Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers

by Helena Puumala

  “Something like that,” Max said evenly. “I am aware that you have been exporting carpets to Continent Nord, to be resold at the Strone Market by a vendor by the name of Lovale. It so happens that I did not have the opportunity to see Lovale’s stock, but did hear good reports about it. So, when Captain Katerina mentioned that she was looking for a piece of exquisite carpet to fill a special order, naturally I thought of Lovale’s wares. Unfortunately he was rather secretive about his source, and we have spent the day tracking it down—to your premises, in fact.

  “Lovale’s secrecy raised our suspicions, however; that is why we would like to see your operation, even though the samples your employee has shown us seem to be authentic enough. But, one never knows, until one knows....”

  Kati wanted to pat Max on the back. He was doing magnificently well! She could not have done better herself, and neither could have Mikal, she was certain!

  Tarig stared at Max for a moment; then took another look at Kati. Finally he turned back to Max, having made up his mind, apparently.

  “All right,” he said somewhat reluctantly. “I’ll walk you through our knotting rooms.”

  He opened the gate that allowed the two of them behind the counter, and began to lead them towards the door by which he had come in.

  “All right, Old Monk,” Kati subvocalized. “You’re on recording duty as of this moment.”

  “Don’t remind me of my business. I’ve been at it much longer than you’ve been alive, girl.”

  Damn. Time to want to kick the creature, once again—only it was impossible, of course.

  *****

  Max and Kati followed Tarig down a long hallway towards the back of the building. Finally they stopped at a closed door, and Tarig turned to them, a severe expression on his face.

  “I don’t want you to disturb my work force,” he said. “They’re a pretty placid bunch, but you never know how seeing strangers will affect them. And we’re on a tight schedule; our product is in demand. So, if you can just follow me through the work rooms in silence, step as lightly as you can, since even footfalls can disturb a person’s concentration.”

  A child’s concentration, you mean, Kati thought, but did not speak the words out loud.

  They stepped into the first room.

  It was not a large room, and therefore not quite what Kati had expected. Somehow, in her mind’s eye the hand-knotting would have been done in a huge hall, with a number of carpets hanging in position for small fingers to knot the soft fibres into the weave, pulled up onto rollers as the work was done. But there was only one carpet being worked on in this room, with three boys sitting in front of its hanging form, busy knotting. The boys were “Murra’s boys” in racial type, and Kati mentally heard The Monk snarl as he took this fact in. So he cared, she thought, struggling to keep her face from expressing the anger she, herself, was feeling.

  Max was walking, stiff-backed ahead of her, and she followed him, trying to stick to Tarig’s instructions. They trod the length of the small room, and to a door which took them to another one which was its exact counterpart. Through that they continued into another, and then still another; Kati lost count but that didn’t matter since the Granda was keeping track.

  Later the Granda told her that it was the seventh room where disaster struck.

  One of the boys at the carpet looked up at the walkers; his hearing must have been more acute than that of the others. The three passers-through made no more noise in this room than they had in the earlier ones, and the other two boys were apparently oblivious.

  “Katie!” a boy’s voice called, a voice Kati recognized, and added in a language that she remembered from the slave ship: “Have you come to get me out, Katie, and send me home?”

  “Oh my God, Lume, it’s you!”

  All Tarig’s instructions forgotten, Kati stepped over to the boy and gathered him into her arms. How long had it been? He was not much bigger than he had been in the slave ship; was he even being fed properly? He had been so homesick on the ship, and here he was—why was he here, the only one of the boys that she recognized?

  Tears welled from her eyes even as Max asked her:

  “Kati, do you know that boy?”

  ...and at the same time Tarig started yelling at her to stop disturbing the workplace, and that he was throwing her and Max out pronto!

  “Lume, please try to endure a while longer,” Kati whispered into his ear through her tears, knowing that he, with a node, could pick up her words. “Now that I know you’re here, I’ll try to arrange a rescue for all of you boys, the earliest that I can.”

