Acorna's Triumph

by Anne McCaffrey

  Acorna had no intention of leaving Aari’s fate in Grimalkin’s careless hands.

  The Condor made only one stop on the way to Vhiliinyar, bypassing MOO, though Acorna asked to speak to Laarye on the com unit.

  “Yes, Khornya? The news you sent about Aari is very distressing, but I don’t see how it could have happened. We were together almost all of the time.”

  “It isn’t your fault, Laarye, and I know he’s glad you’re safe, wherever he is, but the—creature—who enabled him to return for you has more layers of motive than Vhiliinyar has layers of soil and rock from surface to core. What I need to know from you is the time—when did they rescue you? Can you recall?”

  “My chrono was broken when I had my accident, I’m afraid.”

  “The ship’s instruments, once you were aboard—or the log. Did you see anything when you first boarded that would have indicated the precise time of day, moons’ phases, or rotation?”

  “Oh, yes. Our Star had set on the horizon and neither of the moons was up. Of course, it was very difficult to tell, planetary conditions being what they were…”

  “I’m more concerned with the enye-ghaanye, the time of year, the season, the seasonal sector, as near as you can recall it.”

  “Oh, now I remember! On the console it said it was the forty-seventh day of Haal, the moons of abundant rain. I remember thinking that was odd, since I don’t recall it raining even once after the Khleevi arrived. Does that help you?”

  “Yes. Yes, it does. How long would you say you had been in the cave since you and Aari first separated from the others?”

  “No more than fourteen sunrises at most. Are you going back to Vhiliinyar? Could you stop for me? I want to help Aari.”

  “You just did,” she said. “And I’m sorry, but time is playing a rather fickle role in this crisis. I’m afraid we may not have enough of it as it is.”

  “Where are we headed, the cave?” Becker asked.

  “No. I want to return to the time device,” she told him. “If you would keep the Condor in orbit, I’ll take the shuttle down to land outside the entrance to Kubiilikaan. I hope the planet will still support time travel on the surface at the time when Laarye was rescued. The fact that Grimalkin was able to do it is hopeful, but his level of technical expertise seems to transcend the time device’s planetside capabilities. With any luck I will find a way to ride the current time flow back that far and include the shuttle in the equation so I have a way to bring Aari out of there again.”

  “You’d better,” Rafik said. “Otherwise, we lose you, too.”

  Acorna said nothing, but she set her long jaw. She knew the risks very well but believed she had a reasonable chance of overcoming them. She had to try. There was no other choice, really.

  “No we don’t,” Becker said. “If she doesn’t come back in a reasonable facsimile of a jiffy, we find Grimalkin and turn him over to RK until he tells us how to bring her—and Aari—forward to our time again.”

  “Finding him would be the trick,” Acorna said with a small smile. “But thanks for the thought, Captain.”

  Mac clanked across the steel grid to the bridge.

  “Were you able to load the cargo in the shuttle?” she asked him.

  In preparation for the Condor’s orbit around Vhiliinyar, Mac had taken on his Linyaari persona, Maak, and had attached his horn modification to his forehead. “Yes, Khornya,” he said. “Everything is in readiness. Perhaps I should come with you to interact with the time device? It may yield secrets to me it would keep from a purely organic being such as you.”

  Before she could demur, both Becker and Rafik enthusiastically endorsed the idea. Rafik said, “That’s an excellent idea, Mac. That way you’ll be there when she—uh—travels, so maybe you can keep us posted.”

  Well, it was a good idea, as Mac’s often were. Whatever would help her get Aari back safely was fine with her.

  “Thank you, Maak,” she said, giving his name its Linyaari pronunciation, which pleased him.

  They landed the shuttle in the shallows of a stream that sank into the ground to feed the underground sea—which was more of a lake these days. Since water was the conduit for time travel, it would be easier to time-travel in the shuttle if it was within the liquid time channel.

