Friendly Fire

by Michelle Levigne

  The biggest reason, however, was that M'kar needed to be there, in orbit above Le'anka, ready for the day Thyal's drac hatched. Genys couldn't take that away from her, after all she had gone through for Dulit, and what both of them had risked to help Thyal.

  So she fought down her need to defend her crew, ship, and career, and kept her mouth shut, and the communication screen with Fleet Command closed.

  ~~~~~~

  Auntie M'kar. Paging Auntie M'kar.

  M'kar snorted, pleased with Thyal’s sense of humor at a time like this. She nearly missed the goal defender coming at her from above. She caught hold of the handle built into the wall of the zero-g compartment, turned herself around, grabbed the incoming player, and used his momentum to pivot and swing down through a thin tunnel of orange light and doubled gravity, just long enough to gain weight and speed, and slam feet-first into the other team's goal. Red lights flashed and a horn sounded. The score doubled on the wall display.

  She signaled Genys that she needed a break, as the two teams reassembled and the gravity generation fields shifted back to one-third gravity. M'kar pulled herself out of the compartment and sent a mental call to Poki, who opened up her link to Dulit so they could speak.

  Where are you going? Dulit asked. You didn't break something, did you?

  Something else entirely is about to break. Speaking to him through his bond with his drac made communication easier. Still, she would have liked to have seen his face when she showed him a mental image of a huge egg, larger than Thyal, shattering, and an entire flock of dracs pouring out. The burst of mental static was all the confirmation she needed. He understood.

  She didn't take time to shower, just wiped herself down as best she could, and stuffed her padded suit and helmet into her locker, gave it a kick, and tugged her uniform on. Hopping on one foot and then the other, she pulled on her boots as she fled the locker room. Barroo popped in and trilled with excitement as he settled on her shoulder. Dulit would have the shuttle waiting, to head down to the surface of Le'anka, by the time she got to the Defender's shuttle bay.

  "He could have called me," Dulit said, as M'kar leaped through the hatch for the shuttle and it slid down with a loud whoosh. "How did he call you in the middle of the game?"

  Tell him, Thyal said, when she hesitated.

  Explaining how the mental bond their team had pulled together during the battle with the dymcrait had somehow locked into open position between them took up most of the rapid descent from the ship to the planet. M’kar gave him a general idea of all the tests they had performed on the link, the distances traveled. Most of the descent was handled by autopilot, so he could give her all his attention. When they got close enough to the grounds of the Academy, the computers handling spaceport traffic took over. Dulit was astonished and properly sympathetic and amused, in all the right places. Being in a mental link with someone had benefits and drawbacks. There were times M'kar wanted some privacy, and other times she appreciated the knowledge that she was essentially never alone.

  "Some of that will change with the dracs in our heads, you think?" he said, as the gleaming black surface of the private landing field for the Academy grew below them, visible through the shuttle's viewport.

  He laughed when M'kar related how Barroo sensed when she was talking with Thyal, but couldn't hear him, and insisted on looking inside her ears and clothes, trying to find the speaker.

  What is taking you two so long? Thyal said. A burst of warm, rolling mental laughter washed over M'kar, followed by such a strong wave of exhaustion, she yawned.

  "What?" Dulit demanded.

  "Baby's out, and so is Thyal." She braced her knees and disengaged from the exhaustion leaking into their bond. She had experienced that already with Barroo, and once was enough, thanks very much.

  Then she caught her breath as an image filled her mind, of the little drac curled up on Thyal's chest, struggling to keep her eyes open.

  Hello, pretty. Welcome. Go to sleep, and we'll be there when you wake up.

  "She's bigger than Poki," she said, after Dulit had to ask three times what she had seen before Thyal fell asleep. "Deep yellow, almost gold, with streaks of brown on her wings and belly, shading into deep orange."

