Second Wave (28 page)

Hector was reiterating how his stupid daughter-in-law, who was not good enough for his son and had probably been responsible for his falling off his horse and being a cripple, had stolen his grandchildren from him and when he died had had him buried facedown. “Trash,” Hector said.
“Hey, what in tarnation is going on here? Don’t you
young people know it’s rude to interrupt a conversation? You, girl, get out of my face! What are you doin’ hangin’ around here anyway?”

Mikaaye felt a brief, light pressure, and the cool of a horn against his chest. The pain fled, along with Hector, replaced by a comfort as sweet as clover. The horn traveled to his neck and head. He opened his eyes and saw Khorii. It could hardly have been anyone else, since they were the only people with horns in the vicinity.

He sighed and smiled at her. Not only was she his own kind, and had made the pain go away, but he had never known before how gentle she could be. She’d always seemed pretty bossy on the ship. But now she was the most sublime being he could possibly imagine, and, best of all, she had driven Hector away.

“Who is Hector?”
she asked.
“Here, hold on to me. Sesseli will pull us both up.”

“You heard that?”
he asked.

“You’re not shielding very well at the moment. I’m surprised I didn’t hear you all the way back on the landing field. You must have been having nightmares at one point.”

“I was. I had a very bad one about a spirit who drove all the others away. He could not be satisfied in life or in death and never tired of complaining.”

Khorii giggled.
“He drove you away from death, then. I suppose if we only knew it, everyone and everything has a use, and that must be his. But I was not referring to him. There were other things.”

“I remember very little. Even Hector is fading, which is a relief.”
What he did remember was the touch of her horn and her hands soothing his nerves, washing away his pain and filling him with the pleasure of her touch instead. It was something all of his people could do, of course. He could do it himself. But not like she did. They were almost up to the road, and the injured and their friends would demand their attention, so he had only this moment to reassure himself.
“Khorii? Are you still angry with me for going on the mission and not you?”

“I wasn’t angry!”
she replied.
“I just—it doesn’t matter, Mikaaye. As long as the injured are healed and what needs purifying gets purified and the
plague is truly destroyed so we can go home again, what does it matter if you do it or I do?”

“None at all,”
he said.
“I just was wondering. I did not intend to cause you emotional distress.”

“You did nothing wrong,”
she said, although the feeling he got from her was that he had. However, he knew that her words were truer than her feelings, and therefore her feelings were unreasonable, and that annoyed him.

But by that time Hap, Scar, and the others were hauling them over the edge and onto what was left of the road.

T
he road was destroyed in so many places that in the end they healed the injured then ferried everyone back to town. Scar, Hap, Captain Bates, and Mikaaye returned to her damaged shuttle and spent hours repairing it with spare parts from the
Mana
—many of which were inexplicably damaged as well.

Khorii thought wistfully of her uncle Joh, who could have had the entire shuttle and the
Mana
besides completely refurbished in less time. Thinking of him made her think of his asteroid and the
Estrella
Blanca, the
White Star.
This thought was less fond. He was the one who had sent them—what was the phrase?—to pursue wild geese? His flaw of lusting for riches had attracted Marl and the other men of mercenary motivation.

By the time the
Mana
’s crew was ready to depart, two days and nights had passed.

Elder Plimsoll declined to take charge of the prisoners. “We’ve been held up by pirates for less in the past,” he said. “We don’t want them messin’ with us again because we have what they think is theirs.”

The cargo nets that had formed Marl’s shipboard prison weeks before were still in place. “That’s fine,” Captain Bates said. “We may find a use for them yet.”

Khorii couldn’t read her former teacher, who used telepathy rarely and was expert at shielding her thoughts. She had a connection to the pirates, that much was clear from her conversation with Pauli, who had claimed to be her father. Whether that connection was warm enough to keep the captain’s clan from trying to kill her shipmates was not clear. Khorii didn’t think Captain Bates knew herself yet, but it would bear discussion once they were under way.

Jaya started the countdown.

The com unit beeped and Maati, Thariinye, and Khorii appeared on the screen.

