Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers

by Helena Puumala

  Llon found Mikal on the resistance exerciser, apparently ensuring that the enforced sedentary existence aboard The Spacebird would not wither his muscles. The older man sat down on the next piece of equipment to wait for the younger to finish his set of repetitions.

  “You’re here to talk?” Mikal asked when he was done, accepting the towel that Llon handed to him, and wiping sweat off his brow.

  “Indeed,” Llon responded, watching the Agent ease himself into a more comfortable position. “The thought has occurred to me that we do need to bait a trap for this Gorsh, if we mean to catch him.”

  “A notion not unfamiliar to some others of us in the group.”

  “I’m thinking of using bait so powerful that he could not help but make a grab for it,” Llon added.

  Mikal stared at him.

  “You’re thinking Xoraya, aren’t you?” he asked, after a moment’s silence.

  Llon nodded.

  “And I’d sweeten the pot further by including you,” he said. “That would also make it an easier sell to Xoraya.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Mikal protested. “I’d end up lying useless as Canna was on Vultaire, shot full of that tangle-juice crap. I have enough experience of that, and I have no intention of lying around in a coma while others do my work for me. I’m needed with all my wits intact.”

  “You have no idea of how that stuff affects human beings in the long run, do you?” Llon asked.

  “I’m closer to knowing that than anyone else I’ve heard of,” Mikal replied drily. “How long they had me under that stuff the first time Gorsh’s minions used it on me, I don’t exactly know, but we’re talking days, at least, maybe weeks. The second time, on The Drowned Planet, they gave me such a massive dose that I was gone for several days, while Kati and Jocan hauled me onto a riverboat, and kept me alive with the help of the boat’s owners. Neither experience has incited in me a burning desire to repeat the experiment.”

  Llon grinned.

  “Naturally,” he agreed. “However, when the Slaver and his minions assumed that time under the drug would break down your resistance to their interrogation tactics, they were totally on the wrong track. As a matter of fact Xanthus Hsiss misled them as to the long-term effects of the drug, thinking that doing so might be more useful than giving them accurate information.”

  Mikal raised his eyebrows. He was ready to listen carefully, although a part of his mind was very curious as to how the man in front of him had obtained this information.

  “The barriers that the drug loosens are the ones that keep the majority of the human race from exercising their ESP powers. Considering the amount of time that you have already spent under the mind-tangler, your natural barriers, although originally very strong, are pretty frayed. I expect that the next time it’s used on you, you will find yourself in the same situation that the Xeonsaurs are in when they are under that drug.”

  Mikal thought about this for a few moments. It was true that he had become aware of abilities that he had never before been able to lay claim to, since the last time he had been comatose under the drug. Kati had almost succeeded in contacting him on The Drowned Planet, when she had been attempting to mentally communicate with the members of their travelling group. If the girl, Sany, had not proved to be as sensitive that way as Kati was herself, they might have had to rely on his tenuous link with Kati to find out when the desert louts attacked. Plus he was having premonitions, the latest one having to do with their present trip.

  “There may well be something to what you’re saying,” he conceded.

  Llon chuckled.

  “There is something to what I’m saying,” he said. “I can prescribe mental exercises for you, which, if you do them half-as diligently as you take your physical training, should have you ready to function as one-half of our bait by the time we reach Tarangay. And once you’re in the trap, you should be able to, at some point, mentally reconnect with Kati and myself, along with Xoraya. And the two of you may well be adding your minds to those of Xanthus Hsiss and the boy who accompanies him, Murra, inside Gorsh’s stronghold.”

  “I’m not sure how Kati will react to this plan,” Mikal said, speaking slowly. “I think that she had rather been counting on us working together on this business of snaring Gorsh, and bringing him to justice—and freeing the slaves, of course. And I don’t think that she’s been able to contact Murra via her ESP, even though she has been trying to do so, every so often, since we finished our work on Vultaire. What that inability means, we don’t really know.”

  “That may well have to do with time-shifting, which we know that Gorsh is having Xanthus Hsiss do for him. Or with pockets of resistance to mental penetration which are believed to have formed on Wayward in the time since the inhabitants turned away from the Federation influence approximately two hundred years ago.”

  “Pockets of resistance to mental penetration?” Mikal’s eyebrows were up again. “Are you talking about something like what Kati encountered in the Prison Complex cellars on Vultaire?”

  “Something like that,” Llon replied. “Although what you folks dealt with in those cellars was minor and erratic, pretty much like Kati described it, a child Planetary Spirit, born from the agony and resentment of consciousnesses shut underground without reason. What’s on Wayward is much more controlled, and larger in scope.”

  Mikal wanted to ask Llon how he knew all these things, but he suspected that he would not get an answer. The Green Robe would somehow side-step the question, leaving him as much in the dark as he was now. Xoraya had called the man a Watcher, and Kati had vouched for him with her ESP. That ought to be enough for him, too, especially since his own instincts told him that the older man was thoroughly well-intentioned. Still, allowing himself to be used as bait—he realized even as he thought about it, that he would have to keep Llon’s plan from Kati. She would never consent to it.

  “I suppose that you chose to talk to me here and now, because you realized that we’d have to manage this somehow without Kati knowing what’s happening,” he said.

  Llon smiled.

  “Understandably she’d raise objections, most of them, no doubt, very good.”

  “Plus, if I’m going to be taking risks, she’ll want to be right there, taking them along with me.”

  “However, any interest that our target has in her, is not as strong as the interest he has in you and Xoraya. Outside the fact that he’ll keep you and our Lady Xeonsaur alive, since he has a compelling reason in both your cases to do so. Whereas with Kati, his only interest in her would be as a potential second wife, a breeder; in other words she could easily be replaced, and thus not necessarily worth keeping alive.”

  Mikal shivered.

  “Besides,” added Llon, “she’ll be much more useful outside the trap, what with her considerable talents, and her emotional connection to you. I intend to stay with her and Lank, of course, and help them in any way that I can. You can count on that.”

  *****

  Llon instructed Mikal on how to tease his mind to separate from his body and to travel freely along the pathways of the zero-point energy which underlies everything that exists (at least as Llon explained the matter). He had to be careful, however, to not attract Kati’s attention, nor that of her infamous node. Fortunately, the young woman had immersed herself in the unusual opportunity to behave in a manner domestic, cooking healthy meals for all of them, mothering Lank whenever that seemed to be called for, and enjoying Mikal’s presence in the big bed in the Captain’s cabin.

  “It’s probably a good thing this trip won’t last long,” she laughed to Mikal one night while cuddling against him. “Domesticity normally bores me silly; on my in-laws’ resort I was perfectly happy for Jake and me to eat with the extended family, or in the guests’ dining room. I hardly used the kitchen in our little flat at all.”

  She had stopped avoiding the subject of her lost son, Mikal noted. Time, and the brief counselling session on Lamania, had begun to perform healing ma
gic. Perhaps when all that they were involved in was done, she would be ready for the picture he had commissioned from an artist he knew. It was of Jake, taken from Kati’s own memories, the ones she had uploaded through her nodal connector to a computer, for the purpose of finding out how far from home Gorsh had taken her.

  In the meantime, the Green Robe spoke with Xoraya, introducing her to the notion that she and Mikal were the best possible bait with which to snare the infamous Slaver Captain. She had questions, of course, although she knew enough about the Watchers to understand that, as one of those, Llon had access to more knowledge than any of the rest of the group.

  “You’re suggesting that four sensitives—I’m counting Xanthus and Kati’s little friend, Murra—should be able to do something useful, even while three of us are physically immobile by this mind-tangler stuff,” she said to him, after he had explained what he had in mind. “Or is our sole purpose to draw Kati, Lank and you to Gorsh’s location? If that’s the case, I think that you’re expecting a lot from Kati and Lank.”

  Llon laughed.

  “I’m expecting a lot from Kati and Lank—and myself, of course,” he said. “But not quite as much as you suppose. Your Life-Mate has had lots of time to study how Gorsh operates, and I would expect that he has come up with some ideas as to how the Slaver can be defeated or circumvented. You and Mikal can add your mental powers to his, and perhaps help him to break the drug-fuelled lock on your physiques. Xanthus is not a fool, though some Xeon Planetary Council Members have decided to dismiss him as such. He was the one who engineered the details of Kati and Mikal’s escape from the slave ship in the first place. He recognized that the young woman from the obscure planet had what it would take to get herself and the Peace Officer away successfully, with the help of that absurd Granda node, of course.”

  “So you’re saying that he is not quite as naive about humans as I have been assuming that he is?” Xoraya asked.

  “Not any more. Not really, even by the time he helped Kati and Mikal escape. He had been aboard that vessel for some time, watching, and waiting for a chance to do something. He’s still doing something like that, and he may well know what to do with the extra mind power that you and Mikal can provide.”

  “But Mikal and I are to manage this bait business without Kati and Lank knowing what we’re doing? You think it’s not wise to confide in them?”

  “Their efforts to find you, and to rescue you, will be more authentic if they believe that you fell into a trap unknowingly,” said Llon. “Besides which, they might not want to go along with the baiting plan if they know about it.”

  “True. Kati, especially, would object to Mikal and me taking risks that she did not share,” Xoraya agreed.

  Llon grinned and said:

  “You’re repeating Mikal’s sentiments on the subject, almost word for word. I suppose that you got to know her quite well, too.”

  “I studied her nodal record of the escape from the slave ship, and the Drowned Planet,” Xoraya commented with a smile. “And she and I spent time mind to mind, while I was under the mind-tangler on Vultaire. I grew rather fond of this particular short-life.”

  “She’s a rather admirable young woman,” the Green Robe agreed. “She’s smart and capable. And her intentions are always to do the best that she can, in every way possible.”

  *****

  The Tarangay Space Port was not much more than a flat, gravelled field. It lay, more or less, in the middle of the largest island of the longest archipelago, on an ocean-covered planet with no continents.

  Security, apparently, amounted to the fence which surrounded the field, and a couple of men with vicious-looking dogs who patrolled the fence. The Customs building was a shed just inside the gate which led to a Flyer Yard where newcomers could rent or charter flyers and flits to take them to the islands of their choice, or to fly to the Sea Port of this island where they could board boats. There was no Port Town around the Space Port; that was at the Sea Port, and was called Plenty, because the climate of the island was excellent for several kinds of farming, so the inhabitants, with the addition of sea food in their diets, really did live amidst plenty.

  Mikal settled to work immediately on arrival. He questioned the lad who acted as the Customs Officer, even as the youth went through The Spacebird’s registration and had the five of them scan through, using their nodal connector spots.

  Kati was curious to see how the identifying smear Mikal had applied to Xoraya’s and Llon’s wrists inside the ship would work with the scanners, but detected no problems. The fellow behind the scanners didn’t even bat an eyelash to see the two of them present their wrists rather than thumbs to the scanner; Kati assumed that he must have been familiar with this type of traveller ID. Sometimes the mish-mash of low tech and high tech that she had been seeing ever since getting off the Drowned Planet, made her head reel. A gravel field for a space port, and the equivalent of a Quonset hut for a Customs building! And then, inside the hut, nodal scanners, which could also handle what was the latest Shelonian technology for identifying people without nodes!

  “The Lizard scientist?” the Customs worker responded to Mikal’s query about Xanthus Hsiss. “You’ll have to ask Jaritz about him.”

  He indicated an old-timer in a uniform like his, who was sitting at a table at the other end of the shed, reading what looked like a magazine.

  “That was before I started working here, but I understand the scientist brought trouble on himself, associating with the kind of people that he did.”

  “The Council should have allowed me to come with him,” Xoraya moaned softly. “He had no ability to judge humans, my Xanthus. Probably what I told him in answer to his questions made things worse, not better.”

  Mikal took hold of her arm, and drew her towards the old-timer.

  “Kati, I want at least you, with your bad boy on the alert, along,” he said over his shoulder. “Llon and Lank, you can come and listen if you want to, or else look after our bags, and check with the Flyer Yard as to what our transportation options are.”

  “Lank and I trust you to know your job,” Llon said immediately. “We’ll put the bags through the scanner, and take a look at the world outside while seeing about further transportation.”

  They had agreed, before landing, to acquiesce by the local rules, and use the Space Port for landing and parking The Spacebird. Xoraya had said that she was certain that Xanthus would have done likewise when he had arrived. Therefore, the local officials should have some information to offer about him, and it did not do to antagonize them, certainly not before pumping them for whatever data they did have. Tarangay was not a Federation World, so Mikal’s SFPO identity did not necessarily mean much; he would have to use charm and persuasion to pick peoples’ brains.

  Kati followed Mikal and Xoraya to the table where the Customs Official, Jaritz, was reading. She alerted the Granda to do a quick scan of the man. Scans that The Monk did were not deep or all-inclusive; mostly they amounted to getting a feel for the person, and finding out what was uppermost in his mind. Nevertheless, they were very useful: almost always after one, Kati knew whether she was dealing with an honest or a deceitful individual, and if the person had issues which might make him or her an unreliable witness, or a bad informant.

  “This guy’s okay,” The Monk subvocalized to her within seconds. “Not an intellectual giant, but not stupid either. Honest to a fault; probably first rate at his job.”

  Kati translated this into an almost-imperceptible nod at Mikal, when he turned to look at her, his eyes questioning.

  Mikal gifted her with a quick grin of thanks, and turned to the man sitting at the table.

  “Customs Officer Jaritz?” he asked the Tarangayan, who laid his reading material aside.

  Kati was fascinated to note that it was, in fact, an old-fashioned magazine, complete with lots of text, and an assortment of pictures.

  “That’s me,” the seated man answered. “Can I do something for you folks?” />
  He took in all three of them with a practiced glance. A talent obviously honed over years of admitting people on to the world. Mikal interested him, apparently; his eyes slid over Kati quickly, with perhaps only a slight note of appreciation of a lively, attractive, young woman. His reaction to Xoraya, however, was that of quickly muted shock. He knew what he was seeing, and also knew how unusual it was.

  “I’m Agent Mikal r’ma Trodden of the Star Federation Peace Officer Corps,” Mikal introduced himself, “and Kati of Terra,” he nodded in her direction, “is a colleague of mine. We are helping Madame Xoraya Hsiss of Xeon in her attempt to find her Life-Mate, Xanthus Hsiss, who is understood to have had a laboratory here on Tarangay some time ago, a laboratory at which he was conducting tests on some drugs which he and his colleagues on Xeon hoped to market to the humankind. It seems that something went wrong, and Xanthus Hsiss disappeared, perhaps through the agency of some unscrupulous humans.

  “Your colleague at the counter said that you were here when Scientist Hsiss arrived on Tarangay. We’d like to start our investigation by finding out as much as is possible about his arrival, and his time on this planet.”

  “Please sit down,” Customs Officer Jaritz invited them, indicating the other chairs at the table.

  Mikal pulled one out for Xoraya and saw her seated, before sitting down himself, while Kati settled into a chair across from them, beside Jaritz.

  “Your boyfriend’s arrangement is intentional,” the Granda subvocalized to her. “You’re the least awe-inducing of the three of you, so you sit closest to the target. Besides, this way I can keep tabs on him, should that become necessary for some reason or another.”

  Well. Kati was slightly amused by the manner in which The Monk had become an avid participant in Mikal’s information-gathering.

  “Maybe we’ll make an Agent out of you yet, my Monk,” she subvocalized.

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “But it’ll be a long time before I’ll be a pacifist, a la Agent r’ma Trodden!”