  The two of them grinned, and then laughed when their two dracs reacted to the image of the newborn with croons and chirps and demands to go see her. They weren't able to arrive in time to be present for the egg to hatch, but they arrived in plenty of time to help Thyal's parents prepare for the next phase of the bonding process: naming and feeding, and not necessarily in that order.

  Thyal named her Infrenx.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Granny assigned each drac baby with a Human parent two adult dracs as teachers and guardians. On board the Defender, the adults divided their interest between the drac babies and the ship's children. Genys had a few anxious days, waiting for the first explosion where a drac came into conflict with the parents of the child now being guarded.

  After four days, she decided it was useless to keep holding her breath, waiting for something to go wrong. She decided to be grateful the two males assigned to Battleaxe had finely tuned instincts, and never came onto the bridge after the first visit, when they seemed to determine that it was a safe place for the hatchling to inhabit. They, and all the other adult dracs, refused to take food from anyone's hands. That resolved Genys' fear that they would become nuisances, or worse, beggars. A portion of the life sciences lab was renovated to turn it into a garden that grew all the plants native to the drac world that were necessary for good health. Unfortunately, that included the plants that allowed them to breathe or spit fire. M'kar assured her that the dracs only nibbled on those particular plants, to keep up the glandular balance, and wouldn't eat enough to create fire unless there was a specific reason to spit fire. Such as defending themselves or the ship’s children.

  Genys decided to leave the question of "Defend them from what, exactly?" for the future. She focused on the positives, such as the dracs' almost obsessive cleanliness, and the fact they had trained themselves to use the toilet facilities on the ship. Once Tahl showed Ha'ess how to use the toilet in medical, all the other dracs picked up on the trick. More proof of a group mind when they needed to have one.

  Two days after Thyal's Infrenx hatched, the drac parents on board the Defender were preparing to go down to Le'anka for a celebration meal with Thyal, his parents, and M'kar's parents. The alert around the hatching room went off. Granny had taken another egg. This time, to everyone's relief, the chosen parent was a Talent who had just graduated from the Academy and specialized in reaching the minds of patients who were so badly damaged, they were entirely cut off from the world. The match between Talent and drac made perfect sense, because she had been sent up to Anwesta specifically to work with the cocooning victims.

  Oddly, no other eggs hatched and no other parents were chosen in that incident. The theory was that the other two eggs from that specific laying had been damaged or lost somehow, in the mass migration to escape from the Hivers on their mission of genocide.

  The incident finally woke up Fleet Command to the necessity of trying to gain some control over the drac-Human bonding situation. Eighteen dracs were more than enough for one starship to deal with. If the species was going to be protected and focused on saving cocooning victims, then no more dracs could be "assigned" to the Defender by Granny. Dulit had already warned the authorities that if she knew the starship was about to leave, Granny might try to get all the adult dracs to transport the eggs back to the ship. When the order came through, recalling all crew of the Defender, four of the six Human drac parents were kept busy elsewhere, distracted. For added protection, they were discretely given a mild tranquilizer to fog their thoughts so they couldn’t give away anything. M'kar shielded her mind and Genys', to keep their dracs from picking up the message and sharing it with Granny, even if involuntarily. Both of them had a headache, from concentrating on thinking of something else, anything else,
by the time they were half an hour of flight away from the starbase.

  "Think it's far enough?" Genys said.

  M'kar didn't answer. She just sat back in the auxiliary station with Barroo up on her shoulder, one paw latched into her hair, and waited. Genys realized she was holding her breath. She exhaled, tried to force herself to relax, and found out once again that "force" and "relax" didn't go together. One cancelled out the other.

  "Okay, I think we're safe."

  "You hope," Decker said, when Genys called him, the first of the other four drac parents, to let them know what had just happened.

