Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  The eight diners from the previous night were all present—Con and Ren somewhat unhappy to have missed most of the excitement. Captain Lomen told them to count themselves fortunate; they may have missed the excitement but they had also missed the scary parts of the action, as well as the just plain hard work.

  “I think Simos and her Raiders had a few bad moments when they discovered what an arsenal those two crooks had in their room,” he said to the brothers, with a shake of his head. “When Simos and Jocan brought the stuff over to my room and spread it on the table, I admit that I nearly lost it. I had Jocan fetch the Inn errand boy on the double, and sent him to the offices of Portobay Law Enforcement, even before I thought about what Mikal might want to do with any of those things. That’s how seeing that selection of killing machines affected me—why did they think they needed all that for just three people, that’s what I don’t get!”

  “And as for us of the bicycle corps; well, we got to do some riding in the morning, which was fun,” Kati chimed in, “but most of the day we spent breaking the flyer apart and then transporting the pieces from Josh’s farm to The Reclamation Project. The guys did some hard pedaling, to haul the carts of metal all that way along the Sickle Island roads.”

  “Yeah, but it sure was cool when Max and I came upon the Deflector Shield hiding the flyer,” protested Lita enthusiastically.

  “We didn’t ‘come upon’ it, Lita, my dear,” Max objected. “Simmy, Farmer Josh’s son showed it to us.”

  “Or, rather, he didn’t show it to us!” Lita cried, eyes aglow. “He showed us how we couldn’t walk into a bunch of trees; instead we kept walking right by it!”

  So the talk went on. Everyone who had any connection to the day’s events was present and in high spirits. The Seabird’s Raiders were there in full force and so were Marco and his friends. Caterin and Mase had accepted an invitation to dine with the crowd, too. Less involved members of The Seabird’s crew and passengers were hanging around in the Common Dining Room, making forays into the smaller room to listen to the talk in there.

  After the preliminaries, such as the actual eating of supper had been dealt with, it was the time to hear the story of how The Seabird’s Raiders captured Dakra and Guzi, and confiscated their weapons. Simos was the main storyteller, but Jocan, Dav, Wes and Mila filled in the gaps. Kati had been keen to hear the tale; now she listened attentively, asking questions to clarify anything that she found confusing.

  “We got going pretty early this morning,” Simos began in a laconic tone of an old tar.

  “Jocan was banging on my door before sunrise; Mikal had awakened him when he himself rose to start his day. Jocan and I got the other Raiders up right away, and collected our equipment, which were a couple of bags, a lot of rope—the good stuff Mikal, Kati and Jocan brought with them—and the three stunners that Mikal let us use. Then we hurried down to the kitchen, where the cook had kindly agreed to have a cold breakfast ready for those of us who were starting the day early—it is not a good idea to go chasing criminals on an empty stomach; that’s how I see things, anyway.

  “We refined our plans as we ate. Wes pointed out that Yacko runs a pretty rickety ship and once we knew which room Guzi and Dakra were in, we likely could open up the window to their room a crack—very quietly, of course—and, if need be stun them from the outside.

  “So, reconnaissance was the first order of business, we decided. Jocan would have to go into Yacko’s alone; we figured that if the whole bunch of us trooped in, asking about Jocan’s father, alarm bells would start going off inside even a skull as thick as that of Yacko’s daughter; she who generally minds the office during the early morning hours.”

  At this point Jocan picked up the story.

  “The other four Raiders stayed outside, at a side of the building, while I marched in through the front door and found the corner of the lobby that has a desk, and is thereby elevated to the status of ‘The Inn Office’. The girl behind the desk was a cutie, but she looked like she had just got up out of bed, and not voluntarily.

  “’What do you want at this time of the morning?’ she asked me, not really politely.

  “’I got into town just yesterday,’ I told her, ‘and a townsman told me that my father is in town and looking for me. He’s supposed to be staying here—this is Yacko’s, right?’

  “’This is Yacko’s, all right,’ she said, mimicking me, sounding annoyed.

