Acorna’s People

by Anne McCaffrey

  “The invaders have been taken prisoner and the ship secured, my lord,” one of the blue-clad crewmen said across the ship’s computer’s com system. “What shall we do with them now?”

  “I haven’t decided,” Hafiz said. “The crocodile pit or being staked out in the desert. What do you think, my darling?”

  “Oh, Hafiz, that’s so very unevolved. Besides, the crocodiles would probably give Ms. Manjari professional courtesy, or perhaps die of indigestion. Why not just confine them to the ship’s dungeons until such time as they may attain enlightenment?”

  “Yes, my angel, but I am very cross with them. Because of them we may not continue our journey. Perhaps we should teach them the joys of spacial liberation?”

  “It’s a thought,” Karina conceded. But they had delayed a bit too long.

  Kisla Manjari broke loose from her dancing boys and pushed a button on her inconsequential left breast. “Midas, send over the second, third, and fourth phalanxes! And watch out for the biohazards and the dancing girls!”

  Her former captors recaptured her, menacing her with her own weapon. She simpered at them, “You wouldn’t blast a girl for making a little call, would you?”

  Karina looked at her husband hopefully but he shook his head. “Alas, we have no second line of defense.”

  “Shahrazad, this is the Condor. You still in one piece?”

  “Condor?” Hafiz said. “We are just barely. We are about to be boarded a second time.”

  “They’re probably coming through that piece of oversized tubing linking their ship to yours, right?” the voice asked.

  “That seems a safe assumption,” Hafiz said.

  “None of your people coming through, right?”

  “No one but pirates.”

  “Okay, we’re on the case, but Shahrazad?”

  “Yes, Condor?”

  “Dibs on what’s left of the tubing afterward. We’re a salvage ship.”

  “With my compliments, Condor.”

  “Okay, then. Brace yourselves. You may get a little shook up.”

  Acorna had not realized quite the extent of the adventure she was in for merely by becoming part of the Condor’s growing crew.

  “How close are they, Captain Becker?” she had asked.

  “Only a wormhole away,” he replied. “Looks stable, and it should let us out within striking range of the target. Hold onto your horn-hats, boys and girls, here we go.” He had taken what he said was the unprecedented move of strapping the cat in, too, a procedure which caused RK’s ears to flatten against his head. RK’s tail would have lashed as well but it had no place to go. “Sorry about this, shipmate, but we gotta make up some time here.”

  He called back to the rest of them as he plunged the Condor into the first hole, “Salvage and recycling’s usually a more leisurely kind of business, you understand.”

  Acorna smiled. He reminded her so much of her uncles. And Aari, for the first time since she had seen him, seemed to be actively enjoying himself. Or maybe not. He was baring his teeth. Was that hostile or had he just been around Becker too long? No, she thought he was happy. He felt happy to her.

  The ship jolted as it surged out of the wormhole and through the first of the two “pleats” as Becker called them. “Little speed bump there, ladies and gentlemen. Black water, as my daddy used to call it. Space rapids. Yahoo!”

  One more of those and suddenly they were no longer in empty space. They were making visual contact with two similar ships, both posh spaceliners, connected by a long white umbilical cord.

  Becker hailed the Shahrazad. Acorna nearly wept with relief to hear her uncle Hafiz’s voice apprising them of the situation.

  She was about to ask to speak to him when Becker declared he had dibs on the tubing and accelerated, aiming the Condor’s nose between the two liners.

  The tubing was no impediment at all for the Nupiak asteroid breaker nose cone. Space-suited bodies tumbled like corpuscles on a microscope slide of a broken capillary. Gravity boots were locking onto hulls and gloves grasping the gloves of spinning crewmates. Acorna was glad to see that most of them were managing to save themselves but even gladder to see that in order to do so, they had to let their weapons twirl out into the blackness of space.

  Acorna and Aari watched for a moment, and Acorna thought again how terribly lonely it would be to go drifting in space till you died. She glanced at Becker, and at the pressure suits on the wall. Becker looked completely serious for one moment, then got up, threw pressure suits and jet packs at them and said, “Okay, boys and girls, salvage time. You too, KEN-bo, but you won’t need a suit, right? When that little—female individual was kicking the stuffing out of me, some of her boys stopped her from making it worse so I guess I owe them. Besides, I want that tubing! And then we’ll make a house call on your uncle, Lady.”

