“It’s only a half-a-year’s separation,” Rakil responded, his voice suddenly gentle. “Four six-days have already passed. You’ll be fine, and she’ll be there at the end of it.”
“I keep telling myself that.” Mikal gave himself a shake. “And Kati has certainly fallen on her feet, just like I knew that she would. Maryse is absolutely purring because she persuaded Kati to take on this assignment, and Kati has already begun to work at it.”
“What will you be doing in the meantime? Politicking on the Space Station?”
Mikal shook his head.
“No, I’m off to try to communicate with the Xeonsaurs. Kati’s nodal records contained some pretty explosive information. I wonder if she has any idea.... It’s even worse than we thought, and we have to get the Xeonsaurs to listen. I’m Maryse’s choice for that job, partly because I’m involved, and partly because I do have some diplomatic skills. I just hope that what I have is enough.”
Rakil raised his brows, but Mikal shook his head.
“I can’t spill the details,” he said. “This is too big. But, much as I hate to sound like a sap, keep an eye on my girl, while you’re on Vultaire. Don’t try to keep her safe, though; she won’t tolerate that.”
“I’ll do what I can, cousin. I think you’ll find us whole, and bursting with information when your Team reaches Vultaire.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Sorry girls, this is as far as I can afford to carry you.”
The Captain of the small Trader Ship stood with his arms crossed on the Bridge, appraising the two young women whom he had called into his presence as soon as the vessel had landed on the tarmac of the Space Port of the planet Vultaire.
“You’re not dropping us off on this shit hole of a planet, are you?” the red-head asked him incredulously. “Everyone knows that Vultairians have no use for outsiders!”
The Captain shrugged.
“Maybe if you had been more cooperative—nicer to me,” he said in an oily tone of voice. “Maybe then you could have stayed on board longer. I like red-haired women.”
He winked while Joaley spluttered.
“But, let’s face it, the two of you were looking for handouts—well, free passage—and not prepared to give anything worthwhile in return. I gave you two a chance, but enough is enough. Collect your gear, both of you and get off my ship.”
“As if we hadn’t run your galley for you while your cook was sick!” Joaley stormed, but Kati grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the Captain, back towards the tiny cabin where their bags were already packed.
“Take it easy. We’ll figure something out, once we’re out there,” she said to Joaley soothingly before the two of them exited the bridge.
She hoped that whoever was manning the Control Tower was snickering. Captain Jakob had forgotten to close the audio connection before he had called the women to the bridge to give them the bad news. The Trader Captain had done an admirable job of impersonating a questionable character who wanted a roll or two in the sack with one of his attractive passengers—who, by the way, had paid their passage to the Vultaire Port City. This was not the first time Captain Jakob had done a job for the Star Federation Peace Officer Corps; Maryse’s staff had had no trouble locating him.
Kati and Joaley had agreed on their roles before they boarded the Trader Ship. Joaley with her fiery red hair was a natural for the hot-tempered dame; Kati was to try to keep her outbursts within reason. She was to be the more thoughtful half of the partnership, which would be expanded as soon as Rakil and Lank had disembarked from another ship within a week or so. By then the women hoped to have established a presence in the Port City, and have met a few non-Exalted citizens of Vultaire.
“Shit, is Captain Jakob dropping you off in this hell-hole?” Maris, a crewmember with whom Joaley had played board games during the trip, asked when the two of them exited the open hatch at which he was supervising cargo unloading. “What’s the matter with him anyway? He’s not usually cruel! Surely he could have waited until we reached The Marrachat Station—that’s our next stop!”
Joaley hissed something not recognizable as words, her face contorted with fury. Kati grabbed her arm with her free hand, and made calming noises. There were Port workers around them, some of them helping with the unloading and reloading of the Trader, and, without doubt, various security gadgets were recording the incident for posterity. It was actually a good thing that Maris was giving them a second opportunity to justify their arrival—and Captain Jakob would explain to his crew, on the way to Marrachat, the ruse that had been played.
