Eric Flint: The Sorceress of Karres

There was another silence. Then they started cheering.

A little later they sat, spyshielded, still in no-shape, in the great-eater's chamber with Ta'zara.

"I am afraid I have to do it, Mistress," he said apologetically to the Leewit. "Raider-ships are lead by lesser eaters. But the whole fleet? It can only be me, unless you can somehow put an illusion of me in the command chair."

"I could if I was also on the ship," said Goth.

The big Na'kalauf bodyguard shook his head. "No. That would not be safe. I have my responsibility and this is it. They must fly into the rift. I will go. You will just have to teach me some words of their language."

Goth narrowed her eyes. "We have the co-ordinates for this rift. Let me get onto the subradio."

"Not going to let you go, Ta'zara" said the Leewit.

"Leewit. Come with me, said Goth, imperiously. "Captain. Put Ta'zara in a shield cocoon. We're not having anything happen to him."

Ta'zara might have wanted to protest, but he never got the chance.

"So what do we do?" said Pausert. How easy it become to share decisions with Goth, these days, he suddenly realized. How had he managed before this?

Goth grinned. "Exactly what he wants to do. But Karres can be close enough to help out. Cloaked, of course, but right there. We have the co-ordinates. We can transmit from close enough for the Leewit to do the voice… for you to shield him if need be. And then for my father to 'port him out of there. Touch-talk to the Leewit, he'll get the exact image of Ta'zara."

"But… " said the Leewit.

"But nothing," said Goth firmly. "He's decided he wants to be a hero. Let him. You can explain how come he isn't living with the Cannibals forever, later. It's that or send both Ta'zara and you swimming along the Egger route. And them as well. This way he gets to feel good about it and we save a lot of energy."

Fun, said the little vatch.

And thus it was.

The eaters still in a galaxy dimensions away refer to the commands of the tattooed one, who led them out of hell and back to the place of their fathers. So of course they ate their fathers, and tattooed themselves.

But that too was a kind of rightness and happiness.

And the little vatch was quite correct in predicting that the explanation was fun.

Three days later, when the world of Karres swung peacefully in orbit around a hitherto planetless star some few days from Uldune, Pausert sat with his great uncle Threbus on the porch, and discussed the things men sitting on a porch do: the destruction of worlds, star-spanning conquerors and how to stop them; and, greatest problem of all, the female of the species.

"We've more or less worked out the entire sequence of events," said Threbus. "Vatches, it appears, are quite involved in various dimensions. And have complex 'games' in them. The Chaladoor was part of her game."

"So the little vatch was manipulating things. Right under our noses."

"Well, you know how they like to watch. And set their dream things problems."

"They do indeed," said Pausert wryly. "But I hope she never planned on me being part of the mother-plant."

"No cravings to return to the plant?" asked Threbus, cautiously.

Pausert shuddered. "The addiction? No, not so far as I've noticed. Look, Mebeckey had it in him for years-and I gather that being part of the plant was the first time in his life he felt he belonged to anything. That he wasn't racked with guilt about killing his first employer. It made him feel good. Look at the other victims. Many of them are criminals-and yet some are desperately trying to rehabilitate themselves now. It didn't affect everyone in the same way."

Threbus sucked on his pipe. "Well, it's true that even Mebeckey is co-operating to the absolute fullest. We've had truth-speakers listen to his testimony. He's barely strayed from the absolute truth, at least as far as he knows it."

"That's always the problem, isn't it!" said Pausert. "As far as he know it."

"Yes," admitted Threbus. "But we've been able to cross-corroborate parts of it. I'm afraid, grand-nephew, that I was partly to blame with that expedition into the Chaladoor in '008. For a trip into dangerous territory it was an uneventful one. I didn't realize what seed of future problems we'd brought back.

The Venture brought back various relics from that trip, most of which were sold to help pay for it. It hadn't been a very profitable voyage. That included the seedling drip-irrigators thought to be goblets, that eventually found their way, along with the log of the Derehn Oph-one of the first ships to have stumbled on the cinder-homeworld of the Melchin-to the dealer Mebeckey's illegal antiquities sales.

"We didn't take very much off Derehn Oph-it was too much like a graveyard. But I did take a couple of those goblets."

"Drip-irrigators."

"Yes. Leaky goblets. And that box that turned out to be the map-device. The curious thing is that I'd read that log. The ship was centuries dead and all the next-of-kin must have been too. So we left it there. We did visit the world Mebeckey tracked down. We'd tried digging down to the signal with our nova guns. Got nowhere. The Derehn Oph had tried too, and picked over the various wrecks. They'd left after collecting some loot from the various wrecked ships-including the Illtraming flagship-that had crashed almost intact, as it was heavily armored, and they had taken what was described as the Illtraming map."

"So… why didn't the Illtraming stop the Derehn Oph-and yourselves-from going to the Melchin motherworld?" asked Pausert thoughtfully. "The Nuris and Moander?"

"Yes," said Threbus, grimacing. "They'd already begun infesting the area around Megair, and the world was dead. Except that the stasis box had some kind of detector on it, and it began broadcasting when sensors detected something other than a Melchin/Illtraming drive. It was intended as a trap."

"And it succeeded!" said Pausert.

"Yes, in a way it did. But the mother-plant had expected to emerge to a galaxy full of Illtraming. To having no problems finding its host species. Instead it came out to a universe populated by humans-useless to it for breeding purposes. The persona of the xeno-archeologist suited it while it hunted for traces of the Illtraming. But of course it found none. Until it happened on the Melchin relics and the log of the Derehn Oph, which mentioned the sheet of metal that they had taken from the wrecked ship, and of course the goblets which the mother-plant recognized as plant-feeders. When one of those turned up from Nikkeldepain, the mother-plant was on the trail."

Goth came in. She'd kept her hair the way Vala had worn it. "Are you two finished talking yet?" she asked. "Because you promised to take me out, Pausert."

Threbus raised an eyebrow at his daughter. "She's growing up fast, Captain Pausert!"