The Unicorn Girl Read online

  ACORNA

  The Unicorn Girl

  ANNE MCCAFFREY and MARGARET BALL

  Contents

  PREFACE

  The space/time coordinate system…

  Chapter ONE

  At first Gill assumed it was just…

  Chapter TWO

  Purely superficial changes,” Gill…

  Chapter THREE

  Acorna was very nervous for the…

  Chapter FOUR

  Acorna woke to the dawn-chirping…

  Chapter FIVE

  Hey, Smirnoff?” Ed Minkus called to his…

  Chapter SIX

  Delszaki Li and Judit Kendoro…

  Chapter SEVEN

  In the end, it was Judit who conveyed…

  Chapter EIGHT

  Wake up, Jana!” Somebody was shaking…

  Chapter NINE

  No one had yet missed Acorna when…

  Chapter TEN

  Tapha gave his borrowed dock worker’s…

  Chapter ELEVEN

  Brantley Geram, the subcontractor in charge…

  Chapter TWELVE

  The team of four returned from Maganos…

  Chapter THIRTEEN

  As good as his word,” Judit said…

  About the Authors

  Books in the Acorna Series

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface

  The space/time coordinate system they used has no relationship to Earth, our sun, the Milky Way, or any other point of reference we could use to find our way around, and in any coordinate system we use, they’re so far off the edge of the chart that nobody has ever contemplated going there, even with the proton drive. So let’s just say that they were somewhere between the far side of nowhere and the near side of here when their time and space ran out, and what started as a pleasure cruise ship turned into a death chamber. They are like us in many ways besides appearance. They didn’t want to die if they could possibly avoid it; if they couldn’t live, then at least they wanted to die with dignity and peace instead of in a Khlevii torture cell; and they would happily have thrown away life, dignity and everything else to save their youngling, who didn’t even know what was about to happen to them.

  And they had time to talk; what amounted to several hours by our reckoning, while the Khlevii ship closed in on the little cruiser that had run out of places to flee to.

  “We could offer to surrender if they’d spare her,” she said, looking at the net where their youngling curled asleep. It was a mercy that she slept so well; she talked well enough that they’d have had trouble disguising their meaning from her if she were awake.

  “They make no terms,” he said. “They never have.”

  “Why do they hate us so?”

  “I don’t know that they do hate,” he said. “Nobody knows what they feel. They are not like us, and we can’t ascribe our emotions to them. All we know is what they do.”

  And they both fell silent for a while, unwilling to speak of what the Khlevii did to prisoners of other races. No one had ever survived capture by the Khlevii, but the images of what happened after capture were broadcast by the Khlevii, in full three-D reproduction, with sound and color. Was it a calculated ploy to terrorize, or simply a display of triumph, as members of a more humanoid race might display the enemy’s flag or captured ships? No one knew, because the same things had happened to the diplomat-linguists who went under sign of peace to make a treaty with the Khlevii.

  “Cruel…” she breathed after a long while watching their sleeping child.

  “Their only mercy,” he said, “is that they have already let us know to expect no mercy. It won’t happen to us, because we won’t be alive when they reach here.”

  Since the third broadcast of Khlevii prisoner-torture, shortly after the beginning of what history might know as the Khlevii Invasion, no ship of their people had gone anywhere without certain necessary supplies. The only prisoners taken were those caught away from a ship or without time to use those supplies. The others were always far beyond the reach of pain when the Khlevii caught up with their bodies.

  “But I don’t like to go without striking even one blow,” he said, “so I have made certain modifications to our engines. There are some privileges to being director of Weapons Development; this system is so recently designed that even the Fleet has not yet been fitted with it.”

  His hands were not quite as flexible as ours, but the fingers worked well enough to key in the commands that would activate those modifications; commands too dangerous to be activated by the usual voice-control system.

