First Warning: Acorna's Children

Chapter 27

The cargo shuttle docked aboard the Mana. Khorii and the others were forced to unload it. Marl didn't even bother bringing the loaders in to stow the cargo properly. Once they emptied it, he couldn't wait to go down and get some more.

Khorii had never met anyone like Marl before. She thought Captain Becker, whom she had called greedy once, was the soul of generosity and restraint by comparison. He didn't hurt people to get his salvage, or walk over their injured bodies. And he put away what he acquired before acquiring more. Of course, the Condor was much smaller, usually. It varied depending on what parts of what ships Becker was using at the time to patch his own vessel, but it did stay more or less the same size. The size made it necessary to use imagination to find places to put everything. Neatness counted, on a ship like that.

But as soon as the boxes were stacked in the next docking bay, Marl herded everyone back into the shuttle, and they returned to the surface for another load.

On the way down he told Jaya, "Find us a warehouse where they keep weapons.We're going to need some firepower to hang on to this lot."

"What do you mean 'we'?" Jaya asked.

"Okay, maybe not you babies, but I'm sure I can find some like-minded guys to work for me. This is wonderful. I always wanted to be a warlord when I grew up, but never thought I'd actually have the opportunity. It just goes to show that dreams really do come true."

Khorii asked cautiously, curious but not wanting to set him off, "Why do you wish that? I just want to know. We don't have them where I come from. Was your father a warlord, or your mother?"

"How the frag would I know?" he asked. "I never met my dad, and I don't recall having a mother, though I suppose I probably did."

"How did you survive until you got to Maganos Moonbase then?" she asked.

"At Maganos they like to quote the old saying about how it takes a village to raise a kid. In my case, it took a military encampment. Actually, my-role models, shall we say?-were on the opposite side from Lord Bendizi, but I always had a sneaking admiration for him myself."

The odd thing was, since that background would have made perfect sense for breeding the sort of criminal Marl wanted to become, it wasn't true. She could see very clear images in his head of his mother, whom he envisioned in her uniform as a Federation magistrate, and his father, a devotee and minister of a human religion that seemed to involve parallelograms as its most potent symbol.

He had parents. He just didn't like them and had run away from them as soon as he was able to join the Cholaran Resistance Movement, which was where he learned how much he liked blowing things up and the benefits reaped by Lord Bendizi from being a warlord.

He was a very twisted sort of person. Reading him did not confer understanding. At least his lust for the cargo spared her the images she had glimpsed before. She wondered where the detonator was. If he could be separated from it before having a chance to use it, his warlord days would be over before they started.

She was much too new at the psychic stuff. She tried to probe unobtrusively for the location of the detonator and the devices he claimed to have set but he caught her. Abruptly she encountered more of the repulsive images of what he would like to do to the crew of the Mana-this time not only ugly violent mating practices with the females, but quite hideous disassembly for both Elviiz and Hap and even more terrible fates for poor Khiindi and the other cats.

Marl leered at her. "Gotcha. I told you I know how to deal with your sort. Give you something to think about, eh, little girl? Get used to it because even if I have to kill everybody else, you and me are a team. Maybe after you've been around me for a while you'll change your attitude about some of it."

Khorii snorted. She didn't mean to. She wouldn't have done it if she'd thought about it because obviously he was a pretty dangerous person. But he sounded so much like Aunt Maati's mate Thari-inye boasting, as he always had done, about his way with females that she couldn't help it. The images in Marl's mind blew away with anger and, very strangely, embarrassment, and she saw a momentary flash of him giving Shoshisha something and her laughing at him. He knew about all that dreadful stuff he put in his mind to stop her-he had probably seen it and had memories of it. But she was very glad to see that it wasn't really him. He was bad enough, but there might be something in him to salvage, as Becker would say, if she could just think of a way to stop him.

"What was that, horn girl?"

"Nothing," she said. "I got something in my nose is all."

