Second Wave (29 page)

As soon as the grinding noise of the hose ended, a rattle and wheeze heralded the start of the pumps. Almost immediately, they stopped again with a shudder and an alarming bang. Scar, Marsden, Hap, and Thariinye hastened to repair the damaged equipment. With a flare of welding torches and other mysterious mechanical rites, along with the two men, one boy, and one Linyaari all working on it, the pump was soon mended. With a quite loud hiss-clump, hiss-clump noise, it began pushing water in rationed portions at a steady rate through the pipe, which fattened like a huge snake gorging after a long fast.

The twin girls sat on the banked soil and stones rimming the landing field. The air was clear today, the sky bright, and the sunshine warm, bringing out a sweet scent from the grasses and wildflowers. Khorii and Mikaaye hadn’t rid all of the land of its aqua overgrowth, but they had done so to the fields near the landing strip so that they could graze.

Once the pumps started, the noise was less distracting, and Ariin waited until then to reply.
“Yes, I can send and read thoughts, but it is very new to me, and I do not always like to do it. Where, or perhaps I should say when, I lived before, people were always trying to learn everything about me. They could read thoughts, too, although for a long time I could not. So I felt that nothing of myself was only mine.”

“I think a lot of us feel that way when we’re young, before our own telepathy develops. I suppose it is for our own protection. It lets our elders know if we are planning to get into danger or trouble, or to find us if we are. And it keeps us from reading their thoughts, which contain what my friend Jaya would say is ‘too much information.’”

Her sister stiffened and stood up.
“I’m hungry. Shall we graze?”

Khorii looked up in alarm.
“I offended you. I’m sorry. I just thought…”

“I know what you thought, sister, but unlike you, I did not grow up with loving parents who cared if I got into trouble or danger. I grew up in a laboratory with beings that considered themselves not only older and wiser but more sentient than I was, who monitored my every move, word and, yes, thought. The only time I escaped their scrutiny was when I visited the Others.”

“Others?”
Khorii asked and received an image of Ancestors—in fact, these creatures were not the same ones she knew, so they must have been ancestors of the Ancestors.
“I see. What I do not understand is how you came to be there. If we are twins, we should have been born at the same time in the same place and of course, to the same mother. No one ever told me I had a sister, much less a twin, though I always wanted one.”

“Why? You had your parents and all of your relatives who love you around you and everything else you wanted.”

“Parents aren’t the same thing, sometimes especially ours. I had Elviiz, of course, but he is not exactly a peer. He seems to be my age, but with his android attributes and vast intelligence and data banks, he is too much my teacher and guardian to be a real friend.”

“If he teaches you and protects you, is that not friendship?”
Ariin asked. Khorii had put her foot in it again complaining about Elviiz, because behind Ariin’s question was real puzzlement. She did not even know what a friend was.

“Y
es,
of course he is my friend, but it is usually more in the same way that the Others were your friends. Friends who are more similar can do things for each other. I cannot do anything for Elviiz very often because he does everything so well himself.”

“I see. Well, we are sisters so we must be friends, too. I do not know what I can do for you, but I do have a gift.”
She stopped grazing long enough to reach into the pocket of her shipsuit. She pulled out something that sparkled in the sunlight and tossed it to Khorii, who caught it in midair.

“Oooh, pretty!”
she said, holding up the small piece of jewelry so that prisms of light shot out of the little stones and danced across her face and the grass around her.
“This is as beautiful as some of the things in the mansion on Dinero Grande. I really wanted to take some of them with me, but, of course, they belonged to others.”

Ariin was quiet.
“You wear it on your ear,”
she said finally.
“People wear that sort of thing a lot where I was.”

“Thank you very much. I’m afraid I do not have a gift for you.”
She wondered if Captain Bates might make a beaded bracelet for Ariin similar to Khorii’s. Since the bracelet was a gift from a friend, she did not feel it was right to give hers to her sister, but one like it would be nice—then they’d have something to mark their kinship—other than the striking physical resemblance, of course.