  “When anything of a mass equal to or greater than ours approaches within this radius,” he told her, pointing at the glowing sphere that now surrounded their ship in the display field, “the dimensional space around us both will warp, change, decompose until all the matter within this sphere is compressed to a single point. They will never know what happened to us or to their own boarding craft.” His lips tightened. “We’ve learned that they don’t fear death; perhaps a mystery will frighten them somewhat more.”

  “What happens to the space around us when the compression effect is triggered?”

  “No one knows. It’s not something you’d want to test planet side or from a close observation point. All we know is that whatever exists within the sphere is destroyed as if it had never been.”

  She said nothing, but looked at the baby. The pupils of her eyes narrowed to vertical slits.

  “It won’t hurt her,” he said gently, seeing and understanding her grief. “We’ll take the abaanye now, and give her some in her bottle. I’ll have to wake her to feed her, but she’ll go to sleep afterwards and so will we. That’s all it is, you know: going to sleep.”

  “I don’t mind for us,” she said, which was a lie, but a loving one. “But she is just beginning to live. Isn’t there some way we could give her a chance? If we cast her out in a survival pod—”

  “If we did it now, they’d see and intercept it,” he said. “Do you want to think about what would happen then?”

  “Then do it when the ship explodes!” she cried. “Do it when we’re all dying! Can’t you rig those controls to eject the pod just before they reach the radius, so that they won’t have a chance to change course and take her?”

  “For what? So that she can spend her last hours alone and scared in a survival pod? Better to let her go to sleep here in your arms and never wake up.”

  “Give her enough to make her sleep, yes,” she said. She could almost feel her wits becoming sharper in these last moments. “Make her sleep for more hours than the pod has air. If only she were old enough to…well, she isn’t and that’s that. If the air runs out, she’ll die without waking. But some of our people might find her first. They might have heard our last distress signals. They might be looking. Give her that chance!”

  She held the baby and fed her the bitter abaanye mixed with sweetened milk to make it palatable, and rocked her in her arms, and kissed her face and hands and soft tummy and little kicking feet until the kicking slowly stopped, and the baby gurgled once and breathed deeply in and out, and then lay quite limp and barely breathing in her mother’s arms.

  “Do you have to put her in the pod now?” she cried when he stooped over them. “Let me hold her a little longer—just a little longer.”

  “I won’t take the abaanye until I see her safely stowed,” he said. “I’ve programmed the ship to launch the pod as close to the time of detonation as I dare.” Too close, he thought, really; the pod would almost certainly be within the radius when the Khlevii approached, to be destroyed with them in the explosive transformation of local space. But there was no need to tell her that. He would let h
er drink the abaanye and go to sleep believing that their baby had that one chance of living.

  She willed her pupils to widen into an expression of calm content while he was closing the pod and arming it to eject on command.

  “Is all complete?” she asked when he finished.

  “Yes.”

  She managed a smile, and handed him a tube of sparkling red liquid. “I’ve mixed a very special drink for us,” she said. “Most of it is the same vintage as the wine we drank on our vows-day.”

  He loved her more in that moment, it seemed to him, than ever he had in the days when they thought they had long years of life together before them.

  “Then let us renew our vows,” he said.

  One

  At first Gill assumed it was just another bit of space debris, winking as it turned around its own axis and sending bright flashes of reflected light down where they were placing the cable around AS-64-B1.3. But something about it seemed wrong to him, and he raised the question when they were back inside the Khedive.

  “It is too bright to have been in space very long,” Rafik pointed out. His slender brown fingers danced over the console before him; he read half a dozen screens at once and translated their glowing, multicolored lines into voice commands to the external sensor system.

  “What d’you mean, too bright?” Gill demanded. “Stars are bright, and most of them have been around a good while.”

  Rafik’s black brows lifted and he nodded at Calum.

  “But the sensors tell us this is metal, and too smooth,” Calum said. “As usual, you’re thinking with the Viking-ancestor part of what we laughingly refer to as your brain, Declan Giloglie the Third. Would it not be pitted from minor collisions if it had been in this asteroid belt more than a matter of hours? And if it has not been in this part of space for more than a few hours, where did it come from?”

