The shot, combined with the rising of the flit into the air apparently served to change the kidnappers’ minds about handling the situation in person. Someone pulled the stunner-crippled man back into the ship and banged the hatch shut. Moments later the space vessel climbed into the air, and turned around, its front sensors facing the direction in which the flit was fleeing. Casually, brutally, someone inside operated the vessel’s laser cutter, slashing through the remaining flit and the flyer beside it, cutting each of them into two.
“Hey! Goddamned assholes destroying Principality property!” Stan shouted, shaking his fist in the air.
“That was retaliation for your stunner shot, Stan!” the guard behind him said, shaking his head as the big vessel picked up speed and began to chase the flit in earnest.
“Let’s be grateful that they didn’t aim their cutter at us,” Gorine said, and there was a tremor in her voice. “I suppose that’s why the Agent and the Hsiss woman flew off. They didn’t want us to be the target of those brutes’ wrath.”
“That’s right,” Llon, beside her, said. “They know that they are the ones that Gorsh really is after. The goons won’t kill them; Gorsh wants them alive, so even if they don’t succeed in escaping capture, they know that they won’t die, whereas the rest of us, we’re worth the same to them dead or alive.”
“And what we’re worth to them is exactly nothing,” stated the fellow who had spoken of the brutes retaliating. “Ye gods, I really don’t like this sort of a thing!”
*****
“So how are we going to play this?” Xoraya asked as she and Mikal skimmed towards the open sea in the flit.
“I’m going to get everything that I can out of this machine,” Mikal replied from the controls. “Make it look like we really are serious about getting away. I don’t want them to doubt us, think us such easy pickings that they might as well go back and snare Kati while they’re at it.”
“Yes, we need her on the outside of this trap,” Xoraya agreed immediately. “She can be counted on to come up with some good ideas, whereas, if she was in Gorsh’s hands, she would be too busy trying to escape from him and Milla to worry much about us.”
She managed a slightly lascivious grin.
“Besides which, yes, I know,” she added, “she is your woman and no other man is to touch her. Not that she would welcome any other man’s touch. You humans are not like we Xeonsaurs about that. A Lizard-woman in heat will mate with any and all males who want her; she totally loses her sense of discrimination. If a Lizard-man wants to be sure that the eggs she lays are his, and only his, he takes her away from other men, or locks her in a suite to which he has the only key. We Xeonsaur women put up with that because we know that we’re raving lunatics in heat, and, fortunately, we don’t go into heat very often. Only once or so in a century.”
Mikal took a moment from scanning the seascape to stare at her.
“That sounds like a god-awful sex life to me,” he said.
“Oh, there’s more to our sex-lives,” Xoraya responded, with her tinkling laugh. “Xanthus and I have what humans would consider a very healthy sex-life. It just never results in eggs and hatchlings, except when the female is in heat. So far, I have never experienced it, but other Xeonsaur women have told me that being in heat is crazy, and glorious. Men, even the least of them, look so good, smell so wonderful; a woman wants to just stay in a nest and take them all to herself, one after another. And then, after about a week or two of crazy sex it’s all over, and you don’t want to see any man but your Life-Mate until—well, the next time you go into heat.”
“Ye gods,” muttered Mikal. “How do the men handle it?”
“Variously. Some, like I said, make sure that they are the one you are having all that crazy sex with. Others don’t care, and even invite their friends in for what you humans might call an orgy. They’re the ones who consider it good for the species to vary paternity, and when they hear of a woman in heat whose door is open to men other than her Life-Mate, they make a bee-line for that door.”
“Which kind is Xanthus?” Mikal asked.
“I don’t yet know,” Xoraya answered with another laugh. “I guess I won’t, until I go into heat for the first time, and I’m hoping that it won’t be happening for some time yet.”
“I don’t believe that we’re discussing Xeonsaur sex-life while trying to outrun a space vehicle in a flit,” muttered Mikal. “Although there is a certain fitting, surreal quality to it!”