“It will be gift enough for me if you are able to lift the quarantine on our parents so I may greet them in person. Also, I would like to see the human ships and meet more of the human people. I have seen Captain Becker on the
com screen, and I met Uncle Hafiz and Karina and their household, but I would like to meet your friends, too.”

“Of course!”

T
hat night, with the ships in dock, Khorii suggested that people light fires around the perimeter to keep the fog at bay.

“What good is a fire going to do against a ship-eating ghost?” Elder Plimsoll asked. “If lighting fires would help, we should be guarding our own homes and businesses.”

“Never mind what happens to the ships that bring you water and people to heal your sick and clean your cropland?” Captain Bates demanded.

“What good will that do us if everything turns into ghost food?” the elder demanded.

“What have we done for you lately? Huh?” Hap demanded angrily.

Elder Bawb and Marsden had disappeared and now reappeared with armloads of kindling. They were followed by a dozen children, each carrying all of the kindling they could. Moonmay trudged behind them, pushing a wooden wheelbarrow full of wood.

“You got any special places in mind we should light these fires, Khorii?” Marsden asked.

“All around the ships,” she said. “Close enough together that a person sitting by one campfire can feel the warmth of the adjacent ones and visit with the neighboring tender.”

“That’s a lot of campfires. Going to get pretty hot,” Marsden said.

“Are you trying to protect your ships or burn them up yourself?” Plimsoll asked derisively.

“Elder, if you have any constructive suggestions, we would be happy to entertain them,” Khorii told him. “We have determined that the ghosts or whatever they are absorb inorganic material, and last night they traveled under cover of fog. If we keep the real fog at bay, at least we will be able to see our adversaries.”

“And do what? You gonna shoot ’em with your ray guns, Missy?”

“What is a ray gun?” Ariin asked Mikaaye, who shrugged.

“My people are peaceful and do not employ offensive weapons, Elder,” Khorii said. “But we will defend ourselves and so should you. It seems to me that if the ghostly beings absorb inorganic materials, they should be warded off with organic weapons—perhaps a burning brand from the fire, as wood is organic?”

“But you don’t know that, do you, young lady?” Elder Plimsoll demanded.

“No, sir. I have only a partial theory constructed from what I’ve observed. Many of you have also encountered the ghost-beings, and if anyone has more promising theories, I’d ask that you please share them.”

Even that plan was nearly foiled when the wind picked up, roaring across the flat field, scattering the kindling and making it too dangerous and difficult to maintain open campfires. Moonmay’s braids lashed her face and shoulders like whips. Everyone who wasn’t wearing shipsuits had their clothing belling and bannering around them like sails. The beaded braid in Khorii’s mane beat against her face and neck, and the rest of her mane felt as if the wind were tearing it out by the roots.

“Now what?” Plimsoll demanded, his fists on his hips like a scolding mother.

Marsden and his grandchildren disappeared as the wind came up, returning a little while later with another convoy of wooden wheelbarrows, each of which contained a fuel barrel cut in half.

Words were blown away as soon as they were spoken, but the smith and his kids set the barrels on the runway, filled them with sticks of stray kindling, and placed them a safe distance from the ship, but within range of each other. Then Scar arrived on his tractor, hauling a wooden trailer full of more barrel halves. When all of the fire pits were in place, Scar parked his tractor, digger, and the trailer under the fin of the tanker, between it and the campfires. “I’ve had a fair amount of repairs to make on my equipment, thanks to the not-so-dear and not-so-departed,” he said. “I checked on my ship this morning, and it looks like I’ll be needing to hitch a ride off-world with one of you.”

Each barrel was tended by four people. Two sat by the fire, huddling against the wind, keeping the flames from being extinguished. Meanwhile, two other tenders camped inside the ships, sleeping, eating, or visiting away from the whistling swoosh and rattle of the air currents whipping around the landing field.

Captain Bates fixed pot after pot of hot soup and Kava, and some of the girls and women from the town brought bread and more vegetables for the soup and for the Linyaari, who welcomed the change from what they could grow in their ’ponics gardens, though the vegetables, preserved from previous harvests, were dried and old.

