Looking around, I could not see the Mother Superior, just debris of the wagon, several bodies of slaves, and an Ogrh slaver. Just as I was about to pull completely free, something hit me just above the shoulder blades and then, while I could hear the hissing hum of high voltage and see blue sparks dance between my fingers, I convulsed in painful muscle cramps caused by some sort of shocker weapon.
“On your feet, you piece of shit. The wind didn’t kill you, but if you don’t move and get back in line, I will!”
I turned and saw a Togar warrior cat standing there like a black scissor cut against the blinding sun, bulging with muscles under its short fur, and holding a shocker prod with one hand and a whip in the other. “If you try to pretend to be hurt, I’ll kill you right here and now. We lost much merchandise; one more won’t make a difference.”
“I am not a slave or your property. I came—”
He flicked the whip across my chest. “I can tell you did not arrive on the Sorrow with us, but you are property of the Mulwhur Trading Company, now. Get up!”
I noticed I was almost completely naked, only a few shreds of the Sojonit outfit had survived the sand-blasting fury of the tornado. The wig, the mask, and most of the body-altering costume accessories were gone; just a few shreds of bio-skin were hanging from my chest. To the Togar, I guess I looked just like any other human.
He used his whip again, but this time I caught the whip’s end. I had been whipped by my father, and I had been tied to the post at the exercise yard at Camp Idyllic. I hated anyone using this cowardly weapon, and I pulled as hard as I could. He was a Togar, three or four heads taller, much stronger and like all members of his race known to be vicious fighters.
But I was getting angrier by the moment. Angry at the situation, realizing I was stranded on a planet even farther away. Angry at these bastards enslaving humans, angry at Togars seeing humans as prey and food and angry at the world. I was no longer just a brawler of a backwater planet. I was a Union Fleet officer, and he would have to pay!
I put all my weight into that pull. From the Neural uploads I had received at the Sojonit temple, I knew where Togars were most vulnerable and hammered my palm upward, aiming and hitting that gland and nerve cluster sitting right behind the cat-like creature’s lower jaw.
With deep satisfaction, I felt something break, and followed up with a left blow to his kidneys, while he raked his clawed hand over my back. I felt the trickle of blood, while the Togar staggered back. I noticed the handle of a heavy-bladed knife on his leather harness, grabbed it with one hand as he tried to get a hold of my throat, and plunged it deep and repeatedly into his abdomen while his left claw closed around my throat.
He gargled, spat blood into my face and sank to his knees. Holding the knife now with both hands, I brought it down right between his eyes above the elongated snout filled with inch-long fangs. I split his skull almost in half and kicked him in the chest. He was dead long before his body slumped into the dust.
A blaster shot peppered the ground before my naked toes; an Oghar out of my imminent reach held an old Ult blaster aimed at me. He had rounded up three human slaves who now stood behind him. “You will bring much money! Now drop the knife!”
One of the filth and sand-caked slaves, his hands already or still bound to his back, lowered his head and with a short spurt of speed, rammed his shoulder into the back of the Oghar.
This did not bring the Oghar down but distracted him long enough so I could throw the knife. It was not well balanced and not a throwing knife at all. Instead of hitting the greenish-skinned brute tip first in the chest as I intended, it sliced a big chunk of flesh right off his left cheek. The Oghar howled in pain, spraying blood and firing two randomly aimed blasts in my general direction. Grabbing the dropped shocker prod my first opponent had dropped, I crossed the seven meters that separated us, simply ignoring the blaster shots, and rammed the prod with force deep into his open maw while pressing the activator at maximum intensity.
The Oghar gurgled and collapsed, and I shoved the long prod with a sharp push deeper and held it there until the Oghar stopped twitching.
The dirty man rolled over his shoulder, grabbed the Blaster with his hands still tied behind his back, fired, and vaporized the head of a third Slaver Togar running toward us.
