Acorna's Rebels

by Anne McCaffrey

  The surface of the burgeoning sphere where the Condor was preparing to land occupied a third of the port. The Wats gaped at it, stricken by something close to awe, then knelt as if they couldn’t support themselves on their feet any longer. Their minds were literally numb.

  Becker glanced back around the side of his command chair, and jerked a thumb at the open-mouthed men. “Wot’s with the Wats? They look like they got religion all of a sudden.”

  “That’s the least of it, I believe, Captain. I don’t think they’ve ever been permitted to see space since they first traveled to Vhiliinyar. They’re a bit overwhelmed. They’ve been under the impression the Condor is being carried through space by the Thunder God.”

  “Thunderstruck, eh?” Becker asked, then held up both arms and rotated his wrists to show first the backs of his hands, then the palms. “But you’re wrong about the god! Look, Ma, no hands! We’re landing under our own power—but just barely.”

  Acorna got a sudden sense of the upcoming world’s mineral composition. “Captain, I don’t think you’ll want to linger here. This world is extremely wet and the air, while breathable, is full of sulfurous effusions.”

  “Beggars can’t be choosers.” The viewport was taken up with the planet’s surface except for a slender halo of atmosphere surrounding it. “Strap in, folks, gravity is about to grab us.”

  Acorna helped the Wats secure themselves in the auxiliary seats behind the command post and buckled in herself. The ship shuddered, and the planet blossomed to fill the entirety of the viewport, its surface becoming more and more detailed. Streamlets, rivers, lagoons, ponds, lakes, and all manner of wetlands, laced together with heavy vegetation. There didn’t seem to be any seas as such, just innumerable smaller bodies of water running in and out of each other.

  Finally Becker said, “Look, Princess, there’s a kind of flat plain there with a patch of grass. We’ll set down in it.”

  “I hope you have diving equipment, Jonas,” said Nadhari, who had been very quiet through all of this.

  “Why?” Becker asked. “Is there something you’d like to tell me, babe?”

  “Well, yes, actually, but there’s not enough…”

  They splashed down rather than set down, as Becker had planned. The grass was actually a sea of tall reeds and the Condor was in water halfway up to the robolift. And sinking.

  “…time,” Nadhari finished. “Perhaps, Jonas, you could do a quick repair on the Khleevi unit so it would allow us to move to a drier spot?”

  He already had a torch and a screwdriver in hand. “I wonder if there is a drier spot,” he grumbled. “This whole place is one dismal swamp, from what I can tell.”

  “Yes,” Nadhari said. “And there are large, unfriendly reptilian life forms living in these waters.”

  “How do you know about that?” he asked.

  “Because I recognize this place. The Federation used it as a sort of boot camp for Makahomian recruits, to see if we qualified for the Corps. It is near enough to Makahomia that those who didn’t make it through the training could be returned—dead or alive.”

  “Do tell?” Becker asked, scratching his chin. “Hmmm. We seem to have gone a little out of our way.”

  “I don’t want to be rude, Captain,” Acorna said. “But did you maybe detect some small differences in the functions of Khleevi navigational equipment as compared to that of other cultures whose salvage you have adapted to the Condor?”

  Becker harrumphed and looked at the strange array he had installed, waving at it casually. “You mean this? Well, Princess, when you’ve been in the salvage business as long as I have you learn that there are just so many functions a ship is going to perform and that they are to some extent interchangeable. If it wasn’t for that blasted”—he looked at Nadhari and RK, who were both eying him through slitted eyes, and revised his adjective—“holy cat swinging from the toggles and playing leapfrog across the buttons…”

  Acorna and Nadhari looked meaningfully at the watery landscape outside the viewport. The tops of the tall reeds were beginning to tickle the belly of the Condor by now.

  “You suppose that’s it?” he asked with a pained and apologetic grimace as he worked on the control panel. “The Khleevi warp drive is maybe a little juicier than what I’m used to?”

  “Since we are now in a totally different quadrant of space than we planned to be, it would seem as if Khornya has justification for her assumption, Captain,” Mac said. “If I may make a suggestion, sirs and ladies?”

  “Sure, Mac, what is it?”