  “Then she gave me a long look, taking in my hair colour, skin colour, eye colour, everything.

  “’You must be talking about the red-haired man and his wife,’ she said, sounding almost interested. ‘Guzi, he said his name was.’

  “’That’s him,’ I said, trying not to sound too eager. I repeated: ‘I was told that’s he’s looking for me. Do you know if that’s right?’

  “’Might be,’ she said carelessly. ‘You’d have to ask my pa, Yacko, about that. I don’t keep track of what our customers are up to.’

  “I shrugged.

  “’Still,’ I said, speaking just as casually as she had, ‘you would know what room my father and his wife are in. I could drop by and find out what he wants with me.’

  “She laughed out loud.

  “’Sure, boy. I’ll give you their room number but they won’t be up this early. Those two were drinking beer in our Alehouse pretty late last night, making a nuisance of themselves.’

  “I was actually quite cheered to hear that. Sounded like Guzi and Dakra were pretty unprepared to take on The Seabird’s Raiders this morning.

  “’Well, if you’ll be kind enough to give me their room number, what I’ll probably do is come around later, when they’re more likely to be up. Doesn’t seem much point in bothering them right now—I’d just piss Pa off.’

  “’Yeah,’ she said, ‘I’d advise that. Your father can be nasty—but I guess you’d know more about that than I do. They’re in Room twenty-two; it’s at that end—‘ she pointed, ‘—of the Inn, in the back. There’s a side door into the building, right beside their room.’

  “I thanked her most politely; she had been very helpful, more helpful than she realized, I am sure. And then I left to rejoin my comrade Raiders, and to tell them what great information I had gotten us.”

  Simos picked up the tale again.

  “When Jocan told us what the girl had said, I had to keep ahold of myself so as not to dance around with glee. Room twenty-two! Yacko had put those two into Room 22, the worst, the unsafest room in his already unsafe Inn! You would have thought he was in cahoots with us, though I very much doubt that he would have been! No, the couple likely had been cheap and asked for a discount, for whatever reason, and Yacko, wanting to make some money but not wanting to fill a good room (or what passes for a good room at Yacko’s), for less than the going rate, had given them the room that anyone coming to Portobay regularly, would have known to be an unsafe hole.

  “’We shouldn’t have any trouble cracking a window in Room 22,’ Wes said to me with a grin.

  “’Hell, it’s already open a crack,’ said Mila. ‘Bet they can’t close it all the way!’

  “’This is going to be almost too easy,’ Dav grumbled, and I jumped on him for that.

  “’Never, ever, say that something is almost too easy,’ I told him. ‘That’s asking for the Fates to take you down a notch! I don’t want any unexpected difficulties with this operation! Remember that these are off-world criminals we’re going after, with blasters on them, and who knows what else!’

  “By this time we were circling the building around the back way. We didn’t want anybody to ask us any questions as to what we were up to, so we tried to use the less used paths. Things were pretty quiet around Yacko’s at that hour of the morning. That family does most of the work involving the Inn, the Restaurant and the Alehouse, themselves, so we didn’t run into any workers coming in for the dayshift, in the back of the building, like you’d see at most Inns in town.

  “We made it to the window of Room 22
without seeing a solitary soul other than ourselves, and likely, not a solitary soul saw us. The window was too high up for any of us to reach it while standing on the ground—the only safety feature that Room 22 possessed, as Mila muttered waggishly while Dav returned to the back of the building to fetch a stool he had noticed on our walk.

  “I checked the door into the building and discovered that it was closed from the inside, only with a hasp, which was already half off. All it took to jimmy that door was to put my elbow to it; it took me all of fifteen second to get into the hallway. It was to laugh. I know that Portobay is a safe town, but old Yacko relies too much on the good will of the citizens for his patrons’ safety, that’s for sure.

  “Dav climbed up on the stool that he had brought, and checked the window. He found it already open a crack, indeed, but we decided that it would be too noisy to push it open wider right then. I left one of the stunners we had with Dav; the idea being that he would widen the window opening when we had the room occupants’ attention directed at the door.

