Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  Mase and Caterin shared a look, then Mase nodded.

  “I think we’ll take them to the Project for safekeeping,” he said. “We’ve dealt with the folk there at other times, and I know we can trust them to keep this stash safe. And it’s okay, Marco, I know your boss; you don’t have to come. I imagine you have more interesting things to do.”

  He grinned at Marco, and it took him and Caterin very little time to wrap up the offending items and to quit the Captain’s room, carrying the sack between them, somewhat gingerly. The people left in the room heaved a collective sigh of relief as the door closed behind them.

  “Now, Kati,” Mikal murmured, turning towards her again. “Can you summon your bad boy?”

  She did so. Even as she did, she realized that she was learning to deal with this interloper of the mind, in a surer fashion than she had before. She was more confident of having the ability to stay in charge of it at all times, of not allowing it to surprise her at an awkward moment.

  “He’s here and on a leash,” she murmured back to Mikal who winked at her.

  “Good for you,” he told her. The granda snarled mentally, but then appeared to accept the inevitable.

  She invited it to look at the assortment on the bed through her eyes, understanding that whatever knowledge it gained, she would have immediate access to. She began with her hands behind her back but ready to bring them forward if it seemed important to touch something in order to gain knowledge of its function.

  It took her only moments to dismiss the majority of the objects. She brought out her right hand and began to pick up items, name them and toss them aside.

  “A first-aid kit.”

  Mikal nodded at that. She tossed it aside.

  “Two Ferulan credit chips.” She tossed them aside too.

  “A sonic cutter.” Mikal picked it up, looked at it curiously, and slid it into the tool-bag from the Reclamation Project, fattening it further.

  “That might come in handy later today,” he said.

  Kati and her node continued:

  “Time-counter. Useless on this planet.”

  “A piece of jewellery. A mere bauble.”

  So it went.

  Finally there were only four items left of the couple of dozen that there had been. Kati drew a ragged breath even as she stared at them. One of them, an egg-shaped object, she knew from the granda’s knowledge to be another weapon, a flash-bomb. She pointed at it, refusing to touch it, in spite of the greed to do just so, that suffused the granda.

  “Mikal,” she said, struggling to keep her voice steady. “Take that egg. It has to go to the Project and the weapons stash.”

  Mikal grabbed it from the bed, took the bag that had held all the items earlier and slid the egg inside it. Kati watched him pull tight the drawstrings of the sack. Controlling the granda was a fraction easier with the thing out of sight.

  “It’s meant to be thrown, like a grenade,” she said, unsure if her reference to a grenade was meaningful to anyone in the room. “Doing so will create a huge explosion of destruction.”

  “We’ll get it to the Project before we do anything else,” Mikal promised, wrapping the string of the bag around his wrist.

  Kati forced the granda to turn its attention to the last three items.

  A rectangular, long box was the remote controller of a flyer. Kati let the granda handle it while she loosened her control enough that the other intelligence within her, could make an estimate of whether or not it could wield the controller. Moments later she—or the granda—let the box fall back on the bed regretfully. She shook her head.

  “It’s the remote for the flyer,” she told Mikal, “but the granda can’t wield it anymore than you, or anyone else here, could. It needs to be operated by the person or the persons to whom it has been bonded. Otherwise it’s useless.”

  Mikal nodded.

  “I expected that. Bonding a flyer remote is fairly easily done. I thought that they’d take that precaution. We’ll put it in with the egg-weapon and take it to The Reclamation Project. The folk there can fool with it, if they want to, and see if they can do anything with it.”

  He picked up the box and undid the laces of the bag he was carrying. He dropped the box into the bag, and redid the lacing.

  Kati was already examining the next item, a metal cylinder small enough to fit comfortably into the palm of her hand.