I looked around; the slaver ship was still there in the distance, too big to be really damaged by the Tornado, toward the other directions were the solid rock buildings and the knife-like cut into the thousand-meter-tall cliffs, marking the entrance to the canyon system the Sojonit Mother had told me about.
Debris and bodies lay all around me, and I counted about fifteen slaves on their feet or slowly rising, but I did not see the Sojonit. If she had lost her costume and clothing like I did, she could have been among those standing and I would not know if she was one of them.
I also noticed I could not see any slavers.
The dirty man caked with sand, sweat and stinking filth that smelled awful, like human feces, turned toward me. From beneath the dirt, bright blue eyes and a set of white teeth smiled at me. “You fight like a banshee unleashed from Hell, my friend.” Unlike the Squawk the guards had used to talk to me, he spoke Union Standard.
I cut his bonds and said, “And you shoot like the devil.”
He got up, and we went to the other two slaves. One of them was human and now I noticed the short stance and the paper white skin of the completely hairless other being. Also basically human in proportions and shape, but with unusually high cheekbones, burning black eyes and a bloody crusted wound at the chin; this was a Kermac!
The Union man, however, cut the Kermac’s bonds as well and the rest of the surviving slaves slowly gathered around us. I called and yelled for the Mother Superior, but I did not get an answer. None of the bodies I could see within reach looked as if it should belong to the woman. I knew next to nothing about the planet, but I was sure we could not stay here for too long. There were more slavers in that ship, I was certain, and perhaps those buildings near the canyon entrance contained even more. We had little options; we could try to reach the town, which meant certain capture. The desert meant certain death; there was no shade and no water. The only other alternative was to storm the slave-trader ship; it would also give us a chance to reach Union space.
I told them exactly that, and they all agreed this was our only chance.
Our ragtag group consisted of fifteen humans, two Klack, a Saresii, an Oghar and a Kermac. With me, we counted twenty-one. I almost shot the Oghar, but he wore a slave collar and his hands were tied as well. The dirty man with the blue eyes told me that the Oghar was from the Union Oghar and captured and enslaved just like the rest.
The humans were the first who gathered anything usable as a weapon and the rest followed finally, even the Kermac. With obvious disgust in his face, he took a long piece of wood and carried it like a club.
I fell into a fast trot, to cover the distance to the ship as fast as I could, hoping to manage to board it before they closed the boarding ramp. If there was anyone in there watching, our slim chance of boarding the ship would be gone if they closed that ramp!
We had to make it. Somehow, we simply had to! That ugly piece of Velorian Fangsnapper dung, infested with armed slavers, was my only chance to see Union Space again and by Odin, I would. I would see it again! I was a Neo-Viking, I soon hoped to be a Union officer and then I would do my share to keep them safe. The heat was almost unbearable. No longer did I wear boots. I had left them underneath the tail of the lizard, and every step on this hot stone burned like hell.
My sunburned skin felt doused by boiling oil, and I was certain I would look like a peeling tomato if I ever survived this. Despite all this, I somehow managed to run faster.
My eyes were no longer protected by that technical marvel of a Sojonit mask; the sun was glaring, and the dust and grit chaffed what hadn’t been raw already. What an irony. I would die on this bone-dry world, running my feet to a bloody pulp.
Somehow, I reached that ship, and now I saw why they had not closed the hatch. They had been waiting for us—two Oghar and a human.
The human stood behind a portable Neuro Ripper, a big thing on a mechanical arm lowered from an opening in the ship’s hull. The two Oghar held slave prods and were armed with holstered blasters.
The man behind the controls of the Neuro Ripper commanded me to stop at about ten meters’ distance; I did, but I could barely stand.
He clapped his hands and said with a mocking laughing voice, “Most impressive, most impressive indeed. You look like a raw steak, my Union friend. I am assuming you are Union, right?”
All that kept me on my feet was the rage I felt and wishing I could twist his head slowly from his body.
