On Assignment to the Planet of the Exalted

by Helena Puumala

  “So do yah think that this is the right place?” Kati asked loudly when Mikal and Lank had disappeared, and she and Joaley had reached the foyer floor.

  “Ought to be,” Joaley answered just as loudly. “They said to go three floors down, and I counted three sets of stairs. Huh, looks pretty grim. Now, which door did they say it was?”

  “I’m not quite sure which one they meant.”

  Kati walked boldly to the one behind which she knew Xoraya and Canna to be. “Maybe it was this one.”

  She pulled it open, looked in and slammed the door shut.

  “Ye gods!” she exclaimed. “I’m telling you it ain’t that one!”

  She mimed a frightened expression in Joaley’s direction.

  “What’s the matter, kiddo?” Joaley asked, reaching for the old-fashioned pull of the door beside it. “You look like you just saw something awful. Maybe it’s this door.”

  She pulled the door open, pushing it aside so it stayed wide, and stepped inside, stopping there, with Kati crowding behind her.

  “No, it isn’t this one either,” Joaley said in a disappointed tone of voice. “There are three guys here but they’re goddamned natives and we were told we’d find off-worlders. What’s going on?”

  “There were supposed to be more than three, anyway,” Kati stated, keeping her voice loud enough for their accomplices to follow the conversation. “I thought that we’d be able to make a little bit of coin. A half-a-dozen off-worlders who hadn’t seen a woman who wasn’t two-and-a-half meters tall for ages, that’s what they promised us. These guys ain’t it.”

  “No, they flipping ain’t,” Joaley agreed. “Hey Vultairian fellows! Noble Vultairian Lords, or whatever you are!”

  “We’re known as the Exalted Citizens, you little red-headed thing,” answered the closest of the Vultairians.

  He looked ghastly; tired and drunk, hardly in shape to take advantage of the apparent stroke of sexual fortune that had fallen into his hands. Wasn’t his node looking after him?

  “Nodes can only do so much,” The Monk subvocalized to Kati. “But he’ll arouse himself enough to act. And to press his emergency call button if you women screw this up.”

  “Well then, Exalted Citizen,” Joaley proceeded determinedly. “Where are the off-world men we were to service? I’d like to get at it, if you don’t mind.”

  “Hey hold on, Babes,” said the man next to him, getting up onto his feet. “How many of you are there?”

  He tried to peek behind them into the hallway and Kati fidgeted in the doorway, worried that either Mikal or Lank might have crept close enough to be seen.

  “There’s only the two of us,” she said, making her voice sound a touch sullen. “We’re old pros; it doesn’t take more than the two of us to handle six or so men.”

  “Hey, listen to that one,” the third man laughed, standing up, too. “You don’t look old to me, sweetheart. You look like just the right age—and I’ve been off Vultaire long enough that I sure as heck don’t mind doing a foreigner. Though, I hear that a lot people here at home have developed a taste for your kind of ass, too.”

  “I meant that I’ve been in the business for a while,” Kati snapped at him.

  “Take him, and Joaley should take the other alert one,” The Monk subvocalized. “The seated one has only just alerted his node to get his body going; in his state it’ll take a bit, and Lank and Mikal can handle him. They’re just outside the door, either side of it.”

  Kati touched Joaley’s arm to get her attention, when she caught the corner of the other woman’s eye, she nodded at the second man. The Vultairian, catching the gesture, read it correctly and grinned broadly as Joaley approached him. Kati herself headed towards the third one, wiping the sullen expression from her face and replacing it with a “come-hither” look.

  “We’ll give you a little sample of our wares, O Exalted Citizen,” she cooed, “and then maybe you’ll point us in the right direction for the main portion of our job.”

  As she allowed one of his hands to grab her ass, she took firm hold of the other one, palming it in such a fashion that his fingers could not possibly reach the little flat button on his wrist.

  “And please don’t do to us whatever it was you did to the girls in the next room,” she added in a sultry whisper as he leaned down to kiss her.

