Nisa started to stand. You’re a right bastard, Coco, she was thinking, but dared not say. Khorii sensed that the woman had not completely believed the captain would abandon the women and their children, whatever she said; but until that moment, he had not given any reason for her to think otherwise.
Captain Bates was less circumspect in her reaction to him. “You almost suffocated the wife and kids of two of your loyal followers just to see me again, Papa Coco? I’d be touched if I weren’t so revolted.”
Khorii looked from one to the other. She detected no family resemblance, despite Captain Bates’s addressing the man as “Papa.”
His appearance was presentable, even attractive, Khorii supposed, if one were human. But the only similarity he shared with her was that his dark hair and beard, worn long, were braided and beaded in the same manner that she had braided and beaded Jaya’s, Sesseli’s, and Moonmay’s hair and Mikaaye’s, Elviiz’s, and Khorii’s manes. Petit and Pauli had also worn the same style, Khorii realized belatedly, but because their hair was so dirty and matted, she had overlooked that detail.
“Asha! You do turn up in the strangest places, wench. Good of you to lead me to the treasure as well as bringing along a passport to more and a couple of spares.” He nodded toward the three Linyaari. “I’d no idea you were shipping with this lot or, of course, I would not have had to alarm Nisa, Cleda, and the kiddies by having them pose as families in distress. Mako, pass them the packet.”
One of the men had been pulling a large package behind him on a tether and he reeled it in and handed it to Nisa. She opened it and two adult enviro suits and several smaller ones with collapsible plas helmets tumbled out.
“You girls forgot those when you left,” Coco told her. “The oxygen tubes in those are full enough to get you and your broods back to the ship.”
Ignoring the seething women, he returned his attention to Captain Bates. “If I’d known our exalted Linyaari ambassadors were being chauffeured around the galaxy by my own clan daughter, I’d simply have asked nicely if you would pretty please send us one of your new playmates, along with our absent crewmen. I see by their dos you’ve already initiated these three into our clan. I’m sure they—especially Khorii, is it, who has been here before?—won’t mind showing us to the treasure.”
Khorii stood, handing the child to its mother, much to the displeasure of the siblings who had previously claimed her. “How did you get here, sir?” she asked politely. She saw no reason to respect the man, but she did respect the fact that he could probably kill them all or have them killed.
“Through the door. You saw me,” he said, as if she were developmentally challenged as well as freakish, which was what he was clearly thinking.
“Before that,” she said. “How did you get to the ballroom?”
“From my ship, the Black Mariah. Which is, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know, docked right next to the Mana, where my people can keep an eye on both ships for us.”
“If you have harmed those kids, Coco…” Captain Bates began.
“Kids? Of course, the crew would be children these days, wouldn’t it? I am so out of touch with the tragedies that have befallen the universe outside the clans. I must be losing my touch. If it had occurred to me that only children remained on board, we’d have boarded the ship already. Ah well, I had other things on my mind. The treasure? You were saying something about that, Khorii?”
“Yes, Captain Coco. What I was saying was that I doubt that anything you would find valuable here remains, at least where you can access it.”
“Ah, it would not be accessible, of course, because of the plague, but you are going to protect us—”
“That’s not what I mean, sir. Didn’t you find those hills in the docking bay odd?”
“That was a docking bay? I assumed that was the result of the deck having been destroyed when the ship was wrecked and that was the asteroid’s surface…”
Khorii shook her head. “And the corridor you came through to get here? When we arrived, there were the bodies of richly dressed and jeweled people floating around. We have a theory about what happened to them and to the other inorganic bits of the ship that seem to have disappeared. Most of your treasure would have been included in that, I think.”
“Maybe so, but we’re not giving up that easy.” He turned to one of his henchmen, “You, Bunco, put the extra fuel cartridge in the shuttle and take the women and kids back to the ship. Take Asha with you. You”—he pointed to Khorii—“come with me and Fori.”
“I’m coming with Khorii,” Mikaaye said.
“I am, too,” Ariin agreed.
Coco looked like he was going to say no, then changed his mind and brandished his weapon at them. “Okay, Khorii, you’ve been here before. You lead. If you get tricky, though, one of your friends could get hurt. Any sign of the plague there, you fix it before we get there, right?”
Khorii sighed and rolled her eyes. “That’s why I’m here in the first place. To see if there’s any more plague. I don’t care about your stupid treasure, and neither does anyone else.”
