On Assignment to the Planet of the Exalted

by Helena Puumala

  Kati gave her a fierce hug, and took her left hand into hers.

  “Okay, Ingrid, I don’t know how much time we have; it may not be much, but I imagine that you realize that,” she said, forcing her voice to remain steady. “I’m going to have to do this quickly using our nodal connectors. And I mean to be back, remember that.”

  Ingrid nodded, tight-lipped, and accepted the nodal connection.

  “The goons will be here shortly,” she said, “and I don’t know who else, after that popping performance.”

  Kati braced herself for the sensation with which she now was quite familiar: the feeling that a portion of her mental essence was being sucked out through that thumb and into the other woman. Ingrid’s expression, on the other hand, changed to one of pleasant surprise, as she apparently realized that what Kati was doing was in no way painful or draining to her. The transfer of information was done in seconds, and even as Kati dropped Ingrid’s hand, the younger woman began to grin, nodding.

  “Oh good!” she said. “Thank you! I’ll put this to use, believe me!”

  And then there were people at the door, banging on it; sticking a key into the lock.

  “They can damn well let themselves in, the lying bastards,” Jock said. “And the Malaudins can damn well refund my money! I’ll be damned if I’ll be lied to, and then insulted!”

  “You promised us privacy!” Rakil shouted when the door opened, and what looked like a whole troop of tall Vultairians poured in.

  “Do you have any idea how much those electronic eyes that you broke, cost us?” yelled the first person to enter, a man in a vest of Exalted colours and patterns.

  “No,” replied Jock, staring at him with arrogance equal to that which he was facing. “And I don’t give a shit. Your worker promised that we would have privacy. I don’t call being spied on with electronic eyes privacy! Good gods, I realize that you Malaudins are a bunch of lying, cheating, no good bastards, but I never knew that you’d stoop to spy on another member of the Four Hundred! How long has this been going on? Do you have records of all your customers and their various dalliances? Do you use them to blackmail your neighbours?”

  The Exalted Citizen was about to lunge for him, but was stopped by the man behind him, and Kati recognized him, with a sick feeling in her stomach, as Berd Warrion. What was he doing here? Checking on her? Or was he the supplier of the electronics and just happened to be on hand, checking the merchandise he had provided to a fellow Exalted?

  “Don’t do that Morone,” he said, as he held Jock’s would-be attacker back. “He is still a member of the Four Hundred, even if he is a disgusting Carmaks. Besides, it wasn’t he who broke your spy-eyes. That Ape did the breaking—you heard him. And he’s an off-worlder which makes him less than a mere Citizen. He’ll pay for your broken property—along with his employer, this Adventuress, Kati of Terra!”

  The Liveried Lady slipped from where she had been standing by the door, behind one of the two goons, to where Ingrid was, and grabbed hold of her elbow.

  “Let’s get you out of here,” she said, almost kindly. “The green girls need you; we can’t risk you.”

  “Yes, Dovi, get that one out of here; she’s valuable,” Morone Malaudin encouraged her, even as he eyed Rakil and Kati hungrily.

  To Kati’s intense relief, Ingrid went with Lady Livery without a word, not even a glance in her direction. Apparently enslavement on Vultaire had taught her to be careful with her expressions; a very good thing at the moment. Kati was certain that neither Morone Malaudin nor Berd Warrion had any idea that the Team had already accomplished what they had set out to do this evening. Now they just had to get out of the Malaudin House!

  “Three against four,” muttered the Granda. “The Malaudin moron looks like he’s useless as a fighter—all flash and no muscles. Only way he’s dangerous is if he’s got a blaster on him and I doubt that. Either Jock or Rakil can take him out in seconds, even without weapons—so he doesn’t count. The Warrion is more dangerous; I bet that he carries a weapon of some sort, easy to hide but deadly—an import like a lace crystal blade would be my guess. The goons will have local knives, and maybe stunners—this is a bordello and no-one wants the paying customers to suffer too much damage.

  “If Berd comes at you, let me have control—he won’t be expecting anything but a fool woman, and I can handle him.”

