Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers

by Helena Puumala

  “Hang on a minute, buddy!” Mikal admonished him. “What just happened? I thought you and Jaqui got the job done quite nicely, and weren’t interrupted! Did he just come back into his office? I thought that the word was that he was expected to be harassing Kati, and I was trying hard not to let my thoughts go there, because she’s perfectly capable of handling herself!”

  Lank sat still for a moment or two, breathing hard.

  “From what I—or, more correctly, the jini—heard, Gorsh came into the office, all in a huff because the murk Creature in the cabin has decided to protect Kati from his advances. It won’t allow him to touch her.”

  “Thank the Heavens,” Mikal muttered, and immediately felt guilty because Lank glared at him.

  “So Jaqui’s the one who has to do the whoring, instead,” Lank said coldly.

  He shuddered, and Mikal remembered that his mother had made ends meet as a prostitute.

  “She sent the jini away,” he added softly. “I guess it’ll either come here or find Chrysalia.”

  “Ye gods,” Mikal muttered, “and we’re not in the position to do a thing about it. Not at the moment. But we will be, given a bit of time. Lank, we will take Jaqui to Lamania, I promise you that. If this is damaging her, we’ll get Master Healer Vorlund to work with her; I know that Kati will insist on it.”

  “Jaqui told me that if I had to be Koruse’s pet, she would take me to Lamania for healing,” Shyla said softly. “She helped me to avoid that, but I can’t do anything to keep her from having to lie with Gorsh. I wish I could.”

  “You and everyone else sitting in this picnic spot,” Seleni said. “Still, let us remember that she is playing the game in order to give us a chance to trap the man and his co-conspirators. What, therefore, we must do is trap the man and his associates. Nothing less is acceptable.”

  “Hear, hear,” agreed Mikal. “Let us listen to the Wise Woman.”

  *****

  The day after Gorsh had come visiting Kati, and had left in a huff after Chrush had refused to help him with the Cellar Creature fragment, Chrush himself paid a visit to the cabin.

  He was a wizened old thing, and, Kati judged, malicious. The murk entity’s “grandpappy”, for certain. He was also misogynistic, she decided, for the attention he paid to the new resident of the cabin was perfunctory.

  “He’s not interested in the life-force of women,” the Creature explained to her, “only in that of boys. And babies of either sex, but you’re not an infant, and not pregnant. So you are of no consequence to him.”

  He had a long, well-wrapped package with him, and a tool kit, and settled down with these at the dining table, apparently, to work. Since he paid almost no attention to Kati, she watched what he did, inconspicuously from the kitchen, covering her presence there by collecting ingredients for cookie dough.

  It was a good thing that she had occasionally, in an earlier life, made simple cookies for her son, and had, for some reason or other, noticed that Milla must have been fond of making similar biscuits, since the ingredients were present in the cupboards of the cabin. Now she could use that skill to disguise the fact that she was, in fact, avidly snooping on “grandpappy”.

  She nearly dropped the canister of flour, however, when Chrush unwrapped the first layers of cloth from around his package, to see a rag of her old Narra-cloth tunic sheathing the inner object.

  The crazy old man at the dining table was the lace crystal knife-maker that Chrysalia and Lank had gone to look for! The two of them must have found him! They had either sold or gifted him with one, or more, of the shards! Although, considering how possessive Chrysalia had felt about the long shards, Kati very much doubted that she had allowed more than one of those out of her hands!

  Did Chrysalia know that she had ceded her treasured piece to a crazy man?

  Kati deeply regretted being incommunicado. She really needed to talk with her crew, her and Mikal’s Team! She needed to know how much they knew, and to let them know what was happening on Milla’s property! She needed to brainstorm with them in order to figure out what the next step should be in the Team’s project!

  “You’re going to have to suck up to the murk Creature,” the Granda mind-spoke in what amounted to a mental whisper. “This portion of it is somewhat open to reason and, certainly, to charm. You’ll have to play to your strengths, woman, even as young Jaqui does.”

