First Warning: Acorna's Children

Chapter 2

They did not need to return to the ship to fetch her parents or Maak and Elviiz. The landing had awakened Mother and Father, who rightly guessed it had something to do with salvage. They did not realize the extraordinary circumstances of the stop until coming out onto the bridge, where they tried and failed to raise the captain on the intercom. They activated Maak and Elviiz and met Khorii and the captain halfway down the corridor.

"Joh! What do you mean bringing Khorii out here among these dead bodies?" Father demanded.

"I didn't, Aari, honest, but you can be proud of her. She handled herself really well and kept me and the cats from joining these poor corpses in that great nebula far, far away."

"Of course she did, Captain," Mother said, sounding stern. "And we are very proud of her." She linked her arm with Khorii's and patted her hand. "We are simply wondering how you came to be here in a state that required her assistance so desperately that you did not think of the effect seeing so many lifeless people might have on a sheltered female in her formative years?"

"Oh, Moth-er," Khorii said, disentangling herself from the maternal grip in disgust. "Really. From what Uncle Hafiz and my human grandsires have told me, you were freeing child slaves and confronting criminals at my age. I think I can handle seeing a few deceased people. It isn't as if they could hurt us. Well, not on purpose. I think they must have died from some kind of poison gas that my horn purified when I walked into the corridor."

Khorii had a lot to live up to-or down. Her mother, called Khornya among their own people, was known and revered as the Lady Acorna Harakamian-Li to the fierce and warlike Terrans. She was the first Linyaari to go among them, well, not on purpose exactly. The human grandsires, asteroid miners at the time, rescued and raised Mother when they found her escape pod traveling where no Linyaari had gone before.

On top of that, Khorii's father Aari was the only one of their people to have survived being captured and tortured by the horrible Khleevi. Together her parents had, in a most ka-Linyaari fashion, fought and vanquished the Khleevi in two time zones. Of course, the first time they had had help from Mother's human friends as well as from some other Linyaari who helped in a passive way. And the second time, which was actually earlier, they had been aided by her grandsire, or mother-father, as the term literally translated from Linyaari to Standard, the language spoken in the quadrant where Mother was raised. Khorii's grandsire and grandam were no less remarkable than her parents, both having recently returned from the dead.

So, really, with a lineage like that, Khorii did not want anyone to think she could not handle seeing a few dead people. RK and Khiindi were no longer in the corridor with the captain and Khorii's parents, who were standing in a cluster, engrossed in discussing what had probably happened to the people aboard La Estrella Blanca. Probably the two cats had gone back to the ship, but Khorii wandered up the corridor, shining her flashlight on the path ahead, just in case they'd decided to explore further. Cats did like to explore and, according to Karina, one of her human aunties, curiosity had been known to kill cats in the past, as it had almost done just now. So she thought she had better make sure.

If she didn't find them on the path, she would look upward again, though the bodies overhead were distressing to look at because of their contorted faces, which were empty of everything that made a person a person. Mostly they seemed very sad. She wondered who they had been. From the way they were dressed, they were at a party when they died. Had they been having fun then? Had they died happy? Most of them were probably the equivalent of her parents' age-very old, of course, but not as old as Uncle Hafiz in human years. You couldn't tell as easily with a Linyaari, of course. Her grandparents on her father's side seemed much older than her grandparents on her mother's side, but apparently they were all about the same age as cranky old Liriili, who was very bossy, having once been administrator of narhii-Vhiliinyar, and whose attitude made her seem ancient.

But however old they were, she was sure these people were rather young to have died as they did. She felt sorry for them. She felt even sorrier for their kids. They probably had some, at home, being watched by their grandparents or aunties, as she so often was when her parents were off on a mission. How long would these people have been gone now? Did their children know they were dead even? Probably not. They must still be wondering what had happened to their moms and dads.

At the end of the corridor there were lifts and a very handsome shiny silver-colored spiral staircase extending the length of the ship, descending far below the corridor where Khorii stood, where the engine rooms and cargo holds and other utilitarian spaces were located, to far above, where the bridge would be. In her experience, cats didn't care for the smell of engine rooms so she would try the upper levels first. She reached down and flipped off the antigrav setting on her boots, held her arms over her head, lowered them sharply to her sides, and gave a jump that sent her up the stairwell without actually needing to use the steps. That was usually the run way to do it, but now the passage was occasionally blocked by a dead crew member. In adjoining corridors branching off the stairwell she saw more bodies. An unusual number of people seemed to have been heading away from the bridge and cabins. Perhaps they had decided to abandon ship but died before they could reach their own private vessels or the ship's shuttles.