Before I could answer, the man behind his cannon suddenly screamed, the muzzle of the ripper swung around, and I heard the high-pitched hum, the inhuman agony the two Oghar guards felt as they collapsed while every nerve ending in their body overloaded their brains with pain impulses. I heard similar screams of agony from inside the open hatch as the ripper sent its waves inside the ship.
I did not wait to find out why this miracle happened and bolted the rest of the way, pulled the stunned and perplexed human off his seat and said, “I am going to expose your body piece by piece to that Neuro Ripper beam until you tell me the access codes for this ship!”
He gurgled and struggled. “There are no access codes! This thing was stolen eighty years ago in the first place! Access codes! You must be a Union man, psionic talents to boot. I should have fired at you while I had the chance.”
I shook him. “I am Midshipman Olafson, currently assigned to the USS Devastator and you can tell that to whoever you meet next!”
He blinked. “You letting me go?”
I fired the old Ult blaster point blank in his chest while I held him with my other fist and grunted to his corpse, “Not bloody likely! Slave trading scumbag!”
The Kermac and the Saresii woman, helping each other, limped closer and the woman said, “That was the first known Kermac Saresii psionic cooperation in history, my psionic energies, his telekinesis.”
“I think we can celebrate this later. Let’s get everyone in and see if there is anyone left alive and then I suggest we try to leave this place!”
The ship was in no better condition inside than it was outside, but at least the rest of the crew was either dead or on the verge of dying and we helped them along. Somehow, I could not find an iota of mercy within myself when dealing with these slavers. I could understand how a man or a woman could find piracy appealing. But to take a being’s liberty, to treat a thinking person like that and take away all their dignity and their freedom was worse than killing someone in my opinion.
The ship stank and its cargo holds had been transformed into cages with filthy rotten straw and sawdust on the floors for comfort and to absorb whatever bodily waste.
The engine room was a mess, and it reminded me of Rocinante, the ship I had taken from pirates near the Igras Expanse. It had the appearance that the art of engineering and keeping a clean and well-organized engineering department was something only important to the engineers and crews of the Union Fleet.
At least it was all from the same source of technology. Not that I was an engineer or had any real experience with alien technology, but all the base components needed to fly a spaceship seemed to be there.
I was really hurting now; the sunburn was bad, and I felt woozy and suspected I had a light heat stroke.
The ship, to our combined relief, did have a sickbay, and it was surprisingly well equipped. Dirty, disarrayed, but well equipped. The dirty man explained that the slave traders used it to treat slaves they thought could bring more money if healthy.
It took much longer than I liked to fix and doctor us up, identifying the various machines and drugs. The dirty man and I appeared to be the only ones with any medical skills until one of the Klack revealed he was an MD.
At first, I was angry at the ant-like being for not coming forward, but again the dirty man told me that it took Klack much longer to adapt to new social situations and once they did, they functioned like robots.
Bandaged and derma patched as much as the equipment allowed, I went to the bridge. After checking the basic systems, I concluded the ship was marginally space-worthy.
The dirty man, who’d managed to clean himself up a little, delivered the bad news, looking at a read-out on the panel he was checking, “We won’t get far, Soldier; the fuel tanks are nearly empty!”
I rushed over and checked, even though the gauges were quite different from Union tech. The red fields versus the blue fields of the fuel level indicators showed ninety percent red.
The Saresii woman came on the bridge and said, “We got more trouble, human. The local lord is coming with a Kartanian landing tank and armed troops!
I cursed the former owners of the ship; nothing was labeled or arranged in any way that made sense to me. Where were the controls for the viewers? Where did they put the weapon console? This would not have been easy even if I had time to figure things out.
The comm system came on, and a rough voice said, “I repeat, land your craft, or we will destroy you!”
I didn’t know who had turned on the communications or if the channels were open, but I could not spend time or concentration on talking. My mind reeled as I tried to recall what I had learned about Velorian technology in xeno-tech class. I wished Wetty was here; she would have no problems figuring it all out, just glancing at it.