“Well, they’re gaining on us.” Xoraya’s eyes were on the dash screens. “Fast.”
“Yeah. It’s time to start circling back towards the Maldos Chain. I want to be on the outer rocks when they catch us. Not many living things there besides us, to get into harm’s way.”
“As long as the fishies have the good sense to give us a wide berth.”
*****
They were over the tail of the island chain when the first laser cutter beam slashed at them; it went wide, since the bigger ship was barely in range when it began shooting.
“Trigger-happy bastards,” Mikal muttered as the flit evaded the fire.
He scanned the screens as well as the view in front and below them through the windshield, looking for a likely spot to put the flit down before the laser cutter would completely disable it. Ah, there! Two flat islands, close together, one small and the other one considerably larger. If he put the flit down on the smaller one, the larger one could accommodate the space vessel, and it would look like even at the end they were trying to evade the brutes as much as they could!
Mikal opened a channel to send a message to the flit’s sister vehicle, and spoke the words as the second cutter slash shook the flit, crippling it. He broke the connection, shutting the controller off as he did so. Kati and Lank would now not be able to raise them, but should the brutes decide to get curious, once they had him and Xoraya under the mind-tangler, they’d be unable to reach the second flit.
“Hold on, Xoraya!” he shouted. “We’re going down, and the landing is not going to be soft!”
*****
The dark night had enveloped the Maldos Chain by the time Lank brought the flit over it, so there was not the slightest hope of seeing anything of what had happened at its tail end. The lights of Maldosa beckoned, however, and Lank parked the flit in the parking lot that they had used before. He and Kati walked to the Maldosa Lodge, to see if Llon was there. They considered stopping by at Councillor Gorine’s office, but it seemed late in the day to bother going there.
Lank had apologized several times for not taking the message ping on the flit remote more seriously, but Kati had told him, with a shrug, that there was no need for regrets—had they run to the flit to listen to the message, they nevertheless could not have made it to the Maldos Chain in time to be of any use to Mikal and Xoraya. Besides what could they have done to prevent the kidnapping in any case; obviously Mikal and Xoraya had tried their best to avoid capture. A flit against a space ship did not make for fair odds; that was a fact of life.
Kati sighed when she commented on this; she found herself wondering if perhaps the group hadn’t taken on too much in going after Gorsh, just the four—five—of them. Maybe they would pay for the hubris.
Nevertheless, she was yet the eternal optimist. Was there a way to turn this setback into an advantage, somehow? Xoraya would be conscious under the mind-tangler, and Kati could mentally communicate with her in that state. But, did the fact that Xoraya was somewhere in space, in a space ship, affect this ability? Kati remembered Murra, the boy who had awakened her to her ESP on Gorsh’s slave ship telling her that distance should not, did not affect mental communication, but she had not been able to reach Murra since then, although, granted, she had been too busy to try, most of the time. It had been only since they had left Vultaire on the Federation Space cruiser for Paradiso and the Qupar Station, that she had had the leisure to think of Murra for more than moments at a time. And all her efforts since then, at contact, had come to nough
t.
Still, the possibility of mental communication with Xoraya was something that she, Llon and Lank needed to keep in mind.
“This means that we have two more people to free from Gorsh’s power,” she muttered to Lank as they hurried towards the Maldosa Lodge. “By the way, are you hungry? We could stop in the bar and see if they can’t rustle up some grub for us. The restaurant is probably closed; The Monk tells me that it’s pretty near midnight now, local time.”
“Some food would be good,” Lank agreed immediately. “Supper was a long time ago.”
The Lodge bar was quiet. It happened to be the only night of the week when there was no scheduled entertainment; usually this was an opportunity for eager but non-established young musicians to strut their stuff, although they did not get paid for their efforts. But that rarely stopped them from coming to sing and play; the fact that at this hour they had all gone home, or had never even showed up, was a sign, Kati thought, that the people of Maldos Chain were taking the day’s events very seriously. The next sign that this was so, was a knot of people who hailed her and Lank as soon as they saw them, and called for them to come to their table by the bar.
