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

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Khiindi, come back. The captain didn’t say you could go, too!”

  But almost before her words were out, the flap of the cat hatch announced his departure and he, too, made his appearance outside the hull of the Condor, somersaulting nose over tail three feet above the ground or so into the light illuminating the area in front of the viewport. He looked up, blinking at her before righting himself and pushing off after his sire, just as if he’d been in zero G all his life.

  Uncle Joh, clad in full protective gear and helmet, lumbered into view, looked after the retreating cat paws and tail for a moment, then made a thumbs-up gesture in the direction of the viewport. She heard each breath he took.

  “Uncle, why are you wearing both your night-vision goggles and carrying that huge antique infrared camera?”

  “The goggles are so I can see what’s here. The infrared detects heat, so if there are any survivors on this ship, which would mean I couldn’t claim it as salvage, I’ll be able to tell so you and your folks can help them, even though that would, in some ways, pain me. It’s also very hard to tell from the pictures I take with this dinosaur what is valuable and what isn’t. It gives me a few more…shall we say…gray areas, allowing for some flexibility in the salvage regulations.”

  Watching the antics of Khiindi and RK, he chortled and said, “Okay, if everything’s okay for the two bouncy cats out here, I should be fine.” He removed his helmet, adjusted the infrared camera, and began recording the contents of the docking bay.

  The com unit screen broadcast these pictures. While Khorii watched eerie shots of the various silent space yachts in their next-to-last resting places, Uncle Joh uttered appreciative whistles and remarks about what they would bring as salvage. Looking like a strange being with three heads, one of them tucked under his arm, and a third one-eyed head perched slightly to the left of the one sticking out of the neck of his space suit, the captain made his way to the inner hatch and left the docking bay.

  The shimmery dark images jiggled as Becker carried the camera down the corridors, silent but for the creak-thunk of his antigrav boots, his breath, and an occasional “whewee!” when he found something particularly luxurious to record with the camera. Khorii found the details hard to make out, especially since she didn’t know exactly what she was looking at.

  That is, until the hand appeared. A human hand, dangling limp in front of the camera. The captain uttered an expletive and panned the camera up, then back down again.

  “You shouldn’t be watching this, kid,” he said into the microphone, his voice grim. “It’s not a pretty sight. There are bodies floating everywhere. I…” His breathing was quicker and shallower now, she noticed. “I think I’ll come back now. We can do this later. I’m not really feeling all that great.” This sounded so unlike Uncle Joh when he had treasure to salvage, even when there were bodies in the mix, that Khorii got really worried.

  She was going to ask if she should go get her folks when suddenly Becker tripped, his boots went out from under him, and the camera skewed sideways, to capture the bright red image of an unconscious RK, trapped beneath a body and floating just beneath it in the zero G.

  Becker’s gloved hand reached up and grabbed his first mate by the tail, hauling him down. She heard both their hearts thumping through the speaker. There was nothing else to hear except…there was a familiar plaintive mew off to the right. Khiindi! Had he injured RK in a catfight? Was that why the Condor’s first mate was drifting unconscious down the salvage ship’s corridor?

  Khorii loved cats, but she did not understand what it was in the natures of these two that made them so angry with each other. Her mother Acorna had told her that once when they were on a mission together on Makahomia, before Khorii was born, RK and Acorna had briefly forged a telepathic link. Her mother told Khorii that RK was a perfectly reasonable and highly intelligent sentient creature who simply chose to communicate in his own way the majority of the time. Khorii could hardly wait until her own telepathic talents manifested themselves, as they did for all Linyaari. Perhaps she would be able to communicate with both cats all the time, having been raised with Khiindi and RK. Mother had not met RK until she was really quite old, nearly ten ghaanyi.

  Uncle Joh would not be able to manage the camera and both cats. She abandoned the bridge and slipped into her own shipsuit and antigrav boots, then punched the button for the robolift, which cranked toward her far too slowly. At the last moment, she remembered to grab a flashlight and stepped aboard the lift as it descended into darkness.

