Memoofyd and her team of Okme Healers noted a disturbance on the ship but listlessly took no notice until a Keulfyd crew member barged into their Healing Centre and ordered them to remove all those being treated as the ship was being evacuated and to hurry. Hurry, they did having learned that any delay in following orders generally resulted in bruises at the least. Half an hour later, all four of the Machines were empty and the annoyed and (luckily) dazed former occupants were being sent on their way. Memoofyd had made an executive decision and decided to tell none of the machine’s ex inhabitants that the treatment they had paid a cut price for had been cut short and they had not even gotten their money’s worth. They had all had enough of being shoved, hit, punched, and flung against things by Keulfyd who were many times their size and they had no time for any of them. Deceit felt so good. Their unwanted ex patients had lost all sense of time and there was no outward sign that their Treatment had been cut short. She knew she would be safe for a while at least.
Memoofyd and her team had been busy cleaning the Machines when they were again interrupted and ordered out of the room and off the ship. Squinting in the afternoon sunlight, to her astonishment she saw all the Keulfyd evacuating under guard. They had been captured? The Keulfyd had been captured?? She couldn’t stop the smile. But who could have done this? By this time the rest of her team had noticed and were showing a variation of expressions she hadn’t seen for a while, all wonder or cheerful. Murmuring among themselves, they tried to identify the People with the guns but couldn’t. Memoofyd became apprehensive as she saw that one of their new capturers had seen them. One called to another and a woman came over that looked like a jare Niseyen.
Watching the different races coming off the starship, Sarah saw the Okme Stella was pointing at. She directed them all to one side and questioned them, “what are you doing here?”
“The Keulfyd have our families,” one said, “they said if we didn’t come with them they would kill our families and all the Okme they could find.”
“They took out all our Healing Machines and brought them on board,” another added. “They ordered us to treat the officers but we told them the machines had been damaged in transit and we had to fix them. Then we told them some parts were damaged or broken and we could make more parts of repair them but it would take time. They didn’t argue as their slaves were very rough with them and we told them at the time that they were being damaged. We stalled all we could until we judged we would have to start treating but we didn’t actually heal many of them. We told them we were using two Machines to fix the other two so that reduced the available Machines to two and unless someone was watching, we turned them off. We rigged the lights so they shone green regardless.” she added, “It was amazing how good they felt afterwards. But eventually we had to start using more of the Machines.”
“We knew they would kill us as soon as we were no more use to them so we aimed to pretend all of them were treated and that we were still trying to fix the other machines. By the time they found out they weren’t healed, we would be long dead. And we kept stressing to them that the Machines were damaged,” another added.
Sarah didn’t know quite what to make of this so she called for Az. While she started to explain he took one look at them and said, “They’re telling the truth. They have no clothes on and their data bracelets are gone. They were slaves, same as us.”
“Oh,” said Sarah who had vaguely noticed no clothes but kept forgetting the significance of that. And she hadn’t noticed that they had no data bracelets on, “Well that makes all the difference. You’re free,” she said to them. “Ah, you’d better find some clothes.”
Memoofyd looked at the woman in a daze. Fully understanding how she felt, Az grabbed various cloaks off smaller Keulfyd and brought them back. Carefully and gently, he placed them on each of the Okme with the statement, “you are free now,” to each one. Meanwhile Sarah contacted the other leaders and explained again, telling them to look for Okme and People with no clothes on and no data bracelets or anything technological. She directed all the Okme to be taken to Helkmid. She later found out there were ten to twelve Okme on each ship which greatly increased the numbers of Okme when they were desperately needed to help especially with the Cats. Helkmid had another priority however, he wanted help to finish making up the various cures. He prioritised the injured but siphoned off a third of these new Okme to help him.