The Shaman of Karres

by Eric Flint

  “It’s rather dull,” admitted Me’a. “Except of course when they decide you’re going against the will of Irad, like by selling your gemstones instead of giving them to the temple to sell. Or if they catch you selling forbidden goods. Don’t be fooled by the customs inspectors offering to buy things in a whisper.”

  “Anything else we should know about?”

  “Sometimes they’ll pick on a ship just to make an example of it, but other than that, no.”

  * * *

  The Leewit thought the docking facilities on the asteroid outside of the rings were relatively busy, if rather primitive for something that had so much traffic. So were the customs officers. All of them stank of something that made her want to sneeze. Still, it was all going fairly smoothly, until the customs officers went into the Leewit’s cabin. That was probably never a great place to insist on searching anyway. It got worse when the white-garbed customs officer said dismissively, “Out of my way. I have work to do, little girl.”

  “It’s my cabin. I’m going to make sure you don’t steal my stuff,” said the Leewit, folding her arms and pursing her lips slightly, ready.

  The Iradalian customs officer looked affronted at that. “You cannot stop me pursuing my duty. Aha! Officer Shimdram!”

  The other customs man came in too. So did Goth, behind him, from her cabin which he’d just finished inspecting. “Look!” said the first customs official. “Blasphemy!”

  He was pointing at her latest picture. The Leewit liked painting. It wasn’t her fault that paint sometimes liked her too. She was getting better at it. In this case she thought she’d actually done a pretty good job of painting the planets and the sun. It was pretty with the rings.

  “What is this?” demanded the customs officer in a tone of horror.

  “It’s a picture, you stupid kranslit,” the Leewit informed him.

  “It is not permitted to make images of Irad! We shall have to confiscate it,” said the customs officer.

  “What picture?” said the Leewit, giving Goth a meaningful look. Goth would do no-light and make it vanish. Or play other light tricks and make there be one in every corner…

  Only she didn’t do either. She just smiled at the Leewit, which wasn’t the sort of help the Leewit expected from Goth. She always helped out. Always! The Leewit didn’t think she even thought about it. Neither of them did…until Goth didn’t.

  “That blasphemous image!” said the shocked customs officer. “It will have to be removed and purified, and you will be charged.”

  At this point things got very noisy. The Leewit didn’t see that she could whistle without affecting Goth, but she could yell at them. That brought everyone else—the captain, Me’a, and Ta’zara, old Vezzarn, and at least ten more customs officials.

  The Leewit, on a bit more thought, could see that maybe being arrested before they even got to Karoda was not really what the prognosticators of Karres would have seen as a great way to deal with the situation. Or perhaps it was… She had great confidence in the captain’s and Goth’s skill at breaking out of jails and escaping traps. Even escaping planets. But then, maybe it was time she started thinking about how she’d do it without them.

  “All right,” she said. “You can have the picture.”

  That didn’t, at this stage, seem like it was enough. And it seemed that neither Goth nor the captain wanted to take it further. Ta’zara had quietly broken the collarbone of the man who had tried to put his hand on the Leewit’s wrist—and Me’a had somehow positioned herself in her wheelchair in front of the Leewit. “Is it not written that no man shall lay his hand on the daughter of another, without consent?” she asked, pointedly.

  The result was them being herded out of the Venture to the office of the chief customs official. He looked, the Leewit thought, like he had had indigestion—for about twenty years. “I think we’ll make an example of you,” he said, looking at the Venture’s current papers and manifest. “An example…”

  He stopped suddenly. Looked again at the manifest. “Oh. Er. It’s really a small infraction, Officer Shimdram. Stop making such a fuss and let them go.” He gave the captain an insincere smile. “A misunderstanding. There will be a small fine, twenty maels, added to your visa and transit tariffs. That will be…ah…three hundred and fifty maels. If you pay the clerk on your way out you can depart immediately.”

  “But…” protested the customs officer. “They attacked Officer—”

  “Not another word, Shimdram,” said the chief sternly, casting another look at the manifest. “You’re in trouble. Remain here. You…Officer Walbert. See these good people back to their ship via the cashier. You do have the funds to pay, Captain? Otherwise, if your cargo is cash on delivery as they sometimes are, it could be settled on your return.”

