Acorna's Quest

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Acorna,” and his voice cracked in his anxiety, “could you pretend to be a pet?”

  “A pet?”

  “It’s the only thing I can think of.”

  Acorna stood very still, her tall form dwarfing him in the pilot’s chair. She gave a little sniff, her wide silvery eyes regarding him. “I don’t think they’d buy that.”

  “Then let’s play it as cool as possible.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “And this time you’ve never heard of Delszaki Li and House Harakamian. When I can think what they’d hold Hafiz up for, much less Mr. Li, my heart fails me.”

  “You’ve made a very good point.”

  The Acadecki shivered, if a metal ship can be said to do such a thing, as she was locked into place aboard their captor.

  “While I can’t be a pet, Calum, I can be a Didi,” she said, and was off down the corridor, shouting over one shoulder, “You be the pet, this time, Calum. Just bright enough to speak when spoken to.”

  He reviewed that in his mind as he felt other things happening to the Acadecki, like the clang of metal against the main hatch. They were unlikely to be able to break through, but what if they decided to blow or shoot the hatch off? Better to surrender and maintain the ship intact. He quickly keyed in a code and turned off the system with the special switch he himself had installed. Let ’em try to break that, he thought with some satisfaction.

  Then he switched on the exterior speakers. “Wait a damned minute, will ya?” He flipped off the security lock on the hatch. Anyone could open it now from outside. “I’m coming. I’m coming. Doan like no one messing up the ship. My Didi’ll get back at me if’n you do.”

  He was at the hatch when the first of the Starfarers showed up, and he did not like the look on this surly bunch of muscle-bounds at all.

  “Hey, boys, take it easy. The Didi’s coming.” He waved them on in as if he weren’t the least bit impressed by their menacing appearance.

  The leader backhanded him with such efficiency that he careened from side to side of the narrow passageway before falling in an embarrassing heap to the deck.

  “Really!” came the sultry remonstrance from an Acorna Calum didn’t recognize. He blinked, as much to clear the shock of that backhanded blow as to make sure his eyes still functioned. “Was that necessary? Poor Calum doesn’t have many brains anyway, and the ones he’s got don’t need to be rattled. He’ll do whatever you tell him anyway. He’s been trained to.”

  The attention of the heavies was immediately focused on the vision in black. Calum vaguely remembered Judit, Mercy, and Acorna giggling over some of the outfits that had been concocted to either emphasize or hide her horn. This outfit was not only skintight, but the high collar disguised the long fall of Acorna’s silvery mane. It was cleverly attached to the ravishing black hat which sat at a jaunty angle on Acorna’s head. The peaked front completely hid the horn and almost covered her right eye.

  “Let me introduce myself: Badini, the Didi of Kezdet’s best…” she paused, her voice heavy with significance, “…establishment. You wouldn’t happen to have any children you consider excess baggage, would you? They certainly didn’t down there.” She pointed a contemptuous gloved hand down, indicating Rushima, which they had so obviously just left. Acorna’s gloves effectively disguised the differences in her hands, and her cloven hooves were hidden within the apparently stack-soled boots just visible under her long pantaloons.

  “What’s a Didi?”

  A disembodied voice echoed outside. “Bring them aboard. I want to question them if they’ve been on Rushima,” said a woman’s voice.

  “Anything you say,” drawled Acorna’s imitation Didi Badini in what Calum decided was an excellent imitation of the real bonk-shop owner’s voice.

  With an elegant swaying step, Acorna the “Didi” made her way past the first of the guards, deliberately brushing against him in such an enticing fashion that Calum hoped she wasn’t overdoing her role.

  “I suppose you’d better come, too,” she said, deigning to notice Calum just before she went through the hatch. She put just the right inflection in her voice to suggest to anyone listening that Calum was of no importance whatever.

  Of such little importance, in fact, that when he had been given the most cursory glance by the hard-faced woman standing slightly ahead of two obvious henchmen, he was immediately hauled away, probably by the man who had backhanded him. As his collar was tightly held by whoever kept pushing him forward, he couldn’t be sure. But he was pushed down a few miles of antigrav tubes to the bowels of the enormous spaceship and shoved into a bare cell. It was equipped with two slabs of some plastic, strapped up against opposing walls, a sanitary appliance, and that was all. Not even a water supply.

