The Witches of Karres Read online

  "Short hops," the witch nodded reassuringly. "No real runs for a while, though!"

  "Short hops should be good enough." He reflected. "I read that item in the Regulations. They right about the klatha part?"

  "Pretty much," Goth acknowledged, a trifle warily.

  "Well . . ." He'd related his experiences with the lamp then, and she'd listened with obvious interest but no indications of surprise.

  "What do you mean, it wasn't me—exactly?" he said. "I was wondering for a while, but I'm dead sure now I don't have klatha ability."

  Goth wrinkled her nose, hesitant, said suddenly, "You got it, captain. Told you you'd be a witch, too. You got a lot of it! That was part of the trouble."

  "Trouble?" The captain leaned back in his chair. "Mind explaining?"

  Goth reflected worriedly again. "I got to be careful now," she told him. "The way klatha, is, people oughtn't to know much more about it than they can work with. Or it's likely never going to work right for them. That's one reason we got rules. You see?"

  He frowned. "Not quite."

  Goth tossed her head, a flick of impatience. "It wasn't me who ported the lamp. So if you didn't have klatha, it wouldn't have got ported."

  "But you said . . ."

  "Trying to explain, Captain. You ought to get told more now. Not too much, though. . . . On Karres they all knew you had it. Patham! You put it out so heavy the grown-ups were all messed up! It's that learned stuff they work with. That's tricky. I don't know much about it yet . . . ."

  "You mean I was, uh, producing klatha energy?"

  But he gathered one didn't produce klatha. If one had the talent—inborn to a considerable extent—one attracted it to oneself. Being around others who used it stimulated the attraction. His own tendencies in that direction hadn't developed much before he got to Karres. There he'd turned promptly into an unwitting focal point of the klatha energies being manipulated around him—to the consternation of the adult witches who found their highly evolved and delicately balanced klatha controls thrown out of kilter by his presence.

  A light dawned. "That's why they waited until I was off Karres again before they moved it!"

  "Sure," said Goth. "They couldn't risk that with you there—they didn't know what would happen . . . ." He had been the subject of much conversation and debate during his stay on Karres. So as not to disturb whatever was coming awake in him, the witches couldn't even let him know he was doing anything unusual. But only the younger children, using klatha in a very direct and basic, almost instinctive manner, weren't bothered by it. Adolescents at around Maleen's age level had been affected to some extent, though not nearly as much as their parents.

  "You just don't know how to use it, that's all," Goth said. "You're going to, though."

  "What makes you think that?"

  Her lashes flickered. "They said it was like that with Threbus. He started late, too. Took him a couple of years to catch on—but he's a whizdang now!"

  The captain grunted skeptically. "Well, we'll see. . . . You're a kind of a whizdang yourself, for my money."

  "Guess I am," Goth agreed. "Aren't many grown-ups could jump us as far as this."

  "Meaning you know where we went?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "I . . . no, let's get back to that lamp first. I can see that after your big Sheewash push we might have had plenty of klatha stirred up around the Venture. But you say I'm not able to use it. So . . ."

  "Looks like you pulled in a vatch," Goth told him.

  She explained that then. It appeared a vatch was a sort of personification of klatha, or a klatha entity. Vatches didn't hang around this universe much but were sometimes drawn into it by human klatha activities, and if they were amused or intrigued by what they found going on they might stay and start producing klatha phenomena themselves. They seemed to be under the impression that their experiences of the human universe were something they were dreaming. They could be helpful to the person who caught their attention but tended to be quite irresponsible and mischievous. The witches preferred to have nothing at all to do with a vatch.

  "So now we've got something like that on board!" the captain remarked nervously.

  Goth shook her head. "No, not since I woke up. I'd rell him if he were around."

  "You'd rell him?"

  She grinned.

  "Another of the things I can't understand till I can do it?" the captain asked.

  "Uh-huh. Anyway, you got rid of that vatch for good, I think."

  "I did? How?"

  "When you ordered the lamp to move. Vatch would figure you were telling him what to do. They don't like that at all. I figure he got mad and left."

  "After switching the lamp off to show me, eh? Think he might be back?"

  "They don't usually. Anyway, I'll spot him if he does."

  "Yes . . . ." The captain scratched his chin. "So what made you decide to bring us out east of the Empire?"

  * * *

  Goth, it turned out, had had a number of reasons. Some of them sounded startling at first.

  "One thing, here's Uldune!" Her fingertip traced over the star map between them, stopped. "Be just about a week away, on half-power."

  The captain gave her a surprised look. Uldune was one of the worlds around here which were featured in Nikkeldepain's history books; and it was not featured at all favorably. Under the leadership of its Daal, Sedmon the Grim, and various successors of the same name, it had been the headquarters of a ferocious pirate confederacy which had trampled over half the Empire on a number of occasions, and raided far and wide beyond it. And that particular section of history, as he recalled it, wasn't very far in the past.

  "What's good about being that close to Uldune?" he inquired. "From what I've heard of them, that's as bloodthirsty a bunch of cutthroats as ever infested space!"

  "Guess they were pretty bad," Goth acknowledged. "But that's a time back. They're sort of reformed now."