They picked up the second load, and this time he and Jaya used the loaders to stow it in cargo bay one, while Elviiz, his organic bits repaired by Khorii and the manufactured ones self-repaired, carried the rest. Sesseli couldn't lift anything else with her mind at the moment. She had to sleep. Marl had tried to make her do it, and Khorii put her foot down. "She's exhausted. You try lifting all those heavy things with your mind when you're no bigger than she is. If you want her to do it when speed counts, then let her recuperate now."

She carried what she could while on board the Mana, but kept reaching out with all her senses, trying to find Hap. He was still inside the engine room but he felt freer-in more pain than he had been after she'd healed him, but he was partially free.While the others continued to the cargo bay, and Marl gloated over his booty, she slipped away and used the code she'd read from Marl's mind to unlock and open the engine room door.

Hap looked up, still gagged, his arms still partly bound to his chest, but his hands and feet and lower legs free. Blood was everywhere, but she saw that it was from minor wounds on his hands. Khiindi lay on the table, sleeping the sleep of the just. Well, the just fed, perhaps. Hap kept cat snacks in the engine room for Khiindi and the other cats. She hadn't realized the cat was in there, but that did explain the wounds on Haps hands. Khiindi woke, stretched, yawned, jumped down, and leaped through the hold in the slightly irised door without so much as a mew of greeting.

Khorii slipped inside to free Hap, ignoring him shaking his head and bobbed it in the direction of the door. She tore off the strip of tape over his mouth first.

"Khorii, what are you doing? Get out of here," Hap said. "Don't give Marl a reason to come looking for you."

Khorii snatched up the shears and began cutting Hap's bonds. "Just a few seconds, and I'll head back." She understood what he was getting at. They would all be safer if Marl didn't know Hap was free, and he could look for the explosives that way. With one more snip the last of the tape binding Hap parted. She nodded and backed out, leaving the door unlocked, then hurried to the cargo bay.

Khorii wanted to send a message to Asha Bates, but she wasn't sure of her mental aim over the length of the ship. She didn't want Marl to be able to intercept anything she had to say to the captain.

Picking up her load again, she toted it to the cargo bay. Marl and Jaya finished stacking their cargo, and all of them returned to the shuttle. Just before she left the bay, Khorii thought she caught the glint of a slitted green-gold eye high up among the stacks.

"We've cleaned out all the entire stock of cackle juice and rhiosapam, which will bring an absolute fortune on the black market," Marl said, rubbing his palms together with glee. "We'll get the rest, then go for those weapons."

But as Jaya lowered the shuttle onto the street, it was suddenly surrounded by a group of old men and young boys, all brandishing weapons of either an explosive or agricultural nature. The warehouse guard who had shot Elviiz pointed angrily at the shuttle.

"Up!" Marl shouted, but Jaya was already lifting off, amid a hail of bullets, pitchforks, shovels, brooms, wrenches, crowbars, and other items that bounced off the hull. Sesseli, who had slept through the whole thing, sat up and rubbed her eyes. "Huh?" she asked.

Khorii gathered her into her arms, and said, "Shhh. It's okay. There are more enterprising free marketeers who survived the plague here than Marl counted on, that's all."

Marl pounded on the viewscreen and screamed at the people below, "You're all supposed to be dead! Lie down and die and give someone else a chance, you selfish zombies!"

Elviiz opened his mouth, no doubt to make some remark about the lack of logic in Marl's command, but Khorii put her finger to her lips and shook her head.

As they returned to the bridge, she lingered by the engine room but sensed at once that it was empty.

"That place sucks," Marl told Captain Bates. "Take us to the Big Money, honey! I need to pick out my mansion, then we'll go borrowing from the neighbors."

He didn't notice her turning on the signal beacon, because she'd done it while he and the others walked from the docking bay to the bridge. He wasn't especially looking for it, of course, since space was full of such beacons now, and most of them went unanswered by other ships with their own mayday beacons pulsing into empty space.