  ~~~~~~

  For the next eight decs, the Defender worked on the defenses around the Chute, then guided ships ferrying scientists through the Chute to the drac planet. They conducted extensive survey trips across the planet, to catalog the entire ecological, sociological, and geologic structures and systems. With the dracs listed as leading sentient species of the planet, it was vital to learn everything possible about their homeworld so all the conditions necessary for their top health could be duplicated. The dracs on the Defender were vital to the effort to locate any tribes and nesting places that might have escaped the genocidal sweep of the Hivers. The biologists and botanists had a heyday cataloging all the new species and studying them. When the Defender came back through the Chute to Alliance space, they had more than earned some shore leave.

  First stop: Space Station Maqaffree. While it wasn't a planet, with room to spread out and let starship crews experience wide open spaces and fresh air and non-synthesized food, Maqaffree was large enough to present the illusion of being on a planet. It also had strong enough security to be considered an open station, and safe for civilians and the families of starship crews. While the children of the Defender were ecstatic at being allowed to leave the ship, that didn't mean they would be allowed to run free. M'kar caved in to Tress’ big-eyed pleading, and agreed to escort her and her friends while their parents were on duty. Between all the testing the little girl had endured, seeking to understand whatever Talent she had inherited from her father, and then being the peacemaker in clashes between the ship’s children and the children of the newcomers, she had earned a treat. Maybe she would take up a career in the Diplomatic Corps. The core group of Tress and her three closest friends had expanded to include two children of new crew.

  At least, M'kar hoped it was a diplomatic Talent emerging, and not an early display of hormones. The two newcomers were both boys.

  To be totally honest, she was eager to get off the ship, and away from a group of people who seemed determined to learn to speak drac. They were constantly trying to coax Barroo off her shoulder, or to eat from their hands. The chirps and clicks and crooning sounds they made were enough to prompt M'kar to practice her knife-throwing skills without a visible target. Treinna and Brea and Decker agreed that those people were trying to make themselves so drac-friendly that whenever the ship's dracs laid eggs, they would be at the top of the list as drac parent candidates.

  Later, M'kar realized she had patted herself on the back over her escape plan a little too soon. There was always a way to find her, and no way to turn off the locator bracelet everyone had to wear when they left the ship. Tress and her five friends wanted to go to Castle Zooks, an entertainment venue. The noise of loud, brightly flashing game consoles and children laughing and shouting and screaming encouragement from the sidelines of arena games was loud enough to drown out the pinging of her communicator. That didn't stop Kikardi, one of the botanists, from going through all the trouble of tracing M'kar's whereabouts and contacting one of the staff at Castle Zooks to find her.

  The four girls and two boys were having too much fun in the holo-room, and M'kar didn't want to drag them out of there and leave the venue so she could hear Kikardi. Barroo chirped at her as she stood on the observation platform, contemplating the risks of leaving the six alone for ten minutes at the most. If Kikardi couldn't explain the emergency in less than five minutes, it had better be of a magnitude worthy of emptying out the entire station. The image M'kar got from her drac's mind was that he would keep watch on the children.

  "Oh, you will, will you?" she muttered, and fought not to laugh at the idea of him having any control whatsoever over Tress and her friends. Barroo chirped and nodded with utter confidence. All right, but if anything bad happens, you come get me. Fast. How much of that he understood, she couldn't be sure, but she put an image in his head of an Ankuar bearing down on the children, snarling and waving one of those wicked, three-bladed knives with the curved tips, and then Barroo teleporting to find her and teleporting back with her in his claws. He seemed to understand that.

  "What's the emergency?" she said, as soon as she got out of the main door of Castle Zooks. No immediate response. "Kikardi?" She was tempted to rap her communicator against the wall to make it work. Jasper would have her head if she tried something like that.

  "Fire is the emergency," Treinna said, racing up to her in the corridor. Moonrise, hovering over her head, gave a loud cheep for emphasis.

  M'kar looked up and down the corridor in both directions, fully expecting a wave of panic to flash out from Treinna's words. "Fire" was just not a word people said carelessly on board a space station.

  "Kikardi just discovered that almost half of the plants they've been experimenting with in the botany labs are variants of --"

  "The ones that let dracs breathe fire," M'kar finished for her. "Who's the bo'had-drinking, negative-digit I.Q. dunsel who brought the plants on board in the first place?"

