Verkan Vall nodded. “I didn’t think it was any petty larceny,” he said.
“Wait till you hear the rest of it. On the Kholghoor Sector, this gang is known as the Wizard Traders; we’ve been using that as a convenience label. They pose as sorcerers—black robes and hood-masks covered with luminous symbols, voice-amplifiers, cold-light auras, energy-weapons, mechanical magic tricks, that sort of thing. They have all the Croutha scared witless. Their procedure is to establish camps in the forest near recently conquered Kharanda cities; then they appear to the Croutha, impress them with their magical powers, and trade manufactured goods for Kharanda captives. They mainly trade firearms, apparently some kind of flintlocks, and powder.”
Then they were confining their operations to unpenetrated timelines; there had been no reports of firearms in the hands of the Croutha invaders.
“After they buy a batch of slaves,” Skordran Kirv continued, “they transpose them to this presumably Fifth Level base, where they have concentration camps. The slaves we questioned had been airlifted to North America, where there’s another concentration camp, and from there transposed to this Esaron Sector timeline where I found them. They say that there were at least two to three thousand slaves in this North American concentration camp and that they are being transposed out in small batches and replaced by others airlifted in from India. This lot was sold to a Calera named Nebu-hin-Abenoz, the chieftain of a hill town, Careba, about fifty miles southwest of the plantation. There were two hundred and fifty in this batch; this Coru-hin-Irigod only bought the batch he sold at the plantation.”
The aircar lost speed and altitude; below, the countryside was dotted with conveyer heads, each spatially coexistent with some outtime police post or operation. There were a great many of them; the western coast of North America was a center of civilization on many paratemporal sectors, and while the conveyer heads of the commercial and passenger companies were scattered over hundreds of Fifth Level timelines, those of the Paratime Police were concentrated upon one. The anti-grav-car circled around a three-hundred-foot steel tower that supported a conveyer head spatially coexistent with one on a top floor of some outtime tall building, and let down in front of a low prefabricated steel shed. A man in police uniform came out to meet them. There was a fifty-foot conveyer dome inside, and a fifty-foot redlined circle that marked the transposition point of an outtime conveyer. They all entered the dome, and the operator put on the transposition field.
“You haven’t heard the worst of it yet.” Skordran Kirv was saying. “On this timeline, we have reason to think that the native, Nebu-hin-Abenoz, who bought the slaves, actually saw the slavers’ conveyer. Maybe even saw it activated.”
“If he did, we’ll either have to capture him and give him a memory-obliteration, or kill him,” Vall said. “What do you know about him?”
“Well, this Careba, the town he bosses, is a little walled town up in the hills. Everybody there is related to everybody else; this man we have, Coru-hin-Irigod, is the son of a sister of Nebu-hin-Abenoz’s wife. They’re all bandits and slavers and cattle rustlers and what have you. For the last ten years, Nebu-hin-Abenoz has been buying slaves from some secret source. Before the Kholghoor Sector people began coming in, they were mostly white, with a few brown people who might have been Polynesians. No Negroes—there’s no black race on this sector, and I suppose the paratime slavers didn’t want too many questions asked. Coru-hin-Irigod, under narco-hypnosis, said that they were all outlanders, speaking strange languages.”
“Ten years! And this is the first hint we’ve had of it,” Vall said. “That’s not a bright mark for any of us. I’ll bet the slave population on some of these Esaron timelines is an anthropologist’s nightmare.”
“Why, if this has been going on for ten years, there must have been millions upon millions of people dragged from their own timelines into slavery!” Dalla said in a shocked voice.
“Ten years may not be all of it,” Vall said. “This Nebu-hin-Abenoz looks like the only tangible lead we have, at present. How does he operate?”
“About once every ten days, he’ll take ten or fifteen men and go a day’s ride—that may be as much as fifty miles; these Caleras have good horses and they’re hard riders—into the hills. He’ll take a big bag of money, all gold. After dark, when he has made camp, a couple of strangers in Calera dress will come in. He’ll go off with them, and after about an hour, he’ll come back with eight or ten of these strangers and a couple of hundred slaves, always chained in batches of ten. Nebu-hin-Abenoz pays for them, makes arrangements for the next meeting, and the next morning he and his party start marching the slaves to Careba. I might add that, until now, these slaves have been sold to the mines east of Careba; these are the first that have gotten into the coastal country.”
“That’s why this hasn’t come to light before, then. The conveyer comes in every ten days, at about the same place?”
“Yes. I’ve been thinking of a way we might trap them,” Skordran Kirv said. “I’ll need more men, and equipment.”
“Order them from Regional or General Reserve.” Vall told him. “This thing’s going to have overtop priority till it’s cleared up.”
He was mentally cursing Vulthor Tharn’s procedure-bound timidity as the conveyer flickered and solidified around them and the overhead red light turned green.
They emerged into the interior of a long shed, adobe-walled and thatch-roofed, with small barred windows set high above the earth floor. It was cool and shadowy, and the air was heavy with the fragrance of citrus fruits. There were bins along the walls, some partly full of oranges, and piles of wicker baskets. Another conveyer dome stood beside the one in which they had
