Second Wave (33 page)

“You can’t trust these people any farther than you can throw them, kids. Any farther than you can throw them under normal gravity conditions,” Captain Bates said.

“But they are in trouble and afraid!” Mikaaye said.

“They are pirates, and you are prey,” the captain said. “I should know. I was raised with them.”

The woman who attacked them was coughing, and her skin had a bluish tinge.

Khorii poked her horn through its hatch. There had to be oxygen, or these people would not be alive, but there were perhaps a dozen of them and there could not, after all of this time, be very much oxygen left anywhere aboard the
Blanca.
Her horn could convert the carbon monoxide back to oxygen for them as it did for her. She was amazed that there had been enough to sustain these people, but perhaps the rooms were sealed from each other, and each kept its own supply. She recalled that the
Blanca
’s captain had reversed the airflow in the corridors to kill her mutinous passengers and crew, but Khorii’s party had restored the oxygen when they first investigated the derelict vessel.

Ariin and Mikaaye poked their horns out, too, and in a very short time they saw that the humans were breathing more easily.

Captain Bates took off her helmet and looked down at the women. “So, Nisa, long time no see. Funny isn’t it, how you don’t see or even think of people in years and here in just the last week or two I’ve seen Pauli and Petit and now you and Cleda. You’ve picked a strange place to bring the kids.”

“Asha?” Nisa rolled her eyes. “Why didn’t you say these aliens were with you? How were we supposed to know with you in that suit? How’s your mama?”

“I dunno. You’ve probably seen her more recently than I have.”

“You saw Pauli?”

“Yes, he was going to shoot me, but I talked him out of it.”

“Sure you did. Did you shoot him?”

“No, Nisa, I didn’t. A friend of mine almost did, though. He and Petit are on another ship.”

“Going to jail?”

Captain Bates shrugged a big-suited shrug. “Jail doesn’t mean a lot with no Federation to enforce things. He and Petit will probably find their way home one of these days.”

“Yeah, well, you know how Coco feels about widows and orphans,” Nisa said, and made an ugly noise while running her long and very dirty red fingernail across her neck. “I wasn’t looking for it, you know? My man’s been his first mate for twenty years. So I believed him when he told me the ghosts had damaged the ship, and he was loading us women and children into the shuttles. Only the only families he loaded were Cleda’s and mine, and the only place the shuttle had to go was this creation-forsaken rock.”

“How did you get in here?” Captain Bates asked.

“We were running out of fuel and oxygen—the extra canisters and our suits had somehow disappeared from the shuttle. I spotted what looked like a hatch in all that junk out there. Turned out to be the servo-hatch for the galley, and we were able to dock the shuttle. Our instruments showed that there was still some oxygen in here and that if we bundled up, we could withstand the temperature for a little while and conserve what little remained on the shuttle, so we got out. I hoped there might be some food, but if there is, none of us have found it.”

While Captain Bates was questioning the woman, who seemed to be an old friend, about how and why she and the others had come into the
Blanca
’s galley, Khorii knelt to try to comfort some of the children. They ranged in age from an infant in Cleda’s arms to two kids, one in each family, Khorii guessed, close to her age or Jaya’s. Khorii wondered if the mothers, who looked close to Captain Bates’s age, had older children, had started their families late, or had been bearing young yearly. She was too unfamiliar with human family structure to know, but the children were small, and though most of them tried to look tough and even mean, they were frightened and had to have been damaged by the lack of oxygen.

Sitting down beside them, she took one of the younger ones who had been crowded away from the mother by its siblings and pulled it into her lap, laying her horn against the child’s head and saying silly things that the child seemed to find comforting. It was very dirty and had been quite cold, so Khorii wrapped her arms around it—him, she learned when she investigated a certain squishiness in its nether regions that indicated it—he—was eliminating properly, and so must not be starving. Her horn was not quite prepared to do that sort of cleansing. Other children, seeing that she was not eating their brother, crowded closer. One started rifling her pockets. Others besieged Ariin, who protected her pockets with one hand while trying to pat heads awkwardly with the other. Mikaaye was engaged in a mock—at least on his side—battle with one of the older boys, a child of about seven.

