Second Wave (21 page)

Karina’s conceit, however, could prove useful, Ariin noted.

The Harakamians received her, Maati, and Thariinye in a distractingly luscious surrounding—a garden layered with bursts of succulent grasses and blossoms among rows and ranks of other delicious greenery. Unlike the reception halls of the Friends, where guests approached through sterile and intimidatingly vast corridors, the Harakamians sat at the culmination of a meandering journey through outdoor rooms, roofed with boughs of graceful trees, and floored by mosses and blue, pink, and lilac ground-hugging flowers. Small waterfalls and splashing fountains tiled in colors that rivaled the flowers furnished these spaces, while streamlets bridged with filigreed arches laced the landscape together. The end of the pathway was paved with stones that emitted intricately intertwined melodies with each footfall.

Hafiz Harakamian himself was shorter than any Linyaari and much rounder in all respects. His cummerbund formed a band around his middle much like the stripe on a ball. His golden shoes had curling toes that would never have fit a Linyaari foot but would have pleased Akasa, Ariin knew. His trousers, of royal blue silk, billowed about his ankles before being concealed by the hem of a long vest striped with blue, rose, and lilac overlaid with a golden relief that resembled the stylized feathers of a peacock. Over this he wore a longer robe of fabric that shimmered from gold to red to purple with the same sort of figures as the vest, only larger. His head was wrapped with a magnificent twist of scarlet, bejeweled with a golden stone that looked very like a cat’s eye, set in an elaborate structure of blue and red stones, into which a lilac plume had been placed so that it fluttered with the slightest movement.

His face was dark and the plump cheeks and chin somewhat masked by a dark, closely trimmed beard and flowing mustaches, both a startling black. His eyes were small and shrewd and slightly shifty, and when she touched his mind, she quickly withdrew, overwhelmed by a labyrinth of knowledge, contacts, power and resources, motives, reasons, plots, and schemes. He was the first human she had encountered in person. She hoped they were not all so complicated.

Karina, whose clothes and jewels were in the same style but different colors from those she had worn on previous occasions, felt almost as tricky.

One other characteristic of both that Ariin noted was that each had committed acts in the past that would hardly fit in with the Linyaari code of ethics. Hafiz’s aura was not without undertones of violence. Karina had had no one to look after her as a child, and consequently had looked out for herself and no one else for a long time after. Perhaps the Linyaari had healed both of them so that they no longer required their less acceptable defenses, or perhaps it was that they had each other now. Ariin found them both extraordinary and didn’t quite know what to make of it. These two could easily have been the same sort of beings as the Friends, though without the power to shapeshift.

Instead, they opened their perfumed arms and greeted her with affection and genuine relief that she had come to them apparently unharmed. She curtsied, as the Friends always wished her to do when they were wearing particularly grand aspects.

“Dear child, welcome to our humble Moon of Opportunity,” Hafiz said, rising to meet her.

“Thaakew,” she said, trying to speak Standard for the first time in public. It wasn’t a good fit. She tried again, “Thaank yew.”

She needed more practice. Her mouth and vocal cords were shaped awkwardly for this language. Her parents, Maati, and Thariinye managed well enough, so she should be able to as well. Her mother spoke Standard as well as the humans. However, the Harakamians were used to the Linyaari accent and found it charming, so Ariin didn’t feel the need to try too hard to lose hers.

“Telepathy is so much more convenient, isn’t it, my dear?” Karina sympathized. “However, my beloved husband is—telepathically challenged, shall we say—so we must speak aloud out of courtesy to him.”

“Yezz,” Ariin said, then, determinedly trying to force her tongue to mimic Karina’s. “Yez-s.”

It grew easier the more she practiced, and with the help of the LAANYE while she slept, Ariin found that her conversations the next day were almost effortless.

Finally, the time came for Maati and Thariinye to take their leave.

“Don’t leave me!” Ariin cried, rising from the table they all had been dining at so quickly she knocked it sideways. Cutlery, dishes, and ornaments slid off onto the ground. Bowls of food overturned, and one dumped into Karina’s lavender lap, making her squeal. A servant scuttled forward to sponge at the clothing, but Karina waved the woman aside.

