Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  At the moment, however, she was going to take advantage of the fact that the three of them were, presumably, safe, in The Seaview Inn.

  “I’m going to the women’s bathing quarters the first thing,” she told Mikal and Jocan as she was unlocking the door to the room that was to be hers. “When you fellows go bathe, take your dirty clothes and leave them at the laundry, the door to which is between the men’s and women’s bathing areas. Leave your room number with them and they’ll bring the clean clothes up by tomorrow morning.”

  “Do we pay?” Jocan asked.

  “I paid for it, already, when I paid for the rooms,” Kati replied. “If there are extra charges of any kind, we’ll get an accounting of them when we leave, and settle everything then.”

  “Kati, you’re getting to be a pretty efficient travel manager. Enjoy your bath.” Mikal grinned at her broadly as he spoke.

  Kati had the large women’s bathing room all to herself until she was nearly ready to leave. At that time a handful of the female crew of The Seabird burst in, laughing and shedding their clothes even as they entered. They hailed her enthusiastically and repeated the tale about a red-haired man and a stocky, dour woman who were looking for her and her companions.

  “Thanks for the information,” Kati laughed as she wrapped the robe she had taken from her room for the purpose, around her and collected the clothes that she had been wearing, to add them to her laundry. “Although, I’m afraid it’s old news by now; everyone we’ve met has been kind enough to let us know. Which is a good thing; we’d rather not run into those two.”

  “They say that the red-haired man claims to be Jocan’s father,” Rosine spoke up from among the group. “Is it true? Is he?” She sounded a little disturbed by the notion.

  “I don’t think I’m breaking any confidences if I admit that, yes, Guzi is Jocan’s biological father,” Kati replied, speaking slowly. “Not that he ever cared a whit for Jocan, unless refusing to snatch his own son into slavery can be considered caring. Jocan has a lot of anger towards Guzi; there’s a fact.”

  “It sounds like Jocan and I could while away some hours in a tavern, exchanging stories about awful fathers,” said a well-muscled woman in her thirties, as she finished undressing, tossing her undies onto her clothes pile. “Mine was a real creep, too.”

  “Hey, Mila, you just stay away from Jocan!” Rosine yelled, running naked after the other woman who headed for the water tubs.

  Mila turned her confident, prime-of-life body back to face the girl. Her features were contorted in anger.

  “Were you, or weren’t you, going to be spending your shore leave with Matthias?” she asked, and there was danger in her tone of voice.

  “Yes, I am, but....” Rosine replied but that was as far as she got before being interrupted.

  “Then you don’t get to make any claims on Jocan, missy,” Mila stated, her hands on her hips.

  She was magnificent in her fury as she stood glaring at her younger colleague, her muscular form drawn to its full height, her head arrogantly thrown back.

  “Girl, you don’t get to monopolize two men at once, understand that once and for all. So long as you’re playing with Matthias, Jocan’s a free agent, and if I take him to my bed, that’s none of your business.”

  Kati never heard Rosine’s response to that. She fled.

  *****

  Back in her room she dressed quickly into the clothes she had hand-washed on the ship for that purpose. She combed her hair, leaving it loose to dry. In the excellent mirror on the door, she could see that her hair had grown quite a bit since she had been captured on Earth, and now reached her shoulders in damp, untidy curls. She stuck her tongue out at her image; yet she had to admit that the curls were kind of attractive, and would be more so once they dried. The shirt and pants she was wearing accentuated the slimness of her figure, even if, as she thought to herself wryly, she did not have much chest or hips to show off.

  “It has to do,” she muttered to herself, “since this is all I’ve got. I may not be quite as skinny as I was when I was younger, but nobody is ever going to call me voluptuous.”

  There was a knock on the door joining the two rooms together. She went to open it and found Mikal there, also fresh from a bath and a change of clothes. Jocan stood behind him.

  “Are you ready to go eat?” Mikal asked her, his eyes following the contours of her figure in an unconscious imitation of the self-scan that Kati had just done. “With a little bit of luck we can find our way to the restaurant without going outside, and thereby lessen the chances of possibly running into Guzi and Dakra.”