  "Sort of reformed?"

  She shrugged. "Well, they're still a bunch of crooks, Captain. But we can do business with them."

  "Business!"

  She seemed to know what she was talking about, though. The witches were familiar with this section of galactic space—Karres, in fact, had been shifted from a point east of the Empire to its recent station in the Iverdahl System not much more than eighty years ago. And while Goth was Karres-born, she'd done a good deal of traveling around here with her parents and sisters. Not very surprising, of course. With the Sheewash Drive available to give their ship a boost when they felt like it, a witch family should be able to go pretty well where it chose.

  She'd never been on Uldune but it was a frequent stopover point for Karres people. Uldune's reform, initiated by its previous Daal, Sedmon the Fifth, and continued under his successor, had been a matter of simple expediency—the Empire's expanding space power was making wholesale piracy too unprofitable and risky a form of enterprise. Sedmon the Sixth was an able politician who maintained mutually satisfactory relations with the Empire and other space neighbors, while deriving much of his revenue by catering to the requirements of people who operated outside the laws of any government. Uldune today was banker, fence, haven, trading center, outfitter, supplier, broker, and middleman to all comers who could afford its services. It never asked embarrassing questions. Outright pirates—successful ones, at any rate—were still perfectly welcome. So was anybody who merely wanted to transact some form of business unhampered by standard legal technicalities.

  "I'm beginning to get it!" the captain acknowledged. "But what makes you think we won't get robbed blind there?"

  "They're not crooks that way—at least not often. The Daal goes for the skinning alive thing," Goth explained. "You get robbed, you squawk. Then somebody gets skinned. It's pretty safe!"

  It did sound like the Daal had hit on a dependable method to give his planet a reputation for solid integrity in business deals. "So we sell the cargo there," the captain mused. "They take their cut—probably a big o
ne—"

  "Uh-huh. Runs around forty per."

  "Of the assessed value?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Steep! But if they've got to see the stuff gets smuggled to buyers in the Empire or somewhere else, they're taking the risks. And, allowing for what the new drive engines will cost us, we'll be on Uldune then with what should still be a very good chunk of money. . . . Hmm!" He settled back in his chair. "What were those other ideas?"

  * * *

  The first half of the week-long run to Uldune passed uneventfully. They turned around the plans Goth had been nourishing, amended them here and there. But basically the captain couldn't detect many flaws in them. He didn't tell her so, but it struck him that if Goth hadn't happened to be born a witch she might have made out pretty well on Nikkeldepain. She seemed to have a natural bent for the more devious business angles. As one of their first transactions on the reformed pirate planet, they would pick up fictitious identities. The Daal maintained a special department which handled nothing else and documented its work so impeccably that it would stand up under the most thorough investigation. It was a costly matter, but the proceeds of the cargo sale would cover the additional expense. If the search for the Venture and her crew spread east of the Empire, established aliases might be very necessary.

  In that respect the Sheewash Drive had turned into a liability. Used judiciously, however, it should be an important asset to the independent trader the Venture was to become. This was an untamed area of space; there were sections where even the Empire's heavily armed patrols did not attempt to go in less than squadron strength. And other sections which nobody tried to patrol at all . . . .

  "The Sea of Light, f'rinstance," Goth said, nodding at the twisted purple cosmic cloud glow the captain had observed on his first look out of the screens. It had drifted meanwhile over to the Venture's port side. "That's a hairy place! You get too close to that, you've had it! Every time."

  She didn't know exactly what happened when one got too close to the cloud. Neither did anyone else. It had been a long while since anybody had tried to find out.

  The Drive wouldn't exactly allow them to go wherever they chose, even if Goth had been able to make regular and unlimited use of it. But as an invisible and unsuspected part of the ship's emergency equipment it would let them take on assignments not many others would care to consider.

  There should be money in that, the captain thought. Plenty of money. Once they were launched, they shouldn't have much to worry about on that score. But it meant having the Venture rebuilt very completely before they took her out again.

  The prospects for the next few years looked good all around. Goth evidently wasn't at all disturbed by the fact that it might be at least that long before she saw her people again. The witches seemed to look at such things a little differently. Well, he thought, the two of them should see and learn a lot while making their fortune as traders; and he'd take care of Goth as best he could. Though from Goth's point of view, it had occurred to him, it might seem more that she was taking care of Captain Pausert.

  He couldn't quite imagine himself developing witch powers. He'd tried to pump Goth about that a little and was told in effect not to worry—he'd know when it began to happen and meanwhile there was no way to hurry it up. Just what would happen couldn't be predicted. The type of talents that developed and the sequence in which they appeared varied widely among Karres children and the relatively few adults in whom something brought klatha into sudden activity. Goth was a teleporting specialist and had, perhaps because of that, caught on to the Sheewash Drive very quickly and mastered it like a grown-up. So far she'd done little else. The Leewit, besides being the possessor of a variety of devastating whistles, which she used with considerable restraint under most circumstances, was a klatha linguist. Give her a few words of a language she'd never heard before, and something in her swept out, encompassed it all; and she'd soon be chattering away in it happily as if she'd spoken nothing else in all her young life.

