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CHAPTER 18

Once the Venture was safely inside the space debris that made up the very decorative but dangerous rings, and was able to move into orbit around Karoda, it was a case of finding the spaceport their cargo was consigned to. There was certainly no shortage of them, all eagerly broadcasting their wares and rates to the passing ship.

They would certainly be happy to have the business—or so they said. There were five surrounding a particularly jagged piece of geography. “The ring,” said Me’a. “The Karoda slaver base is somewhere in those mountains. They use all of them for landings. The mountains are full of caves, and most of the tracks go underground. Slaves are big money, more than most of the rest of Karoda’s industries and exports put together. They do have a lot of other businesses, everything from wine to rare minerals, but nothing that makes that sort of margin.”

“So: Karoda’s people support them?” asked the captain.

“Not really. The Karodese just believe in minding your own business. They don’t like anyone—least of all Iradalia—telling them what they can or can’t do. As I said, we looked into it as a base, at one time. The ‘tax’ that Iradalia would put on our ships transiting made it not worth it. Besides it is quite a dangerous place.”

“Dangerous in that they’ll shoot you?” asked Goth.

“Let us just keep it at ‘dangerous.’ They may shoot you if they don’t like you, or they feel you’re a threat. There are a number of vicious predatory animals and, as the smaller of the worlds in a binary pair, it has earthquakes and volcanos. And forests with plants that will kill the unwary, across much of it. If you want controlled and safe, go to Iradalia. Oh, and it has a season of torrential rain, and that’s the dry season. It’s quite pleasant when it is not raining.”

“Sounds like a nice place, except for the rain,” said Goth. “I better get out my bow.” She wasn’t joking either, Pausert knew. “I would have thought they would have shot all the dangerous beasts.”

Me’a gave a crack of laughter. “They do. But they breed more. They like having them out there. And it doesn’t rain all the time like on Vaudevillia. It just rains hard most afternoons, and then clears up. That’s in the tropics, but that’s also where most people live.”

The spaceport, when they landed, proved to be in the middle of a busy little settlement, which ended abruptly in jungle just beyond the last building. Various tracks led off under the trees. The tree leaves had a peculiar reflective shimmer to them, making the Leewit screw up her eyes. “I reckon I could do a lot of eye-fixing here,” she said.

“They’re odd-looking trees,” agreed Goth. “A bit like those on Lumajo, just even shinier.”

“They accumulate metals—aluminum and some others—in a microscopic layer in their leaves and reflect back a lot of the radiation they aren’t using. It is cooler under the trees. It also makes the heat signature of things under the trees very hard to trace. Cutting down trees is something most people on Karoda will shoot you for.”

“I’ll avoid it,” promised Goth.

“Huh,” said the Leewit. “They shoot at us, and they’ll be sorry.”

The captain laughed. “Well, Me’a. See what you are taking on. Right, we’d better get to off-loading that cargo. I think we’ll just keep Vezzarn on board, on the forward turret. Any problems and you can let the port have it with the nova guns.”

“We need to go armed ourselves, Captain,” said Me’a. “It’s the way it is done here.”

So the arms locker was opened, and blasters strapped on. “What are their customs officers like, Me’a?” asked the Leewit.

“They don’t have any.”

And indeed, this was the case. Just a port operator in a broad hat who wandered over and asked for the landing fee. He wore a pair of Mark 5 blasters, one on either hip, and a belt of spare charges. That seemed his only badge of office, but the captain took his cue from Me’a, and accepted him as what he claimed to be, and showed him the waybill.

“Soman Consortium. That’s their warehouse over there,” he said, pointing. “You want to hire a cargo float? Save you a lot of carrying.”

“How much?” asked Goth suspiciously.

“Twenty maels.”

That was very reasonable, and certainly beat carrying crates in the heat, so they accepted. The port operator took the money and said, “The Soman Consortium are in town. I can let them know they’ve gotten a cargo.”

“That will be kind,” said the captain.

“That will be five maels, actually,” said the port operator, with a grin. “You up for outgoing cargo? I could try and line some up.”

“For a fee,” said Goth, smiling in spite of herself.

