Third Watch (23 page)

“Two Standard weeks,” Abuelita told him. “It is very difficult with no shelter. Many are burned painfully by the sun, but at least the monsoon season is past.”

Uncle Joh handed out the last of his supplies and jumped back into the shuttle. “Big load from the
Mana
coming next,” he promised.

Captain Bates piloted this one, and Hap jumped out and began dispensing supplies.

“Joh says you folks need shelter,” she said. “Anybody ever do any basket weaving?”

The Linyaari joined her in leading the older children to the river, where the tallest reeds had been restored to healthy growth on previous visits. They gathered armloads of these and began weaving and teaching the techniques to everyone old enough to learn, making panels of basketry they hooked together into awnings, then shelters. All the while they worked, the shuttles came and went, leaving as soon as the supplies were dispensed so that the vessels didn’t draw the tentacles into the field again.

Finally, they had completed four shelters and were sure that there were enough refugees who knew how to make them that the Linyaari and Captain Bates stood in the landing zone to indicate their readiness to depart. Shuttles from all three ships landed—the
Balakiire
’s on autopilot, since Khaari stayed with the ship. Hap was aboard the
Mana
’s shuttle and Elviiz piloted the
Condor
’s.

The shuttles ascended with viewports turned toward the city and the passengers watched, fascinated in spite of themselves, as the inogre tentacles extended and stretched higher and farther out into the countryside, less like snakes now than the elongated tongues of frogs. This impression was heightened as the nearest tentacle receded, then whiplashed out, its tip touching the
wii-Balakiire,
wrapping around it as if to pull it down. Then it whipped back again, pulling off and away from the egg-shaped shuttle so quickly that it set it spinning. Neeva’s face grinned—with teeth showing for the unseeing benefit of the inogre. “It doesn’t seem to like the taste of our technology. No doubt the bioelectronics engineered by our two-horned allies is unappetizing to them.”

But while their attention was on her, the tentacle lashed out again, and this time attached itself to the hull of the
Condor
’s shuttle.

Chapter 19

A
ccelerating,” Elviiz said, but though he pushed the engines until the little craft shuddered, the tentacle quickly filled the viewport with its sludging brown, and they heard the hull creak as the creature bit into it.

“Mayday,
Condor,
we are under attack,” Elviiz said. Though his voice sounded as calm as Maak’s, Khorii felt a rush of panic from her brother. He had suffered badly from this life-form before and did not wish another close encounter.

“Fire on them!” Uncle Joh’s voice boomed through the com. “I retooled that shuttle with top-of-the-line weaponry.”

“I am Linyaari!” Elviiz protested, with an agonized look at his Linyaari family.

“It eats metal for breakfast, boy,” Uncle Joh bellowed again. “Don’t think of it as attacking, think of it as giving it a meal. Be a philanthropist and feed the freakin’ thing everything you’ve got!”

“Excellent point,” Elviiz said, and pushed the trigger, holding it down as the missiles shot into the shuttle’s captor. It shrank away from the hull to coagulate around the darting projectiles. Any explosions they might have caused were smothered in sludge that dragged them back to the surface with it.

By the time Elviiz had the shuttle back on course, the other two vessels were far above them, ready to dock in their respective ships.

Uncle Joh said a Standard word that the LAANYE translated only as “extremely rude.” At the same time Hap’s voice on the com said, “The
Mana
’s pulling away from us! Jaya?”

“How in the cosmos did they get past my sensors?” Uncle Joh said, among other impolite words and phrases.

“Who?” Mother asked.

“Pirates!”

“Not again!” Captain Bates sounded dismayed and annoyed. She had fostered among the pirates. “We had an agreement.”

“I’ll circle around, ram one up their tractor beam, and blow them to kingdom come.” Uncle Joh, his mustache bristling in full battle mode, was in his element. Next to salvage and his friends, he liked fighting best and couldn’t understand the Linyaari aversion to violence.

“No!” Khorii and Melireenya cried at once. “Mikaaye—” Khorii said.

“My son is aboard one of their ships,” Melireenya explained.

“A Linyaari pirate?” Uncle Joh sounded justifiably baffled.

