Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers

by Helena Puumala

  “Now, of course, you Kati, and those who visited Crystoloria with you, are under our protection, even as Zeke and Darla were. And because I’m with you, I can extend the protection to others who join forces with you. Thus, I am, indeed quite useful to you, above and beyond my main reason for coming along on this trip—and it is perfectly possible that what happened to Zeke and Darla may, in some fashion, be connected to the blight which your crew, and others, are trying to eliminate from the galaxy.”

  “Don’t tell me that you and yours somehow manipulated me and my crew into coming to Crystoloria,” Kati said, shaking her head.

  She had thought that Darla’s offer of information had been purely serendipitous. As had been the notion of using the lace crystal as a method to cement the crew’s identities as Free Traders. She really did not like the notion of being a puppet, dancing on someone else strings, whether the string-pullers were human or not.

  Something of that distaste must have shown on her face.

  “Don’t forget, Kati,” Llon said very carefully, looking at her full in the face, “that all is connected.” He smiled. “The Planetary Spirits gossip; the Fiddler’s Green exits in some form or another for everyone. In some sense, every living creature is a puppet on a string; in other senses, not a single one is anything of the sort. You make your decisions; you have always made your own decisions—without exception. Remember that, now, and always.”

  What exactly was he saying? Kati’s head swam. Then she took hold of herself—this was not the time to go into the nooks and crannies of meaning that the Watcher was implying. She had work to do in the present; much depended on her ability keep her head on straight, and on doing what needed to be done.

  Llon smiled.

  “See?” he said. “You do get it. You can always be counted on to understand.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Mosse the Mage stormed into Gorsh’s office disturbing the conference Gorsh was having with his Overseer.

  “Get those girls out of the cellars!” he shouted, and banged his fist on the fancy wooden desk. “I don’t know what the female shits are doing but they’re disturbing the Demonic Creature big time! How the hell am I supposed to do anything with the Demon when it’s spitting at me one moment, and trying to crawl into a crevasse the next?”

  Gorsh gave the younger man a withering look. He did not like having his underlings come raging into his office, and even less when they accompanied their ire with demands.

  “I thought that I brought you in to be the Magic Man,” he snapped. “And you rush in here to tell me that you can’t handle a couple of girls? Are you sure that it’s the girls affecting the Demon? Maybe it’s just gotten tired of obeying you?”

  Mosse shut his lips into a thin line. He was not about to tell the Slaver that he actually had no power over the Demonic Creature. He had got the position with Gorsh by pretending that he could command the being; since up until now his expectations of it, and its behaviour had pretty well amounted to the same thing, there had been no problem. It had seemed to have thrived on Mosse’s sadistic practises with the girls that Gorsh had allowed him to take into his living quarters. They all had been young and very frightened, and had allowed him to perform whatever sex acts he wanted to, on their bodies, without fighting back. Fortunately for them, Mosse was not a very imaginative man, and his repertoire was not very broad, so the past ones had all lived to go back to Milla Gorsh’s tuber patch, relieved to be out in the fresh air, but probably infected with a simmering hatred of men.

  The latest girl had started showing an independent spirit, to the Mage’s surprise, since Shyla and Jaqui had arrived in the room holding the three comatose bodies and Murra. Mosse had assumed that the older girls were somehow influencing the younger one. How they were doing it was beyond him, however; they were never welcomed into his living quarters, where the other girl remained. And the Demonic Creature had grown restive and oddly-behaved lately, too, although Mosse would not have cared about that as long as it did what Gorsh wanted it to do, which was to contain the mental essences of the Lizard people, whose astral bodies were able to leave their physical forms while they were under the drug that Gorsh used on them, and the Federation Peace Officer who had been brought in with the Lizard Lady. The Demon’s murk constrained the boy with the ESP powers, as well, but he was of no consequence as far as Mosse could tell; Gorsh only kept him with the Lizards because the Lizard man had refused to work if he did not have the boy to keep him company.