  “Allow me and your bodyguards to put the Carmaks and the Ape out for a spell,” Berd Warrion said to Morone Malaudin, unconsciously echoing The Monk’s judgement of the brothel owner’s fighting ability. “Then I’d like to play with the Adventuress for a while, before we do anything else. I’d like to know the colour of her pubic hair.”

  Kati saw the flash in Rakil’s eyes. He had joined the Team partly to protect her honour for his and Mikal’s Tree Family. She caught Jock’s eye and nodded towards the goons, pulling her stunner out of her pocket. Jock’s answer was an almost unnoticeable inclination of his head, and two stunner bursts sent the goons sprawling before they had had time to do anything more than take a single step each.

  Morone Malaudin had apparently seen the look in Rakil’s eyes too, for suddenly he was there, between Berd Warrion and the Borhquan, and although his lunge was not enough to drop the shorter, sturdier off-worlder, it was enough to redirect his stunner fire at a wall.

  Kati heard Berd Warrion laugh, and suddenly Jock crumbled onto the floor beside her, and she saw the cocked little weapon in his left hand, a stunner exactly like the one she was holding, as well as the one falling out of Jock’s loosening grip. In his right hand Berd was holding something else. It looked like a long, thin, very sharp knife and he was pointing it at her.

  She ceded Granda control over her body, watching from behind The Monk’s form as Rakil went after Morone Malaudin, and took that annoyance out.

  It took only seconds for Kati to realize that ceding the control of her body to the Granda was a mistake. The first thing The Monk—an angry Monk—did, was use her stunner to blast Berd Warrion’s left hand, rending the hand numb and useless. His gun fell to the floor, but the rest of him was fine, and he came at her with the needle-sharp knife extended in his other hand. Kati found herself evading the thrust that came at her, and then a second one. Berd screamed in anger and frustration; Kati heard a low growling laugh come out of her own throat. She would have chosen to stun the Warrion, but, instead, she was lunging for the Vultairian while dropping her stunner back into her pocket. The Granda grabbed the Warrion’s good hand with both of Kati’s, and forced him to drop the knife—her right hand grabbed the hilt even as Berd’s hold faltered. She realized that she was turning it on its owner. The Granda plunged the sharp, thin but rigid, blade into Berd’s chest, and Kati, struggling fiercely, finally managed to regain the control of her body as The Monk began to slash the knife down through the Vultairian’s innards.

  “You damned piece of shit of a node!” she heard herself screaming even as she pulled the lethal weapon out of the man’s body. “You’re killing him!”

  “That was the general idea,” subvocalized The Monk unrepentantly. “The stunner’s a useless toy!”

  Berd Warrion crumpled on the floor in front of her, blood beginning to well out of the hole in his chest. Kati tried not to think of the damage done to the Vultairian’s body. Instead, she mentally rounded on the Granda even as she began to pour healing energy into the bloody hole in the Warrion’s chest.

  “You will help me undo what you have done!” she demanded, unsure of whether or not she had spoken the words out loud or not. “You will not lose me the chance to become a Federation Peace Officer!”

  “Now just a minute,” The Monk protested, and for a split-second Kati thought that she had an inner rebellion on her hands.

  Then an idea occurred to her. “Go find the Forest Spirit,” she ordered The Monk. “I need its help. Bring what you can of it here, as soon as can be!”

  Then she concentrated on the wound in front of her, determined to fix the damage
to the aorta and part of the heart before Berd bled to death. It took all the strength she could summon to use what she had learned from Master Healer Vorlund, and begin the process of keeping the man on the floor alive in spite of the deep wound he had sustained. At some point energy began to pour into her from beyond her, and it seemed to her that someone, much stronger than she was, began to direct the healing flow that was going through her into the wounded man. She knew then that Berd Warrion would live, would likely not even have a scar to show how close to death he had come.

