“You can’t always get what you want,” said Lank, in a sing-song cadence.
Kati shook her head. Figures of speech; there was no accounting for them.
All four of them headed for the warehouse district as soon as the docking details had been attended to. Ciela gazed about her wide-eyed; this was her first time off her home world, and everything was new to her. Llon seemed to be as watchful as Kati was; there was no reason to expect trouble on Station Plata—no-one knew a thing about them, here—but it was not wise to drop vigilance. Kati had The Monk do a bit of ESP reconnoitring as they walked the short distance to where the Jax Electronics Emporium was located. He returned to report that there was nothing threatening in the Station Plata atmosphere, only the stray thoughts of passers-by floating here and there. Nobody was paying the foursome the least attention.
“That’s how we want it,” Kati subvocalized to the old reprobate. “We want our passing through to be as unnoticed as possible. Trading in the lace crystal knife is going to cause more comment, really, than I’m completely happy with.”
“I suggest that you be as honest as possible—up to a point—about how you got the thing,” The Monk suggested. “Tell him, her, whoever you trade with, that you took it away from a man who was using it against you, planning to rape and kill you. But don’t mention where the event took place, if you can help it; shit like that happens in lots of places, especially on the shadier side of the Trade Lanes. And you’ll be threatened with that sort of thing less often if the word gets around that you can handle yourself.”
“Right now, I really don’t want any kind of word about me swirling about,” Kati responded. “We’re trying to travel incognito; we’re not out to enhance the reputation of that cheeky Adventuress, Kati of Terra.”
*****
The Jax Electronic Emporium was, by the look of things, a large, well-run business, into both retail and wholesale. Ciela went slightly wild when she saw the variety of goods on display, and wanted to look at everything. Kati told Lank to go with her, and, while babysitting her, compare what was in the store with the list he had taken (nodally, of course), from Darla’s information about what the crystal traders wanted. Keeping in mind the storage limitations, she asked him to figure out which items they should buy, and how much of each. She trusted Lank to do a good job, and to give some training to the enthusiastic girl, even as he did so.
In the meantime, she and Llon would search out a manager authorized to make deals with Free Traders. She was certain that the outfit would have someone, behind some counter or desk, whose sole responsibility was to handle such transactions.
She was not mistaken in that assumption.
She had to ask before she found the right desk; the back of the store was a veritable hive of activity, with people going and coming, buying and selling, haggling over pricing, and arranging for deliveries to and from the warehouse. It was clear from the snippets of conversation she overheard that this was where the Free Traders conducted their deals, and that the Emporium did business with large numbers of them.
“Free Trader Captain Katerina,” the young man behind the desk to which she and Llon were directed, said, looking Kati over, after she had introduced herself and “her Uncle Llon”. “You’re new to us. We have no record of you doing business with us previously.”
She noted that he was noded, and had his left thumb on an indentation below the screen in front of him as he spoke. Plata was not a Federation Station, but, apparently, for a job like this fellow’s, a node was an asset not to be underestimated.
“I haven’t been here previously,” she replied briefly.
The man waited for a moment for her to continue, but when she didn’t, he seemed to decide that she was one of those Free Traders who played their cards close to their chests, and declined to gossip about their doings. Governor Jorris on Tarangay had expounded to her and her crew about the Free Traders he had known; some of them apparently loved to talk about their travels whenever they came across willing ears, but others were very much more reticent to drop information. He had suggested that Captain Katerina adopt the pose of the quiet ones, and Kati had thought it good advice.
“So you have something to trade for our merchandise?” the young man ventured. “That’s why you are at this desk? Large objects or small? Will you need delivery from your ship, as well as to it?”
“One small, very valuable item,” Kati said, pulling the lace crystal knife from the inner tunic pocket where she had stashed it before leaving the ship.
It had seemed too crass to draw it from her boot to make a trade. Captain Katerina was not crass; she was a civilized woman who had spent time in The Second City of Lamania.
