Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers

by Helena Puumala

  “Also, he and Lank spent some time flitting over Salamanka, figuring out how much of the city is under Gorsh’s control, and what that means in terms of manpower, and materiel other than weapons. He said that their conclusion is that Gorsh is well-supplied—especially if you count in what his wife can provide him with, from her Estate.”

  “But are the people on his properties willing to fight for him?” asked Cassi. “I would expect that most of them just want to live their lives, regardless of whose tenants they are.”

  “The question then becomes: will Gorsh allow them to just live their lives?” commented Max. “The weapons in this storehouse—could they be used by Gorsh to compel his people to support him?”

  “I’d be very surprised if they couldn’t be used for precisely that purpose,” said the President, her expression very serious. “He’ll probably threaten to blow Salamanka to bits if the people set themselves to oppose him.”

  “We can’t have that!” Nabbish declared, scandalized. “A single person cannot set himself up as the autocratic ruler of a city, or even half a city!”

  “Of course we can’t have that,” Naez agreed. “But how are we going to stop it?”

  “Like Lank would say when things looked tough,” piped up Ciela, “we have to ask the question: What would Kati do?”

  *****

  “What would Kati do? Your group of Waywardians, plus Ciela, want an answer to that question, before you agree on a course of action when it comes to dealing with Gorsh; is that what you’re saying?” Mikal asked Llon when he had joined the communication that the Guide and the Wise Woman Seleni were having, with the help of the various Wayward Nature Spirits.

  Seleni had left her trance long enough to call Mikal to join her, because Llon wanted to speak with him directly—or as directly as was possible, considering how the transmission worked.

  “Ciela was the one who came up with the question,” Llon explained. “She said that Lank liked the notion, and often used it, to help him figure out what his next step in a confusing situation ought to be. So we decided that we should ask him, and you, Mikal, what you think that the answer to that question would be. After all, the two of you know her better than the rest of us, including me.

  “We’re willing to give you some time to come up with an answer.”

  Mikal had his professional composure back. He had, over some pretty tough hours, come to the conclusion that there was no use in worrying about something that he could do nothing about, in the short term. If Shyla was right, and Milla would jealously keep Judd Gorsh from getting to carnally know Kati, that would be, from his point of view, an excellent thing. But if Shyla was wrong, and that was possible, and Milla was only too pleased to share her husband with a younger, fertile woman, there was nothing that he, Mikal, could do to help her at the moment. And if he was to help her in the future he had to keep his wits about him. His brain had to be functioning at its best, if he wanted his beloved Kati back. If, while he was scheming to get her back, and to break Gorsh’s little empire at the same time, Gorsh was mauling Kati, he could not stop it. But he could make sure that he would be there for her, if and when she needed support and healing, later. Oh, he would certainly be there for her!

  “What if Lank and I toss this ball back and forth, between us, for a while?” Mikal asked. “I expect that we’ll come up with an idea or two which would be acceptable to Kati.”

  “I was hoping that you’d say that,” Llon said. “Our Waywardian friends find the notion quite fascinating.”

  Seleni’s cottage had become the unofficial headquarters of the Salamanka branch of the “Let’s Defeat Gorsh” movement. This was partly because Mikal did not dare show his face where Gorsh might see and recognize it, and partly because the undisturbed nature with its Spirit in the river valley provided them with a way to contact Llon. The Wise Woman had made her peace with the situation, although, as Mikal had noted, it did turn her life upside down. Lank and Chrysalia brought in prepared food and groceries when they came with the flit in the mornings, even as Mikal had suggested that they do. He himself had not ventured outside the river valley since the mapping expedition during which he had not left the rented flit, but had sent Lank out whenever an errand had to be run. Instead, he had taken whatever constitutionals he found necessary for the sake of his nerves, around the cottage and along the river valley trails, poorly defined though they might be.

  He could sense the Planetary Spirits’ presence during these walks. They invariably uplifted his mood; he had the feeling while basking in their presence that they were keen to help him achieve his ends, including the one of transmuting the Cellar Creature into something more benign than what it was. Transmuting the Cellar Creature? Where had the thought come from, he had asked himself, early that very morning, while walking by the water before anyone else in the cottage was up.

  Now it occurred to him that that would be just the sort of a notion Kati might come up with. And she would know how to get the cooperation of the Nature Spirits. Well, it was one thought to toss into the discussion with Lank.

  Lank and Chrysalia were seated with Shyla around Seleni’s kitchen table when Mikal came in. They had the long lace crystal shards spread out on the table. Shyla was staring at them, unwrapped as they had been from the cloth which Kati had provided a while back, her eyes wide. Lank, too, was staring at the four long, glistening objects, while Chrysalia was touching one after another with the thumb of her right hand.

  “Admiring the potentially deadly weapons?” Mikal asked as he sat down in the one remaining chair set at the table. “Lace crystal is beautiful; there is no denying that.”

  “You weren’t with us to see the city built entirely of lace crystal,” Lank said, almost dreamily. “That was a sight to see.”

  “Prettier than Salamanka, I’ll bet,” Mikal responded with a wry smile. “Sort of unearthly, would be my guess.”