  “I think we’ll just pay it,” said Pausert. “Thank you very much.” And they followed the suddenly nervous customs official out.

  Within a few minutes they were back on the Venture, cleared for departure inward to Karoda. “Captain,” said Me’a. “With all respect I think you should take off and head out-system just as fast as your ship can go. Something is very wrong.”

  “I got that idea too, Me’a. But sticking our necks out is what we do. What did you spot that was wrong?”

  Me’a grimaced. “Iradalia breeds petty officials. They never turn suddenly reasonable. The rate that he charged is less than one tenth of the normal. And,” she tapped the arm of her wheelchair, “I locked a spy ray onto the chief official. He put a shield down, pretty quick—he had one sitting on his desk—but not before I got one word. Maladek.”

  “What’s that mean?” asked Goth.

  “It’s the name for their secret police. Their spies, their secret service. Someone has to keep everyone in line. They’re a nasty lot. The ordinary people are terrified of them.”

  “And it had something to do with our cargo. That was our manifest he looked at,” said Pausert. “You’re right, we’re running into trouble. If you like, you can disembark before we leave. You’d get another passage, fast enough.”

  “That would run contrary to my oath. Besides, Vezzarn informs me that whatever mess the Wisdoms get you into, they get you out of. But I do think we should have a look at that cargo for Karoda”

  “It’s a load of hyperelectronic forcecuffs.”

  “All of it? I mean, have you checked the crates?”

  “It sure looked like they were all the same,” said the Leewit. “I was with that customs snoop on Cinderby’s World when he looked. He had a scanner and a bunch of hyperelectronic tools himself. He was comparing weights and densities of the crates. All of that consignment were exactly the same.”

  “Senior Inspector Dru,” said Me’a. “He was one of the sharpest they had, at picking up contraband of any kind. Whatever is there will probably be legal, at least in the Empire. And nothing is off-limits on Karoda.”

  “Let’s open one of the boxes, and have a look. We’ll claim ‘opened by customs for inspection,’” said the captain. “And have a good look at the works of the thing. After all, we have got an expert on locking mechanisms with us, eh, Vezzarn?” He lifted an eyebrow at the old spacer.

  “I’ll do my best, Captain,” said Vezzarn.

  The crate they picked had nothing in it but the hyperelectronic forcecuffs it claimed to have. Vezzarn took a couple to his work desk and was soon peering at the first through his jeweler’s magnifier and probing it with his electronic tools. Then he picked up the second. “Hmm,” he said, pushing it aside after a few minutes. “It’s a standard, fairly cheap forcecuff, each one with an individual resettable access code, Captain. But they’ve been modified.”

  “What have they done to them?”

  “Well, they’ve put in a short-range receiver, which will accept a code to override the locking code, so they can be opened and closed remotely. It’s the same code pattern, and the same frequency on both.”

  “So…they can set prisoners free. That could be interes
ting,” said the captain. “Sort of thing Iradalia might arrange, I suppose.”

  “Your problem, Captain,” said Me’a in an odd voice, “is that you are too nice to see into the heads of really nasty people.”

  “Why? I mean what else…”

  “It’s a bomb, Captain. A really clever bomb. Looking at the number of crates and the number of forcecuffs, a really powerful one.”

  “Uh. How…”

  “What happens to forcecuffs if you give them the wrong code? Their field expands and goes critical. That would cut a prisoner’s hands off. Several thousand—all doing it at once, their hyperelectronic fields intersecting…you’d see it from space. And that is what they want.”

  “They want to destroy the slavers badly enough to blow up their base and kill some poor slaves who happen to be cuffed with them. Ouch,” said the captain. “That’s nasty.”