Llon was there, and Gorine and Ciela, with the Town Guards Kormes and Stan. There was also another official-looking male whom Kati did not know, and a man and a woman who she knew to be Gorine’s colleagues on the Maldos Chain Council.
The barkeep brought them mugs of ale before they could ask for it, and promised to bring some sandwiches, and a salad that he had rustled up in the kitchen in anticipation of their coming.
“Llon, here, told me that you two, certainly the young man, would be hungry when you arrived,” he said. “It’s a bit of a flight from Crescent City.”
“Llon was right,” Lank said gratefully. “I’m starving. Whatever you have for us, bring it on.”
Gorine turned to Kati as soon as the barkeep had left.
“Llon tells me that with Mikal r’ma Trodden gone, you’re the person in charge of the operation,” she said. “Needless to say, we are tremendously distressed by what happened. I am sure that the Agent took to the flit with Xoraya Hsiss in order to avoid a fire-fight on the Laboratory Island, and possibly a number of deaths. He succeeded in that, although the brutes in the ship did destroy a flit and a flyer belonging to the Principality as they lifted off to chase their prey.”
“Mikal will do a lot to avoid deaths,” Kati agreed. “I presume that he and Xoraya were captured, not killed.”
“Definitely,” said Stan. “We took the remaining flyer to the site where the space ship shot down the flit. The Agent had returned to the tail of the Chain, presumably to be closer to human habitation, once he realized that the flit was not going to reach safety, and we could see the flashes of the laser cutter from where we were, and knew approximately where to look for wreckage. We found it, and there were no bodies. The brutes hadn’t even bothered to destroy the little vehicle, although it had been crippled by the laser cutter shots.”
“They got what they came for,” Kati sighed, “and took off.”
“Not quite,” piped up Ciela. “I heard the brute at the hatch—the one you stunned, Stan—say something about how the woman that their boss was sweet on, the Agent’s girlfriend, or something, wasn’t there. But that they’d take the other two back home to Wayward. The woman would be you, right?”
Kati made a face, while the Granda laughed at the back of her mind.
“Ouch,” she said. “Is Gorsh still at that? No way he gets me to do his childbearing, nor will I dig tubers under Milla’s supervision!”
“Look at the bright side,” subvocalized The Monk. “She said that the brutes were taking the other two to Wayward. Now you know where we must go.”
“I’m sure Mikal is just as happy as you are, that their net didn’t snag you,” said Llon.
“You’d almost think that he gave us permission to spend the time in Crescent City with my friends just to keep you from getting snatched,” commented Lank. “He was so good about giving me the time to go and visit my mother’s grave, and agreed that you should come along, and said don’t rush back, it’s all okay. I’m not saying that he isn’t always good about things; only this time there was something to be really anxious about, considering that we knew that those guys were around.”
“The boy’s got something there,” subvocalized The Monk. “You may have to have a talk, later, with Llon.”
Kati wanted to ask him why Llon, but Gorine was directing her attention to the official-looking man who was new to her.
“This is Governor Jorris of Greyrock Principality, Kati,” she said, “and Jorris, this, as you’ve no doubt already guessed, is Kati of Terra, Agent Mikal r’ma Trodden’s second in command.”
“On this assignment, anyway,” Kati murmured with a chuckle.
“The last assignment she was the boss,” Lank informed everyone, while Kati tried to shush him.
“And Lank, here, is the crew genius, if the youngest member, and a native of this planet,” she countered, but Lank was eyeing the generous plate that the barkeep was setting in front of him, suddenly totally oblivious to all else around him.
Kati thanked the barkeep for her smaller but delicious-looking plate, and turned to Gorine and Governor Jorris.
“Pleased to meet you, Governor,” she said to the man.
“Since Gorine is just Gorine, I think that I’ll be just Jorris,” he responded with a smile.