  His lips had barely touched hers when suddenly he crumpled with a surprised groan, slipping to the floor from her grasp, never having come close to pressing the emergency button.

  Joaley was standing, shuddering, beside another crumpled Vultairian body, and a third one lay stunned in the chair he had been occupying all along. Lank was calling to the fellows on the steps in a low but nevertheless carrying, voice, and Mikal stood at the door, staring at Kati.

  “It’s damn scary how well you did that, Kati of Terra,” he said, shaking his head, but with a humorous glint in his eye. “I nearly lost my head, and rushed in to beat the living daylights out of that jerk, and to demand that you give up your errant ways.”

  “It convinced him,” Kati said, looking at the body on the floor, “and that’s what counts.”

  “He called me a red-haired Racottian,” Joaley muttered, staring at the Exalted she had handled. “Which means that he knows where I come from. Not very many people do, and I like it that way.”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t get it. How would he, of all people, know of Racotta, and that the red-heads are scum there?”

  “These guys are in cahoots with Gorsh, no question about it,” Mikal said. “Did Kati tell you that Gorsh sent a red-headed doctor to chase after us on The Drowned Planet? Even I didn’t know about the Reds of Racotta until I researched him, and it’s a part of my job to know about the Fringe Planets. No way a Vultairian Exalted who has spent his life as The Playboy of the Federation Space Station, would know about that without a connection. And Gorsh is the obvious connection, since we’re dealing with that lovely drug sometimes known as tangle-juice.”

  “But we better get on with the program,” Kati interjected. “We have no idea how much time we have before someone from the Residence comes to check up on things.”

  Jock, Rakil and Malin had burst into the room, looking almost disappointed to see the three Exalted stunned.

  Mikal turned to them while assessing the situation.

  “Rakil, and Malin, you’ve got the most muscle on you; with Jock’s help, please stack these three in a corner of the room. Jock knows Vultairian physiology so he can help you to ensure that you don’t do permanent damage to them. Then go into the next room and fetch the two women from there, and haul them up to the ground level. Lank and Joaley, you can operate flyers and flits, right? Go up and bring both vehicles to the door of the building—be ready for a quick take-off. I’ll take Kati with me to talk with the Lab workers—I may need the talents of The Monk, if these people are nodeless and from some off-beat world; in that case we need to find a common language. We don’t have the time to learn any, even with the help of our nodes.”

  Kati nodded and crossed over to the door.

  “The Granda tells me that he’s sure to come up with a language we can use. He did a lot of lives among the shadier streets of the Fringe Worlds,” she said, leading Mikal towards what Xoraya had told her was the door to the Laboratory complex.

  The Xeonsaur woman chose to accompany Mikal and Kati in her bodiless state, apparently trusting Malin and Rakil to deal with the bodies in the bedroom without an overseer.

  “They’re not a happy bunch,” she told Kati. “You may have trouble getting them to stay in the Lab complex, once they have seen that there are other off-worlders around.”

  “Mikal and I will have to do some sweet-talking,” Kati subvocalized.

  “Locked is it?” she asked Mikal aloud as he tried the door.

  Mikal studied the panel beside the door briefly.

  “Cheap, old stuff,” he muttered. “Someone has been ripping these Margolises off big time—
and that’s lucky for us.”

  He pressed in a sequence of numbers and pulled at the door handle again; the door opened without protest.

  “Hah!” he said, and then looked around him hopefully.

  “The easiest way to deal with this absurd old mechanism is to prop the door open until we come back out. I used the temporary emergency code, so by the time we come back out, it’ll have reset itself and all we have to do is to close the door again to erase all trace of what we did. This lock is clearly intended to keep the inmates inside, not outsiders from getting in. I wonder if the workers are ever allowed out into the sunlight, or do they have to spend their lives underground?”

  “According to Xoraya the door often is left unlocked. The three from the Federation Space Station locked it the first thing after arriving, even before dumping her and Canna in the bedroom. She heard a lot of grousing about that while she wondered about as a ghost, checking out the premises.”

