[Acorna 08] - First Warning: Acorna's Children (with Elizabeth Ann Scarborough)

by Anne McCaffrey

  Khorii pushed through the broader opening, bracing her hands on the bottom of the iris and pulling her legs over her head in a sort of supported somersault. As she explored the bridge, she had the odd sense of millions of tiny motes fleeing before her, then disappearing again. What was that? It had happened in the stairwell, too. For a moment the things were quite thick in the thin atmosphere, then, poof!

  Two officers sat strapped in chairs close to the command console. For a moment she thought perhaps they had survived, but one look at their heads told her otherwise. The darker-haired officer, a man, had a laser burn through the base of his neck that came out the crown of his head. The other, a gray-haired female wearing a captain’s epaulet on her uniform, had no mouth, nor was the rest of her face a pretty sight. A laser pistol floated near her hand, which hovered over the still faintly pulsing signal beacon control. On the console behind her hand was a printout. Scrawled across it in ragged handwriting were the words “Forgive me! I had to do it. Now I will die, too.”

  It appeared to Khorii that the captain had written those words just before turning the laser pistol on herself. Clearly, the last moments on the bridge had not been happy ones for anyone.

  Khorii was not sure exactly what she was looking for, or even if it existed other than in the ship’s powerless computer. A personnel and passenger list maybe. Surely they had such a list? There were—had been—a lot of people aboard this ship. They’d need to know who was in what cabin and so forth, wouldn’t they?

  But she saw nothing besides the captain’s note that was a printout, or even a scrap of paper, much less a book. She climbed back into the corridor. Some of these bigger ships had special offices for the captain, ready rooms, she thought they were called, where the captain presumably got commands and charts and things ready before taking them onto the bridge. Maybe she should try there?

  The first door that she opened led into a space that she thought might be such a room. There were pictures of other space vessels on the walls, and a series of important-looking framed documents. Captain Dolores M. Grimwald’s certifications and licenses to fly various sorts of spacecraft, citations, and service awards. These were all arranged in a pyramid, seemingly in chronological order from top to bottom. The top one was up a bit higher than she could read by the beam of her flashlight so she turned the captain’s swiveling chair around and stood on the seat, training her light on it.

  It was a medical license awarded to Dr. Dolores M. Grimwald, M.D. The captain had been a physician before she’d been a captain. A healer, like the Linyaari. Why had she killed everyone else on the ship, then? Khorii did not understand.

  Except for the framed documents and pictures, there were no papers in the room.

  She left it reluctantly, because this was the first room that did not contain corpses. Although corpses didn’t bother Khorii, really, not at all, she was getting rather tired of bumping into them and found she was anxious to return to the Condor.

  The next two cabins were also empty, but in the fourth cabin, she found not only a body but also all manner of nonelectronic record keeping. This was the purser’s office, and—to her immense relief—she found the passenger roster she knew had to exist and what cabins the passengers were assigned and what they had paid for them. The purser was evidently someone who liked to have printouts available at all times instead of having to consult electronic devices. Uncle Hafiz was like that as well. She also found a list of crew members along with their cabin assignments, rank, position, and pay scale.

  Just what she needed! Now they could notify the families of the victims and perhaps arrange to have them sent to their loved ones for burial or whatever the local custom was. All that remained was to find a ship’s log or maybe a personal diary that would give some clue as to how disaster had overtaken these people and what motive a healer/captain might have for murdering her crew and apparently the passengers, too.

  From the staircase came the sound of a heavy tread—the clunk of little android feet. They’d sent Elviiz to find her, of course. She was afraid of that, though she’d hoped they would all be too preoccupied to send her back before she was ready. It was okay. She was almost ready anyway. Just one or two more cabins to peek into, then she was sure she would have covered most of the officers.

