Kati of Terra – Book One
Escape from the Drowned Planet
By Helena Puumala
Kati of Terra – Book One
Escape from the Drowned Planet
Helena Puumala
Copyright Helena Puumala 2012
Published by Dodecahedron Books
Cover image and maps Copyright Leona Olausen 2012
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to the memory of my nephew, Nathan Adam Lavoie. Sept. 27, 1984—Nov. 25, 2007. Son of Kaye Stein and Brian Lavoie, stepson to Ron Stein. Brother to Benjamin Lavoie, brother-in-law to Elena, and would-have-been uncle to Desmond.
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.
Special thanks must go to my sister, Kaye Stein, and her husband, Ron, who read an early version of this book and gave me enthusiastic feedback. Kaye also gave her opinion about the cover, as did a number of other relatives, friends and colleagues. My dear friend, Linda Hope, also gets a credit for early reading and feedback, as well as some copy-editing—as a long-time teacher, she has the ability to ferret out mistakes. I must also cite my son, Scott Olausen, who has patiently dealt with annoyances related to my lap-top and its Windows Vista operating system, whenever his Graduate Student schedule has permitted it.
Then there is the artist extrordinaire, Leona Olausen, who created the book cover and worked on the maps that are included in it. I cannot thank her enough. And thanks are also due to her husband Ken, my brother-in-law, for his reading and enthusiasm.
Last, but, by far, not the least, I must thank my husband, Dale Olausen, without whose energy, enthusiasm, encouragement, and editing talents, neither this book , nor Dodecahedron Books, would exist. Besides, his computer skills have made up for my almost total lack of the same. May we spend many, many more years in fruitful collaboration, Dale!
Thank you all.
Helena Puumala.
Excerpt
The attack came the next afternoon.
Loka was at the helm when the flit made the first fly-by, whizzing over the boat so fast and so low that its air wake tore at her hair. She yelled in fear, and Kati, happening to be the closest to the staircase, grabbed the rifle that was sitting, loaded, beside her and ran up the stairs. As she climbed, she shouted to Jocan to wake up Dorn who was asleep in the captain’s cabin.
The flit made a quick turn around and came back. Kati saw its round form as it flew over their craft again, slower this time, and turned around once more, to approach the boat from behind. Kati decided to remain in the stairwell, and crouched there, facing aft, mostly hidden from view of the flit by the low, wooden wall that surrounded the stairwell to the deck.
“Got the stunner?” she shouted to Loka.
“Yes!” One of her hands was in her pocket, the other hung to the tiller. She was not looking where the boat was going, but that hardly mattered. They were floating in mid-river and there were only a few boats in sight, all struggling upstream near the banks.
“As soon as you see someone to use it on, use it!”
The flit landed rather nicely on the stern part of the boat’s deck. It was big for it—the boat was not large—and it landed partly on the railing which—thank goodness—was made solidly out of strong wood. So the flit tilted towards the front and the interior of the boat, jolting the occupants somewhat, or so Kati hoped. Two people exited, one from either side.
It all happened incredibly fast; and there were only the two women on deck. Without doubt Guzi and his partner were counting on surprise to give them momentum.
Guzi’s partner, the woman, was a second or so faster in getting out, her blaster—no stunners for these two—unaimed, because of the angle at which she had to get out of the flit. Loka aimed her stunner at her and got her; the woman crumpled on the deck, beside the flit.
Meanwhile Kati had pointed her rifle at Guzi. The granda was helping her and she felt ice cold and calm. Now.... She realized then that she was aiming at Guzi’s head! She had meant to shoot the hand with the blaster! She wrenched the rifle a bit to the right and down, pulled the trigger, and the bullet smashed into the man’s shoulder! He fell back against the side of the flit; the blaster in his left hand clattered to the deck.
He’s left-handed, Kati found herself thinking and right then someone, Jocan, ran past her up the stairs; he stunned Guzi before he had fallen to the deck.
Kati lay the rifle carefully on the deck, and sat down beside it. She pressed her face into her hands, and shook, physically shook, for a short while. Meanwhile Dorn finally made it to the deck, too, with only pants on, chest bare, holding his rifle in his hands. He was late only because things had happened so fast, not because he was slow, that was obvious.
Dorn stood in the middle of the deck of his boat surveying the scene. A flit landed at the stern with two stunned people, one on either side of it, the male bleeding from his shoulder. Loka at the tiller, not looking where the boat was going, a stunner hanging in the fingers of one hand, her face grim. Jocan staring at the flit and the two beside it with avid, curious eyes. And, Kati, shaking like a leaf, sitting on the highest step with her face buried in her hands. Dorn had heard the rifle shot; she had used the gun on the man, clearly; she had shot him in the shoulder.
“So the women and children took care of things!”
