Kati of Terra – Book Two
On Assignment
to the Planet of the Exalted
By Helena Puumala
Kati of Terra – Book Two
On Assignment to the Planet of the Exalted
Helena Puumala
Copyright Helena Puumala 2013
Published by Dodecahedron Books
Cover image copyright Leona Olausen 2013
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Lauri, and that of my mother, Aino, who, ultimately, are as responsible as anyone outside of me, for the roads I travel.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank, first of all, the extended family members—the Puumalas and the Olausens, both—my friends, and my husband’s friends and colleagues, who have listened to the natter and chatter about my literary ambitions. Some of them have done it for years.
Of course, I must thank the artist extraordinaire, Leona Olausen, who created the book cover and helped with the map included in it. She has been indispensable.
The beta readers, my sister Kaye, and Dale’s brother Ken, have kept me inspired.
So, of course, has my husband, Dale Olausen. He has energized, enthused, and encouraged me; without his editing and publishing skills neither my books, nor Dodecahedron Books, would exist. Besides, he can do wonders that are beyond me with a computer! Also, he took over and finished writing “The Slumming Song” when I became totally bogged down and frustrated with it! And he made a few changes for the better to “The Ode to the Mudball”—anyone curious enough, can compare the version in Book One with the version in this book.
May Dale and I spend many, many more years in fruitful collaboration!
Thank you all.
Helena Puumala.
Exerpt
“You damn foreigner bitch,” the Undar woman snarled at Kati, ignoring everyone else on the Square.
…
You think that you’re so smart, you alien dirt, making a public joke out of my noble husband and his relatives!” Babsy added. “You’re nothing but a cheap Adventuress! Are you sleeping with the juggling ape, you whore? I’ve spent time in Port City and I know that the off-worlders consider the Borhquans great lovers. And I know the Warrions, so I know that you somehow managed to smuggle that simple Vultairian boy, who’s actually a Wild Klenser, out of Port City, right under the Warrion noses! And I’m going to tell them about him drumming with your Troupe, and they’ll come after you to take him back—he’s their property, after all!”
She stomped closer to Kati, unpleasantly close; suddenly her arm struck out and Kati felt the sting of a slap on her cheek! For a split second she was in shock; then, she felt her own hand rising to grab the back of the shirt of the woman who had turned to stomp off. She stayed the hand.
“Let me at that cow!” The Monk snarled inside her head. “I’ll fix her!”
“No,” subvocalized Kati, but, oh, it cost her! Still, a cat fight was out of the question!
Out loud she only said: “I guess we pissed somebody off!”
Her cheek stung. The Granda would take care of it, though.
…
Mimi’s handyman shook his fist after the woman’s retreating back.
“That Babsy Undar, she’s a piece of work,” he snarled. “Parlayed her looks into a rise in caste—almost. Got herself an Exalted husband. Note that she’s still an Undar, though. Her man’s family hasn’t invited her to become one of them; they don’t have to since she’s an Ordinary Citizen. So their kids will be just regular folks, too—if Old Man Undar’s descendants can be considered that, no matter that they’re not Exalted.
“She tried to worm her way into the Warrion Family, but they’re too canny to fall for the charms of her like. Mathis Warrion used her, and then dropped her; she has to make do with the lack-brain that she snagged.
“She’s a bitter woman who has to scrape and bow to the Exalted idiot she married, and is looking to get back at the world. Watch your backs. She’ll make whatever trouble she can.”
“Drat,” Kati subvocalized to The Monk. “’The Slumming Song’ was a mistake. I should never have gone along with Lank’s notion. Mikal would not have done that.”
“It’s too late for regrets,” The Monk responded with the mental equivalent of a snort. “You’ll just have to deal with the fall-out. And don’t talk like your boyfriend’s perfect. He isn’t.”
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER ONE
The Second City of the planet Lamania sprawled on the western coast of the largest of the world’s continents. It was a beautiful metropolis, the pride of all Lamania, and of the Star Federation, as well, since many of its offices were located there.
Kati of Terra had come to Lamania as a refugee, and the Lamanians had accepted her into their midst as such. The people of the Second City were generous towards the strangers who looked for safety, or merely for a new start in life among them; Kati quickly discovered that all that was expected of her in return for the daily necessities were two short work days out of each six day week. This left her with four other days in which to explore the city, to contemplate the changed circumstances of her life, and to brood upon the losses she had experienced.
It was the brooding that was occupying her this particular afternoon, as she sat in an ocean-side park, listening to the squawks of unfamiliar birds which wheeled over the sand and the waves, and watched an assortment of children, both Lamanian and non-Lamanian, cavort on the beach and in the shallow water.