“Naturally,” he said. “It’s business. It might take a day or two. There was a ship yesterday, one of the regulars, but she only hauls Soman cargo. People carrier. So it’ll be Likan leaf and Maturian liquor most likely. For Morteen. Give me a few hours after the rain. You’ll go into Labrun Town, I assume? You’ve got to try the wild galpin steaks at Ma Leerin’s place. I’ll get someone to let you know when I’ve got something.”

“For a fee, naturally.”

“Blaster charges aren’t cheap,” said the port operator, cheerfully.

“I could like this place,” said Goth to the captain.

The captain nodded. “It does seem friendly enough.”

That impression changed while they were unloading the cargo into the Soman warehouse. The warehouse was little more than a roof on steel posts—open, as were the others around the spaceport. The only visible difference was that this one was bigger. The fact that thieves probably would be shot seemed to have reduced the need for locks or fences. While they were there, a group of about twenty heavily armed men drove up in three flatbed floaters. “This the cargo for Soman?” asked one, leaning out of the cab.

“That’s what it says on the consignment note,” said the captain.

“Right. You want us to sign for receipt?”

“They told us we had to get that to get paid,” said Me’a. “Not that we’d care, otherwise.”

That seemed the right answer to give. Men got out of or off the flatbeds to start loading, and the driver signed the consignment note. Then someone got out of the third flatbed cab, looked at the captain, and shouted, “You! What in Patham’s name are you doing here?”

Captain Pausert looked at the stocky, rotund man. He’d swear he’d never seen him in his life before. “Delivering a cargo,” he said, calmly.

“That’s not likely!” snapped the man. All around them heavily armed men stopped what they’d been doing…and reached for their weapons.

“That’s Bormgo. From the Consortium on Cinderby’s World,” said Me’a, quietly. “I knew he came from here, but I never made the connection.”

“Who are they, Borm?” asked the tall man who had signed the receipt.

“He’s the one who shot up Herc’s ship. And then busted things open on Cinderby’s World. He was working with the Imperial cops.”

They were facing a semicircle of twenty blaster rifles and other weaponry. “Coppers. Coming to Karoda,” said the tall man, shaking his head. “And they’re using kids and cripples for cover.”

“We’re not Imperial police,” protested Pausert. “They arrested us on Cinderby’s World.”

“Yeah? They seem to have let you go. They don’t usually do that,” said the tall man with a sneer.

“We weren’t guilty. The judge let us go.”

“They were in it up to their necks,” said Bormgo. “Very thick with that Chief Inspector Salaman.”

“No, we weren’t!” protested Goth.

“I think I might whistle at them,” said the Leewit, crossly. “Seeing as no one else seems keen to do anything.”

“It will wait,” said the captain, sternly, before turning to say, “I’m sure we can explain. Our ship was just in the right place at the wrong time.”

“Oh, really,” said Bormgo. “Well, I guess we’ll find out who is right and what is going on. You’ll tell us happily, after a little…treatment. Take them along, boys.”

So that was how they found themselves being loaded up onto the flatbeds along with the cargo of forcecuffs in their crates. Well, almost all the cargo was in the crates. The slavers took some out to forcecuff them.

The floaters edged their way along under the trees down a winding trail that took the Venture’s crew up toward the mountains. The Leewit, sitting next to Pausert, waited until their captors were talking and laughing among themselves to ask him what his plans were.

“We’re getting to their base; we might get to find out what’s going on, and deal with it.”

“I like ‘shoot their front end off, shoot their rear end off, and ram them in the middle,’ more than all this stuff.”

“Patience. That’s the ‘deal with it’ part.”

“Huh,” said the Leewit. “I’ve gotten some new special whistles I want to try.”

“I’m pretty sure you’ll get a chance.”

“Or make a chance,” said Me’a, quietly. “There is fair amount of rumor about how the Wisdoms of Karres operate, but it is something of a surprise to me. It’s not the way I would have done things, but at this stage I am following Ta’zara’s advice: to watch and learn. Give the word when you need me to do anything.”

