Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  “One thing I want clear,” Katie subvocalized. “I want the other prisoners to be mixed up in this escape attempt as little as possible. I have no choice about Murra; he is already knee-deep in this, and may suffer for it once we are gone. But I want Ingrid and Roxanna to know only what is absolutely necessary for them to know, and the children are to be kept completely out of it.”

  “It should be possible to keep the young women and the children in ignorance. Whatever message you may want to leave with Ingrid and Roxanna can be done through Murra; as you say, he is already complicit in this. And since he and you share a mind-link it would not matter even if he could be kept on the outside. Captain Gorsh will, without doubt, node-probe him, once he realizes that you have escaped with the Peace Officer.”

  “Node-probe?” That sounded ominous.

  “The spot that a node grows on the host’s left thumb? It can be used to connect to equipment that will read the contents of a person’s mind. Since Murra’s node is not an old, wily one, but a new growth, everything they ask for, will tumble into their machine. Except for what the host considers absolutely private, such as his or her toilet trips or sex practices, but no-one ever wants to know about those things anyway.”

  “Wanna bet?” Katie thought about some of the survey articles she had seen in magazines on her own home world. Her node “raised a mental eyebrow” but she ignored it, and pushed the thought aside. This was no time for trivialities. Maybe if she lived through this, and succeeded in doing all the things she had on her new to-do list, maybe then, someday, she could have a mental discussion with the granda about the weirdnesses of her home planet. In the meantime, she really ought to get some sleep. If that was possible.

  She fell asleep in minutes. The granda may have helped with that, for all she knew.

  *****

  The ship made its landfall near the end of its dark cycle. Katie was asleep, and Murra woke her up, having himself been awakened by the Xeonsaur, who, as far as she could tell, never slept.

  “He tells me that it’s morning outside, and the Captain, the doctor and the second officer, along with a security team are getting ready to go outside to the location where they usually meet the drug peddlers. There they will either wait for the people from the other ship, or meet with them if they are already there. It seems that the rules among thieves prevent them from spying on each other; the only contact allowed between ships is the personal one at the appointed site. Which is good for you because all the spy-eyes on the outside of the ship are turned off, and with luck, will be off until the ship leaves again.”

  “Get him to let us know the moment the group leaves the ship.” Katie was glad that she and Murra could communicate subvocally; no need to worry, among other things, that their voices would wake anybody up. “And I need to know where the men who are to guard the ship are; can he give me that information?”

  “No problem. He can get information from anywhere on, or around, the ship. Outside, inside, I don’t think that Captain Gorsh or his crew realize how far and wide he can range, and he hasn’t cared to tell them.”

  Katie thought it better not to point out that when she had made her escape with the Star Federation Peace Officer, Gorsh was going to find all that out, most likely by turning Murra’s mind inside out. Surely the Xeonsaur had thought of that and considered getting an escapee out worth the risk! Nevertheless, she did not like the idea of leaving kind, gentle Murra to the wolves. Nor did she have any option but to do so!

  She sighed and went to use the washroom. When she was done she took out the peace officer’s uniform from the drawer in which Roxanna and Ingrid had stored it, and waited for Murra’s sign.

  It came before even a minute had elapsed.

  “They’re out. There’s a guard at the door, inside, and another outside, that’s all. They took four guards with them but hopefully you won’t have to deal with them. Turn to your right when you get outside; the rendezvous site is to the left. The terrain on the right gets rough pretty quickly and there should be some cave entrances within a kilometre or so.”

  She returned to the prison room to help Murra get up the man she was to take with her. He was groggy and confused; she placed her hand over his mouth to keep him quiet and handed the uniform to Murra to begin the process of getting the man into it. To her surprise, he snapped to, at least a modicum of, alertness; when he realized what they were doing, he began to help with the procedure. He was ready in less time than Katie had counted on, and that meant that they could move onwards faster than she had expected to.

  With the Peace Officer between them, she and Murra walked to where they knew that the door which they had chosen for the operation was. It would be locked, of course, but the granda had told her that the lock could not keep him in. None of the locks on the ship could keep him from what they wanted, he had told her, and she was counting on that being so.

  “All, right my inner friend,” she subvocalized to the node, and put her left hand to where she believed the lock to be.

  She felt a keypad under her hand; she could have sworn it had not been there a moment ago. She relaxed, as instructed by the granda, and her fingers danced over the keys, pressing them in a rapid sequence that she could not have consciously even begun to follow. Her fingers came to a stop, and the door slid open in front of her. She realized that the man who was to be her escape partner was staring at her.

  He seemed to be able to move about on his own, with only minor help from her. This prompted her to make the first of the decisions that she knew would pile up as she went along, and she grabbed hold of Murra, giving him a quick but hard hug. She subvocalized to him that he should return to their prison, and let the door lock behind him. She thanked him for all that he had done, and promised to be back, someday, with help. She would find all of the prisoners, she swore, and get them out of slavery, no matter where they would be by the time she got back, no matter how long it would take her.

