Escape from the Drowned Planet

by Helena Puumala

  “And since it has taken us quite a long time, in their terms, to travel here,” added Jocan, “they should have had plenty of time to set someone up in this place to wait for you two. You figure that most likely there are two individuals, and that they’ll be hauling along a set of weapons which would pose a danger to not just us four, but to the townspeople as well.”

  “Innocent bystanders might die if we come to a shootout,” Kati sighed. “What sort of authorities would a town like this one have? Shouldn’t we warn them; maybe ask if they have noticed any suspicious strangers with suspicious stuff?”

  “Good point,” Mikal conceded. “Maybe we could get our voluble Lady Innkeeper to pour out more information?”

  “I should look into that, Mikal,” Yarm said. “I can use my Northern Plains identity as an excuse to pump people for information. And once I get hold of the civic authorities—assuming that they exist—I can get you into the picture, Mikal, to convince them of the reality of the danger.”

  “Ask them about any strangers who have been hanging around for any length of time, and are curious about other strangers coming into town,” suggested Jocan.

  “That might be something Sora could help us with,” mused Kati. “If I was in a strange town, waiting for someone whom I wanted to drug or kill, to arrive, I’d try to get friendly with all the Innkeepers. Then I could find out from them when my targets arrived and hey! Everything would be easy as pie.”

  “Don’t assume that our criminals have your social skills, Kati,” Mikal laughed. ”Gorsh’s crew members likely have more experience threatening folks, than sweet-talking them. Still, it’s worth checking out; you never know what’ll fall down from a tree, until you give it a shake.

  “I need a look into the temple as well. Jocan, I suspect that you’re the best one for that task. I’ll have to get to the beacon sooner or later, but I don’t want to just walk up to the Temple and ask whoever’s in charge if I can look around. That strikes me like asking for a poisoned dart in the neck, at the minimum. So I need some preliminary reconnaissance done, and you’re my man for that.”

  Jocan’s face broke into a broad grin.

  “I don’t think I can promise you any sewers in this town, Mikal, but I’m sure I’ll find out some way to sneak you in there unseen,” he said.

  Yarm stared at Jocan for a moment.

  “Before you start that, Jocan, let me do a little investigating about that Religious Community that has grown up around the Temple,” he suggested. “There’s no point into walking into anything without having some idea of what it is you’re headed into.”

  “I had thought that I’d go into the Community and say that I’d heard about how their Temple is indestructible,” Jocan said. “I’d tell them that the story has made me very interested in the Temple and their god or gods. And that I’d really like to know more about their community, and how it came to be.”

  He grinned.

  “Folk love to hear that you’re interested in what they believe makes their lives meaningful. I expect to get any number of Temple tours within days, and I’ll know everything that’s useful to us about the ways of that Religious Community, in less time than that.”

  Yarm shook his head, then smiled.

  “Okay, I don’t presume to tell you stuff that you obviously know backwards and forwards,” he said. “However, I will, nevertheless, question the other locals about how they see the Religious Community; how it fits into the rest of the town. That may be useful information.”

  “Jocan was a pretty amazing associate to have in River City,” Mikal said to Yarm. “I expect that he’ll be just as helpful here in Faithville.”

  “I have heard the stories,” Yarm replied. “Now I guess I’m about to find out what the stories mean.”

  “So Yarm’s going to get some information from Sora as to who are the local authorities, and then he’s going to tackle them,” Kati said, laying a spoon on the table beside her plate. “And Jocan’s going to take on the Temple of the Morning Star of the Spring Equinox—what a mouthful!—and the associated community.” She lay a second spoon beside the first.

  Then she grabbed two forks and held them in her left hand. She transferred one to her right hand and waved it.

  “What about me? What do I do? Hide in my room? And Mikal?” She transferred the other fork into her right hand. “What’s on the agenda for you?”

