Third Watch Read online

  THIRD WATCH

  Acorna’s Children

  ANNE McCAFFREY and ELIZABETH ANN SCARBOROUGH

  To Liz O’Connell and Frieda Bates

  with thanks and affection

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Khorii left the message on Elviiz’s portable com—the one he…

  Chapter 2

  Khorii bid farewell to Akasa, who pointed out the way…

  Chapter 3

  There he is!” Grimalkin in unicorn guise cried, galloping away…

  Chapter 4

  To think she had imagined that having a sister would…

  Chapter 5

  Grimalkin dismissed the puzzling disappearance of Pircifir and Ariin and…

  Chapter 6

  Grimalkin and Pircifir did not actually stick around for the…

  Chapter 7

  It’s okay now, Pebar. The ship is gone,” Sileg reported…

  Chapter 8

  Khorii was tired enough to sleep despite captivity, the cage,…

  Chapter 9

  The snake allowed Khorii to carry the alien disk. It…

  Chapter 10

  Never send a Friend or a cat to do a…

  Chapter 11

  We have to save them,” Khorii told her sister. “That’s…

  Chapter 12

  Now I want to go home, to our own time.

  Chapter 13

  Just so he knew they really wanted him, they asked…

  Chapter 14

  At least Ariin can’t blame me for the plague, Grimalkin…

  Chapter 15

  I don’t imagine it’s worthwhile to try to find this…

  Chapter 16

  We’ll speak to Uncle Hafiz about it,” Khorii said to…

  Chapter 17

  Grimalkin faced an unexpected dilemma. Actually, he should have expected…

  Chapter 18

  Once they entered what had been, until recently, Federation space,…

  Chapter 19

  Accelerating,” Elviiz said, but though he pushed the engines until…

  Chapter 20

  Grimalkin didn’t need Pircifir’s ship in order to leave Vhiliinyar.

  Chapter 21

  The coordinates Odus had provided led Grimalkin to a system…

  Chapter 22

  Ariin had no idea how to use the information she’d…

  Chapter 23

  Odussia, red and gold with veins and plains of blue-green,…

  Chapter 24

  Two of you started this mess,” Ariin harangued the elder…

  Chapter 25

  Khorii told their friends first, Abuelita, Jalonzo, and the throng…

  Chapter 26

  Maak was about to take Khindii’s shiny prey from her…

  Glossary of Terms and Proper Names in the Acorna Universe

  Brief Notes on the Linyaari Language

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  Other Books by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  Credits

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Now and Then

  Now

  Elviiz, with all of the time changes we’ve been through during our journey and the disappointment of not being able to get Mother and Father out of quarantine, we cannot sleep a wink. So we decided to go visit the LoiLoiKuans and see how they’re settling in to their new home in our ocean with the sii-Linyaari. Please tell everyone so they won’t worry. We’ll be back before you know it.

  Love,

  Khorii, Ariin, and Khiindi, too. (You know how he is about fish.)

  Khorii left the message on Elviiz’s portable com—the one he needed now that he was fully organic and missing his critical android modifications.

  Then, with the moons shining down on them, she and her twin walked down to the pearl-crested sea, Ariin carrying Khiindi.

  “He’ll walk if you want to put him down,” Khorii told her twin. “We could stop to graze on the way. It would make our story more believable.”

  Ariin frowned. “He really does need to come with us, and he’s so unpredictable.”

  Khiindi took matters into his own paws by hopping down, waving his tail as if beckoning them to graze. The girls assumed grazing posture and bent to taste the tantalizing grasses growing in the meadows sloping down to the sea. Their horns, a single shining gold one in the center of each of their foreheads, glowed softly in the silver moonlight.

  When they were done, Khiindi dodged Ariin’s questing hands and trotted ahead, just out of reach. The cat was not about to let the young Linyaari use his crono to spirit Khorii off to the distant past and get her into who knew what kind of trouble without him there to protect her. Nor, for that matter, was he going to miss a chance to escape the little kitty form into which he’d been frozen by his fellow shape shifters, all because of a very slight miscalculation during a mission with which they’d once entrusted him. If they insisted on continuing to hold their grudge, he would be better able to act freely back in the time before the monstrous Khleevi had destroyed the large time-traveling device. The buglike aliens wrecked everything they touched, and they had wreaked havoc not just with the time machine, but with the whole planet. The ecological damage had been repaired, but the time machine was no longer functional.

  And, of course, the fish were lovely, too. The LoiLoiKuans saw the three of them approach. The younger ones, well trained by Khiindi back in the days when they were pool pupils, or poopuus, at the school on Maganos Moonbase, flipped a sleek, fat fish out of the water directly into his mouth. Good. Delicious. They had not forgotten the tribute due to their patron cat.

  He barely had time to devour it and no time at all for a good wash and brushup before the twins stepped into the water. Khiindi jumped in after them. Makahomian Temple Cats, his lineage in more ways than one, did not mind a nice swim now and then. However, he remembered the first time he had met the aquatic dwellers, after suffering at the hands of that brat Marl Fidd, who had hurt him badly, then thrown him into the pool back at Maganos. The large brown LoiLoiKuans with their fused legs and flippered feet swam up to surround them. They were joined by their watery hosts, the sii-Linyaari, who were as indigenous to Vhiliinyar as anybody was.