  “Are the ship’s communication devices still functional?”

  “Seem to be,” Becker said, checking them.

  “Then I suggest we send a Mayday message, sir, and promptly. I do not believe the Condor has the appropriate modifications for supporting our lives for the rest of eternity under the sludge into which we are sinking.”

  “I was just about to do that little thing,” Becker told him. “No need to state the obvious, Mac. In fact,” he said, turning to Nadhari, “if we’re close to your homeworld, babe, why don’t you do the honors?”

  Before she had finished her opening hail in her own language, RK had planted himself in front of her face. Becker plucked him out of the way, and with help from Acorna, they wrestled the cat into a harness that tethered him to one of the bridge seats. Afterward, Acorna doctored Becker’s scratches and puncture wounds.

  The Wats did not seem to entirely understand the danger they were currently in and Acorna saw no need to enlighten them for the time being. The two men stared out the viewport and seemed lost in the scenery. From the snatches of their thoughts Acorna caught while Nadhari made repeated hails in her native tongue, the Wats seemed to think sinking into an alien marsh was just another of the strange things their current captors did. They weren’t sure if it was a function of battle, a form of transportation, a demonstration of power, or possibly some kind of strange courtship ritual, but Acorna’s previous reassurances had gained their confidence and they saw no reason to lose it now.

  Sooner than any of them had imagined possible, they received a response to their Mayday. “Condor, this is the Arkansas Traveler. I don’t rightly understand all that language you’re speaking, but I got enough of it to know you’re in trouble. I’m coming up on your position now. Could you repeat your message in Standard Galactic lingo, over?”

  “Certainly, Arkansas Traveler,” Nadhari said smoothly in the more familiar language. “I will turn you over to Captain Becker.”

  “Uh, I don’t suppose you folks could let me have a visual on you, could you? My cargo is not my own and it’s always nice to know who you’re dealing with. No offense.”

  “None taken, Traveler. We’ll show you ours if you’ll show us yours, over,” Becker said in a tone that, in other quarters, might have implied something completely different. “Nadhari, you’re more photogenic than me. Wave at the nice ship on the vid screen, will you?”

  When she had done so, Becker leaned in and wiggled his fingers, too. In a moment, the handsome, friendly face of a man with green eyes and white hair grinned back at them. “Nice to meet you folks. I’m Scaradine MacDonald. I’ve got a load of tractors and irrigation equipment I’m delivering, but I reckon I can stop long enough to give you a tow.”

  “We’d appreciate it, Captain MacDonald,” Becker said. “We got in a little deeper than we’d planned.”

  “No problem. I’ve got a tractor beam on this thing that can pull you up right through the atmosphere. And hey, call me Scar. Everybody does.”

  “Thanks, Scar. I’m Jonas Becker, Chief Executive Officer as well as Chief Cook and Bottle Washer of Becker Interplanetary Recycling and Salvage Enterprises, Ltd. We were en route for a planet in another sector altogether when we had an equipment failure. I thought it would be safe to land here for repairs, but it was a lot soupier than it looked. This nice lady beside me is Commander Nadhari Kando. She tells me we’re pretty close to Makahomia, which is where she’s from. Y
ou think you could tow us that far?”

  “Sure, that’s not much out of my way. I was hoping to stop and refuel there, anyway.”

  Becker looked at Nadhari, who said, “That shouldn’t be a problem. I will transfer to your navigation computer the proper coordinates for our final destination.” She did so and then said, “These are the coordinates of the Federation outpost nearest my place of origin. It has an excellent spaceport and enough landmass that the planet’s various border skirmishes really don’t affect the people who aren’t interested in the battles.” After she’d finished the transmission, she sat back, as still as a statue.

  Acorna looked at her sharply. Nadhari was clearly uncomfortable. Had she been a less disciplined and guarded individual, she might have been twitching or displaying a nervous tic, but as the highly trained peacekeeper that she was, Nadhari simply became increasingly still, outwardly calm, her face serene as a sheathed knife unless she was speaking.

  At that moment the vid screen lit again, “Okay, Captain Becker, ma’am. I’m going to turn on the tractor beam now. Hope everybody is strapped in?”