  “Actually, for the both of you, hiding in your room, or at least inside this building would make a lot of sense,” Yarm stated. “Whoever is after you, is going to recognize you unless you go around disguised, or veiled. A disguise, and a veil, too, would attract more attention than you really want to have right now.”

  “You’re more right about that than you perhaps realize,” Mikal agreed. “Gorsh’s crewmembers have nodes even as Kati and I do, and I have no doubt but that they have inside their heads, good images of both of us. Maybe we can risk going out into the world at night, wearing hoods, but otherwise we’re going to have to be very careful.”

  “Drat!” Kati let the forks clatter on to the table. “I can’t say that it makes me happy.”

  “Well, we can do the information transfer from the granda to my node tonight,” Mikal said soothingly. “I can then go through that stuff carefully, and see if it gives me any ideas that the granda didn’t already come up with. I have looked into Gorsh’s dealings before, so it is possible that something rings a bell.”

  “I suppose that’s the only crumb you have to toss me,” Kati sighed. “It’s too bad that I can’t do like I did in River City, and buy and don a veil to go wandering around the Temple. Then I could pick out our un-friends without them recognizing me, and we at least would know who it is we have to avoid.”

  “I could make discreet inquiries about whether or not the local women ever wear veils,” Yarm offered.

  “If you can do it without sounding weird,” said Kati. “Don’t bother if it’s going to draw too much attention to us. That arsenal we’re likely up against is definitely adding a dimension of caution to my actions; it’s just as well that I didn’t know what gun-nuts these crooks are, when we first started on this trip.”

  “You could have guessed it if you’d taken a good look around you in the ship’s armoury, where we picked up the first two stunners,” Mikal admonished her mildly.

  “I was avoiding looking around in there,” Kati protested. “Remember, I was fighting the granda, which was doing the mental equivalent of drooling all over my synapses, just seeing all that firepower. And I had no idea how much control I had over the old devil; I was struggling with a madman inside my brain, as I remember it.”

  “Point taken,” Mikal said and lay a soothing hand on her arm. “I’d forgotten. But then, I wasn’t steering all that well myself, at the time, since I’d just come up from under the influence of that drug of Gorsh’s.”

  Kati smiled at Yarm and Jocan who were listening intently.

  “When I think that we made it out safely, and into hiding before our absence was discovered, I think we must have had Lady Luck riding on our shoulders.” She shook her head a little ruefully.

  “Well, maybe she’s still along for the ride,” Yarm said. “We could use her talents, that’s a certainty.”

  *****

  “All right,” Mikal said to Kati when the two of them were alone in their room. “Let’s do this information transferral. We’re going to limit it to what’s relevant; make sure that your inner rascal is aware of that. You’re too new to this node business to try anything else. I’m not prepared to risk your mental health, no matter how experimental old granda wants to be.”

  “Fine, fine,” subvocalized the monk image in Kati’s head. “We’ll play it the way Mr. Caution wants it played.”

  Suddenly the monk disappeared and live images of the people she had seen on the ship, some only in glimpses, seemed to float by in her mind; they were followed by other faces that she was sure that she had never seen. In the end there was a line
-up—much like the police line-ups she had seen on television shows in a different life—of six people, two of whom were Guzi and Dakra. Another was Gorsh’s son, Joakim, the fourth, she knew that she had see before as only a glimpse, and the last two were from the granda’s list of the ones she had not seen in person.

  She gave her head a shake to see Mikal sitting beside her on the bed. He reached across her lap to clasp her left hand with his.

  “Ready?” he asked her, and she nodded, unable to think of any reason to put off the transfer, even though she was feeling apprehensive about it.

  Mikal slid his left thumb against hers, so that the soft pads of the fingers connected; the connector points of their respective nervous systems would thus meet. The monk was in her mind’s eye again, incongruously he appeared to be holding a hose in his hands which he slid down the inside of her left arm, into her hand and thumb; she felt the connection as if substance was being sucked out of her, through the hose. It was terribly disconcerting, and then it was over. Mikal pulled his thumb away from hers and she drew back her hand, feeling strange, bereft, almost. The monk brought the images of the people on the ship back up to her consciousness, as if to prove that nothing had actually disappeared from her mind during the process.