Dorn’s laughter boomed over the boat and the surrounding water. He turned to stare at the flying craft and its former occupants.
“Their timing was good! Hah! But not good enough, ‘cause the women and children were on the job!”
Table of Contents
Excerpt
Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
Global Map of the Drowned Planet
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
Map One – The Southern Continent Journey
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
Map Two – The Ocean Journey
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
Map Three – The Northern Continent Journey
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
PROLOGUE
The table on which the laptop sat was plastic, and the room in which it stood was in a cheap motel. A motel which stood next to the highway, in a Northern Ontario town, hundreds of miles from anywhere that the world considered important. The young woman who sat at the computer, typing industriously, was a red-head. Her face was freckled along her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose; she must have spent time outdoors recently. That was not surprising since it was late summer outside, or early autumn, perhaps. The leaves of the poplar and birch trees looked tired but still green; they had not begun to change into the yellow hues that they would later take on. The woman had a coil-bound notebook and a messy stack of loose papers beside the laptop on the table, and she consulted them frequently as she wrote. She worked steadily, without st
opping as the minutes of the afternoon slipped by.
Her cell phone, lying on the other side of the table, rang.
Automatically, she saved her writing as she picked up the phone.
“Hello, Lanie Jones speaking.”
“Ah, got you on the first try, Ms Jones,” an unfamiliar male voice said. “My name is James Haddok; you don’t know me. But, I just left the local Police Station, the OPP Station, and Sergeant Martin gave me your name and number. He hasn’t the time to talk to me right now, but he said that you’re working on a story about the case I’m interested in, and could tell me as much about it as anybody. I’m a lawyer from Alberta, and I’m here because this incident seems to have some similarities with a murder case that I’m defending; I’m hoping to strengthen my case. Any chance that we could meet?”
Lanie glanced at the clock on her laptop. It was mid-afternoon. She could use a break. Besides, if there was case in Alberta akin to the Katie Maki incident, that would add another dimension to her story.
She agreed to meet James Haddok at a restaurant which was a short walk from the motel. She collected her notes and her computer, shoving them into the backpack which she thought of as her portable office when travelling. Violating small town custom by leaving her sub-compact car in front of the motel, and hoofing the short distance to the cafe, she enjoyed the moment of sunshine and the tiny bit of exercise she was getting. That was the one problem with her work, she thought as she walked. Too much time spent sitting on her rear, and not enough exercise. Although this past week she had had the opportunity to tramp through a lot of bush country; one more reason why she was pleased to have landed the assignment.
*****
She found James Haddok already seated in a booth in the restaurant, looking at the scanty menu in front of him. The place was almost empty; mid-afternoon was not a busy time for eating. Apparently the Albertan had told the waitress that he was meeting Lanie, for the girl immediately directed her to his booth when she arrived. Haddok was, as he had told her on the phone, a blond guy with glasses, wearing a black T-shirt and jeans, and in possession of a briefcase. When he looked up on Lanie’s arrival, she decided that he was about thirty, and not unattractive. He put out his hand for her to shake and she did so, dropping her backpack on the seat opposite from him.
“You really are a red-head,” he commented with a grin as she sat down.
She had told him on the phone to look for a “grown-up Anne Shirley, but without the pig-tails”.
“Yeah,” she replied, “though I haven’t yet decided whether it’s a boon or a bane.”
“Boon, I’d say, if my opinion should matter.” His grin had widened into a disarming smile.
A charmer, was Lanie’s thought.
“Do you know if anything on this menu is worth eating?” he then asked, changing the subject. “I haven’t had lunch yet so I really ought to eat something.”
“The filet of fish on a bun,” Lanie answered immediately. “Not the fish and chips—that’s frozen crud trucked across half the continent, no doubt. The filet is local—fresh daily--and the buns come from the local bakery every morning.”
“Sounds like you know what you’re talking about, Ms Jones.”
“I do.” She smiled at him. “I’ve been here a week. If you’d come tomorrow, I would not have been here anymore; I’ll be on my way back to the big city—well, a bigger town, anyway.”
The waitress came by to take their orders and Haddok took Lanie’s advice about the food while she contented herself with a coffee and a pastry.
“By the way, I’m just Lanie,” she added when the girl had left again.
“And I’m Jamie, or James: never Jim.”
Lanie raised her eyebrows at that but he ignored the implied question. She accepted his silence with grace; it was none of her business anyway.
“Sergeant Martin at the OPP detachment said that you had a really good grasp of this story,” Haddok then said, getting into the matter that they had come to discuss. “He told me that I’d be able to get the relevant information from you.”
