Authors: Anne Mccaffrey
Maati was on the com again. “Rushima base come in. This is Linyaari expeditionary vessel
Nheifaarir,
towing a water transport tanker for the relief effort. Come in, Rushima base. Over.”
For the longest time there was no answer at all, then a young hornless head with red hair tied into two plaits and brown dapples on its nose appeared on the screen. Before it could speak, a smaller furred face popped up in front of it. “Get down, kittencat. Commin’ is for people, not kitties,” the youngling said, removing the offending creature. “Hi, Linyaari ship. This is Rushima base, Moonmay Marsden, comoff for right now, speaking. Can I help you?”
Maati said, “The cargo vessel
Mana,
docked at your landing facility, appears to have been boarded by unauthorized personnel. Please alert the
Mana
’s crew to return to their ship, but proceed with caution.”
“Khorii is headed back that way. Everybody else is off rescuin’ the folks from Bug Gulch.”
“Khorii should not face those men by herself. We do not know how many of them there are.”
“I’ll go tell her, then,” the girl said, rising.
“Don’t go alone!” Maati said. “The men look dangerous.”
“Okeydoke,” the girl said. “There’s nobody else to call this minute, ma’am, but don’t you worry about it none. I’ll tend to it.”
Maati leaned back in her chair, the expression on her face not one that Ariin liked at all. And the words she spoke were not soothing either. “Two girls against those men? How is she possibly going to ‘tend’ to it?”
W
hat are you doing here, Marl?” Khorii demanded, trying to sound calm, although she could feel her heart thudding against her chest wall.
“Jail got boring, and I missed you, pet,” he said, maintaining his grip on her shoulder. “I made some new friends, and I told them all about you. They’ve been very anxious to meet you.” He smiled, baring his teeth without the slightest degree of warmth. “And you and I have some unfinished business to take care of.”
Khorii searched the underskirts of the fog for Khiindi, but didn’t see her faithful feline companion anywhere. She was glad. Marl had been cruel to Khiindi before and, after all, there wasn’t much a helpless little cat could do to defend her, was there? Of course, he was supposed to be a Makahomian Temple Cat, and they were supposed to defend their temples and their human followers, but Khiindi was a runt as Temple Cats went. Even full-grown he was smaller than his sire, and was not inclined to be aggressive except toward fish.
“I see no other ships here, Marl. Only that shuttle.” Meanwhile she was sending a mental message to Captain Bates.
“Fidd is one of the boarding party, Captain, and he has me now. Please approach with caution.”
“Tell Fidd to be cautious himself,”
Captain Bates replied tersely.
“I’ll mow his candy ass down if I see him. Uh—can you get away from him?”
Marl spun Khorii around and shook a finger in her face. “Don’t you know it’s rude to use telepathy in front of others? So who’s that? Bates, Hellstrom, and Jaya coming to save you, are they?” He gave a jerk and pulled her after him toward the hatch.
She backed up to him enough to get her balance, then aimed a backward kick at his knee. It did not land solidly, however. He let go of her arm, but before she could escape him entirely, grabbed hold of her mane with the hand that wasn’t cradling his injured leg. He jerked down viciously, pulling her to the ground.
“What’s the matter with you? Why’d you do that? Aren’t you people supposed to be pacifists?” He yelled toward the hatch, “Pauli, Petit, come and help me, you useless louts!”
Khorii, watching the fog for signs of Khiindi or the
Mana
’s shuttle, saw that although the fog had receded from the
Mana
, it had enveloped the shuttle, which shuddered convulsively as the tendrils of mist climbed higher on its hull, seeming to pull itself up by what looked like partially defined human fingers. Khorii thought she saw a face grinning at her, and gleaming, translucent teeth, then heard a metallic noise as—what? The fog? Something took a bite out of the shuttle.
“Drop it, varmints!” a girlish voice with a slight lisp snarled. “You’re surrounded, so you two blocking the hatch put your weapons down, and you there take your hands off Khorii.”
“Pull the other one, kid!” Marl called back, laughing, but there was an explosion and something zipped past close to Khorii and closer, she guessed from his exclamation, to Marl.
Behind her she heard the clatter of plasteel on the tarmac.
