“Oh, very good, Captain. Do you want to know…?”
“Not now, Mac,” Becker said, setting the flitter down in the smoothly, even artistically drifted desert sands. The night was calm and bright with striped moonlight and seemed to be saying “Sandstorm? What sandstorm?”
But bleeding atop one of the dunes, stripped of most of her clothing and a lot of her skin, lay a person Becker barely recognized as Nadhari.
“Hey, babe, come here often?” he called.
“Jonas, you junkman in shining armor,” Nadhari said, or tried to say. Her voice was hoarse and cracked; her hands, arms, and torso were so abraded he could see very little skin through the blood. Though she’d shielded her face pretty well, her cheeks and forehead also looked like raw hamburger.
“Oh, honeybunny, we need to get you to Acorna right away, doll. That bastard. I can’t believe he dumped you out here!”
She smiled a little, painfully, and her teeth were pink outlined in red. “I dumped him,” she rasped.
He tried to find spots on her anatomy he could hold so that he could carry her, but in the end getting her to the flitter involved him supporting and her half walking, half being pushed and dragged. She sucked in her breath a lot, but otherwise was quiet, even though that walk had to have hurt like blazes. She was a tough lady.
He would have covered her with something except he didn’t want to get anything else in those wounds. He helped her arrange herself as comfortably as possible in the back of the flitter. She was half fainting from pain, loss of blood, and exhaustion.
“Mac, you still there?” he asked, toggling the com unit.
“Yes, Captain. Do you have Nadhari Kando?”
“I do and I gotta get her to Acorna right now. She’s a real mess.”
“Captain, since you have been preoccupied during this transmission, I took the liberty of acquiring your position from your signal. I wish to inform you that the wii-Balakiire is not far from you and closing quickly.”
“The what?”
“The wii-Balakiire, the shuttle belonging to the Linyaari ship Balakiire, with crew members…”
“I know what the wii-Balakiire is. I was just wondering when and how they got here so fast.”
“They arrived only moments ago by following the same course we took, which I downloaded directly into their computer banks, correcting our coordinates so that they did not end up mired on Praxos. It saved a lot of time.”
“I’ll bet it did.”
“Melireenya asked me to inquire if the crew might not be able to offer their assistance so that Nadhari would not have to suffer through the journey?”
“Sure thing. You told me how they found us, but you haven’t said to what we owe the honor of their company?”
“When Acorna contacted MOO from Captain Mac-Donald’s ship, she told her friends about the plague here. They decided to come and help.”
“Save it, Mac. Patch me through to the wii-Balakiire now.”
“Very well, sir. I can do that easily since Chief Petty Officer Lea removed the jamming signal she devised to interfere with the Linyaari signal, so we may all converse freely.”
“That was nice of her, whoever she is,” Becker said. “Hurry up, will you?”
“This is Melireenya on the wii-Balakiire, Captain Becker. We have made visual contact with you, and if you look up and a bit to your right, you will do likewise with us.”
Becker did and saw the Linyaari shuttle berth itself in the sand. Six Linyaari waved at him through the viewport. He couldn’t tell in the darkness who they were exactly, but he was glad to see them.
Opening the hatch, he stepped out and allowed two of the Linyaari to enter in his place. They immediately turned to Nadhari and began laying hands and horns tenderly upon her wounds.
“I don’t suppose any of you ladies brought an extra tunic or something, did you? She might get a little chilly—you know, shock and stuff—once you put her back together.”
“Certainly, Captain,” said the one nearest him. As soon as she spoke, he recognized her as Acorna’s Aunt Neeva. She blithely stripped off her tunic and handed it to him. “She can wear mine.”
“But I—er—what will you…” he stammered, trying not to look.
“If you think it necessary that I cover myself to preserve the good opinion of Khornya’s new friends, then I’m sure I’ll find something. I actually felt that in such a warm climate, perhaps the attitude toward clothing was more relaxed than it is among your own people. But now you must tell me how to contact Khornya. I have been trying to reach her, but I can’t seem to. Mac tells us that she is inside some sort of stronghold, so I am assuming that it has some sort of barrier to telepathic communication.”
