Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers

by Helena Puumala

  “She persuaded the murk Creature to go and ask for help from the Lake Spirit in order to become a positive Nature Spirit,” Xanthus Hsiss’s mental tones murmured beside him, amused. “Old Chrush lost his security blanket. I wish I had realized, long ago, that that was all it took to influence the Creature. Be nice to it, and give it some good advice.”

  ‘But how do I keep her safe, when I’m not there physically?” Mikal groaned, eyeing her and the old man Chrush in frustration.

  At the moment Kati had the table between her and the man with the knife. How long could she keep it between them? She could not run away, Mikal knew. The door was securely locked. Did the Granda have some ideas as to disarming the old man? The man was holding the dangerous knife in one of his sturdy gloves; Kati had nothing except her bare hands.

  “There are oven mitts on the stove,” muttered Xanthus. “Can she grab them?”

  “Useless,” came The Monk’s mental tones. “Unless we use them to grab the hot cookie sheet out of the oven. Now that’s something.... Girl, give me control of your body! Right away! That old bastard is getting ready to pounce!”

  Mikal knew that the Granda was right! He, too, recognized the tension of the ancient body; the signal to impending action that could not be hidden, and which every person trained in physical combat of any sort, learned to recognize. He reinforced The Monk’s message for Kati to let go.

  The Granda acted phenomenally fast. It helped, of course, that Chrush had to circle the table, but even at that, afterwards Mikal marvelled that Kati was actually standing, oven mitts on, and the cookie sheet out of the oven and in her hands, by the time the ancient one was facing her, brandishing the unfinished lace crystal knife in one hand.

  The cookies had not finished baking, and, half-cooked, were sticking to the pan. The Granda clearly believed that an offence was the best defence for he hesitated not a moment, but smashed the hot metal sheet into the knife! It hit the knife diagonally, but even at that, the sharp, hard lace crystal, slid through the metal—and stuck there! Chrush had not finished honing the blade; it was not yet perfectly smooth!

  “You are done for, you stupid, murderous old man!” The Monk growled with Kati’s voice. “It matters not that you removed the protections that the Crystolorians wove into that blade! You will not kill this body, or the woman who inhabits it!”

  “What?”

  Chrush let go of the blade, and began backing towards the door.

  “Who or what are you? Who is talking to me?”

  “He’s got a flit out there,” Xanthus Hsiss subvocalized. “Noticed it when I zoomed in as per my wife’s instructions.”

  “Let him go,” Mikal said through the jini to Kati/Granda. “We’ll get him later. With the Cellar Creature gone to get some schooling, he can run, but he can’t hide.”

  *****

  “She’s safe for the moment,” Mikal said, jumping up from the bench on which he had been sitting, entranced. “But we’ll have to get her, and go after the old man, and Gorsh and Milla, as well.”

  Lank rolled the flit along the street, slowly so as to give pedestrians and other traffic a chance to avoid him. Mikal looked at it thoughtfully, as Lank exited it.

  “You don’t need this, or me, anymore?” Lank asked, looking at Mikal’s face.

  “Oh, we need you, all right,” Mikal replied. “It occurred to me, however, that we should send Ciela, Shyla, and Max with the flit to pick up the ship, the one you’re calling The Spacebird Two. Ciela can pilot it here to Salamanka, and Max can grease the wheels at the Strone Space Port if the bureaucrats there need oiling. It’s possible that our law-breakers will decide to try to escape by going into space, if the ground under them gets hot. We want to be able to give chase.”

  He looked around him.

  “We have two flyers, right?” he asked.

  At Nabbish’s nod he continued:

  “We’ll divide the rest of our forces into two. The first order of business is to pick up Kati, and to pick up Xoraya and Xanthus—their bodies, that is, and Murra. That’ll take both flyers, and then there’s Jaqui, and who knows how many others needing help on Gorsh’s compound—and somebody has to free the prisoners in the dungeons of the Citadel, and lead them up into the open.

  “Seleni, is there anything the Nature Spirits could do—maybe with the help of the ex-Cellar Creature—to contain any possible explosion of the weapons cache in the Citadel cellars?”