Jake, her five-year-old son, would have loved the park, she thought, trying to not sniffle. He was not there with her, and she had very recently found out that her chances of ever seeing her child again, were, basically, zero. For close to a year, trudging across an alien planet while running away from slavers, she had been telling herself that at least he was home with people who knew him and loved him. She had saved him from being taken by the slavers, if only to lose her own freedom in the process, but the knowledge that he was safe had kept her spirits and sanity intact during the long escape from the Drowned Planet.
The trek, with Mikal, had been an arduous one, and she had not had much time to dwell on the past. Only now, she had time to think; plus, she had been separated from Mikal, the companion in adversity who had become her lover, so she also had been deprived of his sturdy shoulder to lean on. It was hard, especially on this day which had confirmed what she had long suspected: there was no road back home for her—or for any of the others who had been on the slave ship which had picked her up from her home world.
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On arrival at the Second City Space Port, Kati and Mikal r’ma Trodden had been unceremoniously split up. Because Kati was what was known as a Wilder woman, and Mikal was a Star Federation citizen, the local Social Service Officials assumed that he could be taking advantage of her, and she, in need of protection. As it happened, this was ridiculous—Kati was perfectly capable of taking care of herself, and Mikal was not in the least interested in abusing her in any way—but, as Mikal had pointed out, bureaucracies were often adamant about rules. The separation would last for half a Lamanian year, which likely was a shorter period than the time it would take to convince the Social Services that the two of them ought to be considered an exception to their regulations.
“You have the freedom of the Second City during your leisure time,” the Social Worker assigned to Kati at the Transient Quarters had told her, as she had shown her to an empty room in a six-person Unit. “As long as you make no effort to contact Mikal r’ma Trodden. We’ll have a tracer on your node, so we’ll know if you try to pull a fast one about that. The tracer is also there for your safety; if you get into trouble of any kind, just ask your node to activate it, and appropriate help will arrive in minutes.”
Kati had rolled her eyes at that. She was hardly a naive young woman, arrived in the Second City trailing an unscrupulous man. She had saved her lover’s life more than once, and he had returned the favour, while the two of them had crossed parts of two continents, and an ocean; at the same time avoiding capture by the slave traders from whose space ship they had escaped. But, no doubt Mikal had been right, and it would be easier to acquiesce, rather than try to fight.
“Social Services are a rule-bound organization,” Mikal had said. “And they do deal with women who are abused. Put the half-year to use, love, by learning as much as you can about anything which strikes you as beneficial. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Mikal would make no effort to see her, she knew, but would remain true to her. She had been happy when she had discovered that she had won his love. He had proved himself a good friend, and a strong partner in adversity, during their wild trip across Makros III, the Drowned Planet. Her previous experiences of men, however, had been scanty and negative, so she was in awe of being cherished the way Mikal obviously cherished her. Surely there were plenty of women on Lamania, who found him as attractive as she did! But he had chosen her, Kati of Terra, who once had been Katie Maki on a different world, a divorced mother of a five-year-old son, her only blood relative alive!
Thoughts of Jake, sent her emotions into a tailspin, again. On the Drowned Planet, she had refused to dwell on her lost boy, telling herself that she would grieve later, when she and Mikal were out of danger. And now, here she was, safe, but still trying to avoid the pain!
That very day she had received a notification from the Research Institute to which she had submitted a nodal record of all her memories, in the hopes of finding out where in the Universe she was now, in relation to where she had been born. The organization that Mikal worked for, The Star Federation Peace Office Corps, the Sector in Charge of Enforcing the Laws Against Human Trafficking, had encouraged her to make the submission. They were anxious to find out how widely the Slaver Gorsh, from whose vessel she and Mikal had escaped, had ranged. The Researcher assigned to her case had found something really important in her records, the notification had stated. Kati of Terra needed to get in touch with him in person.
Dutifully she had presented herself at the Research Institute offices. A Lamanian man had met her at the reception, and had taken her to an office equipped with consoles and access stations with which Kati was not familiar, since she had only begun to learn about the Star Federation brand of information storage technology. The kindly Lamanian had introduced himself as Lienel r’pa Gradin, while serving her, and himself, with mugs of herbal tea, and a plate of tiny, sweet pastries. He was the one in charge of her file, he had explained.
“So have you found out where my home world might be?” she had asked him straight out. He had seemed to her to be putting off the topic by chit-chatting about trivialities, and querying her about her time in The Second City.
The delicately built, large-headed, pale-skinned man had stared at her from his large, blue-green eyes, and although Kati had had to struggle a bit to read his expression, she had realized that he was displaying concern—for her.
“The news you have is not good, right?” she had added, biting her lip.
“Let’s just say that your chances of going home are practically non-existent,” he had responded in a mild tone, watching her closely.
Kati had sighed.