  “This is what you’re looking for,” she said as she displayed it on her palm. “The controller to the Deflector Shield. Fresh out of a factory, no extra goodies on it, dangerous or otherwise, I think. Just point this end—“ she indicated the end of the rod which was cut at a diagonal, “—at the item you want disguised, or undisguised, and press this button on the side. Simple, easy, small enough to hide in your hand; a wonderful little gadget, and awesomely powerful!”

  She handed it over to Mikal who slid it into his pants’ pocket.

  “We’ll be going to test its awesome power pretty soon,” he said with a smiling glance towards Marco and his friends, who were standing in a group near the foot of the bed.

  “And that last item?” he then prompted Kati and her granda.

  Kati was staring at the round, pale metal disk that was the last undesignated item on the Captain’s bed. She gave a tiny shudder. It brought back the memory of the slave ship that she and Mikal had escaped. It brought Gorsh and his crew too close for comfort, even here on an island in the middle of an ocean.

  “It’s a communicator,” she said in a low voice. “A beacon of sorts. It’s most likely set to make a single call, to summon Gorsh’s ship. In case of emergency, all Guzi and Dakra had to do was activate this thing, and Gorsh could have located them wherever on the planet they might have been. A failsafe in case they ran into trouble.”

  “Has it been activated? Can you tell?” Mikal stared at her and the disk in her hand, intently.

  Kati allowed the granda to feel the contours of the disc. One surface was slightly convex, while the other was completely flat. She knew, even as the granda knew, that the thing was activated by pressing its convex side with a sharp, strong motion, such as the thumb of a hand clutching the disc might produce.

  “Simos,” she said, turning to the First Mate of The Seabird. “Where did you find this? Was it on the person of either Guzi or Dakra? Or was it somewhere else in the room?”

  Simos, stared at the disc for a long moment, clearly trying to recall the details of the collecting of the off-world paraphernalia.

  “I think,” she said finally, “that the thing you’re holding was on the table at the back of the room, among the remains of a meal that they must have eaten in the room, the night before.”

  She turned her eyes to Jocan.

  “Am I right about that, Jocan?” she asked him. “Do you remember?”

  Jocan creased his brow for a moment, and stared at the little disc as well.

  “I think you’re right,” he said finally. “I remember you looking at their mess, and muttering something about slobs who left their garbage lying about. And there was a bunch of strange objects on the table behind the food scraps, and you added that ‘here’s a few things that Mikal will surely want us to grab’, and I brought the smaller bag we had and put them in it, and, yes, that disc was one of those things, I’m sure of it now.”

  “Thanks, both of you,” Kati said formally. “In that case neither of them was handling it during the raid. Therefore it likely has not been activated.”

  “Then we can assume that neither Gorsh nor any of his accomplices are on their way to this world right now,” Mikal said. “Which is something of a relief. It has been bad enough having Guzi and Dakra on our tail; the idea of reinforcements showing up does not exactly tickle my fancy.”

  “Are the three of you really that important to them?” Captain Lomen asked curiously. “That they’d travel through far reaches of space to retake you?”

  “Looks like it,” Mikal replied with a sigh. “It’s not that they’re fond of
us or anything. Jocan would be fine if he hadn’t chosen to travel with Kati and me, and he should be safe again once we’re off-planet. But what the two of us know about Gorsh’s doings...if we can get that information back to the Federation, and that is exactly what we intend to do, Gorsh’s slave-procuring business will get shut down permanently. And he knows that perfectly well.”

  “We have recording equipment at the Reclamation Project that you could use to make a record of your information,” Marco said. “That way, even if the worst happens, there exists a record of what these slavers you’ve talked about are up to. Folk from the stars do show up on our drowned world every now and then; we could get word out to the Star Federation, sooner or later, that shit is going on. Of course our equipment will seem primitive to you, but it may serve the purpose.”

  “It might at that,” agreed Mikal. “Expect us to take you up on that before we leave. But I think we better deal with the flyer first.”

  “If we’re going to stop at the project to drop stuff off, I can broach the subject of a recording with my boss,” added Marco. “Maybe we should get on our way.”