  “To that end, I had Jocan take another of the three stunners while he banged on the door of Room 22, calling loudly for his sire. I stayed by him, glued to the wall on one side of the door, with the last stunner.

  “’Father! It’s Jocan here!” the boy shouted through the door.

  “By this time we weren’t worrying much about the din we were making. The patrons who were likely to rent the rooms at that end of the building were used to noise, and no doubt could’ve slept through an earthquake at that time of the morning. Besides, did anyone care enough about those two to try to stop us from nabbing them? Not a chance, I think.

  “’Father! People have been telling me that you’re looking for me! I want to know what you want with me!’

  “Jocan was doing a really good job of shouting and rattling the door. He kept it up, refusing to give up, and finally we could hear stumbling and cursing from the other side, and a scraping sound like someone was removing something heavy from behind the door. That was the locking mechanism of the door to Room 22, a chest pushed in front of the inward-opening door!

  “Moving the chest was a bit of a job for the occupants, and that was quite lucky for us. Dav used the cover of the noise and the engagement of the twosome in the task, to pry open the window and position himself ready to shoot with the stunner, from behind the skimpy curtains. So when Jocan pushed the door open and faced two armed people, he only had to stun the one he was closest to, Guzi, that is. Dakra who clearly had intended to operate as back-up to him, never even knew what hit her, Dav stunned her from behind.

  “It was when we all went into the room to tie the two of them up with the rope we had brought, and to collect the off-world things that Mikal wanted, that we realized how lucky it had been that we had chosen to take on those two when we did. It was the early morning of a day when those two had spent the night before doing a long shift in Yacko’s Alehouse. When we saw the number and the type of lethal weapons that they had in that room, even with our greater numbers, I really wonder if we had done as well as we did, had Guzi and Dakra been feeling more healthy. I have a sneaky suspicion that one of them would have managed to get a shot off at one of us, and considering what they were armed with, that’s all that it would have taken. The Seabird’s Raiders would have numbered one less than they did to begin with.”

  “I’m pleased to hear that common sense rather than some idiotic romanticism prevailed among The Seabird’s Raiders,” Captain Lomen spoke in a voice loud enough to carry through the room and even into the Common Dining Room. “Sailors have to depend on Lady Luck much of the time but it is always foolish to presume upon her. What a sailor must do is to try to anticipate as many of the possible circumstances as he or she can, and hope that he has the flexibility to respond to the circumstances that cannot be anticipated. It does sound to me as if the five of you approached this situation with the proper caution, and Luck was with you, in that your targets had spent a long evening drinking ale, and therefore were not nearly as alert as they might have been. On the other hand, had you not had that bit of luck, even with caution, the outcome might have been quite different from what it was, since the two of them had at their disposal more fire-power than any one of us could have anticipated.

  “There’s a lesson here and I expect everyone of my crew to think on it, and to remember it for the future.”

  “A teachable moment,” Kati whispered to Mikal who had come to sit beside her.

  He grinned back at her, lifted up his wine glass, and loudly proposed a toast to The Seabird’s Raiders. The toast was greeted with enthusiasm, and all seriousness was forgotten. The room erupted into cheers.

  *****

  The party broke up well before midnight since The Seabird’s Captain was anxious to have the ship ready to sail again, before the morning was far advanced. It would not do for the crew to be fighting hangovers in the morning, he said, and he also expected the passengers to be ready for embarkation well before mid-morning. There was no reason to delay the sailing since Mikal and Kati, with the help of The Seabird’s Raiders, had accomplished what they had set out to do. The Island authorities were keen to charge the interlopers with the breaking of local laws which prohibited the possession of lethal weapons, and punish them accordingly.

  “Unless they have something really unexpected up their sleeves,” Mase had told Mikal during the aftermath of dinner, “I think they can expect to stay in jail for several years. We don’t take kindly to murder here on Sickle Island, and it is hard to think of a reason other than that, for having a weapons cache such as theirs. So, my opinion is that you won’t have to worry about them anymore; you’ll have made it off-planet before those two can chase you again.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” Kati had responded upon hearing his words. “It would be so nice to not have to worry about them following us.”