  The next door was another office. There she found more paper lists along with duty rosters held against the walls with magnets. There was also a diagram of the ship and the location of all the cabins, along with notations about each passenger. She couldn’t read them because they were written in Spandard, the Spanish version of Standard spoken on the ship’s homeworld. She did make out the names of flowers and foods. And one more thing sprang out at her near the end—the letters “S.O.S.” Perhaps she held the key in her hands to what had happened on this ship—if only she could read it. She took the papers down and started to put them in one of the pockets of her shipsuit. As she folded, more of the mysterious motes sprayed off the papers. She touched the papers with her horn, and when the air between her and them cleared, she stuffed them into her pocket.

  “Khorii, where are you? Khorii!” Elviiz was calling. Then she heard him mumble, “Of the two of them, Khiindi is the more reliable.” Then, “Khorii! Come along now. We are returning to the Condor and resuming our journey.”

  “What?” she asked, popping her head out of the office. “The captain would never abandon this ship!”

  Elviiz looked back at her from the hatch to the bridge. Now the iris was more or less neatly opened. “Of course not. He will tow it to one of his private storage asteroids, so that we may continue our journey to Maganos Moonbase. He can report his find and make his claim to the authorities there. Now come on.”

  Figures, Khorii thought as she followed the android back to the Condor. Just when things were getting interesting.

  Chapter 3

  The storage asteroid was not far by space-faring standards, basically only a wormhole away. One of the things Uncle Joh was teaching Khorii was how to navigate the way his father Theophilus had taught him, using wormholes and “pleated” space and other anomalies of physics as shortcuts. Of course, Maak knew how to do this, as did her parents, and Elviiz would probably have it in his data banks long before she flew solo for the first time; but at least she sort of understood how it worked, and everyone else didn’t know all of the special Becker byways.

  “See, this is really not on a commonly used corridor,” the captain said. “So I don’t have to worry about somebody disturbing my stuff. It’s also, ahem, a bit out of the reach of the Federation, so I don’t have to comply with a lot of stupid rules and regulations. It’s all mine. My own little world—actually, I have several.”

  He seemed very relieved when they went through the worm-hole. For one thing, the huge liner put a tremendous strain on the tractor beam and the Condor’s engines, which were quite powerful compared to her size. “Whew,” he said. “Now we’re off the main track, and I don’t have to worry about someone investigating this particular tail wagging this particular dog. We’ll be able to maneuver the Blanca into position pretty shortly though. The company cache is coming right up. You’ll know it when you see it. I made it easy to identify in case I ever forget to reinstall the coordinates when I change out equipment.”

  He was always using a newly salvaged piece to upgrade or replace one of the Condor’s parts. You couldn’t say original parts. He said he figured the whole ship had been replaced quite a few times by now. In outline, it still roughly resembled the carrion bird for which it was named, but its texture reminded Khorii of the patchwork quilts some of the church ladies of Rushima had sent to MOO in gratitude for Mother’s help in defeating the Khleevi.

  Readily identifiable did not quite cover her first impression however. The name of his company was spelled out in salvage spread over the asteroid’s surface followed by, KEEP OFF. DANGER! TOXIC WASTE! BIOHAZARD! EXPLOSIVES!

  He watched her face closely, then beamed with pride at her expression. “Impres
sive, huh? I wanted to add that trespassers would be fed to the cat, but I was afraid that most salvage thieves who hadn’t met RK wouldn’t know what a serious threat that was and think I was kidding about the other ones, too.”

  That was the last conversation for a little while as the Condor coddled and prodded, tugged, backed, lifted, and very gently deposited the huge liner on the asteroid’s surface before disengaging the tractor beam. Then they landed for a comparatively brief time while everyone suited up and anchored the liner firmly to the asteroid’s surface, then camouflaged it with huge asteroid-colored protective tarps. Then all of them packed as much portable salvage as they could around the ship. None of this threatened the sign, Khorii noticed. Captain Becker had that well protected with a fence around its perimeter.

  She reboarded the Condor, took off her suit, and waited for the others. “What about all of those people?” she asked, when everyone had arrived.

  “What people?” Becker asked. “Oh, you mean the stiffs? They’ll keep.”