  Fortunately the Creature’s attention was on what Chrush was doing, and it missed the communication. That was probably why Granda had chosen that particular moment to proffer his advice; the old reprobate was a wily operator.

  For the time being Kati concentrated on mixing the cookie dough. Fortunately the ingredients seemed to be working not too differently from what she had used back home. She thought that her results would be edible, if not exactly like the cookies that she had made in another life.

  Meanwhile the old man at the dining table had drawn out of his tool kit a pair of sturdy gloves, and a bladed mechanism which reminded Kati of a sonic cutter. Only it was not a sonic cutter; she was pretty sure that a sonic blade could not have been used to shape lace crystal.

  The wizened man had settled down to create a lace crystal knife, apparently. He was using his instrument to shave off bits of the lace crystal, carefully saving all the tiny slivers, sweeping them into a bag which also came from his tool kit. He seemed to be giving the task his full attention, paying no heed whatsoever to the audience of one (plus one murk Creature, and a nodal Monk) who was surreptitiously watching him. Nevertheless, Kati felt chilled by his presence, and by his intentness on his task. There was something menacing about the oldster.

  It was when she was dropping the cookie dough onto a baking sheet, and Chrush removed the protective gloves for a short moment, that the man’s finger tips registered in her consciousness. She asked The Monk to increase the acuteness of her sight, and they both stared at the deformed fingers. Kati felt a cold shudder pass through her body as she realized their import. She studied the man more carefully than she had before, and realized that Chrush’s self-rejuvenation tactics had had more success than she had at first credited them with. The old man was not small because he was ancient, as she had at first assumed; he was small because he was a Crystolorian, one of Chrysalia’s people! Only his hands had been tampered with; the roots that grew the lace crystal talons had been forcibly removed!

  Why? What had he done that he had been subjected to such a punishment? And had his people exiled him for some crime, sending him out into the Space Trade Lanes to live or the die as best he could?

  Was that why Chrysalia had joined the crew of Spacebird Two? What had she expected to find when she had gone looking for the knife-maker? Kati rather suspected that she had not expected to find what she had—she had not been particularly anxious to give up even one of the shards of lace-crystal suitable for turning into knives. Had she been so taken aback by finding the old Crystolorian still alive that she had let a long shard of crystal out of her hands without a fight?

  And what was the connection among the knife-maker, the Slaver Gorsh, and the Cellar Creature in all its various forms—however various they were?

  “Papa likes to have pieces of me around,” the murk essence suddenly answered her unspoken question. “Grandpappy can use his sharp knives to cut pieces of me in the cellar off, which Papa can then plant wherever he wants to. And I get to go to places where I’ve never been, and see things I’d never see in the cellar. Like now, I get to hang out with you.”

  “But you’re a form of a Nature Spirit,” Kati protested. “You can go anywhere in Nature you want to, regardless. You’re not limited to one, or a few places.”

  “Not true.” Now the entity was back in its petulant child persona. “The Forest Spirits, the Water Spirits, the Air Spirits, all of them, don’t let me go anywhere. They tell me that I have to stay in the cellar where I belong.”

  “Well, of course, if you’re going to remain an energy suck forever....” Kati wrinkled her
nose.

  She figured that the lapse would have lost her the Creature, but, to her surprise, it was still attending to her. She drew a deep breath.

  “Nature Spirits usually give energy; they don’t draw it away. They’re filled with the joy of the plants being plants, the air being air, and full of odours, and oxygen for animals to breathe, and other gases, and the joy of the water moving in lakes, streams and seas, the fishes living in it. They’re so full of the enjoyment of life that they fill anyone near them with it, and make them happy, too. They’re helpful, so they want to heal what is sick, or not growing properly, but at the same time they recognize that everything physical must die sooner or later, if only to give way to other plants and creatures. But they themselves are not physical so they last, even as the planets last, because they are embedded in the very fabric of the worlds.”

  “Listen to who’s lecturing now,” came The Monk’s acerbic comment. “Been taking lessons from your boyfriend?”