  Acorna was well used to maneuvering in jets and pressure suits from her childhood mining asteroids with her uncles, and Aari also had used them before his captivity on Vhiliinyar. Fortunately, Acorna’s horn was not so long that it required a special helmet. Maneuvering in space was a lot like swimming, using the jets as fins, grabbing the drifting crewmen and bringing them back to the Shahrazad and shoving them through an airlock before going after the next one.

  They managed to pluck two off the hull of their own ship where they clung like barnacles before that ship took off. As soon as they shoved the last one aboard Becker said, “Lady, you may want to visit the Shahrazad and make sure your uncle is okay. Aari and KEN, unless you like family reunions, come on back to the Condor and we’ll eat our humble din-din of plant seeds and cat food and hope Acorna brings us back some highclass chow from her rich relative.”

  Acorna waved and climbed through the airlock. The previous hitchhikers had been taken into custody by the Shahrazad’s crew but once she drew off her helmet, Hafiz himself was there to embrace her and welcome her aboard. As they repaired to the ship’s lounge, she felt it suddenly lurch, and saw a bolt of light zipping across the view screen from the Shahrazad to the departing Midas. The Midas exploded in a ball of flame.

  From the com set, she heard Becker yelling, “Yahoo! Instant karma for coming to the rescue, Aari, my man! Lookit the salvage! See ya later, Lady!” and the Condor with a wee waggle of its chassis zoomed off to retrieve its prizes.

  “No!” cried Kisla Manjari, bound hand and foot to a chair in the corner of the lounge. “It’s not fair! That junk man can’t have the nice new ship my uncle gave me. Daddy, do something really nasty to him and his horrible cat.”

  Acorna saw that Kisla’s eyes were turned up in her head so only white showed through her lids.

  “As you see, dear Acorna, we are playing host, somewhat unwillingly, to an old schoolmate of yours.”

  Acorna rose and crossed the room, kneeling beside Kisla and looking into her face. She started to touch the girl’s head with her horn but Kisla jerked away, batting at her with manacled hands.

  “She’s had some sort of psychotic break,” Acorna said, recoiling slightly from the ugly chaos of the girl’s mind. “She followed Captain Becker and took away the horns of the Ancestors he had gathered. She tried to kill him to make him tell where the Linyaari home world is.”

  “And no doubt it was for the same reason that she pursued us,” Hafiz said with a heavy sigh.

  “I wonder if she knows anything about the disappearance of my people,” Acorna mused.

  Before she or anyone else could pursue that line of inquiry, a familiar voice penetrated the room. “Shahrazad, this is the Haven. We received your Mayday. Shahrazad, come in. For the love of all the moons of Mithra, Shahrazad, don’t tell us we’re too late and that explosion was you! Please come in, Hafiz, you old camel molester, you.”

  “Mr. Greene,” Hafiz said to the room at large. “There are ladies present, if you please. And no, quite happily, the explosion was that of a ship called the Midas registered to Count Edacki Ganoosh. The Midas attacked us and launched a boarding party. We mana
ged to capture most of the party, and then we blew up the ship, once it uncloaked, in order to forestall future difficulty.”

  The sound of youthful cheering and squealing and one shrill celebratory whistle overcame Greene’s transmission for a moment.

  “Johnny, it’s Acorna,” she said. “What are you and the Haven doing out here?”

  “We originally came thinking to give safe escort to the Shahrazad, Acorna, but things have gotten a little complicated. What are you doing there?”

  “That also is complicated, Johnny,” Acorna said.

  “Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages,” Becker’s voice crackled in on top of the others, “I think it’s time we all had a little real-time interfacing here. What say we pop over to the nearest dirt, set our respective vessels on their tails, and climb aboard Shahrazad so Mr. Harakamian can entertain us in the style to which it would be nice to become accustomed while we tell our respective war stories, hmm?”

