Showdown on the Planet of the Slavers

by Helena Puumala

  “Oh, you people are here because he’s snatching and selling slaves.” The voluble woman again. “But you don’t have a Warship, or Big Black Warriors with you, shooting, and whipping, and destroying people, and the countryside around them.”

  “That’s what we were told would happen if the Federation came to look into things,” added the portly man. “They’d unleash these crazy, black-skinned warrior beasts on us, who’d kill, main, and destroy indiscriminately.”

  Mikal gritted his teeth.

  “No, we don’t have a Torrones Warship with us,” he said. “Although you have it all wrong when it comes to Torrones Warriors, and they’d be insulted by your attitude. The Torrones are extremely disciplined soldiers, and although they like to strut and look dangerous, no Torrones Warrior who expects to keep his job will shoot a civilian, unless ordered to by a Lamanian Commander. And Lamanians do not kill civilians—or soldiers.

  “I, for one, am half-Lamanian, and I have taken an oath to preserve sentient life, to perform my job without any killing done on my watch.”

  “And I’ve got the worst feeling that I won’t be able to prevent all killing this time,” he added subvocally to the Lady of the Lake who was surrounding him. “Which will mean months—maybe years—long investigation and penance on Lamania and the Federation Space Station.”

  The Lake Spirit nuzzled him comfortingly; it felt like he had a jini around his neck.

  “However, what I need now, from you people,” Mikal nodded towards the Waywardians, “is a contingent of persons to go into the above-ground levels of the Citadel, and harry everyone who may be there, out and as far away from the building as you can persuade them to go. And when that’s been done, get everyone else in the surrounding area away also. Head out of the city, or to the other side of the river, at least.”

  He had the sense that the Spirit of the River Valley would offer some protection from whatever blast might come, and therefore the south side of the Salamanka River would be relatively safe.

  “Meanwhile, Llon, Elli, and I are going down to the dungeons to help get the people there out. Some of us and a bunch of the resident youngsters are down there already, but I’ve been told that a lot of the prisoners there are in bad shape, and need help to get out of the building.”

  “An evacuation, then,” said the portly man. “We can manage it, can’t we Carina?” He looked at the voluble woman.

  “Of course,” she replied. “Though you better get the men to handle the barracks rooms. Those blockheads won’t listen to a woman, and they think Gorsh would never leave them to die. What fools!”

  “Can anything be done to prevent the blast?” the man then asked, as he turned towards the Citadel doors.

  “Somebody’s working on it,” Mikal replied. “I’m planning to check on his progress on my way down to the dungeons.”

  *****

  The first of the rescued prisoners had reached the level on which the weapons cache was, by the time Mikal, Llon and Elli made it down there. Their young helpers greeted the threesome gladly, and told Mikal that, yes, Nabbish had finished using the sonic cutter which had been very useful in speeding up the opening of doors and the undoing of restraints. Mikal groaned at the word “restraints”; Xoraya, formlessly shepherding the young workers and their charges, sniffed mentally at him: “What did you expect?”

  Mikal asked Llon to pass the word to Nabbish that he would be needing the sonic cutter in order to get into the weapons storage vault. Xoraya slipped in there formlessly to consult with her husband; it was wise to make sure that the use of the cutter on the door and its lock would not, of itself, trigger any explosions. Mikal agreed with her precaution, although he rather thought that Gorsh and Chrush would not have considered it very likely for any enemies of theirs to make it to the door of the vault with a powerful cutter.

  As it turned out, Xanthus was of his opinion, and by the time Nabbish had sent the sonic cutter to Mikal, the Agent was ready to use it. He ended up spending an unexpectedly long time breaking through the metal; Gorsh must have had a new, reinforced door put in when he decided to turn the room into a weapons storage vault. Mikal was reminded of how the Cellar Creature had resisted his entry as an astral form in the company of jini number one.

  “Gorsh went to a fair bit of trouble actually,” he muttered to Xoraya who was following his progress in her bodiless state, “to keep his weapons safe and hidden. Was he protecting them from his enemies, or from disgruntled workers and chattels, I wonder?”

