The Shaman of Karres

by Eric Flint

  He sucked breath through his teeth, thoughtfully. “We transported the Venture. We could probably transport the tank.”

  “It didn’t go well, remember?” said Goth. “Look, if you and I go we can be back here really fast. And I am, of all of us, the most experienced at using the Egger Route.”

  “Makes sense to me,” said the Leewit.

  “It means leaving the Leewit and the others here. Or are you suggesting we try to take them without the tank?”

  “The Egger Route, huh, no thanks,” said Leewit. “When we have to, but right now—no. We’ll sit tight in the tank, with you on comms, and work on getting people out of the Soman caves. You and Goth go. There is nothing much you can use for padding, though.”

  “I guess we’ll have to make do without it. Oh well. We’re bruised and battered anyway,” said Goth, taking the captain’s hand. “Best to get it over with.”

  Pausert nodded. “My cabin, I think. Leewit, take care, and if I don’t get back soon remember to wash behind your ears.”

  He got the sudden death stare from the Leewit, as he and Goth vibrated, blurred and disappeared.

  Ta’zara turned to Me’a. “You get used to it, eventually. Or, like Vezzarn you just find reasons to be elsewhere when witchy stuff is going on.”

  “I can see the sense in that,” said Me’a, wryly. “I suppose we’d better see if we can let the former slaves know it is safe to flee this place.”

  So they did. Some of them even collected the floater trucks from the parking bay, and started for the fringe of the forest.

  * * *

  The distance in Egger space bore little or no relationship to the distance in ordinary space. Pausert knew that. It was just remembering it that he’d failed at, he reflected, as they swam through the strange place that was somehow between everywhere and everything. His klatha senses relled that there were vatches in it, somehow. Of course, in Egger space there was no telling just how far off they were, either. But at least he was with Goth and she was with him…and vibrating and bouncing and shaking into his cabin on the Venture.

  It helped a lot that they held each other tightly throughout. But they still needed a couple of minutes to recover. As every time they used the Egger Route, Pausert remained obstinately convinced they were doing the pattern slightly wrong, just not quite matching that place right. However, his suggestions for tweaking it had been met with firm resistance, so far. One day, perhaps. But right now, he had a spaceship to fly, and to land in a forest. They really weren’t designed for planetary work.

  It would take a fair amount of piloting skill, and not just lying here, holding Goth. “Up,” he said. “We’ve a ship to fly. The Leewit to fetch. An alien pet to rescue.”

  “Clumping nuisances, all of them,” said Goth, smiling up at him. “You know, the more this goes on, the more I feel like we’re a piece in some game being played. And we’re only seeing part of the picture. Not all of it.”

  “Me, too. And I got the sense of vatches being in Egger space. That’s new to me. But there are all sorts of links. The trees here. The rochats. Even that paratha stuff.”

  They’d walked through to the bridge by then, where Vezzarn was worriedly working his way through preflight checks. “Am I glad to see you, Captain! Takeoff is a bit out of my league,” he said, standing up from the command chair. “You want me strapped in on the aft guns? Missy Leewit going to take hers again?”

  “She’s not with us. We’re going to pick her up. Goth will be working the lateral rocketry, so you’ll have to take the forward guns. Jump to it, we’re going for a short hard boost and a bit of atmospheric flying. You’ve got Me’a’s position logged?”

  “You’ve got me on comms, Captain,” said Me’a from the speakers. “You’ve got a couple of minutes before the lead elements of Soman fliers get to the area. When they detect a spaceship coming in, they’ll stop worrying about maintaining secrecy.”

  “We’re on our way, Me’a. We just need to find you and find a place to set down near you.”

  “We’ve cleared the tunnels, Captain, or at least as well as possible. Farnal has taken charge. He’s quite an organizer. He has six floaters and perhaps two hundred former prisoners and slaves, and some arms. They could endanger the ship, wanting to escape.”

  The captain, his hands and eyes busy with the controls, was not too sure how to deal with that. The Venture could never take all of them, let alone pick up the Arerrerr—and they could not let that fall into anyone else’s hands. He wasn’t sure what they could do with it. It would be a potential problem almost anywhere, even, possibly, on Karres.

