“So do I,” Nabbish agreed. “But better safe than sorry. And Marna Naez would have my neck if I didn’t outfit you properly for the job.”
Everything was ready at the Gurt Resort when the night had fallen, and the Local Nature Spirit came to report to Mikal, Kati, and Murra that the “mean men” had left the keep for the night, turning on their defenses on the way out. Mikal, Kati, and Jaqui climbed into the flits, and turned the flit coms to a single channel, speaking a few words to one another, to make certain that the communications were in order. It was necessary to have them operational since Jaqui, not having ESP, would be depending on them, as well as her considerable street smarts, and piloting skills.
“Once again,” Mikal said over the com, “I’m going down into the compound first. Kati is going to psychically guide me to Lume who will translate to the other boys for me, since I haven’t had enough experience with the boys’ language to have facility with it, in spite of my noded state. Jaqui, have your flit computer map the route I take; you will be following it exactly. I’ll take five boys on, and climb back up, and take them to the Resort, and drop them off there, for Murra and the others to look after. Then I will return for the next load.”
“I’ll go down after you, as we planned,” Jaqui said. “I’ll talk with Lume who should be expecting me, and pick up another load of five. And I’ll follow your route, Mikal, exactly, on the way up, too. And once I’ve landed the boys on the Resort, I’ll do the same thing again.”
“And I’ll be the one to make the last pick-up,” Kati said. “And Lume will be in that group of five.”
She could sense the presence of the Local Nature Spirit, encouraging and supporting her. For a brief moment she wondered what it was like to be Jaqui, unaware of all the feeling tones around, to which Kati had become accustomed in the time since her ESP had awakened. Jaqui didn’t even have a node; yet she was nevertheless extremely capable, and fearless. Or, at least, she did not allow her fears to stop her from doing what she had decided to do.
The process of rescue seemed to proceed remarkably well. Gorsh and Yaroli had behaved like cheap bastards would, even as Mikal had calculated. There appeared to be plenty of room in the geographical centre of the compound, to get the first flit down without triggering any perimeter alerts. Kati, hovering at a safe distance, followed with her ESP as Mikal put the craft down, entered the building, and found the sleeping children. She helped Mikal identify Lume; Mikal woke the boy up and eased his fear and startlement, as only Mikal could.
“Mikal needs to have children,” Kati found herself thinking. “He’d make a great father, considering the natural rapport he has with kids.”
No time to dwell on that.
Five boys were woken up and led into the flyer; then Mikal gave Lume a last reassurance, and took his craft up. As soon as he was on his way to the Resort, Jaqui followed his route in her flit. Kati felt the Nature Spirit touch her, and offer her a view of Jaqui’s actions. She was grateful; being able to see the girl’s efficient handling of the situation eased some of her nervousness. Perhaps the Nature Spirit was canny enough to have realized that.
Then it was her turn to go down, and she did. She gave Lume a fierce hug and promised that she would be the one to pick him up as one of the last group of five.
“I knew you’d come, Kati,” Lume told her. “I only needed to wait.”
*****
It was during Kati`s second trip that all hell broke loose.
She was just settling the last five boys, including Lume, into the flit, not very comfortably since the flits are small craft, when the Nature Spirit warned her that there was a flyer speeding from the direction of Suderie, towards the old keep.
“The mean men are on it,” the Spirit informed her.
Kati pressed the hatch button on shut, a shudder running through her.
“Is something the matter, Kati?” Lume asked, noting her agitation.
“Yeah, Yaroli and Tarig are coming towards this place in a flyer,” Kati said, forgetting to “shield the children”. “We have to make tracks.”
“Let me have control,” said the Granda. “I’m much the better pilot of the two of us.”
Another split-second decision. The Monk was right of course. And Lume and his companions deserved the best shot she could give them.
“I won’t be myself for a while,” she said to the boys, no doubt mystifying them totally. And mentally:
“Nature Spirit, please let Mikal know what’s up, and that I’m ceding control to The Monk.”
