[Acorna 08] - First Warning: Acorna's Children (with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough)

by Anne McCaffrey

  FIRST WARNING

  Acorna’s Children

  ANNE McCAFFREY

  and

  ELIZBETH ANN SCARBOROUGH

  This book is for Jason and Cynthia Scarborough, with love

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Until the Condor encountered the derelict spaceship drifting through deep…

  Chapter 2

  They did not need to return to the ship to…

  Chapter 3

  The storage asteroid was not far by space-faring standards, basically…

  Chapter 4

  This is Federation Station Alpha adjunct to Kezdet. Please state…

  Chapter 5

  Elviiz didn't get to fly the shuttle manually because nothing…

  Chapter 6

  Hap led them to a computer terminal and suggested they…

  Chapter 7

  Calla Kaczmarek ordinarily enjoyed the open plan of the bubbles…

  Chapter 8

  Hafiz Harakamian had not attained his wealth and high position…

  Chapter 9

  It wasn't until the end of the first week on…

  Chapter 10

  At the lab Khorii found Hap and Elviiz building a…

  Chapter 11

  The entity in feline form who was commonly called, but…

  Chapter 12

  I think Maak programmed Elviiz to feel much of what…

  Chapter 13

  Hap sat beside Elviiz in the spacecraft, wondering how to…

  Chapter 14

  Elviiz began the countdown and instrument check while Khorii took…

  Chapter 15

  Jalonzo was told by his school counselors that, like a…

  Chapter 16

  You look surprised, Uncle Hafiz," Neeva said, as he gaped…

  Chapter 17

  Jaya's grief surprised Khorii a little. People on Vhilliinyar didn't…

  Chapter 18

  Khiindi was getting worried about himself. He didn't feel at…

  Chapter 19

  Across the street from the building where Aari and Acorna…

  Chapter 20

  Ordinarily, mutiny was not an option that Asha Bates would…

  Chapter 21

  Jaya had never loaded the delivery shuttle by herself before,…

  Chapter 22

  LoiLoiKua appeared in space as a shimmering ball of aquamarine…

  Chapter 23

  So how bad is it down there?" Becker asked, as…

  Chapter 24

  Aari and Acorna were awakened by a strange sound. A…

  Chapter 25

  The Solojo system, at last!" Khorii said, giving Captain Bates…

  Chapter 26

  The Mana's shuttle was the largest and roomiest of the…

  Chapter 27

  The cargo shuttle docked aboard the Mana. Khorii and the…

  Chapter 28

  As spaceflights went, the one from Rio Boca to Dinero…

  Chapter 29

  Khorii was more devastated than she would have believed possible.

  Chapter 30

  As the Mana left Paloduro space, Khorii watched the speck…

  Glossary of Terms and Proper Names in the Acorna Universe

  Brief Notes on the Linyaari Language

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Books in the Acorna Series

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Until the Condor encountered the derelict spaceship drifting through deep space, Khorii couldn’t understand why the fact that she was taking her first long space voyage had caused so much fuss back home. She had flown on the Condor plenty of times when her family shuttled between her home planet of Vhiliinyar and the Moon of Opportunity (known as MOO to everyone except Uncle Hafiz and Aunt Karina now). This trip was just like those ones, only longer, although she did like seeing all the new solar systems and such that Mother and Father, Captain Becker, and her android friend Elviiz’s dad Maak were so eager to point out to her.

  When Khorii’s parents decided to take her on a trip into Federation space to see her mother’s human friends and family, Khorii had been afraid it would be really boring. But Mother had her reasons for taking her along. Mother’s adoptive human fathers had come to visit when Khorii was younger, but she barely remembered them, and she had not yet met their mates and children. Mother said it was time and past that Khorii got to know them. Mother also wanted Khorii to see something of the worlds that she herself had known as a girl.

  But Khorii was on her way, even though her Linyaari playmates, both of them, thought the prospect of a trip into a whole new sector of space was pretty scary. That was despite the fact that they were starborn themselves, and used to meeting other races.

  Khorii was scared, too. But not for the same reasons her friends were. She was scared that it would be absolutely mind-numbingly dull, what with all of the adults talking about the Good Old Days and about people who were dead before she was born, as Linyaari adults seemed to do all the time.

  At the same time she was worrying about being bored, she also thought that this trip could be thrilling.

  But now, sitting in her berth and staring out through her viewscreen into space, she was not yet thrilled, and she wondered how it could have possibly been night for so long. Days and weeks and months full of nothing but darkness. Stars were everywhere, but not one of them turned the morning sky violet, as it was at home when Our Star rose over the mountains.

  She understood, of course, the physics of space and light. She knew that it was Vhiliinyar’s atmosphere that produced the beautiful skies she longed to see again, and not Our Star alone. Still, she couldn’t help feeling that if she touched the tip of her horn to the screen, it might somehow purify the vastness and depth that had swallowed the ship and with it her family and friends, and turn the airless blackness into the light and sweet-smelling air she craved.