Marl jerked her around toward the sound as he bellowed at his companions, two unwashed and poorly groomed individuals, both hirsute and gaudily attired. One of them was still armed, though the other’s hands were raised tentatively to shoulder height.
“Petit, you idiot, it’s just some kid,” growled the third man, who raised his weapon and shot into the fog in the direction of the first shot’s origin. “Put it down and go home to your mama, girly. That twelve-gauge is too big for someone as little as you.”
Moonmay zinged another shot past. It bounced off the hull. “My mama is dead, hairball face. And my gramps reengineered this here weapon so even a baby could use it.”
The fog that had been climbing the shuttle receded and swirled toward them in coils, like some great drifting serpent.
Marl pulled Khorii in front of him and backed up. “Lay off, kid. You wouldn’t want to hit your friend here, would you?”
“Weren’t aimin’ at
her,
” Moonmay said. The fog carried sound strangely. Moonmay’s voice seemed to be coming from several directions at once and something rustled and crunched from elsewhere.
Khorii saw one of Marl’s accomplices point his sidearm into the fog. The fog pointed back. The man fired, but the shot suddenly became muffled as if wrapped in heavy fabric. Then the weapon began disappearing. The man let go and stepped back but not before he was enveloped by the fog.
“Petit, come back here!” Marl bellowed after the man.
“We got what we come for, Fidd. We can take her with us,” the other miscreant advised.
“No you won’t!” Moonmay cried, but as if that had been what he was waiting for, the man fired directly into the fog and guessed right this time. There was a shriek and another shot, this one going wild.
“We may as well take their ship, too,” Marl argued, oblivious to the muffled sobs of the child in the distance.
“Let me heal her, Marl, and I’ll go with you without a fuss,” Khorii said. “She’s only a child.”
“In case you haven’t noticed, most people are these days,” Marl said.
He shoved her toward the hatch, and another shot rang out. Khorii whirled to see Marl dropping to the ground behind her, his mouth opened in a silent moan of pain, blood seeping between his fingers where they clutched his right knee.
“Not all of us, Fidd,” Captain Asha Bates said, stepping through the coils of fog with the modified twelve-gauge trained on him. The remaining man, who had grabbed for Khorii when she turned, released her and stepped back with his hands in the air.
Khorii dodged past Captain Bates and found Moonmay crumpled on the ground, her left shoulder shattered. Tenderly, Khorii lay beside the little girl and pressed her horn to the wound, knitting vessels, nerve endings, bone to bone, muscle fiber to muscle fiber, and, finally, flesh to flesh.
She supported Moonmay as the little girl sat up. Water dripped onto her face and blood ran from her clothing. “Hey, it’s raining,” Moonmay said.
So it was. The two of them stood and walked to where Captain Bates held the pirate at bay while Marl writhed on the ground.
Something odd was happening between Captain Bates and the uninjured intruder.
“You’re Asha, aren’t you?” the pirate asked.
“Hello, Pauli,” she said. “I guess that would be Coco’s ship orbiting waiting to pick us off, right?”
“Aye. The brat yours?” he asked, nodding to Moonmay.
“No, though if I had one, I’d hope she’d be as brave as this one. What are you and Coco doing with this punk?” she asked, but before he could answer, said, “Khorii, no. Don’t heal him before you tie him up. Moonmay, there’s tape in the utility drawer under the console on the bridge. That’d be to starboard as you enter the hatch and forward down the corridor, last hatch on the starboard side.
Moonmay looked confused.
“Right,” Khorii said. “Starboard is right.”
“How do ya know?” the child asked.
Without breaking eye contact with Pauli, Captain Bates said, “The phrase to remember is ‘There’s no red port left,’ Moonmay. Port is left, so starboard’s the other one.”
“Right—I mean starboard,” Moonmay said, and entered the ship, returning after what must have seemed a very long time to Marl Fidd with a roll of duct tape.
Moonmay didn’t surrender the tape to Khorii, but bound Fidd’s wrists and ankles together with a few quick twists of her wrist and a little wrestling of the boy, which caused him to scream.
“Go ahead and heal him now, Khorii,” Captain Bates said. “Moonmay, you can tape Pauli up, too.”
“Now, Asha, we’re more trouble than we’re worth. Let us return to the ship, and we’ll be out of your space for good. We’ll only be a burden to you as prisoners.”