  “I don’t think that is what they want, no,” said Me’a, grimly. “They want to know a locality, and attack just that instead of having to try and fight their way across all of Karoda to find it. They fail at that, but if they put a massive force right on a base that had just suffered a huge explosion, they would succeed. The high priests of the temple of Iradalia know that there is, hidden somewhere in the mountains, some device that the Karoda slavers use to indoctrinate people into serving and serving joyfully. It’s a lifetime compulsion, and the Karoda slave will find reasons to serve joyfully, whoever they are bound to. They’ll even die to make whoever they are bound to happy. You think the high priests of Irad want to destroy it? No. They want to own it, to have it, to use it. They could then make people follow their religion, and do anything they ordered. The first people they’d line up for treatment would be their enemies from Karoda. They’d have some of the deadliest fighters in the galaxy as their loving slaves. And any captives would end up the same way.”

  Suddenly, the reason why Iradalia winning this war could be far worse than Karoda’s slave trade was very clear.

  “We could disable their bombs, Captain,” said Goth. “Or warn the slavers. I don’t like them much after my brush with ’em, but I can see the alternative could be worse.”

  “Five thousand forcecuffs might be a bit much for Vezzarn, my dear. We’ll just have to tell them their cargo is pretty useless.”

  “Well, Captain, actually,” said the old spacer, “I can change the code easily enough. They’re all set with the same code. I can access the controllers on the right frequency and give the disarming code. Then, when I have access to their controller, I can reset it.”

  “That wouldn’t help much, if what they plan is sending the wrong code,” said the Leewit, seeing the problem immediately.

  “There is one other possibility,” said Me’a thoughtfully. “If you can gain access to all their controllers, Vezzarn, you should be able to reset not just the codes but the transmission frequency they have to be sent on.”

  Vezzarn looked thoughtful. “I could do that. It’s fairly simple coding. Child’s play really. They bought cheap and nasty.”

  “Good,” said the Leewit. “I want to stay and watch and learn it. It could be useful.”

  “Then I had better too,” said Me’a.

  A little later, the Leewit finally got a chance to talk to Goth alone, when she took the now modified sets of forcecuffs back to the crate in the hold, and found Goth doing tallies of the goods there. They carried some trading goods on their own account—gambles that the captain felt might pay off, and, given his luck, often did. Goth liked working out the business side, and had done most of the ship’s accounts for a few years now. Her way of relaxing herself—if she couldn’t take her bow and go hunting—was to count the stock. The Leewit couldn’t see why, but Goth liked it and there she was.

  “What’s going on with you, Goth?” said the Leewit. “You knew I wanted you to do a light-shift on my picture. But you didn’t do it.”

  Goth sighed. “Yeah, well…”

  The Leewit poked her in the ribs. “Come on. Tell.”

  Goth shook her head. “If there is one thing I have learned going off on my own on Karres business, it’s that you have to find out what you’re breaking up before you just start doing stuff. The captain would never have found out about the forcecuffs and what those smelly Iradalians were planning, if we’d gotten into a fight then and there. And you’re getting to the age where you won’t have the captain or any other hot witch to turn to, often times. You’ll have to get out of the messes on your own, or with Ta’zara and Me’a doing their best. And while their best is pretty good, they can’t do klatha. So don’t get into messes you can stay out of, just for the sake of getting your own way,” she said, severely. “I need you to start learning that.”

  The Leewit scowled. “You could have clumping well told me, instead of dropping me.”

  “That’s the Karres way,” said Goth, turning and walking out.

  * * *

  Goth knew she was going to have to face up to telling them sometime, and soon. She just wasn’t quite ready yet. Just as she wasn’t ready to try ’porting anything again, yet.

  She didn’t feel any different, here in the comforting cocoon of the Venture. She just knew that she was.

  CHAPTER 18

  Once the Venture was safely inside the space debris that made up the very decorative but dangerous rings, and was able to move into orbit around Karoda, it was a case of finding the spaceport their cargo was consigned to. There was certainly no shortage of them, all eagerly broadcasting their wares and rates to the passing ship.

  They would certainly be happy to have the business—or so they said. There were five surrounding a particularly jagged piece of geography. “The ring,” said Me’a. “The Karoda slaver base is somewhere in those mountains. They use all of them for landings. The mountains are full of caves, and most of the tracks go underground. Slaves are big money, more than most of the rest of Karoda’s industries and exports put together. They do have a lot of other businesses, everything from wine to rare minerals, but nothing that makes that sort of margin.”

