The Sorceress of Karres (10 page)

"Let's try hailing them. If they don't want to fight, they're welcome to it. We're just passing through. We don't need trouble."

The Leewit nodded, looking just a little disappointed. She loved those nova guns. But not having her sisters around was forcing her into a different role, making her just a little less of a wild-child, showing that she could act with sense and maturity when she had to. Pausert thought Toll and Threbus might appreciate the change.

She'd seated herself and was working the communicator, scanning likely calling frequencies, sending out standard Empire hailing pulses. If she got a reply of any sort her linguistic klatha skill would allow her to translate it.

The communicator howled like a banshee. The pitch was sharp and eerie enough to make Captain Pausert's hair stand on end. The Leewit snapped it off, mid-caterwaul.

"What was that? What did they say?"

"Nothing," said the Leewit, her voice unusually quiet. She got up and came and leaned against his shoulder, a totally uncharacteristic thing for her to do.

Pausert put his arm around the littlest witch.

"It was just . . . hate. And almost a kind of hunger. And fury."

"We'll deal with the ships if they try anything."

"It wasn't the ships sending it. It came from that star."

"What?"

The Leewit shrugged. "They hate us. And they're trying to do something to us. That's all I got. But it's not the ships. They didn't answer."

As she said that, the lead ship fired on them. A torpedo of some sort, according to the detector board. The captain glanced at the readouts. The torpedo was not going to intersect their course, unless it changed vector. But the mere act of firing it showed intent.

The Leewit saw that too. "They mean business, Captain."

He nodded, hands moving over the controls, increasing thrust and pushing the ship onto a slightly different trajectory. "Get Vezzarn up."

"I'm here, Skipper," said the grizzled old spacer.

"Unlock the nova gun turrets. Vezzarn, stern turret. The Leewit, take the other. See if you can deal with that torpedo."

It would not be an easy target. But the Leewit's ability with those guns verged on the uncanny.

And once again, she proved it so. The torpedo exploded into a vortex of amber incandescence, far enough away to be harmless, although close enough to set the
Venture
's radiation detectors squawking.

"Nasty stuff," said the Leewit. "The lead ship is coming into range, I reckon, Captain."

As she said that, the mysterious ship fired two more space-torpedoes. That seemed to be its chief armament.

"Let them have it," said Pausert. "They asked for it. We'll run, if need be, after that."

The captain readied the wires for the Sheewash drive. He was sure he could do that on his own, if need be, even if he never had before.

The Leewit took out the torpedoes, and then launched a volley of purple nova gun fire across space.

She did not miss. But for all the effect that she had on the attacking ship, she might as well have.

"Give them some more," said Pausert tersely.

It was almost as if the nova bolts were just going through the ship. Pausert checked his instruments. There was something very wrong here. The visual and radiation detectors were giving readings—but the mass-detector wasn't. The attacking ships were pushing out power, and they could be seen . . . but they were as insubstantial as snow-flakes, mass-wise. He commented on it, as the Leewit continued to fire.

"It's Chaladoor Phantoms, Captain," quavered Vezzarn's voice over the intercom.

"What are they?" asked Pausert.

"Stuff of legends of the spaceways of long ago, Captain. But you can't escape them, apparently. And you can't kill them, either. You can drive a ship right through them, and it has no effect. But they sure can kill you."

"Huh! Those torpedoes sure got hit," said the Leewit. "Anyway, how did any legend start if no one gets away, Vezzarn?"

"Well,
we're
going to get away," said Captain Pausert. "Seal those guns and let's do some special running."

Goth found the waiting tedious. She whiled away the time by climbing back into the car and checking out the contents of the glove compartment. Those would have given the customs official more pause than the rock-drills had.

For starters, there was a pair of gloves. Quite a normal thing for a glove compartment—except these had artificial fingerprints embossed onto them. Then there was a transdermal syringe and a set of ampules, one of which was empty. Goth was willing to bet that that was what she had been dosed with.

