First Warning: Acorna's Children

Chapter 28

As spaceflights went, the one from Rio Boca to Dinero Grande was a mere commuter hop.

On the bridge, everything seemed uneventful. Marl remained firmly in charge, though he might have been more suspicious of the unnaturally meek demeanor of the rest of the crew. But flushed with the success of his first venture, he no doubt figured he had them cowed. He had stepped out of sight outside the bridge door to turn off the timer to the bomb, then come back inside.

This time, instead of orbiting, Marl insisted that since there was no one to enforce the Federation quarantine, the Mana should land in the private port attached to the mansion of his dreams.

"You're just the most helpful little thing, Khorii," he said. "That passenger roster you brought from the derelict is great. I just pick out the ones from Dinero Grande that I recognize-like these. The woman was a major exporter to drug companies, and her husband was in the shadier side of the business. I've heard about their place. It's a bloody palace. Ought to do nicely for my pied-a-terre here."

While the Mana was en route, he enthused about the baths of rock crystal and the kitchen large enough for fourteen chefs with an oven so large that it could hold two entire oxen.

Captain Bates suddenly said, "That's odd."

"What?"

"Look, the com board just lit up. It looks like the Federation relays have been reestablished."

Marl looked, and said, "All at once? Nah, that doesn't mean anything. Those are all remote. Nothing from around here. Don't get your hopes up. Nobody's going to be calling up to rescue you."

Just then the com unit beeped. Captain Bates toggled up the vid. "Mana, this is Acorna Harakamian-Li aboard the Condor. Please do not count on us for aid.We are extremely contaminated and have two very sick crewmen on board. We read that you are in trouble but if it is at all possible for you to get word back through other vessels to Maganos Moonbase and the Federation, please ask them to send word to the Linyaari homeworld. Our own people are our only . . ."

Khorii ran forward. Her mother's voice had poured over her like a shower of comfort and warmth until she took in the words, then she felt frightened as she never had been before. Marl blocked her way and pulled the toggle back, then reached over and shut down the distress signal.

"What a clever captain you are, Asha," he said. "I may have to kill you once we land. The truth is, I don't need any of you anymore."

"Marl, that was Khorii's mother we just heard," Captain Bates said. "Why don't you get out here on Dinero Grande and go live happily ever after, but let us go try to help them?"

"Okay, fine," he said, and although Khorii couldn't believe it, she relaxed enough to release some of the tightness that had constricted her chest since hearing her mother's voice.

"Everybody but Khorii can run off and rescue everyone in sight."

"It's her parents, Fidd. And she's probably the only one who can help them."

"Tough," he said. "Because she's the only one who can help me, too, and in case you've forgotten, I still have the detonator. Land this thing, dammit. You can off-load my cargo, then Khorii and I will leave, and you can take off and go do anything you bloody well choose."

It came to Khorii suddenly that they needed a distraction, and she flashed a message to Captain Bates, hoping that Marl was too full of his own plots to intercept hers.

On the way down to the surface the ship began bucking and jerking as if it were a lightweight flitter. Everyone not seated fell to the deck.

"I thought you knew how to fly this thing," Marl said.

"Turbulence," Captain Bates said, and shrugged. "Sorry. I don't make the weather."

"Again," something told Khorii, and she told the captain.

"The device is strapped to his inner left forearm," something or someone told her. The voice was as familiar to Khorii as her own, yet she had no idea whose it was.

But the information did them no good at all. Marl was the only one besides Captain Bates who was strapped into a chair.

They landed, and Marl said, "I can't really wait around while the menial stuff gets done before I see my new digs. Come on, Khorii. You can clear my path with pure air and uncontaminated luxuries. The rest of these folks, if they wish to leave when I say the word, can unload my cargo."

Her heart sank. Marl pushed her out the hatch ahead of him. She was alone with him on the ground, while aboard the ship she imagined the others going to the cargo bay for the loaders.

She also imagined, because she sort of heard it from the same familiar and yet totally strange source as before, that it was entirely possible that there was no longer anything for the detonator to detonate.

