Acorna’s Quest Read online

  ACORNA’S

  Quest

  ANNE MCCAFFREY and MARGARET BALL

  Preface

  A short recounting of events that took place prior to the opening of this book, events that are fully detailed in the novel Acorna, also by Anne McCaffrey and Margaret Ball

  The asteroid miners Calum Baird, Declan “Gill” Giloglie, and Rafik Nadezda were at the beginning of one of their long collecting journeys when they discovered, floating in space near the asteroid where they were working, a life-support escape pod of unknown origin and its single, sleeping occupant. The occupant was clearly humanoid yet not quite human; this was not as much of a problem for the miners as the fact that they had suddenly been saddled with the care of an infant—and a female one at that! Yet, having no desire to stop working a profitable asteroid belt to bring the child back to their base, they had no choice but to keep and care for her as best they could. In a few days, they loved her as they would a child of their own. Then the child’s unusual qualities became obvious—she could purify water and air, she learned with astonishing speed, and she matured even faster. Within the single year of their voyage she grew as tall and mature as an adolescent human girl.

  When they did finally have a large and valuable enough load to return to their base, they found that MME had been taken over by a larger company, Amalgamated Mining. This change in ownership, as well as Amalgamated’s desire to assume all control over the waif whom they had named Acorna, proved unacceptable to the three miners. When they and their “ward” fled, officials at Amalgamated pursued them with claims to ownership of the ship, which was the miners’ only means of livelihood—untrue claims which could nevertheless keep Gill, Rafik, and Calum tied up in Federation courts while their resources were drained by legal expenses. In desperation the miners turned to Rafik’s remarkable Uncle Hafiz, the wealthy and more than slightly shady owner of an interstellar financial empire.

  Hafiz arranged to swap the identifying beacon of their ship for one belonging to a wrecked vessel with Kezdet registration. Although the miners were uneasy about adopting the registration of a planetary system with which they had had some difficulty in the past—a small matter of disputed mining claims—they had no option but to accept the offer and pay part of the price Hafiz demanded—a substantial percentage of their profits from the last mining journey. The rest of his price, though, was unacceptable to them. A dedicated collector of rarities and one-of-a-kind treasures, Hafiz was fascinated by Acorna’s short horn and delighted by her precocious ability to understand the numbers he loved most—gambling odds. He demanded that the miners leave Acorna with him and clearly planned to keep them prisoner until they complied. Rafik outwitted his uncle in a series of clever maneuvers which freed them but left them on the run from even more enemies than they had had before: not only the minions of Amalgamated Mining, but also the Kezdet magnates who had caused the wreck of the ship whose identity they had “borrowed.” In addition, they had a third enemy they did not even know about. Hafiz Harakamian was so impressed by the way in which Rafik had outwitted him that he decided this nephew was quite clever and crooked enough to be a worthy heir to the Harakamian financial empire—in contrast to his worthless, bungling son, Tapha. Hearing about his father’s plans to disinherit him in favor of Rafik, Tapha decided that the only way to keep his inheritance was to find his cousin and kill him.

  After a precarious time spent moving from system to system, trying to sell off their payload without being caught by any of their numerous pursuers, the miners were finally captured by Pal Kendoro, a young man working for Delszaki Li. Li had been a friend of the real owner of the ship whose identity they had borrowed, and when his agents discovered the ship’s beacon again in use they assumed the miners had killed the owner and hijacked the ship.

  Although based on Kezdet, Delszaki Li was no friend of the Kezdet government and their quasi-military police, the so-called Guardians of the Peace. In fact, he had quietly funded an organization which worked to subvert the ruling class of Kezdet. The wealth of Kezdet’s few was based on the sufferings of the many; its low-tech mines and factories were served by unwanted children brought from nearby systems and kept in bondage by a semilegal system which treated them as debtors who must work off their debts. The factory owners saw to it that the children’s nominal wages were so low and the charges against them for food and shelter so high that they never “worked off” any debt, but remained in perpetual bondage. Few survived to adulthood, and those who did were so debilitated by years of poor food and crippling work that they had no energy to challenge the system that had enslaved them.