Kati laid the ornate stick on the desk. She activated the mechanism which brought out the shining, sharp, thin blade; the man on the other side of the desk gasped audibly. She gifted him with a wry smile, and closed the knife again. She kept one hand on the stick that it again resembled.
The man in front of her had his thumb on the connector button of his console again; the look on his face told Kati that he was calling for a higher official to deal with the situation. She could imagine the nodal communiqué: “This woman just pulled out a lace crystal knife that she wants to trade! What do I do? Somebody help! I can’t deal with this!”
There was a flurry in the back of the cavernous room as a door opened and a well-dressed woman, trailed by two burly bodyguards(!) came through it, heading directly for the desk where Kati and Llon waited. Kati heard Llon snicker to see the bodyguards.
“You’re scaring them, niece,” he said, a droll expression on his face.
“It is a scary weapon,” Kati commented casually, caressing the stick. “Although, as you know, Uncle, I haven’t killed anyone with it.”
“But you could have, if you had wanted to,” Uncle Llon said softly, but not too softly for the young man to catch.
“Actually I did want to,” Kati corrected him. “I just thought it was wiser not to.”
By now the woman, a middle-aged, businesslike specimen, had reached the desk. Her eyes were on the stick under Kati’s hand.
“You two better come to a private office with me,” she said sharply.
Kati picked up the stick and shrugged.
“We’re here to make a deal,” she said casually.
“And a deal you’ll have, if you’re truly willing to part with that,” the woman said. “I may as well admit it, anyone could tell you; there are a half-dozen collectors on this Station alone who’d give their first-born child for that thing. And the criminals would toss in their second-borns, too.”
So. How the hell had Berd Warrion of Vultaire come to possess it? No wonder he had been livid when Kati had taken it away, handing it over to Mikal’s Borhquan cousin for safe-keeping! And, now, that victory no longer mattered at all.
Kati and Llon followed the woman through the door by which she had come, into a hallway, and a rather opulent office halfway down it. The bodyguards trailed them, but did not enter the office. The woman nodded to them before going in; Kati did not doubt but that they would be keeping a vigil outside the door.
“I am Meliss Jax,” the woman introduced herself at long last, as she directed her guests to sit in comfortable, padded chairs next to a massive desk. She settled into another chair behind the desk, empty except for a console, obviously node-compatible.
Meliss Jax, like her employee at the desk outside, sported one of the tell-tale lumps under her left ear.
“And you are the Free Trader Captain Katerina, who berthed her unregistered ship at the Port only a short while ago, and came on Station with her Uncle Llon, and a nephew and a niece, these relatives apparently being Tarangayan,” she continued. “Are you a Tarangayan, too?”
She had been in nodal contact with the Port, obviously. And probably had been told that Captain Katerina was tight-lipped.
“No,” Kati replied, even as the four of them had decided, enroute. “The Tarangayan connection
is through my husband. But since I have no blood relatives of my own, I consider his family mine.”
“But he is not travelling with you?”
“Things are a little unsettled, right now, in parts of the world, including the island where the family holding is. It was decided that he should stay home, to help with the politicking that seems to be necessary to keep the population safe.”
Meliss Jax nodded. As the travellers had calculated, word of Tarangay’s troubles had already been passed along by the gossips of the Space Trade Lanes. Jorris had said that it would be a given.
“But he didn’t object to letting you go trading on your own?”
Kati smirked. Stupid question.
“As you know, I’m not on my own,” she replied, courteously enough. “And I have grown used to looking after myself, even when I am on my own.”
She allowed her eyes to stray to the knife which she had lain on the desk, but did not comment further.
She did not miss the slight shudder that passed through Meliss Jax’s body.
“It’s perfectly safe while it’s sheathed,” Llon said, smiling gently.
“So I’ve heard,” responded Meliss Jax, nevertheless looking uneasy.
“How did you, Captain Katerina, become its owner? Free Traders are not in the habit of buying ornate, expensive, antique-style weapons, except when they get them dirt cheap, and therefore can profit nicely from them. Did this come from some obscure planet the name of which you’ll never tell me, or anyone else, for that matter?”