  From the corner of her eye she could see Rakil’s hand pick up the bloody knife from the floor, wipe the blood on it on the carpet and close it so that it was no longer the deadly weapon it had been, but merely looked like a long, thin, exquisitely carved stick. Thank goodness for the Borhquan, she thought vaguely, even as she was helping to restore Berd’s blood pressure with the Forest Spirit. A person could trust Rakil with even a horror like the lace crystal knife.

  *****

  “What happened to me?” Berd Warrion asked as he regained consciousness, to find himself lying on his side on the carpet, his wrists and ankles tied together with strips of sheeting which Rakil had cut with the dangerous knife, and drying blood dirtying the front of his shirt.

  The Borhquan Ape was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of him, two stunners within reach next to him. Jock Carmaks was also lying on the floor, comatose from the stunner shot he had taken earlier, and Morone Malaudin was further away, his wrists and ankles tied. The woman, the Adventuress, Kati of Terra, sat on the floor, not too far from the Ape, looking exhausted.

  Berd remembered fighting the woman. She had gone crazy, he remembered with a shudder, almost as if suddenly she had not been the small woman that she was, anymore, but some murderous beast, furious with him for some reason. Well, he had threatened to rape her, but the lesser beings of the universe, such as off-world women, ought to acquiesce to being used by the Exalted of Vultaire. And this Kati had smart-mouthed him, and conspired to deprive him of a piece of property, the Klenser; she had to expect to be punished. Nevertheless, she had shown herself to be much more dangerous than Berd had imagined.

  He could tell that the Ape was following his eyes as he studied the Adventuress.

  “She nearly killed you,” the Borhquan said coldly. “As a matter of fact, she did kill you, only she thought better of it, and then healed the damage she had done. You’re a fool, Berd Warrion, playing around with a deadly toy such as a lace crystal knife—did it never occur to you that it could be turned against you?”

  “Where is it?” Warrion asked, his voice hoarse. “I paid a stack of Federation credit chips for that thing!”

  Rakil shook his head.

  “Oh, no, don’t even try. Do you really think that I’d give it back to you? And I don’t care shit how much you paid for it; you’ve lost it for good!”

  Warrion let out a string of epithets and swear words; he struggled against the knots at his wrists and ankles in vain. The knots were good and the sheets from which the ties had been torn were clearly of the best cloth.

  Kati of Terra raised her face to look at him struggle. A smile ghosted across her features.

  “An excellent tying job, Rakil,” she said, turning her smile on the Ape. “You must have handled a boat at some time to have learned such knotting.”

  “I did a little sailing back home,” Rakil acknowledged. “It’s a part of a young Borhquan male’s training for life. We do have oceans there; it’s not all just tree groves.”

  “I seem to recall Mikal saying something like that,” Kati answered. “But, Rakil, I think that we have to think about getting ourselves and Jock the hell out of here. Those goons by the door won’t stay stunned forever.”

  She stood up, looking around her.

  “Can we stuff these louts in the washroom or something?” She prodded Warrion with her toe. “I can send the infamous Granda to search for a back door that we can use, if you think that you can haul Jock around in his comatose state.”

  “There’s a washroom, assuming your bad boy can certify it as bugless. And it can be locked from the outside so we can be sure that it’ll take a while before anyone gets out even after the goons awake.” Rakil laughed. “Right now I’m rather delighted with the Malaudins for soundproofing these rooms, although I doubt that I’d care much for the reason for the soundproofing.”

  Kati shuddered. “Ew. Brings immediately to mind the little green girls, as well as what had been going on with Kerris when we found him. Don’t want to think about it right now.

  “The Monk says that there were two spy-eyes in the washroom but that he popped them the same time he did the others.”

  “Then I’ll stuff the Vultairian scum in there while you and The Monk search for a bolt hole.”

  *****

  The back lanes of the Red Light District were blessedly badly lighted. Kati kept the Granda busy scouting a road for them, one that kept her and Rakil, and Rakil’s burden, which hardly seemed to slow the burly Borhquan at all, in the shadows, and away from passers-by. The node, riding her ESP powers kept her informed of the traffic on the fronts of the Houses which had increased considerably since the threesome had made their way to the Malaudin House. She sensed the Forest Spirit about them, too, as if it had decided to make certain that they would reach their destination safely.

