“How are we doing, Mikey, Elviiz?” Jaya asked through the intercom. “Holding together?”
“We seem to be,” Elviiz replied. “Great holes are conspicuously not gaping in any critical equipment, and there are no untoward rattles, bangs, pops, or vibrations that we can detect.”
“Thanks, guys,” Jaya said, and let out a long sigh. She looked to Captain Becker, who nodded and turned to Khorii. “I’d feel much better if we had Elviiz the android in the engine room instead of Elviiz the invalid, but it sounds like it’s all good so far.”
Then the smooth sailing was over, and they started spinning through the wormhole.
“Can the ship take it?” Jaya asked Captain Bates, whirling one finger in the air.
“Relax,” the captain said. “The hole is spinning, not the Mana.”
By the time they were through it, the novelty had worn off for the younger girls. Moonmay had stopped squealing and threw up in the cat basket at some point during the transition. “Don’t anybody tell my cousins,” she begged after she had cleaned herself and the basket. “They never would let me live it down.”
“Good thing those kittens weren’t in their basket,” Captain Bates said, grinning.
“No, they think Khiindi is their ma now,” Moonmay said, pointing to a motley pile of furry lumps sprawled and curled around a larger one. “They slept through the whole thing. They’re gonna make good ship’s cats, Khorii.”
“It’s too bad they are using Khiindi as their example then instead of the mother ship’s cat,” Khorii said. “She and her offspring and male colleague are far more aggressive at hunting counterproductive life-forms than Khiindi.”
Khiindi opened an eye, and one ear poked up above a tiny paw as if he’d heard and resented his girl’s lack of loyalty.
Khorii laughed and unstrapped herself to go give him an apologetic stroke. “It is not your fault, Khiindi. You were raised on Vhiliinyar, and have adopted our peaceful Linyaari customs.”
The cat snagged the cuff of her shipsuit with a lightning paw.
“Khiindi!” she scolded. He let his paw go limp and closed his eye as if the threat of claws had been unintentional.
Moonmay and Sesseli giggled, but when Khorii looked up, she found Ariin watching her and Khiindi with an unreadable expression—and an unreadable mind.
Where’s the sign?” Khorii asked when their course finally brought them to the asteroid that should have been the one where Captain Becker had stowed the Estrella Blanca.
Captain Bates cocked a questioning eyebrow at her. “Captain Becker made a sign all across the face of the asteroid warning trespassers away,” Khorii said. “You could see it from space.”
“You were approaching from the other direction,” Captain Bates told her. “It’s probably on the far side.”
But although they circled the asteroid, they didn’t see the sign, though there was indeed a lot of other, well, stuff, on the surface.
None of it looked like the Estrella Blanca, however, or anything else Khorii found familiar.
“What in the zodiac is that stuff?” Captain Bates asked.
Khorii was puzzled. The material on the surface of the asteroid looked nothing like the collection of parts and wrecked ships and other “good stuff” Uncle Joh had collected. It almost looked like there was a network of connected dwellings down there. One thing for certain was that, however the salvage had been altered, Uncle Joh had not done it. He’d been in quarantine with her parents and had not had time to return here, she was sure.
She noticed as they drew nearer the surface that one especially large rounded hump still bore the letters “anca” on its side. Why was there something wrong about that? She pointed at the area, and Captain Bates used the ship’s computer to enhance and enlarge it. Had Elviiz been himself, he could have given them a detailed analysis, but of course, he wasn’t.
Then she remembered. “We camouflaged the ship completely by covering it with other salvage,” she told them. “We should not be able to see any of the hull, much less read its name.”
