Second Wave (16 page)

It wasn’t until they receded, as if walking backward, footless, into the corridor, that she found the courage and the ability to move and speak. That was when she called for her friends.

Chapter 14

N
o wonder all the children were crying!” Khorii said aloud when she had absorbed Jaya’s impressions and feelings. “How awful for you. I wonder why this is happening.”

By that time they had paged Hap and Mikaaye, and Mikaaye had arrived, saying Hap was on his way. The summons had not been an urgent one, as until Jaya explained aloud as best she could what had happened, they had no idea what sort of crisis had caused her to call for them.

Mikaaye’s brow puckered around his horn. “Perhaps with so many dying so quickly, the spirits could not find their way to their transition points. I have never heard of such a thing occurring, but then, we know very little of what comes after.”

Jaya was not crying, but she was very upset. Sesseli released Khiindi, who landed indignantly on the floor. Khorii thought it was a good thing the little girl had to let go of him sometimes, or her silly cat would forget why he had four legs.

He immediately jumped into Jaya’s lap. Shortly after, Sesseli returned with Captain Bates’s beading tray and handed it to the former teacher.

As they talked, Captain Bates and Jaya released her braids, and the captain combed her hair and slowly braided the beads into it as she had done with Khorii’s. Jaya began relaxing with the gentle change of pressure on her scalp, feeling her hair lifted and released repetitively in that hypnotic soothing way.

Finally, she said, “I don’t know why whatever that was looked like my family. I think maybe if it was them, they were so far away in whatever place people go when they die that they couldn’t really come back enough to be them. Maybe it was just me wanting to see them again.” She shuddered. “But not like that. Everything that made them themselves was gone.”

“That’s how it is,” Captain Bates agreed. They all fell silent, thinking it over when Hap burst in.

“Jaya!”

She looked up. Hap was more agitated than she had been. Although he was extremely competent, he was also very excitable and imaginative and could not help showing his feelings.

“I’m sorry. I had to go to the head, but while I was there, all of a sudden I saw some—well, they were almost people, and they looked like your folks and the other crew members. I mean, they weren’t real, couldn’t have been because we’d have never all fit into the head if they had been but—”

“You saw them, too?” Jaya asked, looking up but not becoming overly excited again, still under the spell of the hair braiding. “And you recognized them?”

“Sure. I mean, I guessed it was them because what other older couple who looked like you and their friends would be hanging around here as ectoplasm or anything else?”

Hap was pretending that the idea of ectoplasmic forms was just one of those things people sometimes encountered, but Khorii could tell he was almost as shocked as Jaya had been.

When Hap walked into the room, Khiindi looked up. All the time the tall boy spoke, Khiindi had stared first at him, then up at Jaya, and finally, with a glance at Khorii, jumped down and ran to the hatch, which irised open automatically. Before it closed again, Khorii heard his paws thudding down the hall as if he had hooves like hers.

“You know what I think?” Hap said. “I think they want us to give them a proper burial, off the ship, somewhere dirtside.”

“Traditionally our people cremate the dead,” Jaya said. “But the medical officials seemed to fear that might spread the disease.”

“It won’t with Mikaaye and me there to purify the smoke as it rises,” Khorii said.

“There’s only one planet on our course to Becker’s wormhole where we might be able to do that,” Captain Bates said. “That would be Rushima.”

“Then that’s where we’ll stop,” Khorii said. “My people have friends there because we helped them repel the Khleevi invasion.”

“Oh yes!” Mikaaye said. “That is a very good story. Both Khorii’s mother and mine helped the settlers there and they were very grateful. They are certain to help us give proper ceremony to Jaya’s family.”

“Rushima it is then,” Jaya said.

K
hiindi pelted down the hall, knowing he would be able to see the specters that had disturbed Hap and Jaya. There was something extremely familiar about all of this. Perhaps in his former life he had seen the sort of thing Jaya’s family had become in their next life?

Just when he thought he would need to search the entire ship, he heard a “RRRROWL!” and a hiss and saw four felines bounding out of the cargo bay that contained the makeshift graveyard.