  “It has occurred to me,” said Kati as she locked her room door, “that settling in at The Seaview may not have been the best idea. Everyone knows that the people off ships, passengers and crews, often stay here. It would not be difficult to come to the conclusion that it’s one of the first places to look for us.”

  “Besides, it’s common knowledge that this is where Captain Lomen likes to stay,” added Jocan gloomily. “It would be easy to guess that this is the place that he would recommend.”

  “Valid considerations,” agreed Mikal. “However, something very like could be said about every inn in this town. I honestly don’t think we’re in more danger of discovery here, than if we had chosen a different place to stay.

  “That’s not to say we’re not in danger of discovery. I think those two are going to be doing the rounds as soon as they realize that The Seabird has arrived. Con and Ren were at the baths while Jocan and I were there and I had a quick chat with Con. He is arranging for us to have our meal in a private dining room—no unauthorized persons allowed. Just us, Marco, Ren and Con; Captain Lomen, if he would like to join us, with whomever of the crew he vouches for.”

  “Sounds like you’ve been busy,” Kati commented.

  “Just doing my job,” Mikal said with a grin.

  They arrived in the wing of the large building which housed the restaurant and the attached tavern. Here the Inn fronted the street by the port, the one along which earlier in the day Kati and Mikal had taken their bike ride. As the threesome crossed the lobby they could look out through the large windows onto the view that the establishment was named for. Ahead of them were the clamorous noises of an eating area. They had reached their destination and it looked like the restaurant that they were coming to, also boasted an ocean view.

  It did, indeed, as they discovered on entering. However, they did not get to enjoy it, since the woman acting as the hostess quickly whisked them to the promised private room on the other side of the building, and here the curtains were drawn, the electric lights were on, and Con and Ren were waiting for them.

  The room had a fireplace and a cheerful blaze was burning in it. A couple of comfortable chairs had been placed in front of the fire, a small table beside each of them. There were shelves along the walls with curios and books on them. Kati’s eyes lighted at the sight of the books; Mikal grinned at her when he noticed that. The dining table, more or less in the middle of the room, was set for eight people, with eight high-backed chairs surrounding it. Con and Ren were already seated at it, with glasses of wine in front of them. There were two opened bottles waiting on the table, one white and the other, red, clearly there to welcome them and their guests.

  “Are there any rules as to where we sit?” Kati asked eyeing the bottle of red wine. She could use a drop of the Sickle Island Red; that was a fact.

  “You and Mikal are the hosts, so the ends of the table are for you,” explained Con. “That seems to be an Island custom, handed down, I gather, from the times before the world drowned. Jocan, as a youngster, can choose to sit anywhere he wants.”

  Kati nodded and sat down at the end closest to the bottle of red; Jocan sat next to her. This left Mikal with the end where Con and Ren were, sipping contentedly on glasses of white. Kati poured herself a glass of the red; Jocan passed his wine glass for her to fill, and suddenly Mikal was there, beside her, holding his glass.

>   “Don’t you two dare hog that stuff to yourselves,” he laughed. “I need a drink, too.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they have lots more of it, if we run out,” Kati said, filling Mikal’s proffered glass.

  “The white’s good, too,” Con said as Mikal walked back to his seat. “You ought to try it.”

  “Oh, I probably will before the meal is over,” Mikal replied, taking his first sip of the red.

  “It is lovely,” he commented.

  Lovely is how Kati was characterizing it, too. Although how much of her reaction had to do with being off the ship, she did not know. It was good to be in a real dining room, and to know that she would be sleeping in a bed, not a bunk, this night, in a bedroom big enough to stretch in. The wine was good, the Inn was comfortable, and Portobay was a pleasant town. It was a pity that Guzi and Dakra had shown up to ruin their visit.

