Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  *****

  The surgical area of the room was equipped with five tables but the red-haired doctor used only one of them. He chose Katie as the first patient, and led her by the arm to the table beside which he had his equipment tray. The bigger of the two boxes now was open on the stool, and in it Katie glimpsed four cranberry-sized balls; they must be the nodes in question, dormant, apparently.

  She settled herself on the white cloth covering the table, lying on her right side, her neck and head on the small pillow provided, exactly as the doctor was instructing her with gestures. She could see the instrument tray from her position; it was just below her eye level as she lay there. The doctor turned away; she could hear him walk over to a sink that was a part of the room’s equipment, no doubt to wash his hands. She lifted her head momentarily to look at her four fellow patients—all their eyes were on the doctor. Thus it was that no-one but she saw the odd event of the instrument tray.

  Silently the lid of the smaller box opened, and a wee, flesh-coloured ball rose into the air from it; the ball extruded fine tentacles even as it moved above the open larger box. The tentacles picked up one of the balls inside it, and dropped it into the smaller one. The filaments then retreated into the first ball, even as it fell soundlessly into the bigger box to take the place of the object it had moved.

  The exchange happened so quickly that even had Katie wanted to draw attention to it she could not have done so. She had a strong feeling as it was happening, and for a moment afterwards, that she was not supposed to mention it, although the intention was for her to have witnessed it. As she closed her eyes to await the return of the doctor, she was sure of two things. One was that Joakim was not going to be getting the granda node that his father had meant him to have. The second was that the granda node, now no longer in a box by itself, was going to end up in her neck. This turn of events had be a good thing, did it not?

  *****

  It did not take long for the promised nausea to kick in. The bored crew-woman who had had to stay in the room helped her off the table, and onto a bed in a corner, once the doctor had indicated that he was finished with her. Already, she felt dizzy as she walked, the woman steadying her. When Katie had lain down, the woman arranged beside her bed an apparatus to catch vomit; it looked something like a plastic bag stretched on a frame, and with a tube at the bottom. Clearly, she was expected to puke out her guts.

  “And you will,” whispered a voice inside her head. “No-one is to know that it is you who have the granda node. That idiot boy will be sick too, so they’ll know that he did not get it, but the doctor is smart enough to realize that I could be anywhere, in anyone he operated on in the past two days. He knows that nobody can corral a granda, even if that fool of a ship captain is arrogant enough to think that he can!”

  *****

  Katie spent the next few days in a blur. First she had nausea, horrible, gut-wrenching nausea. It felt as if her digestive system had turned inside out, to somehow try to expel this alien, growing thing that had been grafted onto her. When that failed, her body changed tactics and her temperature ran up, as if to burn the intruder out. That, too, proved useless. Slowly her body began to accept the inevitable, and the new nerve fibres grafting on to her existing ones started to connect to her brain tissue. After approximately a week of being ill, she began to recover-- fast.

  In the meantime, life aboard the vessel went on. Sometime early on in her sickness, she awakened feeling a little less nauseous than usual to hear a heated argument going on in the room. The Ship Captain and the doctor were shouting at one another over Joakim who was whimpering on a bed several cots away from hers.

  “Why is the boy sick?” the Captain was yelling. “He’s not supposed to be sick! The granda node is supposed to be able to suppress any illness in its host! Why is that not happening?”

  “Obviously because that node is not in the boy but somewhere else,” answered the doctor in an icy tone. “I told you. I told you a dozen times, if I told you once, that nobody, not even I, can control a granda node. A granda picks its own host and finds a way to get to it.”

  “I don’t see how that’s possible!” shouted the Captain, still angry.

  “I don’t either. Yet it happens, time and again.” Now the doctor sounded tired. “I have seen it myself once before, and I have heard the same story over and over again. A granda will not allow itself to be herded into a particular host. This one could be in any one of the children I’ve implanted with nodes in the past days. Since children don’t get implantation sickness we have no way of knowing.”

  “Well, it’s not likely to be in this room any more, anyway,” muttered the Captain. “All of these people are experiencing some discomfort. And that adult woman is so sick that we can surely cross her off the list of possibilities.”

  “Don’t be completely certain of that,” warned the doctor. “The grandas have many lifetimes of experience behind them. They can behave deviously.”

  But the Captain’s interest had turned to his son.

  “’Tis a pity you did not get the granda, my boy,” he said with surprising gentleness. “With that granda enhancing your brain, you might have amounted to something. As it is, I’ll likely have to send you back to your mother and hope for other sons, more capable ones.”

  At this moment Katie felt her stomach contract with another heave, a dry one, she discovered when she leaned over the plastic bag to vomit. Oh how her insides hurt! If she hadn’t possessed an uncanny sensitivity to the sounds in the room she would never have heard what the Captain said to the doctor as he watched her struggle.

  “Better go and give that one some water so she has something to throw up. And try and keep her hydrated when she gets to the fever stage. She’s a lively one, has lots of spirit. And we know she’s fertile, and good with children, likely good genetic material, too. My Milla has been saying that it’s about time I brought her a sister-wife to help her with the Estate. I’ve been putting her off; haven’t had time to look for another woman, but since this one’s fallen into my hands like a ripe fruit, I think I’ll take her home to Milla and maybe get me some robust sons on her.”