  Aari, the twins’ father, had transplanted the sii-Linyaari to the current time from a previous one in which they were about to become extinct. They were not an attractive species, at least, not to anyone except others of their kind. They were examples of a failed attempt on the part of Khiindi’s people, known to the Linyaari and the Ancestors as the Friends, to create the Linyaari race. Like Khorii and the rest of her race, the sii-Linyaari also had horns—many little ones growing all over their heads. Some had long, waving hair, some had none. They had fish tails instead of legs, and glistening scales, and spoke only in a bubble-accented thought-talk.

  Although they had a reputation for being difficult and even hostile back in their original time, Khiindi figured it probably had a lot to do with their rejection by their parent creators. These days, they were quite happy to see him. If they knew that Khiindi was one of the Friends who had made them, they apparently thought his being a permanent pussycat was punishment enough because they were as friendly to him as they were to the girls and their new guests, the LoiLoiKuans.

  “Greetings, everyone,” Khorii said. “We thought you might like your waters freshened up a bit. Fancy a race to the island?”

  All of the sea people were a bit overstimulated from the events of the previous day, when two tanks of LoiLoiKuans had been decanted into the surface-connected inland sea of Vhiliinyar. A nice sea race was apparently just their idea of a good time.

  Popping b
ubbles and other expressions of assent rose from the water as bodies dipped, tails flipped, and the sea peoples left the twins and Khiindi wallowing in their wake.

  “Now!” Ariin said. Khorii held on to her arm and took the liberty of grabbing Khiindi’s tail. And suddenly, they were then.

  Then

  One moment they were in the water, the next they were inside a room bursting with fancy flowing robes framing a huge mirror and a chest brimming with jewels and cosmetics. Ariin looked around and nodded.

  “Where are we?” Khorii asked.

  “Akasa’s wardrobe. That’s where I found this,” Ariin said, holding up her wrist to show off the crono, which dangled loosely on her small arm. “No more questions now. It’s complicated. I need to get us back to an earlier time, before we were born.”

  “This is before I was born?” Khorii asked.

  “Right. This thing seems to default to the time and place it was before starting the next time sequence, but we’re not ready to be here yet. I have something to show you a little farther back.”

  She gave Khiindi a look that was remarkable for its wickedness in one so young. He knew what she intended then, but it fit in well with his own wishes so he sent her the desired information. He could, of course, still converse without resorting to Linyaari, Standard, Makahomian, or even Cat. Nor did he require the cruder forms of thought-talk. He simply formed a picture of the time they needed to go. Back before he had brought Ariin’s egg to his people. Back before he had first befriended her father, Aari. Back when he could walk on two legs. Ariin recklessly tapped the crono without even looking at it, allowing his image to flow from her to the device. He picked the time, but she picked the place.

  They stepped out of the water again, onto the grassy banks. Behind them the sii-Linyaari dived and fished, or sunned on the island just offshore. Before them, a meadow full of wildflowers, insects, and small animals stretched up to the mountains. Over the mountain peaks shone Vhiliinyar’s two moons, one of which was to become the Moon of Opportunity. It glowed with the fullness and benevolence of Hafiz Harakamian’s face gazing fondly at the profit balance on his ledger. The other moon was a mere crescent-shaped sliver of light.

  Reflecting the light of both moons were the white and shining coats of the creatures hunted on their homeworld for the healing, purifying, and supposedly aphrodisiacal properties of their spiraling, golden, opalescent horns. There they were called unicorns, for obvious reasons. Here they were simply the Others, who were not the same as the Friends, although their kind varied. The Others were beautiful, useful, and innocent beings with whom the habitually self-centered Friends had become uncharacteristically enchanted. Usually, the Friends were the ones who did the enchanting, chiefly of themselves, when they beheld their own reflections. If they didn’t like what they saw, they simply changed it to something more pleasing.

  Most had a bipedal and humanoid form that generally alternated with a dominant alter form. Khiindi’s own dominant alter form had always been feline, though not always or even usually a mere moggy.

  “We must hide Khiindi here until we need him,” Ariin told Khorii. “He has enemies in this time, and even more enemies later on, when we’re going. We’ll have a use for him soon, but we have to lay some groundwork first.”

  Khorii bent and picked the cat up, laying his head against her neck, his front paws on her shoulder, his magnificent, fluffy tail curled around her forearm. “Khiindi-cat, you know the Ancestors in our time. These are their ancestors. They are very good creatures and as you know, they like cats. You’ll be safe here with them. There are fish in the sea and other creatures for you to eat in the meadows. We’ll return for you before you know it, if I understand this timing thing correctly.”