“Zhorry,” she apologized and bent to pick up the fallen objects, half-expecting a blow. The Friends had never beaten her, but they had occasionally cuffed her when irritated. As they seemed oblivious to their own strength compared to her size and relative fragility, she had quickly learned to duck.

Maati and Thariinye turned to her, but it was Hafiz who touched her and guided her to her feet. “There, there, child. We thought you might want to stay with us while your relatives are on their mission. You have yet to see all of the diversions and games we have to offer, all entertaining and educational, I assure you, with many young people of your own age, both Linyaari and human, to befriend you. Or, if you are not yet ready for so much novelty, a ship can return you to Vhiliinyar if you prefer.”

“You really should stay here, Ariin,” Maati encouraged, her. “It’s a wonderful place. We have a mission to perform, and we must go. The sooner we all do our part, the sooner all of us can return home.”

“Yezs,” Ariin said, still in Standard and aloud, “but I need to go with you. I will find Khorii my twin and help her so that our parents can be healed.”

Thariinye looked puzzled. “We did not know that was what you wished,” he said. Of course he didn’t. If he and Maati had known, they would never have brought her this far. They would have probed her thoughts and found what they would have considered questionable motives and forbidden her to come. In front of the powerful and more easily fooled humans, speaking aloud for their benefit, she had a better chance of getting what she needed.

“But it is very dangerous, my child,” Uncle Hafiz said. “And you are very young and unused to the wider universe.”

“I can learn,” she said. “Khorii learned.”

He was wavering. He was not actually averse to potentially putting innocents in harm’s way if there was a point to it, or a profit to be made. But she needed something more compelling to convince him, something that would make him insist that Maati and Thariinye take her with them.

Karina, who had risen to see the damage to her gown, now swayed, a tidal wave of lavender veils rippling. Uncle Hafiz was by her side at once, supporting her and attempting to lower her into a chair. Karina was having none of that.

“They walk!” she cried, her voice echoing and deep as if she were speaking from the bottom of a well. “The dead walk. They destroy all, enslave the living. Everyone, everyone in terrible danger. Khorii—oh no, must warn Khorii! Only her twin can save her!”

Staggering, she allowed herself to be lowered to her chair. Ariin tried not to look triumphant as she stole a peek at Maati and Thariinye. Compared to the friends, humans were so very easy to persuade. Karina suddenly straightened and, looking quite focused and alert, said, “That settles it. Ariin really must go with Maati and Thariinye. But do be careful, dears. What is lurking out there is something the likes of which none of you have ever encountered before.” Despite the others’ questions, Karina couldn’t supply any more information.

Even though she had succeeded in continuing her mission to find Khorii, Ariin couldn’t help shuddering at the human’s words.
Enslave the living
—it sounded like what she had suffered at the hands of the Friends. And that was something she was determined never to go through again.

Chapter 19

M
arl blinked hard, looked away, purposefully tracked the
Mana
’s progress out of the Solojo system, noted the coordinates and then, casually—nonchalantly he would have said—glanced back down at the form in the pallet. It grinned back up at him, a Jolly Roger grin under a translucent overlay of mud brown dust with rather sickening threads of red running through it up to it. It would have been much easier to look at if the underlying skull had had dark empty sockets as it properly ought to have, but instead, jellied egg whites with rotted black centers swimming in the middle of them filled the holes. They stared at him with a thinly veiled malice that he had seldom seen outside the frame of a mirror.

He looked away again, hoping that somehow the thing was an aftereffect of staring at the laser lights too long. Other pallets swooped closer like buzzards, surrounding his perch until they were close enough for him to see their occupants as well. There was no beauty contest to be won here. Nobody reclining on any of the berths would qualify to become Miss Corazon, though some of the more solid figures did seem to be female. Not only did the corpselike figures on the pallets seem to be in various stages of decomposition—or were they indeed composing themselves?—but opacity also seemed to be optional. Coyly, a couple of the females turned into dust and dissipated as he watched, while the male beneath him grew more solid and human-looking.

