Marl 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.
How 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.
“Naturally they would have that sort of vessel,” he said. “It makes sense. They might have to transport all manner of liquid assets from place to place—drinking water, for instance, or liquid fuel for planet-bound vehicles.”
“The next step is to have our people check each of the Federation bases and outposts for such a vessel,” Maati said, and relayed the request via LaBoue. For three sleep periods as the Nheifaarir drove deeper into Federation space, they received a monotonous series of brief, negative responses. No tankers were located on any of the worlds or moons currently being visited by Linyaari, nor did any of their people recall seeing a vessel they could identify as a tanker.
“Do they look different than other Federation ships?” Ariin asked.
“Bigger,” Thariinye said. “They’d have to be larger. After all, if you’re transporting water, or the younger portion of an aquatic population, you could hardly dehydrate them, then just add water later.” Ariin laughed a little at his joke in spite of herself, but Maati gave him a pained smile while he snorted and guffawed and chortled and chuckled until his eyes ran, he was so tickled by his own cleverness.
“LaBoue Base, please access Federation database for images of tanker-class vessels and transmit,” Maati requested.
“We don’t really need all that, dearest,” Thariinye said. “We can extrapolate from what we’ve seen of their vessels and surmise that—”
“Perhaps you can extrapolate, Lifemate, or I can, but we need the image for those among our people who are less imaginatively gifted than ourselves. And don’t call me dearest, please, dearest. You only use that sort of endearment because you used to court so many females it taxed your memory to call each by her proper name.”
There followed a lengthy discussion of what he should call her, what she should call him, the impression of their relationship such endearments would evoke in outsiders, the impression other endearments would evoke in outsiders, the deeper psychological implications of addressing each other by such endearments and what each conveyed to the other and others about the person being addressed by such endearments.
Ariin found all of this only slightly less interesting than the questions the Friends had posed during their daily interrogation sessions. Her mind wandered, as did her gaze. There was nothing new to look at, and she could hear the argument even when her aunt and Thariinye switched to thought-talk. The only thing that changed was the size of the blip on the sensor screen. It grew bigger and bigger, unheeded by her contentious fellow crew members. It occurred to her that the kind of discussion the two were having was a device they employed to relieve the boredom of space travel. Still, some times were less boring than others.
The blip in the screen approaching the central light hypnotized Ariin to the point that when she looked up and beheld a vessel in the viewport, she was quite startled to see it seemingly hanging there in front of them.
“Excuse me!” she said out loud. “Do you think a tanker-class vessel looks anything like that?” and pointed to the ship, which seemed to be on a collision course with them.
Maati let out an exclamation and took evasive action, which rolled the Nheifaarir out of the other ship’s path. When they were clear, and all three of them could breathe again, Thariinye said, “Oh, I doubt it, dea—Ariin. That would be a huge coincidence, and besides, that ship looks much too—”
The com screen lit up and an image of a ship very much like the one they had almost crashed into appeared on the screen, the image morphing into various views that continued to look very similar to the reckless vessel.
Maati said, “It looks the same to me,” and, seeing a signal light indicating a waiting transmission, switched from remote relay to a local frequency.
A voice, mechanical-sounding in tone and yet with an underlying anxiety that was palpable to a telepath, even many months later, said, “Mayday, Mayday. This is niner two seven three zed Federation tanker-class vessel en route to Rushima with freshwater for plague survivors. Since our ship left base, sixteen crew members have died of plaguelike symptoms, including the entire command staff, our pilot, copilot, navigator, and engineering crew. Six others are exhibiting similar distress. Mayday, Mayday.”
Maati hailed them, but received no response except a repetition of the distress signal.
“Sad, but convenient,” Thariinye said.
“Yes,” Maati said, casting a sideways assessing glance at Ariin, “isn’t it?”
“I didn’t DO anything!” Ariin responded. “I can’t!”
“No, I suppose it is only luck that we encounter a ship we need en route to where the sister that you so desperately wish to see is.”
“YES!” Ariin said, but she didn’t think Maati believed her.
They boarded the ship, and that part was quite interesting, though Ariin was not allowed to board but was told to stay on the bridge of the Nheifaarir, while Maati and Thariinye checked for survivors. At least Ariin didn’t have to worry about the larger ship crashing into theirs, since the Linyaari ship locked itself magnetically to the hull of the tanker. Thariinye proved himself useful by detecting the code necessary to open the hatch to the docking bay. A bit of remote conversation between the ships’ computers, and the hatch irised open. Maati, having already attached her helmet, gauntlets, and gravity boots to her shipsuit, was out the Nheifaarir’s hatch before Thariinye left the bridge.