“Nice horsie,” said a small girl, stroking Khorii’s mane.

In the course of all of this activity, she lost track of the conversation between Captain Bates and Nisa until the captain said, “Okay, gang, we’re going to have to get these folks back to the
Mana,
back through the area with no oxygen. Khorii, why don’t you and I go back for the shuttle while Ariin and Mikaaye keep the air sweet here?”

Khorii looked up. “Either that or perhaps Jaya could bring the shuttle to us.”

“She doesn’t know what it’s like,” Captain Bates said. “The docking bay and tubes have plenty of clearance above those whatever they ares, but I’d rather go back and make sure everything is still navigable and bring it back ourselves.”

Khorii started to rise, and the child she had been cuddling bellowed and grabbed her horn.

“I’ll come with you,” Ariin said, batting little hands away from her pockets and the hands of an older boy away from other areas of her shipsuit. “Khorii is busy with her little friends.”

But as Captain Bates and Ariin headed back for the door, they heard footsteps clomping unmistakably across the marble floor toward them.

The door flung wide and four men in shipsuits and helmets entered, then closed the door behind them. “Hah! Thought you’d take the bait!” a male voice rasped through the helmet’s speaker. “Now tell me, where is all the treasure the punk was blathering about?”

Chapter 32

N
isa started to stand.
You’re a right bastard, Coco,
she was thinking, but dared not say. Khorii sensed that the woman had not completely believed the captain would abandon the women and their children, whatever she said; but until that moment, he had not given any reason for her to think otherwise.

Captain Bates was less circumspect in her reaction to him. “You almost suffocated the wife and kids of two of your loyal followers just to see me again, Papa Coco? I’d be touched if I weren’t so revolted.”

Khorii looked from one to the other. She detected no family resemblance, despite Captain Bates’s addressing the man as “Papa.”

His appearance was presentable, even attractive, Khorii supposed, if one were human. But the only similarity he shared with her was that his dark hair and beard, worn long, were braided and beaded in the same manner that she had braided and beaded Jaya’s, Sesseli’s, and Moonmay’s hair and Mikaaye’s, Elviiz’s, and Khorii’s manes. Petit and Pauli had also worn the same style, Khorii realized belatedly, but because their hair was so dirty and matted, she had overlooked that detail.

“Asha! You do turn up in the strangest places, wench. Good of you to lead me to the treasure as well as bringing along a passport to more and a couple of spares.” He nodded toward the three Linyaari. “I’d no idea
you
were shipping with this lot or, of course, I would not have had to alarm Nisa, Cleda, and the kiddies by having them pose as families in distress. Mako, pass them the packet.”

One of the men had been pulling a large package behind him on a tether and he reeled it in and handed it to Nisa. She opened it and two adult enviro suits and several smaller ones with collapsible plas helmets tumbled out.

“You girls forgot those when you left,” Coco told her. “The oxygen tubes in those are full enough to get you and your broods back to the ship.”

Ignoring the seething women, he returned his attention to Captain Bates. “If I’d known our exalted Linyaari ambassadors were being chauffeured around the galaxy by my own clan daughter, I’d simply have asked nicely if you would pretty please send us one of your new playmates, along with our absent crewmen. I see by their dos you’ve already initiated these three into our clan. I’m sure they—especially Khorii, is it, who has been here before?—won’t mind showing us to the treasure.”

Khorii stood, handing the child to its mother, much to the displeasure of the siblings who had previously claimed her. “How did you get here, sir?” she asked politely. She saw no reason to respect the man, but she did respect the fact that he could probably kill them all or have them killed.

“Through the door. You saw me,” he said, as if she were developmentally challenged as well as freakish, which was what he was clearly thinking.

“Before that,” she said. “How did you get to the ballroom?”

“From my ship, the
Black Mariah.
Which is, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know, docked right next to the
Mana,
where my people can keep an eye on both ships for us.”

“If you have harmed those kids, Coco…” Captain Bates began.