Kati shook her head.
“No, this one came into my hands along the Trade Lanes. Although, you could say, in one of the less attractive parts of the Lanes.”
It was Meliss Jax’s turn to smirk. She nodded.
“In fact, I took it away from a rather nasty man,” Kati added. “He was going to rape me, and kill me afterwards, so I figure that I was perfectly within my rights to take his weapon away from him.”
She heard the hissing as Meliss Jax inhaled and exhaled.
“You took it away from him!” she gasped. “And left him a mangled, bloody mess, dead?”
“No,” Captain Katerina said. “I did do damage. However, I didn’t kill him because I don’t like killing. In fact, I prefer a stunner as a weapon over this knife, any day.”
“Well, I don’t,” snapped the Granda inside her head, but she ignored that.
“Which explains why you’re here, peddling the thing in exchange for electronics. All right, you’ll get a lot of electronics, even of the excellent Shelonian electronics, which are all that we deal in, in return for that deadly thing. We’ll want to authenticate it, of course, before we’ll quote a price, but we’ll be fair. We don’t stay in business by cheating Free Traders, here at Jax Electronic Emporium.”
“So I was told.”
Kati stood up, leaving the precious knife on the desk.
“We’ll have to check on the young fry; see if they’re learning to pick out trade goods. I suppose that you realize that our ship will not accommodate all that the knife entitles us to, so I’d like to get a bit of credit to spend elsewhere on the Station, and leave the rest on your books for the next time one of us comes through. My node is recording all of this; I suppose that yours is, too.”
Meliss Jax nodded.
“One of the lucky ones, you are, to have a node. You don’t have to depend on our honesty the way most of the Free Traders do.
”Someone will find you when we’re ready to encrypt the deal.”
*****
They had a deal within a couple of hours. In fact, all their dealings on Space Station Plata, including a meal eaten at a cozy bistro in the Portside business district, were finished within hours.
When one of the burly bodyguards came by to inform Captain Katerina that Von and Meliss Jax were ready to finalize their deal with her, she was quite confident that her crew could be trusted with the purchase of the trade goods that they needed. Uncle Llon chose to stay with the youngsters, judging that Katerina no longer needed the support of his presence. Perhaps he had concluded that his more youthful relatives were more in need of his protection than the Captain was.
The bodyguard took Katerina to the door of the same office in which she and Llon had been earlier. Inside were Meliss Jax and two men whom Meliss introduced as her husband Von, and Curt Sandu, a collector residing on the Station. She did not explain what it was that Sandu collected, but Kati assumed that it was weapons, possibly antique ones.
“We chose to give Curt first crack at the prize you have provided us with,” said Von Jax to Kati as he looked her over.
The “prize” was still, or more likely, once again, lying on the big desk. The greed with which Sandu was eyeing it was obvious; apparently he was restraining himself from reaching for it by keeping his hands behind his back.
“Curt chose to check into its history, if he could—that’s only natural for a collector,” Von added. “Turns out that the little beauty has a dealer mark on it; those things can only be detected by specialized equipment, so you would not have known about its existence.”
Kati nodded. She had expected something along those lines. That was why her group, and Jorris and Gorine on Tarangay, had decided that she should hew as close to the truth as possible when explaining how she had obtained the weapon.
“So you probably now know more about the little beauty than I do,” she said.
Curt Sandu’s face broke into a grin.
“A little beauty, indeed,” he said. “A rare, nasty, little beauty. A few of them were still being manufactured occasionally, up to a dozen years ago, not to be used as weapons, but because collectors loved their precision; they are perfectly suited for the task they were intended for, which is to knife an enemy in the back.”
Meliss Jax shuddered. Kati schooled herself not to.
“The guy who pulled it on me wasn’t planning to knife me in the back,” she said. “He was out to force me onto my back, to be raped. After doing so, at least according to what he said, he intended to cut my throat.”