At the top of the stairs she turned on her boots again and walked out onto the corridor leading to the bridge and the crew's quarters. Still no cats and many more dead crew members. All seemed to be humanoid at least, if not as human as Uncle Hafiz and Auntie Karina, but that wasn't surprising. Unlike the quadrant of space containing Vhiliinyar's native star system, which had many different species of people, in this quadrant almost all sentient life was human or humanoid, according to Mother and Captain Becker.

And, of course, according to Elviiz's know-it-all data banks. It was totally unfair, in Khorii's opinion, to put a person's school inside a person's already far too superior foster brother. Anyway, it sounded monotonous to her, to have only one kind of people no matter what world you were on. What was the point of going to other planets if everybody else was just like you? That was, she supposed, the best thing about Elviiz. He was different from anyone else on Vhiliinyar, being an android created specifically to be Khorii's companion, teacher, and protector by his father android, Maak, the Condors android first mate (as opposed to the feline first mate, RK. Uncle Joh was very democratic in his assignment of titles for crew members). As birthing gifts went, she supposed Maak's gift of the ever-present, ever-in-her-way Elviiz was preferable to pricking her finger on a spindle when she was sixteen (by then she would be quite mature of course, in Linyaari years) and falling into a deep prolonged sleep, rather like hypersleep, as the princess in the fairy tale had done.

She'd read that story, along with many, many others, among the books in the captain's extensive dump-rescued library. The Condor, with its junk hard-copy library, computerized references, and seemingly endless supply of vids, recycled ancient knowledge as well as refuse. Much of the data Maak had imparted electronically to his son had come from those sources. The way Elviiz acted sometimes, though, you'd have thought he invented all the stories himself. When Maak gave her the birthing gift of Elviiz, unfortunately he had also given Elviiz the birthing gift of both ego and attitude, something previous androids had been without.

It didn't do any good to complain about him to Mother or Father. Maak had been their friend as long as Uncle Joh, and they said they could never have defeated the Khleevi without him. They were sure Elviiz was really as dear to her as Maak was to them. But Maak did not correct every single thing they said or try to stop them from doing anything really interesting, as Elviiz always did with her. In fact, she was surprised to have gotten away from him this long. She expected to hear the clomp of little android boots catching up with her at any moment, telling her to return to the Condor while he, Elviiz, got to explore with the grown-ups. Not that she was exploring. She was looking for cats. Really.

The bridge hatch did not respond to its control, so she tried to pry it open, but something seemed to be blocking it. "I'm sorry, it's the only way," she said to the bodies floating below her, then backed up to the hatch and gave it a one-legged kick. Her legs and feet had the strength of her equinesque forebears and the hatch, though damaged, opened enough for her head and shoulders to pass through. Shining the beam of the flashlight around the perimeter of the hatch frame, she saw what was blocking it. Three bodies had apparently been wedged into the workings. Parts of them drifted in zero G, but they were stacked atop each other, and each had a limb or a bit of clothing trapped in the iris. Sticking the flashlight under her arm, she reached down and as gently as possible-which wasn't very, dislodged the blockages, freeing two of the bodies to float ceilingward. She saw as she released the dead that, unlike the bodies in the corridors, these people had laser burns through the centers of their chests.

Khorii pushed through the broader opening, bracing her hands on the bottom of the iris and pulling her legs over her head in a sort of supported somersault. As she explored the bridge, she had the odd sense of millions of tiny motes fleeing before her, then disappearing again. What was that? It had happened in the stairwell, too. For a moment the things were quite thick in the thin atmosphere, then, poof!

Two officers sat strapped in chairs close to the command console. For a moment she thought perhaps they had survived, but one look at their heads told her otherwise. The darker-haired officer, a man, had a laser burn through the base of his neck that came out the crown of his head. The other, a gray-haired female wearing a captain's epaulet on her uniform, had no mouth, nor was the rest of her face a pretty sight. A laser pistol floated near her hand, which hovered over the still faintly pulsing signal beacon control. On the console behind her hand was a printout. Scrawled across it in ragged handwriting were the words "Forgive me! I had to do it. Now I will die, too."