  Wordlessly, she and Mac disembarked and trotted down the short tunnel leading to the entrance of the caves where the Ancestors had once lived with their first attendants. The caves were the foundation of much of the city of Kubiilikaan, and at the back of one of them was the staircase leading into the vast, echoing, self-lighting building containing the time device.

  No one else was around. On any Federation planet the place would have been buzzing with people, prodding, disassembling, prying into the secrets of the entire ancient underground city. The Linyaari were not exactly disinterested in the concept of time travel, but neither did they crave it. They simply wanted their planet back to normal and used the time device occasionally as a tool in that quest. Once the process of using the device was understood well enough so that people didn’t keep disappearing, other matters took the attention of most of the scientists. Aari was the only Linyaari still missing in action, as Becker put it. Since Acorna was so vitally interested in the time device for such immediate and personal reasons, the other Linyaari left her to it.

  Besides, at this time of day most of the people on Vhiliinyar, the terraforming crews and reclamation teams, were grazing with their families, telling each other about their day, preparing to settle down and sleep with the comfort of other warm bodies around them. Things were so peaceful at present with the planet mostly restored to its pre-Khleevi state.

  Acorna stopped herself in the midst of that train of thought. No. Now was no time to feel sorry for herself. If she wanted a warm body to sleep next to, she would simply have to go fetch him herself.

  The double helix of light and water that flowed upward from the floor of the room to the top of the building twined and curled with unending precision. The wall panels glowed softly with their map of the planet.

  Acorna strode straight for the section of the map indicating Aari’s cave, tapped in the time Laarye had provided, and concentrated on Aari’s image. Two silver-white dots indicated the presence of two Linyaari and a gold dot probably indicated Grimalkin.

  The ship’s icon was there, too, tiny but discernible. Barely. Had Acorna not known where to look, she might never have found the three dots, two white, one gold, that indicated her lifemate, his brother, and her adversary. Because every other place on the walls around her was crawling with green dots oozing across the surface as if it had suddenly been invaded by armies of insects. Which, of course, was the case.

  She suppressed a shudder, suddenly remembering that this image had been part of her recurring nightmare. She had the terrible feeling that she was about to make it come true. Taking a deep breath to steady herself, she returned her full attention to the white dots. Make that dot. The white and gold ones faded, a single white one remained, and then it, too, vanished.

  “What happened?” Acorna asked.

  “The white dot identified on the key as Aari disappeared, Khornya,” Mac told her.

  “Uh, yes. It did. But, why? How?”

  “I do not know. But perhaps if you board the shuttle and I reset the device you will arrive in time to learn the answer.”

  She certainly couldn’t argue with that though the swarming icons of the Khleevi made her hesitate. But not for long. If she feared flying into them, how must Aari feel, abandoned again near the cave not too far from where he had been captured so long ago.

  “Right. Let’s see…it looks like the Khleevi are not too close to our present position at that time. And as far as I can tell from the map, the entrance to the cave is still open then. You know what to do, Maak. I will return to the rendezvous point in two Standard hours if all goes well. If I don’t return then, keep watch for me at the same point for the next forty-eight hours,” she said.

  �
��Yes, Khornya. And if you are not back by then, I will search for you in the future. If I do not find you, I will return to the Condor, we will acquire another shuttle, and follow your path until we locate you. Just as you are doing to find Aari.”

  “That’s about it,” she said. “Thanks, Maak. Don’t take any chances. The Khleevi would like your organic bits.”

  “I will give them no opportunity to enjoy them, you may be sure, Khornya. I will see you in two Standard hours.”

  She returned to the surface and boarded the shuttle with one backward glance to reassure herself that her cargo was secure. As she did so, she heard the com unit’s smooth beep, and Mac said, “time transfer beginning—oh, that’s odd.”

  He hadn’t quite finished saying “odd” when the landscape shifted horribly. The newly reclaimed surface vanished, replaced by a bleak, parched, heaving, burned, and smoking wasteland.