Aari and Acorna held on to the lives of their friends with every shred of will and skill they possessed. The problem was, it took both of them to keep both Becker and RK alive and that meant neither of the Linyaari had a chance to get enough rest, and neither of their horns regained enough power to cure the captain or even the cat.

Acorna stroked RK and hung pouches of new fluids to flow into his veins. Abuelita had taught them how to rig up and sterilize makeshift kits for administering intravenous fluids for waiting patients. But everything they administered seemed to leak out of the patients as quickly as it went in.

Furthermore, the water and air supplies were both getting low, and neither Linyaari had enough power left to purify other sources.

In between putting cold cloths on Joh's neck, armpits, and groin to keep his fever down, Aari kept up a steady psychic stream of memories of their adventures together, of all the times Joh had saved his life.

Acorna rubbed RK's head and ears and the places behind his whiskers and reminded him of when they were in close psychic communication on the cat's homeworld of Makahomia. She asked him to recall all of the beautiful jungle temple cats he'd met, including the one who had borne him the litter of kittens from which Khiindi had come. "Remember, Roadkill, that you are no common feline, but regarded as a superior life-form on Makahomia. Think how sad Nad-hari and Miw-Sher would be if you depart this life without saying farewell to them. Also, you should remember that you are a very mature cat, spiritually as well as physically, and have probably already exhausted most of your other lives. You must hang on to this one as long as possible. Continue your long nap, continue your passive feed, but do not leap into your next life yet. It may not be there when you land."

If only they could take the two of them to the surface, where even in isolation they could receive the food and water she and Aari had purified when their horns were potent. But from their research they both feared that the plague they carried may have mutated when filtered through the Linyaari system. They might kill the survivors they had just rescued, and Joh and RK as well.

One at a time, each had taken a break from their psychic interaction with their respective patients to try to send a long-distance message to their own people, praying that somehow it would get through. Then it was back to the grueling efforts of trying to keep their friends alive.

Jonas P. Becker was not a religious man, even though his first mate was of a species worshiped on the planet of Makahomia. Becker had been orphaned, enslaved, then adopted and raised by his scientist foster father, Theophilus Becker, to be a scientist. Of sorts.

The thing was, when you got to a certain level of theoretical physics, it was very difficult to tell if you were talking science or religion. Much of it sounded similar. Religion-maybe-was more like theoretical history with some miracles thrown in here and there. The courtesy and suspension of disbelief Becker accorded alien priesthoods and cat deities did not extend to human holy rollers and missionaries.

He was not sure he had a soul. He knew there was a core of stubborn self, of course, but he felt that it was unlikely to sprout wings, ascend any higher than he already was above the Condor, or learn to play a harp.

So he was totally unprepared for what awaited him after he had emptied his guts, coughed up his lungs, and felt as if the Khleevi bug-eyed monsters were taking revenge on him by pulling his brains out his ears and his skin off his muscle, his muscle off the bone. That was the kind of pain that he was feeling.

But then, although he was in no less pain, he suddenly shifted places, as if he'd gone through a wormhole and come out the other side. The pain was there, but it was beside the point. The point was that bright light at the end of the wormhole-yep, he was in a wormhole all right. He became sort of alarmed when he realized that he was passing through the hole toward the light ass over teakettle without the Condor surrounding him.

He became aware of a voice in his head, Aari's voice, and he said, just kidding, "What light through this here wormhole breaks?" and Aari replied, "Light? Oh, no, Joh, you see the light when you are dying, it says here in Ancient Terran Myths of Life and Death. Do not go to the light, Joh. You do not belong there yet."

But Becker tumbled ever closer and closer, though now it seemed he was bodiless. Except, it wasn't true that there was no Condor around him. Not exactly. He was the Condor, all patched and bolted together, and he was roaring through that wormhole focusing more and more intently on that light. If he could just see what it was-just a little closer.

"Joh. No! You are slipping from me. Do not go to the light. Do not look at it."

And from somewhere Becker formed the thought, "Then you look at the damn thing. Don't you guys ever check the scanner array?"

That said, he continued dying.