“Don’t worry about us, Maris,” Kati said as she led the spluttering Joaley off. “This is a Federation world, after all. We’ll figure something out; we’re not out of civilization.”
Maris was shaking his head, but Kati turned her back on him resolutely, and studied the flat-roofed buildings at the far edge of the tarmac, one of which had to contain The Customs.
“Take it easy, Joaley,” she said to her companion in a carefully calculated tone of voice, intended to carry to the nearest workers. “There’s no way you have to bed an asshole just to get us passage. We’ll work something out.”
“He didn’t give a rat’s ass about me,” her companion snarled, slightly louder. “He just wanted to bed a red-head! He said he wanted to see if my pubic hair was red, too! That’s all he cared about—notching up an exotic! He figured that I’d do whatever he wanted, because we’d want to get past this place and to Marrachat!”
“Well, he figured wrong,” Kati said soothingly. “Maybe he thought that I wouldn’t back you up, but if that was so, he’s an idiot.”
She let go of Joaley’s arm and looked around her curiously at the ships unloading and loading around them, the workers hauling loads on maglev-sleds towards what looked like a line of warehouses in the distance. For the single Space Port of a Federation World, the place was not busy. It was certainly nothing like the Lamanian Space Port which had been a veritable hive of activity when Kati had been there, even though most of Lamanian Star Trade was directed through the Federation Space Station above the planet, since it could accommodate bigger ships than the Port could. Then there was the Shuttle Port, which handled the traffic between the Space Station and the planet, and was separate from The Second City Space Port. Vultaire had no Space Station, and this Port was the World’s only connection to the Space Trade Lanes.
“I hope nobody gives us a hard time about getting stranded,” Joaley was muttering now. “I’m not sure I can handle any more shit right now.”
“We’ll probably have to deal with officials,” Kati responded. “Some bureaucrat will want to know why we’re here, who we are, and how we’re planning to feed ourselves until we can scare up passage out. So steel yourself for further trouble.”
*****
To Kati’s surprise the bureaucrat they dealt with was utterly indifferent to them.
“Purpose of your stay on Vultaire?” the tall Vultairian at the Customs Gate asked them.
“We’d like to look around a bit, and then snag transport to Marrachat,” Kati answered for both of them.
The Vultairian man looked them over with a bored expression on his face. “Same old story,” is what his eyes said. Kati did not need her ESP talent to get the message loud and clear. Had there been lots of other reluctant travellers stranded at the Vultairian Space Port, recently? She let the matter lie, since the bored official was already indicating the ident-scanner on the console in front of them.
“Slide your left thumbs across that, each of you,” he said, turning his eyes to the screen on his desk, as the two women took turns complying.
He did not comment on the information that must have been scrolling down his screen. Cary had mentioned that most of the workers at the Gate were non-Exalted, and therefore not equipped with translation nodes. It was likely that the man passing Kati and Joaley through, was unable to read the information about them, and his attention to the screen was a bluff, to make them thi
nk that their identities were being scrutinized, when that was not so.
“Fine,” the bureaucrat said, clearing his screen and giving his long body a good stretch. “You have freedom of the Port City, for as long as you choose to stay with us. Welcome to Vultaire.”
His tone of voice was not particularly welcoming, but Kati and Joaley hardly cared. They grabbed their bags from the luggage scanner, and hurried out, half afraid that someone would call them back to grill them about their business. But no-one paid them the least attention. The clerk who had processed them, had, already, when Kati took a quick glance behind her, turned to deal with the next batch of arrivals, a handful of gaudily dressed, arrogant Exalted Vultairians, returning home from some jaunt. Kati was amused to note that the bored clerk had turned into an obsequious, attentive worker, who bowed and scraped to the nobles.
“That was unexpectedly easy,” Joaley said in a low voice when they reached the street outside the Customs Building.