  Khiindi clung to her with every available claw. He knew Khorii would not abandon him willingly, but he had no idea what Ariin was up to. That one had a positively ka-Linyaari ability to conceal her thoughts. He also knew she meant to repay him for bringing her to be studied by his kind as their experiments in creating the Linyaari race continued. They knew they had created the Linyaari. They just didn’t know how or when. Of all of them, Grimalkin was, if not the only empath, certainly the one in whom the quality was best developed. He had imagined he would be around during Ariin’s youth to see that she was treated well and reasonably happy. Instead, his people, who were angry because he had brought only one of Acorna’s embryonic twins instead of both, took away his crono and froze him in little cat form for all time, the first part of which he was to serve as Khorii’s guardian and friend. This had left Ariin out in the cold, an object of pity and even scorn.

  She hadn’t taken it well at all.

  Khorii unhooked him and tried to set him down, but he clung to her arm. When she shook him off and tried to step back, he clung to her leg, even wrapping his tail around her ankle. Finally, Ariin grabbed him around his sizeable girth and threw him into the middle of the unicorn herd, to be surrounded by white-bearded muzzles and long, slender white legs. The unicorns parted enough that he zipped out from among them to catch up with the girls, but they had already vanished.

  He meowed his frustration, and one of the ancestresses touched him gently with her horn. “Poor little fellow. Stay with us. They’ll be back. You’re welcome here. You’re sort of cute. What are you anyway?”

  The horn touch made Khiindi feel even warmer and fuzzier than he actually was, which was saying something. He purred and gazed up at her with wide, adoring kitty cat eyes, his specialty. Oh well, gather ye allies while ye may.

  Khorii and Ariin were back in the closet again. “I hope you had a good reason for that, Ariin,” Khorii said. “That was kind of mean. Poor Khiindi was really upset and he doesn’t like to be tossed around.”

  “We can’t have him tagging along while we’re going undercover,” Ariin replied. “You do want to get to the bottom of this alien threat, don’t you? And release Mother and Father from quarantine?”

  “Of course, but I don’t understand the plan or what Khiindi has to do with it,” Khorii replied. “You insisted we bring him along and then the first thing you do is abandon him.”

  “The first part of the plan depends on us being interchangeable, so that the Friends think we’re both me,” Ariin explained. “That way, while you are doing what they expect me to do, I can try to get people to tell me what we need to know.”

  “What is it that we need to know? And what makes you think I can’t gather information as well as you can?” Khorii demanded.

  “I know this time better than you do,” Ariin said. “I know these people and how they act and what they want. I know what we’re looking for and—be patient, I’ll tell you—and I know where to look and how to ask. You’re much too polite.”

  “No, I’m not! I can be very rude if it helps my family. Our family. I can be—”

  “That’s not what I mean,” Ariin said, trying to be patient.

  “Well, what do you mean?”

  “I don’t like to say.”

  “Then I don’t like this plan,” Khorii said. “I want to go home. I haven’t seen Mother and Father in months, and I’m worried about Elviiz.”

  “You needn’t be. We’ll be back before they know we’ve gone. We can be back before Elviiz wakes up and reads your note even. It will be fine. Trust me.”

  “Why should I?” Khorii asked. “You don’t even trust me enough to let me help find out the information we came for.”

  “Yes, I do. But I’m better at it than you. If you keep the Friends busy, I can move around more freely and probe a little. If we’re clever, they’ll never find out there are two of us.”

  “Why shouldn’t they know that?” Khorii asked. “These are the Friends who saved the Ancestors. They’re not evil or anything.”

  “If they know we’re both here, they’ll want to interrogate and experiment on both of us,” Ariin told her.

  “We could just tell them we can’t do that right now, but will be back later to answer their q
uestions.”

  Ariin gave an internal groan. “Look, Khorii, you know how you can see plague indicators? It’s your special talent? Well, I can—persuade—people to think about something I want them to without them realizing I’m doing it. That’s my special talent.”

  “That’s not very nice. It’s kind of sneaky, isn’t it?”

  “I was afraid you’d feel that way,” Ariin said. “That’s why I didn’t want to tell you. You grew up among our people, but everybody isn’t so nice. Like that Captain Coco.”

  “I thought you were pushing him, but I was surprised when it worked,” Khorii said, remembering how unexpectedly reasonable the pirate chieftain had been. “I gave him credit for seeing how sensible Mikaaye’s solution was.”

  “People like that rarely care about how sensible things are. They just care about getting what they want. Speaking of which, Akasa is awake now. I’m going to hide. You be me.”

  “But won’t they know?”

  “It’s not like we can’t thought-talk,” Ariin replied, dismissing her fears. “If they wonder why I’m so slow all of a sudden, tell them you’re getting in touch with your inner self. They like anything that refers back to themselves, so they’ll think it’s perfectly natural that you do, too.”

  The door of the wardrobe opened and a beautiful, human-looking female with long rainbow-colored curling hair stood in the opening. She had large, gemlike eyes that glittered from amethyst to sapphire blue as she looked at Khorii. “Narhii, you stupid child, what have you been doing in here? You’ve washed off all of the cosmetics I helped you with. I thought you wanted to wear some of my robes and jewels?”