She pocketed the syringe and ampules, and then carefully damaged the embossed fingerprints on the gloves. That took a further five minutes. Then she sat and thought about their adventures on the
Venture
and about
Petey, Byrum and Keep
, the lattice ship. Sat and thought about the Nanite plague. Just sat.

Eventually, she got bored and searched around the car for more entertainment. She found a book under the seat on xenoarchaeology. Specifically, the book was about the Melchin culture, the ruins from which had been found on several worlds on the fringes of the Chaladoor relatively near to Uldune. It was not the most interesting thing that she had ever read, but it was what she had, and it was better than just sitting. The pictures of the Melchin spacecraft—alien, spiky-looking sleek things—were some of the more fascinating parts of it.

Eventually she started to get hungry and thirsty again. By the looks of the light, it was getting on for late afternoon. Was she going to have to spend the night here? She couldn't keep up a light-shift indefinitely.

Hunger and impatience finally got the better of her. She left the book. Confiscating the syringe was one thing, taking someone's book another entirely.

There was an airbus service into Nikkeldepain City. After someone nearly sat on her, Goth realized another one of the less obvious disadvantages of being able to hide in no-shape.

She was beginning to think that the reason that the precogs had seen her traveling back in time to Pausert's youth might be a bit more complex than just to save Captain Pausert, as she'd originally assumed. Marshi had been callously unconcerned about killing her criminal associate. Yet they were steering clear of obvious clashes with the law. It could be that if they could have found this map that they were looking for, they would just have quietly gone away. Goth wondered briefly if she should find it and give it to them. But the thought was dismissed: even if they were mere treasure hunters, if anyone had a claim to the map or whatever treasure they could find using it, it was Pausert, or her father, or, for that matter, herself.

She'd deal with them in her own way, once she'd dealt with issues like supper and where she was going to sleep tonight. After some thought, she took herself back to the apartment where her kidnappers had held her. The door was still open, with a key inside the lock. There were also a pair of good solid old-fashioned bolts. Goth had no faith that someone like Franco—or his friends, if he had any—could not pick a lock, if he decided to return. But bolts were a tougher proposition. She knew that much from old Vezzarn. He'd been, under some protest, quietly teaching her his lock-picking skills. The poor old fellow was nervous of what the captain might do to him if he ever found out!

When you weren't being held captive there, or dodging searchers, it was actually quite a pleasant apartment. The most serious fault Goth could find with it was that there was very little food in the cupboards or the fridge. A meal of crisps, some cookies and water was not at all satisfactory.

Mostly, though, she was very tired. Using klatha so constantly would do that to you, even klatha that you were especially good at. Goth found that she had a good view of Pausert's home from the third room, which also had two unmade beds in it. She was tempted for a moment—she was
really
tired, now—but Goth decided that while she didn't mind sleeping in a props store, sharing Franco's bugs was a different matter. She found a spare blanket, still in its store wrapping, and a sofa, and slept the sleep of the very tired. The sleep of the just would have to wait until she caught up with the perps.

The next morning she locked up the place. She'd have to get fresh bedding and some food. She was already considering it her apartment, she thought with some amusement. Well, maybe the criminals had done the bureaucratic work for her. She'd just have to check it out.

The question was: what to do next? Did she go and lay siege to the
Kapurnia
? In the end, she decided to go and have a look through her father's things in Pausert's house. That probably wasn't the right decision, she knew. But she was very curious about this map. En route she stopped at a money dispenser and, using her teleporting ability, swapped the maels she had for ones that were currently dated. Since it was an even swap, she figured it didn't count as stealing. After that she bought herself some breakfast, which consisted of a curious bunlike pastry with seeds and cheese in a neat little cardboard box.

She let herself in to Pausert's home, and began to look in the obvious places—and then decided that was probably a complete waste of time. Franco and his friends would have done that, anyway, and done it better than she could.