  “Remember the ‘Mudball’ song,” she added, still subvocally. “And tell Ingrid and Roxanna that, too. You’ll know me by the ‘Mudball’ song. When you hear that song you’ll know that I’m around, that I’ve come looking for you!”

  She hurried off, before the door had closed behind Murra, pulling the Peace Officer along by his arm.

  Their first stop was at the ship stores. It had not been possible to prepare for the trip in any way except mentally, since there was no place to hide anything in the prison room. Besides, Katie was certain that there were spy eyes and ears all over it, and any suspicious behaviour by her, or the others, would have been noticed. Thus, she would have to quickly fill packs for the two of them from the ship’s supplies—she hoped that there was something resembling back-packs handy. The Xeonsaur had claimed that there were such items in the store-room to which she was now heading, when she had had Murra inquire him about the things that they would need out in the wild. Her granda, even though he claimed much knowledge of the ship, knew nothing of such items; clearly they had been of no interest to him while he had been without flesh.

  However, the granda node manipulated the lock of the store-room through Katie’s fingers, as easily as it had the one on the prison door. In she and the SFPO went, but Katie left her companion to lean against a wall by the door, while she went to fetch, first, the back-packs, which did, indeed, look perfectly adequate. She picked up a few other items that were on her mental list; then she returned to see how her charge was doing and to give him one of the packs.

  She found him beside the racks of clothing, going through the footwear, apparently selecting for himself a pair of boots.

  “Ah, an excellent idea,” she said in a language that the granda thought the man might understand. “We will be doing a lot of walking.”

  “Apparently somebody took mine.” The granda’s choice of language appeared to have been good. “You’ll need a pair as well. What you’ve got on won’t be adequate for long.”

  He was right. Katie had worn sneakers for berry
-picking and that is what she still had on her feet. She quickly searched among the boots and found a pair that fit. In fact, they fit remarkably well. Clearly the thieves’ boot makers had tricks up their sleeves that the humans of Earth were not privy to.

  “Do we need cold-weather gear?”

  Katie decided that the Peace Officer was coming out of his stupor, and had a brain cell or two besides.

  “No, apparently it’s warm out there. If we need it later, we’ll figure out a way to get it from the locals. It’s not worth the weight right now; we have other things we need more.”

  They stuffed necessities into the packs, and Katie shoved into hers a package of the feminine hygiene products that she had grown used to having in the prison washroom. They were handy and washable, and she was pretty sure that there would be nothing as good on the planet that they had landed on. They left room for food packets and water bottles, which were in a different storage area, to which Katie led the way, once again easily unlocking the sealed door. Her companion, now motoring under his own steam, if a touch shakily, once again watched the process curiously, but she did not offer any explanations. There would be lots of time for that later, when they were on the trail together.

  They chose filled water containers and the most nutritious packets in the store-room. Katie instructed her companion to pocket one of each, even as she did the same. It did not do to start on a long trek without breakfast.

  Their final stop was the armoury.

  The seal on that door took a longer stretch of the granda’s ministrations than the other ones had, but it, too, opened without a hitch. Katie’s problems did not begin until they were in the room, staring at the bounty of war toys in front of them. Her idea had been to pick up two stunners: one for herself and the other for the man with her. But suddenly the other mind inside her head went nuts.

  “Oh what a delicious selection!” it shouted inside her head.”Look, look at them all! What shall we have? Phasers for sure, and...”

  With an enormous effort she shoved the granda to the back of her mind.

  “Is something the matter?”

  She opened her eyes, only then realizing that she had closed them, and scrunched up her face, while fighting her node. She drew in a deep breath and forced herself to relax physically while keeping the granda squashed at the back of her mental space.

  “Yeah, but nothing I can do anything about right now,” she replied. “Except keep my own counsel, and do as I see fit. We’re taking a stunner each, that’s all. I’ve never killed anyone, and I’m not about to start now.”

  Her companion reached for the stunners, picked up two and handed her one of them.

  “A wise choice, lady,” he said to her formally. “I believe it’s better for the friend who helped you, if we don’t do any killing.”

  “Yes. I just hope he’ll be okay. There’s nothing I can do for him right now. But we better be on our way.” The thought that the granda was willing to further endanger Murra made her slightly nauseous.

  There was not a thing she could do for Murra outside of keeping a rein on her node. She could not haul a twelve-year-old on a cross-country trek across a mountainous country, while running away from the slavers. The granda claimed some knowledge of the planet they were on, but his information was decades, perhaps centuries, out of date. No, Murra was better off facing known dangers, bad as they might be, rather than being dragged across an alien country-side, chased by the heat-seekers the granda had mentioned.

  Also, it was a very good thing that the Peace Officer was already proving to be less trouble, and more of a benefit, than she had dared to hope.

  *****

  When they reached the last turn in the corridor that took them to the outer hatch, Katie came to a stop.