  It stank, too. Acorna lifted up from the river’s surface and saw the slimy Khleevi trails from the air. Acorna double-checked to make sure her shuttle’s special Linyaari cloaking device was activated. Mac had modified the cloak from the Linyaari ships to adapt it to the smaller craft and allow the craft to be virtually undetectable whether in space or within the atmosphere of a planet.

  Acorna profoundly hoped that the Khleevi had no means of penetrating the shields. She had nothing that would protect her against the large numbers of them she saw swarming over the surface below. What looked like green foothills tunneled with holes were actually Khleevi colonies housed in a habitat formed from their own hardened excrement. Since this was the first time she had ever been on a planet in the midst of a Khleevi occupation, she had been fortunate enough before to escape seeing this particular feature of the Khleevi’s so-called culture.

  The insectoid aliens crawled in and out of the tunnels of the mounds, radiating new slime trails from each like the legs of a mutant spider as they destroyed all living organisms remaining in their paths, then digested and excreted them.

  Other Khleevi, armed ones, blasted away at anything standing more than a foot taller than the ground. This caused a chain reaction from Vhiliinyar, which, it seemed to Acorna, went down fighting. Mountains were blasted into oblivion but their avalanches buried Khleevi hives. Other mountains spewed lava and magma from their hot centers, while the ground rumbled and shook, fell apart and tried to put itself back together again. The planet’s death throes were terrible to watch. The very air was a hellish bruised purple with an overlay of red-violet acrid smoke.

  Though the trip via shuttle from Kubiilikaan to the cave was not an especially long one, it seemed interminable to Acorna. She hoped she would arrive before Grimalkin and Laarye left. She planned to give the cat creature a piece of her mind when she rescued Aari. Or rather, another piece of her mind.

  When the cemetery and the cave first came within the shuttle’s visual range, she thought she’d come in time. The outline of Grimalkin’s ship was black against the ruined surroundings.

  But as she flew nearer, the ship twisted, and she saw that the blackening really was black, and the ship was little more than the skeleton of a hull.

  How could that be? She knew Grimalkin and Laarye had arrived safely in her own time after abandoning Aari. And yet, it appeared that either one of the myriad natural disasters erupting simultaneously all around her had destroyed the craft, or else the Khleevi had intercepted and destroyed it.

  Very briefly, she activated her scanners, which she had been cautious about using lest the Khleevi could backtrack her signals as Becker had done with the Stones of Skarness. No life-forms were present in or around the ship, which didn’t surprise her, since the Khleevi had been there. However, there was another strong, familiar signal emanating from the wreckage.

  The homing beacons Hafiz had placed within the catseye chrysoberyls were calling to her from the wreckage.

  Since Grimalkin had acquired the chrysoberyls long after he rescued Laarye and abandoned Aari, the ship had to have been wrecked on Grimalkin’s second rescue attempt. Presumably, he had returned to rescue Aari, and the ship had been discovered by the Khleevi.

  From the air, Acorna could see no Khleevi patrols nearby, so she risked setting her own ship down beside the wreckage and briefly searching it for remains she hoped she wouldn’t find. She was in luck. No people of any species or race had left traces of themselves in the wreckage. The only evidence of what had happened there was that of the stones.

  She picked up one, turning it over in her hand, gazing into its slitted eye. Acorna shoved the chrysoberyl into the pocket of her shipsuit. So, Grimalkin and the stones he had stolen from Smythe-Wesson had arrived here from her own time to fetch Aari, as promised. But somehow disaster had overtaken him, destroying his ship and leaving only the stones to identify it.

  She immediately discarded the notion of retrieving the other stones, and loading them into her shuttle. No doubt Hafiz would have wished her to do so. But her other task was more pressing.

  The trembling of the planet beneath her boots threatened to topple the wreckage onto her head. She kept her psychic ears open for the approach of Khleevi patrols. This was no place to linger gathering mere wealth. If she couldn’t find Aari or Grimalkin, she needed to leave as quickly as possible.