  Once out of the halo cast by the Condor’s running lights, Khorii felt as if she should be creeping forward through the darkness on tiptoe, but she couldn’t very well do that while wearing antigrav boots. She did, however, keep the beam of her flashlight rotating in a circle around the path in front of her. Twice the beam picked out a white, dead face staring blankly through the viewport of one of the docked ships. Once the face was black. But no bodies floated or lay across her path.

  Leaving the docking bay for the central corridor where she had seen the captain and RK, she was gradually aware of little motes of something fleeing from the beam of her flashlight. They were so concentrated that when she stepped into the corridor, for a time she could not see even with the flashlight because it was clouded by the presence of these—whatever they were. But they fled quickly, and every movement of her flashlight revealed the scene before her more clearly. She almost wished it hadn’t.

  The dead floated around her like idle swimmers in a lake on a hot afternoon, though they obviously had not had any fun in a long time. There was no smell because the atmosphere was so depleted, and anyway, her horn would have removed the foul odors had they been there. But the dead eyes, the protruding tongues on some of the corpses, the death grimaces on their faces: all of them so sad. Some ladies were dressed in beautiful gowns, some men in fine uniforms with golden braid. They bore no wounds that she could see, though with the lighting so poor, she might have missed them. Then she saw Uncle Joh. To her surprise, he was crawling, not walking, toward her, dragging his inert first mate behind him by the tail.

  “Uncle Joh, what is the matter?” she asked. “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “I don’t feel so good, sweetie. Better call your mom and dad. RK’s sick, too. He’s still alive, but just barely.”

  “But you were stricken so suddenly!” she said. “I am afraid to return to the ship, Uncle Joh. I do not know if you will survive until Mother and Father came. Besides, that isn’t necessary. I have a horn, do I not?”

  “Yeah, but you’re just a little bit of a thing.”

  “It does not matter. Some of the elders say that the healing power is more concentrated in us younglings. Oh, poor RK!” Khorii said, lifting the first mate into her arms and extricating his tail from the captain’s fist. Lowering her horn to his head and tummy she said, “Wake up, cat. You must help me help the captain.”

  RK did, of course. With a wiggle and a flip he was out of her arms and swimming anxious circles around the two of them. As she lowered her horn to the captain’s head, RK paddled off into the darkness. By the time Becker was back on his feet, RK had returned, this time with the nape of Khiindi’s neck between his teeth while her own cat’s head lolled and his limp paws and tail trailed beneath the floating older cat’s belly.

  “You’re a good first officer, RK,” Becker said, giving the cat a pat as Khorii relieved him of Khiindi. “Got to look after the passengers, even if you don’t especially like them.”

  RK yawned and paddled back toward the ship. He had had enough. As Khorii touched her horn to the fur between Khiindi’s ears, her cat reached for the horn with his front paws, patted it, yawned, and stretched in her arms, then settled against her shoulder, kneading his claws in her shipsuit and drooling with relief.

  “Come on, Uncle Joh,” Khorii said, extending her free hand. “I will carry your helmet for you. We should return to the ship now. This is a very bad place.”

  “Yeah, you’
re right. We need to get reinforcements in here. This liner is way too big for me to catalog the contents alone. Maak can do it much faster than I can manually, and with Elviiz to help him, I’ll know how rich we are much sooner! Fortunately, you Linyaari are here and can clean out all the nasty germs or whatever the hell hit me, so all my cargo is nice and negotiable and we can put these poor devils to rest.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Maak and Elviiz can also identify each of these people and which belongings aboard the ship belong to which person so their things may be returned to their heirs. You know, as it says in the Federation Unified Code of Conduct? The one you told Elviiz to make me memorize?”

  “Touché” he said glumly. “You should think about going into politics yourself, sweetie. You sure know how to take the fun out of everything.”