“Not to me you won’t. And these folks will most likely hang you.”
“You can’t let them do that! I’m your father!”
Khorii had knelt to heal Marl’s knee but looked up before she touched it. The tarmac shook with a terrible rumble and roar. Cleared of fog, the pirate shuttle shuddered and shook like a wet dog, showering hull tiles to the ground. A hatch opened and the other large, fat pirate raced toward them, making very good time for someone of his size. Out the hatch behind him came a chair, trailing its bolt, and a sputtering com screen. The viewport burst, showering the retreating pirate with fragments.
Just when it seemed about to explode, the shuttle collapsed instead, leaving a fractured superstructure of metal that looked like wood gnawed by beavers.
Captain Bates smiled sweetly at Pauli. “You’re not my father, just my clan father. But you’re free to go now, as far as you can fly in that thing you rode in on.”
Khorii smiled herself as she applied her horn to Marl’s knee, taking the same care she had with Moonmay’s shoulder, even though the task was a distasteful one.
Moonmay busied herself tying up the other two pirates in the same fashion as she had Marl. “They won’t go nowhere now, ma’am,” she told Captain Bates.
“Fine, but we have to get back to the accident. Khorii has injured to attend to.”
“I didn’t hear the shuttle land,” Khorii told her. “But with all of the shooting…”
“I didn’t exactly land. It crashed. Well, belly-flopped in a field not far from here. When I knew I wasn’t going to make it in one piece, I looked for a softer place to set it down.” She nodded to the wreck of the pirate’s shuttle. “It wasn’t as bad as that one, but pretty much the same thing happened, to a lesser degree. Let’s see if we’ve got anything left sound enough to make a round-trip.”
She didn’t add that, if they didn’t, Mikaaye and others might die before Khorii could reach them.
I
f that ain’t just like an offsider,”
a rough-edged voice complained.
“Come to poor little Rushima to save the world and ends up gettin’ himself hurt so bad it takes us locals to save them instead.”
“Hush, Hector,”
answered a female voice familiar from the earlier healing sessions. Mikaaye hurt too badly to be able to recall much about her except—oh yes, she was dead.
“This boy already cured bushels of arthritis, rheumatism, sciatica, cataracts, heart ailments, pleurisy, and pneumonia today as well as earaches, hives, colic, bad teeth, hardening of the arteries, ringworm, shingles, and hives. I’d say that was a pretty good start on saving the world, or at least our people. Even Doc never had a day like that, did you, son?”
“Ali, I never had a
month
like that. Stay with us, son, there’s help comin’.”
Mikaaye groaned. He was cold, and it made the pain worse, but at least he was not alone. Although, recalling the salient feature of the female visitor, perhaps that was not entirely a positive thing.
“Live help?”
he asked.
“I am still alive?”
“You’d be the best judge of that,”
the female said.
“You look solid enough to me, though.”
“Except that horn of his,”
Hector, his whine unmistakable, spoke up again.
“It looks a might see-throughish to me.”
“That’s how they get when they’ve been working too hard,”
Doc told him.
“I remember that happening to Acorna when she was helping with the wounded after the Battle with the Bugs. You’ll be fine, boy. Everybody get back from him. You know how the living are always complaining about us making cold spots.”
“I say we just go and let the living look after each other,”
Hector said.
“What have they done for us lately?”
“Don’t go,”
Mikaaye said. The doctor and Alison were comforting, some of the other figures crowded into his unconsciousness were peculiar and might have been frightening had he been better able to tell what they were or what they were doing. Hector was obviously a sad spirit with a poor view of himself and everyone around him. But Mikaaye wanted them near simply because he didn’t want to be alone. Until he’d begun his duties on the Moon of Opportunity, he had always been surrounded by his own kind. Even on MOO, there were lots of other people around. Dead company was better than being by himself.
“I have done what I could for your living people,”
he said.
“But I do not understand what I or other living people could do for you. Tell me.”
Hector began to do so, and Mikaaye learned how dead company could actually be. Old Alison and the doctor receded as Hector told Mikaaye the story of his life and death and all the injustices that had been done to him and of the ingratitude and indignity he had suffered. Mikaaye thought he might have been bored to death, except for the probability that if he died on Rushima, he would have Hector as an eternal companion.