  “Yeah, get on with it,” laughed the Captain. “There’s a sailing ship you need to catch and the time it leaves is tomorrow morning.”

  “So you’re good with us turning the tied-up rascals to the local authorities?” Simos asked Mikal. “If so, Jocan and I can go and await their arrival at Yacko’s and give Dav, Wes and Mila a hand.”

  “Yes I am,” Mikal replied, grinning broadly. “We’ll let the local authorities keep them under lock and key. Maybe they’ll keep them there until the Federation law can come and fetch them! And Simos, Jocan: I want to hear the story of how The Seabird’s Raiders nabbed those two, at the earliest opportunity!”

  “It’ll keep till we can share a bottle or two of the Island wine, tonight maybe. Get your work done before then!”

  Mikal, Kati and Marco’s group took their leave while Simos stayed to have a few words with Captain Lomen, before she and Jocan also left The Seaview Inn.

  *****

  “Think we could come, too, and hear Simos story, tonight?” Lita asked while they took out bikes from the public rack.

  “Don’t see why not,” Mikal answered cheerfully. “The way word seems to travel on this world it’ll be old news by tonight anyway. Besides, when you’re sharing wine and tales, the more listeners, the merrier the party.”

  They made a stop at The Reclamation Project, the whole group of them trooping into the front offices where Mikal surrendered the egg-weapon, the useless flitter remote and the disc-like communicator to Marco’s boss. He asked this man, Jahan, with whom he had dealt earlier that morning to store the egg in whatever safe-keeping he had found for the other off-planet weapons, stressing the dangerousness of the object. The other two items, he told Jahan, were less critical, but that it would be wise to ensure that the disc was not activated by mistake.

  “You really don’t want Gorsh, the slaver, to show up on your doorstep, and that’s who it’s designed to contact,” Mikal told Jahan who gingerly took the bag in which the communicator and the flyer control were, and promised to keep them locked up until further notice.

  “When we come back with what’s left of the flyer, later today, I’ll do my best to deactivate the weapons in that nasty stash,” Mikal promised before leaving.

  Kati noticed that Jahan’s face grew noticeably more cheerful at those words. She decided that she did not blame him for having been nervous; having an arsenal handed into one’s safekeeping may be a compliment, but it’s not good for the peace of mind.

  When Marco asked Jahan about the use of the recording equipment, Jahan suggested that a good time for that would be once the off-world weapons had been defused. Mikal agreed readily, with the caveat that if they ran short of time, they would be allowed to do it early the next morning.

  *****

  The six cyclists remounted their machines, with Lita and Max taking the lead. They biked around the large Reclamation Project building, and then their route led them out of town and into the farm country beyond. Here, the island sloped to the sea gently and appeared to be covered with the good top soil, which grew the crops that kept the Islanders fed. The ride was enjoyable, with the weather quite clement by Kati’s reckoning. The fields, however, were empty of crops; it was after harvest time but not yet the season for re-sowing.

  “Here’s Simmy’s parents farm,” Max called from the front of the pack. He pointed to a prosperous-looking property on the landward side of the road. “The weird copse is a little ways past the house, near where their land ends, and the neighbour’s begins.”

  They cycled a little farther, until Max directed them to stop and waved his arm to indicate an area which, to Kati, looked like a tree lot, a part of the farm allowed to overgrow with trees, which then could be selectively cut down for firewood or, possibly, even building lumber, if there were suitable tree species. Next to this tree lot, separated from it by a short break, was a small copse of evergreens, looking slightly forbidding within the pastoral setting.

  A narrow path led to the evergreen copse from the road, making it unnecessary to traverse fields or the tree lot to get to it.

  “Yes,” said Mikal as he studied the evergreens. “It looks promising. Dakra and Guzi must have figured their gods had prepared this place especially for their use. If there’s room among those trees, it’s the perfect place to stash a flyer.”