  Mikal was trying to think of everything that needed to be considered. Welcome as the murk Creature’s desertion of Gorsh and Chrush was, it was also going to cause serious problems. The mind shadow that the murk had amounted to, had been the criminals’ first line of defence, and the most effective one. With it gone, they could be expected to retreat to their back-up defences, and those back-ups were going to be more conventional ones, and involve more violence. At the bottom of the list was, Mikal did not doubt, the possibility of blowing up the contents of the weapons vault in the Citadel cellars. Could the Federation-Continent Nord alliance gather up the leaders of the criminals, that is, Judd Gorsh, Milla Gorsh, and Chrush without their deciding to abscond with whatever they could, and blow up everything else?

  Mikal sighed. The responsibility for the operation’s success rested on his shoulders. He was the only trained Agent in the group. Everyone else, psychic or not, and no matter how willing, were amateurs.

  Lank helped Shyla, Ciela and Max pile into the flit.

  “I’ll do the piloting, of course,” Ciela said. “I’ll get us to Strone to pick up The Spacebird Two as quickly as is humanly possible.”

  “Shyla, take the jini number one,” Seleni said, sending the sprite to curl around the girl’s neck. “That way you three have a way of contacting us which our opponents cannot breach, once you’re back in Salamanka air space.”

  “Seleni, thanks, you’re a genius.” Mikal grinned.

  Apparently he was not required to think of quite everything.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Mikal sent Lank, Chrysalia, and Gerr to pick up Kati from the cabin on Milla’s Estate. He desperately wanted to go himself, but realized that it was out of the question. Going to Gorsh’s compound to deal with what was happening there, and to collect the comatose bodies of the Xeonsaurs was the bigger task, and required his presence. Accordingly, he made sure that the three heading for the cabin had stunners with them, including one to give to Kati. Chrysalia asked to be one of that team because she wanted to recover the lace crystal piece that Chrush had left behind, and she, of course, was the best person to be entrusted with the material. Once Kati had been scooped up, the crew was to join Mikal’s team at the Citadel.

  Meanwhile Mikal, Nabbish, Kortone, Seleni and Llon piled into the flyer bound for the Citadel.

  “Possibly, if we rush in like fools,” Mikal said, as he directed Kortone into the pilot’s seat, “we’ll at least get the Xeonsaurs and Murra out of the cellar before Gorsh manages to collect troops to chase us away. I don’t know whether or not he’s aware, as yet, that his mental block is gone.”

  “I intend to demand that he respect the laws of the Continent Nord,” stated Nabbish sharply.

  “We ought to empty out the cellars before we alert him, if at all possible,” said Llon. “It’s better to try to save everyone we possibly can, including the folk in the dungeons, just in case Gorsh plans to blow up his weapons stash in a tight spot.”

  “I think that we better assume that it is a part of any contingency plan of his,” Mikal said. “What I’d like to know is, can we somehow muffle its effect, so as to save as much of Salamanka and its inhabitants as we can.”

  Seleni had not answered the question that he had put to her earlier about whether or not the Nature Spirits, including the Cellar Creature (or the ex-Cellar Creature) could help with the containment of the explosion. Now she was sitting very quietly in the flyer, as Kortone took it up, her eyes closed. Mikal guessed that she was exploring the matter with the Nature Spirits. She, no do
ubt, understood that it was up to her to commune with the Spirits while the Agent, no matter how much the darling of the Nature Spirits, attended to the pressures of the physical reality.

  While waiting, he tried to assess the situation.

  One certainty was that it would be hours before Ciela could have The Spacebird Two in Salamanka. Not that it would take long to hop it from Strone to Salamanka, but the flit trip to pick it up would take time. Mikal was glad for Ciela’s presence, and that Lank had taken the time and the trouble to turn the bright girl into a competent pilot. If he had not had her to call upon, he would have had to send someone else for the ship, and the fact was that they were short of manpower, (and womanpower, he pointed out in a wry mental aside to images of Kati, and Maryse). Middle aged Max Lordz was no doubt best used to cut through the red tape which might engulf the two young girls at the Strone Space Port, and as for Shyla, Mikal had just wanted to stash her somewhere where she was, for the moment, safely out of the way. For Seleni to have realized that the jini could turn her into a communications conduit between The Spacebird and the sensitives of the rest of the Team, had been a stroke of genius, and probably made the girl feel like she was playing an important role in the events. Which was all to the good.

