Acorna's Rebels

Twenty-One

Splash! RK's ears twitched at the sound. He sniffed and opened an eye, trying to keep the dream he was having about Haruna safe behind his other, closed eye.

He hadn't noticed the hum of the flitter or the disturbance it made in the air. He was so used to such things, it was more noticeable to him when they were not present than when they were.

The splash woke him immediately, however. No one had mentioned fish, but it was always possible. That lake could contain fish. Real, live ones, that wiggled and swam and made wonderful sport before you slapped them silly with a blow from a mighty paw and devoured the fresh fish flesh… ahhh.

But his waking eye didn't catch the silver gleam of a leaping lake denizen. It saw the flitter. And it saw the second item dropping into the lake from the flitter, which preceded the second, also nonfishy, splash.

There was indeed something fishy about all of this, although not of the delicious sort.

RK sat up, staring, his tail jerking.

In the basket with the kittens, Grimla opened both eyes wide.

(What is it?) she asked calmly, quietly, so as not to alarm the little ones.

(Don't look now, but I think it's your fearless leader, the Mulzar, and that clown from the Federation.)

The kittens mewed excitedly. They were more confident now that they knew they weren't being abandoned, and one after the other asked in small, squeaky, annoying voices, "New ma, what's a fearless?"

"New ma, what's a leader?"

"New ma, what's a Mulzar?"

"New ma, what's a clown?"

"New ma, what's a Federation?"

(I'll go with you,) Grimla said. All of the tiny mouths which had held her down were now open with questions and therefore unfastened from her person. She jumped out of the basket. (Whatever he's up to, it can hardly be worse than kittens. I'm too old for this.)

(You fought me for them,) RK reminded her.

(I thought you were going to hurt them,) she said. (Some toms do.)

(Me? Naah. It's just I never saw another cat that small before. I was curious. I am curious now.)

She rubbed her side against his as she joined him on the side of the balcony and they watched the flitter set down among the foliage on the far end of the lake. (Oh, I know better now. I can see you're an old softie. Are we going to stand around here all day or are we going to investigate? I'll have to return to feed the children again before long.) She sighed and walked back for a moment to give the nearest kitten a lick, then hopped off the balcony. (You coming?)

(As soon as I can. I'd better put this Temple 's so-called guardians and the two-leggeds on red alert.)

But as he turned to wake the other cats, he found himself hemmed in. Large, furry bodies slunk to the edge of the balcony and surrounded him, while behind them, from all ledges, balconies, door and window frames, the chrysoberyl eyes of hundreds of other guardians stared unblinkingly into the shadows.

(Acorna?) RK used his cat-to-humanoid telepathy, which here on Makahomia seemed to come not so much from his brain but up from the ground through his very paw pads. (We got trouble out here. Pass it on.)

(I know. I'm on my way.)

Miw-Sher sat up, wiping her eyes. She looked drowsily out over the canyon, then wiped her eyes again. "The lake!"

RK didn't need her to tell him about it. He could smell it already. The lips of every cat on the Temple were curled back over the scent glands, the hackles of each cat raised, the tails bushed. Even the kittens tried to see through their closed eyes and bristled instinctively, their individual baby hairs standing up on their uncoordinated little bodies.

The waters, so clear and clean just a moment before, were boiling and steaming with an acrid stench that was worse than the combined signatures of a hundred tom cats looking for love.

RK growled low in his throat and said to the other cats near him, (Okay, troops, here's what we do. We run down the beach and some of us jump up on the ledge back there and then we drop down onto them as they come out of the flitter over in those trees and demolish them.)

The nearest cat, this one a large sleek one with midnight stripes, said, (You do that. We'll do this.)

And he and every other Temple guardian emitted ear-splitting yowls that did to the auditory senses what the polluted lake did to the olfactory ones.