  “There should be,” said Max. “Simmy told us that he, his brother and the neighbour’s children used to play games there. Cops and robbers, stuff like that. They were not happy to discover that they’d been shut out from it.”

  The group leaned their bicycles against a stretch of ancient rock fencing on the seaward side of the road, out of the way of any passing traffic. They set out on foot to cover the last, short distance. Mikal checked to make sure that the Deflector Shield controller was in his pocket.

  “Lead us on, Max and Lita,” he encouraged the discoverers of the anomaly, and those two were the ones to head the procession towards it.

  There was a second path leading to the evergreen copse, Kati noted; this one crossing the fields, from the farmhouse past which they had bicycled. Two small figures were running along it, headed towards the same goal as the group.

  “We have been detected,” Kati said to Mikal whom she was following.

  He half-turned to look at her as he walked, and grinned.

  “Simmy and brother, I bet,” he stated. “They’ll be curious, like small boys are, to find out what’s going on.”

  “No more so than I am!” Kati retorted.

  “Oh, we’re all pretty keen to know what’s going on in that copse!” laughed Mikal, turning to hurry on after Max and Lita.

  Simmy and his brother, Lem, were slight, dark-haired, olive-skinned boys, neatly dressed in comfortable shirts and pants. Kati judged Simmy to be about eight or nine years old, with Lem a couple of years younger. Their dark eyes shone with intelligence and they had ready smiles, especially for Max and Lita whom they greeted like old friends.

  “These are the buddies that I told you about,” Max told the boys, nodding towards the four that the boys had not yet met. “Mikal, here, is the real expert on unreachable playgrounds, but the rest of them are pretty smart, too.”

  He pointed out Mikal first; Mikal grinned and repeated the boys’ names as he heard them. Max then introduced Kati, Ney and Marco, and invited Mikal to question the boys. Mikal asked them to tell their story again, in as much detail as they could remember. Simmy and Lem were eager to talk, and tripped over their words and interrupted each one continually, during the explanation. The gist of it was, as Max and Lita had reported: for about a week, the informal playground inside the evergreens had been out of reach. The boys could not recall anything like that happening ever before.

  “And you discovered this a week ago?” Mikal asked at the end, to clarify the point.

  Simmy counted on his fingers while t
hinking hard.

  “It was six days ago, today,” he answered at last. “We were playing in there every day before that, with our neighbours, and it was fine then.”

  “We’ll see if we can bring it back to normal for you boys and your friends,” Mikal promised. “But first I want you, Simmy and Lem, and Max to demonstrate what happens when you try to go into the playground.”

  The boys ran to Max who grasped hold of each of them by a hand. Then, flanked by the boys, Max started to walk directly towards the evergreen copse. Even as the rest watched, their steps began to veer to the left, and instead of walking into the trees, the three of them circled neatly around them, ending up out of sight, behind the tree patch.

  “There’s a Deflector Shield there, all right,” said Mikal shaking his head. “Let’s try to veer around the trees on the other side to get some idea of where exactly the centre of the shielded area is.”

  He grasped Kati’s hand, and led her across the edge of the field, towards the evergreens, but heading slightly to the right of the direction that Max and the boys had taken.

  As Mikal had expected, the two of them found themselves circling the trees, but in the opposite direction from the way that Max and the brothers had gone. Kati found that skirting the copse gave her a strange sensation; she was aware of a slight but insistent pressure on her left side, causing her to change her heading just enough to arc around the trees, rather than walk into them. She wondered whether she would have noticed it, had she not known that the Deflector Shield was there.

  She and Mikal met Max, Simmy and Lem on the other side of the little wood. Lita, Marco and Ney had followed her and Mikal, so all eight of them stood together there, exclaiming over the peculiarity of the situation.

  “Did anyone besides me feel a pressure on the tree side as you walked, sort of forcing you to change the direction of your steps?” Kati asked the others, curiously.