  Chrush had flitted away from the cabin on Milla’s Estate, so for the moment it looked like the crew going to pick up Kati would not have to deal with him. It was possible, however, that they might have to deal with Milla, but Milla, for all her unpleasant characteristics, was a normal human being, and therefore could be dealt with on that level. If she came snooping in the cabin before Lank (with a sonic cutter to deal with the cabin locks), Gerr, and Chrysalia reached it, Mikal was certain that Kati and her inner rascal would be able to handle her.

  The situation in the area of the Citadel, the place towards which they were flying, was the bigger unknown. What did Gorsh know as yet, about the latest developments? What was his contingency plan for an eventuality such as had occurred, where the Creature providing the impenetrable mental envelope within the Citadel, and around its environs just up and quit?

  The absurdity of that suddenly struck Mikal, and he had to control himself to keep from bursting into inappropriate guffaws. Kati had simply had a chat with the provider of the envelope, and had persuaded the Creature that there were better ways to live than spending its energies blocking the mental communication powers of sentient beings! In the time that the Cellar Creature had existed, had no-one else ever thought of doing that?

  “We humans can be such creatures of habit,” came a light-hearted thought to him, and he realized that Kati was following his, and the flyer’s, progress with a strand of her consciousness. “We get stuck in our ways and forget to be creative. We forget that we can be innovative, that we can change almost anything, if we just stop to consider the matter.”

  Ah. That was Kati all over. Mikal smiled to himself. He would never again be utterly alone, he knew. Kati would always be with him—maybe just as a thin mind thread, but a bit of her would be there.

  Where had Chrush flitted to? Lank and Chrysalia had found him at home in a house near Gorsh’s Citadel compound, in an area which the Slaver had been claiming as his territory. Mikal had the sneaking suspicion that Chrysalia was right about the ancient man, that he was more dangerous than Gorsh, mainly because of his fanatical fear of death, and the resultant desire to prolong his physical existence at any cost. The old man was mad, of course, but the madness made him only more dangerous. He could not be expected to behave in a rational fashion, and Chrysalia, for one, was out to seriously threaten what Chrush would think of as his interests. And there had to be some kind of an agreement between Chrush and Gorsh, some sort of a mutual assistance pact, whether formal or informal.

  For the moment, however, Mikal would have to ignore Chrush, and leave him to whatever hiding place he had prepared for an emergency. Emptying out the Citadel and its cellars were the first priority.

  Seleni opened her eyes.

  “The Planetary Spirits will help us,” she said. “They understand that you are in charge of this operation, Mikal, and that you want as few lives as possible cut off before their time. The Cellar Spirit knows a lot about damping energies, and the Spirit of the Lake will accompany him back to the cellar to try to muffle any possible explosions.”

  “Ah.”

  Mikal realized as Seleni spoke that the Lake Spirit was the one that had helped him leave the cellar earlier.

  “That’s right,” Seleni responded to his unspoken comment. “That’s when the Cellar Creature, or, more correctly, now, the Cellar Spirit, decided that he liked the Lady of the Lake better than any of the other Nature Spirits around here. So when Kati suggested that he approach one of the Nature Spirits for lessons in behaving like a constructive Spirit, he wanted to go the Lake Spirit, and Kati encouraged him.”

  “And the Cellar Spirit did so, solving a massive problem, just like that, one which had stumped us for some time.”

  Mikal grinned at Seleni.

  “Now, why didn’t some smart, enterprising Waywardian think of that, ages ago?” he asked.

  “Because the human mind follows the tracks that it follows,” Llon said before Seleni could respond. “Most people on Wayward, as well as on the other worlds that you know, barely credit the existence of Planetary Spirits, never mind exploring the possibility of communicating with them, or influencing them. Think of how short a time ago you were swearing by the book of the law of physics, Mikal!”