  *****

  “My idea,” said Mikal sometime later, when Marco and Captain Lomen, who was accompanied by First Mate Simos, had arrived and everyone was sipping wine while waiting for dinner to arrive, “is to try to strand the two of them here on this island, so that they have to use local transportation to follow us. Fact is, I’m a little tired of their using off-planet technology to chase us about, while Kati and I, and Jocan, are limited to what’s normal to this world.”

  “I’ll grant you that they did not come here aboard a boat,” said Marco thoughtfully.

  “No, they did not come here aboard a boat,” Mikal said with certainty. “Fact is, the last time we three saw Guzi and Dakra, they were unconscious in an off-world lifeboat which we had taken off their flit, headed up-river, presumably as far as the power-pack in the boat would take them. After that they should have been walking, floating, or rowing if they could find an oar.”

  “Besides,” added Jocan, “Kati had shot Guzi in the shoulder with a pellet-gun. He should have been in a pretty rough shape, even though our friend Loka did clean and treat the wound.”

  “Mind you, Guzi has a node in his neck, and one of the things nodes can do is speed up healing,” Mikal explained. “By now, he most likely seems perfectly healthy.”

  “They had not reached Delta by the time we left from there,” mused Kati. “They had to have stopped at Delta to find out how and where we shipped out.”

  “You are right,” Captain Lomen commented, setting his glass of white on the table. “There is no way they could have beat you here, using usual transport. My ship has been travelling about as fast as the crossing can be made at this time of the year, and as far as I know, the Port at Delta was not expecting any other ocean-going vessels to arrive until, possibly, a week after we left. And even if one did come in unexpectedly—that can happen—it would still be behind us, by a day or two, at least.”

  “So, what do you think did happen?” This was Simos, a slim, muscular woman looking to be in her late thirties. Kati had not seen much of her aboard The Seabird; she was a busy woman, who, she remembered hearing Rosine say to Jocan, could be counted on to keep the ship “humming along”.

  Mikal explained about the beacon that he and Kati were looking for, for the benefit of those at the table who were not familiar with their story. Then he told about the possible beacon that they had chased down in River City, and how it had turned out to be nasty decoy.

  “It must also work as a beacon,” he added, “but instead of calling in a Federation ship, it sends its message to the slavers, or one of their criminal confederates. So, my thought is that Guzi and Dakra used it to get word to their employer, Gorsh, who sent someone to equip them for a further chase. They must have received a flyer, rather than another flit, to replace the one we destroyed from under them; a flit isn’t suitable for an across-the-ocean flight as long as the distance from Delta to Portobay. They then must have flown to Delta where they checked with the Port Clerk to find out with what ship we had taken passage, and where that vessel’s sailing itinerary would take it. With a flyer, intercepting us here in Portobay makes sense; they would have known that they could easily get here before The Seabird did.

  “So they flew here and hid the flyer somewhere outside of town, and came into town to leisurely wait for us to arrive on The Seabird.”

  “They have been in town for nearly a week,” said Marco. “It seemed quite mysterious; suddenly they just showed up, and walked the port to see what vessels were in dock. There were no ocean-going ships there, of course. They checked out all the inns and holed up at Yacko’s, the cheapest one, and started asking questions. That always annoys us Portobay folk, people asking questions without offering anything in return. They didn’t even give their names; no one knew what to call them except ‘Hey, you!’ So they didn’t exactly make friends, and a quite a number of us were waiting for you three to show up, so we could warn you about them.”

  “I guess it’s our good luck that they seem to be so short on social niceties,” Kati threw in with a grin at Marco.

  “Guzi’s problem is that he thinks he’s so smart, and everyone on this world is an idiot,” Jocan snapped, his eyes blazing.

  Kati leaned to pat him on the shoulder.

  “That kind of arrogance is a weakness, not a strength,” she said. “Betcha we can outwit him and that sourpuss, Dakra.”

  “Does any one of you have a plan?” Simos again, with the pertinent question.