“I think that I already guessed that,” she had said, nevertheless feeling tears sting her eyelids. “People who disappeared from my home world generally stayed gone. So I’ve been trying to steel myself to that.”
She had been glad that her translation node, the infamous Granda, had stayed out of the conversation. She needed no more aggravation if she was to make it through this meeting with the Researcher r’pa Gradin, with her dignity half-intact.
The Lamanian had reached to flick on the screen of the nearest console. Kati, who knew that the Federation citizens could perform all kinds of amazing feats through their translation nodes, and the nodal connector points on their left thumbs, was amazed how often they did things “the old-fashioned way”. But then, she had noted on her arrival in The Second City, that Lamanians liked to mix high tech with low tech. If low-tech sufficed, they used it.
The image on the screen had been of one of Kati’s memories; she was leafing through a book on astronomy at a school desk. It had to be from her high school days. The picture on the screen had looked odd to her; it had been presented from her point of view at the time, mostly showing the book on the desk, and her hands flipping its pages as she perused it. The image had been crystal clear, much clearer than the corresponding memory inside her mind. That clarity had to be the Granda node’s work.
Lienel r’pa Gradin had frozen the image at a point where Katie-who-once-was, had been examining a representation of the galaxy. There it had been, filling most of the large, glossy page, with its countless stars forming a spiral shape with the two arms extending out, and a black arrow pointing to the approximate location of the sun around which Kati’s home world orbited.
“This, I gather, locates your home world’s light,” Lienel r’pa Gradin had said, pointing a long, slim finger at the arrow in the image.
“Right,” Kati had answered, giving him a quick, sharp glance.
Something in the researcher’s tone of voice had disturbed her. She had waited for him to speak again.
The Lamanian had nodded, and inhaled before continuing:
“Perhaps you are not aware—and there is no reason why you would be, unless someone had happened to mention it—that the world Lamania and its sun are not in a spiral galaxy. We of the Star Federation know of them, of course, and have known, for a long, long time, but we do not, in fact, live in one. Our galaxy has a more amorphous, elliptical shape; it lacks the beautiful symmetry of the spiral galaxies.”
Kati’s head had swum; then the Granda had come to her aid, and worked on her nervous system to allow her to regain some equilibrium.
“Are you saying,” she had asked, “that I have—somehow—travelled right out of my galaxy and into another one?”
She had shaken her head, trying to absorb the enormity of it.
“The slave ship that collected you from your world did that,” Lienel r’pa Gradin had replied. “That’s why they had the captive Xeonsaur on board. He was navigating the ship through nearly unimaginable distances, and probably through time as well. We have known that the Xeonsaurs could do that, but up until now, that knowledge was only theoretical. The Lizards do not care to share secrets with us short-lifes, as they call us, unless such sharing is unavoidable. How this slaver, Gorsh, managed to turn an Xeonsaur into a captive forced to do his bidding, I don’t know, but that seems to be what happened. And it explai
ns how he obtained captives who had nobody to speak up for them—they snatched them from worlds so far away in space and/or time that no-one could possibly trace them.”
“So far away in space and/or time?” Kati’s mind had been reeling.
She knew a smattering about the notions of the relativity of time and space, but it was one thing to have a tiny bit of knowledge about something, and a whole another to find oneself in the middle of its implications. However, at least she had the Granda to help her, to understand perhaps, and certainly, to calm the nervous agitation that even partial understanding was creating.
“That’s why Murra couldn’t reach the Institute on his home world when he tried to contact its people through ESP!”
She had stared at Lienel r’pa Gradin, flabbergasted. The Lamanian had nodded, without even asking her who Murra might be. But he would have known; he had been trawling through her memories.
“Yes,” he had said softly. “That boy was right about distance not mattering to mental communication. But that’s not true about time, and therefore, your young friend’s inability to reach his mentors at the Institute, is an indication that the Slaver, Gorsh, was travelling through time as well as space.
“I have already been in touch with Maryse r’ma Darien at the Peace Officer Corps about this. The Xeonsaurs will have to be notified, of course, and it now is more essential than ever that these slavers be stopped from doing what they have been doing.”
He had picked up Kati’s mug which she had barely touched, and had pushed it into her hands.
“Drink this down,” he had said. “It’s a mild relaxant. It’s one thing to suppose that you can’t go home again, and another to know beyond question, that it’s impossible. Dealing with a dislocation this brutal won’t be easy. Yet, I understand that you are a woman of great spirit, and if anyone can do it, you will. But I am sorry to have been the one to give you the bad news.”
Then he had flashed a sudden, impish grin.
“Better me than some of the Social Services people,” he had added. “I want you to know that my concern is that of a possible friend, not that of someone for whom you are a job.”
On Assignment to the Planet of the Exalted Page 1