No doubt this process would be of tremendous scientific fascination to someone with more curiosity and a less highly developed sense of self-preservation, but Marl was disinclined to stick around and see what other tricks these things could do. He tried dropping the pallet straight back to its dock, but the other pallets blocked him, much as if they were all in a large airborne game of soccer. Corpse hands reached for him.

Marl twisted on the pallet and leaped to the floor, landing lightly and thanking his jail-bound opportunities for fine-tuning his body. He sprinted for the door, the pallets zooming toward him, his head full of what sounded like canned laughter on a very old vid, full of crackle and buzz. He reached the opening seconds ahead of his pursuers, and as it irised shut behind him, a pallet slammed into the doorway and wedged there. The sound of other pallets crashing into the wall followed, or that was what he imagined it was anyway. He wasn’t about to go back and investigate. Had he given the situation a little more reflection, he would have realized that while the perpetually solid pallets could not penetrate the portal, never mind the solid wall, there was no guarantee that the occupants of the pallets shared that limitation.

H
ow will we know where Khorii is?” Ariin asked Thariinye as the
Nheifaarir,
the egg-shaped spacecraft assigned to Maati’s family—Ariin’s family, too, now—entered the area the ship’s computer designated as Federation-controlled space.

“We already know where they are, little one,” Thariinye said in a superior manner as annoying as that of the lordliest Friend. “But that is not our main concern. Our mission is to assist in the rescue and relocation of the LoiLoiKuans.” He could not say their name any better than Ariin could, and instead showed her the word on the LAANYE screen. “Your sister met the younger LoiLoiKuans at Maganos Moonbase, where they were brought by the Federation to spare them an earlier catastrophe their elders feared would overtake the planet before the plague came along.”

“From what are we rescuing them?” Ariin asked.

“According to your sister’s transmission, some sort of a mutant sea dragon.”

“Is she going to help, too?”

“No, when last we heard, she was en route to Rushima for an undisclosed purpose.”

“Why was it undisclosed?”

“That, too, was undisclosed.”

“How are we going to assist? Or is that also undisclosed?”

“It was not disclosed because nobody is quite sure how to proceed. Let me check with your father-sister.”

Thariinye seemed to be an intelligent male, but he could annoy her without the slightest effort. He acted as if she didn’t know her own relationship to Maati.

“Dearest.”
He used thought-talk to address Ariin’s aunt, who was monitoring the ship’s controls and wore earbuds so that incoming communications did not disturb the peace of the off-duty crew members.
“Have we received any instructions regarding the rescue of the LoiLoiKuan?”

Maati removed an earbud and swiveled in her seat to address them out loud. “No one is quite sure how to go about it. These LoiLoiKuans are aquatic and cannot survive outside of seawater.”

“Are there many?”

“Not anymore. The plague eradicated a good portion of the population. Vessels that will hold enough water to sustain one or two individuals will not fit into the average Linyaari ship. Furthermore, our people and the survivors of the humanoid population have yet to locate enough tanks to rescue the entire population.”

“How did the kids get from their planet to the school?” Ariin asked.

“As I explained,” Thariinye said with exaggerated patience, “the Federation transported them.”

“How? What did they use?”

“An excellent question!” Maati said as she toggled the comlink. “LaBoue Base, this is Maati on the
Nheifaarir
again. Has anyone asked the LoiLoiKuan students how they were transported to Maganos?”

The answer didn’t come until Thariinye’s shift at the helm. Ariin thought it a shame that thought-talk did not travel over the vast distances of space. Instead, the ship had to hail the nearest relay base or sister ship, and that ship or base then had to relay the next closest. Then, of course, as Maati pointed out, it would take even longer while someone on Maganos queried the LoiLoiKuan students. Finally, LaBoue Base transmitted the response. “They say they were brought in a Federation tanker filled with seawater.”

“A tanker? They have ships large enough to hold great quantities of seawater?” Ariin asked.

She was immediately sorry she had. It gave Thariinye another opportunity to act superior even though he clearly hadn’t known about tankers either.