“No, there’s no such barrier. She contacted me that way when she was inside the stronghold and I was out in the flitter,” Becker told her.
Just then Khaari poked her head out of the hatch and said, “Nadhari says her cousin and that crooked Federation commander were armed, and were setting out to destroy a sacred lake and kill the inhabitants.”
“How is she?” Becker asked them.
Nadhari herself answered in a strong voice. “I’m fine, Jonas. But something is wrong at the lake. I can’t get Acorna to answer me.”
“That’s bad,” Becker said, adding to Khaari and Melireenya, “You ladies better sit down or get back to your own vessel. We have to get back to the lake, and fast.”
“The location of the stronghold is a sacred secret,” Nadhari whispered.
“So is the location of the Linyaari homeworld, if you’ll recall. I think we can safely guarantee that these people can keep a secret. Besides, the priests at the stronghold think Acorna is some kind of second coming. Just think how tickled they’ll be to see six more folks just like her. Let’s boogie, people.”
He flew right into the crater, with the wii-Balakiire trailing behind. The twin cat’s-eye moons had set by then, and the first of the suns was rising, its pinks obscured by a squirming yellow-green fog leaking out of the mountains beyond the crater. From the readings Becker was getting, the bilious stuff was rising from the fissure above the lake. That wasn’t good.
Besides, the stronghold might still be locked.
“Change of plans, folks,” he told the Linyaari escort, and flew up over the lip of the crater that contained the stronghold. On the other side, he saw the slit between the white knuckled ridges, with the fog billowing out of it. “Hold your noses. We’re going down there,” he told them, and dropped his flitter’s nose through the crack emitting the steam.
He couldn’t believe his eyes at first. What had been a scene of beauty and peace when he retired only a few hours earlier now looked like his worst nightmare.
The formerly clear lake was churning with stinking cloudy water, casting up stones like some filthy froth along the beach. In the middle of the mess was a Federation flitter half sunk into the water. Becker thought he could make out a body at the controls.
It wasn’t the only body. As he found a place in the bushes broad enough to land, he could see through the steam to the shore, where he spied the prostrate bodies of dozens of cats and four or five priests. Miw-Sher, cradling the body of Grimla, walked through the carnage beside Tagoth, trying to tend to the fallen priests and cats.
Nadhari loped over to them as if nothing had ever been wrong with her. Embracing both of them and the cat in a single desperate hug, she cried, “I can’t believe you’re all right! I felt sure you were injured.”
“I was,” Miw-Sher replied, “but Ambass…Acorna…made me better before she was shot. Uncle Tagoth tackled the Mulzar and got the gun away from him. He shot down the flitter, but not before its guns got Acorna.”
“Got Acorna?” Nadhari asked, and the words echoed through Becker’s brain like a ricocheting missile.
Kando lay farther down the beach, surrounded by cats and priests. They were not trying to tend to any of his wounds. In fact they seemed to be looking for undamaged parts of him to
claw, bite, or beat.
Another huddle of about ten priests crowded around something else a little farther away.
The wii-Balakiire found its berth beside his flitter, but before he could open the hatch, Neeva was out and running toward the huddle of priests. Melireenya and Khaari cried, “Khornya!” together, and surged for the hatch, but Nadhari beat them to it.
They all but climbed on top of Becker’s head evacuating the flitter.
Becker, feeling sick in a way that even a Linyaari couldn’t heal, followed them, stumbling over the bushes, trying to catch his breath in the stench from the lake.
His foot touched something soft and he looked down. His boot was under RK’s belly. The cat was very still, and when Becker picked him up, RK’s tail hung down limply over Becker’s arm.
Becker tapped the nearest Linyaari on the shoulder and pointed with dumb misery to his first mate.
“Riidkiiyi!” the girl cried. “Oh, Riidkiiyi, don’t be dead.” She lay her slightly immature horn upon the cat’s fur while stroking him.