  “Is the esteemed Lady Xeonsaur with us?” he asked her curiously. “I would have thought that she would have been keeping an eye on her and Canna’s physical forms, as Rakil and Malin haul them up the stairs.”

  “No, she’s here,” Kati replied. “She trusts the Team, and you and Malin as well. And she wants to help us, if she can, to gain whatever information possible from the Lab workers.”

  There was nothing around to use as a doorstop, so Kati called to Jock to see if he could bring something from the lounge for the purpose. He came quickly with a large, heavy, stoppered crock.

  “Ah,” Mikal cried when he saw it. “Volkor IV wine in an earthenware jug! The Margolises do get around, don’t they? Or they have suppliers who do!”

  “Malin said that it’s awful plonk, just the thing for a doorstop,” Jock laughed. “Might as well put it to use.”

  “Malin should know, coming from Paradiso which produces some phenomenal wines from grapes brought there from Volkor IV by the earliest settlers,” Mikal said as he helped Jock to settle the crock. “Maybe Kati and I can get you to watch our backs here in the foyer after Rakil and Malin leave with the women’s bodies. I’m not expecting any trouble, but I would feel more comfortable knowing that there’s someone around to call on in case things go wrong.”

  Jock assented readily and returned to check out the disposal of the three Exalted in the lounge.

  “Well, Kati, let’s go check out the workers,” Mikal said to Kati as they entered an empty anteroom of the Laboratory complex. “If you’ll kindly let me know if Madame Hsiss has some helpful information to offer.”

  “Of course.”

  Kati headed confidently towards the next door which was slightly ajar, and behind which she knew that the main Lab was located.

  The Laboratory was situated between the anteroom and the staff quarters, a set-up which struck her as odd. She thought that the workers would have preferred to have more distance between their living and work areas. But then, the Margolises likely were much more interested in what the Lab produced than in the comfort of its work force. Were the workers being properly supplied with the necessities of life, she wondered, or was that considered just another frill to be dealt with when the complaints grew too vehement to be ignored?

  There were two men in the Lab when they entered it. The dark, heavy-set one looked up from mixing something that was cooking in a clear bowl above a small blue flame of a lab burner. The taller, thinner, grey-haired one had his back to the newcomers, but appeared to be bottling a liquid into vials.

  The husky man said something brusque that Kati could not immediately translate, but it had the effect of getting the tall man to lay down his equipment on the counter, and turn around to look at Mikal and Kati.

  “And who the hell may you two be?” The Monk finally translated, and Kati felt a new language start to take over her speech centres, and to direct the functioning of her larynx.

  Something was off, though; the version of the language that the Granda knew differed from the one which the man had used. She knew that with certainty.

  “We’re from the Star Federation,” she answered, speaking more slowly than she wanted to, struggling to form the words as The Monk fed them into her mind.

  “Oh, indeed?” The stocky man’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “So are our tall, skinny keepers. Are you here to buy some tangle-juice or to keep the peasants in line?”

  “Actually, neither,” Kati replied, managing to coax a smile on her face in spite of the hostility she was facing. “We’re here to take a look at what has been reported as an illegal drug manufacturing operation. Can you tell us what it is that you’re cooking there, and where the ingredients for it come from?”

  “Lady, you sure talk funny,” the man said, with no apparent intention of responding to her question. “You must have learned our language in the slums of Kamaka City.”

  “You’re probably right about that,” she responded enigmatically, keeping the smile plastered on her face. “But we really are Federation Operatives and we need to know about this Lab. And we don’t have much time before its owners will return—we’ll have to be gone before then, if we are to get our reports and you, eventually, out of this place.”

  “Ask them if they worked with Xanthus?” Xoraya prompted her. “I’ve heard his name mentioned.”

  “Did either of you work in the Laboratory of Xanthus Hsiss, the Xeonsaur?” Kati inquired obediently.