  “So: Karoda’s people support them?” asked the captain.

  “Not really. The Karodese just believe in minding your own business. They don’t like anyone—least of all Iradalia—telling them what they can or can’t do. As I said, we looked into it as a base, at one time. The ‘tax’ that Iradalia would put on our ships transiting made it not worth it. Besides it is quite a dangerous place.”

  “Dangerous in that they’ll shoot you?” asked Goth.

  “Let us just keep it at ‘dangerous.’ They may shoot you if they don’t like you, or they feel you’re a threat. There are a number of vicious predatory animals and, as the smaller of the worlds in a binary pair, it has earthquakes and volcanos. And forests with plants that will kill the unwary, across much of it. If you want controlled and safe, go to Iradalia. Oh, and it has a season of torrential rain, and that’s the dry season. It’s quite pleasant when it is not raining.”

  “Sounds like a nice place, except for the rain,” said Goth. “I better get out my bow.” She wasn’t joking either, Pausert knew. “I would have thought they would have shot all the dangerous beasts.”

  Me’a gave a crack of laughter. “They do. But they breed more. They like having them out there. And it doesn’t rain all the time like on Vaudevillia. It just rains hard most afternoons, and then clears up. That’s in the tropics, but that’s also where most people live.”

  The spaceport, when they landed, proved to be in the middle of a busy little settlement, which ended abruptly in jungle just beyond the last building. Various tracks led off under the trees. The tree leaves had a peculiar reflective shimmer to them, making the Leewit screw up her eyes. “I reckon I could do a lot of eye-fixing here,” she said.

  “They’re odd-looking trees,” agreed Goth. “A bit like those on Lumajo, just even shinier.”

  “They accumulate metals—aluminum and some others—in a microscopic layer in their leaves and reflect back
a lot of the radiation they aren’t using. It is cooler under the trees. It also makes the heat signature of things under the trees very hard to trace. Cutting down trees is something most people on Karoda will shoot you for.”

  “I’ll avoid it,” promised Goth.

  “Huh,” said the Leewit. “They shoot at us, and they’ll be sorry.”

  The captain laughed. “Well, Me’a. See what you are taking on. Right, we’d better get to off-loading that cargo. I think we’ll just keep Vezzarn on board, on the forward turret. Any problems and you can let the port have it with the nova guns.”

  “We need to go armed ourselves, Captain,” said Me’a. “It’s the way it is done here.”

  So the arms locker was opened, and blasters strapped on. “What are their customs officers like, Me’a?” asked the Leewit.

  “They don’t have any.”

  And indeed, this was the case. Just a port operator in a broad hat who wandered over and asked for the landing fee. He wore a pair of Mark 5 blasters, one on either hip, and a belt of spare charges. That seemed his only badge of office, but the captain took his cue from Me’a, and accepted him as what he claimed to be, and showed him the waybill.

  “Soman Consortium. That’s their warehouse over there,” he said, pointing. “You want to hire a cargo float? Save you a lot of carrying.”

  “How much?” asked Goth suspiciously.

  “Twenty maels.”

  That was very reasonable, and certainly beat carrying crates in the heat, so they accepted. The port operator took the money and said, “The Soman Consortium are in town. I can let them know they’ve gotten a cargo.”

  “That will be kind,” said the captain.

  “That will be five maels, actually,” said the port operator, with a grin. “You up for outgoing cargo? I could try and line some up.”

  “For a fee,” said Goth, smiling in spite of herself.

  “Naturally,” he said. “It’s business. It might take a day or two. There was a ship yesterday, one of the regulars, but she only hauls Soman cargo. People carrier. So it’ll be Likan leaf and Maturian liquor most likely. For Morteen. Give me a few hours after the rain. You’ll go into Labrun Town, I assume? You’ve got to try the wild galpin steaks at Ma Leerin’s place. I’ll get someone to let you know when I’ve got something.”