  “They are people,” Khorii said, with a fierceness that surprised her. “They have families and homes, and someone is going to be worried about them.”

  “You mean in the same way as we were worried about you when you just took off on that death ship and we didn’t know where you were?” her mother asked sternly.

  Oh, please, Khorii thought. They were psychic even if she wasn’t yet. They could hear her mind and know if she was in trouble or not, even if they weren’t actually reading her at the time.

  “Captain Becker is just trying to protect the evidence, yaazi, until the Federation can conduct a proper investigation—back where we found the ship. But he’s right, you know. Looters could have found it and spaced the bodies—”

  “You mean looters who aren’t us?” Khorii demanded. “He doesn’t really care about the people at all. You heard him! Stiffs! He just wants the salvage and as much as—”

  “That is enough, Khorii,” her father said. “Come here, youngling, you are agitated. The sights you have seen today have upset you as they would any sensitive person.” He reached for her, and her mother did, but she backed away from them. She didn’t want a horn touch to make her feel better. The people aboard that ship would never ever feel any better. She could not believe her parents were going along with Becker’s greedy scheme. She could not believe she had ever liked him or claimed him as kin. He was a horrible man. Horrible. She hated him. Well, maybe not hated. Hate was not a Linyaari thing to feel. But she was very, very disappointed in him. And ashamed, too.

  Uncle Joh looked angry himself. “What’s the matter with you, kid? Can’t you see what we’re doing? Those people are better off here. Someone else would come along and space them maybe, the authorities would have a devil of a time telling who was who or how they died. That ship is just too fraggin’ big for us to cover and investigate as thoroughly as we should, and, besides, we might mess stuff up for the pros. It’s a very delicate situation telling the cops that you’ve found some salvage you intend to claim, but meanwhile it’s full of a lot of inconvenient corpses that you didn’t cause to be in that condition. It’s gonna take a little time and some finesse to report the wreckage and have it back where we reported it to be. It’s not something we can just call in, you know. There will be questions and inquiries and a lot of other stuff.”

  “I have a list of the passengers,” Khorii said. “All their names and where they are from.”

  “Good work,” the captain said. “We can give it to the Federation when we report it and…”

  “I’d like to do that myself,” she said.

  “Khoriilya.” Her mother held out her hand. “I have heard enough from you for now, young lady. Give me the passenger lists. We will report this immediately.”

  Khorii began to protest, even in spite of her mother’s tone, but Mother lifted one eyebrow, and she knew better than to argue.

  “Okay, then, fine.” She surrendered the various lists she had retrieved, then stomped to her cabin with Khiindi and secured the hatch. She did not feel like talking to anyone. She did not feel like going to visit relatives she had never met or had only met for a short time. She wanted to go home and be with the people she knew. The ones who were around while her parents were off on some mission or other.

  Looking around her cabin, she wished she could see the face of Auntie Karina, Uncle Hafiz’s wife, when she saw what Elviiz termed the “modifications” Khiindi had made in the décor Karina had chosen to embellish Khorii’s quarters. Auntie Karina would not like it.

  Her aunt was very impressed with the fact that Makahomian Temple Cats like Khiindi were sacred on their own homeworld. Aunt Karina set a lot of store by things that were sacred, holy, or otherworldly, and showed her respect for all of them by burning a great deal of strong-smelling incense that made both Khorii’s and Khiindi’s noses burn and by talking in deep, wavering tones. It had always seemed a little silly to Khorii before, but at the moment it was downright endearing. Some people could use a little more reverence.

  However, Karina did not really know much about cats, sacred or otherwise. She would never have filled Khorii’s cabin with so many little cat statues made of different materials and in all sorts of colors, patterns, sizes, and poses if she’d known what Khiindi would do to them. The fragile ones were all in pieces, which Khorii had stowed in a locker. The soft plushy ones had been clawed, shed upon, nuzzled, drooled on (and sometimes something else, though Khorii purified the spots immediately so nobody would know how naughty Khiindi had been), and torn. Most of them lacked heads or paws or tails and had stuffing hanging out. The “four-poster” effect, whatever that meant, that Aunt Karina had tried to achieve over Khorii’s sleeping hammock with veils had ended up being fringe instead.