  “You’ve got me there, Llon, definitely,” Mikal said a little ruefully. “I’m not even now certain that I’m prepared to toss that book into a garbage heap, and look at what I’ve been doing lately!”

  “You’re living proof that even an old dog can learn new tricks,” Llon responded, smiling.

  “Hey, I’m not that old!” Mikal protested. “Adult, yes. Old, no. Though I intend to live to a ripe old age, along with every other person involved in this business—with the possible exception of Chrush who has had his day, and then some, already.”

  “The universe being as imperfect as it is, I have to admit that it may not be possible for it to unfold quite so nicely,” Llon said softly. “However, I do charge you and all the others to do your best, but do understand, that if your best is not quite good enough, you will not be faulted.”

  “The powers of the Fiddler’s Green know that what we’re trying to do skirts the borders of the possible?” Mikal said. “Is that what you’re implying?”

  “I am.”

  Llon turned to stare out the flyer window, as if to signal that he would say no more. Mikal and Seleni shared a look. They both were worried, but also, very cautiously optimistic. In any case, neither of them could turn back from the road they were on.

  *****

  Chrush must have informed Milla, somehow, that the prisoner in the cabin had not only somehow worked herself loose from the clutches of the murk, but had also turned totally mad and violent. She showed up at the door with two large Estate workers armed with stunners.

  By the time they arrived, Kati had worked the haft-less, unfinished lace-crystal knife out of the cookie sheet—working very carefully, and with a pile of kitchen towels, pot holders, and oven mitts. The Monk had remained with her every step of the way, insuring that she did not cut herself, and jostling into action their combined healing powers the one time Kati did nick herself, not even aware that she had done so until the blood began to spill.

  “That’s how sharp it is, even at this stage,” the Granda had subvocalized as Kati had stared at the blood in surprise. “It’s a pity the old coot didn’t leave his gloves behind. They’re obviously specially constructed to be used with lace crystal.”

  Kati had burst into hysterical giggles at the term “old coot’. Not that Chrush was not, but The Monk was even older than the man was, having spent countless lifetimes with various hosts, so hearing him use the term had sounded comical.

  “Control your mirth, woman,” the old reprob
ate had said. “I just did a scan of the environs, since now we can, and the miserable Milla is approaching the cabin on some kind of a riding mower, or something, accompanied by a couple burly men.”

  “Ah, shit,” Kati had muttered, finishing the quick heal on the cut, and carefully wrapping the blunter end of the blade inside several dish towels.

  With an oven mitt she figured that it would be safe enough for her to wield, as long as she did not press on it too hard, but used finesse rather than strength.

  “I can do that,” The Monk informed her.

  The trouble was, Kati knew that Milla might well have no qualms about killing her from a distance. She was not the one who was besotted with Kati; she saw Kati as a dangerous rival for her husband’s affections. Her only use to Milla was as the chosen mother for her husband’s future sons, since he wanted sons so badly, and had decided that he would beget them on Kati’s body. And Kati herself, of course had no intention of being used in that fashion.

  “Any future children I might bear will be Mikal’s children,” she subvocalized to the Granda, as she waited for Milla and her farm workers to unlock the door and let themselves in.

  “Of course,” the Monk agreed. “But we’ll have to keep you alive if we’re to have a future at all, never mind you birthing babies. I don’t know how long it’s going to take your rescuers to get here.”

  Mikal had sent a quick psi-feed to say that a flyer was coming to collect Kati; that had been right after Chrush had left, locking the door behind him. When a flit or a flyer would arrive, Kati could have determined with her ESP, had she the time to concentrate, but at the moment she lacked the luxury.

  “My husband’s associate, Chrush, has informed me that you took something from him which rightly is his property,” Milla said primly, once she and the farm workers were inside the cabin.

  She had a stunner aimed at Kati. The workers looked confused at the sight of the not-large woman sitting at the dining table. Apparently they had expected to find somebody much more dangerous-looking.