“Jorris and I often collaborate when it comes to issues of importance to both of us,” Gorine explained. “I called, and asked him to come and discuss this situation with us, and you, since it definitely suggests that we can no longer assume that our world can hide in the shadows, and not be affected by what goes on along the Space Trade Lanes. Neither of us much likes the idea that we have become a place where visitors can willy-nilly be kidnapped by criminals, no matter what the provocation for such kidnappings.”
“Some of our Trade Lanes scrip—Federation credit chits—comes from tourists who come here to enjoy the sea, the sun and the beaches,” Jorris added. “If it becomes known in the galactic neighbourhood, to coin a term, that we’re no longer a safe playground, that income source will dry up in no time at all. So the whole planet ought to have an interest in doing whatever is necessary to make us safe. I think that we in Greyrock, the Maldos Chain, and the principalities around us are going to have to start politicking to get something done about a possible relationship with the Federation. Assuming that the Federation has an interest in an unimportant world such as ours.”
“Mikal would have been the person to pontificate on the subject,” Kati said with a smile, “but that, of course is not now possible. My knowledge about things Federation is much less extensive, since I’m a newcomer to Lamania. But I do recall Mikal saying that he thought it was a mistake for the Federation to not have made some serious efforts to bring Tarangay under its umbrella in some fashion or another. He thinks that Tarangay’s biggest resource is its people, and that this planet could be a very important addition to the Federation.”
“People?” Stan asked, looking puzzled. “How so? I’ve always thought that we’re pretty ordinary; we even look pretty average. Nothing interesting or exotic about our looks; no Lamanian large heads, Borhquan wedges, or Torrones musculature.”
“Maybe it’s our love of music,” one of the Maldos Chain Councillors suggested. “I understand that our penchant for turning every gathering into a song-and-a-dance session is not shared by everybody. Maybe they need to be taught.”
“Actually, what Mikal was talking about is related to musicality,” Kati said, “and it’s what brought Scientist Hsiss here to build and operate his laboratory. It’s the fact that a fair percentage of Tarangayans are capable of understanding the complex engineering involved in anything and everything that we humans get from the Xeonsaurs. Of the present Federation worlds, only Shelonia has an appreciable number of such individuals, and, believe me, they treasure those people.
And the Federation is always looking for more; Mikal said that he doesn’t quite understand how Tarangay has slipped under the radar. He thought that it may have to do with the fact that the last few Federation Presidents before the present one, were rather ineffectual administrators, more interested in keeping the boat from rocking than in sailing it ahead.”
“You mean people like me?” Lank surfaced from his sandwiches long enough to ask the question. “And Ciela? And the others working on Laboratory Island?”
“Just so,” Kati answered. “You guys would be gold to an engineering school. And I don’t know enough about the subject to know where else you’d be priceless assets. You did note, Lank, did you not, that I was pretty quick to recruit you for this mission as soon as I found out that we were going to be trawling around space in a used ship?”
“But that only made sense, and you’re a sensible person,” Lank objected. “You’re as good as Mikal is at figuring out what to do, and the best way to do it. And you use the talents around you.”
Jorris brayed with laughter.
“Now there’s a talent I can appreciate,” he said, “not being one of the Tarangayans with an engineer’s mind, but a mere politician. Which brings us up to the next two questions: what do you, Kati of Terra plan to do about this kidnapping situation, and what is the best way to contact Federation with our concerns about it having happened on our territory?”
“I have been trying to think of how to deal with the mess on hand,” Kati responded, pushing her now empty plate aside. “And I’m pretty sure that Llon, Lank and I will have to make our way to Wayward, Gorsh’s home world, but we’ll want to do it without being noticed. How to do that will require some thought.
“In the meantime, word will have to be sent to Mikal and my boss about what has happened, and it will be necessary to make sure that she isn’t alarmed enough to authorize the sending of a Torrones Warship here, or to Wayward. Gorsh makes Maryse r’ma Darien very antsy; this is the second time he has taken her best operative prisoner. The first time, when Mikal and I escaped from Gorsh’s slave ship, there was a Torrones ship orbiting the planet we were on when Mikal activated the homing beacon.
Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers Page 15