  Not that the Lizard man had been doing much work lately. Gorsh had not been taking his slave-procuring trips; things had grown somewhat difficult with his off-world businesses lately, from what little gossip drifted down to the cellars for Mosse to hear. He had lost much of his source of the drug which he favoured for controlling the people he snatched, and apparently, at the same time he had also lost an easy, and a lucrative market for the slaves. Because his slaves could not be traced to their home worlds, he had been able to sell them on some renegade Federation planet where the rich people wanted to keep slaves, while also retaining the advantages of Federation membership. But someone had caught on to what was going on, and the Federation had stopped the practise, abruptly and mercilessly, quite simply freeing every slave on the planet. Mosse had no opinion on the matter, other than that it was to his advantage if Gorsh was busy, and bringing in coin and goods from off-world. The Mage had a freer hand in the Citadel cellars when his employer was busy doing business elsewhere.

  Gorsh sighed as he looked at the handsome man’s pinched face. The fellow was not nearly as attractive with a grouchy look, as he was without it. Well, maybe he could humour the Mage; there was no harm in it. Besides, he was missing Jaqui, although she certainly was not nearly as sexy as a brunette as she had been as a fiery red-head. But with the girl’s hair brown, maybe he could pretend that he was with Kati of Terra when he took her...but, no. Some things—and people—could not be substituted for, and Kati was one of those.

  “All right, find Tere and take him down to bring the girls up,” he said to the Mage. “Tell him to bring them here to my office. Now get going. Can’t you see that I’m busy with running my holdings?”

  Mosse was surprised that it was so easy. Now he just had to find Tere—who was he anyway? He ransacked his brain—oh, yes, Tere was one of the youths who had come down with Shyla to look after the comatose bodies. He had been the only one left after Shyla and Jaqui had pulled off their escape attempt; the other youth had been sent off on loan to some Councillor whose favour Gorsh needed to curry.

  *****

  “Gorsh wants Jaqui and Shyla to go to his office.”

  Tere had persuaded Mosse to let him approach the girls alone in the back room. It had been easier to do than Tere had expected; the Mage seemed preoccupied, in addition to his usual spite and moroseness. He seemed to have no experiments going on in the lab; no caged animal was being tortured, apparently. There were no dead creatures around, either; this surprised Tere since he was used to, at the very least, having to walk by a partly dissected corpse of some rodent on his way to and from the back room.

  “I’d wondered how long it would take him to want me in his back room, again,” Jaqui snapped. “I guess I should be grateful that it took him as long as it did. But what does he want with Shyla? Is he sending her, after all, to that creepy old man? I had hoped that he had given up on that idea.”

  Tere shrugged.

  “I have no idea what he wants with either of you,” he said. “I didn’t even see him. Mosse came and got me, and told me that I was to come and bring you girls to Gorsh’s office. I persuaded him to stay in his lab while I talked to you; I know that you two don’t much like him, and would probably have made a fuss if he’d tried to boss you around—which he would have, for sure.”

  Tere noticed that the boy, Murra, was looking at him with lively interest. Murra had been cheerier since the girls had returned from their aborted escape attempt; Tere could not quite understand why. Perhaps
the girls’ presence had lightened the atmosphere in the back room—it was a fact that the place seemed less murky, somehow—and Murra was reacting to that. He hoped that their leaving again would not adversely affect the boy; Tere had developed a fondness for the ESPer who communicated with the Lizard people, even though he did look kind of strange.

  “Mosse came and got you.” Jaqui made a face. “I wonder if he was complaining about our presence to Gorsh, although I fail to see why he would care where we are. Does he think that we as women are polluting the atmosphere of these cellars?”

  “Wouldn’t put it past him,” Tere replied. “Though I think that you two have been brightening the air, at least in this room, rather than polluting it.”

  “Maybe Mosse thinks that what you experience as brightening, is pollution,” said Murra, grinning impishly.

  “You’ve got a point there,” Tere agreed. “But I have to get the ladies up to Gorsh’s office whether I like it or not. So, please, Jaqui and Shyla, collect your things into your bags, and let’s get going.”

  The two began to do as requested.

  “Don’t worry girls,” Murra said cryptically. “What we planned will be done.”