She sat aside mentally, while the old reprobate took control of her body, and the flit shot up, almost vertically, and at a speed that had the boys bodies digging into whatever they were sitting on. She vaguely heard their surprised cries, but had no time for that. Most of her attention was on what the Granda was doing, and the flyer which was already frighteningly close.
“They’re within range of a trigger—let’s hope we’re high enough,” the Monk subvocalized, and then the ground underneath the flit burst into flames.
What saved them, and without doubt the Granda had taken this into his calculations, was that they were up in the air, and the flash bombs were designed to do damage at the ground level. Even with the number of them going off at once, the flames did not reach as high as The Monk had taken the flit—though the air currents through which they had to fly buffeted them crazily, and The Monk had to use all his skill to fight them.
The Granda was furious with the “mean men”, Kati could tell.
“Let me keep control a little longer,” he told Kati, when they made it into relative clarity. “I’m going to take a shot at their flyer; they won’t be expecting that, and if we cripple them, Mikal, Jaqui and Nabbish can pick them up at their leisure, as if they were damn lazy Suderie cops!”
Clearly The Monk had not been impressed by Muggs and his cohorts.
Probably, if Kati had not been so badly shaken up by what had happened, she never would have gone along with the Granda’s notion. But she was in no shape to fight with The Monk, and the flit careened towards the flyer at top speed (faster than Kati had realized it could go—how had the Granda known about whatever overdrive he was using?), dove under it and sent a burst of laser shots into the flyer’s undercarriage. Then The Monk turned the flit around to return to the Resort. All this, apparently, took place before Yaroli and Tarig had even managed to activate whatever defenses or weapons they had on board!
“They have no idea what they’re doing,” The Monk subvocalized contemptuously. “They should have stuck to manufacturing and selling carpets.”
She got her body back when the flit landed. Nabbish was waiting for her and the boys to tumble out; ready to take the flit up again.
“Mikal was swearing at you,” he said to her as he climbed into the pilot’s seat. “We heard it over the house com, after he took off like a madman, with Jaqui following him.”
“When you talk to him, tell him it wasn’t me doing aerial acrobatics; it was the Granda. I think that I have to admit that, this time, my bad boy saved all six of our lives!”
*****
“Do you mean that we can stay outside in the sunshine all day long, if we want to?” Lume asked Kati the next morning, when she had suggested that the boys might want to play in the garden of the Gurt Resort, and catch some rays which would be good for their health.
“Yes,” answered Kati, “and I’m going to see if I can’t find a sunny place for you boys to stay, even after you become Wards of the Federation, or whatever it will be that you are going to be.”
Murra smiled at her over Lume’s head.
“The best thing of all is that there won’t be any more boys snatched from my home world,” he said. “You have kept your promise.”
“Always assuming that Maryse’s recruits do a good job picking up the rest of the snatchees,” Kati responded, keeping her tone light.
“They will,” said Murra, sounding sure of himself. Kati thought that he must have don
e some communicating with Mikal.
Mikal, at that moment, was on the Resort’s communications console, talking to the Federation Officials who had arrived in Strone, and the Continent Nord authorities.
Cassi came by with bowlfuls of fruit snacks for the boys.
“The media people, including Klenn and Minna, are putting together a great vid,” she said, as she passed the snacks around. “They’ll be showing it all over the planet for quite some time to come, I bet. And the great thing about it is that it’s about real life; there’s not a smidgen of fiction to it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Mikal was angry enough with Yaroli and Tarig who had been locked into the Resort’s empty root cellar (at a suggestion from the Lady Caretaker) that he turned uncharacteristically haughty when the Master Law Enforcer Muggs called to demand that they be released into his care.
“There’s not a chance of that,” he snapped on the communications console, to Nabbish’s relief. He had been the one to whom Muggs had made his case first, and not knowing what to do, and how far his authority extended, had deferred the matter to the Federation Agent.
“What do you mean?” Muggs had asked belligerently. “I have the law enforcing authority in Suderie, and here, on the Continent Sud, there is no higher enforcer. I’ll send a police flyer to the Gurt Resort, and you’ll hand over those prisoners.”