  Kati had worried about the Spirit’s reaction to the fiasco that she had caused when she had ceded the control of her body to The Monk, but The Spirit apparently held no ill will towards her. Which meant that it was behaving better than she was—she was furious with the Granda for having taken advantage of her. She was furious with herself, too, for trusting the old reprobate; she should have known better than that after all the tricks that it had pulled on her during their time together! Trouble was, much of the time the inner Monk could be very helpful, and accepted the inevitability that her will took precedence over his; then, the odd time, he would show that he had not accepted her lead after all.

  “You were able to correct for it,” the Forest Spirit comforted her. “No permanent harm was done. And that Exalted child of my world-flesh needed a scare, and he got it.”

  *****

  Apparently the folk going about their evening routines around Nelli’s Inn were so used to absurd events that they barely paid attention to the two off-worlders, one of them carrying an unconscious Vultairian over his shoulder, who made their way to the Inn. To Kati’s surprise and gratitude, no-one stopped them to ask what had happened to Jock, why Rakil was hauling him around comatose. Perhaps they assumed that he had had too much to drink, or suffered from an overdose of some other drug; from what she had seen so far, that was hardly unheard of, among the Exalted of the Capital City. They reached the room at Nelli’s in which Lank awaited them, without further problems.

  Joaley was in the other room, but when she heard the commotion of their arrival, she joined them.

  “Is he okay?” she inquired on seeing Rakil and Lank lay the tall man on his bed and cover him with a blanket, not aware that she was echoing Lank’s query from moments ago.

  “Took a stunner shot,” Kati explained, sitting down in the nearest chair and giving Jock a once over as Lank made sure that his arms and legs were comfortably extended. “He’ll be out for another hour or so, I’d say. Have we got something for a headache? He’ll need it.”

  “You,” Joaley pointed out. “I don’t think that we have any herbal remedies on hand.”

  “Oh yeah,” Kati replied with a short laugh. “I guess I ought to be able to deal with a headache after what I’ve done about birthing babies, and keeping men from bleeding to death from heart wounds.”

  “What?” Joaley croaked. “What the hell happened to you guys tonight? And was your mission a success?”

  “Please,” Kati said, rubbing her face with her hands. “Can I have something to drink while I talk? Even a glass of water would be good.”

  Joaley looked at her, and then at Rak
il who slid into the chair across the table from Kati.

  “I picked up some wine at the Food Market this afternoon. It wasn’t expensive but the stall owner claimed that it was excellent,” she said. “I can get it if you, Lank, can roust up some glasses.”

  She left the room while Lank went to the cupboard by the bathroom door and brought out four glasses, not wine glasses according to what Kati understood about such things, but definitely serviceable under the circumstances. In fact, the one Lank placed in front of her was an artistic piece of coloured glass, with rainbow hues blown into the bowl-like shape using some process that not even the Granda could explain to her. The other three were similar but differed in shapes and hues; each one of the four was a piece of exquisite and unique craftsmanship.

  Lank saw her staring at them and explained:

  “When Jock saw them for the first time, he said that they must be very old and valuable. He was quite surprised that Nelli had them in the room; he said that it must mean that she trusts us not to destroy things. One of the families on another continent—one of the Four Hundred that the Carmaks ally themselves with—has jurisdiction over the last glass factory to have the secret of the process by which they are made. They haven’t been bringing any over to this continent for a long time; there are plenty of markets on their continent.”

  “He also said that the glass is very strong and doesn’t break easily,” Rakil added. “So, if you have these glasses available, they’re actually very good at an Inn. But they will break if they’re thrown about, so obviously Nelli must have decided that we weren’t likely to toss things around.”

  Joaley returned with a jug—not a bottle—of red, but Kati refrained from commenting. There were four of them, even if Jock stayed comatose, besides which they all had nodes to help with the alcohol metabolism, if that became necessary. After the evening’s events a glass of wine—or two—was definitely welcome.