  If Katie had not already been thoroughly sick, those words would have made her so.

  *****

  During the feverish stage, Ingrid, Roxanna or Murra seemed to always be on the bed next to hers, handing her drinks, persuading nutrients down her throat and wiping her sweating brow. She realized that they must have regained their own health, and had persuaded the Doctor and the Captain to let them look after her. She was grateful for their presence; they were kind and attentive towards her in a way that the ship’s personnel never were, not even when they were giving her perfectly adequate care. To her fellow captives she was a friend caught in the same trap as they were; to the crew she was merely another of the Captain’s possessions. Her friends’ concern helped to speed her recovery, she was certain.

  It was wonderful when she finally managed, with Ingrid’s capable help, to enter one of the shower rooms of the infirmary, to strip off her sweaty, stinky clothes—why hadn’t the ship’s personnel given her something clean to wear?—and to step into the cleansing mist to scrub herself with shaking hands, while Ingrid tossed her clothes inside the console designed to clean them. The moment when she came out of the shower, feeling clean and refreshed, was even better, improved further, when the clothes cleaner dumped out her jeans and shirt and undies, fresh as new, and she was able to put them back on. The clothes were loose; she had lost weight while sick. That was hardly a surprise; she had not been able to keep down much of the nutrient paste that on this ship passed for hospital food.

  “The doctor tells me that I can take you back to our prison,” Ingrid said when they were finished in the bathroom.

  There was no-one besides the two of them in the infirmary.

  “Can you find our way back there?” Katie asked hesitantly, remembering the long walk along an unmarked corridor that had brought them to the medical qu
arters, ages ago, or so it seemed.

  “Sure can.” Ingrid laughed. “These nodes are marvellous things, you know. Now that you’re getting healthy again, you will start noticing how much better your brain performs. I don’t need any help travelling between this infirmary and our quarters anymore. I’ve travelled it a number of times now and it seems that every time, I notice, and remember, more small details that make the route stick in my mind. And to think that the first time I thought the corridor was a featureless blank! I would never call it that now!”

  Because Katie was still weak, they walked slowly. Ingrid stayed close to her, ready to support her if such was needed. It was not, although Katie felt a bit unsteady on her feet and was aware of hunger gnawing at her stomach.

  “I hope it’ll be close to meal time when we get there,” she said with an effort at gaiety. “I’m starving.”

  “Not to worry,” Ingrid comforted her with a laugh. “Someone in authority was kind enough to leave a special, nutrient-rich meal packet for you, this morning. The fellow who brings in the food made a point of telling us that it was for you, because you need to build up your strength after the implantation sickness.”

  “Good Lord!” Katie remembered suddenly what she had heard the Captain say about taking her home as a second wife. She stopped and shuddered.

  “Is something the matter, Katie?” Ingrid asked solicitously, placing a protective arm around her.

  “Umm. I’ll tell you later,” Katie said and resumed walking. “Somewhere where we won’t be overheard.”

  “I’m beginning to doubt that such a place exists on this ship,” Ingrid muttered. “And one problem with the effortless learning of languages is that everyone knows everybody else’s. Can’t do that trick that my grandparents used on my brother and me, when we were kids. They used to switch to Norwegian when they didn’t want us to understand what they were saying.”

  Katie had a sudden flash of one of the shower rooms, the cleansing mist on full blast. Yes, she thought with elation, that would work! She sent a mental thumbs up to the granda for this bit of information, and stored it for future use without speaking of it.

  “By the way,” Ingrid added when Katie did not comment on her speech, “we have more company.”

  “More company? In that space? What, another fifteen kids added to the ones already there?” She shuddered to think how crowded that would make the room.

  Ingrid shook her head.

  “No more children,“ she said. “This one’s a grown man, and they’re keeping him drugged the whole time, and inside some kind of a stasis field. He was brought in a few days ago, while you were still really sick. It was Roxanna’s turn to look after you so Murra and I were there when they dropped him in on us.” She drew a breath. “They were pretty careless with him. The Captain was laughing and gave him a few good kicks, even though he was full of tangle-juice and not conscious. But for some reason they seem to want him alive; they let him come out far enough from under the drug to be fed and toileted, and washed, once a day or so. The crew members were pretty crude while seeing to his needs, so the three of us offered to do it instead. The Captain thought that was funny, and let us, although he makes sure that one of them administers the drug to him, once we have him clean and fed.”

  This was quite the story. Katie forgot her hunger as she listened, her mind, now an enhanced mind, racing to try and fathom the implications. The granda node, which had been merely to giving her information when she needed it, began to make a stir inside her brain. This was important! It might fit well into the plans of escape—suddenly Katie realized that she was determined to escape, and to do so before they reached the Captain’s home planet, and the household containing Milla!

  The node inside her purred with pleasure at this thought. “Mind you,” she sub-vocalized to it, even as she used to sub-vocalize to Murra, “I’m going to get help and get all the rest of us out of that slaver’s clutches, too. So help me, I’ll make that task my life’s work, if need be.”