After a moment, RK struggled in Becker’s arms and jumped down.
“Thanks,” Becker said.
“It’s Maati, Captain,” Aari’s little sister told him. She’d grown so much that he hardly recognized her. She’d been on the Balakiire and he hadn’t realized she was there. “My father and mother and I all came with the Balakiire to see if we could help.”
“Thanks, Maati. Is—is that Acorna they’re working on now?” he asked, trying to see through the wall of Linyaari and priestly backs.
“Yes.”
And then he felt a most welcome mental touch. Though it was weaker than usual and very tired, he knew it well. Acorna said, (Captain, I’m fine. Please persuade some of my friends to help the others.)
Twenty-Two
Acorna and her fellow Linyaari worked all day long treating the wounded. Had the carnage been more carefully aimed or gone untreated much longer, there would have been fatalities, too. Time was playing tricks on her. It seemed to Acorna that the carnage had gone on forever, and that after she was hit, she had laid on the beach gasping for breath for an eternity before she passed out.
In reality, once she was able to compute the time elapsed, she found to her surprise that Becker, with Nadhari and her people, had returned just after she fell and Tagoth downed the Mulzar and blew the Federation flitter into the lake.
Once people and cats were restored to health by the unconcealed application of Linyaari horns, the only human casualty untreated was Macostut, still floating in the flitter on the lake’s bubbling, stinking surface. But his injuries, if he had any, were of less concern to them than the damage to the lake.
“How will we ever fix that? It’s so large. All of us are depleted from healing the casualties,” Maati sighed, tired and uncharacteristically discouraged.
The Mulzar, bound and under guard but still among the others, laughed. “It is permanently changed. Everything is permanently changed. I have a market for those stones. The smart thing to do would be release me, fish out the Federation flitter, heal my own and Dsu’s wounds as you’ve done those of these worthless cats and priests, and let me explain my plan for Makahomia’s future to all of you.”
“You explained it to me already, Edu,” Nadhari said. “I can’t say that I cared for it. I don’t think anyone else will either.”
The stronghold’s high priest shook his head. “With the lake thus defiled, Makahomia has no future. The sacred lake feeds into all rivers, all streams, all water on our world. The poison will infect everything. No one can drink the holy stones, fool and blasphemer.”
“Though I think it would be fitting punishment if we allowed Edu to try,” Tagoth said. “Or if not the stones, perhaps a refreshing drink of lake water?”
Neeva said, “Don’t despair, everyone. We can fix it. We’re simply going to need reinforcements. I know this place is sacred and secret, but I hope I may have permission to have the Balakiire land here as well as Captain MacDonald’s flitter. Maak used Captain Mac-Donald’s flitter to collect him and the barbarians.”
“I bet the Federation folks aren’t going to like that,” Becker said.
“On the contrary, the outpost is nearly deserted since the commander ordered his troops into the city to monitor and assist with the war effort. Maak tells me the remaining person in charge, a noncommissioned officer, has been most helpful. I have contacted her myself. She told me that so many eggs have now been broken that we may as well make a soufflé.
“I’ve explained to her telepathically that we will need the additional transport to deal with the emergency here at the lake. What I did not say is that once we’ve dealt with the lake, we will also need to disperse our people quickly to other areas to purify the other water sources.”
Acorna translated and the old priest’s eyes widened and he looked as if he were about to faint from ecstasy. “Yet more of the Star Cat’s own sacred Companions? How have we come to be so blessed that we deserve so much pain and joy in the space of the same risings and settings?”
“That would be a yes,” Acorna said to Neeva, translating.
In less than an hour, the flitter arrived with Mac, better known as Maak to the Linyaari, Captain MacDonald, the Wats, and six more people from the Balakiire: Thariinye, Kaarlye, Miiri, aagroni Iirtye, Yaniriin, and—rather to Acorna’s surprise—Liriili.