  “Nor any drop to drink,” he murmured, then reminded himself that this cell was likely bugged. So he released the fastening on one slab and sat down on it. And began to worry about Acorna. Could she pull off her fancy-dress persona? And what good would it do? These people were the type who’d think nothing of spacing superfluous bodies. He was suddenly not so happy to have been cast in the role of “expendably unimportant.”

  “WHERE did you say you came from?” asked one of the three facing her.

  “Kezdet,” Acorna promptly replied. “I’m looking for…replacements.”

  “Replacements for what?” the woman asked, but the first man laughed.

  “Dirtsiders need certain types of entertainment I’m sure this woman provides, Nueva.”

  “Oh. And you had no luck on Rushima?” This seemed to amuse the woman.

  Acorna snorted contemptuously. “If it isn’t flooded out, it’s desert or burned out. Not what I was told to expect,” Acorna said indignantly. “No one would even come out to speak to us, no matter where we landed. Ruined one outfit in the wet, and another has sand just driven into the seams.” She let her voice flatten with annoyance. “Wasted time and fuel. As I said, I’m Didi Badini….” She cocked her head, as if she expected to be informed of her interrogator’s name.

  “Welcome to the Haven, Didi Badini. I am Captain Nueva of the Starfarers.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a few excess…children, or females…or even that sort of male type…I could relieve you of?” Acorna said.

  “We’ve…sort of…relieved ourselves of the excess.”

  That was when Acorna realized she and Calum were in big trouble. Maybe she should have remained Acorna Delszaki-Harakamian, and worth a sizable ransom.

  “Really,” she replied as if amused at such a mutual circumstance, “then, if you’ll just return my…my little friend, we’ll be on our way. I really do need to find a few replacements, you know. Tastes get jaded so quickly.”

  Nueva made a motion, and two of the guards behind her grabbed Acorna by the arms. She could have thrown them off easily enough, being far stronger than she looked, but unless she also had Calum, displaying any of her discreetly concealed abilities was futile and possibly dangerous to them both. As she was turned and taken off in the direction Calum had been hauled, she saw that the Acadecki was tightly held by deck clamps fore and aft.

  “Let’s see how quickly your tastes jade,” Nueva said, with an unpleasant laugh.

  Over her shoulder, Acorna saw Nueva signal a waiting group of men and women, carrying various kinds of testing equipment and tools, to board the ship.

  Acorna didn’t think that Calum would have forgotten to disable the Acadecki before he’d opened the hatch. Of course, a personality like Nueva—and she made Kisla Manjari seem angelic in comparison—would have ways of extracting the information she wanted.

  Nor was she, as she had half hoped, flung into the same cell as her guardian. Five of the doors on the narrow aisle she was pushed to were blue with force-field lights. So another time consuming puzzle would keep her from being totally jaded. Insane, maybe, but not jaded. Did they fill the cells in order? Or had Calum been pushed into the first empty one…since this Nueva person had boasted o
f relieving herself of excess personnel?

  After using the sanitary appliance, with a deft but concealing shift of her pantaloons, Acorna unfastened one of the two slabs and lay down on it. She also decided to keep in character. She didn’t doubt for a moment that anything she said would be monitored. So why had they separated her from Calum? Two people in the same fix would certainly exchange information. Oh, dear, perhaps she had laid it on a bit thick that Calum was useless. At that moment she would have given anything to be comforted by her “uncle.”

  She was roused from a restless sleep by a hissing noise and, as she lay prone on the comfortless slab, her face was turned to the metal ceiling…and the open vent. A thin, mournful face was framed within the vent. A grubby thin finger was placed across the lips of a tear-stained and very dirty face. But Acorna was not in a mood to quibble; she welcomed any friendly contact right then.

  The child slowly let a rope down through the opening. She stood on the slab, thinking to assist by being closer to the vent. But instead the kid made violent gestures for her to refasten the slab to the wall.

  As if she’d never been there. Good thinking.