  With a final caress, she let Lume down, and he scurried back to his spot in front of the carpet. She then turned defiant, teary features towards Tarig whose face was red with anger.

  “I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing, you damn Free Trader, you, but you and your noble Nordlander friend are getting the hell out of this establishment, right now,” he said. “And don’t come back. Ever. Either of you. Or you just might pay a heavy price for your snooping.”

  *****

  “He was so homesick on the slave ship,” Kati said to Max on the tram ride back to their hotel. “As I remember it, he had me in tears then, too. And I swore that I’d get all those kids out of slavery, at least, if I couldn’t get them home again. I still mean to do it.”

  Max took hold of her hand and squeezed it.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “Your friends have come to Salamanka to discover what kind of a fighting force Gorsh has on hand,” the Wise Woman, Seleni, communicated to Mikal through the jini. “Are there things that they should know about in the Citadel cellars?”

  “If there are, the Cellar Creature has been successful in keeping us away from them,” Mikal responded. “When we first were brought down here, Xoraya and I spent some time exploring the cellars. We came across nothing like that, which, of course, means only that we found nothing. There could be a cache of arms somewhere, and we were not allowed near them. I think that it might be easier for someone operating in-body to find something like that. The murk might not constrain a live body as much as it does a mental entity.”

  “I’ll pass the word to Lank and Chrysalia. Maybe they can figure out a way to get down there for a look. Or get someone else to go. Right now they’re busy helping Shyla escape from Gorsh before he can send her to that man Koruse who wants a virgin to play sadistic games with. I’m expecting to hear from that jini—I guess we could call it number two—and find out how things went.”

  “Chrysalia,” Mikal mused. “She must be one of the two new team members. I don’t think that I know anything about her, or her talents.”

  “She’s a Crystolorian, from the planet which produces lace crystal. She’s sort of a custodian of the lace crystal shards, and none too happy at the moment about the possibility of the longer crystals being turned into knives on this world. Not that I blame her; only I have a few misgivings of my own about her, although those misgivings are more intuitive than fact-based.”

  Mikal could feels some uncertainty in Seleni’s thoughts as they came across through the jini which was sitting quietly, touching his astral arm, allowing the communication to happen.

  “I suspect that she was the one her people sent because she is capable of violence, and they were sending her to a violent world,” she added. “She is also quite psychic, and helped me to birth the second jini, endowing it with some qualities that I could not have given it. Oh yes, and she has lace crystal talons on four of her fingers on each hand. Apparently that is how the Crystolorians grow the lace crystal, out of their bodies, when they want it, and can, in fact, grow great quantities of it, if and when it’s needed.”

  “Hm. She sounds like something of a mixed blessing,” Mikal commented.

  “You and I are in agreement about that. But if you think that the jini number one can help you search for the arms, please feel free to set it to work.”

  “There might be something to that pla
n,” Mikal agreed. “The jini has been able to make some kind of inroads into the Cellar Creature’s operations and Mosse the Mage’s unpleasant habits. At least Mosse is very annoyed, and has been since the girls came down after their escape attempt. And he is still annoyed; chasing the girls away did not, after all, improve his relationship with the Cellar Creature, is my guess.”

  Seleni transmitted a mental chuckle to him.

  “Maybe we’re getting somewhere,” she sent, before cutting the connection.

  “So, is something useful happening?” Xoraya asked, as soon as the jini had separated from Mikal’s form.

  “Perhaps,” Mikal responded.

  He told her about Lank and Chrysalia’s presence, and explained the Crystolorian as much as Seleni had done so to him.

  “Seleni thinks that we should get the jini to try to find any possible armaments that might be hidden down here in the Citadel cellars,” he told her. “She thinks that it might have better luck finding such things than you, Xanthus, or myself could have, bodiless as we are.”

  “I have had the feeling the whole time, whenever I’ve been kept down here, that there is a lot of real estate in these cellars that I just could not penetrate,” broke in Xanthus. “I did consider sending Murra to investigate in person, but I did not want to put him in harm’s way.”