  It was extremely unlikely that they could have remained hidden from the Khleevi in the cave, but she felt she had to check anyway. Infrared sensors did not penetrate the peculiar mineral makeup of the cave’s walls, or Laarye would have been discovered by the Khleevi when they captured Aari. So the fact that she had not seen any sign of them on the scanner meant nothing.

  She ducked low, shining a small but powerful pocket torch around the cave. (Aari?) she sent out a mental call. (Grimalkin?) But there was no answer. She found traces of Laarye’s recent occupation, but nothing indicating Aari had ever been here, or Grimalkin.

  She quickly returned to the shuttle, the ground rolling under her feet as she ran. She jumped into her craft and cloaked it while gaining altitude. She couldn’t understand exactly what had happened. Why hadn’t she found Grimalkin and Aari? Why was there no sign that either had ever been there except for the ship with the chrysoberyls?

  She glanced at the shuttle’s console and saw that she had spent forty-four minutes on the ground. Mac would be expecting her in little more than an hour. But she could not now return straightaway.

  She had to search, in case Aari or Grimalkin or both of them were running, hiding from the Khleevi who had destroyed Grimalkin’s ship. With her scanners activated and her sensors at their maximum sensitivity, she circled the airspace above the cave in an ever-widening spiral. A few miles away, a molten fire pit that had once been a sacred mountain glowed in the darkness.

  Acorna ignored the catastrophe all around her and focused on her personal mission. She called to Aari periodically and listened very hard for his thoughts. But she heard, felt, and sensed nothing except for a Khleevi patrol a bare kilometer from her position, moving quickly away.

  And then, from the scanners, there was another signal of inorganic origin. She hovered, undecided. The object was not Grimalkin or Aari, and she really should not risk her life, the shuttle, or the precious cargo, not to mention the chance of finding Aari, by trying to retrieve the thing. She supposed the sensible thing to do would be note the coordinates and return after rendezvousing with Mac. But the ground lurched sickeningly below her. Whatever the object was, it could be swallowed up before she returned. She had to risk it.

  The shuttle’s cloak didn’t work while it was grounded. If she had some sort of grappling hook, she could fish for the object while hovering above it, but the shuttle was light on all but essential equipment. She checked the scanner one more time and homed in on the target as tightly as possible before setting the shuttle down.

  Cautiously, she opened the hatch and played her torch beam across the barren broken ground. She didn’t want to use the shuttle’s running lights—no sense in painting the Khleevi a huge sign that said,
“Come and Get Me!”

  Rather to her surprise, the beam picked up a reflection from something shiny. As quickly as possible, Acorna climbed out of the shuttle, reached down, and scooped the object up in her fingers.

  It looked extremely familiar. Because she was viewing it by torchlight and in an unexpected place, it took her a moment to recognize it. Turning it over, she saw it for what it was—Aari’s—no, Grimalkin’s—wrist time-changing device, the source of so much trouble for them all.

  It had, in fact, been on Grimalkin’s wrist when she last saw him.

  Her thoughts spun, her nose and brain filling with the stench and smoke despite her horn’s attempt to clean the air around her. Grimalkin would not have voluntarily separated from his timer, so he must be either dead or imprisoned. Which probably meant Aari was imprisoned or dead as well. The thought of Aari in the Khleevi’s claws again made her almost physicallyill. After all he had been through, to be recaptured. It was too much for anyone to bear.

  If she could figure out how to use Grimalkin’s device, which seemed to be much more flexible and was certainly more portable than the larger device, perhaps she could separate the Khleevi from their prey. But she needed to return to the safety of her own time to study it properly. Perhaps Mac would have some insight.

  As she returned to the shuttle, she wondered where Grimalkin was? If the time device was here, now, then she knew at least when the shape-shifter was. She didn’t know where. And if the Khleevi had him, she prayed Aari was not with him.

  As she reached for the shuttle hatch, the ground rolled under her, knocking her onto her back and sending the timer flying. She heard a shift and a thump from the direction of the shuttle, but kept her eyes on the timer and grabbed for it instead. Once she had it, she strapped it on to keep it from flying out of her hands again.