  She felt a nudge under her arm and lifted it to see her cat Khiindi staring at her while his sides rose and fell with the passion of his purrs. Khiindi loved it out here. Well, he would. Cats loved nothing better than sleeping. Endless nights were good for sleeping. Of course, cats loved sunlight, too, but Khiindi just curled up under the nearest lamp and pretended it was his own personal sun.

  Khorii sighed. How she longed to set the ship down someplace larger than the Condor, somewhere outside, where she could graze and run and play. And, right now, except for Khiindi, she was lonely. Her foster brother, Elviiz, usually annoyed her by being underfoot and in her way every chance he got, but now that he was closeted with his android father/creator, Maak, Khorii felt abandoned. Her parents, Acorna and Aari, were in their own berth, sleeping after a long watch. They had proposed this trip as a way to spend more time with their family after a long series of missions that had taken them away from Vhiliinyar, but at the moment it felt to Khorii that they were spending their time exclusively in each other’s company. She was feeling decidedly left out.

  Khorii stretched, yawned, and decided to go see what was happening on the bridge. Maybe she could get Captain Becker, her beloved Uncle Joh, to play a game with her or teach her more about gonzo physics.

  When she got to the deck, it seemed that Uncle Joh also had better things to do. He was bouncing up and down in the command seat, alternately wringing his hands and clapping them together before spreading them over the various controls of his scanner array like a concert pianist about t
o pound out a sonata in one of the cultural vids Mother insisted she watch.

  Drawing nearer to her human friend, she saw a spot of drool beaded at the side of his mouth. Becker looked exactly like RK, the ship’s feline first mate, when RK was contemplating a particularly tasty specimen of vermin. Khorii rushed forward, worried that Uncle Joh, who was of course quite aged, being a contemporary of her parents, was having some kind of seizure. But then she saw the reflection of his eyes glittering avariciously in three of the scanner arrays and knew he was fine. What he was wearing was simply a heightened version of his characteristic “Yahoo, salvage!” expression: a mixture of enthusiasm, delight, and greed.

  The Condor was a ship dedicated to collecting and “recycling” or selling salvage, and Uncle Joh loved his business. There was very little else that could thrill him so much as a bit of wreckage or refuse. It appeared that he had a particularly luscious bit of salvage in sight this time.

  “What is it?” she asked him, sliding into her usual seat beside the captain. She had lived only six Linyaari years, the equivalent of twelve Standard years for a humanoid child, and was somewhat short for her age, even among her Linyaari friends. Khiindi hopped onto the headrest of her chair, which rose a foot or so above the top of her head.

  RK, whose given name was Roadkill, was a huge brindled black and gray, very furry, Makahomian Temple Cat. RK had been sleeping in a similar position on the chair above Uncle Joh’s head. The feline first mate had been with Uncle Joh since before Khorii was born. Upon seeing Khiindi, RK opened one eye and growled. Khiindi, a gray-striped cat who was large, though not as large as RK, gave a pathetic mew in return. RK was Khiindi’s sire, or at least the Makahomian priesthood suspected that he was, and Khiindi always seemed hurt by the older cat’s animosity. Khorii reached up and, with one of her three-fingered, single-knuckled hands, stroked Khiindi’s fluffy gray tail as it flipped in an agitated fashion against the small, spiraling opalescent horn nestling among the short pink-and-purple-streaked silver curls of her mane. Normally, as a space-faring Linyaari, she should have had silver curls, but she’d been experimenting with dyes to make her look somewhat different from every other star-clad Linyaari person her age.

  Like her, every other Linyaari who’d been into space was white-skinned, silver-maned, opal- or golden-horned, and had feathery silver curls growing from head and neck and halfway down the spine. Another ridge of curls tickled the back of her legs from knee to ankle, where her feet ended in two hard, hooflike toes. The dye Khorii had used was pale and sort of messy-looking now, but it had been pretty when she first did it. Aunt Maati said that Khorii’s mother had done something similar when she first came to narhii-Vhiliinyar, the new homeworld of the Linyaari that Khorri’s mother had helped create.

  After a moment of fiddling with the controls that sent the Condor in pursuit of its prey, her Uncle Joh leaned back in the chair and pointed to the scanners. “Khorii, cutie, I am so glad you are keeping me company on this historic occasion. Lookee there!”

  She saw a small blip on the screen quickly blossom into a larger blip.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “Ah, my child, listen and I will tell you a poem. You like poems, right?”

  She nodded, cautiously. Uncle Joh still recited poems and played practical jokes on her as he had done when she was a very small child. To be fair, though, he did the same thing to her parents, so she supposed it had more to do with who he was than with his perception of her. He began:

  “’Twas night just like always as it is in deep space

  We were scanning for salvage all over the place

  When what to my wondering scanners appeared

  But a derelict ship, off our port bow, right here!”

  Uncle Joh stabbed at a button, and the blip bloomed until it filled the entire screen, revealing itself to be a large luxury space liner, its name clearly legible on its side.