“A fool. He forgot that a thing like that can be turned against its owner. But, then, he might have thought that, facing a woman, he had nothing to worry about.”
Kati thought it better not to answer that. She merely compressed her lips.
“This knife was forged on the planet Wayward, about twenty years ago,” explained Curt Sandu. “It was last sold about fifteen years ago, by a dealer on a Space Station orbiting one of the Star Federation worlds, to a Vultairian of the Exalted Class (as those idiots call themselves) named Berd Warrion. There were more of these around then, so they were less expensive than they are today, although still far from cheap. Since then, there have been no recorded transactions.”
“The jerk I took it from called himself a Vultairian Exalted,” Kati said carefully. “He was a tall, fairly muscular, self-satisfied prick. Still is, I presume.”
Curt Sandu burst into laughter.
“I hope that you don’t mind that I’m recording this nodally,” he said. “It’ll make a great addition to my weapons lore! A woman turning a big man’s own lace crystal knife on him when he tries to rape her! It’s absolutely beautiful!”
Kati gifted him with a wry grin.
“Feel free to include that snippet in your display—if you’re planning to display the weapon,” she said. “You said that it was manufactured on Wayward? I didn’t realize that Waywardians were into weapons manufacturing—not that I know much about the world, never having been there. But what I’ve been told has characterized the planet as a rather lovely, pastoral place.”
“Much of it is that,” Sandu agreed. “But there are portions of it that are different.”
He shook his head.
“Because of my interest in antique weapons I have taken a few jaunts there,” he added. “The less pleasant parts of Wayward, if one can stomach wandering through them, can be a source of such items. However, a potential buyer needs to stay alert; the deal
ers that he, or she, encounters are just as likely as not to be dishonest.”
“Hm,” Kati muttered.
The weapons collector was confirming Llon’s take on Wayward. He had also handed Captain Katerina a fine reason to take her ship and crew to Wayward—assuming that they made the trip to Darla’s crystal source and back safely. And that, while they were there, they were able to secure for themselves a few, long pieces of lace crystal.
Part of Kati wanted to forget about impersonating a Free Trader, take the profit from the knife trade, and rush off to Wayward immediately, to rescue all those in need of rescuing. However, she suspected that this was exactly what Gorsh was expecting her to do, and he would have an unpleasant welcome waiting for her as soon as she arrived, and that welcome would include Milla, a tuber-patch, and a marital bed. It was better to curb her impatience, bide her time, and forge an alternate identity which might not fool any noded person, but ought to serve her for a time on a world where, besides captives whose sympathies would lie with her, only Gorsh, Milla and a few of Gorsh’s employees knew her.
Accordingly, she did not quibble about the price that Curt Sandu offered to pay for the lace crystal knife, nor the cut that the Jax couple took for facilitating the interaction. The amount that Sandu was willing to pay was a substantial sum and the Jaxes, obviously quite used to dealing with Free Traders, arranged to pay for any and all of Captain Katerina and her crew’s transactions on Station from the funds that would be left with the Emporium. And as Von Jax pointed out, the fund would function as an insurance of a sort while the Captain, her ship and its crew continued their trading lifestyle: should their next foray turn out to not be profitable, they could always return to get more Shelonian electronics with which to try again.
*****
By the time Xanthus’ ship landed on Wayward, Mikal was thoroughly sick of the malicious entity that had taken residence in it, as well as of the vessel’s grumpy crew.
Being out of his body had proved to be an interesting and valuable experience, especially since he had Xoraya as his guide for the intricacies of the bodiless state, but being, nevertheless, pent up in the confines of the space vehicle, had been frustrating. He and Xoraya had tried to study the amorphous consciousness that was penning their minds on the ship, determined as they were to outwit it, and its ilk, as soon as was possible. However, they had not had much luck; the entity seemed capable of evading their mental probing, retreating into the cracks of the physical body of the ship whenever their prying seemed to be getting somewhere.
Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers Page 19