  The stocky man nearly dropped the glass spoon with which he was stirring his chemical soup. The skinnier man who had not spoken yet, drew in a breath with a hiss.

  “What do you know about Xanthus Hsiss?” the man who had nearly dropped his spoon snapped.

  Almost at the same time the thin man finally spoke up:

  “Xanthus Hsiss was a genius,” he said fervently. “His intellect was beyond compare.”

  “Was? Why are you talking about him in past tense?” Kati was genuinely puzzled.

  The two men looked at one another.

  “They told us that he was dead,” the thin man then said heavily. “They killed him, they said. They had no use for him anymore once they had his recipe for the drug which they wanted. They told us that they’d kill us, too, if we didn’t co-operate and go with them to manufacture the drug elsewhere, at a place of their choosing.”

  “They?” This was Mikal. His node must have succeeded in digesting and reconstituting the language the men spoke.

  “The criminals that descended on us, on that Water World where the Laboratory was when we worked for Xanthus. Tarangay, it was called; all ocean and islands, and we had an island all to ourselves. Not that many people on the world; lots of empty islands to choose from, Xanthus said. He had chosen one and then found him some helpers and sourced the stuff he needed: chemicals, herbs, all sorts of things that people used as medicines—oh, he had us work with all kinds of ingredients, and when we had something that seemed promising we’d try it on the test subjects whom Xanthus paid to be guinea pigs, or we’d try the concoctions on ourselves, just to get a feel for what effects they would have on a human body and mind.”

  For the thin man the dam seemed to have burst; almost, he couldn’t stop himself talking, Kati thought. Meanwhile his colleague was rolling his eyes at him.

  “How did they find him?” Mikal asked.

  “He used them to obtain ingredients. One of them wanted to be told if we came up with something that put people under really easily, and for an extended period of time, but would not cause any permanent damage even if used for a while. Xanthus said that he was trying to create medicines to enhance people’s health and to cure diseases, not drugs with which people could control others. But he agreed to let the man know if he happened upon something that would do what he had asked for—and he did, we did, accidentally. He kept his promise to the man, even gave him the recipe for the stuff for nothing—and was rewarded with death. And once he was gone, we had little choice but to agree to go wherever we were taken, and use the recipe to produce more, and always more, min
d-tangler, as we called the concoction.”

  “So it wasn’t these very tall, skinny people who are keeping you prisoner now, who took Xanthus Hsiss from you?” Kati interjected when the fellow stopped to draw a breath.

  He shook his head.

  “No, they were ordinary-looking people. Except that they could be mean. I couldn’t quite figure out why Xanthus was willing to deal with them, but I guess they were good at getting ingredients for him.”

  “Xanthus was no good at judging human character,” Xoraya subvocalized to Kati, sighing.

  “Was a man named Gorsh among them?” Mikal asked, his enunciation of the tongue still hesitant. “Or a red-head calling himself Doctor Guzi?”

  “How do you know so damn much?” the thick-set man asked back while the thin fellow gaped.

  Mikal shrugged.

  “She told you. We’re Federation Operatives,” he responded, but before he could add anything, his fancy communicator beeped.

  It was Joaley in the flit which she had apparently brought to the building door.

  “Get yourselves up here,” she said tensely. “Malin and Rakil are just settling our cargo in the flyer, and the alarms on both machines are screaming. A flotilla of flyers just entered their scanning range and I doubt that they’re coming to give us back-up. We’ve got to vamoose as fast as we can.”

  “We’re on our way,” Mikal said, pocketing the com.

  “We have to get out of here,” he told the two Lab workers. “Your employers are coming here in large numbers and we’re not equipped to resist them. Pretend that you never met us. We never came into the Lab—I think that’s the safest for you people. We’ll be back, or others of our kind.

  “Kati, let’s run.”

  They ran.

  They made a half-stop at the main door to the Lab to kick the wine-crock aside and to tell Jock to hurry, too. Then up the stairs and out the front door, where the flyer was waiting with its hatch open, Malin at the controls.