  “According to the schematic of the ship that I’ve got up here—“ she pointed to her temple with an index finger and spoke in a whisper, “—when we turn this corner we’re about four metres from the door. My informant told me that there’s one guard inside the door, obviously to prevent anyone from doing what we’re doing, and another one outside the door. That’s supposed to be it for guards, and it damn well better be.”

  Her companion nodded. He pulled out the stunner he had been carrying in a convenient pocket, and gestured to Katie to let him take the lead.

  “This is probably more my specialty than yours,” he whispered, and leaned around the corner, just enough to see what was around it.

  There was a short hiss from the stunner as he pressed the trigger; seconds later they heard the guard fall.

  They ran for the door; Katie gaped at the comatose body on the floor.

  “Shit,” she said. “Papa Gorsh left his only son to do guard duty. This weakling was supposed to get the granda node that’s now on my neck, but the granda had other ideas.”

  “Bloodthirst would have served us badly now,” her companion added, stopping to study the stunned teen for a short moment. “Had we blasted this boy to kingdom come, someone would pay.”

  Katie shuddered. There was no question as to who that someone would have been. Once again, however, there was no time to worry about ifs, or buts. She was already in front of the invisible door that the boy had been guarding. She ran her left hand (the one with the connector spot in the whorl of her fingerprint) over the area where the door should have been, relaxing her mental control on the other mind inside hers. Apparently the granda node had decided that co-operation was the wisest course of action, as she found the lock with its key pad in seconds, and immediately found her fingers dancing a tune on it, a tune that opened the door.

  The Peace Officer was ready the moment the door began to slide open. He was at the crack, his stunner pointing into it, his body now not showing any of its earlier weakness. Instead, he had an air of an animal ready to pounce; Katie realized that he was doing what he had been trained to do.

  A growling came from the outside as the door opened wider; then the stunner hissed again, twice this time, and by the time the door was fully open they were facing a stunned cat-man lying on a ramp leading to the ground.

  “Well, well, well!” muttered the SFPO as they leaped over the body and started loping towards their right. “This ship has quite the crew.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Katie responded. “It also has quite the cargo.”

  “We better make tracks,” her companion said. “And I’m still not in the best shape for it. I have no idea how long I was lying on the floor drugged. That sort of thing is not good for the physique, I’m afraid.

  “By the way, my name is Mikal.”

  “I am Kati.” Katie grinned at him. She had decided on becoming Kati, Kah-ti, as Murra had pronounced it, sometime after the escape plan had become a real possibility. She felt that recently she had become somebody other than the Katie who had gone picking raspberries with her son and in-laws. The change should be noted somehow, she felt, and had decided to mark it with the small name change, a change that would always remind her of Murra.

  “So, Kati, Kati with a granda node, I assume that you have a plan of some kind for evading the heat-seeking pursuit that is bound to come after us. I do assume that someone explained to you that springing me would ensure a chase. The Captain of that ship wants very much to know what’s inside my head. At our last meeting he was unable to break the blocks that protect what I know, but I had the impression he could change that, given enough time.”

  “There are supposed to be entrances into caves in the area that we’re heading for,” Kati replied. “Somewhere, within about a kilometre of the ship.”

  She stared ahead at the broken rocks they were traversing. They were in a region of sparse vegetation, a landscape made up of expanses of sand broken up by jagged rocks, some of which did not look much like products of nature. The thought that came to her was that all had been tumbled there by a giant flood long since receded.

  Subvocally, she queried her node about the globe that the Xeonsaur had given her; was it
possible to pinpoint this place on it and get a fix on one of the cave entrances?

  The granda was pleased to be useful. It began to direct her towards the nearest entrance into the underground passages, and she took the lead as they scrambled in that direction. At the moment, they neither heard nor saw any pursuit, and took advantage of that to choke down their breakfast packs even as they moved along.

  “What does your granda know about this planet?” Mikal asked between bites.

  “It claims to have been on it in one of its human lives. But that was ‘a while ago’, according to it, and since I think that its notion of ‘a while’ is a lot longer than mine, I expect that the information is somewhat dated. Indeed, it seems puzzled by the weather and the countryside; according to it, the temperature is too warm for the time of year and it cannot remember a landscape like the one we’re in right now.”

  “Of course, it likely never was in this particular area; criminals like our Captain would have their rendezvous places far from the crowds of the local population.”

  “Yeah, except that doesn’t explain the weather. We’re at a pretty good elevation, apparently, and well into autumn. Yet, the weather feels summery, to me, anyway, and the humidity is high. Apparently that’s not in accord with the granda’s memories, but then the image of the globe that we got on ship doesn’t jive with his memories either.”

  “I suppose your node wouldn’t entertain the possibility that it might be mistaken, that it’s never, in fact, been on this world.”

  “It spits on the notion.” The granda inside her mind was furious that Mikal could even consider such a possibility.

  “Nodes do not make mistakes!” The thought was a mental shout, reverberating around Kati’s head, and she had to banish its producer to the back of her mind to silence it.