The helmets carried AV communication chips, so Ariin didn’t feel too left out as she watched while Maati and Thariinye boarded, floating into the ship at first. When Thariinye had closed the hatch, pointedly speaking the code aloud as he punched the keypad so Ariin could clearly see and hear everything he did, their boots touched the deck and Ariin saw Maati’s back and the brightly lit interior of the bay ahead of her on half the screen, while the other half of the screen transmitted the image from Maati’s helmet showing the bay, the room where the mechanics and other crew accessed it, and the corridors beyond.
“Someone must be alive!” Ariin said excitedly. “They turned on the lights for you.”
“Sorry, youngling,” Thariinye’s voice answered. “The power cells on these Federation ships last for years and the interiors stay illuminated except in designated sleep areas.”
They entered the room and found two bodies, both badly decomposed.
Maati removed her helmet. “Life support is still functioning, even though life seems to have ceased,” she said.
“How do you know?” Ariin asked.
“For one thing, the suit’s sensors tell us. And the bodies would not decompose without the presence of oxygen.”
“They could have decomposed before the oxygen supply ran out,” Thariinye said.
“Yes, but that’s not the case, according to the sensors. However, I’ve purified the air here so you can safely remove your helmet without smelling the deceased.”
“Please don’t!” Ariin said. “I want to see, too.”
“This is not pleasant, youngling,” Thariinye said, “not a fit experience for one so sheltered—”
Maati, however, replaced her helmet on her head, and said, “Sorry, Ariin, I forgot. Of course you want to know what’s going on, and it’s safer if you do. We’ll have to remove them if we need to purify something or if someone has survived, but otherwise you can monitor us throughout this phase of the mission.”
“But corpses, Maati—” Thariinye protested.
“If she is to participate in this mission, then she will be seeing some, I imagine. Are you bothered by the state of these humans, Ariin?”
Ariin peered closely at the screen. The human bodies did seem altered from their normal living state, with parts of their interiors visible, parts of the exteriors sloughing off, and their colors somewhat unusual. “I am not familiar enough with the usual form these creatures take to be unsettled by the alterations,” she said after thinking it over.
“True enough,” Thariinye said. “Perhaps the smell is the worst of it. It will be easier to work here if we designate a certain area for the dead and take them there.”
Maati’s helmet view nodded in agreement. Thariinye looked at an instrument panel and pointed. “Here. There is a cold locker off the infirmary. Many of the bodies may have been taken there already.”
“I doubt it,” Maati said. “If the living suspected the dead died of the plague, they wouldn’t have touched them. But I agree it is a good place. We are unlikely to need anything in the infirmary, since that is where humans keep their healing devices.”
They collected more bodies, a process Ariin was happy to have no part in. Time and again Maati and Thariinye lifted a human in the unattractive state they attained after death and bore the body down the corridor to the infirmary. After the first six, the cold locker could hold no more, so they laid the other bodies on examining tables and the floor. On the bridge, four people had died at their duty stations. The latrines were where most of the dead had congregated. Ariin didn’t see too much of this because Maati needed to remove her helmet to use her horn. The mess was only tolerable, she said, because their horns lessened the stench.
When the last of the remains were inside the infirmary, the internal temperature of the entire room reduced, and the hatch sealed behind Maati and Thariinye, the two located the sonic showers, cleansed themselves and their garments, and returned to the bridge of the tanker.
The com unit switched to full screen, and Maati spoke directly to Ariin. “According to the cargo manifest, the shipment of freshwater is still in the tank. If Rushima still needs it, the most practical course would be to deliver the water, then proceed with emptied tanks to LoiLoiKua. We’ll delay as little as possible, but there seems no other logical course. Rushima is by far the closest inhabited world, and if we triangulate back to LoiLoiKua and have the others waiting for us there, we should be able to effect the rescue within the next week.”
“How will the three of us fly two ships?” Ariin asked. “The tanker had a huge crew.”
“Ah, but the Nheifaarir has a powerful tractor beam,” Thariinye said. “We’ll tow the tanker to Rushima.”