  Chapter 2

  They did not need to return to the ship to fetch her parents or Maak and Elviiz. The landing had awakened Mother and Father, who rightly guessed it had something to do with salvage. They did not realize the extraordinary circumstances of the stop until coming out onto the bridge, where they tried and failed to raise the captain on the intercom. They activated Maak and Elviiz and met Khorii and the captain halfway down the corridor.

  “Joh! What do you mean bringing Khorii out here among these dead bodies?” Father demanded.

  “I didn’t, Aari, honest, but you can be proud of her. She handled herself really well and kept me and the cats from joining these poor corpses in that great nebula far, far away.”

  “Of course she did, Captain,” Mother said, sounding stern. “And we are very proud of her.” She linked her arm with Khorii’s and patted her hand. “We are simply wondering how you came to be here in a state that required her assistance so desperately that you did not think of the effect seeing so many lifeless people might have on a sheltered female in her formative years?”

  “Oh, Moth-er,” Khorii said, disentangling herself from the maternal grip in disgust. “Really. From what Uncle Hafiz and my human grandsires have told me, you were freeing child slaves and confronting criminals at my age. I think I can handle seeing a few deceased people. It isn’t as if they could hurt us. Well, not on purpose. I think they must have died from some kind of poison gas that my horn purified when I walked into the corridor.”

  Khorii had a lot to live up to—or down. Her mother, called Khornya among their own people, was known and revered as the Lady Acorna Harakamian-Li to the fierce and warlike Terrans. She was the first Linyaari to go among them, well, not on purpose exactly. The human grandsires, asteroid miners at the time, rescued and raised Mother when they found her escape pod traveling where no Linyaari had gone before.

  On top of that, Khorii’s father Aari was the only one of their people to have survived being captured and tortured by the horrible Khleevi. Together her parents had, in a most ka-Linyaari fashion, fought and vanquished the Khleevi in two time zones. Of course, the first time they had had help from Mother’s human friends as well as from some other Linyaari who helped in a passive way. And the second time, which was actually earlier, they had been aided by her grandsire, or mother-father, as the term literally translated from Linyaari to Standard, the language spoken in the quadrant where Mother was raised. Khorii’s grandsire and grandam were no less remarkable than her parents, both having recently returned from the dead.

  So, really, with a lineage like that, Khorii did not want anyone to think she could not handle seeing a few dead people. RK and Khiindi were no longer in the corridor with the captain and Khorii’s parents, who were standing in a cluster, engrossed in discussing what had probably happened to the people aboard La Estrella Blanca. Probably the two cats had gone back to the ship, but Khorii wandered up the corridor, shining her flashlight on the path ahead, just in case they’d decided to explore further. Cats did like to explore and, according to Karina, one of her human aunties, curiosity had been known to kill cats in the past, as it had almost done just now. So she thought she had better make sure.

  If she didn’t find them on the path, she would look upward again, though the bodies overhead were distressing to look at because of their contorted faces, which were empty of everything that made a person a person. Mostly they seemed very sad. She wondered who they had been. From the way they were dressed, they were at a party when they died. Had they been having fun then? Had they died happy? Most of them were probably the equivalent of her parents’ age—very old, of course, but not as old as Uncle Hafiz in human years. You couldn’t tell as easily with a Linyaari, of course. Her grandparents on her father’s side seemed much older than her grandparents on her mother’s side, but apparently they were all about the same age as cranky old Liriili, who was very bossy, having once been administrator of narhii-Vhiliinyar, and whose attitude made her seem ancient.

  But however old they were, she was sure these people were rather young to have died as they did. She felt sorry for them. She felt even sorrier for their kids. They probably had some, at home, being watched by their grandparents or aunties, as she so often was when her parents were off on a mission. How long would these people have been gone now? Did their children know they were dead even? Probably not. They must still be wondering what had happened to their moms and dads.