But as the great yowl started, a figure emerged from the foliage. Edu Kando! When he saw the cats and heard their yowl, he turned tail, but RK, Grimla, Pash, Haji, and Sher-Paw bounded after him, only to be outsprinted by the larger, longer-legged Temple cats who guarded Aridimi. With a mighty coordinated leap, they brought him down, screaming their battle cries and- shooting sparks?

But the cats on top of Kando began falling off, lying limp, and RK realized his enemy was shooting a laser pistol.

Grimla hung onto a foot with teeth and claws. Among the roil of cats was a huge one. Miw-Sher, changed to cat form, waded into the fray. The Mulzar, freeing himself from the first ten cats to attack his body, backed up a pace, then fired at her. She crumpled. Grimla abandoned her place shredding Kando's leg and jumped away from it, running to Miw-Sher. Kando fired again and Grimla lay smoking, a bare paw's length from her friend.

Then suddenly, behind them, the flitter rose jerkily from the foliage. Federation flitters were well armed. This one opened fire. Priests had joined the cats, but both quickly fell and dropped to the ground, and in some cases, into the roiling lake waters.

RK grew very still inside, very numb, and slunk from the body of one fallen comrade to the body of another while the carnage continued. When he was behind the Mulzar, but very close, he leaped up on the arm that held the gun, hung on to it with deep sinkings of his front claws while he bit and churned his back claws with all his might.

Kando's grip loosened and RK thought that one more kick would set the laser pistol free.

And then he felt a terrible crunching pain, as if his spine had broken, as Kando's other hand crashed down upon him, and sent him flying into the foliage.

As the pain of his injuries overcame him, he saw another huge cat, Tagoth, jumping over the fallen bodies. Acorna was just behind him, supporting the old priest.

RK called out to her, but not with his mind. In fact it was just a feeble little mew, but she heard him, and looked up. Touching the old man with her horn, she steadied him before she sprinted after Tagoth into the welter of bodies. She stopped first to bend over Miw-Sher.

The Mulzar, nursing his shredded arm where RK had nailed him, didn't bring the laser pistol up in time. Tagoth landed full on top of him, disarming him.

But the flitter barked again. As Miw-Sher sat up, Tagoth's arm raised and the flitter spiraled - slowly, it seemed to RK, down to the lake.

Tagoth lowered his arm. Miw-Sher tried to rise to her feet. Acorna, clutching her throat, fell over her.

No. That couldn't be right. Acorna would not fall.

But she did.

Acorna fell. And lay still.

No.

RK's world crashed from night blackness to a darkness far more profound.

"Captain Becker, do you read me now?" Mac's voice woke Becker from a fitful doze.

The com unit was live again!

"Mac, funny you should mention. I was going to call you as soon as I got the com unit back up. How did you fix it anyway?" He was genuinely curious, but remembering Mac's tendency toward long-winded explanations, he decided curiosity could wait. "Never mind. No tune now. I need to recalibrate the scanner to pick up someone on the ground and I need to do it now, without having to figure it out. Run through it with me."

"Yes, Captain, but…"

"I'd ask Acorna, but she has other fish to fry back at the Temple. Nadhari is somewhere out in the desert, hurt. I need to find her."

"I am distressed to hear that, Captain, but…"

"No ifs, ands, or buts about it, guy. Tell me how now before I miss her and she ends up dying."

"Very well, Captain," Mac said. He rattled off the computations and Becker entered them quickly, his concentration narrowing to just the screen. No sooner had he adjusted his instruments than he spotted something right about where he supposed Nadhari might have been ditched. "Stay tuned, Mac. I think I got her now."

"Oh, very good, Captain. Do you want to know…?"

"Not now, Mac," Becker said, setting the flitter down in the smoothly, even artistically drifted desert sands. The night was calm and bright with striped moonlight and seemed to be saying "Sandstorm? What sandstorm?"

But bleeding atop one of the dunes, stripped of most of her clothing and a lot of her skin, lay a person Becker barely recognized as Nadhari.

"Hey, babe, come here often?" he called.