  “A very sound suggestion, Captain Becker,” Hafiz said. “Please, bring your excellent crew.”

  “Bring the kitty, too, Captain,” a young voice piped up.

  “That request was brought to you by Ms. Turi Reamer, jeweler at large, Becker,” Johnny Greene said.

  “Course it was,” Becker replied. “I’da known Turi’s voice anywhere, Greene. You best not be coming between me and my lady friends now, John, you hear?”

  “Lordee, I can tell you are on a salvage high, Joe. Get much from the wreck?”

  “I did not. It’s in a bazillion teeny pieces all moving rapidly away at warp speed. Not really worth my while.”

  “Gentlemen, when you have finished your bonding ritual, perhaps we might agree upon a place to meet?”

  “There’s a puny little planetoid not far from here that doesn’t seem to have any life or want any,” Becker said. “Let’s set down there.”

  This they did. As Becker, Aari, RK, and the KEN unit boarded, Acorna and the Harakamians greeted them.

  “What a splendid specimen of a Makahomian Temple Cat you have on your shoulder, Mr. Becker!” Karina said, clapping her hands. “I understand they are among the most enlightened of all creatures. It is said that when the Makahomian elders and priests begin to consider their next incarnations, the most favored of all possible fates is to be born again as a Temple Cat.”

  RK licked his paw, swiped it across his whiskers, narrowed his eyes, and purred appreciatively.

  Becker was more single-minded. “I’d like to have a look at the human space salvage you and Aari retrieved, Acorna, if your uncle doesn’t mind,” he said. “Like I said, a couple of those guys who were with Manjari were not half bad. I’m sort of hoping they were among the survivors.”

  Acorna was pleased that he had dropped the “Lady” part now. It meant that he was starting to consider her a friend, instead of some legendary character he had heard about on Earth, which had been how he had regarded her before.

  Uncle Hafiz waved his hand graciously. “Please consider my dungeon as your dungeon,” he said.

  Becker strolled up to the force field where Hafiz had confined the miscreants. The hologram behind them showed a Crusades-style dungeon, complete with sound effects of someone being dismembered in the background. Acorna was very glad it was just a hologram.

  Becker said, “I like the ambience, sir. Amnesty Interplanetary would be less enthused, I’m sure, but if they ever come aboard because someone who deserves this has the brass to complain, there will be nothing anyone can put a finger on in the way of cruel or unusual punishment.” Kisla Manjari was by now confined in a separate cell. Karina Harakamian kept sending troubled glances in the deranged girl’s direction.

  “Can you wall off her cell from visual or auditory contact for a little while, please, Mr. Harakamian?”

  “My dear Becker, we are fellow entrepreneurs, businessmen, and adventurers. Do call me Hafiz, my friend, and I shall call you…”

  “Becker’s okay, but Aari here calls me Joe.”

  “Joh,” Aari said, and looked challengingly at Uncle Hafiz. Acorna was pleased to note that either Aari’s appearance was so much improved by his surgery, prosthesis, and horn-hat that the Harakamians noticed nothing unusual, or else Aari’s wounds had only been particularly repugnant to Linyaari. Hafiz smiled and said, “And you too, my dear fellow, must call me Hafiz. Our beloved Acorna calls me uncle. I practically raised her, you know. Why, I am all but a kinsman to your people!”

  Acorna stifled a giggle and Aari gave Hafiz a slow baring of his teeth, rather like Becker’s more wolfish grins. “I am Aari, Uncle Hafiz. I have lost much of my own family and will happily adopt you, since you wish it.”

  Oops. She wished she and Aari could thought-speak as easily as they had been able to among the horns of the dead. She could have warned him. Uncle Hafiz was a very nice man in many respects but he was not exactly to be trusted—not even by members of his blood kin.

  “Splendid, splendid.” Hafiz erected a hologramatic wall in front of Kisla’s cell, adding some decorative manacles with a skeleton dangling from them on the outside, a burning brazier with implements of torture heating in it, and, as a finishing touch, a dish of greenish gruel crawling with virtual maggots. It matched the decor of the interior of her cell nicely, though that now was wholly blocked by a slimy looking stone wall. Had Acorna not witnessed some of the conditions in the child labor camps of Kisla Manjari’s adoptive father, the Piper, she would never have believed human beings could incarcerate each other in such dreadful nonhologramatic conditions.