  “I would expect it was from disgruntled employees and slaves,” Xoraya replied. “If I was a slave-dealer, I’d watch my back pretty carefully.”

  “You are, no doubt, right about that,” Mikal agreed.

  “I’m keen to see what progress Xanthus has made in figuring out how Gorsh and Chrush arranged to effect the final bang, should such become necessary. He must have a need of a pair of physical hands to sift through physical stuff. Although, to be perfectly honest, I wish Lank was here to give a hand. He’s more of an expert in this sort of a thing than I can ever hope to be.”

  “Just do exactly what Xanthus tells you to do,” Xoraya suggested. “He’s pretty good at figuring things out.”

  “He should be. He’s an Xeonsaur, after all. Way beyond me.”

  Finally he had the lock off, and the door mechanism responding to his touch. He entered the vault, after taking one last look at the people being helped up the stairs, only a couple of metres from where he had stood.

  Damn! The situation with the sick and the maimed was upsetting! And it was dangerous! How much time did they have? What was Gorsh up to at the moment? And Chrush? And where was Kati? Had she arrived at the Citadel compound yet? And how was he going to keep her safe now, when he was needed right where he was, trying to help Xanthus figure out Gorsh’s booby trap?

  “Relax, Mikal, and concentrate on helping Xanthus,” Xoraya thought at him. “I’ll go and check out the situation up on the ground level. Lank’s flyer ought to be arriving any moment, and I don’t imagine that Kortone will be far behind. He has the shorter distance to travel.”

  *****

  Lank piloted the flyer into the area just as Gorsh, accompanied by Jaqui who he had called from the back room to be his walking companion, exited his office building. The Overseer had returned to his own office, to finish whatever paperwork he had there, and Chrush, presumably, had gone home, although Gosh could call him anytime using his node in conjunction with a pager that the old man carried. (The system did not work the other way—though it could have—the Slaver considered himself too important to be contacted willy-nilly. Only Milla could do that, and she very rarely did.)

  “Whose flyer is that?” Gorsh asked on sighting the vehicle. “It’s got some Strone Rental Agency logo on it, and nothing else.”

  Jaqui shrugged, although her heart took a leap. Was Mikal’s Team bringing forces into the Compound?

  Gorsh took an old-fashioned (pre-nodal) communicator from a tunic pocket and stopped to thumb its controls. Moments later it beeped and he spoke into it:

  “Morg, there’s an unknown flyer coming down near the Citadel. Do you know what’s going on?”

  Morg, Jaqui knew was the head of the barracks crew—the goons. They were housed in the Citadel, and had a high tolerance for the murk. But they were a bunch of miserable, vicious, misogynistic idiots, in her estimation. They did guard duty at times, although mostly, unless they were off on some long-term errand, they just hung around Salamanka annoying the productive people.

  “Damned if I do,” Morg’s reply came, and Jaqui refrained from snickering. Of course he didn’t know; the man was clueless except when it came to obeying his master, or to abusing people who did know what was what.

  “Some workers came into the Citadel a short while ago and said that we have to evacuate it,” Morg continued. “They said that it could go up in a big explosion, any time, and that the whole compound ought to be cleared of people before then.”

  �
��What the frig?”

  Gorsh stared at the little device in his hand. How could anyone possibly know that he and Chrush had wired the weapons stash to function as the bomb of final defence? It had been Chrush’s idea; he had not trusted Gorsh’s people. They were not committed enough to their Boss, is the way he had put it.

  “For all their easygoing ways, and their willingness to see people other than themselves be mistreated, they’re not exactly paragons of loyalty,” is what Chrush had said. “You need to be prepared, have a meaningful final threat to hold over their heads, should they ever decide to turn on you, and follow a different leader. The threat of killing every last one of them, and flattening the city, and much of the countryside, should work as a disincentive to rebellion. Besides, you’ve got the means; all you have to do is get the arms stash to blow up at your command. I can help to arrange it, but the way we do it, you can still go down there and retrieve weapons whenever you want to, so no purpose of yours will be compromised. And the murk Creature will help to keep the place safe and secret—though, if I were you, I’d still put in a sturdy door on that room, just to deter the stupider among your troops, should they get any silly ideas.”