  *****

  Mikal watched as the jini slipped into a motionless contemplative pose which it utilized when it communicated with the Planetary Spirit which had birthed it, and the Wise Woman who had acted as the midwife to that birth. The Cellar Creature was helpless in the face of that communion, although it was perfectly capable of preventing any other type of mental contact with the outside world. Its helplessness infuriated it, perhaps because the jini’s existence made it impossible for it to keep some of the positivity of the Planetary Spirit from invading the space that it had claimed for itself.

  Mikal had occasionally wondered if the Creature had informed Mosse the Mage of the intruder in the cellars. He rather doubted it; the Mage and the Creature, from what little he had been able to observe, did not actually interact much, outside of the way Mosse fed the Creature with his emotions, especially when he was playing games with the girl he kept in his rooms. And Mikal, in his astral form stayed out of those rooms—he had made only brief forays there to determine what the Mage was up to, and how his victim was faring—because the handsome man’s behaviour infuriated him, and he did not want to feed the Cellar Creature with his own negative emotions. The worst thing about being out-of-body, he had decided, was the inability to affect the physical world in a direct fashion. It would have been a pleasure to have grabbed the Mage with his Corps-trained hands and arms and fight him down to the cement floor, and then tie him into a package to be delivered to Federation justice.

  He had bigger fish to catch, however. Gorsh was somewhere in the up-above world, ruling over half a city, called Salamanka, apparently. And trying to extend his hold on Wayward, even as his enterprises off-world had begun to unravel. And Kati was somewhere on Wayward, too, trying to drum up support for the enterprise of capturing Gorsh and his minions, and taking them to face trial in the Federation Halls of Justice. The last word that the jini had relayed, had said that Llon had been in touch with the Planetary Spirit that dwelt in and around the capital city of the Continent Nord—which was the continent they were on—a city called Strone. Llon had affirmed that Kati and Lank were with him, along with two new recruits to The Spacebird Two’s crew. Outside of the fact that they were both women, Llon had not gone into details about the recruits, other than to say that both were very “usefully talented”.

  The Wise Woman in the river valley of Salamanka, and the Nature Spirit with which she dealt, assured the back room dwellers, through the jini, that help would be sent to Jaqui and Shyla at ground level. Seleni was trying to work out how to do that, while the jini would stay in the cellars with the captives. Jaqui had said that she was prepared to return to Gorsh’s bed if doing so helped the cause; her evident determination to endure, and to improve things, made Mikal think of Joaley, Kati’s travelling partner on Vultaire, who had hinted at going through ordeals to set a person’s teeth on edge, during her circuitous trip to Lamania’s Second City from her home world. Joaley had done well for herself in the end: she had been a City Peace Officer when she had joined Kati’s Team, and presently she was at The Star Federation Peace Officer Corps Academy, learning all the things that Mikal himself had been taught there. Jaqui, he thought, had the potential to do as well; her concern for the more naive Shyla was one of the admirable things about her.

  Shyla was the worry. Mikal had no idea from where, or when, the girl had been snatched. She seemed much more childish than Kati had been when he had first encountered her. Kati, of course, had had the benefit of the Granda node, which with its nasty proclivities, was one of the goads for her to quickly develop a high level of sophistication of thought. Shyla didn’t have even an ordinary node to help her; what purpose Gorsh had had in mind for her, Mikal knew not. But now the Slaver had offered her for a year to a man apparently vicious and perverted, a man who wanted a virgin to toy with, and if Mikal had not already been raging at Gorsh, this would have been a goad enough.

  He had to remind himself to control his emotions; the cellars where the Creature fed on such feelings, were not the place to indulge fury. He and the others in the back room were out to shut the thing down, not feed it. He sighed mentally—again—as he sensed the Wise Woman’s eyes on his astral form through the jini. She wanted him to cool it, he knew, vaguely wondering what the woman could see. Was his astral presence an angry red to her sight, an angry red, bleeding energy into the Cellar Creature?

  “She understands,” the jini communicated, “that this is hard for you precisely because your instincts are right. If you were free, we could use your anger as a tool with which to fight the Slaver. But you are a captive here, so you have to work within the limitations of the situation.”

  Wise words, but tough to put into practise, for a man of action which is what he considered himself to be. But, hey, no-one was quitting the fight! He would do his best to work in an unfamiliar environment, even as others were doing their part in differing circumstances, some of them, perhaps, just as difficult for the particular individual, as his were to him.