  Fortunately, Goth, who had already dealt with her lateral checks, answered Me’a. “Keep a couple of them, ideally someone who can operate the tank. Use the PA to tell them that Soman troops are arriving and you’re going to be rearguard. And then use the guns to clear a few trees to make us a landing spot. We’ll be ready to blast out of here in about two minutes. It shouldn’t take us long, so move fast. And then pull back. We don’t want to flame you with our tubes.”

  “Will do,” said Me’a, tersely.

  Two minutes later they made one of the captain’s typical firecracker launches toward the stratosphere. Really, that was the only effective way to use the main tubes for atmospheric work. You could do a few miles on the laterals but that was practically the limit. Otherwise it was hopping up and then controlling her descent and using the laterals. Because they had to make a landing, the descent had to be relatively slow. That made them a prime target for revolt ships or surface fire or rocketry.

  The captain knew this all too well from his training in the Nikkeldepain Space Navy, and did his best to counter it. That was not easy on himself, the ship or the other people aboard. It meant getting his bearings once they had gained height, and then dropping as fast and far as he dared, before using the main tubes for braking, as Goth handled the laterals to try and put them as close to the location that they had from Me’a. She would only have seconds, fast-falling seconds, to get them on an exact heading. Miss it, and they’d either land in the metallic trees, doing Patham alone knew what damage, or he could try to boost them upward. That might well leave the tank or anyone below in the blast from the tubes at maximum thrust, something the tube liners also would not cope with well.

  They dropped through the clouds like a stone—more like a meteor, really—winds buffeting as Goth steered and the captain watched the figures on the altimetry screen plunge. His knuckles were white on the thrust lever as they dropped toward the tiny clearing in the forested valley. At the last second he pulled back the throttle. The Venture shook like a leaf in a gale and then in a huge pall of smoke, as the captain killed the roar of the Venture’s stern tubes, dropped again…about a hand’s breadth.

  “Phew!” said Goth, from next to him. “I sweated a bucket doing that, Captain. And then I thought you’d left it too late. They were shooting at us!”

  “Didn’t notice,” admitted the captain. “Vezzarn, did you get any shots off?”

  “Too busy hanging on and being sick,” said the spacer. “I’m getting too old for this, Captain!”

  “Venture, Venture, can we come aboard, quickly?” said Me’a. Her voice sounded a little shaken. “We should have been a bit further away.”

  “Good landing, Captain,” chirped the Leewit in the background.

  “We’ll open the hatch for you.”

  “Just open the cargo hold and get Goth on the grav-tractor-beam projector and grab us,” said the Leewit. “We’ll hang onto Me’a’s wheelchair. We gotta pick up the Arerrerr, and the bad guys are coming as fast as they can.”

  Goth had already unstrapped and was legging it down the corridor before the Leewit had finished talking. The captain turned to his detection equipment and external screens instead, and transferred the laterals to his board. No need to worry about Goth. She could do her job. And sure enough, he got an intercom call moments later, as he watched the Sirius 7 tank turn and trundle toward the deep
er forest. “Got them all, Captain.”

  “Get them strapped in. No. Wait. Send the Leewit to the aft nova guns. Tell her to let me know once she’s there and strapped in. This may be rough. I’m tracking incoming aircraft.”

  “She’s on her way, Captain. What do you want of me?”

  “If either Ta’zara or Me’a can handle the tractor, I want you back in the copilot seat as soon as I put her down. We’re going to grab the Arerrerr and run.”

  “Strapped!” yelled the Leewit.

  “Lifting!” snapped Pausert, suiting action to his words.

  The captain pulled the incredibly tricky move of boosting just slightly and then kicking the Venture over sideways so she could ride on her laterals, over the bleak cliff-edged mountainside to the lava hole that was the Arerrerr’s little island of greenery. It was slow, careful work, which just couldn’t be done faster. He knew they were coming under fire, and was dimly aware that the nova guns had fired in return. But all his concentration was on managing to set the Venture down. The gimbals swung his chair and his controls, but the rest of the crew would be hanging in their straps. Gently, on what was far too steep a slope for comfort, he put her down. The Venture scraped and slid slightly, making the captain grit his teeth and reach for the controls, but she stopped. “Opening the hold,” he said calmly. “I hope you can manage to load it. We’ve got no time for tie-downs. Hold the creature with the gravity tractor.”