“Fine,” Coco said. “Because if you did, you’d be disappointed. I intend to keep it all.”
Khorii strode out the hatch to the ballroom, Mikaaye and Ariin behind her, followed by Coco and Fori.
Once back inside the tubelike corridor, she followed it as far as she could, until it sloped steeply upward. Since the Linyaari suits and Coco’s weren’t programmed for intercommunication, she pointed to where the bridge had been.
If not for the low gravity and the magnetic settings on their boots that allowed them to cling to the sides of the well-like passage, they would not have made it to the top. Once there, however, they found that although the bridge was damaged and the hatch open, it was still recognizable and some of the equipment seemed to be intact.
None of the crew members Khorii had seen on her first trip remained, not even the captain. Nor did she see any of the plague indicators. She pointed at the ship’s computer and looked questioningly at Coco. He waved his weapon toward it, indicating she should try it.
She did not expect that with the structural damage to the ship the computer would function, but it turned on at once. Coco shoved her aside and began pushing buttons with his heavy gloves on. Khorii remembered the location of the switch that the brave copilot had tried to flip to cause oxygen to flow back into the ventilation system. If they could breathe, parts of this search might be easier and quicker. The plague as a disease had vanished from the Blanca as it had from so many other places once the second stage of the alien life cycle began.
The pirate punched and punched, and Khorii felt murderous rage coming off of him in waves at his frustration. He wanted the location of the safe. All three Linyaari looked on anxiously as he met with failure after failure.
Then Khorii felt, rather than heard or actually saw, her sister shift her thinking slightly, and the security system welcomed Coco with open menus. He searched for the safe. It was located in the purser’s office.
Khorii had been there before and she was about to tap him on the shoulder and suggest that she lead the way again, but he had lathered himself into such a state that she didn’t want to startle him into using his weapon. Instead, as she watched, he found the security cameras.
The huge com screen lit up with a many-celled diagram of the ship. Many of the cells carried live feeds from the areas they represented. Many more, including the docking bay, did not.
The purser’s office had been empty the last time Khorii saw it. It was no more. From the diagram, Coco could see that it was just down the corridor off the bridge, clearly labeled as such. He turned to go, but Khorii caught a movement within the picture of the office and leaned over and clicked. Suddenly the screen was filled with a scene that caused Coco and his accomplice to stand back and watch with wide eyes.
Creatures that were roughly human-shaped, many still bearing a faded version of human coloring, crowded the room, which seemed to be missing a wall, the same wall where the safe had once been.
These forms, in addition to their human coloring, were metal gray, plasteel black or white, the brilliant orange of safety-painted equipment. There were perhaps forty of them, the remnants of former crew members, Khorii guessed.
They sank into the walls, deck, furniture, and equipment of the room, and that crumbled around them as she had seen the ships do. But, perhaps because they did not know they were observed, they speeded up the process. As they moved through the crumbling material, they left other matter behind, smoothing it as they passed it through and the next figure came after them. The furnishings and walls of the purser’s officer began to merge with a smooth tunnel like the others, growing forward as the wraithlike beings gradually lost their human form in the walls until, in their wake, there remained only the impressions where they had last stepped inside to feed and meld.
Without waiting for Khorii, Ariin, or Mikaaye, Coco and Fori bolted out of the hatch and jumped down the long well to the tunnel deck below, then bounded down it toward the docking bay.
Guess it’s still a work in progress,” Khorii told Ariin and Mikaaye when they had finally escaped through the tunnels and bounded over the hills and valleys that were probably the remains of the ships once docked in the Blanca’s bay. The most disturbing part of their escape was when they found that the tunnel connecting with the hatch had extended itself and now reached well beyond where the pile of debris had once been, as if stretching out like a long, hungry straw to suck up the two space vessels docked away from the bulk of what had been Captain Becker’s salvage cache.
Coco and a complete complement of henchmen were waiting for them, along with Captain Bates, whom Coco held on to awkwardly, one puffy space suit holding on to another. “He’s going to use us as human shields to take the Mana,” Captain Bates told her friends. “They tried while we were gone, but Moonmay and her grandpappy’s twelve-gauge persuaded them to wait until we were here to host them.”
Each of the Linyaari was grabbed by one of Coco’s men as they pushed their way through the Mana’s hatch.
Once aboard, Coco hustled everyone to the bridge, where the rest of the Mana’s crew met them.