  Maleen was simply a very good all-around junior witch who'd recently been taken into advanced training three or four years earlier than was the rule.

  Goth clearly didn't think he should be given much more information than that at present; and he didn't press her for it. As long as he didn't attract any more vatches he'd be satisfied. He retained mixed feelings about klatha. Useful it was, no doubt, if one knew how to handle it. But it was uncanny stuff.

  There were enough practical matters on hand to keep them fully occupied. He gave Goth a condensed course in the navigation of the Venture; and she told him more of what had been going on east of the Empire than he'd ever learned out of history books. It confirmed his first impression that life around here should be varied and interesting . . . .

  One interesting variation came their way shortly after the calendric chronometer had recorded the beginning of the fourth day since they'd turned on course for Uldune. It was the middle of the captain's sleep period. He woke up to find Goth violently shaking his shoulder.

  "Uh, what is it?" he mumbled.

  "You awake?" Her voice was sharp, almost a hiss. "Better get to the controls!"

  That aroused him as instantly and completely as a bucketful of ice-cold water . . . .

  There was a very strange-looking ship high in the rear viewscreen, at an indicated distance of not many light-minutes away. Its magnified image was like that of a flattened ugly dark bug striding through space after them on a dozen spiky legs set around its edges. The instruments registered a mass about twice that of the Venture. It was an unsettling object to find coming up behind one.

  "Know who they are?" he asked.

  Goth shook her head. The ship had been on the screens for about ten minutes, had kept its distance at first, then swung in and begun to pull up to them. She'd put out a number of short-range query blasts on the communicators, but there'd been no response.

  It looked like trouble. "How about the Drive?" he asked.

  Goth indicated the open passage door. "Ready right out there!"

  "Fine. But wait with it." They didn't intend to start advertising the Sheewash Drive around here if they could avoid it. "Try the communicators again," he said. "They could be on some off-frequency."

  He hadn't thrown the override switch on the throttled main drive engines yet. It might have been the Venture's relatively slow progress which had attracted the creepy vessel's interest, giving whoever was aboard the idea that here was a possibility of easy prey which should be investigated. But if they set off at speed now and the stranger followed, it could turn into a long chase . . . and one long chase could finish his engines.

  If they didn't run, the thing would move into weapons range within less than five minutes.

  "Captain!"

  He turned. Goth was indicating the communicator screen. A green-streaked darkness flickered on and off in it.

  "Getting them, I think!" she murmured.

  He watched as she slowly fingered a pair of dials, eyes intent on the screen. There was a loud burst of croaking and whistling noises from one of the communicators. Then, for a second or two, the screen held a picture.

  The captain's hair didn't exactly stand on end, but it tried to. There was a sullen green light in the screen, lanky gray shapes moving through it; then a face was suddenly looking out at them. Its red eyes widened. An instant later the screen went blank, and the communicator racket ended.

  "Saw us—cut us off!" Goth said, mouth wrinkling briefly in distaste.

  The captain cleared his throat. "You know what those are?"

  She nodded. "Think so! Saw a picture of a dead one once."

  "They're, uh, unfriendly?"

  "They catch us, they'll eat us," Goth told him. "That's Megair Cannibals."

  The name seemed as unpleasant as the appearance of their pursuers. The captain, heart hammering, reflected a moment, eyes on the grotesque ship in the rear screens. It was considerably closer, seemed to have put on speed.

  "Let's see if we can
scare them off first," he said suddenly. "If that doesn't work, you better hit the Drive!"

  Goth's expression indicated approval. The captain turned, settled himself in the control chair, tripped the override switch, fed the Venture power, and set her into a tight vertical turn as the engine hum rose to a roar. His hand shifted to the nova gun mechanisms. The image of the pursuing ship flicked through the overhead screens, settled into the forward ones, spun right side up and was dead ahead, coming towards them. The gun turrets completed their lift through the Venture's hull and clicked into position. The small sighting screen lit up; its cross-hairs slid around and locked on the scuttling bug shape.

  He snapped in the manual fire control relays. They still had a good deal of space to cover before they came within reasonable range of each other; and if he could help it they wouldn't get within reasonable range. He'd done well enough in gunnery training during his duty tour on a space destroyer of the Nikkeldepain navy, but the Megair Cannibals might be considerably better at games of that kind. However, it was possible they could be bluffed out of pressing their attack. He edged the Venture up to full speed, noted the suggestion of raggedness that crept into the engines' thunder, put his thumb on the firing stud, pressed down.

  The nova guns let go together. Reaching for the ship rushing towards them and falling far short of it, their charge shattered space into shuddering blue sheets of fire.

  It was an impressive display, but the Megair ship kept coming. Something hot and primitive, surprisingly pleasurable, began to roil in the captain as he counted off thirty seconds, pressed the firing stud again. Blue sheet lightning shivered and crashed. The scuttling thing beyond held its course. Answering fire suddenly speckled space with a cluster of red and black explosions.

  "Aa-aa-ah!" breathed the captain, head thrust forwards, eyes riveted on the sighting screen. Something about those explosions . . . .

  Why, he thought joyfully, we've got the range on them!