  Mikal sat still for a few moments, his eyes closed, apparently digesting the information that had just passed from her mind to his. Then he opened his eyes and looked at her, eyes filled with concern.

  “Are you okay, Kati?” he asked her. “I’m told that information transfer can be really upsetting the first few times you do it, if you haven’t been doing it since you were a kid. You look a little green at the edges. Can I get you anything? A cup of water from the sink in the commode, maybe?”

  Kati shook her head and laughed shakily.

  “A good stiff drink would do me good right now, but—“ she began, only to have Mikal interrupt her:

  “That’s a darn good idea. Let’s grab Yarm and Jocan and go down to the Tavern. I’m sure Jocan can persuade them to find you something more powerful than the local beer. Besides, then the four of us can do a little more brainstorming. The night is still young.”

  *****

  By the time they reached the Alehouse Kati had decided that a mug of the local brew would do her as well as stronger alcoholic drink. Jocan, who was in the process of making friends with the prettiest serving-girl, managed to expedite their service enough that mugs of beer appeared in front of the four of them so quickly that some of the other patrons who had had a longer wait complained audibly. Yarm slipped over to these patrons’ table, to make peace while Kati downed half of her mug, drew a couple of deep breaths, and claimed that she would be all right in a minute or two.

  “So what did it feel like?” Mikal asked her, curiously.

  Kati shrugged.

  “Like a part of my brain was being sucked out through my left thumb,” she replied with a nervous laugh. “The granda, in his new monk form, reassured me that I had actually not lost anything, that those images were still in my head afterwards, even though they had just been sucked out of me. Disconcerting, to say the least, but of course I haven’t the faintest idea how the whole thing works.”

  “I’ve had it explained to me that the node makes a copy of what it transmits, and it’s the copy that gets sent, not the original,” Mikal mused. “I’ve done it so many times that it’s second nature to me by now; I don’t even think about it. But then I’ve had my node since I was two years old, which is as young as it’s ever implanted, so I’ve grown up with it. I have no memory of not having one, and I suppose I started to learn to use it as soon as I got it, so the learning curve was simply a part of growing up.”

  “The littlest kids on the slave ship were the ones who took to having the nodes like fish to water,” Kati said, remembering that strange time in Gorsh’s ship. She heaved a sigh, thinking about how far from helping her friends she still was.

  Mikal placed his hand on top of hers.

  “Look, we’ll get all those slaves free yet, dearheart, never fear. It may take a while but nobody’s quitting until the job’s done.”

  Jocan’s favourite serving-girl came by again and plopped a pitcherful of beer off her tray on to their table.

  “Will this do for a bit, Jocan?” she asked, and gave Kati who had attacked the other half of her mugful, a searching glance.

  “I think your friend’s colour is looking a little better now; you were right, Jocan, she just needed a wee bit of alcohol in her system to calm her nerves. You guys take care of her, okay?”

  “Hey Tilda, are you going to serve us or not?” shouted one of the fellows at the next table to her, and she headed off in his direction.

  “I sure am. You’re good customers, regulars after all,” she warbled at them, and started to lay down on their table the full beer mugs from her tray. “I just wanted to look after a member of my own sex who’d had a bit of a shock, first. I’m sure you fellows can understand that.”

  Yarm returned to their table and his mug of beer, shaking his head, and grinning.

  “All is well then, I presume,” he said as he sat down.

  “Kati is looking better,” Jocan commented, nodding in her direction.

  “Which means that we can get to work and do a bit more brainstorming, right?” added Mikal, grinning.

  “Does your enthusiasm mean that you have extracted something useful from this information that Kati was able to pass to you, although not without discomfort?” Yarm queried of him.

  “Possibly,” Mikal answered, “just possibly.”

  He turned to look at Kati.