What the Ontario Provincial Police Sergeant had said was that “the Jones woman was damn good. She’s an old-style investigative reporter, or certainly would be if someone paid her to do the job. The papers are pretty shoddy these days most of the time; they send a reporter to ask us a few questions and then he writes the story from our answers. But this young woman has been checking everything herself; she’s been talking to the principals involved, went to the site in the bush, looked into Katie Maki’s past. I’m surprised that her paper’s allowing her the time to do so, but since they sent someone, she’s a good choice; she’s a thorough investigator.”
“Well, to begin with, there is no question about the main fact,” Lanie said, emptying a sheaf of notes and her laptop from her backpack. “Katie Maki has disappeared.”
“Just...disappeared?”
“Disappeared.” Lanie stressed the word. “Vanished. Gone poof.” She smiled, thinly. “It could be a Monty Python joke, except that it isn’t.
“She was on a berry-picking expedition with her parents-in-law, John and Raisa Maki, and her five-year-old son, Jake. They were picking raspberries—Raisa makes jam and jelly for their Resort with all kinds of wild berries—at a place that John had heard about at the end of an old logging road. This was in the second half of July and apparently the place was an excellent berry patch, with no bears—a picker’s dream. None of the other pickers witnessed the actual disappearance but Jake was with her just before it happened, and all three of them saw the egg-shaped object that rose into the sky right afterwards.”
Haddok was listening closely.
“Go on,” he encouraged her when she stopped talking.
“According to Jake, he had been tired and had lain down by the berry-pail that his mom was filling while she picked one more bowlful of berries; it would have filled the pail and they then would have returned to his grandparents who were picking closer to their truck. He had fallen asleep, only to be awakened by being grabbed. He had looked up to see a creature that looked half-man, half-animal to him; he still refers to it as a ‘cat-man’. He had got out one piercing scream before the creature silenced him by covering his mouth with a paw. It had started dragging him across the little clearing they were in, and then his mother had arrived, howling. She had a bowl of berries which she had smashed into the cat-man’s face; it had let go of Jake and tried to clear the berries out of its face and eyes. Jake had expected his mother to run off with him but she had been staring past the cat-creature, and turning Jake around had ordered him to run to his grandfather. Just before getting into the bushes Jake had snuck a look behind him and he had seen another of the cat-men, and his mother facing it. He had run for his grandparents, not knowing what else to do.
“John had already been hurrying in that direction—a sturdy stick in one hand—when Jake reached him. He had taken a second to redirect the boy to his wife, and that second may have made all the difference. By the time he reached the clearing with the berry-pail, there was nobody there; only a bowl half-full of mashed berries lying on the ground, surrounded by more berries.
“Then, while he had watched, confused, a luminous egg-shaped craft had risen from among the brush a short distance off, and disappeared once it was in the sky. By this time Jake had returned to the clearing with Raisa and all three of them had watched the little vessel blink out.
“The three of them had searched the area for Katie but had found no sign of her, or of the cat-men Jake had seen. What they did find were three holes in the ground, arranged in a triangle, where they figured that the strange craft must have been sitting.”
Lanie stopped talking and sipped her coffee while Haddok received his meal from the waitress. Once the girl had left again he bit into his sandwich, eating a piece hungrily.
“It’s good,” he told Lanie. “Thanks for the tip.”
“Did Katie’s in-laws have any reason to want her out of the pictu
re?” he asked after another bite.
Lanie shook her head.
“They were very fond of her as a matter of fact,” she answered. “However, her ex-husband, Donny Maki was immediately fingered as a suspect. The couple had got a divorce a few years ago because Donny had beat the shit out of Katie when she refused to sign her inheritance from her parents over to him. But he was guiding fishermen at least a hundred kilometres away, and the American tourists with him swore that he had never left them, not for even fifteen minutes, never mind long enough to go commit murder.”
“There are definite similarities with the case I’m working on,” Haddok mused, finishing his sandwich and drinking down his glass of milk. “Only my client, even though he has no motive for murder, was on the spot when the disappearance took place.”
“Tell me about it.”
“The girl who disappeared was the teenaged granddaughter of the farmer on whose property the incident took place. Apparently she was a looker; tall, blond and beautiful. The grandparents had come from Norway, oh, ages ago. My client was working on the farm; he stayed in a cabin near the barn during the weeks and went home on the weekends. Apparently he and this granddaughter were having an affair—behind the grandparents backs. She would sneak into his cabin once the old folks had gone to sleep, and then sneak back into the house before the sun came up.
“Well, according to my client, that morning she had left to go in as usual, while he stayed in bed. A little later he had heard her scream, a piercing scream cut off abruptly. He had got up, grabbed a pair of pants and ran out to see what was going on while putting the pants on. He had got outside just in time to see two weird-looking, hairy guys dragging Ingrid, that was the girl’s name, into an odd, egg-shaped, glowing thing which took off as soon as the three of them were inside. Nick, my client said that it looked like the girl wasn’t conscious considering the way the cat-men—he used the same term your boy Jake did—were handling her.”
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