“Maybe a meteor or something knocked part of the camouflage off?” Captain Bates speculated uneasily. “But I have a feeling that something even weirder than usual is going on down there. Jaya, I believe it’s time to change course and head straight to the Moon of Opportunity. I don’t know why Joh Becker wanted us to come here to begin with, but if Khorii pronounces him and her family plague-free, he can come here himself and check his own darn cargo. I don’t like the looks of this, and I don’t want to take any unnecessary chances with you kids. From what Khorii says, the ship was cleansed the first time and…”
“That was just the parts we saw, and the air, Captain,” Khorii told her. She caught her breath and suddenly felt the roots of her mane all the way down her spine bristle like Khiindi’s. Even the feathers on her calves pushed against the legs of her shipsuit. Why did it put her on alert, even frighten her, to look at the asteroid’s altered surface? “We did not realize at that time that there was a plague. It was the first place I saw the plague indicators, however. If there are still some there, we will know—well, something. That it can live when there are no living organic hosts, if nothing else. In which case, other humans could still catch it and our people cannot return home as we hope.”
Jaya, her dark eyes blazing with indignation, said, “With all due respect, ma’am, it is my ship and Khorii’s mission and you are here in an advisory capacity only. While your advice is duly noted and your concern appreciated, we’re not babies! Whatever is down there can’t possibly be any weirder or more dangerous than what we’ve been through lots of times already.”
“There’s Sesseli and Moonmay. They’re babies where I come from,” Captain Bates replied stubbornly.
“They’ve had to grow up like the rest of us,” Jaya argued. “Sesseli can protect herself better than most of us and Moonmay brought her grandpa’s twelve-gauge shotgun as well as the kittens.”
Mikaaye’s thought voice spoke from the engine room, “Khorii, Ariin, what reading are you getting? Who is on that asteroid and what is it that they fear?”
“You may be picking up remnants of the last moments of the passengers,” Khorii suggested, “There’s nobody living down there—I’ve seen for myself.” But the thought had barely formed, her mind’s eye once more seeing the overdressed corpses floating in zero G amid the sparkling blue motes of contamination, when she knew that was not what concerned Mikaaye. Perhaps because there were fewer people in the engine room, the psychic static was less, and he was reading the signals more quickly and strongly than she was.
“No, sister, there are extant life-forms there. I feel them. Do you not?”
By then, Khorii knew that the fear she had been feeling earlier, perhaps the same fear that was making their telepathic teacher try to turn them from their mission, was not her own. It was her heart that beat faster and louder, her eyes that constantly scanned the surface looking for the source of the danger, but it was someone else’s fear.
“Jaya is right, Captain. We have to land. Someone seems to be trapped down there, and they are in some kind of trouble.”
“I don’t suppose you could be more specific?” Captain Bates asked.
“Perhaps I should take the shuttle and go down alone to scout the area,” Khorii suggested.
“No way!” Jaya said. “We land and do this together, or we don’t do it at all.”
“We’ll be okay, Khorii,” Sesseli said, reaching around Khiindi and patting her on the shoulder. “Even if those ship-eating things are there, from what you said, Captain Becker has plenty of spare parts we could use to repair it.”
“Hap is not with us,” Khorii reminded her.
“Hap isn’t the only one who knows how to repair a ship,” Captain Bates growled. Their normally cheerful mentor was not a bit happy about this sudden mutiny, and didn’t mind letting everyone know it.
They landed on what looked like a clear patch as close as they could find to the
buried ship’s logo of the Estrella Blanca.
“Okay,” Captain Bates said, standing up and stretching. “Khorii and I will go take a look around.”
“Sesseli and me are a-comin’, too, ma’am. Like Jaya said, we can look after our own selves. She’s got her moves, and I got Grampa’s twelve-gauge.”
“I’m afraid not, girls. Someone has to guard the ship.” She knelt and looked them both in the eyes. “Who will look after the cats if something happens to you? Khorii just has to see if the plague is still active, then we’ll all leave for the good part of the trip. And Jaya, you need to stay here so there’ll be someone left on board who can fly this bucket or pilot a shuttle if we need you in a hurry.”
“Aye, aye, Captain,” Jaya said, only a little sarcastically.
“Well, as you keep pointing out, it is your ship.”