Coco unsealed his helmet. Weapon at Captain Bates’s back, he pulled the awkward thing off his face, and said, “Lay down your gun, little girl, or I’ll shoot her dead.”
Captain Bates nodded. Moonmay put her weapon on the floor, then backed away. Coco kicked it back into the corridor, then he and his henchmen removed their helmets and allowed the Linyaari to remove theirs.
“Everybody on the deck, now!” Coco ordered. Reluctantly, the Mana’s crew obeyed. Elviiz wore a miserable look as Jaya helped him from his chair to the floor, afraid that the intruders would injure him. Khorii knew that her brother, who would have ordinarily been talking fast and full of ideas, was thoroughly demoralized at being unable to defend his friends with his former strength and intellect.
“You, too, Asha,” Coco ordered, nudging Captain Bates forward.
“Coco, you’ve become even harder than you used to be,” Captain Bates said, making herself comfortable with her legs crossed in front of her and drawing Moonmay under one arm and Sesseli under the other. “You never used to hold up kids.”
“Nobody else is left!” Coco said, running his free hand through his helmet-matted hair in exasperation. “With Petit and Pauli gone, I don’t have crew enough for the Black Mariah, much less to take this one in tow, but it seems a shame to waste a perfectly good hijacking opportunity, and with these handy horned kiddies on board, too. There’s a lot of wealth lying around loose in the universe right now, and not all of it has got alien tunnels running through it, but some of it might still have plague.”
“This is a lousy time to be greedy, Coco,” Captain Bates said. “There’s plenty of opportunity out there for able-bodied adults who aren’t in their dotage. Plenty of money to be made rebuilding things—maybe rebuilding them your way with you in charge. Let us go.”
Coco cocked his head to the side, and for a moment Khorii actually thought he might be considering the idea. Then he shook his head with an abrupt jerk. “Naw, my way’s easier.”
“Captain?” Ariin spoke up.
“What?” he demanded angrily.
“Captain, my sister and I are on our way home to see our parents. I’ve never met them before, and if Khorii can see that they are as free of the plague as everywhere else seems to be here, they can come out of quarantine.”
“Wouldn’t that be dandy!” Coco replied, clearly unmoved.
“But the thing is, she would also be reporting to our Council that the plague is gone and our people can come home. As I understand it, our people have been the ones maintaining order since the plague. With no more plague and with our people out of your systems, would you not have more freedom to ply your trade? Whereas if you take my sister, well, the thing is, sir, our people are nonviolent, but they are highly intelligent, extremely advanced, and very persistent. You may have heard of the Khleevi? Our people, led by mine and Khorii’s parents, were their downfall.”
“Yeah, well, your sister doesn’t know the plague is gone everywhere yet, does she? We need her to—”
Mikaaye interrupted. “All you need is someone to cleanse the place if there is plague, sir, and we do that automatically if one of us is along. You don’t need Khorii in particular.”
Coco started growling, but Mikaaye continued. “And well, the truth is, ever since I saw the vids on MOO, I have wanted to be a pirate. Not a violent one, of course. I would just like to have adventures with you. And I could keep your families safe and heal your men’s wounds, too.”
“Mikaaye, what would your mother say!” Captain Bates demanded.
Mikaaye, who had already seemed to have become a pirate in his own imagination, stared levelly back at her. “My mother would say that as long as this is my decision to join Captain Coco’s crew, she would let me choose my own path and not interfere, nor would she or any of our other people pursue me or my new friends.”
And privately he added, “And she would know that one of us among these people could possibly help turn them to being useful rather than destructive to others. It seems to me, from what we’ve seen here, that these worlds are in for much more trouble. I want to go, really. I want to see what it’s like.”
“And you know that my sister and I very badly want to see our parents again, don’t you?” Khorii asked.
This time she heard Ariin’s little suggestion to Coco. “It’s the perfect solution, and you want to take it.”
Coco and the others looked at each other as if trying to and failing to find anything wrong with the scheme. He looked out the viewport and his eyes opened wider in alarm. The others rose to their knees and turned to look, too. Below, the metallic junk heap was shifting and stirring as a tunnel advanced like a beckoning finger.
Coco jerked his head back toward the hatch, and his men began filing out. He nodded to Mikaaye to go ahead of him, saying, “Come along then, boy, and shake a leg before both our ships get taken.”