  “I’m not like that,” the Creature muttered. “I hurt, hurt, hurt. I’m angry, and I hate. Not you, but I hate Papa, and Grandpappy, and that mean guy who was in the cellar, and now is in the infirmary. They boss me around, and tell me what to do. Why do I have to do what they tell me to?”

  “Why do you do what they tell you to do?” Kati asked in response. “If you’re going to do what someone tells you to, you could ask what your equals want you to do, like the Forest Spirits, the Lake Spirits, all the Nature Spirits out there.”

  “Clever girl!” the Granda murmured.

  “I’ll do what you want me to do,” the entity suddenly offered. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to go to the Forest Spirit, and ask it to teach you how to be a productive, functioning Nature Spirit.”

  The murk seemed to think this over for a moment.

  “Couldn’t I go to the Lake Spirit, and ask it to teach me?” it finally asked, partly wistfully, partly petulantly. “The Lake Spirit is lots more fun than the Forest Spirit!”

  Kati had to control herself to keep from laughing out loud. The Ocean Sister on Vultaire had been the fun Spirit, she remembered. And the Ocean Sister was the one who had taken the Cellar Child in hand, and taught it to love the world that it had been born into!

  “Go and ask the Lake Spirit if she, he, it will take you on as a student,” she encouraged. “I bet it’ll be glad to do it, and the other Spirits will be happy to help.”

  There was a sudden whoosh around her, and the sense of something tearing. She had just put the cookie sheet into the hot oven, and closed the oven door; as she straightened from the stove, she felt as if a heavy weight had been lifted off her shoulders, and she had not even known that something had been weighing her down!

  The ancient man at the dining table glared up at her.

  “What the frig did you just do?” he asked in an angry voice.

  “Me?” Kati stared at him. “I didn’t do anything.”

  She turned around on her heels, feeling incredibly light in spite of the wizened oldster’s obvious irascibility. Her mind was out of its prison! She could go anywhere psychically. She could find Mikal!

  “Slow down!” the Granda’s subvocalization was a mental shout. “That old man really is furious with you and, he’s got a sharp piece of lace crystal in his paws!”

  “You must have done something!” the man Chrush shouted at her, clutching the lace crystal shard in his gloved hands. “My protection just disappeared! Now anyone with any ESP can sense me working with the lace crystal pieces! Anyone can find out what I do, and how I do it!”

  “Your protection!”

  Kati found that she was too angry at the old goat to be afraid of him.

  ”That’s a sentient creature that you had somehow convinced to act as a front for you! An unhappy, sentient being!”

  “It was a useful being! Useful to me as it was! And you may have ruined all of it, the whole Cellar Creature, all the parts that I sheared from the original with my knives, as well as the original itself! If you think that the fact that Judd Gorsh is infatuated with you will protect you, you’re an idiot, woman! Gorsh needs me and he needs the mind shadow that the Creature was providing!”

  The mind shadow. It was an appropriate term! But it was gone now, even if the crazy old man was threatening her with a lace crystal shard!

  She settled into a defensive posture which would allow her to cede physical control to the Granda as smoothly as possible. If the ancient fool was going to try to kill her, he was going to be in for a surprise! And The Monk would love the exercise!

  “Mikal! I need help! At Gorsh’s cabin on Milla’s Estate! The crazy old coot is going to attack me!”

  *****

  Outside the third-best hotel in Salamanka the summer day was stretching into the afternoon as summer days should. The sun was shining, birds were chirping, and insects were buzzing. Traffic of monorail trams, bicycles, scooters, carts, and pedestrians was snaking along lazily on the ground, stopping when necessary, while a few flits and flyers were riding the air, each one intent on its particular mission.

  The Waywardian law-enforcers, Max, Llon and Ciela were enjoying the sunny day, along with Mikal, Seleni, Shyla, Lank and Chrysalia, on the benches in front of the hotel, speaking of tasks finished and unfinished. Congratulations were offered to Lank, Ciela, and Chrysalia for successfully hacking into Gorsh’s computers through the shard that Jaqui had installed the previous evening.