It appeared to Khorii that the captain had written those words just before turning the laser pistol on herself. Clearly, the last moments on the bridge had not been happy ones for anyone.

Khorii was not sure exactly what she was looking for, or even if it existed other than in the ship's powerless computer. A personnel and passenger list maybe. Surely they had such a list? There were- had been-a lot of people aboard this ship. They'd need to know who was in what cabin and so forth, wouldn't they?

But she saw nothing besides the captain's note that was a printout, or even a scrap of paper, much less a book. She climbed back into the corridor. Some of these bigger ships had special offices for the captain, ready rooms, she thought they were called, where the captain presumably got commands and charts and things ready before taking them onto the bridge. Maybe she should try there?

The first door that she opened led into a space that she thought might be such a room. There were pictures of other space vessels on the walls, and a series of important-looking framed documents. Captain Dolores M. Grimwald's certifications and licenses to fly various sorts of spacecraft, citations, and service awards. These were all arranged in a pyramid, seemingly in chronological order from top to bottom. The top one was up a bit higher than she could read by the beam of her flashlight so she turned the captain's swiveling chair around and stood on the seat, training her light on it.

It was a medical license awarded to Dr. Dolores M. Grimwald, M.D. The captain had been a physician before she'd been a captain. A healer, like the Linyaari. Why had she killed everyone else on the ship, then? Khorii did not understand.

Except for the framed documents and pictures, there were no papers in the room.

She left it reluctantly, because this was the first room that did not contain corpses. Although corpses didn't bother Khorii, really, not at all, she was getting rather tired of bumping into them and found she was anxious to return to the Condor.

The next two cabins were also empty, but in the fourth cabin, she found not only a body but also all manner of nonelectronic record keeping. This was the purser's office, and-to her immense relief-she found the passenger roster she knew had to exist and what cabins the passengers were assigned and what they had paid for them. The purser was evidently someone who liked to have printouts available at all times instead of having to consult electronic devices. Uncle Hafiz was like that as well. She also found a list of crew members along with their cabin assignments, rank, position, and pay scale.

Just what she needed! Now they could notify the families of the victims and perhaps arrange to have them sent to their loved ones for burial or whatever the local custom was. All that remained was to find a ship's log or maybe a personal diary that would give some clue as to how disaster had overtaken these people and what motive a healer/captain might have for murdering her crew and apparently the passengers, too.

From the staircase came the sound of a heavy tread-the clunk of little android feet. They'd sent Elviiz to find her, of course. She was afraid of that, though she'd hoped they would all be too preoccupied to send her back before she was ready. It was okay. She was almost ready anyway. Just one or two more cabins to peek into, then she was sure she would have covered most of the officers.

The next door was another office. There she found more paper lists along with duty rosters held against the walls with magnets. There was also a diagram of the ship and the location of all the cabins, along with notations about each passenger. She couldn't read them because they were written in Spandard, the Spanish version of Standard spoken on the ship's homeworld. She did make out the names of flowers and foods. And one more thing sprang out at her near the end-the letters "S.O.S." Perhaps she held the key in her hands to what had happened on this ship-if only she could read it. She took the papers down and started to put them in one of the pockets of her shipsuit. As she folded, more of the mysterious motes sprayed off the papers. She touched the papers with her horn, and when the air between her and them cleared, she stuffed them into her pocket.

"Khorii, where are you? Khorii!" Elviiz was calling. Then she heard him mumble, "Of the two of them, Khiindi is the more reliable." Then, "Khorii! Come along now. We are returning to the Condor and resuming our journey."

"What?" she asked, popping her head out of the office. "The captain would never abandon this ship!"

Elviiz looked back at her from the hatch to the bridge. Now the iris was more or less neatly opened. "Of course not. He will tow it to one of his private storage asteroids, so that we may continue our journey to Maganos Moonbase. He can report his find and make his claim to the authorities there. Now come on."

Figures, Khorii thought as she followed the android back to the Condor. Just when things were getting interesting.