  “Do our best, Captain,” said Ta’zara. Pausert was aware of the nova guns firing again. Goth, panting, dropped herself into the second’s command chair, pulling the straps on to clip in.

  “Tell us when we can close and run,” said Pausert. “Goth. Transfer laterals, and set up a transmission on the frequency that will blow those forcecuffs.”

  “Righto,” she said calmly, hand flickering across the controls. “Also have done a light-shift on the Venture, Captain. They can’t see us.”

  “Good thinking,” he said, looking at the detector screens and indicators.

  “The Arerrerr’s in, Captain,” said Ta’zara. “Activated the hold-door closing circuit.”

  Pausert eyed his instruments again. “Hold tight! Goth, full lift on the lower laterals! And transmit!”

  The Venture began to rise—this was not what the laterals were intended for—and as soon as they had clearance the captain gave the Venture’s main tubes thrust. He was attempting something that was more than just difficult and fuel-expensive, juggling thrust from various tubes to put the Venture in an accelerating curve, upward.

  “Got him!” yelled the Leewit.

  And then the Venture was buffeted by the slap of the force from a vast explosion from the Soman tunnels. The captain struggled for control, watching the damage telltales for warnings, as the Venture raced away skyward, free and clear.

  Two minutes later, as he was beginning to relax slightly, Goth said, “Captain! There’s a whole armada heading toward us from space!”

  Indeed, there was. Literally, fifty ships. “What the…” exclaimed the captain.

  “Iradalia. That’s an invasion fleet. Heading for the explosion,” said Goth.

  “And we’re between it and where it is going.” He reached for the drawer where the wires that helped them with visualizing the pattern for the Sheewash Drive were kept. “Time for some especially fast running before they start shooting.”

  Goth nodded. “We’re still stratospheric, but there is no help for it, I reckon. We can’t go down—we’ve got the Somans’ survivors and allies hunting us there. And we can’t outrun them, incoming like that. They must have been waiting on the asteroids and moonlets, ready to pounce ever since we landed on Karoda.”

  “Time to go Sheewash,” said the captain.

  “Uh-huh!” agreed Goth, and a few moments later the strange flame of energy danced in the twisted wires. The Venture, already racing skyward, accelerated furiously at a tangent to her course, to miss the incoming fleet.

  “Good part of the world to be leaving,” said Goth. “Looks like they’re throwing everything they’ve got at it.”

  “It’s going to be messy,” agreed the captain.

  Some of the invading fleet obviously thought a spacecraft hurtling up toward them—even though it was angling away—was a threat. Shooting at the Leewit was definitely enough reason for her to respond. At this range, given the speed of the Venture, a hit was unlikely. The captain did a few evasive maneuvers, anyway. This was nothing like the full power of the Sheewash and they were still in exosphere and not out of Karoda’s gravity well. The Venture was just a really fast ship, pushing its human cargo to the practical limits.

  “You nearly waggled us into that beam, Captain!” said the Leewit over the intercom. “Leave off. They can’t hit a barn door from inside, and you just made me miss. I got a hit on one, though.”

  As an ex-space navy man himself, the captain hadn’t been impressed by the invasion fleet’s shooting or their piloting skills. He said as much. “Unless they’re much better infantry than they’re pilots, and better shots with blasters than space cannons, they’re doomed. I think some of them are going to plow into each other, or hit each other on the breaking blast.”

  “This is something like their nineteenth try,” said Me’a. “And as most of their people outside of the religious police never pick up a blaster until they get conscripted, the gambling money says this one won’t go a lot better.”

  “Still, they can claim to have destroyed the Soman base,” said Goth.

  “They’ll have to get back, first,” said Me’a.

  They were now well out of range, and the captain was glad to let the Sheewash wires collapse. The cluttered area between Karoda, Iradalia and open space was tricky enough to negotiate. Besides, there were a few things about the usage he’d put the Venture through that needed checking.