  Becker reassured him on that point. “Just about time too, buddy. The viewport is starting to get a little moist around the edges. You sure that winch of yours can pull us out of this? Want me to use my thrusters first?”

  “Well, let’s just crank ’er up and give ’er a go first, whatcha think?” the other captain suggested.

  “Sounds good to me. Only step on it,” Becker suggested.

  The tractor beam had a little problem pulling the Condor loose, but after a few nasty jolts and some ghastly creaking the ship began to shift, until at last the outer hull was visible again through the viewport, the landing pods choked with reeds and dripping with giant sharp-fanged eel-like reptiles.

  “Ewww,” Becker said. “Glad we didn’t go out there!”

  The Wats were awestricken all over again as the Condor pulled free from the muck with a deafening sucking noise and leaped into the air under the tow of the other ship.

  When Scar’s face appeared on the screen, Sandy Wat said to Red Wat, “The face of the Thunder God as he lifts us onto his lightning bolt.” To Acorna he pointed triumphantly at the screen and said, “You see?”

  Acorna decided it was better to deal with the Wats’ misconceptions later. Much later.

  But Nadhari didn’t move, not even when they felt the heavy pressure of acceleration as their ship was pulled out of the gravity well and into space.

  “Nadhari,” Acorna said carefully, “although we all know you and RK well, we know very little about Makahomia. Your planet has the reputation for being almost as secluded and secretive as Vhiliinyar and narhii-Vhiliinyar. Is there anything you would like to tell us about it so we can avoid embarrassing you or ourselves?”

  “Like what?” Nadhari asked.

  “Whatever seems pertinent right now—for instance, where exactly are we going? What is your planet like? Does the name of your planet mean something special? Answers to those questions seem like a good place to start.”

  Nadhari took a deep breath, more out of tension than the need for oxygen. Finally she said, “The name of my home planet? Makah is our word for cat, and ‘hom’ refers to either people or place, so we are the people or place of the cat, depending on the suffix. Makahomia, as you say, is ‘place of the cat.’ We would say ‘Makahomin’ for place, ‘Makahomini’for ourselves. We’ll be landing near the Federation outpost facility, which is the only place vessels like the Condor and the Arkansas Traveler can refuel on Makahomia. There is only one outpost, or at least that was the case when last I was here. It is just outside the city of Hissim, on the semiarid Mog-Gim Plateau bordering the Great Aridimi Desert.”

  “Is that where you’re from, Nadhari?”

  “Not originally, no, though I lived there briefly in semi-slavery before being recruited by the Federation.”

  “Semi-slavery?” asked Becker, who had himself been a child slave on Kezdet. “Does that mean they shackle you only on alternate days?”

  “No,” she said. “I was taken prisoner by the Aridimis after a battle and given to the Temple priests as an acolyte. As such, I was confined to the Temple to do menial chores. My fighting ability and my affinity for the sacred cats saved me from some of the less pleasant duties I might have been forced into otherwise.”

  “That must have been terrible for you,” Acorna said sympathetically. “No wonder you were so eager to help Mr. Li free the children of Kezdet and establish the training center on Maganos.”

  Nadhari raised an eyebrow and smiled a half-smile. “Actually, it wasn’t bad at all. I let myself be captured, once I had demonstrated that I could handle myself in battle. I knew our enemy was near the new Federation outpost, and I knew that the Federation recruited likely Makahomian young people and took them off-planet to train for the Corps. One of my cousins had gone and returned, which was quite unusual. He said it was wonderful, but that Makahomia needed him more than the Federation. His stories made me determine to be chosen. Mostly they didn’t choose girls, but there were not many girls who could fight as I could.”

  Becker had wanted Nadhari to open up, and now she was unusually garrulous. Acorna thought it was extreme nervousness, as well as being around people she trusted, that made her so talkative.

  “What was your home like?” Acorna asked her. “Now that we are here, will you be able to visit your family? Can we explore the planet with you and see where you come from?”

  “I very much doubt it,” Nadhari said with a half shrug. “It may not even be advisable to let the Federation know I’m aboard, depending on who rules Hissim these days. Also, the Federation does not allow anyone to introduce alien technologies to our people.”