  “Our cities are like nothing you people are used to,” Chrysalia said. “Most of your type of humans would not be able to live in a lace crystal environment. Your own thoughts resonating, bouncing back off walls, combining with those of all the other inhabitants; you’d go crazy. You wouldn’t be able to separate the different thought flows, couldn’t tell which thoughts were yours and which were not. You noticed, Lank, that we didn’t bring your crew into the city, although we showed it to you from a distance.”

  “True,” said Lank, then turned his attention to Mikal:

  “What did Llon want?”

  “The Waywardians are discussing what should be done next in the problem involving one Judd Gorsh, and his inclination to do things like kidnap people’s guests from their flyers. That’s not to be countenanced, apparently.”

  “It shouldn’t be,” Lank agreed. “And having seen what I did of the group Max Lordz associated with, I’m not surprised that they are not reacting with indifference to the insult.”

  “However, apparently the new Government of the Continent Nord is not well equipped to deal with the likes of him,” Mikal added. “No army. No police force. Llon did say that he pointed out that the Federation has those things, and that Wayward is still, like it or not, part of the Federation.”

  “I think that Max, for one, would be quite comfortable with a renewed Federation presence,” Lank said. “How the whole of the Great Council would vote, I don’t know.”

  “Well, Ciela, she with a Tarangayan mind as sharp as yours is, Lank, had come up with an interesting way to go about figuring out what to do next. She had suggested that they ask themselves, as one Lank has a habit of doing in a jam: What would Kati do?”

  Lank started to laugh.

  “She remembered that! I mentioned it to her once, I think! But, you know, it’s not a half-bad idea! Kati was always the one to come up with the really good schemes!”

  “Yeah, I remember,” said Mikal. “Although some of the ones she came up with on Makros III were pretty hare-brained. Mind you, the rest of the group usually liked them, and the
y worked out just fine in the end!”

  “So they weren’t so hare-brained, after all,” Chrysalia said wryly. “It seemed to me that Kati didn’t rush into things headlong. However, if she thought a chance was worth taking, she’d take it.”

  “That’s true,” Lank said. “I’d love to hear what she’d think about your idea of enmeshing Gorsh into the resonance of the lace crystal shards!”

  “You two have come up with something that I don’t know about?” Mikal’s eyes shifted between Lank and Chrysalia’s faces.

  “Possibly,” the Crystolorian said. “Like I’ve mentioned before, the thought of being instrumental in providing Wayward with four more very sharp knives has been growing less and less pleasant, the more I’ve seen of the planet. But bringing along these long shards seemed like a good idea when my people discussed the matter, including the desire we had to find out why our safeguards on Zeke and Darla had failed. Something of the wisdom of my people is embedded in the crystals, therefore there had to be a reason why I was encouraged to bring them, when truly, the communications crystals would have been enough to earn Kati’s crew the good will that she was looking for.

  “Therefore, I have been digging in my mind for an alternate use for these shards, because I am certain that there is one. And since I have begun to suspect that it is the murk of the cellar creature that somehow has been used to alter the resonance of some of the communications crystals, that creature, and the man that depends on its talents, are where I must look.”

  “Go on.” Mikal’s eyes were on her.

  “Unfortunately I’m not an expert in the use of lace crystal; no such expert would agree to leave our home planet,” Chrysalia said. “I can get in touch, at least a little, with the experts, so I’ll be able to do something with them, besides either allow or refuse to have them turned into very sharp knives. But....”

  She was staring at the long shards, looking slightly displeased with herself.

  “I wish that I could do more,” she finished, somewhat lamely.

  “Well, let’s find out what you can do,” Mikal said encouragingly. “First of all, you mentioned something about the resonance of some crystals having been altered. What are you talking about?”

  “The tracer in Shyla’s shoulder, as well as the one Jaqui has, and I would guess, every tracer in every chattel on Wayward who has one, is a tiny sliver of lace crystal. Either a piece of communications crystal, or, perhaps, left-over shards from when long pieces were sharpened into the famous knives. The original resonance that my people build into the crystal has been altered in those tracers, so that I can detect them only at close quarters, whereas Gorsh can use his equipment to follow them all over the planet, and probably off-planet, too, without anyone else being the wiser.”

  “Isn’t that how the communication crystals are supposed to work?” Mikal asked.

  Chrysalia smiled, and shook her head.

  “Not lace crystal shards,” she said. “My people build the resonances into them; they vary, but they are all detectable by a Crystolorian with working talons.”

  She extruded the crystal claws of her left hand, then retracted them, while Mikal looked on, fascinated.

  “The altered resonances, at least from what I could tell when I was taking out the one in Shyla’s shoulder, and inserting it into the rat which subsequently drowned itself, are slightly off-key—that’s the only way I can describe it. I didn’t like handling that thing; my crystal wanted to purify its vibrations. Unfortunately I don’t have the know-how to do that, although I may have to take the time to acquire it, if there’s a lot of the altered crystal around.”

  “And you’d do that by getting in touch with the experts on your world?” Mikal asked.

  Chrysalia nodded.