  “Wise of you,” Mikal agreed. “Murra’s too peaceable a person to be sent on a task like that. Besides the fact that he’s really still a child.”

  He directed a mental smile to the boy, to take any possible sting out of his words. During the hours Murra had been his ESP instructor he had developed a real liking, and an admiration for the talented boy, and had begun to feel very protective towards him. He realized that his attitude towards Murra was much like what Kati had described hers to have been, when she had spent time with, and learned PSI lessons from him.

  “I want to find out what Master Healer Vorlund would make of you, Murra,” Xoraya subvocalized. “He might insist on taking you on as an apprentice, and teaching you to heal.”

  “I’d like that,” Murra responded. “I would like to know how to be a healer.”

  “Good,” Mikal replied. “But that’s still in the future. To get there we still have lots of challenges to face. The first one being, is it possible for me to follow the jini during its search for arms? It would be useful if I could, since I have a lot of knowledge about stuff that kills, although I am oath-bound to never use any of it. But we Agents need to know what we’re to avoid setting on fire, as well as what our opponents may want to throw at us. One of the courses a Federation Peace Officer takes during training has to do with deadly weapons. Plus we take refreshers every so often just to try to keep on top of the latest killing stuff.”

  “Maybe you’re as ambiguous a character as Seleni found Chrysalia,” Xoraya subvocalized with an astral grin. “It’s a good thing about that oath business.”

  “Indeed, and Gorsh better know it. If it wasn’t for the oath he might be in trouble....”

  He did not finish the thought, not even in jest.

  The jini was quite cooperative, and willing to allow Mikal, in his astral form, to hang out with it while it did another round of exploring. It was even patient with the disembodied Agent’s difficulties with navigating through the murk. The jini itself had very little trouble; it could cut a path through the heavy atmosphere, but a human had a tougher time. Mikal remembered how Kati had been trapped in the Prison cellars of Vultaire’s Capital City by the unhappy child Spirit which, born from countless years of human misery, had made the cellars its home, and had been desperate enough for company to try to force the sensitives it encountered to stay with it. He hoped that the jini had the power to help if he found himself in comparable circumstances—but, of course, he realized as he thought on it, he already was in a similar situation, the difference being that this Cellar Creature wanted nothing to do with him, other than to keep him imprisoned, and to feed off his negative emotions.

  “I have ranged widely in these cellars,” the jini communicated to him, as they moved through the floor to a lower level. “There is a storage area on the level above the dungeons which might hold what you are looking for. The door is locked, which matters not at all to me, and I have looked in, but did not understand what I was seeing. We should perhaps go there first, since you have trouble moving in the murk, and I can do only so much to clear the atmosphere for you.”

  “That sounds sensible,” Mikal agreed, doing his best to not feel blind, deaf, and idiotic as the weight of the murk interfered with his astral senses. “I don’t think I can handle this sort of travel for too long. We better make the best possible use of it, since we will have to return soon to where I have some psychic breathing space, and that seems to mean the room at the back of the lab.”

  He struggled down another couple of floors, following the jini. How deep were the Citadel cellars, anyway? There had to be at least six or seven levels according to his count, though his counting was a little shaky at the moment. Well, he could get the accurate information, later, from the jini, since it had explored the cellars. What mattered on this trip was whether or not he could identify the weapons that they found, if, indeed, they found any.

  When they came to the locked door that the jini indicated was the one it had penetrated earlier, Mikal became convinced that they had, indeed, reached Gorsh’s arsenal, or else something just as important as the weapons were. The murk seemed to have grown darker and heavier at the door, and the wall that held it; the stuff felt almost like a physical barrier would have, had Mikal been in body.

  “They’re certainly protecting this place,” he mentally gasped to the jini, as he found himself bouncing off the barrier the second time. “I don’t know if I can make it through.”

  “Hold on,” responded the jini, wrapping itself around Mikal’s psychic form, compressing it at the same time. “I’ll pull in more energy from my Spirit Mother. That will alert the Cellar Creature, but we should be able to force you through for a long enough a period that you can take a look-see. But you’ll be batted back to your usual prison in a hurry, after that.”