“I’m coming, too,” Ariin said. “If things need cleansing, two horns will be better than one.”
“Three is even better,” Mikaaye said, appearing in the hatch as they were about to leave. “And you need a male along for protection.”
Elviiz expertly zoomed his cart onto the bridge, narrowly missing two scampering kittens, and parked. “I will protect our remaining shipmates here,” he announced.
“And I’ll protect Elviiz with Grampa’s gun,” Moonmay said, brightening. “On account of he’s mostly Linyaari and not s’posed to shoot folks, even when they need it.”
Khorii, her hackles still vibrating with tension, very much hoped the altered landscape would contain no folks or anything else who needed shooting by anybody.
Chapter 30
Linyaari environmental suits were less bulky than those the humans had to wear. Since they could endlessly purify and recycle the air already inside their helmets, they didn’t need fresh oxygen supplies. Their shipsuits could be sealed to gauntlets, gravity boots and hoods with faceplates and a vacuum seal through which the horn could be freed. Oxygen and temperature gauges in the gauntlets kept them apprised of the need for their protective clothing.
Almost at once it became clear to Khorii that the difficult part of this mission would be getting back inside the Blanca.
“Do you not remember the way in?” Mikaaye asked, hopping over the back of a discarded tank of some sort and landing with a clang of gravity boots on a metal plate. Towering above them like cliffs were mounds of weathered metal, plasglass and plasteel, hull plates and stair grids, broken cables and torn cargo nets, bits that looked like they came from engine rooms and old berths, toilets, shuttles, some wrecked and in pieces and some that seemed undamaged, storage containers, old lockers, and a vast majority of other objects, the use of which Khorii could not begin to guess. Everything was covered with a thick coating of gray-brown dust.
Captain Bates tapped Khorii on the shoulder, pointed down, then bent over and adjusted her boots to put more bounce in her step on the low-gravity asteroid. Khorii passed along the suggestion, and she and the others followed the captain’s example.
“When we came here before, although things appeared chaotic, there was actually an order to them. Uncle Joh had parts of each sort of ship piled in one place. Miscellaneous fittings were in other places according to their use, furnishings in still another. There was a large sign on the asteroid’s surface warning trespassers to keep away. And although we camouflaged the Blanca with salvage, it did not spread over so great an area as this.”
Mikaaye picked up the first large object in his path and flung it aside, watching it fly with the force of his throw. His face held the joy of a child with a new ball until the pile shifted and other debris slumped toward him.
He jumped clear and landed on Khorii, who fell back with the impact but easily righted herself. Ariin and the captain fell back, too, then everyone grabbed debris and began flinging it to the sides to make a passage.
Captain Bates planted herself in front of them and pointed back to the ship. “It’s too damned dangerous, kids.” Her voice came through Khorii’s earbud. “We can’t just bull our way through. This stuff could avalanche and kill us all.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to the people who are trapped here,” Mikaaye said. “We are the only chance of rescue they may have.”
“Try to get a better idea of their location then, you psychics. We could kill them by piling more junk on top of them if we don’t know where they are.”
Khorii felt the fear, now stronger and fresher than before, which told her that whoever it was still lived. “I’m getting nothing specific,” she told the others. “Perhaps they’re unconscious or sleeping or so low on oxygen, they…”
“Yes, it would be nice if they’d give us some way to locate them,” Ariin agreed.
“If Elviiz still had his android bits…” Mikaaye began, but then stopped as they all felt it, at some distance but directly ahead of them, not fear alone but a complex stew of human emotion. Khorii identified terror, anger, hostility, pain, and even love, some fragmented images of faces, flashes of color and music, but she thought these might be dreams instead of communication. Still, it provided the direction they needed.
“Ahead, Captain Bates, and not dead,” Khorii said. “Whoever it is might even be aboard the Blanca.”
“Survivors?” Captain Bates asked incredulously.