She could always pump Pausert for clues, but instinct said that would be a mistake. She felt that quite strongly, and one of the side effects of being a klatha-operative was that sometimes those feelings were in themselves klatha side effects. Perhaps what she needed to do was to tap into those feelings.

She wandered around the house looking at the souvenirs of fifty worlds. They were interesting but she felt no draw towards any of them. She wandered into the kitchen, and then the bathroom, feeling like a bit of an invader. From there she peered into the bedrooms, feeling even more uncomfortable. She walked back downstairs.

Her attention was suddenly caught by a piece of patterned cloth on which the communicator rested, on some kind of wall bracket. She touched the cloth, which was plainly some kind of handwoven material, pretty enough in a primitive sort of way. The cloth didn't feel special, just reminiscent of a hot place of tall fronded trees—but it was covering a small metal box that stood on the shelf. The cord of the communicator would be too short otherwise.

Goth touched it, then pulled her hand back abruptly. The metal was oddly cold and felt repulsive, almost slimy. Carefully, Goth pulled the cloth aside and peered at the box.

It looked disappointingly like a box, although there was some patterning etched into the metal. Goth carefully took it off the shelf, balancing the communicator against the wall. She didn't really like touching the thing. It reminded her, in a way, of the synergizer from the Lyrd-Hyrier ship, except that it felt old.

She felt a flood of strange, unpleasant images coming into her mind, and put the box down hastily on a small table. It still just looked like a box. She could see a thin line where the lid fitted onto the lower section. There were neat little hinges at the back. There was no sign of a lock or any way to open it.

Braving touching the box again, she shook it. There was a faint sound, too dull to be a rattle—as if whatever was inside was heavy and fairly soft. She put it down again. The box did odd things to her head. Images. Strange images. Enormous trees spanning whole continents, and little animals dying.

Goth couldn't be sure quite what was in the box, but she was willing to bet that this was the "map" they were looking for. It would seem that they were wrong about the size. Or perhaps this was a sheet of metal that could be folded. The question was: what was she going to do with it now that she had found it?

She was quite reluctant to even touch the box again. On the other hand, she was now very sure that she shouldn't let it fall into the hands of Mebeckey and his cohorts. If she left the box here they might come back and find it. But she couldn't just take it, since that would be rather obvious. Looking at the wall and the faint line where someone had obviously dusted often, the box had been lying on that shelf for many years. The box, however, was almost the same size and shape as the box her breakfast had come in. That was now in the previously empty trash can attached to a post just down the road.

Goth went and fetched it, and put it under the cloth. It was much the same height, and nearly as wide. Unless they looked closely, no one would never know that a substitution had been made.

She couldn't cope with actually touching the box for more than a few seconds. But with a little experimentation, she discovered that a bit of cloth—anything—between her and it, and she felt fine. She settled for taking two squares of kitchen towel and wrapping it in that and putting it in a carrier bag. It wasn't a very large box. She'd have to get something else to put it in once she got back to what she had decided would be "her" apartment.

Perhaps it was having been taken by surprise once before that made Goth more wary. This time she actually spotted her assailants before they got to her, although they were well hidden. She didn't have time for any fancy maneuvers. She just ducked under the reaching hands and ran.

There were three of them: the woman Marshi, a tall balding man with a few grizzled whiskers and an aquiline nose, and, although wearing a hooded top and sunglasses, the fellow from the van who Goth had had arrested. They ran after her.

As she dived over a fence, Goth cursed her ill luck. They must have been watching Pausert's home.

Then she realized that she had a more immediate problem. The garden she had jumped into had a squat but vicious looking dren-hound, still blinking itself awake from where it had slept in the morning sun. The beast was looking at her incredulously, as if to say "you dared jump into
my
garden?"

Goth knew that the one thing she dared not do was to run—and even no-shape wouldn't help. The dog could certainly smell her, and she really hadn't completely mastered no-scent yet. Not well enough to fool a dren-hound, for sure.