  “Did any of the ones on the granda’s most likely list—outside of Guzi and Dakra who should be rotting on Sickle Island—mean anything to you?” he asked her.

  “Two came out of the granda’s knowledge,” Kati replied immediately, “and one I’d only seen in the passing. The fourth, the boy, is Gorsh’s son Joakim. He was supposed to receive the granda node, but the granda had other ideas.”

  “Joakim?” This was Jocan. “That’s a little close for comfort.”

  “Hah!” Kati made a face. “The only thing anything like you would be his age and name, and both of those are off, too. The kid was a spoiled brat. My friend, Roxanna, the girl with the sharp tongue, called him ‘Daddy’s weakling boy’ the moment she saw him. I suspect that she was right on in her judgement!”

  “Why did the granda put him on that list?” Mikal asked. “Can you ask it?”

  Kati took a swig of beer and closed her eyes.

  “You heard the question,” she subvocalized.

  “I think that it’s quite possible that Papa might give his son one last chance to prove himself,” the brown-garbed monk subvocalized back to her. “Papa was getting annoyed with him already by the time he was planning to have me implanted into the boy’s neck. The boy’s mother had insisted that Gorsh take him along with him, likely to get him out of her hair, and he had been a disappointment to his Sire.”

  Kati opened her eyes.

  “The granda thinks that this might be the boy’s last chance to prove himself worthy to his father,” she explained. “Papa had not been impressed with him. For good reason, I’d add.”

  “It would be a case of sending a boy to do a man’s job,” Mikal muttered. “However, he’d be the most disposable of the four, so he may well be one member of a two-man team.”

  “Assuming anyone with a bit of clout would be willing to haul him along on an important mission,” said Kati.

  “Oh, I think if Gorsh told one of the other three on that list that he had to haul the boy along, he would haul the boy along,” Mikal argued. “And use him as a shield for the operation. Meaning that if we’re going to see a person from Gorsh’s ship it’ll likely be this Joakim. So let’s keep eyes open for a skinny teenager with olive skin, greasy dark hair, and a receding chin.”

  “He’ll recognize the both of you, right?” Yarm asked.

  “Oh yes, he’s seen both of us
although I’ve only seen him through the information Kati transferred to me,” Mikal replied. “I would have been drugged when he saw me, but he does have a node—although not of the granda variety—so he’d recognize me without a problem.”

  “You did see him, Mikal,” Kati protested. “Remember when we left the ship? He was guarding the hatch and you stunned him?”

  Mikal wiped his face with both his hands.

  “Shit, you’re right, my node has a record of it—sort of vaguely. I was coming off that drug and I think my node and my brain were both sort of off-line! Damn, how I resent that tangle-juice crap!”

  He grabbed his mug and swallowed a stiff gulp of beer.

  “Well, you handled the situation just fine, as I remember it. You took over from me, and stunned him before he knew what was happening,” said Kati, shrugging.

  “Training, my dear. It’s supposed to pull you through when you’ve nothing else to fall back on.” Mikal grinned wryly at her. “Like when you’re coming off a drug you didn’t ingest voluntarily. I’m sort of hoping that Gorsh’s minions won’t force me to use it again in a hurry.”

  “You and me both,” Kati muttered. “Especially since the rest of us don’t have your training.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The next morning Jocan set out to find out what he could about the Temple and the Religious Community.

  He started off by exploring the physical environs of the town, walking down streets that seemed interesting to him, first the ones lined with small shops and cafes, then further down into the residential areas and the garden plots that lay interspersed among the houses. Farther out from these he could see farmland but did not bother trekking there. He returned to the town centre, instead, and headed into the half which was closer to the looming mountain. This part of the settlement he had already marked in his mind as the residential area of the Religious Community; however, he had not wanted to approach it too quickly. Now, however, having, established himself as merely a curious traveller in the mind of anyone paying attention to him, he began to scrutinize the dwellings of the people attached to the Temple of the Morning Star of the Spring Equinox.