  Gorsh had thought it a good idea, and had acted on it. Or had had Chrush act on it. Chrush had spread his little “echo crystals” around the vault, keying them to the one which was attached to a wrist band that the Boss Man wore at all times.

  Now, unthinkingly, he fingered the wrist band, although without uncovering its crystal, and Jaqui’s eyes opened wide for a second. She had wondered about that wrist band, when in bed with the naked Gorsh! He had never removed it, and she had wondered why. Now she suddenly understood, and her stomach did a somersault! The man could kill them all with a flick of a finger!

  Well, he was not suicidal so he was not going to do it while he was within the explosion’s reach. Mikal and his friends were probably trying to undo whatever Gorsh had arranged, even as she stood with him on the grass.

  Gorsh took a deep breath.

  “Never mind such nonsense—surely you don’t think that I’d arrange to destroy my own people?” he said into the communicator.

  “Well, maybe not you, Boss, but I wouldn’t put it past that crazy old man you keep hanging around, to pull off something like that behind your back,” came Morg’s answer.

  So Morg was not quite as stupid as Jaqui had always assumed! Chrush the Creep no doubt had his fingers in this pie—wait a second! She had to talk with Mikal, Lank, or Chrysalia! The crystal in Shyla’s shoulder—she had its like inside hers! Could crystals like that be somehow implicated in this business, with the one on the Boss’s wrist band being the master one, just like whatever crystal was used to trace the ones in the chattels’ bodies?

  That very notion was under discussion in the flyer which was just then landing on the grass in front of the Citadel. Kati had told the others about Mikal having gone down to the arms vault to try to help out-of-body Xanthus to figure out how the place had been booby-trapped, and to dismantle the trap, if at all possible. Since Chrush with a store of tiny lace crystal shards was implicated in the larger picture, Chrysalia had immediately zeroed in on him.

  “He has learned to tamper with the crystals,” she said flatly. “That much became obvious the moment I took that locator crystal out of Shyla’s shoulder. The resonance was all wrong, and in that case, harmonized with another one which must be embedded in Gorsh’s tracing equipment. One tracer crystal had been set to locate a whole slew of other crystals, the echo crystals. The same principle could easily enough have been employed in the arms vault: key a whole bunch of crystal bits to respond to just one, and spread the many among the weapons, while setting the master crystal in a spot convenient for either Chrush or Gorsh to reach. In an emergency, the master is activated, however they arranged to do that, and boom, the whole room goes up in explosions. And should someone find and destroy an echo crystal or two; well, there will still be lots left.”

  “Uhhuh,” said Kati. “I sure don’t like what you’re saying.”

  “If it’s Chrush who has the key crystal,” interjected Lank, “he won’t use it unless he himself is at a safe distance. He’ll do anything to stay alive.”

  Chrysalia gave him a look.

  “You’re darn right about that,” she said.

  “The same goes for Gorsh, too, I think,” Kati added. “Which means that whatever the key is, it’ll be portable.”

  “Probably something that one or the other of them carries on his body,” Chrysalia muttered.

  “So the fireworks won’t start until those two have left the scene,” said Lank. “Well, if they are around right now, I guess that means that we have a bit of time.”

  “Only we don’t know how much,” Chrysalia responded.

  “Time for what?” asked Gerr. “Shouldn’t we, the Waywardian Law-Enforcers just be marching to confront Gorsh, and tell him that he is under arrest for forcibly kidnapping and confining the guest of a local citizen? Isn’t that what we’re here to do?”

  “And then Mikal can step in and make the accusations about his breaking Federation laws on Human Trafficking,” Kati added. “Works for me, assuming that he allows himself to be arrested. Which is questionable. And it leaves Chrush out of the picture, and he’s played a major role in all this. A bigger role than the one Milla had.”

  She glanced into the back of the flyer where Madame Gorsh lay, tied up in a medical harness.