No one was more startled than Khorii herself. To the others, most star-clad Linyaari looked alike but to Linyaari, there were many variations in appearance that distinguished them—the shape, length, and color of the horn, the color of the eyes, texture of the mane, conformation of the skull and body. The girl standing beside Maati looked to Khorii like her own reflection.

“Where have you been?” Maati asked. “We’ve been trying to hail you since yesterday.”

“There were emergencies,” Jaya said.

“We’ve had a few of those, too,” Maati said. “If you can delay your departure until we arrive, we can explain more fully.”

“How soon can you be here?” Jaya asked.

“We’re unsure. We await the arrival of the
Balakiire.
”

“Maati, what is the situation? Who is your companion and why must you wait for the
Balakiire
?”

“I thought you would never ask. It is so awkward at times to have humans, however competent and friendly, in the middle of our communications. I wanted you to know this news ahead of the others. My companion is your twin sister Ariin, who will be accompanying you and the
Balakiire
back to Vhiliinyar so Elviiz’s father can finish healing him.”

“Wait! Why does Elviiz need healing, and when did I get a twin sister?”

Maati sent her a series of images of how they found Ariin, or rather, how Ariin found them, followed by other, less-distinct images of the horrific way Elviiz had been injured.

While Khorii digested this, her twin watched her face carefully. So did Jaya. “I know I’m missing something here, Khorii. What’s going on?”

“Family issues,” Khorii said. Jaya’s lids came down to shutter her eyes, and she pretended to be very interested in the instrument console. She no longer had family to cause problems or to give her joy or support. Khorii did not know what she should do first, but finally said to her look-alike, “I am very surprised to learn that I have a sister, Ariin.”

“I was surprised, too, Khorii, but very glad. I have heard so many wonderful things about you. I will try to live up to your example and be of some small assistance in your great work.” She inclined her head in what almost amounted to a bow.

“This is my friend Jaya,” Khorii told her quickly. Hearing praise about herself from someone who looked so similar was extremely unsettling, and she wanted to get away from the subject of her “great work” as quickly as possible.

Captain Bates, Hap, and Mikaaye entered and prepared to strap themselves in for takeoff. “These are my other friends, our teacher Captain Asha Bates and Hap Hellstrom. You probably know Mikaaye already?”

Both Mikaaye and Ariin shook their heads, their manes ruffling slightly as they did so.

Sesseli entered last, clutching Khiindi. The cat looked at the com screen as if he had seen a larger carnivore and bolted, scratching a track across Sesseli’s forearm as he ran to hide beneath a storage bench.
Leave it to a cat to capture all of the attention in the room,
Khorii thought. Ariin barely acknowledged Sesseli, but had watched Khiindi’s flight intently. Surely she had seen cats before? Since Nadhari Kando became regent on Makahomia, litters of temple kittens had become ceremonial gifts between her world and Vhiliinyar. Quite a number of Linyaari pavilions hosted Temple Cats these days.

Sesseli, holding her bleeding arm, came to Khorii and held her injured limb up to the Linyaari’s horn. Khorii absently rubbed her horn against the wound as a
good
cat might rub his head against a beloved friend.

“And this is Sesseli,” Khorii concluded.

Sesseli scrutinized the screen, then looked back at Khorii.

“Maati says that Ariin and I are twins,” Khorii told Sesseli.

“Hi, Ariin,” the little girl said with a giggle. “Now I don’t know how I’ll tell you apart.”

Jaya asked, “Why are you waiting for the
Balakiire
? When is it due?”

“Soon,” Maati told her. “We need help towing a Federation tanker with a cargo of freshwater safely to the surface of Rushima. Then we need an extra crew to fly the ship to LoiLoiKua, where we can fill it with water from there to evacuate the sea people.”

“Perhaps we can help you with that,” Jaya said. “The
Mana
is larger and more suited to towing than the
Balakiire.
In the past we sometimes hauled strings of cargo barges for outlying ports.”

“We still need to rendezvous with the
Balakiire,
because of Elviiz,” Maati said.
“Oops, forgot she could not hear us before, Khorii.”

“The ghost-beings attacked Elviiz shortly after we left, destroying many of his inorganic parts,” Khorii told her shipmates.