  "They're different enough from the ones Granny showed us, and the ones the Corona's crew catalogued, we've only just discovered the similarities in chemistry now. Even worse …" Treinna shuddered and Moonrise let out a sorrowful little croon as she came in to land on her shoulder. "Not your fault, sweetheart. They hid it from you, too."

  "Hid what?" She braced herself for the "heck no, what did we ever do to deserve this?" quotient to double. M'kar decided life on the Defender had been too calm and quiet for too long. They should have expected something to happen.

  "Well, the teacher dracs discovered it and didn't tell our babies. It's a variant that isn't very prevalent, and some of them have been fighting over it. No one knows how much they have because they've been harvesting and storing it away. It's like catnip for them."

  "Great -- drac narcotics that let them breathe fire. Why are you telling me?" She raised a hand to stop Treinna. "I know. Because I'm the only one the grown-ups listen to, because Granny scolded them all and made me their boss."

  "Better you than us." Treinna patted her shoulder. Her sorrowful look cracked into a grin when M'kar bared her teeth at her. "So, what do we do, oh big mean boss of the grown-ups?"

  "I need to get back on the ship and put some fear of Enlo into those drac-nip hoarders, and get them to show me where they hid the plants. And get Kikardi and her crew to root up and destroy everything. There's no keeping dracs out of anything we lock up." She hooked her thumb over her shoulder into Castle Zooks. "The kids are in a holo-room. If you take over escort duty, I'll get back to the ship."

  "That's what I'm here for." Treinna snapped off a crooked salute, squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and stepped up to the triple-wide doors of the entertainment venue. They slid open at her approach, letting out a deafening, blinding wave of noise and lights.

  "Better you than me," M'kar muttered. She managed a crooked smile as she headed down the corridor, looking for the main hub of lifts to take her to the docking arm for the Fleet ships.

  Treinna contacted her just as she had stepped into the lift. The children weren't in the holo-room. M'kar slapped the controls to stop the door from closing and ran out. She tried to tell herself that it couldn't be too bad, because Barroo hadn't come looking for her.

  "Well, duh," she muttered, dodging around several people and feeling like a fish swimming against the current. Having a flying spy was still taking some getting used to. Barroo, where are you? W
here are the kids?

  The image that came to her jumped around enough she had to physically stop and close her eyes and focus. M'kar realized Barroo was in the air over the children's heads, fluttering to one girl, landing on her shoulder, looking at what she was doing, then fluttering over to the next, then visiting one of the boys. He took his orders to keep watch very seriously. When M'kar could finally focus on the surroundings enough to know where the children were, she contacted Treinna.

  "They're at the back of the whole complex, in the prize shop. Jayna decided she wanted to turn in her tokens from the games."

  Treinna said something, but her voice was barely discernable over the cacophony of Castle Zooks. M'kar kept going. If her friend hadn't heard her clearly, they would just have to meet up somewhere in the maelstrom of children and games and lights and noise. Treinna was a parent -- wasn't she supposed to have inborn tracking skills?

  Barroo popped into the air above M'kar's head just as she stepped into Castle Zooks. The little drac screeched terror and fury and landed on top of her head, his talons digging through her braids. M'kar gasped at the dozen little pins stabbing into her scalp and took a moment to be grateful she had worn her hair up today, for padding. She reached up and yanked Barroo free.

  "Calm down!" she shouted, reinforcing it with a mental roar, and managed to get a grasp on all four of his churning little legs without fouling his wings. Show me.

  More than a dozen snarling Ankuar loomed over the children, none of whom was older than ten years old, Standard.

  Barroo shrieked fury, a call for assistance, loud enough to feel like a spike going through M'kar's head from temple to temple. Her legs buckled, even as the images in her head clarified and she realized there were multiple images of the same three Ankuar.

  Treinna raced over to her, clutching a struggling Moonrise. "What is going --" She yelped, barely audible over the happy noise inside the entertainment venue, as both Moonrise and Barroo popped out.