  There seemed to be just enough rope to reach her outstretched hands.

  If this is all he’s got, we’ll never reach Calum even with the slab down, she thought.

  She heard a soft, interrogative “Mmm?” from above, as if her rescuer was afraid to say out loud, “Come on, what are you waiting for?” Somewhat dubiously, Acorna gave a tentative pull on the rope. The thin youngster who was her unexpected savior couldn’t have enough muscle to pull her up, light as she was. But he had tied the rope to something reassuringly secure. Hand over hand, she pulled herself up, grasping his hand as she reached the frame and angled her shoulders to the diagonal of the vent. Despite that, she scraped her arms badly getting through.

  There was only the light from the narrow vent to see with. It reflected off a tube wall that wasn’t very big, so she had to sort of slither the rest of her body out of the cell. Her rescuer quietly replaced the vent grill, screwed the fasteners back in, and began to recoil his rope. Once more he put his finger to his lips, then began to wriggle along the tube, looking back once to indicate she was to follow.

  Fortunately, Acorna’s gown was made of a fabric much more durable than it looked, but the fashionable boots that hid her oddly shaped feet were very clumsy and might make enough noise to be heard. How she finally got them off she never knew because it involved contortions of her lithe body she’d never had to make before, even in her self-defense exercises. Lying on her back, she sort of inched her feet up to where she could grab the boots and untie the laces. She would have loved to abandon them right there, but it seemed unwise to leave this proof of her escape route. Turning back on her stomach, she managed to tie the boots around her waist to keep them from hitting the tube walls. “Good idea,” her rescuer approved in a bare thread of a whisper. After that they made better, and much quieter, progress along the tube. She wondered once or twice if her blood pounded more loudly than her body slithered, but no alarm was sounded.

  She did sneak a peek through the other vents, but Calum was not in any of the three cells she could see into. The apathy of the detainees did nothing to reassure her about his safety.

  They came to an intersecting tube, and the boy swung his body expertly to the left and wriggled down it. How long she followed him in this snake-like fashion Acorna had no idea, but suddenly they were in a much wider place—wider by comparison, at least—and she could sit without hitting her head on the ceiling. She was breathless and dry-mouthed from all her exertion.

  “It’s safe enough here. We can talk now,” her savior said, but his voice was only a faintly raised whisper, warning her that their “safety” was only relative.

  “What about Calum?” she whispered back.

  “Who?”

  “My…pilot.”

  The boy shook his head. “Must have been held in another area. I didn’t see anybody but you and some of our own people.”

  Acorna’s heart sank at this information, but she tried to put a brave face on it. “We must search for him,” she said. “But first, I should thank you for rescuing me. I am Acorna….” She let her voicetrail off as she could not decide how else to identify herself. Was it safe to tell this unknown rescuer of her connection with the houses of Harakamian and Li? It might be better to find out a little more about him first.

  “I’m Markel Illart. My father…” He gulped. “They…the ones who caught you…they’re not Starfarers, not really. They were refugees we were helping out, and then that Nueva had a coup and spaced practic’ly all of the First Gen. I couldn’t do anything, they’d locked the cabins. I couldn’t do anything,” he repeated, his voice rising dangerously.

  “No, of course you could not,” Acorna said at once, though she was not at all clear on the situation—except that her rescuer, having shed his self-confident air, was clearly only a boy, a lost youngling in need of comfort. Despite, or perhaps because of, her sympathetic reassurance, Markel suddenly crumpled into sobs, even though he tried very hard to suppress them.

  Immediately Acorna transferred herself to his side of their refuge and pulled him into her arms. Despite the hat, which had somehow remained in place through all her recent gyrations, she could touch his head with her concealed horn, to help relieve his anguish. The hands that he held to his face to muffle his sobs were bruised and bloodied as well as filthy. She could, and did, heal them. If he was to be of any further assistance to her, he needed to be whole. She left the dirt, having no water anyhow to clean him up. That reminded her of her own thirst.

  “I’m terribly sorry, my dear,” she said, hoping that he could feel the sympathy and reassurance she longed to give him. “How long ago did this happen?”