  Heir to a financial empire that rivaled that of Hafiz Harakamian, Delszaki Li had first freed his own interests of any connection with the Kezdet child-labor system, then had begun working secretly to help the enslaved children in any way he could. Although physically disabled by a wasting neurological disease which had almost totally paralyzed him, he was still brilliant and wealthy and was able to recruit others to his cause—among them Pal Kendoro and his two sisters, Mercy and Judit. The Kendoro siblings had been among the orphans brought to Kezdet for slave labor, but Judit had escaped by winning one of the scholarships established by Delszaki Li to encourage education among the bonded children, and by hard work she had soon earned enough to buy her young brother and sister free. Now grown, all three were determined to take whatever risks were necessary to free the children who remained in bondage.

  Their attempts to effect peaceful change by educating the enslaved children and helping them to demand better conditions were continually frustrated by the wealthy class that controlled Kezdet’s government, and by the time he encountered Acorna, Delszaki Li was on the verge of despair. It seemed as though nothing short of a revolution would free the children—and it would take a miracle to overthrow the solidly entrenched government of Kezdet.

  In Acorna, Delszaki Li thought that he recognized that miracle. Half-Chinese, he saw in her a kilin—the legendary unicorn of China, whose appearance is an omen of great and beneficent change. The fact that she came accompanied by three asteroid miners only increased his belief that she was sent by the heavens to bring good fortune to his enterprise, for it happened that he was in particular need of such expertise as they might supply. Before he met Acorna, Mr. Li had subtly acquired the mineral and mining rights to Kezdet’s three moons—Maganos, Saganos, and Tianos—seeing in them a possible place for the children he wished to rescue from Kezdet’s factories and mines. None of the planetary mining companies wanted to bother with the problems of building moon bases when it was so cheap to use child labor on…or rather below…the surface of the planet. But Li’s plan was ambitious as well as altruistic. He meant to use his great fortune to create mining bases on the three moons, where the children he freed could work part-time and be schooled part-time. With love and care and decent nourishment, upon reaching adulthood they should be ready to take over the mining bases and make them truly self-sufficient. But until he met the three asteroid miners and their “ward,” the mysterious unicorn girl, Acorna, Mr. Li’s plans had moved so slowly that he despaired of their coming to fruition in his lifetime. There were too many problems for one man to overcome: the entrenched opposition of the wealthy families of Kezdet, the bureaucratic obstacles which the Kezdet government threw in his path, and, most of all, the fears of the children who had been taught from arrival on Kezdet to flee strangers—even benevolent ones. When the factory owners would not admit to employing children, and the children themselves had been trained to hide, how could they be found and freed?

  Once it was clear that Calum, Gill, and Rafik had not caused harm to his friend, but had merely exchanged identities with the wrecked and derelict spacecra
ft in an effort to evade their own pursuers, Li recruited them as his allies and offered to adopt Acorna as his own ward. Recognizing that the child they had raised was now maturing to the point where she needed a permanent home and an education in the ways of “normal”—i.e., planetside—civilization, the miners agreed to help Mr. Li with his project. But when Acorna learned of the plight of Kezdet’s enslaved children, she precipitated a crisis that affected all of Delszaki Li’s slow and careful plans. Unable to wait and do nothing where she saw obvious cases of need, she became entangled in any number of projects that aroused the wrathful attention of Kezdet’s ruling class—rescuing one child from a brothel, another from begging on the streets, giving shoes to the barefoot slaves of a glass factory and using her horn to heal their wounds. The furor aroused by her actions forced the Child Liberation League to forgo their years of patience and incremental improvements in favor of a bold stroke for freedom.