  “You’ll have enough worries without them,” Mase had said with a grimace. “Travelling through the Northern Continent, so I’m told, is an experience better enjoyed years after you actually do it.”

  “Ouch.” Kati had made a face. “I’ve heard about that sort of travelling. Provides you with great tales to tell over beer or wine later on, but drives you nuts while you’re in the middle of it.”

  “You’ve got the idea.”

  “Well, it so happens that there’s no help for it. I hope you’re full of great ideas as to how we’re to get to where we’re going, Mikal.”

  “All I know,” Mikal had said, “is that, once we make it across the ocean, we will be riding, runnerbeasts, presumably. There’s a desert that we’ll have to cross, or get around, somehow. Then, presuming that my scanty information is correct, there are plains, foothills and mountains. And once we get to where we’re going, we’ll have to hope that it is, indeed the place we think it is, and want it to be.”

  Mase had laughed.

  “Your version of the journey is missing a lot, Mikal,” he had said. “The longer version has things like biting and stinging insects, predators, bandits, tribes of people who have reverted to lives of warfare and killing strangers. And that’s only in the first hundred kilometres outside the Oasis City!”

  “Yikes,” Kati had groaned. “I think I like Mikal’s version better!”

  *****

  She was happy to wish their new friends good night, and to head to her room, in time to get a decent sleep before an early morning reveille. Yes, they might find the Northern Continent a struggle, but mostly likely the tales Mase had heard were gross exaggerations of the true facts. Stories had a way of growing in the telling, especially ones about faraway places. Besides, they weren’t even near the Northern Continent yet; there was another stretch of the stormy ocean to brave before they reached it.

  She had not gone far when Mikal caught up with her.

  “Hey, I thought you’d stay to the end of the party,” she protested when he fell into step beside her.

  He shook his head.

 
“No,” he said. “I wanted a chance to thank you for reminding me today, to not take chances with other people’s lives. When I was about to use the Deflector Shield Controller, that is.”

  “Oh. As it turned out, I was being paranoid.”

  “No, you were thinking of the children, like you so very often do. It’s good. And I was barreling along recklessly, trusting your granda more than it should ever be trusted. It’s one thing to put myself into danger—that’s a job requirement, often. But only a fool risks others when that’s not necessary.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Kati said slowly, “Although the image of you standing there, risking your life to uncover that flyer still gives me the shivers.

  “But there is a thing that I don’t understand,” she added, while unlocking the door to her room.

  Mikal who had been digging out the key to his room turned to look at her.

  “Well?” he encouraged her.

  “Guzi and Dakra have nodes, just like you and I do. How come they were still in rough shape when The Seabird’s Raiders confronted them? Surely their nodes could have cleared that cheap beer out of their systems by then?”

  Mikal laughed.

  “Tonight, when you were drinking the Sickle Island Red, didn’t you let the granda know that you’d just as soon enjoy the tipsy feeling for the time being?”

  Kati nodded. Her node had obliged her until she had been ready to leave. Then it had initiated the cleaning out process in a leisurely fashion. Mikal continued:

  “That is the explanation. The two of them were bored here, just as I expected them to be. I didn’t count on their being in their cups, but I did think that they would be overconfident and arrogant, incapable of properly judging the locals. I was thrilled to get the sailors in on the act—I knew that they would be thoroughly competent, and that Guzi and Dakra would underestimate them big time.”

  He gazed at Kati for a moment or two before adding:

  “It’s one of the techniques a Peace Officer learns. When you’re not allowed to shoot to kill, you have to learn more subtle ways to deal with your opponents. One of the most useful ways is to harness the opponent’s own arrogance as a weapon against him; believe me, the bang-bang cohorts with the deadly guns are always underestimating those who have to rely on intelligence and guile.”