  “Yes, indeed.” Mikal smiled at her. “Although I will need help, mainly from Marco, but the rest of you may well also have useful skills.” He looked around the room and was about to launch into an explanation when the door burst open and two waiters arrived with trays of food and a couple of more bottles of wine.

  “I think our talk will have to wait,” he said with a laugh. “That food smells absolutely delicious!”

  Kati realized that she, too, was very hungry, and the others at the table seemed perfectly content to eat first and plot later. And the cuisine of The Seaview’s restaurant turned out to be certainly worth concentrating on.

  “This food is as good as the victuals at Maya’s Kitchen in River City,” declared Kati after sampling several dishes.

  “Yes, it is,” Jocan agreed, shovelling fish into his mouth.

  “I understand that those words are high praise indeed,” Captain Lomen said, even as he made inroads into his plateful. “I have never been to River City since my travelling is pretty much all ocean-going, but even I have heard reports of the Kitchen at Mistress Sye’s Inn in River City. Sye’s sister Maya, who runs it, has an excellent reputation.”

  “Other than Sye’s Inn, River City is an awful hole, though.” This was Con, speaking up unexpectedly. “I found it very strange, the one time I was there for a few days. People were horrible gossips, but they didn’t seem to like travellers much. Lots of crime, much of it directed against people passing through. I was lucky to have stayed at Sye’s Inn; I heard of travellers who stayed in one of the inns by the Farmers’ Market, who got their money stolen at night, right from their rooms.”

  Kati and Mikal exchanged glances.

  “When we were there--” Kati grinned wickedly as she spoke, “—I spent several hours checking out the Inns on the Square, and found every one of them wanting. Fortunately I ran into Mistress Sye herself; she had heard that a woman was refusing to rent rooms on the Square.

  “However, Sye and Mac could not have been more welcoming and helpful, so I prefer to rate River City by their standards, rather than by what goes on by the Farmers’ Market. And hey, we found Jocan in River City and he has been a true friend.”

  “During my years travelling,” the Captain commented, “I have found that places generally are mixtures of people. Some folk you don’t turn your back on unless a friend is watching it for you, and others can’t help you enough, if help is what you need. Sounds like River City fits that pattern quite well.

  “Now, this town we’re in, Portobay, is different. People seem to look out for one another here, and they’re happy to help travellers, too, if there’s a need. Maybe li
ving on an island changes things; I don’t really know. But I like stopping here; everyone on the ship is refreshed and raring to continue on the voyage after a couple of days and nights here.” He laughed and emptied his wine glass. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s something in the wine.”

  They did not resume the conversation about Guzi and Dakra until the supper dishes had been cleared, and the waiters had brought to the room the extra wine bottles that Kati had requested. The server who brought the wine assured them that they had the use of the private room for as long as they wanted it.

  “You are customers of the Inn,” he told Kati when she asked about it. “Your party can stay as long as you like. If you want anything else, just send someone to ask the hostess and we will bring it to you.”

  Then he was gone, and there were just the eight of them, refilling their glasses one more time.

  “So, you’ll tell us your plan now, Mikal,” prompted Captain Lomen, once they were all seated comfortably again.

  “It’s actually very simple,” said Mikal, “although putting it into effect may be anything but that. Which is why I wanted you here with us, Captain. I’d like to ask you not to leave us behind if we don’t get everything done by the sailing deadline.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time we have had to wait for a passenger or a few,” the Captain chuckled. “Although usually we find that the tardy ones have enjoyed a little too much Sickle Island wine, and therefore need a little help making it to the ship.”

  “Good grief,” groaned Kati. “Getting aboard a ship with a hangover sounds awful.”

  “And not too smart,” added Simos. “There have been a few people who spent the first day, or so, after Portobay, retching in the head.”

  “But this won’t amount to that, I gather.” The Captain brought them back to the subject at hand.

  “What I want to do,” Mikal resumed his explanation, “is to find the flyer that Guzi and Dakra used to get here, and disable it, so that they won’t have the advantage of an off-planet vehicle. I’d like to get their blasters away from them, too, but that may not be possible in the short time that we have.”