“Yeah,” Kati agreed, adding: “It occurred to me that they don’t worry too much about outsiders. We stand out among the locals, so if they want to pick us up for some reason, it’s easy.”
“You could be right,” Joaley concurred. “And the clerk did say that we have “freedom of the Port City’. I suppose that if they don’t like the look of my hair colour, or something, they can just make us stay here and not let us elsewhere on the world.”
“Let’s hope that it doesn’t come to that,” Kati muttered. “I don’t know how much investigating we’d get done, confined to this city.”
They had started walking in the direction of what looked like the commercial district. It would not be a long walk; the first shops were only about a block away from the Customs Building, and beyond these a noisy melange of businesses servicing travellers came into view, seemingly grafted on to an area of more staid enterprises which, Kati assumed, had mostly to do with trade.
“I guess we’ll have to find a place to stay,” Joaley said. “And locate Cary’s contact. Which should come first, do you think?”
“A place to stay,” Kati replied without hesitation. “That may be a problem, since we’ll have to be careful with our coin. We’ll likely have to haggle.”
Joaley shrugged. “I’ve spent time on worlds strange to me, living on limited resources. I can go hungry, and I can scrounge.”
The street they were on had grown busier as they left the Space Port farther behind. The traffic was mostly pedestrians, although a few bicycles and scooter-like vehicles zipped down the middle of the roadway. Flits flew above them; flown by the Exalted Citizens, easily recognized by the gaudy colours in which they dressed, apparently to differentiate themselves from the Ordinary Citizens who had to be content with garb more drab. These flits seemed a safety hazard to Kati, the way many of them zoomed down towards the walkers, and then pulled back up at the last moment. The Vultairians ignored them, but Kati wondered uneasily what substances the pilots might have been ingesting.
“Some of those pilots are complete lunatics,” Joaley muttered when one flit had swooped down close, coming within a foot of the tallest Vultairians. “If I was on Peace Officer duty, I’d arrest them on the spot, and confiscate their flits. No wonder the Vultairian visitors to The Second City acted like such idiots—they’re used to getting away with being assholes at home.”
“Well, I guess we’ll have to tolerate whatever the locals put up with,” Kati replied with a sigh. “I wonder how we should set about finding accommodation? I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as a Visitor Information Centre in this town, or a street map with a side bar of Useful Information?”
“I very much doubt it,” Joaley laughed. “But waiters and waitresses in bars and bistros are often excellent sources of info. There’s a terrace filled with tables up ahead. Shall we buy a glass each of the local hooch and chat up the server?”
“Sounds like as good an idea as any I could come up with,” Kati said. “Let’s try it.”
*****
“My Mom, who runs this place, has a handful of rooms upstairs in the back, and she rents them out to travellers,” the tiny blonde, definitely not a native Vultairian, who served Kati and Joaley mugs of foaming beer, said, when Joaley asked about places to stay. “They’re not large rooms, but do have two beds each, and the bathroom’s down the hall. They’re clean and inexpensive, and Mom prefers to rent to off-worlders rather than the locals. I’m sure she’ll show you what she has available, if you want to take a look.”
Joaley gave Kati an inquiring glance, and Kati nodded back, almost imperceptibly.
“Yeah, why not?” Joaley said to the girl. “It would solve our immediate problem; definitely be a load off our minds. How about if you tell your Mom that we’ll take a look after we’ve emptied these mugs? Then we’ll make up our minds.”
Smiling, the blonde collected the coins Kati paid out from her skinny money bag for the beer. According to what Cary had told her to expect to pay for goods, the bar was not overly expensive, in spite of its central location. Kati figured that this might bode well about the room prices.
“I’ll tell Mom that you’re interested, and I’ll come and fetch you when you’ve finished your beer,” the girl added as she headed off to serve the next table.
“Not bad work,” Kati said to Joaley, after the server had left. “It’s easy to tell that you have had experience travelling through strange lands.”