  While the miners worked desperately to get the first of the planned moon bases in condition to receive children, and Delszaki Li fought Kezdet’s bureaucracy to get permission to open the base, Acorna solved the problem of finding and freeing the children. They might have been taught to flee strangers, but the mystical rumors which identified Acorna with the protective saints and goddesses of the children’s manifold belief systems ensured that she alone, of all the beings on Kezdet, was accepted by all of them. Believing that the silver-haired girl with the horn on her forehead was an earthly manifestation of Lukia of the Lights, or Epona, or Sita Ram, at her call they came willingly from mines and factories and followed her without fear. With the help of Calum, Rafik, and Gill to implement plans for a working mining base on Maganos Moon, and the sometimes overenthusiastic help of Acorna to reach out to the neglected children of Kezdet, Delszaki Li had the immense gratification of seeing his plan become a reality. He also saw that he had made many implacable enemies among those formerly wealthy who were now, as a result of his machinations, merely well-to-do. But it did not appear that this fact disturbed him particularly.

  By the time that Maganos Moon Base became a reality, the miners’ lives as well as Delszaki Li’s had been changed—as much by Pal Kendoro’s two sisters, Judit and Mercy, as by the implementation of the moon-base plan. Gill and Judit Kendoro had agreed to act as foster parents to the children brought to Maganos. Rafik’s cousin Tapha had died in an attempt to assassinate him, and Rafik felt it was his responsibility to work with his uncle Hafiz and learn the ins and outs of the Harakamian family businesses that he was now slated to inherit. As for Calum, he was as taken with the shy, quiet Mercy as Gill was with her more outgoing sister, but he felt that with the defection of his comrades it was even more his responsibility to help Acorna in the search for her home, especially as it was his mathematical analysis of the partial results given them by Dr. Zip that had narrowed down the possible location of her home planet to a searchable sector of space.

  Even Acorna was not romantically untouched; Pal Kendoro had fallen in love with her, and she was, like any young girl, flattered though distressed by his devotion…but unlike most young girls, she had to wonder whether their two species were even compatible! In any case she felt that she could not commit herself and her life to this young human while she still did not know where, or even if, others like her might exist.

  Where did she truly belong? And how much time did she have to find a suitable mate? In the three years that had elapsed since the establishment of Maganos Moon Base, she had matured from an adolescent into what appeared to be a fully adult female of her kind. Knowing nothing of her origins, she had no way to guess whether her body would stabilize or whether she would age and die as rapidly as she had matured.

  Although the search for her home world was of prime importance to Acorna and almost as much to Calum, Acorna’s other friends and guardians were reluctant to see them start out on such a long and potentially perilous journey. They had become used to protecting Acorna—not only from the enemies she and Delszaki Li had made on Kezdet, but from the genuinely ill who wanted access to her healing powers and the charlatans who thought to grow wealthy by exploiting her unusual capabilities.

  To protect her from wearing herself out in an attempt to heal everyone who might approach her, they had grown into the habit of shielding her from the world, screening her mail, and otherwise treating her as someone to be sheltered and hidden. Sometimes it seemed that it would take another revolution to free Acorna from her well-meaning friends, and as Acorna’s Quest begins, just such a revolution is about to take place….

  Contents

  PREFACE

  A short recounting of events that took place prior to the…

  ONE

  Acorna’s office in the Dehoney facility on…

  TWO

  The unused ’ponics tank was cold and…

  THREE

  House Harakamian received an…

  FOUR

  While the Starfarer vessel was orbiting…

  FIVE

  Calum tried desperately to send a Mayday…

  SIX

  Once she got over her shock at being…

  SEVEN

  “That’s Hoa,” Markel mouthed in…

  EIGHT

  Thariinye was too stunned to resist the…

  NINE

  Neeva began to tell the story of the…

  TEN

  “So, what do we do now?” Calum asked.

  ELEVEN

  Hafiz had never been so long out of…

  TWELVE

  It was nearly six days before Acorna started…

  THIRTEEN

  There she is…my ’Khornya…our…

  FOURTEEN

  If some of the Red Bracelets were offended…

  FIFTEEN

  The Kilumbembese mercenaries got back…

  SIXTEEN

  With the Khleevi mother ships disabled…

  GLOSSARY OF TERMS

  NOTES ON THE LINYAARI LANGUAGE

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  BOOKS IN THE ACORNA SERIES

  CREDITS

  COVER

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  One

  Maganos, