Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers

by Helena Puumala

  He was bringing the flit down over Maldosa now, aiming for a large, open, paved space in the middle of the town, apparently the local parking lot. One corner of it seemed to be devoted to what looked like public transportation flyers: a sign advertized hourly circuits of the Principality, with scheduled stops at the larger islands, interspersed with unscheduled ones for travellers dropping off on, or leaving, from the others.

  “Looks like every islet big enough to have a hut on it, on the Chain, has enough flat rock to accommodate a flyer,” Lank laughed as he saw the business. “So some enterprising fellow has created competition for the boats that generally ferry people around. The flyers are faster, of course, but I should imagine that flying costs more than taking a slow boat.”

  “Yeah, you usually have to pay for speed,” Kati responded with a laugh. “Aren’t you glad that we’re a well-funded enterprise, and can afford to rent flits?”

  “One of the reasons I’m pleased to hang out with you, Kati of Terra,” Lank said, with a return grin. “I’ve noticed that you seem lucky when it comes to finances—not to discount your ability to handle money well, despite the complaints, on Vultaire, of our red-haired friend.”

  “Oh, I’ve had real luck with money, all my life,” Kati agreed, thinking back to the Kitfi fortune which had paid her and Mikal’s way across The Drowned Planet. Plus, there had been her parents’ legacy before that, which should pay for Jake’s schooling when the time came. And the Entertainment Troupe had done well financially on Vultaire; its members had had the funds to sleep in inns and eat in restaurants wherever such services had been available. “Let’s hope it continues.”

  Mikal who had been following Lank, parked next to them at the edge of the almost empty lot. A wire fence separated them from the surrounding town, and there was a guarded gate not far. At first, Kati thought that this was to ensure that the parkers paid whatever fee was charged them, before they headed into town, but when the group reached the gate, she realized that the man was there for security, not to collect money. He was burly, wore an official-looking uniform, and was armed with a conspicuous side arm, as well as an inconspicuous stunner (which The Monk pointed out to her).

  Mikal, recognizing a fellow peace officer, stopped to chat with him.

  “The town is finding it necessary to provide security for the flyers and the flits?” he queried in a friendly voice, but with his eyebrows cocked. “Have there been problems with crime?”

  “Yeah, a bit,” the guard replied non-committally, eyeing the group members, one by one, then returning his attention to Mikal. “You folks are from off-planet, I presume?”

  “Mikal r’ma Trodden of the Federation Peace Officer Corps,” Mikal introduced himself, and then went on to name the rest of them.

  “Xoraya Hsiss?” the guard repeated, scrutinizing the Lizard woman. “Hsiss sounds like a familiar name.”

  Kati checked his left ear and environs. No, the man did not have a node, not surprisingly, since they were in an obscure place on a non-Federation planet. The Customs Officers at the Space Port had been noded, but that most likely had to do with the requirements of their job, which involved dealing with strangers.

  “It should be,” Xoraya said mildly, the language which she had been practising with Lank almost unaccented. “I believe that my Life-Mate, Xanthus Hsiss, set up and ran his laboratory in this Principality before his disappearance.”

  “Ah.” The guard looked at her again, this time studying her carefully.

  Then he nodded.

  “You’ll want to talk to First Councillor Gorine of the Maldos Chain Council, I am sure. She would be at her office at this time of the day. It’s in the large stone building on the square at the end of this street.” He pointed in the right direction. “Ask the guard at the entrance for directions; tell him Officer Kormes sent you, and you should have no trouble.”

  “Thank you, Officer Kormes,” Mikal said with a smile, as they filed through the gate which the guard held open for them.

  Kati grinned at his back as she followed him and Xoraya. The experienced SFPO Agent kept the guard sweet, just in case he came in useful, later on.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  First Councillor Gorine’s office was a modest room, a work place rather than one designed for entertaining. Councillor Gorine, as soon as Mikal had greeted her and introduced the group, suggested that they move to the building’s lounge where there was seating for more people. In the office, all except one of Mikal’s cohort would have had to stand.

  “The lounge is quiet at this time of the day, and I can ask my Page to come along,” Gorine explained. “She can fetch whatever papers, and other items relating to this matter, you might want to see.”

  The lounge was on the same floor—the second—as the Councillor’s office, but its windows looked down on the Square, and further back, the street that the group had walked along from the parking lot, which was also in sight. Kati could pick out their flits with her ordinary sight, as well as Guard Kormes’ shelter, and if she had enhanced it, she was sure she could have made out the signage of the Flying Bus Business, which is how she had mentally renamed the depot of the scheduled flyers. To add to her amused notion, several people were just then heading towards the flyers, having entered the lot, no doubt, under Kormes’ careful scrutiny.

  The First Councillor’s Page, an intelligent-looking girl, about Lank’s age, brought a tray of mugs and a pitcher of some hot beverage onto a low table which was surrounded by comfortable chairs. The drink smelled fruity and delicious, and no-one refused a glassful, not even Xoraya who could not always consume what her companions did. She did, however, sip at the drink carefully, unlike Lank who downed his mugful in a few gulps, and then poured himself more.

  “Hot thornberry juice was my favourite beverage when I was a kid,” he explained when he saw Kati following his actions with an amused half-smile. “I didn’t get it very often; my Mum didn’t have the money for many goodies for me. It still tastes as good as it ever did.”

  “You’re welcome to drink all you want,” the First Councillor said with a smile. “One plant that grows well on these rocky islands is the thornberry bush. I bet Page Ciela doesn’t share your fondness for the beverage. She has probably been drinking it every day of her life!”

  “That’s right, Councillor Gorine,” the girl said with a laugh, replacing the now empty pitcher with a steaming, full one. “I’d rather drink almost anything else.”

  Mikal watched the girl leave with the empty pitcher, and then broached the topic of interest:

  “You and the other Council Members dealt with Scientist Hsiss, did you not?”

  “Yes, we did, indeed.”

  The First Councillor leaned back in her chair, and sipped her beverage while eyeing Mikal.

  “What is the Federation’s interest in Scientist Hsiss, anyway?” she asked.

  “Part of it is simply the desire to help Madame Hsiss find her Life-Mate,” the Agent replied carefully. “The other part involves the fact that it seems that Scientist Hsiss became involved—presumably inadvertently—with a cast of very dubious characters. They kidnapped him, and forced him into activities which only an Xeonsaur can perform, and which contributed to the kidnappers’ illegal operations along the Space Trade Lanes, and in Federation space.”

  “Tactfully worded,” Councillor Gorine said drily. “You are showing more diplomacy than Scientist Hsiss ever did, in his dealings with us, the lesser intellects.”

  Xoraya moaned.

  “My dear Xanthus had no experience dealing with humans,” she sighed, once again speaking on the subject. “I tried to enlighten him as much as I could in the short time we had, before he left to do his research, but clearly what I did was not nearly enough. I was afraid that it would be so.”

  She answered the Councillor’s questions relating to the Xeon Council’s refusal to let her accompany her Life-Mate, and how the human short-lives had been her field of study at her Institute, for more years than any
one else in the room cared to contemplate.

  “So how exactly did the matters unfold here in the Maldos Chain Principality?” Mikal asked, when he could, tactfully, interrupt the female lamenting, and bring the topic back to the matters of real interest.

  “Everything began reasonably well,” replied the First Councillor, while Xoraya settled down to be one of the attentive listeners. “My office received the call from the Customs Office on the Greyrock Island, suggesting that both Scientist Hsiss and our Principality could benefit from doing business together, since we had a number of habitable, but uninhabited islands, and his enterprise could provide work for some of our young people who are constantly fleeing the area to search for employment elsewhere. Naturally, I asked him to send the Scientist along, to explain his plans and his needs.

  “In the meantime I gathered my fellow Council Members together—there are only seven of us—and got out our charts of The Chain. I figured that among the seven of us we would have enough knowledge about the islands that we would be able to pick out the one most suitable for the Scientist’s purposes.

  “He wanted to build a laboratory, and that meant bringing in at least a certain amount of equipment that he could not obtain on Maldos. We assumed that Hsiss was an off-worlder since he had consulted with the Customs Officers about his wants and needs. He would probably have a space-going vessel which he would like to park on the island, for ease of transferring equipment. So we chose an island with such criteria in mind: sheltered enough from the seasonal storms and winds that human habitation was possible, room enough to park a small space ship, and more room for flits and flyers, since he would be depending on local suppliers and workers for at least some of his needs.”

  She stopped to sip her drink while her audience quietly waited.

  “When the Scientist arrived, a couple of us Councillors went with him to check out the chosen island. He seemed quite satisfied with it. He brought his ship with the equipment he had in it, to the island, and we arranged for suppliers to provide him with building materials for the laboratory and the attached living quarters, and workers for the labour. We even persuaded one of our building experts to work with him to anchor the structure to the rock of the island in such a fashion that the bi-yearly storms would not budge it.”

  “Did you have any problems dealing with him?” Xoraya asked, somewhat anxiously.

  “Jaritz at the Port Customs had warned us that he was a non-human, and that we would have to make some allowances for his behaviour, so, no, most of us who dealt with him, did not take offence when he seemed abrupt, or rather unreasonable.”

  Gorine’s face broke into an almost childish grin.

  “We decided to make a game of it,” she said, gleefully. “Dealing with him, that is. We had contests with one another, as to who could be most diplomatic. Anyone who became exasperated with him lost a round, and had to buy each of the others a drink at the Lodge Tavern that evening. There were a few boisterous evenings at the Tavern in the beginning—even I bought a few rounds in the first weeks—but things got better as time passed. Not just on our side; Scientist Hsiss was clearly not a stupid man, although not human, and he learned to deal with us even as we learned to deal with him.”

  “Thank goodness,” said Xoraya. “He must have absorbed some of the things I told him; at least enough to have taken it upon himself to modify his behaviour as it became necessary. I was afraid that he would have been so absorbed by the details of his research that he’d forget that he was dealing with sentient beings.”

  “He was very much absorbed in his research,” the First Councillor said, her merriment disappearing. “He did want the construction to be done as fast as possible; he paid extra for speed in that. Which was good for us, since it gave some more youngsters a short term job that season. Then he hired some of the young people to run his equipment; he went through a few of them before he found a handful that satisfied him. They were some of our brightest young lights, and perhaps their smarts were a part of the problem we eventually ended with, or maybe it was just that these kids were young.

  “In any case, the young employees began to complain about some of the things that they were being asked to do. Apparently Scientist Hsiss wanted them to take part in some of the trials he was doing with his medicinal concoctions. He was working on drugs of some kind and he needed human test subjects to try them out. They weren’t supposed to be dangerous, at least the Scientist insisted that they weren’t, but some of us were deeply disturbed by the notion of our children taking part in what sounded like crazy experiments.

  “We, the Councillors, talked it over among ourselves, and decided that only those persons who were freely willing to participate in the trials would be required to do so. The Scientist Hsiss told us that he had never intended that anyone participate against his or her will, but that he did expect that anyone working in his laboratory in any capacity would participate. That, of course was unacceptable to the Council. We had invited him to build his facility on our territory, and had helped him with its erection, and operation. We had provided him with a work force. And now it seemed that he was making ultimatums that at least some of the workers could not countenance, and for all we knew, the demands he was making might put the people who accepted them at who knew what risk!”

  “Oh dear,” murmured Xoraya, looking seriously distressed. “Sounds to me like he was refusing to take your concerns seriously.”

  “That was how I felt about it. However, when I told him that he would lose most of his local workforce if he insisted on their taking part in the trials, he backed down. A couple of the employees agreed to do the trials, one of them is the young woman who is now my Page, Ciela. The two were curious about the chemicals that Scientist Hsiss was developing, and apparently trusted his reassurances that they would come to no harm. As for the rest, they continued working in the lab while the Scientist himself began to take trips off-world, looking, the workers told us, for people who were willing to experiment with his drugs, as well as for promising ingredients with which to modify his creations.”

  “Presumably he found both,” said Mikal.

  Kati guessed that he was thinking about the lab she and he had visited on Vultaire, the one that had been producing the mind-tangler that the slave-snatchers had used to immobilize their catches. The two men they had talked to had not been Tarangayans, but from some other planet in the Fringes. They had worked with Xanthus Hsiss, and for him, most likely on Tarangay. Mikal had interviewed all of the lab workers on Vultaire after the lab had been shut down, but had not found them particularly helpful. They had believed that the criminals who had moved their lab to the island on Vultaire, had killed Scientist Hsiss, and they had not been qualified to do much more than manufacture the mind-tangler, not having the ability of some of the Tarangayans to understand the workings of Xeonsaur technology.

  “Yeah, he found both,” Councillor Gorine said drily. “And more. It seems that he hooked up with some seriously unscrupulous individuals in his search for ingredients and laboratory subjects. And, unfortunately, he drew the interest of these individuals to us. Suddenly we found that criminals from the Space Trade Lanes were eyeing our home world in a calculating fashion, looking to see what might be here that was worth their while. Whereas up until then we had been too unimportant a planet, too ocean-covered and poorly populated to be of any interest to that type of an operator, now that an Xeonsaur Scientist had chosen us as the location for his laboratory, they were checking again, and wondering what might be here that they could profitably plunder.”

  “I suppose that the first object of the plundering was Scientist Hsiss’ operation?” Mikal queried.

  “That was their initial focus of interest, yes,” the First Councillor agreed. “I don’t know what, exactly, the Scientist Hsiss told them about his research, but some of the shady types that visited him, and occasionally travelled to this town to drink and carouse, were really keen on it, and on hearing about the results of his experiment
s on the human subjects.

  “Ciela, apparently overheard a few disturbing conversations during her work shifts, and came to me with her concerns. She rather liked Scientist Hsiss, and had a remarkable ability to relate to him in a manner which avoided the raising of hackles on both sides. He explained quite a bit about his research to her, she said, including what he thought the drugs he was trying to develop should eventually do. According to her they were to be mind-expanders of a sort, something that would allow humans, and other sentients, to control their responses to stimuli. She said that such things would be of great benefit when it came to dealing with pain, and negative emotions. But that was not what the conversationalists that she overheard were interested in; they were hoping for something that would allow them to control people, mind and body, both.

  “Scientist Hsiss, however, did not take her concerns seriously when she brought them to him. She told me that she thought that he was unable to understand what the unscrupulous humans were doing; his alien mind could not quite grasp the notion of making others do what you want them to do, and not what they want to do themselves. I don’t know if she was right about that—you, Madame Hsiss, no doubt are a better judge of that. But I did tell her that there really was nothing I could do to help. I could not reason with the Scientist better than she could, and if he was unable to see the danger, I could not coerce him into paying attention to it.”

  “Oh dear,” muttered Xoraya again. “I tried to tell Xanthus about that,” she added, “but very likely I didn’t get through to him with my explanations. Sometimes I forget, having immersed myself in the study of humans for so long, that others of my species have a hard time understanding certain of the human attitudes. That is one reason why we isolated ourselves from your kind; the notion of using another sentient being to further one’s ends, and to the detriment of that being, is almost incomprehensible to those of us who have not studied the history of the short-lives in great detail.”