  One of the really positive results of the jini’s arrival, and Murra and Xoraya agreed about it, had been that Xanthus Hsiss had taken heart from the development. He was spending less time hiding within the confines of his physical body, and had begun to take pleasure in the presence of his wife. She was encouraging him to try to think of ways by which the four of them and the jini could erode the Cellar Creature’s dark dominion further, and he had quit protesting that he had already thought of everything possible in the years past, and none of his ideas had worked. Mikal and Murra often left them to it, judging that after a long separation, it was good for a married couple to spend time with one another, even if the contact was only mental.

  While the two young women had been sharing confidences, or just gossiping, Mikal had taken it upon himself to learn as much about ESP as he could from Murra. He recalled that Murra had been Kati’s first teacher on the subject, and Kati had been impressed by the boy’s ability to pass important lessons on to her, without ever being condescending or unkind. Now Mikal had the opportunity—nay, a need—to take advantage of this knowledge and talent, and he found himself amazed by how much Murra’s Institute Mentors, his one-time teachers, had known. Probably, Mikal mused, he was getting almost as good an education into what he and Murra laughingly referred to as General Psychics, as he could have at a Shelonian School devoted to comparable Arts.

  The jini, like a trickster god of sorts, often disappeared from the room when its human companions were busy. It, later, would return, mentally cackling about something or other. No doubt, it was following instruction from its parent, and its midwife, to erode the Cellar Creature’s strength as much as it could. It was, apparently, irritating the Mage while doing so; Mikal had seen the jini chortle when Mosse would come into the back room for any reason.

  �
�He’s an idiot!” the trickster had mind-snarled after his first probing of the Mage. “He was tossed out from the Shaman School! He can’t even sense my presence, that’s how useless he is at Magic! He’s hiding behind the Cellar Creature, and thinks that he is powerful as long as he keeps feeding it! The fool!”

  *****

  Mosse was not in sight when Tere and the girls crossed the laboratory.

  “Sieur Mage has made himself scarce,” Jaqui sniffed as she looked about the room.

  “Maybe you better not be snotty, Jaqui,” Shyla said uneasily. “The walls have ears, around here.”

  “Yeah, but I doubt that the walls will tell Mosse anything,” Jaqui shot back. “You heard what Murra said. He said that he didn’t think that Mosse and the Cellar Creature were on very friendly terms. Mosse’s pretending that he can control it so as to keep in good with Gorsh, and to keep Gorsh feeding his tastes in perversion.”

  They had agreed to keep Tere out of the loop involving the jini, the three astral forms in the back room (which Jaqui and Shyla couldn’t see anyway), and the Wise Woman and her Nature Spirit in the River Valley. The less he knew, the less he could reveal; Jaqui was thoroughly in agreement with this sentiment. He was Shyla’s friend, having been snatched from her home world the same time she had been, and because of that Jaqui extended to him the solicitousness that she felt toward Shyla. Which reminded her that they were going to have to figure out a way to keep Shyla out of Koruse’s hands. Rosa had told Jaqui some disturbing stories about Councillor Koruse and young, virginal women, while she had dyed the girl’s hair brown; they had made her own fate in Gorsh’s bed seem tame. At least Gorsh’s tastes, when it came to sex, were pretty run-of-the-mill; he was content to merely use Jaqui’s body in the most perfunctory fashion. He did not even expect her to pretend to like it, merely to be available.

  The Wise Woman and her Nature Spirit had promised to help Shyla avoid Koruse; that was what Murra’s cryptic remark was about. What they could do, Jaqui was not sure, but Murra had mentioned that the Federation Agent who was also flitting about the room in his astral form, had made a suggestion or two, the jini had passed them to the Wise Woman, and she was taking them into consideration. Federation Agents were supposed to be resourceful, Jaqui knew, and Gorsh definitely had a hate on for this one. She hoped that Gorsh wouldn’t find out any time soon that the drug he was counting on to break the Agent’s resistance to his brain being mined of its Peace Officer Corps secrets, was actually doing no such thing. Instead it was enabling Mikal, that was the Agent’s name, to have an awareness of his surroundings in his mental form, even while his body was lying comatose, on a gurney.