  Aunt Karina had funny ideas sometimes, and Khorii knew the captain was not happy that she had tried to modify his ship, though he did it all the time. But Mother had said it was thoughtful of Karina to try to make the ship more homelike, by Karina’s standards, for the youngling, since it would be the child’s first major spaceflight.

  That all seemed so long ago. After recent events, she definitely did not feel like a child anymore.

  Chapter 4

  This is Federation Station Alpha adjunct to Kezdet. Please state your name, ship, corporate or galactic origins, registration number, and the purpose of your voyage.”

  “Federation outpost, this is Captain Jonas P. Becker aboard the Condor, flagship of Becker Interplanetary Recycling and Salvage Enterprises, Ltd. Registration number 333666444555333. I am transporting two Linyaari ambassadors, one of them the Lady Acorna Harakamian-Li, and their—”

  “Holy holos, Captain Becker, are we glad to see you! Well, not you. It’s Lady Acorna. Maganos Moonbase notified us that she would be arriving soon, and it’s not quite soon enough. Lady Acorna?” the dispatcher asked, trying to look beyond Uncle Joh and onto the bridge. He was a very young man, a boy really, with dark hair, skin the color of some of the roan planet-born children of Khorii’s generation, and very light eyes. No horn, of course. Like Uncle Joh, he was a human. Mother waved at the screen. “Maybe you don’t remember me, Lady, but you rescued me from a mine on Kezdet a few years ago. Kmal Madari—well, Midshipman Madari, now. There are stories about you and your lifemate Aari going around all the outposts—and Captain Becker and his cat first mate and the android, too. How you all squashed those Khleevi bug monsters.”

  “It wasn’t quite like that, Kmal. But thank you for remembering me so fondly. We are on our way to take our daughter to visit relatives at Maganos Moonbase. How can we help you? I take it there’s some trouble?”

  “You bet there is. The whole Solojo star system has been infested with some kind of a plague, and the Federation Health Authorities are scared stiff it’s already spread to other systems and worlds in our quadrant. A healer of your caliber—and your husband’s, of course—well, you folks are maybe the only hope the victims in the Solojo settlements have left. The docs are ba
ffled—and most of the medical folk are sick or dead as well. This is a killer plague. Even hazmat teams haven’t been able to figure it out. We can’t evacuate anyone without exposing ourselves and other people. It’s a real mess. So when Mr. Nadezda and Mr. Baird told us you were coming to Maganos, the brass stepped in. They want you to go straight to Solojo, to the settlement on Paloduro. It’s the most recently stricken, so there’ll be the most survivors or people you can help. We hope.”

  “Naturally we’ll be happy to assist,” Mother said, with an apologetic look in Khorii’s direction. “But our daughter is with us. It’s her first visit here to see her grandparents on Maganos Moonbase. We were hoping to arrive for the birth of Gill and Judit’s baby.”

  “I understand. I—er—let me patch you through to Federation Health Headquarters.”

  The com screen flashed to a woman who looked so tired that when she tried to smile it was as if gravity kept the corners of her mouth down. “Commodore Crezhale here, Lady Acorna, Lord Aari. Glad you are willing to help us. We will reroute your ship immediately, as soon as one of our fuel ships can replenish your supply. Your Linyaari expertise in these matters will be a godsend to Solojo. However, I have to warn you that Captain Becker and any other non-Linyaari life-forms traveling with you, I repeat, any non-Linyaari life-forms, including androids and animals, are under strict orders to remain aboard the vessel at all times. The most rigid sterilization procedure must be used when you reboard your ship to avoid bringing contaminants aboard. Sterile procedure must also be followed on foodstuffs or other supplies. There is to be no cargo taken on your vessel. From what we’ve observed, this plague crosses species with the greatest of ease, and until we’ve figured out its transmission method, we’re not taking any chances.”