  At the end of the corridor there were lifts and a very handsome shiny silver-colored spiral staircase extending the length of the ship, descending far below the corridor where Khorii stood, where the engine rooms and cargo holds and other utilitarian spaces were located, to far above, where the bridge would be. In her experience, cats didn’t care for the smell of engine rooms so she would try the upper levels first. She reached down and flipped off the antigrav setting on her boots, held her arms over her head, lowered them sharply to her sides, and gave a jump that sent her up the stairwell without actually needing to use the steps. That was usually the fun way to do it, but now the passage was occasionally blocked by a dead crew member. In adjoining corridors branching off the stair-well she saw more bodies. An unusual number of people seemed to have been heading away from the bridge and cabins. Perhaps they had decided to abandon ship but died before they could reach their own private vessels or the ship’s shuttles.

  At the top of the stairs she turned on her boots again and walked out onto the corridor leading to the bridge and the crew’s quarters. Still no cats and many more dead crew members. All seemed to be humanoid at least, if not as human as Uncle Hafiz and Auntie Karina, but that wasn’t surprising. Unlike the quadrant of space containing Vhiliinyar’s native star system, which had many different species of people, in this quadrant almost all sentient life was human or humanoid, according to Mother and Captain Becker.

  And, of course, according to Elviiz’s know-it-all data banks. It was totally unfair, in Khorii’s opinion, to put a person’s school inside a person’s already far too superior foster brother. Anyway, it sounded monotonous to her, to have only one kind of people no matter what world you were on. What was the point of going to other planets if everybody else was just like you? That was, she supposed, the best thing about Elviiz. He was different from anyone else on Vhiliinyar, being an android created specifically to be Khorii’s companion, teacher, and protector by his father android, Maak, the Condor’s android first mate (as opposed to the feline first mate, RK. Uncle Joh was very democratic in his assignment of titles for crew members). As birthing gifts went, she supposed Maak’s gift of the ever-present, ever-in-her-way Elviiz was preferable to pricking her finger on a spindle when she was sixteen (by then she would be quite mature of course, in Linyaari years) and falling into a deep prolonged sleep, rather like hypersleep, as the princess in the fairy tale had done.

  She’d read that story, along with many, many others, among the books in the captain’s extensive dump-rescued library. The Condor, with its junk hard-copy library, computerized references, and seemingly endless supply of vids, recycled ancient knowledge as well as refuse. Much of the data Maak had imparted electronically to his son had come from those source
s. The way Elviiz acted sometimes, though, you’d have thought he invented all the stories himself. When Maak gave her the birthing gift of Elviiz, unfortunately he had also given Elviiz the birthing gift of both ego and attitude, something previous androids had been without.

  It didn’t do any good to complain about him to Mother or Father. Maak had been their friend as long as Uncle Joh, and they said they could never have defeated the Khleevi without him. They were sure Elviiz was really as dear to her as Maak was to them. But Maak did not correct every single thing they said or try to stop them from doing anything really interesting, as Elviiz always did with her. In fact, she was surprised to have gotten away from him this long. She expected to hear the clomp of little android boots catching up with her at any moment, telling her to return to the Condor while he, Elviiz, got to explore with the grown-ups. Not that she was exploring. She was looking for cats. Really.

  The bridge hatch did not respond to its control, so she tried to pry it open, but something seemed to be blocking it. “I’m sorry, it’s the only way,” she said to the bodies floating below her, then backed up to the hatch and gave it a one-legged kick. Her legs and feet had the strength of her equinesque forebears and the hatch, though damaged, opened enough for her head and shoulders to pass through. Shining the beam of the flashlight around the perimeter of the hatch frame, she saw what was blocking it. Three bodies had apparently been wedged into the workings. Parts of them drifted in zero G, but they were stacked atop each other, and each had a limb or a bit of clothing trapped in the iris. Sticking the flashlight under her arm, she reached down and as gently as possible—which wasn’t very, dislodged the blockages, freeing two of the bodies to float ceilingward. She saw as she released the dead that, unlike the bodies in the corridors, these people had laser burns through the centers of their chests.