  Aloud, she only said: “Let’s take a look at him when we get back to the prison room.”

  *****

  The room was a much noisier place than Katie had remembered from her pre-illness days. Nearly thirty children were busy talking to each other in several languages, and, clearly, some of the rambunctiousness of the human children had infected Murra’s boys; they were louder and less well-behaved than they had been a week ago.

  “Katie! Kati!”

  Delighted shouts greeted her, and had it not been for the solicitousness of Ingrid, Roxanna and Murra, the children would have mobbed her, with good intent but more enthusiasm than she could handle in her weakened state.

  “Come on, guys,” Roxanna yelled to the crowd surging around Katie. “Have a heart! She’s been sick and she’s still very weak. She’s not going to be leading any sing-alongs for a while yet! Ally, go and get the meal packet that was left for her; she’s going to need to build up her strength! Jore and Lume and others: make room for her in that circle. She looks like she’s going to drop if she doesn’t sit down right now!”

  Katie slid down gratefully into a sitting cup that appeared in the nearest circle. With a sigh she accepted the food packet that Ally brought to her and began to eat it without thinking about why she had been provided with it. She needed the energy.

  For a while the children hung around her, some of them daring to gently touch her. They seemed glad to have her back. However, whatever they might have wanted to ask of her or tell her, for the time being they held all such back. Roxanna was keeping an eagle eye on the proceedings, ready to pounce on any child who did not respect Katie’s need for rest. Since she really was too tired to be much fun, one by one the youngsters began to drift away, back to whatever games had occupied them before her arrival. It was just as well. Eating made Katie sleepy, and she slid from her seat to the floor, unable to resist the temptation to curl up and get some rest.

  “The new prisoner will have to wait,” she murmured to Ingrid, before dozing off.

  *****

  When she woke up Katie felt almost like her old self—if, considering what she carried on her neck, she could ever feel like her old self again.

  “Ready to take a look at the latest addition to our company?” Roxanna asked her after she had made the necessary visit to the washroom.

  “Well, I am curious,” Katie admitted.

  Roxanna led the way to an isolated part of the room; it could almost be called a corner. Both Ingrid and Murra came along but the smaller children ignored them. A sleeping man had stopped being a curiosity to the youngsters, days ago; there were games to organize and play, now that everyone could communicate with one another. A drugged body did not do anything interesting, although the older prisoners were still fascinated by the stranger.

  The man lay in a fetal position on the spongy portion of the floor that the inhabitants of the room had learned to use for sleeping. He was surrounded by a slight shimmer; Roxanna pointed to a small box near his head. She pressed a large button on it and the shimmer disappeared; she pressed it again and it reappeared.

  “It’s a force field of some kind,” she explained. “It keeps him pinned down. We’re supposed to keep it on all the time except when we feed him and haul him to the bathroom.”

  Katie stared at the man. He looked almost pitiful lying there, completely still, clad only in an undershirt and boxer shorts. He was an odd type, not one she had seen before, with golden brown skin which, under better conditions, might have been beautiful, but now had an unhealthy look. His curly hair, too, was golden brown, darker than the skin, and it extended down the back of his neck in a thin wedge which disappeared under his shirt. He appeared to have no facial hair, although he was definitely old enough for a beard. Given his position on the floor, it was hard to judge his height; nevertheless, she thought that standing up he would not have been any taller than Ingrid was. However, what he may have lacked in height he made up with muscle development; even caught in a
trap that kept him motionless on the floor, it was clear that under normal conditions he could take care of himself.

  “Is that all the clothes he has?” she asked. Half-formed notions were stirring in that part of her mind which she still did not truly consider her own.

  “No,” replied Ingrid. ”He had a green one-piece uniform on when they brought him in but we didn’t bother putting it back on him since it’s pretty warm in here and that force field seems to generate some heat. It’s in a drawer in the washroom if you want to look at it.”

  “Yeah, but it can wait.”

  She had noticed that there was something that looked like a small tattoo on his left shoulder, the one which was off the ground. It was barely peeking from the armhole of his sleeveless undershirt and she was suddenly very interested in looking at it.

  “Can you turn the force field off for a moment?” she asked Roxanna. “I want to take a look at that thing on his shoulder.”

  “None of us could make anything of it,” Roxanna said as she complied and the shimmer around the man died.

  Katie leaned down to push aside the cloth of the shirt enough to look at what seemed to be a round, tattooed badge. There was a picture and characters on it, and she knew that both were familiar to the granda node. She braced herself to contain the sudden elation that was streaming into her nerves from the node (which she sensed at times like this as a sort of a mind within her own mind).

  “A Peace Officer of the Star Federation!” that second mind exulted inside her head. “What luck! But how does he come to be here, under such circumstances? Caught by a slave ship? No, the SFPOs are not that stupid—unless things have changed a lot in the years that I’ve been bouncing around fringe planets! Whatever-- we can make use of him; he’ll be our ticket to civilization! But be silent about that, young woman, assuming that you want out of here and to bring help to your friends!”