  “If it leaves Chrush free and intact, it doesn’t work for me,” Chrysalia stated flatly. “Besides, if he is not dealt with, it won’t be long until he’ll be collaborating with someone else in criminality involving small children. Have you asked yourself, Kati of Terra, why that old man allied himself with a slaver who was into procuring and selling children?”

  “You’re suggesting that the service that Gorsh provided him with, in return for all the communications wizardry, and keeping the Cellar Creature busy blocking certain kinds of communications, was children?” Kati asked carefully.

  Her quick glance at Chrush’s libris had suggested this notion to her, but her mind had recoiled from the thought.

  “What do you think, Lank?” she asked, with a sigh. “You absorbed the information in that libris. Does Chrysalia have something there?”

  “She has something there,” Lank said. “And I agree with her that Chrush must die.”

  Kati rubbed her face with her hands, as Lank opened the hatch of the flyer. What was happening to Mikal’s peaceful operation? Was there some way that she could still salvage it? Snare both Gorsh and Chrush, so that they could be forced to face Federation justice, alive, thus keeping Mikal’s oath intact?

  Once that was done, she and Mikal could do the mopping up of locating and freeing the slaves, including the ones in the carpet factory in Suderie.

  Or had events careened out of control, her control and Mikal’s, even as they had slipped out of Gorsh’s control, and Crush’s control, when she, Kati, had persuaded the Cellar Creature to go make friends with the Spirit Lady of the Lake?

  *****

  “Oh my goodness! We have to get you people somewhere safe, and looked after!”

  Kati was appalled by the appearances of the folk who had trickled up from the dungeons into the open air outside the Citadel.

  “Gerr, you can pilot the flyer, right?” she asked.

  At Gerr’s nod, she made a quick decision.

  “Let’s haul Milla out of there and into the Citadel somewhere—I don’t care where. Then we can fill the flyer with people and you, Gerr can fly them somewhere, south of the river would be the safest, I think. Is there a hospital, or a healing centre in the southern half of the city, does anyone know?”

  “There’s a large Health Centre, staffed by Healers and Medics south of the river,” responded an older, capable-seeming woman. “I can accompany the first flyerful, and show the location to the young man. But there are still people, the kids who have been helping the inhabitants of the dungeons
, tell me, down there who are in really bad shape. They’ve been hesitant to move them without equipment, especially since they have no medical training.”

  “Yikes! I’ll have to go down there and see what I can do for them,” Kati said. “Someone is going to have to take charge here. I can heal, but since I’ll have to work alone—well, the Nature Spirits will help me I’m sure—it’ll take some time, and I’ll be able to do only so much. So the ones up here will have to go to the Health Centre as is; let’s hope that they’ll find some satisfaction there.”

  She sensed Mikal’s mental presence, reflecting some urgency, and stopped to attend to him.

  “Kati! Lank’s with you, right? Can you send him to the weapons cache immediately? Xanthus and I need his help here.”

  “Lank, you’re wanted in the arms vault,” she shouted to the youth who was hauling out the trussed-up Milla from the flyer, to the amusement of some of the young people helping the ex-prisoners.

  “Hey, Madame Gorsh has got what was coming to her!” shouted one of the boys. “I guess none of us will have to worry about her tuber-patch anymore!”

  Milla opened up eyes blazing with hatred. They had stopped bleeding, even without Kati’s healing powers. Fortunately Gerr and Lank had covered her mouth when they had tied her up, so all the sound she could make was a mumble. Otherwise, Kati was certain, they would have had to listen to loud swearing.

  “Fine,” Lank replied. “I’ll toss this bundle in the room behind the lab, on my way. Xoraya will show me where to go—I can feel her presence, I can almost see her, as a matter-of-fact.”

  He was getting more psychic every day, Kati noted.

  Then he was gone, and Kati turned to Chrysalia:

  “Can you take charge while I go down into the dungeons to do some healing? With the murk gone, you ought to be able to get in touch with Mikal, if anything untoward happens, and I’ll be within reach, too, although I suspect that I’m going to be very busy.”