Mikal wondered how Yaroli and Tarig had got word to Muggs about their situation. Of course, the story of their capture had already hit vid-feeds, and Yaroli might have paid Muggs enough in bribes that he thought it was worth his while to help them out.
“There are no law enforcers on the Continent Sud, other than your damn self in Suderie, and those who lick your boots,” he spat out. “Therefore, I’m the law on this Continent; as a Star Federation Operative, I step into the breach, and I’m taking those two to the Continent Nord, where there now is a Federation presence.
“If you have a problem with that, Master Law Enforcer Muggs, call my superior in The Second City of Lamania, one Maryse r’ma Darien.”
He cut the connection.
“Whoa,” said Kati who had been listening to him. “I don’t need ESP to tell you’re boiling over, Mikal. Although I’d like to hear the conversation if that fool does call Maryse. She’d put him in his place in about two seconds.”
“Yeah, well.” Mikal gave her a long stare. “It’s getting a little bit tiresome, having to rely on your crazy node to keep people safe, because the criminals are so quick to resort to death-dealing shit. Yaroli and Tarig are just lucky I’m basically a peaceful man; I have refrained from beating them to pulp, and I’ll go on refraining.”
“Sweetheart, you need a vacation in the worst way,” Kati said. “As do I.”
She grinned wryly.
“The only one who doesn’t, is the Granda,” she added. “Yesterday’s activity was a big thrill for that one—if I was willing, he’d repeat it in a minute.”
“Well, we better get ready to take the prisoners to Strone to meet the Federation Officials,” Mikal said. “They were employing child slaves, and their flash-bomb booby trap was reckless endangerment at a minimum, but more likely, attempted murder. Therefore I am perfectly within rights to turn them over to Federation justice.”
“At least he’ll have a couple of live ones to turn over,” muttered The Monk to Kati. “Not just three dead bodies.”
For The Spacebird Two had returned to Strone, towing Xanthus’ crippled ship behind it.
*****
The first Federation ship to have arrived on Wayward had brought there, among other people, Mikal’s colleague Arya r’pa Dorral.
“So you’re not ordering around Torrones Warriors, this time,” Mikal said to Arya, when he and Nabbish turned Yaroli and Tarig over to the Federation ship at the Space Port.
“Right. It’s a nice change, and Mikal, I gather that I have your Team to thank for it,” Arya, a slight, big-headed Lamanian, replied.
Kati, trailing behind the prisoner escort, recalled how shocked the Vultairians had been to see this tiny woman in control of the huge, muscular Warriors, bristling with a nasty assortment of weapons which they always carried. Not one of those big men and women would have dreamed of using their weapons or muscles without Arya’s okay. The Torrones had a deep respect for Lamanians, and for the fairness for which they were known throughout the Star Federation. And Arya was an excellent example of the best of Lamania, which was why she had Maryse r’ma Darien’s trust, and Mikal’s respect.
“I’m in for it with the Federation judiciary,” Mikal sighed to his colleague. “Lank, Chrysalia, the Crystolorian, and their assorted companions are back, I gather, although I haven’t talked to them in person, yet. I do understand, however, that they did perform what amounts to an execution of Gorsh, his wife Milla, and their very nasty Crystolorian associate, Chrush. Chrysalia had orders from the Elders of her home world to kill Chrush, but the deed was, nevertheless, done on my watch, so I am responsible.”
“Maryse filled me in, insofar as she knew the details. She and I will do our best to demonstrate that your actions, or non-actions, were justifiable under the circumstances. We’ll need to call witnesses, though, the more the better. I sure hope that this Chrysalia will come and explain her side of the story—it sounds like she’s pretty key to what happened.”
*****
The next few weeks slipped by in a whirl of activity, all of it necessary before the Team could consider its work done, but none of it brimming with the danger and the excitement of events rushing along in the middle of an assignment.