It was a good party, but a bit anticlimactic, since the wind kept both fog and ghosts away.

“Maybe they’re just full from last night,” Moonmay said.

But the next morning, on the far side of the fires where the darkness eclipsed their light but their heat still warmed the tarmac, the departing guards saw that footprints, whole and partial, were indented in the heat-softened landing field, round and round and back and forth, as if patrolling the fire line, looking for a way inside. Oddly enough, the only place where no footprints appeared was in the field around the
Nheifaarir.

Hap was elated. “Hah! They can’t get in. You did it, Khorii. You thought of a way to fool them,”

But Khorii shook her head grimly. “It only shows they’ve mutated from mist to mass enough to leave prints.” Indeed, this development worried her even more, for the ghosts had been dangerous enough when they were incorporeal, but who knew what destruction they might wreak if they ever got physical bodies of their own?

That day the ships and equipment were checked and rechecked for damage. Scar, Hap, Captain Bates, and Marsden repaired and recalibrated the tanker, pronouncing it spaceworthy under its own power. Scar and a burial detail also hauled the remains of the crew members to the graveyard. No sooner had they set off than the com units on both the
Nheifaarir
and the
Mana
beeped on to announce the
Balakiire
’s arrival.

“It would be best if you sent only a shuttle,” Maati advised the
Balakiire.
“We have ship-eating entities aboard down here. Though they didn’t seem to bother the
Nheifaarir,
so perhaps they don’t care for the taste of Linyaari ships.”

“If you’ve room for one more shuttle, open your hatch and we’ll dock inside the
Nheifaarir,
” Neeva said.

After some discussion, they decided that Elviiz would go with Ariin and Khorii aboard the
Mana,
which would continue on its original mission, but Hap and Jalonzo would augment the crew of the tanker with Thariinye. Scar was going, too. His own ship had been lodged in a local barn during the aftermath of the plague, and had suffered damage he needed more equipment to repair. The Marsden men were traveling with the tanker as well, to hold it together as much as possible. Of them all, only Thariinye, Hap, and Scar had any navigation experience, but with the
Nheifaarir
and the
Balakiire
“riding shotgun” as Scar put it, they would be fine. Mikaaye stayed with the
Mana.
And everyone agreed it would be better to transfer the prisoners to the brig of the Federation tanker than to take them anywhere near the Linyaari homeworld.

Moonmay was there to see her brother, cousin, and grandfather off. In the crook of her arm was a basket of kittens, while trailing behind her was a low-slung, furry-faced dog.

“What in tarnation did you haul the livestock out here for?” her grandfather asked.

She carried the kittens over to her grandfather, and he leaned down while she whispered into his ear. “Okay then, you talk to them, but make it snappy. Khorii, honey, my granddaughter needs to jaw at you.”

Khorii looked up from Elviiz’s cart. He was using his legs somewhat better than he had before, but still tired easily, even with the help of the horns. There was no substitute for building his own muscles and endurance so he could get around without the help of his bionic extras.

It was sad to see him like this, weaker than she had ever thought possible, and often bewildered by what was happening around him. He seemed baffled by Ariin, but she was very sweet to him and already he seemed to like her a lot.

Moonmay said, pointing to the dog, “This dog here is the one I was telling you about that you thought that big boy might like.” When she turned to show Khorii the dog in question, the animal was no longer there, having trotted straight to Hap, who was rubbing her ears. “I reckon he likes him okay.”

“It’s up to Hap, of course, but it looks like he wouldn’t mind having her. And there will certainly be room aboard the tanker.”

Moonmay held up her basket and looked around Khorii to where Ariin was patting Elviiz’s hand. “And I thought your new sissy might want a kitty cat for herself, bein’ as you’ve got Khiindi and all. I reckon he won’t care if the kitty belongs to your sis.”

To Khorii’s surprise, Ariin looked at the kittens in much the way RK might have done, or Khiindi himself. Then she smiled, and said, “Thank you, youngling, but I prefer to lavish my attention on my two new siblings.”