  “Conundrums, is it? I’ll leave the solving of them to you,” Gill said with good humor. “I am but a simple metallurgic engineer, a horny-handed son of the soil.”

  “More like a son of the asteroidal regolith,” Rafik suggested. “Not that this particular asteroid offers much; we’re going to have to break up the surface with the auger before there’s any point in lowering the magnetic rake…Ah! Got a fix on it.” An oval shape, regularly indented along one edge, appeared on the central screen. “Now what can the sensors tell us about this little mystery?”

  “It looks like a pea pod,” Gill said.

  “It does that,” Calum agreed. “The question is, what sort of peas, and do we want to harvest them, or send them gently on their way? There’ve not been any recent diplomatic disagreements in this sector, have there?”

  “None that would inspire the placing of mines,” Gill said, “and that’s not like any space mine I ever saw. Besides, only an idiot would send a space mine floating into an asteroid belt where there’s no telling what might set it off and whose side might be worst injured.”

  “High intelligence,” Rafik murmured, “is not inevitably an attribute of those who pursue diplomacy by other means…close reading,” he commanded the console. “All bandwidths…well, well. Interesting.”

  “What?”

  “Unless I’m mistaken…” Rafik paused. “Names of the Three Prophets! I must be mistaken. It’s not large enough…and there’s no scheduled traffic through this sector…Calum, what do you make of these sensor readings?”

  Calum leaned over the panel. His sandy lashes blinked several times, rapidly, as he absorbed and interpreted the changing colors of the display. “You’re not mistaken,” he said.

  “Would you two kindly share the great insight?” Gill demanded.

  Calum straightened and looked up at Gill. “Your peas,” he said, “are alive. And given the size of the pod—too small for any recycling life-support system—the signal it’s broadcasting can only be a distress call, though it’s like no code I’ve ever heard before.”

  “Can we capture it?”

  “We’ll have to, shan’t we? Let’s hope—ah, good. I don’t recognize the alloy, but it’s definitely ferrous. The magnetic attractors should be able to latch on—easy, now,” Rafik admonished the machinery he was setting in action, “we don’t want to jostle it, do we? Contents fragile. Handle with care, and all that…. Very nice,” he murmured as the pod came to rest in an empty cargo bay.

  “Complimenting your own delicate hands?” Calum asked caustically.

  “The ship, my friend, the Khedive. She’s done a fine gentle job of harvesting our pea pod; now to bring it in and open it.”

  There were no identification markings that any of them could read on the “pea pod,” but a series of long scrolling lines might, Calum surmised, have been some sort of alien script.

  “Alien, of course,” Rafik murmured. “All the generations of the Expansion, all these stars mapped and planets settled, and we’re to be the first to discover a sapient alien race…I don’t think. It’s decoration, or it’s a script none of us happens to know, which is just barely possible, I think you’ll agree?”

  “Barely,” Calum agreed, with no echo of Rafik’s irony in his voice. “But it’s not Cyrillic or Neo-Grek or Romaic or TriLat or anything else I can name…so what is it?”

  “Perhaps,” Rafik suggested, “the peas will tell us.” He ran delicate fingers over the incised carvings and the scalloped edges of the pod. Hermetically sealed, of a size to hold one adult human body, it might have been a coffin rather than a life-support module…but the ship’s sensors had picked up that distress signal, and the signs of life within the pod. And the means of opening, when he found it, was as simple and elegant as the rest of the design; simply a matter of matching the first three fingers of each hand with the pair of triple oval depressions in the center of the pod.

  “Hold it,” Calum said. “Better suit up and open it in the air lock. We’ve no idea what sort of atmosphere this thing breathes.”

  Gill frowned. “We could kill it by opening it. Isn’t there some way to test what’s in there?”

  “Not without opening it,” Calum said brightly. “Look, Gill, whatever is in there may not be alive anyway—and if it is, surely it won’t last forever in a hermetically sealed environment. It’ll have to take its chances.”