Kaarlye analyzed the waters. After testing it, he declared that they would not harm Linyaari horns. The Linyaari then all knelt, joined hands, took deep breaths, and ducked their horns into the filthy, bilious foam of the lake.
From the corner of her eye, Acorna saw Becker and Tagoth manhandle the Mulzar to the shore and shove his face as near to the lake waters as theirs were. She found it a little hard to chuckle and purify at the same time, but after what truly seemed a miraculously short interval, the sacred lake’s waters were once more clear and smooth, though they seemed to be more filled than ever with the sacred stones.
Captain MacDonald, the aagroni, and Kaarlye and Miiri each took command of a shuttle, with one of the high priests on each vessel. Maati joined her parents in their vessel, along with Liriili and Thariinye, while Maarni and Yiitir—the Linyaari folklorist and historian husband-and-wife team—joined the aagroni’s vessel. Yaniriin, Neeva, Melireenya, and Khaari rode with Captain MacDonald.
Of all the Linyaari, only Acorna remained at the sacred lake. She stayed there at the insistence of the high priest.
After the last phase of the decontamination process, Aridimi priests hauled the flitter from the lake. The flitter was opened, and Macostut was pulled out. He was not actually wounded, simply shaken by the crash. The priests seemed to regret this, but did not make up for it by administering new wounds themselves.
Macostut was bound and placed next to Kando. Their priestly guards were augmented by the presence of the Wats, who thoroughly enjoyed being on the other side of the bonds for a change. They frequently gave their prisoners little blows, kicks, and intense frowns.
“You won’t get away with this, you know,” Macostut said. “The Federation will not allow you to interfere with the authority of one of its officers, to wreck a craft, to contradict the orders of the native ruler, and to interfere with standing treaties.”
Mac surprised all of them by responding. “I believe you will find you are incorrect on all points, sir,” the android said. “The Federation has an investigative team on the way to interview the parties you and your conspiracy with Edu Kando, the former Mulzar, injured by your actions, and particularly by misuse of Federation technology and research. Your plot to sell and personally profit from the sale of the cat’s-eye chrysoberyls held sacred by the local populace is known to them.”
Kando and the Mulzar regarded each other with suspicious slit-eyed speculation. “How can that be?” Kando asked.
“Because the party you tried to sell them to was a subsidiary of House Harakamian enterprises, which as you may not know is run by Ambassador Acorna’s
foster father, Rafik Nadezda, under the occasional advisement of his uncle, Hafiz Harakamian. When the chrysoberyls, with their unique properties that would make micro-terraformation technology possible on a large scale, came to Hafiz Harakamian’s attention, he recalled conversations with the ambassador and made inquiries among his—er—employees, among the Federation. It took very little research to realize that while such stones are indeed indigenous to this planet and possess the desired properties, they are not for sale and have immense religious significance to the local populace. They were very fair to you, sir, and searched the records for some evidence of a revision of treaties or rules or possibly some special permission that would allow you to collect the stones, but as you know, no such revisions or permissions exist.”
“I am ruler of half the people of this world,” the Mulzar said. “I am making the revisions and certainly gave the permission.”
“Not anymore,” the high priest told him. “The guardians have conferred. They know what you have tried to do to them and to the lake. Had you sought to loot us without also seeking to destroy the guardians, you might have been allowed to retain your rule. Cats, on the whole, prefer to stay out of the affairs of humans unless such affairs interfere with their comfort. But your own guardians have testified to the others on this planet. Even as a ruler by conquest, you are unfit to rule.”
“And who is fit to rule, old man? You? You are so isolated here with your sacred lake you won’t drink from that you have no idea what the people need.”
“I am kept better informed than you were by the late Brother Fagad,” the priest told him.
Kando knew that yet another of his schemes had been discovered, but he couldn’t seem to help himself and tried one more time, staring angrily at Tagoth. “Fagad is late because this mutant murdered him while he was performing his sacred duty and reporting to me that which it was my right, as Mulzar, to know.” He spat at Tagoth. “Traitor.”
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