He might have known—had he not seen the other odd occurrence there himself? Except somehow, he thought at that time it was caused by the malign presence of that tail-breaking Marl creature.

Now the Vermin Eradication Squad stood hissing and spitting outside the hatch, even the half-grown kittens twice their size, every hair on their furry bodies standing at attention, backs arched, tails bristling, ears flat, and white fangs bared through peeled-back lips.

“I don’t suppose I need to ask if you saw anything,” Khiindi said.

“Wick-ed!” spat the queen.

“Nassss-ty,” hissed the kits.

“Scared the crap out of
me,
” their father, now surgically celebate, like the rest of them, agreed.

“Did they look like your old humans?” Khiindi asked.

“Of course not!” the queen said, and Khiindi jumped back for fear she might give him a claws-out smack. “Didn’t look like anything but a collection of evil dust motes.”

“How can dust motes be evil?” Khiindi asked. He knew, of course, he just wanted to see if she could articulate what he felt better than he could.

“Well, they smell that way, don’t they?” the unfortunate male responded. Of them all, he had calmed down the most quickly. Queens with kits, even when both were incapable of reproduction, could be excitable. “Worse stench than jellified mouse.”

“Go see for yourself if you’re so curious,” the queen said, hissing the “curioussss.” “But remember what they say about
that.
”

Khiindi may have been born on Makahomia, but prior to that birth he had been around enough to be familiar with that old saw. And in his experience, lack of curiosity at certain times could kill the investigatively impaired as quickly as the alternative.

Whatever it was couldn’t be worse than it had been before, when Marl Fidd had been involved, too. Bravely, Khiindi strutted forward, into the cavernous cargo hold.

His gorgeous golden eyes—although he was of course behind them, he was well aware of how gorgeous they were, since others frequently remarked upon it, and he was not the sort of foolish cat who imagined that the magnificent creature in the mirror could be anyone but himself—quickly adjusted to the darkness. Fur erect, tail lashing, ears pricked and rotating to detect the slightest sound, he slunk forward, crouching and stalking toward the mound of soil held in place by banks of large containers.

He had spent a lot of lap time soaking up antique vids aboard the
Condor
and on Maganos Moonbase. He knew very well that hyperactive dead things tended to return to their places of not so eternal rest when they ran out of things to frighten or mischief to do.

Compared to himself, they were rank amateurs at mischief doing, and when he could switch shapes, he had sometimes been very frightening. The dead part was something else again. He had never been nor did he have any intention of becoming dead but he knew that dead things lay still. That was how it worked. They didn’t roam around worrying their living offspring or interfering with the duties of working felines. Of course, there might have been time travel involved, but he didn’t think so. In that case they would now look exactly as they had before. The VES denied recognizing them, and Jaya had said that though they resembled her family superficially, she felt that they were not the same.

Even the soft footfalls of his paws echoed in the emptied hold.

The distance from hatch to graves felt as if it could be measured in light-years. But hovering over the graveyard, he saw the same shimmering shapes he had seen before, except that now they seemed more solid and better defined. They did indeed seem to have coalesced into roughly bipedal forms.

He slunk closer, keeping his belly low to the deck, but they seemed unaware of him, or, if they were aware, not properly respectful of him as a potential predator.

The nearer he drew, the more his nostrils filled with their scent. He did not find it quite so thoroughly offensive as the ordinary cats did, but he did find it distinctly odd. A medley of rot, metal, and something like the smell of the cultures Jalonzo was growing in the laboratory was as close as Khiindi could come to describing it. It was also very much the same sort of odor he had detected around the sand castle on LoiLoiKua. Khorii had acted as if he were merely showing off, which hurt because he had definitely sensed this same sort of presence and had been trying to protect her from it.

But while the smell was strong to a cat’s sensitive olfactory organs, he doubted that the blunted senses of the humans or even Linyaari could detect more than a whiff of it.

As he had thought they might, the forms began to pour themselves back into the soil, returning to their graves. Oooooooooh. Khiindi was not going to let them get away with that spooky nonsense around
him.