One of their captors climbed back from the armored cab, to where they’d been put into a barred section on the second to last floater. He stopped in front of Ta’zara. “You’re one of those Na’kalauf fighters, supposed to be so tough, aren’t you?”

“I am from Na’kalauf, yes,” said Ta’zara calmly.

“That’ll put your price way up,” said the slaver. “An absolutely loyal bodyguard for life has gotten to be valuable.”

“I already am a life-sworn bodyguard,” said Ta’zara, with calm finality.

“I guess that’s about to change…agh…” The last part of that was as the man cartwheeled over the edge of the flatbed.

The floater behind them stopped and plainly radioed theirs, because the entire caravan stopped. It was noticeable that the first thing their captors did was to deploy a watchful force—looking for attack from the forest. And it was plain the last thing that their captors thought could have happened was that the man, with a broken head and a broken leg, might have had his leg broken before he fell, not after. He wasn’t in any state to tell them, and so, after some rudimentary first aid, they loaded him up again and the floaters moved on, now with two watchful guards on the back with weapons at the ready, looking into the trees.

“I could cure him,” said the Leewit, quietly.

“That would be awkward,” said Me’a. “You see, at the moment, they think someone or thing out of the forest must have knocked him off. Not Ta’zara breaking his knee.”

“You will not allow them to steal my loyalty, mistress?” asked Ta’zara. “It cannot be permitted.”

“Besides the mess it would cause. Half of Na’kalauf knows he is the Leewit’s life-guardian. Breach of that oath…well, any man or woman of Na’kalauf would kill Ta’zara,” said Me’a. “If they ever found out that these Karoda slavers even tried to change that, it would probably mean war.”

“I would kill myself first,” said Ta’zara.

“No, you won’t,” said the Leewit crossly. One of the downsides she had found to being a healer was that she was aware of the pain of others—at least if they were badly hurt and close. She could block it…almost entirely. “We’re going to shoot their bows off, blow their stern off and ram them in the middle, just as soon as the captain gives the word…hey. We’re going into a cave.”

They were. A whole labyrinth of them, by what they could see in the headlights. It was rather clear why Iradalia’s soldiers had never worked out where the slaver’s base was. The floaters left no trail through the caves. Eventually they came out of the oppressive darkness and back under the forest canopy again. But the Leewit had no idea in which direction lay the spaceport where the Venture 7333 stood. Then they drove through more forest, and back into a cave. It was a shorter journey this time, only broken by some blaster fire at a shrieking flying creature that swooped down out of the darkness to attack the guards. In the woods beyond that they saw a pack of long-fanged creatures watching them from the shadows. “They’re as big as a bollem,” commented Goth, who had been mostly silent on the trip.

“Yes. I think the return journey is going to be interesting,” said the captain. “But I dare say we’ll manage. We’ve got a few skills they don’t have, don’t we?”

“Um,” said Goth.

The caravan of vehicles had arrived at an overhanging cliff into which a door was set. Not just a door, but a hull-metal door, triple-layered, big enough for the floaters to drive through, under guard turrets fitted with spaceguns. Even if the Iradalians got here with an army, it wouldn’t be easy to get in.

In front of them loomed another door, equally impressive, equally well armed. Anyone breaking in this far would be in a fire zone. A solitary guard came out and went to the driver of the lead floater and spoke briefly to them.

“Ah. Password. Melon. Answer, Cantaloupe,” said Me’a.

“How do you know?” asked the Leewit.

“The spy ray in my wheelchair. And a bone-induction earpiece. I’ve been listening in on them for most of the trip. I have not learned much of value. Bormgo is convinced you are more than you seem. The rest think he’s either wrong or stupid, but he is quite high up in the Consortium. So…when do we take action, Captain? I took the liberty of sending positional data to Vezzarn on a narrow-beam transmitter. We can communicate with the ship.”

“Just let us get inside,” said Pausert, grimly. “I think I’ve had about enough of patience.”

But they were ill-prepared for the fact that the slaving operation was an old one, and had long since developed a method of dealing with potential trouble from slaves. The floaters’ driving cabs had sealed windows, and the cavern had knockout gas.


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