  The men looked at each other, shrugged, and donned their working gear before moving themselves and the pod into the airlock.

  “Well, Calum,” Rafik said in an oddly strangled voice, seconds after the lid swung open, “you were half right, it seems. Not an adult human, at any rate.”

  Calum and Gill bent over the pod to inspect the sleeping youngling revealed when it opened.

  “What species is it?” Gill asked.

  “Sweet little thing, isn’t she?” Gill said in such a soppy tone that both Rafik and Calum gave him an odd look.

  “How’d you arrive at the sex of it?” Rafik wanted to know.

  “She looks feminine!”

  They all admitted to that impression of the little creature which lay on her side, one hand curled into a fist and thrust against her mouth in a fairly common gesture of solace. A fluff of silvery hair curled down onto her forehead and coiled down to the shoulder blades, half obscuring the pale, delicate face.

  Even as they watched, she stirred, opened her eyes and groggily tried to sit up. “Avvvi,” she wailed. “Avvvi!”

  “We’re scaring the poor little thing,” Gill said. “Okay, obviously she’s an oxygen breather like us, let’s get out of the suits and take her into the ship so she can see we’re not metal monsters.”

  Transferring the pod and its contents back into the ship was an awkward business. The “poor little thing” wailed piteously each time she was tilted in the pod.

  “Poor bairn!” Gill exclaimed when they set her down again. The movement of the pod had dislodged the silvery curls over her forehead, showing a lump over an inch in diameter in the center of her forehead, halfway between the hairline and the silver brows. “How did that happen? This thing’
s cushioned well enough, and Rafik drew it into the bay as gently as a basket of eggs and not one of them cracked.”

  “I think it’s congenital,” Rafik said. “It’s not the only deformity. Get a good look at her hands and feet.”

  Now that he called their attention to them, the other two saw that the fingers of the hands were stiff, lacking one of the joints that gave their own hands such flexibility. And the little bare feet ended in double toes, larger and thicker than normal toes, and pointed at an odd angle.

  “Avvvi, avvvi!” the youngling demanded, louder. Her eyes looked strange—almost changing shape—but she didn’t cry.

  “Maybe it’s not a deformity at all,” Calum suggested.

  “Still looking for your intelligent aliens?” Rafik teased.

  “Why not? She’s physically different from us, we don’t recognize the writing on the pod, and can either of you tell me what an ‘avvvi’ is?”

  Gill stooped and lifted the youngling out of the life-support pod. She looked like a fragile doll between his big hands, and she shrieked in terror as he swung her up to shoulder height, then grabbed at his curly red beard and clung for dear life.

  “Perfectly obvious,” he said, rubbing the child’s back with one large hand. “There, there, acushla, you’re safe here, I’ll not let you go…. Whatever the language,” he said, “‘avvi’ has to be her word for ‘Mama.’” His blue eyes traveled from the pod to Rafik and Calum. “And in the absence of ‘avvi,’ gentlemen,” he said, “it seems that we’re elected.”

  Once she had found that Gill’s beard was soft and tickled her face and that his big hands were gentle, she calmed down in his arms. Figuring she might be at least thirsty from being in the pod for who knew how long, they experimented by offering her water. She had teeth. The cup would forever bear the mark of them on its rim. She made a grimace, at least that’s what Gill said it was, at the first taste of the water, but she was too dehydrated not to accept it. Meat she spat out instantly and she was unenthusiastic about crackers and bread. Alarmed that what was basic to their diet was not acceptable, Calum rushed down into the ’ponics section of the life-support module and gathered up a variety of leafy greens. She grabbed the lettuce and crammed it into her mouth, reaching for the chard, which she nibbled more delicately before going on to the carrot and the radish. When she had had enough to eat, she wiggled out of Gill’s arms and toddled off—right to the nearest interesting instrument panel and set a danger sensor blaring before Gill swooped her out of harm’s way and Calum corrected her alteration.