  Well. Mikal braced himself for a completely new experience. It would make a story to be told later, to Kati, perhaps. He felt himself, suddenly, to be in a whirlwind of energy, and being propelled through the door and into the room beyond! The energy propelled him around the room, and down the aisles of shelves, allowing him a view of everything there, a clearer look at the contents than any examination which he might ever have managed in physical life.

  The room was an arsenal. A nasty arsenal, from what he could grasp. As he had said earlier, he had had to study the topic of armaments for his job, and kept up with the Federation developments, and the developments that the Federation knew of, but even thus, he did not recognize every weapon, nor every bomb-like object that his non-eyes were taking in with extraordinary clarity. No surprise there; on Sickle Island, the Drowned World, he had relied on Kati’s Granda for the identification of some of the weapons Gorsh’s minions, Guzi and Dakra, had carried with them. This was where they, without doubt, had obtained their lovely stockpile.

  “This is dangerous, hellishly dangerous,” he told the jini, trusting that it would pass the word on to its Spirit Mother, and to Seleni.

  Then a black maelstrom was upon him, tearing him from the jini’s hold, and from the clear energy vibrations which had been surrounding him. He was slammed back into the room behind the lab, and into his body, with a force that had his body reeling on the gurney! He cried out physically, and frightened Murra scurried over to adjust the life-support controls.

  “That was not good,” said the jini to those in the room, back from their expedition, still wrapped in the shimmering, extra energy which it had used to get Mikal through the blocked door. “The Creature cannot hurt the astral form, but it can hurt the physical self, and that will certainly affect Mikal’s functioning. We need to heal whatever damage was done. You must help me, boy, a
nd I will use the extra strength the Nature Spirits granted me, for the healing.”

  “Can you heal?” Murra asked the jini in some surprise.

  “Of course. Seleni, the Wise Woman, was my midwife, and she endowed me with her healing abilities. But I don’t have hands with which to handle a body, so you will have to do that for me.”

  According to the jini’s instructions, Murra peeled the life-support systems from Mikal’s body. The jini said that they would get in the way, and might even choke the man while the jini and Murra were directing healing and strengthening energy into his body. Mikal decided that the smartest thing that he could do was to stay with his body, but to remain still, both mentally and physically, while they worked, and simply accept the next stage in the development, whatever it turned out to be. He had a vague suspicion that nothing in his life would be quite the same after this healing. What the Cellar Creature had done was not what it had wanted to do; the jini, Seleni, the Nature Spirits, and Murra were going to make certain of that.

  “I’ll have to draw the drug out of his system, otherwise his physical form will remain too sluggish to use its natural healing abilities,” the jini subvocalized to Murra, while Xoraya and Xanthus were hovering above them, protectively, (if probably ineffectually). “If you will please take hold of his wrist, pressing your thumb on a vein while I envelope you.”

  Murra did as requested, and Mikal had the weirdest sensation of being aware of his blood separating from the drug that had been pumped into it, and the drug then leaving his veins through Murra’s finger into the jini’s ethereal form where it was neutralized in some fashion.

  “Now, the healing energy. We will get it into him as quickly as possible, and negate the effects of that slam, as well as the weakness of lying on this mattress, motionless, for so long. But we must be careful, and not over-stimulate him; we want him normal, not bouncing off the walls with sudden energy.”

  Mikal wondered whether Murra’s feelings were akin to those that Kati had had when the Master Healer Vorlund had drawn her to help him with a healing, on Lamania. He certainly had a look of concentration, and pleasure, on his face as he worked, helping to direct the Nature Spirit energies into Mikal’s body, according to the jini’s instructions. Slowly the shimmer around the jini lessened, and Mikal began to feel physically alive, wonderfully, healthily, alive in his body. With the knowledge, the whole time, that he could still separate from it into his astral form any time he wanted to! He was going to find out, at least approximately, what it was like to be Kati!