“Kids? Of course, the crew would be children these days, wouldn’t it? I am so out of touch with the tragedies that have befallen the universe outside the clans. I must be losing my touch. If it had occurred to me that only children remained on board, we’d have boarded the ship already. Ah well, I had other things on my mind. The treasure? You were saying something about that, Khorii?”

“Yes, Captain Coco. What I was saying was that I doubt that anything you would find valuable here remains, at least where you can access it.”

“Ah, it would not be accessible, of course, because of the plague, but you are going to protect us—”

“That’s not what I mean, sir. Didn’t you find those hills in the docking bay odd?”

“That was a docking bay? I assumed that was the result of the deck having been destroyed when the ship was wrecked and that was the asteroid’s surface…”

Khorii shook her head. “And the corridor you came through to get here? When we arrived, there were the bodies of richly dressed and jeweled people floating around. We have a theory about what happened to them and to the other inorganic bits of the ship that seem to have disappeared. Most of your treasure would have been included in that, I think.”

“Maybe so, but we’re not giving up that easy.” He turned to one of his henchmen, “You, Bunco, put the extra fuel cartridge in the shuttle and take the women and kids back to the ship. Take Asha with you. You”—he pointed to Khorii—“come with me and Fori.”

“I’m coming with Khorii,” Mikaaye said.

“I am, too,” Ariin agreed.

Coco looked like he was going to say no, then changed his mind and brandished his weapon at them. “Okay, Khorii, you’ve been here before. You lead. If you get tricky, though, one of your friends could get hurt. Any sign of the plague there, you fix it before we get there, right?”

Khorii sighed and rolled her eyes. “That’s why
I’m
here in the first place. To see if there’s any more plague. I don’t care about your stupid treasure, and neither does anyone else.”

“Fine,” Coco said. “Because if you did, you’d be disappointed. I intend to keep it all.”

Khorii strode out the hatch to the ballroom, Mikaaye and Ariin behind her, followed by Coco and Fori.

Once back inside the tubelike corridor, she followed it as far as she could, until it sloped steeply upward. Since the Linyaari suits and Coco’s weren’t programmed for intercommunication, she pointed to where the bridge had been.

If not for the low gravity and the magnetic settings on their boots that allowed them to cling to the sides of the well-like passage, they would not have made it to the top. Once there, however, they found that although the bridge was damaged and the hatch open, it was still recognizable and some of the equipment seemed to be intact.

None of the crew members Khorii had seen on her first trip remained, not even the captain. Nor did she see any of the plague indicators. She pointed at the ship’s computer and looked questioningly at Coco. He waved his weapon toward it, indicating she should try it.

She did not expect that with the structural damage to the ship the computer would function, but it turned on at once. Coco shoved her aside and began pushing buttons with his heavy gloves on. Khorii remembered the location of the switch that the brave copilot had tried to flip to cause oxygen to flow back into the ventilation system. If they could breathe, parts of this search might be easier and quicker. The plague as a disease had vanished from the
Blanca
as it had from so many other places once the second stage of the alien life cycle began.

The pirate punched and punched, and Khorii felt murderous rage coming off of him in waves at his frustration. He wanted the location of the safe. All three Linyaari looked on anxiously as he met with failure after failure.

Then Khorii felt, rather than heard or actually saw, her sister shift her thinking slightly, and the security system welcomed Coco with open menus. He searched for the safe. It was located in the purser’s office.

Khorii had been there before and she was about to tap him on the shoulder and suggest that she lead the way again, but he had lathered himself into such a state that she didn’t want to startle him into using his weapon. Instead, as she watched, he found the security cameras.

The huge com screen lit up with a many-celled diagram of the ship. Many of the cells carried live feeds from the areas they represented. Many more, including the docking bay, did not.

The purser’s office had been empty the last time Khorii saw it. It was no more. From the diagram, Coco could see that it was just down the corridor off the bridge, clearly labeled as such. He turned to go, but Khorii caught a movement within the picture of the office and leaned over and clicked. Suddenly the screen was filled with a scene that caused Coco and his accomplice to stand back and watch with wide eyes.