There was an uncertain comfort if ever she had heard of one. Khorii couldn't take the chance that the mystery voice was wrong, however, so she kept going, waiting for her chance to escape.

She did as Marl told her, clearing the way up through the wilted, unwatered gardens to the great carved doors of the home. She led him through the halls to the bedrooms with the mattresses forty inches thick, hoping he might decide to fall asleep so she could escape, but of course that didn't happen. In two of the beds lay corpses, and she purified the air there. Like the other places where she had seen the plague, the air was filled with the specks that fled before her horn. It wasn't quite so bad here though, since the rooms were so large and airy.

"You'll have to remove those bodies later," he told her.

He saw the baths made of rock crystal, some of which were golden, some of which were pink. Unfortunately, recent neglect had allowed scum to settle in the perpetual pools flowing over the sides of the bath from waterfalls that fell across gemstone cliffs. The falls were reduced to a trickle now, clogged with dead flowers and leaves from the untended gardens.

And last, she entered the kitchen with him. It stank of rotten food, but the freezers had not fully defrosted, and there were dried stores as well.

"Yes," he said, "this suits me fine. Let's see if they've unloaded my cargo yet."

They walked back through the ruined flowers and weeds just as Jaya and Elviiz drove the loaders back into the docking bay.

"Is that it?" he asked.

"That's it," Jaya said. "Now, let Khorii go so she can see her parents."

"I don't think so. Like I said, I need her. The rest of you can go though. Give my regards to the moonbase!"

They headed back toward the mansion as the ship lifted off and disappeared into the atmosphere. Then, as they walked into the kitchen, before Khorii could stop him, Marl pressed his right hand against his left forearm.

"What did you just do?" she demanded.

"Got rid of witnesses and evidence," he told her. "Get over it. You didn't really think I was going to let them go, did you? And the crowd management was getting to be stressful. Now come on and fix us something to eat."

"Can't make me," she said. She expected to be overcome with grief and fury, but actually, felt her insides freeze to an icy calm. "You've just done your worst, you vicious, stupid boy. Why do you think I'd ever do what you say now?"

"How about because I'm bigger, older, smarter, and meaner than you, and I can make you afraid in ways you cannot imagine?" he said, advancing on her as she backed toward the door, not in a hurried or frightened way, but slowly and deliberately.

"You had it the right way around before," she told him. "You need me. I don't need you. This entire house, except for the very steps I took and the very places I touched my horn to, is infested with organisms that will make you look exactly like those bloated bodies in the beds. If you set a foot wrong or try to go anywhere I didn't go before you, you will die just like them." And while he was thinking that over and trying to decide when to pounce, she sent images of herself in three other places in the room. She sent images of the plague germs everywhere, of bodies lying as thick on the marble and carpeted floors of the mansion as they had on the beaches of LoiLoiKua. When he started spinning around the room trying to decide which one of her to attack, she slammed out of the kitchen, running through the house by a different path than they had come and out into another garden.

An inarticulate howl of rage rose from the house, and Khorii looked back to see Marl burst out of the house and race after her, his face a snarling mask. Although Khorii was light on her feet at the best of times, she still hadn't fully recovered from the healing she had performed on the poopuus' planet, and her energy flagged almost immediately. She heard the older boy panting over the slap of his feet on the ground, and knew that he had closed the distance between them. Then fear lent her speed, and she practically flew down the rest of the hill, heading back to the landing dock.

Rounding a corner of a building, Khorii staggered and nearly fell. She didn't see anyone who could help her. The streets were still completely deserted.

"Stop-Khorii-stop right now!" Marl yelled from behind her. She kept going, looking for someone, anyone.

Her legs buckling, her sides aching, Khorii reached the dock just as a large shadow passed over her. She looked up to see the Nako-mas descending from above, interposing itself between her and Marl, who screamed in frustration. The shuttle hatch opened and she leaped inside, relief making her knees feel like sap. Elviiz was in the pilot's chair, and Khiindi hopped onto her shoulder.