“It’s kind of an exchange program, Jonas,” Captain Bates explained.

“What kind?” Uncle Joh demanded.

“Kind of a quasi-hostage, quasi-training, quasi-reform program,” Captain Bates replied. “Mikaaye volunteered, and Melireenya doesn’t object, do you, Melireenya?”

“Only if someone tries to blow up the ship he’s on,” Melireenya said. “I think communication is in order rather than an exchange of weapons fire. Especially since all of the shuttles and the
Balakiire
are now within firing range as well and since your shuttle has fed her missiles to the beast below, Captain Becker, we are all unarmed.”

Uncle Joh said a number of other rude expressions, and scowled as ferociously as RK when he attacked Khiindi. “Those fleas on the face of the galaxy sure know how to pick their moment,” he said. “I got them now, you know. They’ve been listening in, and they uncloaked just to jeer at me. I could have seen them before if I hadn’t been instructing Elviiz on the ethics of interspecies interactions.”

“Oh good,”
Father said.
“You can relax, Melireenya. The danger from Joh is over now. He has returned to employing words of more than one syllable to express himself. We can concentrate on the threat from without now.”

“Can you thought-talk with Mikaaye from this distance, Melireenya?”
Mother asked. Ship-to-ship telepathic contact was rather difficult, especially when one of the ships was running as far from the others as it could, but close family connections could often communicate over even more vast distances.
“Is he on that ship? If he is, can he tell us what their plan is?”

As they communicated from shuttle to shuttle, the
Balakiire
’s docking hatch opened to admit the
wii-Balakiire,
and the
Condor
’s docking hatch opened to admit its shuttle.

“Hang on, gang,” Uncle Joh said. “There’s not room for two shuttles there, but if Hap and Captain Bates suit up, Maak will come out and attach your shuttle to our hull and pull you in.”

“We will maintain surveillance in the meantime, Joh,” Khaari assured him.

“Fine, while we load the shuttle, you track the pirates, and we’ll track you,” Uncle Joh told her.

“Do you think Jalonzo and Abuelita and the other people down there will be all right?”
Khorii asked her parents.

“As long as they continue to surround themselves only with organically based materials, they’ll be fine,”
Mother said reassuringly.

“Maybe once the inogre has eaten everything in the city it will starve to death,”
Ariin put in, sounding cheerful.

“That would be terrible,”
Father chided Ariin for her
ka-
Linyaari unkindness.
“Perhaps we should find a way to feed it.”

Ariin had no response for that, but they could all tell she was appalled by what she saw as their father’s naïveté. She had not been raised, as Khorii had, among people who still remembered how Aari had been tortured by the horrible Khleevi, escaped, and lived to tell the tale. Despite the terrible things they had done to him, he had still retained his innate goodness and not let himself be twisted by the experience. To Aari, all life was valued—theoretically even his former captors. Just because the Khleevi hadn’t been interested in peaceful cohabitation didn’t necessarily mean this creature wasn’t either.

Father simply smiled at Ariin, and said, “Since Maak had to leave the bridge to help your friends, I will go help Joh.”

“We should go help the newcomers with their gear,” Mother said, then smiled at Ariin. “I think in time you will come to trust your father as I do. His ideas may sometimes seem odd, but the best ideas often do.”

Khorii thought Mother ought to know. She had had plenty of odd ideas of her own over the years. As a Linyaari raised by humans, she was considered even odder than Father was, but like Father, she had long ago earned the respect of more conventional Linyaari.

By the time they helped Captain Bates and Hap out of their pressure suits and oxygen helmets and brought them to the lounge, another crisis was under way.

On the remote screen, the surface of Paloduro had been replaced by an image of the
Mana
, suspended in space except for a slender strawlike tube down which something bumpy was pouring itself, seemingly endlessly, into the ship.

“They’re boarding her,” Captain Bates said as she walked into the lounge. She didn’t sit but watched the scene with fascination and anger. “So much for Coco’s promise. He accepted Mikaaye, waited until I was gone, and…”

Suddenly the tube, which had been stretched more or less taut, broke loose at one end and people began floating out of it. They wore pressure suits, too, and others attempted to gather them back in.