  “Days, weeks, months it could be. It…it isn’t easy to keep track of time up here.” His voice wobbled dangerously.

  “No, it certainly wouldn’t be,” Acorna agreed at once, “and I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for rescuing me.”

  “I had to, if I could. I’ll do anything I can to get back at them for my father.” He pressed his lips together as if holding back another outburst of unmanly sobs. “And they’re going to make you tell them how they can get control of that ship of yours. It’s a beauty.”

  “How would you know that?”

  Markel’s eyes lit up, and for a moment he seemed to have put aside his grief and his too-adult mannerisms, to be a normal cocky teenager enjoying a chance to boast of his expertise. “Oh, I know every tube and conduit in this ship. I can go anywhere, and I can even listen in on their coms. They think they’re so smart. Well, they’re not all THAT smart. I even know where they came from. They got on board the Haven by pretending to be Palomellese political refugees, but what really happened was Palomella decided to dump its worst criminals and scammed us into taking them on. That Nueva was running an extortion racket on Palomella, and now she’s trying the same thing on the Haven. If only I’d warned Dad before—” He broke off and swallowed hard.

  Acorna realized he was fighting back a sob, but the gesture still made her thirsty. She tried to moisten her mouth by running her tongue over the tissue, but she really needed some water. She thought rather wistfully of all the water they had so casually left behind.

  “You wouldn’t possibly have access to some water, would you?”

  “Ha! I have access to anything I want,” Markel said. “For all the good it does…”

  Acorna sensed that he needed bolstering up, needed to think more about what he could do and less about the past that he could not change.

  “I’m very thirsty,” she said wistfully. “And, when I think of the floods there were down on Rushima….”

  He reached behind his back and pulled out a water bottle, complete with nipple, the kind used for free-fall supplies.

  “Oh, that’s wonderful!” Acorna said, and there was no need to feign pleasure for Markel’s sake. She enjoye
d a long, luxurious drink of the water; it tasted stale and metallic, and she would have liked to purify it before drinking, but she didn’t want to insult the boy.

  “Go ahead,” Markel urged when she paused after that first restorative drink. You can have all of it,” he added with a casual flick of his fingers. “I’ve got more whenever you need it. Are you hungry?”

  “Why, I am. Don’t tell me you can find food, too! Is there anything you don’t know about this ship?” She exaggerated her admiring tone slightly and saw the praise work on Markel as the water had done on her, restoring the parched tissues of his soul. “Only…” she thought to warn him before he made promises he wouldn’t be able to keep, “…I cannot eat meat; only grains and vegetables.”

  Markel looked slightly relieved at this statement. “That’s as well because it’s much easier to snitch plants than anything else, like cooked food. Finish your drink. We’re not far from the ’ponics.”

  Acorna’s stomach made a joyful noise she was certain would echo down the tubes, but Markel had already turned to lead her to food. She slipped the bottle into one of her boots—as long as she had to drag these things along, at least they could be useful as carriers. The laces were long…maybe if she could add them to Markel’s rope, they’d be long enough to reach Calum.

  Over the other reeks of the ship, Acorna smelled vegetation: lots and lots of different kinds of vegetation, and the slightly chemical smell that her sensitive nostrils could identify as ’ponic nutrients. She wondered wistfully if the seedling chard she had planted on the Acadecki would ever leaf for her.

  “Be very quiet now,” Markel said, once again more mouthing words than actually speaking, as he deftly inserted a tool and withdrew the fasteners of a much larger grill.

  The smells were almost unbearably enticing to Acorna, but she waited on his signal to enter after he had done a preliminary prowl round on hands and knees. The scent of chard drew her like a magnet, and it was fortunate indeed that it was nearer to her than the root vegetables he was deftly, and cleverly, harvesting. She noticed that he was careful to take only the small ones that were likely to be culled anyway. He took carrots and turnips and potatoes and several other brightly colored things that she did not recognize. Hybrids, probably. She carefully augmented his selection with chard leaves, then some lettuces, and one head of cabbage, stuffing what she could into her other boot. She was glad she hadn’t been wearing the boots for very long before using them as food and water carriers.