  “Why not?” Becker asked.

  Nadhari took a deep breath. “Because if one faction had a technological edge, it would upset the balance of power that keeps our continual wars from escalating to a bloodbath that could wipe out the population. You must understand, Jonas, my people are at war all the time—it’s part of what we do,” she told him.

  “But we don’t need to worry about someone shooting us down as we land?”

  “Oh, no, because the Federation are the only ones who have modern weapons. Anything more advanced than a spear or a knife is considered much too dangerous to be in Makahomian hands.”

  “By the Federation?” Acorna asked. “That’s very…paternalistic, isn’t it?”

  “Actually, it was our priests, both the war priests and the peace priests, who jointly decided on the taboo and insisted that the Federation enforce it as a condition of their maintaining a presence on the planet. In exchange, the Federation gained the concession that it could choose likely youngsters to train for its service. Of course, when one of us was chosen to leave our world and take up fighting elsewhere, that is a different matter. As expatriates, we could learn anything they wished to teach us, including how to handle all the weapons with which they armed us. We are not allowed to take those weapons back to the indigenous areas of our homeworld with us, however. Or even to speak to our people of their existence.”

  Becker snorted. “Yeah, I can see where you could become Supreme High Pooh-Bah in a nanosecond if you had Old Betsy with you,” he said. Old Betsy was what he called Nadhari’s laser rifle.

  “Should I visit my planet’s surface, I will be allowed to carry no weapons but the dagger I took with me from the Temple when I left,” Nadhari said.

  “But on the other hand, you’re saying that nobody else on your world will have anything badder,” Becker said, nodding his understanding. “Well, that’ll make things more even. But you don’t need a laser rifle to do damage, babe. I’ve seen you in action.”

  She grimaced. “It is true I’ve learned much since leaving the Temple, but many of my people are at least as able in the traditional fighting skills as I was when I was chosen to leave. And though I may have had much more training and experience since, I am older now, and my reflexes are not
as fast as once they were.”

  “You musta been a beautiful baby,” Becker said. “And death on wheels if you were any tougher than you are now.”

  She didn’t acknowledge either aspect of the intended compliment, but said seriously, “My bloodlines on my father’s side are from the Kashirian Steppes, where the best fighters come from. Kashirians, when they are not personally defending their own territory or attacking someone else’s, are hired by the other peoples as mercenaries. Normally, girls are not trained as highly as boys in battle skills. However, my mother’s people were Felihari, one of the Makavitian Rainforest tribes. The climate in the forests is hot and very, very wet, and fighting is done with less physical and more intellectual finesse than elsewhere on the planet. My mother was initiated as a Felihari High Priestess.”

  As Nadhari spoke, Acorna saw the images of her memories quite clearly—the rubbery copper-colored foliage of the jungle, stirring sluggishly in a dripping heat, the striped and spotted creatures slithering along the ground or up and down the trees, the rainfall that came second- and thirdhand after first being deposited on the tallest branches, then flowing onto the lower ones, and finally reaching the ground. The Temples draped in drowsing cats and studded with winking jewels—or were those more cats blinking back the light? Nadhari’s mother, erect and proud as Nadhari herself but shorter, browner, wearing the practical dress for the climate—that is, very little dress at all. Her skin, coppery as the leaves around her, glistened with moisture. Her auburn/black hair was braided with what looked like—but couldn’t be—the eyes of cats.

  Nadhari was remembering one cat in particular—a sleek tawny creature with a throaty purr whose butter-soft fur turned red at ears and tail, and whose jonquil eyes always seemed uplifted to a particular young girl.

  “The Felihari women hold much of the power in their culture, and since their fighting skills require more of an intelligent application of the laws of physics than brawn, the women are quite effective fighters. When my father was taken prisoner by her people, my mother thought he would make a highly desirable contribution to the tribe’s bloodlines and became impregnated by him. Religiosity does not require celibacy on my homeworld. The resulting child, my elder brother, was considered such a success, and I suspect my mother and father found the process so enjoyable, that they formalized their union and made me as well.”