  CHAPTER 22

  Once the Venture was comfortably out of the Irad system, and there was no pursuit visible on the detectors, the crew of the Venture gathered in the mess. Most of them did, anyway. Old Vezzarn had volunteered to stay on the bridge, watching their instruments so no nasty surprises crept up on them.

  “Captain, I’m just a crewman. You decide where we’re going and what we do next. You’ve proved you always come back for me, look after me. Besides,” he said, with a wary smile, when Pausert called the meeting, “it’ll probably involve witchy stuff I’d rather not know about.” Vezzarn remained rather superstitious about klatha. “This way I genuinely can say to anyone from the Daal’s secret police that I really don’t know. What I don’t know can’t be gotten out of me by the Daalmen, and not telling them anything is wiser from the Wisdoms of Karres’ point of view. And that is for the best, I reckon.”

  It was quite crowded in the Venture’s small mess. Part of that was not just the number of people but because the Leewit and Tippi were playing a complicated game which involved the rochat jumping to catch pieces of the seaweed biscuit it had become so fond of.

  “Aren’t you going to need that stuff to feed the Arerrerr?” asked Goth.

  “Fed the Arerrerr already,” said the Leewit, tossing another fragment of biscuit for Tippi. “It won’t need much more for weeks. It’s got a kind of slow metabolism. But don’t go into the hold without suiting up or cycling the airlock. I’ve changed the air mix a bit, for starters, to make it more comfortable, and pushed up the temperature. There’s a bit more sulfur in the air, too. I have made sure it can’t scent-spray you, or work on your neural patterns, but no sense in taking chances.”

  “Well,” said the captain, “that’s rather what I wanted to talk about. It fills most of the hold. Now… Goth and I have a task to attend to, but we also have this…pet. It’s a problem. From what I can work out it can’t really look after itself—and anyway, it’s been used to make slaves once, so the idea that that is possible is out there now. We really don’t want it happening again. It seems the only really safe place for it will be Karres itself.”

  “Karres i
s short on the minerals it needs to thrive. They’d have to look after it very carefully. I think it would be miserable,” said the Leewit. “We should take it home.”

  “That’s all very well, but we have no idea where ‘home’ is,” said Me’a. “I had never heard of such a creature. It’s not like its owners are out looking for it, and putting up notices on the walls. We don’t even know where to start.”

  “I think I do,” said Goth. “And maybe they have even been searching. Something odd has been going on. I’ve been putting clues together. I have been checking on some of the star charts, looking up what information we have on the systems we’ve been to. And there is a pattern. And that pattern relates to metal-leaf trees, and”—she pointed at Tippi, who wrinkled her nose at her—“rochats.”

  “Cinderby’s World and Na’kalauf don’t have metal-leaf trees, but do have rochats.”

  “Rochats don’t breed on Na’kalauf. They’re brought in, mostly from Serax, which does have metal-leaf trees, or the Armbour system, that did, before they got chopped down. Cinderby’s World…well, it doesn’t. It’s too windy, I suspect. But it’s also a world with a lot more heavy metals than average—the same as everything I can find on the others. When you look at where the systems with rochats and/or metal-leaf trees are—there are only twenty of them, and they’re in an expanding cone down this edge of the galactic arm. They weren’t introduced by humans—they were there when the first humans arrived. The cone doesn’t have a point, but if it did it would be outside the border of the Empire. Off the southwestern border zone. And the leaves of the metals trees are the Arerrerr’s food. From what I ‘read,’ that is what it has always eaten, including a variety that’s rich in selenium.”

  “I see,” said the captain. “If we find the point of that ‘cone’ and we have the planet the Arerrerr came from. Well, it gives us an area of space, but there are a lot of suns out there…”

  “I’ve got the coordinates,” said Goth. “I’ve been there. I saw a rochat, was wrapped in a blanket of rochat wool, and it’s full of metal trees, and has a plant the Arerrerr remembers—the paratha spice, that doesn’t grow anywhere else. The world is scarred by signs of an interstellar war and has alien structures on it big enough to see from space. That might account for why the Arerrerr was left here. They expected to come back for it.”