“I have.” Joaley’s face darkened. “It took me a while to get from where I was born to Lamania. And, believe me, Lamania’s Second City is a good place for a woman alone.”
“I imagine that you know what you’re talking about,” Kati concurred. “Me, I haven’t been around much. Besides The Second City, I only know Makros III outside of my own world, and I’m getting the impression that it was, all told, a pretty positive introduction to the greater galaxy. Most people were good to us there.”
“Most people are kind and generous in most places,” Joaley said, and her smile returned. “But not all, and not everywhere. It’s the not nice ones who create trouble, and it doesn’t take many of them to do that.”
“You said that it took you a while to get from where you were born to Lamania,” Kati said a little hesitantly after taking a swig of her beer. “I met a man who had hair as red as yours, and his son had hair almost as red, although his mother was not a red-head. Is it possible that he came from the same world as you did?”
Joaley made a face.
“Very likely,” she answered. “Especially if he was an asshole.”
She grinned at Kati.
“Something in your tone of voice tells me that he was—is. Am I right?”
“Afraid so,” Kati conceded. “He worked for a slaver, as a medical practitioner. He implanted me with my node, as a matter of fact. But I liked his son much better—Jocan travelled with Mikal and me across Makros III. He was a wonderful young man.”
“Many of the red-heads of my world have been horribly soured by our struggles to survive,” Joaley said, sipping at her drink. “We are a very visible minority on our planet; the majority of the population are what are known as The Goldens: tall, slim blonds whose colouring, unfortunately, is a recessive trait, whereas red hair is dominant. That simple fact of genetics has caused an untold amount of grief, since The Goldens are proud of their appearance, and consider red hair a blot upon the creation.”
In spite of an attempt to keep a light tone, there was an undercurrent of bitterness in Joaley’s voice.
“I suppose that there is very little intermarriage between the two groups,” Kati suggested.
Joaley laughed, although without cheer.
“There’s no intermarriage,” she said. “None whatsoever. But there is interbreeding. Mainly through Golden men seducing red-headed women and leaving them to look after the resulting children the best they can; after all these children are nothing to their fathers, since they all have their mothers’ colouring, and the mothers are considered sub-human to b
egin with.”
“Sounds sweet,” Kati said with a shake of her head. “A recipe for anger, bitterness and misery.”
“Precisely. And the red-heads can be almost as bad as The Goldens, when it comes to the half-breeds. When you’re one of them, as I am, and I’m sure that the medical man you met was the same, you never really belong anywhere. It’s a relief to get away, if you can. I was lucky enough to have maternal kin who did their best for me; thus I didn’t get twisted out of shape before I was even a teenager. Now that I have spent time among people who accept me as I am, and don’t think of me as an insect of some kind, I have become a functioning human being.”
*****
When their glasses were empty, the little blonde came and fetched them to an office at the back, near the bustling kitchen.
“This is my Mom, Marita,” the young server said, to introduce them to the short, middle-aged woman who was busy doing paper work behind a massive desk.
The two women were similar in looks, outside of the age difference. Marita rose from her chair to greet Kati and Joaley as they introduced themselves. They were taller than Marita; the native Vultairians must have towered over the restaurant owner. However there was something about her face and stance that told Kati that the Vultairians did not, for all their height, intimidate this woman; if anything, she likely frightened them.
“We’re pleased to meet you, Marita,” Kati said as she shook the older woman’s hand. “Joaley and I understand from your daughter that you rent rooms to travellers, and we could use one, assuming that what you have available is suitable, and that we can agree on terms.”
“You may as well look at what’s empty,” Marita said right away. “Business hasn’t been busy lately so I have three rooms, out of five, available. I don’t rent to Vultairians; I’d sooner leave the rooms empty, since the bar and the restaurant keep us going even without the rental income. I don’t need arguments and fighting in the back. That can get bad enough in the bar, at times.”
On Assignment to the Planet of the Exalted Page 10