"The others are undamaged," Elviiz told her. "Hap escaped his bonds and the engine room. Then he located all of the explosives Marl Fidd set. Hap spaced them, using the airlock from the docking bay, while the Mana orbited Rio Boca and the shuttle was on the ground. The detonator Marl wears is out of range of those explosives. As soon as all our friends were out of Marl Fidd's reach, Khiindi and I brought the shuttle to fetch you."

Even though Elviiz never really liked to be hugged, she hugged him anyway.

Back aboard the Mana, Captain Bates coached Jaya in setting a course for the coordinates of the Condor, still orbiting Paloduro.

In another relatively short commuter hop they were within boarding distance of the ugly, awkward-looking patchwork ship. Khorii thought it had a certain style and distinction she had failed to notice before, an individuality that made it rather homey.

She could read the distress of her parents even before she left the Mana. But until she was safely aboard the Condor, she could not read Uncle Joh Becker or RK at all.

She expected her parents to rush up to embrace her, but she did not see them. However, over the ship's intercom, her mother's voice said, "Khorii, yaazi, we cannot come out and meet you, but you have come just in time. Go to Uncle Joh's cabin. There you will find him and RK still alive, we hope. They were a few seconds ago."

"Where are you?" Khorii asked, bewildered. "Aavi? Mother? Mom? Papa? Daddy?" she said, using some of the words she had learned on Maganos Moonbase. "Why aren't you here?"

"We will explain later, yaazi," her father said. "Please heal Job. and RK. We cannot for the same reason we are not there to embrace the stuffings out of you."

Jonas Becker, lately absorbed by the Condor which was absorbed by a wormhole, felt himself shrinking back out of the hull and into his skin. It wasn't unbearably hot and dry anymore, his skin. It was moist and cool and his throat and his butt and every other part of him didn't hurt anymore. His chest expanded and contracted without complaint while the air went in and out.

Opening an eye, he looked into Khorii's anxious face. "Uncle Joh, don't die, okay?"

"Does that mean I'm forgiven for being a greedy old goat who dishonors dead people by calling them stiffs?" he asked, and the words came out as smoothly as ever, though they sounded really loud to his ears.

"Mostly," she said. "You were right about most of what you did with the Blanca."

"Me? Right? My child, those are healing words, a balm to my soul and music to my ears. Hiya, Khorii, give your old unk a hug?"

Her horn touch had even done something about the sickly odor that had been clinging to him.

He sat back up, and demanded, "Now, what do you mean 'mostly'?"

RK barely felt the sweet touch of horn, for he was too far sunk in his misery. Even though he felt his skin tingling, his whiskers sensing the softness of someone holding him on one side, the brush of a hand on the other, he did not think he could possibly pull out of the nosedive he had been in for so long.

"Giving up that last life, are you? Good. You are a wretched old creature well past your prime. You should die and bequeath your cushy job as a ship's officer to some deserving young cat who will do the job properly. You're no good to anyone anymore anyway. You have been a fickle mate, an abusive sire, and the fact that your two-legged companion is fond of you owes more to his eccentricity and enjoyment of a good fight than to any virtue of yours."

Who was this unsympathetic, unperceptive, rude animal saying all of these terrible things to a dying hero?

"Hero?" the upstart continued. "Why, I saved my girl and all of her friends with nothing but my wits, my claws, and teeth. It's a good thing for all of those children aboard the Mana that there is so much more to me than just your sorry DNA. I freed a boy who had been held hostage, then let myself out to follow one who hid things that would have destroyed all of the others, including my charge. I peeked into the destroyer's mind when he thought nobody was looking and learned his secrets, and led the other boy to them. Together we spaced them so when he took our girl, he had nothing to use against her and, of course, she came back to us like we were her food dishes."

"Braggart," RK mumbled, the expression on his face changing from ill to furious. "Upstart. Ingrate. Heretic. Liar."

"Am not."

"Rrrrr, too," the older cat growled from his deathbed, then flipped to his feet, knocking the healing horn away from his hide, leaped through the air, his no-longer-dank-and-matted fur bristling, and gave chase to the other cat, who wore a mocking smile as he streaked out of the room.