"Jonas, you junkman in shining armor," Nadhari said, or tried to say. Her voice was hoarse and cracked; her hands, arms, and torso were so abraded he could see very little skin through the blood. Though she'd shielded her face pretty well, her cheeks and forehead also looked like raw hamburger.

"Oh, honeybunny, we need to get you to Acorna right away, doll. That bastard. I can't believe he dumped you out here!"

She smiled a little, painfully, and her teeth were pink outlined in red. "I dumped him," she rasped.

He tried to find spots on her anatomy he could hold so that he could carry her, but in the end getting her to the flitter involved him supporting and her half walking, half being pushed and dragged. She sucked in her breath a lot, but otherwise was quiet, even though that walk had to have hurt like blazes. She was a tough lady.

He would have covered her with something except he didn't want to get anything else in those wounds. He helped her arrange herself as comfortably as possible in the back of the flitter. She was half fainting from pain, loss of blood, and exhaustion.

"Mac, you still there?" he asked, toggling the com unit.

"Yes, Captain. Do you have Nadhari Kando?"

"I do and I gotta get her to Acorna right now. She's a real mess."

"Captain, since you have been preoccupied during this transmission, I took the liberty of acquiring your position from your signal. I wish to inform you that the wii-Balakiire is not far from you and closing quickly."

"The what?"

"The wii-Balakiire, the shuttle belonging to the Linyaari ship Balakiire, with crew members…"

"I know what the wii-Balakiire is. I was just wondering when and how they got here so fast."

"They arrived only moments ago by following the same course we took, which I downloaded directly into their computer banks, correcting our coordinates so that they did not end up mired on Praxos. It saved a lot of time."

"I'll bet it did."

"Melireenya asked me to inquire if the crew might not be able to offer their assistance so that Nadhari would not have to suffer through the journey?"

"Sure thing. You told me how they found us, but you haven't said to what we owe the honor of their company?"

"When Acorna contacted MOO from Captain MacDonald's ship, she told her friends about the plague here. They decided to come and help."

"Save it, Mac. Patch me through to the wii-Balakiire now."

"Very well, sir. I can do that easily since Chief Petty Officer Lea removed the jamming signal she devised to interfere with the Linyaari signal, so we may all converse freely."

"That was nice of her, whoever she is," Becker said. "Hurry up, will you?"

"This is Melireenya on the wii-Balakiire, Captain Becker. We have made visual contact with you, and if you look up and a bit to your right, you will do likewise with us."

Becker did and saw the Linyaari shuttle berth itself in the sand. Six Linyaari waved at him through the viewport. He couldn't tell in the darkness who they were exactly, but he was glad to see them.

Opening the hatch, he stepped out and allowed two of the Linyaari to enter in his place. They immediately turned to Nadhari and began laying hands and horns tenderly upon her wounds.

"I don't suppose any of you ladies brought an extra tunic or something, did you? She might get a little chilly-you know, shock and stuff-once you put her back together."

"Certainly, Captain," said the one nearest him. As soon as she spoke, he recognized her as Acorna's Aunt Neeva. She blithely stripped off her tunic and handed it to him. "She can wear mine."

"But I -er-what will you…" he stammered, trying not to look.

"If you think it necessary that I cover myself to preserve the good opinion of Khornya's new friends, then I'm sure I'll find something. I actually felt that in such a warm climate, perhaps the attitude toward clothing was more relaxed than it is among your own people. But now you must tell me how to contact Khornya. I have been trying to reach her, but I can't se em to. Mac tells us that she is inside some sort of stronghold, so I am assuming that it has some sort of barrier to telepathic communication."

"No, there's no such barrier. She contacted me that way when she was inside the stronghold and I was out in the flitter," Becker told her.

Just then Khaari poked her head out of the hatch and said, "Nadhari says her cousin and that crooked Federation commander were armed, and were setting out to destroy a sacred lake and kill the inhabitants."

"How is she?" Becker asked them.

Nadhari herself answered in a strong voice. "I'm fine, Jonas. But something is wrong at the lake. I can't get Acorna to answer me."