  “We in Nabbish’s flyer knew as soon as the job was done, because we were able to connect to Gorsh’s machines with the flyer’s computer,” Chrysalia said, grinning and petting the jini number two which cuddled against her neck. “Just to be on the safe side, we copied everything into the flyer’s memory. Maybe Nabbish here can dump that stuff into a Government machine when he gets back to Strone. It could be useful.”

  “I haven’t had the chance to go through much of it, yet,” Nabbish added. “I’ve only glanced at it, enough to get a very scant overview of what information he was storing. I’m afraid that it’s going to take me a lot longer to go through the stuff than you ESPers, and the noded people. But we, even those of us without all the Star Federation advantages, will persevere.”

  “I have the contents of the HBusiness file safely inside my node’s memory,” Mikal said, grinning. “What’s in that file, alone, should be enough to get Judd Gorsh locked up for a good long time. He, and his lackeys were meticulous record keepers, by the look of things. They kept track of everything: snatches, number of bodies snatched, sales, location of the sales, to whom, and for how much. My boss, Maryse, is going to love the contents of that file; she is going to be able to set her newest recruits to do the relatively easy job of tracing the people sold into slavery, and getting them out. The recruits will be doing very useful work, and learning a heck of a lot about this business while they’re at it.”

  He was just turning his head to glance at the hotel’s front steps, when his whole inner being was shook by Kati’s mental shout:

  “Mikal! I need help! At Gorsh’s cabin on Milla’s Estate! The crazy old coot is going to attack me!”

  At the same time the first jini suddenly appeared at Seleni’s bosom, aflutter with mental chatter!

  “The Cellar Creature has abandoned its post!” Seleni shouted. “It gone to the Lake, to confer with the Water Spirit there!”

  “I need a flyer! Or a flit! Kati’s under threat!” Mikal shouted, turning towards the hotel’s parkade.

  “I’ll get the flit!” Lank shoved Mikal aside, taking off for the parkade at a run. “Send jini number two to her in the meantime.”

  Chrysalia was already doing that. She, too, had heard Kati’s mental shout and had no trouble guessing who the “crazy old coot” was!

  She came over to Mikal who had stood up, trying to regain control of himself in order to do something useful—whatever that might be. She pushed him back into the nearest bench. A tiny woman bossing a lot bigger man—perhaps to some pas
sers-by it might have looked like a comical situation, but no-one in their group was the least amused. Everyone knew that something serious was happening, even if the grasp of the situation varied among the members.

  “The jini should be there now, Mikal,” Chrysalia said. “Relax and concentrate so as to look at the scene through the jini, if it’s too disturbing to contact Kati directly—that may well be, since she is no doubt scared silly. Which is understandable; Chrush is dangerous, and well armed. Always well-armed.”

  “Relax, everybody, especially you, Mikal.”

  Xoraya’s mental presence was suddenly there, adding her clear tone into the mental soup made up of the other sensitive minds present.

  “Kati has handled a lace crystal knife twice before, with the help of her Granda node,” Xoraya continued. “She has an excellent chance of dealing with this situation successfully, especially if you, Mikal keep your head about you and help her any way you can, through the jini, if that seems like the best option.”

  “Call on the Nature Spirits, Mikal,” added Seleni. “They are your friends, and they will help.”

  Mikal closed his eyes, and reached for the jini number two, which was the one Chrysalia had sent to Kati. The jini had wrapped itself around Kati’s shoulders, and it was bristling at the ancient man across the table from her; both it and Mikal recognized him as the same person who had threatened Lank in the lakeside bar. The long shard of lace crystal which he was brandishing was not a finished knife, but it was a sharp, pointed blade—perhaps more dangerous because there was no way to sheathe it. Mikal could tell that Kati’s Monk was on the alert, studying the half-finished knife to try and figure out what was the best way to turn it on its owner.

  Kati was frightened, though not panicked—and the kitchen in which she was standing was incongruously filled with the pleasant smells of baking. What the heck? Had Chrush surprised her in the middle of a mundane, domestic chore? However he had come to be in the room, the old man was furious with Kati; it was as if he reeked with anger, and that odour was muddying the domestic aromas.