The speakers blared with the unfriendly voice, “There will be a reward. If you give up now, I will personally set you free and see that you are returned home! I will take you to Netlor and from there you can reach Checkpoint 96! Just land the bloody thing and let us talk about things!”
“Liar!” I grunted and paid no further attention. I muttered to the rest, “That was the biggest load of Fangsnapper Dung I’ve heard in a long time. Either he wants to save the ship, no matter how old and badly maintained it is, a ship this size is still valuable. Or he is afraid I found the weapon and shield controls.” I had seen the weapon turrets when it landed, nothing to really scare anything bigger than a D 40, but more than enough to take care of a landing tank and ground troops and liquefy some of the local landscape.
Maybe they had planetary defense batteries, but they were useless against a ship already on the ground. I doubted they had the kind of hostile ship containment hardware needed to deal with a rogue ship on the ground.
I finally found the helm controls and flooded the Arti-Grav while I tried to take reactor from standby to full.
I cursed even worse as one of the freed slaves pulled a lever that looked as if it was connected to the main engine control. Not that I had seen any levers on a starship before, but it was next to a panel that indicated the ship’s power-generating status.
A clunking sound could be heard, and the lights flickered. All my engine indicators went dead and the AM that had just lifted us a few meters off the ground cut out, and we slammed hard back on the telescopic landing gear, most likely bending or breaking what was left.
Someone pointed out the main viewport. “Whatever you did, human, they’re running like hell! The landing tank and troops just turned around and are hightailing it back to the settlement!”
The dirty man delivered the bad news. “I think we just ejected the reactor core.”
No wonder they were running. There was still enough AM in that core to blow a sizeable crater in that landing field. However, even if it didn’t explode, our chances of leaving in this dung heap were gone!
The human who’d just pulled that lever turned, holding a blaster trained on me. “I think I take that reward.” He fired, sweeping the bridge with paralyzing energies. My impulse to jump at his throat and strangle the traitor was stopped by the same rays that toppled the dirty man and the Saresii woman fractions of a second before me.
This place, this planet, was getting to me; i
t felt like the amusement park ride I had taken on Twilight. Up and down and without any control where the ride would go. I found myself in a cavern-like room with sturdy-looking metal bars across the open end. The cavern’s floor was covered with reeking straw and about thirty others who were naked as I was. We all wore metal collars. While the others could walk around, mine was attached to a chain, which in turn, was locked to a steel loop bolted to the rock wall. It gave me very little room for movement. My hands, however, were free.
To the right of me was the dirty naked man and to my left the Kermac. The Kermac had in addition to his steel collar, a blinking device attached to his forehead. Probably some device blocking his psionic abilities. There were no women with us and no non-humans, but on the other side of the cave, leaning against the wall, the cursed coward who had paralyzed us.
Seeing his guilty face as he glanced over made my blood boil and I jumped up, forgetting and then disregarding the shocking collar, I tried to reach him. Of course, that was completely impossible; the chain was way too short to reach across the nine meters that separated him from my longing fingers. However, the coward shrieked and scurried like the vermin he was, farther away toward the opposite end of the grotto. I also noticed more than I heard a grinding noise from the loop. It wasn’t as solidly attached to the wall as it looked. Two of the lower anchor bolts were somewhat loose and gave the whole plate a little room to move.
I settled back down but said in his direction, “You better hide, before I try to escape or find a way off this planet. Before I do anything else, I am going to kill you.”
The thin man shivered and said, “They did not keep their promise! He said he would let us go!”
“You are as stupid as a bag of rotten Snapper fur, you backstabbing, cowardly slime fish excrement. Of course, they didn’t keep their promise. They are slave traders, and you are nothing but merchandise to them.”
The dirty man next to me said, “He is a Gal Drift; they are as wacko as they come.” He turned his head to look at me and exposed his bright teeth. “You did well out there, real well. We could have made it. Somehow, I think you’re Fleet, right?”
Eric Olafson Series Boxed Set: Books 1 - 7 Page 62