  RK sat with lashing tail and narrowed eyes watching as Becker paced with his hands clasped behind him, studying the faces of the men Acorna and Aari had rescued. They were all men, which did not surprise Acorna. Kisla Manjari would have no other women in her entourage. Her ego was such that she would see any other woman as competition.

  “I think I recognize a couple of you fellows,” Becker said. “Pardon me if I don’t quite remember your faces. I was dying at the time. But you failed to kick me when I was down and I like that in an enemy, fortunately for you. Now then, I’m wondering if any of you, being the lickspittles of Kisla Manjari and her uncle as you must be to find yourselves in this charming accommodation, would care to redeem yourselves a little further and fill us in about your employers’ plans. You understand we’re wondering why we have been singled out for the honor and distinction of being Kisla and Ganoosh’s enemies.”

  Acorna saw them hesitate, and quite without shame she used some of the new skills she had acquired on narhii-Vhiliinyar to give her wily old uncle a small psychic push in the right direction.

  “I can assure you,” Uncle Hafiz said suddenly, an inner smile lighting his eyes as if the brilliant idea he had just had was his very own, which, for all Acorna knew, it may have been. Perhaps her push was merely giving him the sort of cue an actor needed to speak his lines at the proper time. “That the man who proves to be of the most assistance to us will no longer need be in anyone’s employ.

  “So grateful for his services shall the House of Harakamian be that it shall reward him so that he will believe he has found the universe’s most generous djinn in the most secluded and luxuriously appointed bottle in the universe. Should he be kissing his own mother on the lips, his identity would yet be a mystery to her when our physicians have concluded his transformation and yet, so handsome a—what is that idiomatic expression you so charmingly employ, O incomparable jewel among jewels, when referring to my personal physique and sexual prowess?”

  “Studmuffin, Lord and Master,” Karina replied with a demure lowering of her lashes and a coy curtsey.

  “So handsome a studmuffin shall he be that all women will desire him and all men admire him. A far more attractive retirement program than being left adrift in space, would you not say, gentlemen?”

  There was only a moment of silence before one of the men Acorna had rescued, one whose face wore a careworn expression that was perhaps the result of a troubled conscience, spok
e up. “I’d do it for a new job and protection for my family, Mr. Harakamian. I understood that I was being employed to pilot an executive liner to take VIPs to business appointments. This kidnapping and torture stuff and posing as Federation Forces was not in my contract.”

  Acorna did not stay for the bidding war that ensued, each prisoner vying to give the most accurate details to which he was privy concerning Ganoosh’s operation and plans. For at that moment, Johnny Greene and what remained for the crew of the Haven were boarding the Shahrazad. Acorna ran to greet them. It was so good to see her old friends again! She could hardly wait to see Pal Kendoro and ’Ziana. She wondered if ’Ziana realized yet how much Pal cared for her. And if Markel and Johnny Greene would be there.

  Markel and Johnny were there, it was true, and Khetala, who stepped forward and hugged Acorna in an embrace that quickly degenerated into sobs. Acorna wondered what could be upsetting her so until she realized that here were Johnny, Markel, Khetala, red-haired Annella, a tall red-haired man with two children of the same coloring, and a passel of very young children. And that was all.

  “Kheti, where are the others?” Acorna asked. “Johnny? They’re not on the Haven, are they? What happened?”

  Johnny took a deep breath. Becker and Hafiz had by that time noted that something else was amiss and joined Acorna and Karina.

  “Well, honey, there’s good news and bad news,” Johnny said. “The bad news is, General Ikwaskwan is working for the bad guys. He and a bunch of his fake Federation Forces troops came home to roost about the time the Starfarers arrived to pick up Nadhari Kando for combat lessons. Ikwaskwan gassed Nadhari and our ship and took most of the Starfarers prisoner. If it hadn’t been for Markel knowing how to use the vents and suggesting them as a safe space, we, too, would be guests of the general.”

  “Was that last part the good news?” Acorna asked.