Karoda very carefully. I was among those sent out to be captured, so I could be the hand of Irad in destroying the beast. I was here to destroy the creature which turns men into slaves,” he said with a sadness underlying his happy smile. “I was always intended to be captured. I wanted to be.”
“But…you helped the others escape Cinderby’s World,” said the Leewit. “You helped them get home when we freed them.”
He nodded. “They were free, but in trouble. They needed guidance, and support. That too is a good deed in the service of Irad.”
“And just how did you plan to destroy this beast?” asked Ta’zara. “Because it is plain that you failed.”
“I cannot tell you, sir, in case others succeed. It is probable will be others taken. There were quite a number of us sent out.”
“He’s got a bomb in his belly,” said the Leewit to Ta’zara. “It makes sense, now. The captain was wrong. They don’t want to capture the thing that conditions the slaves. They wanted to kill the Arerrerr.”
The older man gaped at her. “How did you know…?”
The Leewit shrugged. “It was making you sick. I examined you, remember. I treated you, made you get better.”
He sighed. “Our technicians were worried about that. They had to interface Irad’s will with our nervous system. It was a risk, but one I believed was worthwhile. After all, it was a small sacrifice to be made. And yes, the ruling faction of the high priests of Irad do favor capturing the beast. Our group hold that it is evil incarnate, and it must be destroyed.” He frowned, just slightly. “The levels of corruption there…you would not understand, but we found that several of the high priests are active in the financing of vessels engaged in piracy, and shipping conditioned slaves inward to the Empire. That was how we knew where the true vessels of Irad’s will—those of us carrying the bombs—had to be placed in order to be captured. To destroy the evil thing which makes Karoda slaves.”
“Well, it’s not going to be destroyed,” said the Leewit. “But we’re not going to have it making more slaves either. In case you hadn’t figured it out, we’re busting up this place, cleaning up the slavers. It’s over. But the Arerrerr is not going to be killed or go to Irad. It’s not evil. It’s just an animal. The Soman were evil, and your high priests would have been eviler. So we’re dealing, see. It’s all over.”
“I am glad. It is too late for me, but it always was something I was willing to die to end.” He
smiled wryly. “The oddest thing is, I know it to be false, but the rapture… It is in itself a love I have never felt, even in my service to Irad. I understood how it was abused, how it made slaves, but not the way the slaves felt. The misuse was evil, but the love and joy it brings is of itself not.”
“Yeah. But it’s not real,” said the Leewit.
“It is to us. It is odd to find myself a slave, an evil I have fought all my life. And yet…” He sighed again. “I understand what was done to us. But I am sure all of us will make our way to Parisienne and try to find a place on one of the barges so we can serve. I know what we love and where it comes from. We were told. It is worthy.”
The Leewit rolled her eyes. “You’re really messed up.”
“Maybe. But I feel more whole than I ever have,” he said calmly.
The Leewit shook her head. “Wait. I gotta talk to Me’a and the others.”
* * *
Sitting in the tank, keeping a wary eye back the way they’d come, Goth finally had some time to be alone with Captain Pausert. To tell him how afraid she’d been that she’d lost klatha skills, and how glad she was having them back. “So you and me can still be together, Captain.”
He squeezed her hand. “I never saw it as any different, Goth. And I wish you’d told me. I could have told you that you were wrong. You ’ported that power wrench for me, when you were helping me with those calibration checks.”
“I did? I don’t remember,” said Goth, wrinkling her forehead. She remembered doing the checks with the captain. It was a slow, tedious and awkward job that he always saw to himself. He was exceptionally good at it. Klatha luck, perhaps.
“Sure you did. I don’t think you even thought about it. It’s so natural to you, and you were busy with the micrometer readings, when I asked.”
“Oh. But…but that was weeks ago!” said Goth, flushing. All this time…
“Yes. But it doesn’t matter. All that matters is you’re back to being yourself. Anyway, it’s not like I’m that good…by Karres standards,” said the captain. “Not that useful. I mean the cocooning is useful, but I think it’s in some ways like making vatch hooks.”