At first Kati spent time helping out with the ex-slave boys, since she was the one, alongside Murra, who had a good grasp of the language the former slaves spoke. None of them, outside of Lume, had been implanted with the translation nodes, and though Mikal could have picked up the language quickly, since he was noded, and an ESPer, he was needed elsewhere. The Waywardian authorities, both on the Continent Nord, and in Suderie (in spite of Muggs), had apparently decided that they were in need of the Federation Agent’s knowledge and expertise, and Mikal obliged them, taking the opportunity to enlighten anyone who would listen, about the latest in Lamanian theories of government. Kati could not complain about that, but it left her, once the children had been transported to Strone from the Gurt Resort, playing a large role in re-introducing them into existence which did not involve knotting carpets.
Their different tasks during the aftermath kept the lovers separated a lot of the time. They could be in touch mentally, of course, but Kati found out quickly, and with some surprise, that it was not enough for her any more, although it was lovely. She was a young, healthy woman, and Mikal had aroused in her something that she could only term, giggling to herself, as lust. She wanted to spend physical time with him, and she wanted a certain amount of that time to be in a bedroom—with the door closed to all intruders. Mikal, obviously welcomed her desire for him, and did cater to it, whenever the opportunity arose.
“We’ll have lots more time for this back home on Lamania,” he said one morning when they had spent the night in their Strone hotel room together, a circumstance that did not seem to arise often enough. (Kati had moved out from Max’s city dwelling to make room for the boys who were getting excellent care there from Sammas, and the rest of the staff.) “And it looks like I’ll be stuck there for some time. We could take the opportunity to get married and start that stage of our lives—maybe even think about children of our own, if you’re ready for that.”
Kati laughed. She added:
“I sense the Waywardian Nature Spirits pushing me in that direction; it’s kind of like they’re saying: ‘You like dealing with the ex-slave boys, and you’d make a great mother to your own children’. It sounds sort of silly when I say it out loud, but it does seem real to me.”
She opened her eyes wide, to gaze at Mikal.
“I suppose that’s what happened to Xoraya,” she said. “The Nature Spirits pushed her into heat. I don�
�t think that she was expecting it to happen for quite some time yet.”
She looked so lovely that Mikal leaned down to kiss her.
“I wouldn’t put it past those playful entities,” he said, caressing her. “I can hear the Lady of the Lake laughing at us right now, and she’s pretty far away from Strone, at least in simple physical terms. I think that she’s messing with my hormones, too, which would be delightful, except that I have a meeting with the Mayor of Suderie, and a handful of the Members of the Great Council, in an hour, and need to be showered, dressed, and breakfasted before then.”
Kati kicked him on a shin.
“Go, man, go! Go do what you must, before I turn into a Lizard-woman in heat, and demand that you stay with me, and never dare to leave me again!”
Mikal grabbed his robe, and, laughing, headed for the bathroom.
*****
Llon had not been on The Spacebird when it arrived on Wayward.
“He said that his work was finished, now that Chrush was dead,” Lank explained. “He had to go and try to help him and the Gorshes in Shadowland, wherever that may be. It’s his duty, he said, since he had been instrumental in sending them there. Then he just wasn’t there the next morning, nor were any of his things.
“Don’t ask me to explain it,” he added. “I’m no expert when it comes to stuff like that.”
“His testimony would have been useful at the trial Mikal will have to face,” Arya said. “But there’s a whole shipful of the rest of you. It’ll probably suffice.”
Mikal had rounded up the people who had been on The Spacebird during its fateful voyage, for a debriefing which included Kati, and Arya.
“You do realize that those asses tried to destroy our ship, and all of us with it?” Chrysalia asked, an edge to her voice. “Did Xanthus Hsiss explain to you how he saved us?”
“He told me that he yanked your ship ahead in time, just enough to miss the big blast they shot at you,” Mikal said. “He had worn himself out pretty badly during his servitude to Gorsh, so the effort was almost more than he could manage—I gathered from what he was saying that time-shifting large objects is not trivial—but he had taken on the task of safeguarding you and he was not about let Gorsh and Chrush kill you.”
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