  “It would mean spending some time—I’m not sure exactly how much, but I’d guess hours, at least—in a trance-like state, similar to that which allows Seleni to communicate with the Nature Spirits.”

  Mikal nodded.

  It was probably a good thing that he had been initiated into the realm of the psychic. Otherwise he would have had trouble accepting all that was happening around him, all the esoteric knowledge that seemed to have become necessary for him to accept if he was to finish this particular portion of his job.

  “Do you need that knowledge to trap Gorsh with the long shards, the way you and Lank have been discussing?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. It would help if I knew how much Gorsh knows about lace crystals. I’d also like to know who is doing the altering of the crystal shards for him.”

  “Mosse the Mage, maybe?”

  “Mosse!” Shyla’s voice dripped with contempt. “I doubt it! Does he know how to do anything besides be a small-time bully?”

  “That’s a good question actually; one that we don’t have an answer to as yet,” Mikal answered.

  “You mentioned slivers left over from making lace crystal knives, Chrysalia,” he continued. “What about the person who used to make those knives? With the supply of lace crystal drying up, more than a decade ago, he, or she, must have had to find a new way of making a living. Why not put the little bits of crystal that he must have had on hand, to use? Especially if he was already on good terms with Gorsh, and knew a lot about lace crystal.”

  Chrysalia stared at him.

  “Now, why didn’t I think of that?” she asked. “Of course! The knife-maker would be the logical person! And he—or she, as you pointed out—could have been the one who mucked up our safeguards that were supposed to protect Zeke and Darla! If this person can alter the crystal resonance.... Damn, Lank, you and I were going to find this person, but we got side-tracked!”

  “It may be just as well that you did,” Mikal said quietly. “This could be our most dangerous opponent, someone who is capable of creating more trouble than even Gorsh is. We’ll have to tread carefully.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Chrysalia muttered. “Possibly my people’s safeties mean nothing when we’re faced with him, or her.”

  “I guess we managed to throw a few more complications into the picture that we should be presenting to our hypothetical Kati,” Lank said with a wry grin.

  “You have no idea how much I wish that we were talking about the real woman, and not the hypothetical doppelganger,” Mikal said. “The stew that we seem to have stepped into gets thicker every time I turn around.”

  He sat back in his chair, and tried to think clearly.

  “Let’s clarify the whole messy situation to ourselves before we try to make any decisions as to what’s to be done. Have we got any paper? Lank, want to be our secretary and write down the details of where we’re at? Then we can look at it, and maybe make some sense of things.”

  Lank reached for a satchel that he had brought into Seleni’s from the rented flit. He pulled out a pen, and a pad of paper, both of which Mikal recognized as some of those that Kati had bought on Vultaire. He sighed as Lank examined the fountain pen to make sure it had ink, before setting its nib to paper.

  “Let’s start with the opposition,” Mikal suggested. “There’s Gorsh, of course.”

  “And Milla,” added Shyla immediately. “And Mosse, the Mage.”

  “We better count the Cellar Creature, too,” added Lank.

  “And the knife-maker, though we don’t know, yet, who that might be,” said Chrysalia.

  “Then there are all the people who either work for Gorsh or Milla, or are beholden to one or the other, or both of them, and therefore willing to do their bidding,” said Mikal.

  “And that, unfortunately, amounts to a quite the crowd of people,” muttered Lank.

  They were busy at it when Seleni came in, and picked up the sheets of paper on which Lank had been scribbling.

  “You’ve done a good job of defining the problems and the difficulties involved,” she said, after a perusal of the writing on the sheets. “All the people that need rescuing; there are enough of them, including Kati, and the Xeonsaurs. The necessity of
getting Gorsh to face justice without starting a minor war, or having him use his arms stash to blow up Salamanka. Neutralizing, at the minimum, the Cellar Creature, to stop it exuding the mind-numbing murk. And this new one about having to deal with someone who knows how to do things with lace crystal that nobody ought to be able to do.

  “Now,” she lay the sheets on the table as she spoke. “Let’s list all the factors we have on our side. It’ll be a long list, longer than the iteration of the problems, so, Lank, give your writing hand a shake, and get ready!”

  Shyla looked up at Seleni, and grinned.

  “This last part is the best, right?”

  Lank turned to a clean sheet on the pad, and looked around expectantly.

  “Who’ll start?” he asked.

  In no time, they were competing with one another as to who could come up with the next positive item on their side. They did have a lot of things going for them, Mikal had to admit after a while, starting with the Federation laws against slavery, continuing with the willingness of the Great Council of the Continent Nord to work with them. There were the Planetary Spirits that seemed to be solidly with them, and the expert help Chrysalia expected to get from her own people. There were the personal strengths of the persons present, and those not present; the list did grow longer as they went on.

  Making it cheered them all up; by the end they were laughing and hopeful, certain that they could not be defeated in their endeavours. The Wise Woman was grinning at Mikal; they both understood what she had done, and Mikal was grateful to her. The shot of adrenalin that the exercise had provided was just what they all needed to keep on going at a tough time.

  “So are we ready to figure out what Kati would do?” Lank asked finally.