“I knew we shouldn’t have left him,” Hap said. “Shoot, I liked him, too. I thought it was safe making friends with a droid, but now he’s bought it, too.”

“Oh no, Elviiz is alive,” Maati told him. “Simply…somewhat diminished. The
Balakiire
is returning with him to Vhiliinyar, but they wish to pick up Khorii to accompany him. If she can determine that the strain of the plague affecting her parents and the
Condor
’s crew has vanished like the rest of it, then Elviiz’s father/creator Maak will be able to repair him more easily.”

“And I can finally meet the rest of my family in person,” Ariin said. “So I am coming, too.”

“So we’re going to have a basic switcheroo, is that it?” Captain Bates asked. “We’ll help you off-load the water and rescue the LoiLoiKuans with the tanker, and sometime in the course of all that, Khorii and Ariin will transfer to the
Balakiire
to return to their homeworld. Right?”

“But we also have another mission,” Jaya said. “Captain Becker in particular asked us to perform it.”

Khorii said, “Even Uncle Joh would not value his cargo above Elviiz’s and my family’s well-being. Besides, we do not have a specific function, simply to check on the status of his cargo, and the
Balakiire
can do that as well as the
Mana.
The
Balakiire
is also programmed with Uncle Joh’s universal shortcuts, so locating the cargo will pose no particular difficulty.”

“Brilliant,” Jaya said, “but whatever we’re going to do, we should do it quickly. Doesn’t the attack on Elviiz give anyone else a clue as to what has been causing all of the accidents and deterioration here?”

“Do you mean that these ghosts are absorbing—perhaps even feeding on—inorganic matter?” Khorii asked. That much was obvious. What was less evident was any other motive or methodology the entities might use in selecting their targets, or how they came to exist in the first place.

“We should do a final check, then lift off before they decide to chow down on
us,
” said Hap.

Chapter 27

T
he settlers of Rushima were delighted to receive their overdue shipment of freshwater. Jaya used the tractor beam aboard the
Mana
effortlessly to take control of the tanker and guide it to the landing field, where it occupied almost all of the space provided.

Everyone from Elder Plimsoll to Moonmay was waiting with hoses, pumps, wrenches, and buckets.

“Buckets?” Hap asked. “That tank holds the capacity of a small sea. That’s a lot of bailing you’re looking at, people.”

“Marsden is working as hard as he can repairing the pumps and pipes of the irrigation system, but it’s taking longer than we thought,” Elder Bawb said.

“There may be similar items aboard the tanker,” Khorii suggested. She strode back toward the larger ship in time to see Thariinye emerge and the
Nheifaarir
settling in to land in a nearby field since the docking bay was full.

“Never fear, youngling, I read the problem in your thoughts and investigated the ship’s resources. It appears that all the people will need is a reservoir to hold the water. There are pumps and tubing attached to the tank, no doubt ready for the transfer,”
Thariinye said to Khorii.

Khorii beckoned the elders over, and they entered the ship with Thariinye. Meanwhile, she trotted over to meet her new sister.

Maati waved at her and hastened, Ariin trailing her, to meet Khorii. Khorii hugged her aunt, then turned to her own mirror image.

Up close, she saw that although Ariin’s features, form, and, of course, her coloring were identical to hers, she had an air of reserve about her. She met Khorii’s embrace a bit hesitantly, though Khorii felt the other girl relax as they separated.

“Please don’t let me keep you from your work,” Ariin said aloud.

“There are many others who can do the same work better,”
Khorii told her.
“They understand that I wish to get to know my sister! Are you thought-talking yet? It is so much easier than verbal speech, especially with all that noise.”

On the landing pad, people swarmed over the tanker like busy ants. A new hatch had been opened in the tanker’s hull. A very loud mechanism extruded compressed coils of flexible pipe, thick as the torso of an adult male. Thariinye and the others pulled coil after coil away from the ship, stretching it as it was released. In pairs stationed every few feet, people supported the hose, hauling it off the landing strip, across an adjacent field, and up the hill that cupped their reservoir in its center. Because the volume of water carried by the tanker was expected to be so great and the weather had been unusually dry, the irrigation ditches had been opened to accommodate the runoff.