"That's bad," Becker said, adding to Khaari and Melireenya, "You ladies better sit down or get back to your own vessel. We have to get back to the lake, and fast."

"The location of the stronghold is a sacred secret," Nadhari whispered.

"So is the location of the Linyaari homeworld, if you'll recall. I think we can safely guarantee that these people can keep a secret. Besides, the priests at the stronghold think Acorna is some kind of second coming. Just think how tickled they'll be to see six more folks just like her. Let's boogie, people."

He flew right into the crater, with the wii-Balakiire trailing behind. The twin cat's-eye moons had set by then, and the first of the suns was rising, its pinks obscured by a squirming yellow-green fog leaking out of the mountains beyond the crater. From the readings Becker was getting, the bilious stuff was rising from the fissure above the lake. That wasn't good.

Besides, the stronghold might still be locked.

"Change of plans, folks," he told the Linyaari escort, and flew up over the lip of the crater that contained the stronghold. On the other side, he saw the slit between the white knuckled ridges, with the fog billowing out of it. "Hold your noses. We're going down there," he told them, and dropped his flitter's nose through the crack emitting the steam.

He couldn't believe his eyes at first. What had been a scene of beauty and peace when he retired only a few hours earlier now looked like his worst nightmare.

The formerly clear lake was churning with stinking cloudy water, casting up stones like some filthy froth along the beach. In the middle of the mess was a Federation flitter half sunk into the water. Becker thought he could make out a body at the controls.

It wasn't the only body. As he found a place in the bushes broad enough to land, he could see through the steam to the shore, where he spied the prostrate bodies of dozens of cats and four or five priests. Miw-Sher, cradling the body of Grimla, walked through the carnage beside Tagoth, trying to tend to the fallen priests and cats.

Nadhari loped over to them as if nothing had ever been wrong with her. Embracing both of them and the cat in a single desperate hug, she cried, "I can't believe you're all right! I felt sure you were injured."

"I was," Miw-Sher replied, "but Ambass… Acorna… made me better before she was shot. Uncle Tagoth tackled the Mulzar and got the gun away from him. He shot down the flitter, but not before its guns got Acorna."

"Got Acorna?" Nadhari asked, and the words echoed through Becker's brain like a ricocheting missile.

Kando lay further down the beach, surrounded by cats and priests. They were not trying to tend to any of his wounds. In fact they seemed to be looking for undamaged parts of him to claw, bite, or beat.

Another huddle of about ten priests crowded around something else a little farther away.

The wii-Balakiire found its berth beside his flitter, but before he could open the hatch, Neeva was out and running toward the huddle of priests. Melireenya and Khaari cried, "Khornya!" together, and surged for the hatch, but Nadhari beat them to it.

They all but climbed on top of Becker's head evacuating the flitter.

Becker, feeling sick in a way that even a Linyaari couldn't heal, followed them, stumbling over the bushes, trying to catch his breath in the stench from the lake.

His foot touched something soft and he looked down. His boot was under RK's belly. The cat was very still, and when Becker picked him up, RK's tail hung down limply over Becker's arm.

Becker tapped the nearest Linyaari on the shoulder and pointed with dumb misery to his first mate.

"Riidkiiyi!" the girl cried. "Oh, Riidkiiyi, don't be dead." She lay her slightly immature horn upon the cat's fur while stroking him.

After a moment, RK struggled in Becker's arms and jumped down.

"Thanks," Becker said.

"It's Maati, Captain," Aari's little sister told him. She'd grown so much that he hardly recognized her. She'd been on the Balakiire and he hadn't realized she was there. "My father and mother and I all came with the Balakiire to see if we could help."

"Thanks, Maati. Is-Is that Acorna they're working on now?" he asked, trying to see through the wall of Linyaari and priestly backs.

"Yes."

And then he felt a most welcome mental touch. Though it was weaker than usual and very tired, he knew it well. Acorna said, (Captain, I'm fine. Please persuade some of my friends to help the others.)