Melireenya spoke, her face appearing beside the other images on the screen. “It’s not what you think. Mikaaye says they needed the
Mana
. The ‘ghosts’ aboard the
Black Mariah
continued damaging her until they formed the larger creature. The taking of the
Mana
is not so much a hijacking as an evacuation. The captain had a terrible time getting everyone to go, and now it looks as if the
Black Mariah
has been—there, do you see?”

The ship had reappeared somewhat beyond the waving tube. It bulged, straining, and broke into several large pieces as they watched. Sludgy inogre oozed out between the pieces, covered them, and slowly absorbed them. Before it had finished devouring all of the visible pieces, however, parts of it froze, turning white and motionless in the vacuum of space. Finally, from within its core, it extruded one tentacle that clutched at the tube.

The last of the evacuees had been plucked from space and pulled through by a rescuer attached to a cable apparently moored to the
Mana
. As the tentacle made a final desperate lunge, it caught the free-floating end of the tube.

Almost simultaneously, the
Mana
accelerated, and the tube broke free from its hull, where it was sucked into the creature until the tentacle also hung rigid and still from its body.

“It ate too much. It ate too fast,” Uncle Joh chanted, no doubt quoting one of those ancient Terran aphorisms of which he was so fond.

Ariin smiled unpleasantly, and for a change it was not aimed at Khorii or Khiindi. “I see now the wisdom of Father’s kindness. Without protection from space, the creature freezes and dies.”

“We cannot actually be sure it’s dead,” Mother said. “But unless it is thawed, rehoused, and fed again, it should be moribund for all intents and purposes.”

Captain Bates rose from her seat in the lounge and headed for the bridge, saying, “Hail the
Mana
now, Joh. I want to have a couple of choice words with my clan daddy, Coco.” Khorii followed. The new screens were great, but they didn’t show what was happening on the bridge itself.

“This is the
Condor
calling the
Mana
and all crew and passengers,” Uncle Joh was saying into the com. “Everybody okay?”

Captain Coco stood behind Jaya, his heavily ringed hands on her shoulders as if he were a kindly uncle. Every tribally beaded braid was in place, and his expression was as cool as if he lost a ship to a ravenous monster every day.

“How good of you to ask,” he said suavely. “We all made the move to our new home before the destruction of our previous quarters reached—ah—critical mass. We were overcrowded anyway, which was to be expected, although the virulence of the creature that stowed away was not. We were heading for Corazon to lighten our load, but detected that it had similar problems. So fortunate for us that you happened to be waiting between us and the surface with this commodious ship. Asha, I love the décor of my new cabin.”

“You can’t keep the
Mana,
Coco,” Captain Bates told him. “We had a deal. You know how the clans despise a welcher.”

“They’ll understand. The
Mana
was the only available ship large enough to hold all of our people. Even our cabin boy Mikey the Horn agreed that we had no alternative, isn’t that right, lad?”

Mikaaye, looking shaken but relieved, peered around the captain, and with a feeble smile, said, “Arrrrgh.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” his mother asked from the
Balakiire.

“Occupational jargon, Melireenya,” Captain Bates told her. “An all-purpose kind of answer.”

“So I suppose you’re going to demand that we turn over the passengers to you now, eh?” Captain Coco said, as if sneering at the very idea.

“Not really, no,” Captain Bates said, giving Uncle Joh a wide-eyed look that was probably supposed to look innocent but, accompanied by a shrug, invited Uncle Joh to play along with her.

“No room,” Uncle Joh said with a shrug of his own. “This look like a passenger liner to you, bub?”

“Then you don’t care what we do with them? Aisha, don’t play games with me,” Coco scolded Captain Bates. “You are very attached to these kids. You were ready to lay down your life for them when last we met.”

“Wrong, Coco. I was ready to lay down your life for them,” Captain Bates corrected him. “And I will do it yet if any harm comes to them. You took command of their ship, now you’re responsible for them.”

“What am I supposed to do with them?” he demanded. “I have women and children enough already.”