“Not from the time we were there,” Khorii said. “My mother and father were there, too, and even if I missed it, they would have known. Elviiz was with us as well, and Uncle Joh had an infrared scope. But obviously this place has been disturbed since our previous visit.”
Captain Bates made a huge shrug, magnifying the gesture with her puffy, oxygen-holding suit, and turned to begin digging through the debris more carefully as the rest of them stepped up to join her.
They cleared only another foot or two, however, when Ariin pulled aside a large hull plate and revealed a long open tunnel, tall enough and wide enough for them to walk into it four abreast.
“That’s luck,” Captain Bates said. “This must be some old ship’s hold—a central corridor maybe, that will take us through the trash without our having to move all of it manually. Now if it’s not collapsed at the other end…”
She switched on the lanterns mounted in her helmet and gauntlets. Each Linyaari suit also carried a small glow tube in an outer pocket as part of its standard equipment.
If it was a ship, it was unlike any she had been on before, though in some ways the interior of the tube reminded her more of the egg-shaped smoothness of the Linyaari ships than the more clumsily constructed human vessels.
The deck, walls, and ceiling were a single piece, without joints or division. Khorii ran a glove along one bulkhead—or was it a wall?
Although the texture of the walls seemed smooth for the most part, there were odd indentations and shadows every few meters in the corridor.
Captain Bates ran her glove over one set. “This is like the handprints you see in some cave painting on elder worlds.”
“Yes!” Khorii said, though she’d never seen the paintings in question. “Except more like a reverse sculpture. Here, you see, this looks like the profile of a human face.”
As they progressed down the hall, they saw other prints, backs of torsos, a leg, a face, more hands, all imprinted in the smooth walls.
“Ugh,” Captain Bates said, as they went farther. “This is creeping me out. It looks like people just stepped out of these walls.”
Although the tubular corridor did not resemble any ship Khorii had ever been aboard, as they continued, it ended in a hatch the size of the entire administration building in Corazon.
All four of them stopped in front of it.
“Look familiar?” Captain Bates asked Khorii.
“Yes, this looks like the hatch to the docking bay on the Blanca.”
“It can’t be,” Mikaaye said. He held his glow tube aloft. “It’s part of this corridor—see how the ceiling swoops up to encompass it, then it’s all part of the same structure.”
“At least t
here aren’t any bits of people imprinted on the hatch,” Ariin said.
“How do we get this son of a gun open now without a ship’s computer telling it to?” Captain Bates wondered.
Mikaaye examined the opening. “We could try pushing,” he said, and before anyone could stop him, did. To their surprise, the gigantic hatch slid open at his touch.
The proportion of the inner space was familiar to Khorii, but that was all. Where she expected to see the docking bay with the silent ships sitting waiting for owners who would never return, instead there was what could have been a small city or a very large and extremely abstract and rather ugly sculpture.
Although Khorii and her parents had cleansed the air of the poisons the Blanca’s captain had released to kill the passengers and crew, the suits’ gauges showed that the oxygen level remaining inside the docking bay was so low as to be negligible. Of course, without a functioning airlock, the oxygen in this section would have dissipated once the hatch opened to the outside. Someone would have to restore power before the area could be examined without portable oxygen. That was also assuming they could find any intact and functioning equipment.
What had once been a docking bay had now been morphed into something far more changed than mere indentations in the walls. As far as the explorers could tell from their limited light sources, instead of ships and ramps, the cavernous room was now filled with hillocks and hollows that lumped and humped out into each other. Where the decks had once been, there were steep ramps or perhaps slanted roofs that descended into what seemed to be more of the same forms. Also, although they could see a vast unbroken space overhead, in front of them the hillocks formed walls that loomed up and twisted and turned, making their progress through the area very slow. Once in a while, Khorii thought she recognized another piece of salvage off to the side somewhere, but most of the surrounding structures bore little resemblance to the ship’s interior she remembered. Also, while they watched, the structures seemed to shift slightly, glacially, as if they were expanding even as they sat there.
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