He put his paws into warp drive and raced for the mound, leaping the barriers with a single bound and landing stiff-legged, claws extended in the grave dirt.

Rats! The last few motes were sinking into the soil even as he stood there, escaping his wrath. Or almost.

A final trail of the dustlike specters spiraled before his eyes, sailed over his head and behind him, and curled itself around his tail, tugging it, tugging
him,
trying to pull him down after it. With a mighty yowl and a twist of his lithe body, Khiindi pounced on the thing holding his tail, dispersed it, and teleported across the cargo bay and through the hatch where he landed sprawling on the deck with the queen and a kit squashed beneath his prostrate form.

“They—they almost
got
me,” he panted.

“Nasty
and
incompetent then!” the queen snarled. “Get off me, you, and unpaw my child or I’ll finish what they left undone!”

Khiindi levitated and raced down the corridor toward the bridge and the protection of Khorii and Sesseli.

As he reached the hatch, it irised open and he leaped in, the queen half a body length behind him.

The two-leggeds watched stupidly, all except Sesseli, who snatched him up with her telekinesis and pulled him into her arms, while the queen braked, smacking her tail against the deck and glaring up at them.

Khiindi wriggled free of Sesseli and hopped onto Khorii’s shoulders. Because it was expected of him, he laughed down at the angry queen, but his heart wasn’t in it.

How was he going to find a way to warn Khorii that the plague was not dead after all but changing into another form?

Chapter 15

I
t is she, as I saw it would be!” An unusually round humanoid female pointed at Narhii. She was so covered in the feminine garb Akasa prized, and needed so very much of it to cover her, that she might well have used up half of Akasa’s extensive wardrobe. Jewels hung from every part of her a jewel
could
hang from, covering her otherwise mostly bare upper chest, arms, fingers, and dangling from her ears and the draperies veiling her mane, which was a sort of roan color.

“Please, Karina, you’re frightening the child,” another female voice said, and a face much like Narhii’s appeared on the screen. “Who are you, youngling, and how did you come to be in the sea?”

Narhii knew the female wanted to ask about her clothing as well. She also knew, just by looking at her over the com screen, that this female had been hoping to see her, though not perhaps in this fashion.

“I don’t like talking into this thing, in front of so many others,” she replied, feeling very daring. She hadn’t heard all of the others, but she could feel them watching her even though the female like her was the only one she saw.

“It’s really quite all right,” the other female assured her. “These are all friends and—well, I’m afraid that I cannot come and speak to you in person, nor can Aari, my mate.”

“Why not?” Narhii asked.

“It’s complicated, but we’ve been exposed to a disease that you might catch. It’s a very bad one.”

“You look fine to me,” Narhii said. She didn’t sense a trick, but neither did she see why the female wouldn’t come to meet her. She had an idea about her, and as long as she was being very bold, she decided to go all the way. “I found out recently—they didn’t mean for me to but I did—that I have a mother and father alive about now. Are you my mother?”

The female, confused, looked away from the screen as if to speak to someone else—the mate? Narhii’s—
father
? and the first female appeared again. “Apparently so, dear, if my vision was correct, which naturally it was. Now then, tell us, from when came you and what are you called?”

Narhii didn’t want them to see that she was just as confused as they were. They would think her stupid, or guess that she had run away from what the Friends had always told her was her destiny and her duty. They wouldn’t want a stupid, lazy daughter.

“I came from—before,” she said. “I thought I was the only one like me. There were people like them.” She waved at the
sii
-Linyaari, who had left her the rock while they swam and dived around it. “And there were the Friends and the Others, who say they were saved by the Friends.”

“Others?” the heavily bedecked and fleshed woman asked.

“Quadrupeds with horns like mine, white like me,” Narhii explained. “And similar feet.”

“She must mean the Ancestors,” a male voice said. His face appeared on the screen, and Narhii guessed that this must be the mate of the female—her father? “I believe I have visited the time you speak of,
yaazi
, though I did not see you there. How
did
you come to be there and now—here?”