  “La Est-trail-a Blanket?” Khorii asked, unsure of how to say the words.

  “La Estrella Blanca,” he corrected her pronunciation, turning the sounds at the end of the words into long a’s. “It’s Spanish, chica. Means ‘The White Star.’ Historically not the best choice of words, but probably the guy who named her was a businessman, not a space mariner or a historian.”

  “Why not a good choice?” she asked.

  “It’s very ancient history, but once upon a time on Old Terra, back when it was called Earth, some people built a huge ship—not a space vessel; it sailed on the water of the ocean, though maybe sailed isn’t the right word, since it didn’t have sails. It had motors. Anyway, they built a ship so huge that they said it couldn’t be sunk. And it did. End of story.”

  “And the ship was called The White Star also? Like this one?”

  “No, it was called the Titanic. But the company that built it was called the White Star Line. In Spanish, that ended up being translated into this ship’s name. Naturally the Titanic’s sinking didn’t do the White Star Line any good. For one thing, it wiped out quite a few of the richest people on the planet, who were on that maiden voyage because it was the fashionable thing to do.”

  “What is ‘fashionable’?” she asked. Her Standard was really pretty good, but every once in a while humans, Uncle Joh especially, came up with an expression that had not been covered in her lessons.

  “Means all their friends were doing it and thought it was cool, so they wanted to do it, too.”

  “Ah.” She thought about that for a moment, but it did not make a great deal of sense. If all of her friends were grazing on one patch of grass, she had always found it helpful to find another patch for herself, which would give her more food and not overgraze that particular area. But maybe that was just her.

  Returning her attention to the screen, now filled with the starboard side of the ship, the portion that said “Blanca,” she noticed a faint pulsing of the indicator light to the right of the scanner array.

  “What does this mean?” she asked, touching it.

  “Nuts!” he said, touching a volume control, “it’s a distress beacon. Does look pretty old though.” He studied the pulses for a moment, and said, “I guess they would have been in distress at some point or the ship wouldn’t be wallowing around in space like this. We’ll just pull alongside her with the tractor beam, board her, and see what’s what. I don’t wish those people any ill luck, mind you, but that ship would be some bodacious salvage if nobody’s still aboard.”

  He fiddled with the com system and began talking to his prospective prize.

  “Hey, there, you aboard the Estrella Blanca, this is Captain Jonas Becker aboard the Condor, flagship of Becker and Son Interplanetary Recycling and Salvage Enterprises, Ltd., of which I am the CEO. We received your distress signal and ask permission to board. Do you read me?”

  After turning up the volume, waiting, and going through a number of other procedures, he flicked off the com signal, and said, “Guess nobody’s home.” He looked much happier.

  After that, he ignored her while she watched him approach the much larger ship and attach the Condor to its docking bay hatch using the tractor beam. The tractor beam had been culled, like most of the Condor, from another larger and more powerful vessel. Khorii knew this because Uncle Joh was fond of telling her about the heritage of each and every sheet of metal, panel, nut, bolt, screw, and button he had adapted for his ship. Now he reversed thrusters and, with the pull of the tractor beam to override the electronic controls, the hatch opened the rest of the way of its own accord. Becker disengaged the tractor beam and flew into the outer airlock of the liner’s docking bay. It irised smoothly shut behind the Condor, and the hatch leading to the bay irised open.

  “Normally I might have to cut open the hull or extrude a boarding tube,” Becker told her. “But this baby is large enough that I’ll just drive on in there and find us a parking place.” When the inner hatch irised shut behind them, the bay became dark as night, like space itself, without stars. Except for their lan
ding lights, the deck was black and silent. Their lights slid over the hulls of what looked like many other sleek vessels, some larger than the Condor, as the ship settled into an empty berth among them. “The ship’s atmosphere seems to be intact—normal O2 levels and reasonable air pressure, but no gravity out there. But I don’t like the looks of it. I’m gonna suit up.”

  “Should I call my parents or Uncle Maak and Elviiz?” she asked.

  “Nah. Your parents need their rest, and Maak is downloading some new programming to Elviiz, so they’ll be all plugged in and disassembled and stuff. I’ll take the camera to document the findings, in case the company that owns this bird contests my salvage claim. That way, I’ll be transmitting back to our com screen and you can watch that and make sure I don’t run into any trouble. If I do, then you can call the cavalry. But don’t worry, honey, I do this stuff all the time. So does the cat. C’mon, RK. You wanna stink up a new place, here’s your chance.”

  He clattered down the metal stairs to the lower deck, where the robolift and the first mate’s intricately engineered cat hatch and airlock were located. She heard more clanking and banging and a couple of swear words, then the creaking of the robolift descending through the tail of the ship. Before the sound stopped, RK appeared through the viewport, floating through the zero G with his tail lashing like a rudder until he blended into the darkness. When he looked back, his eyes glowed like stars in the ship’s lights. Khiindi mewed and jumped down from Khorii’s chair.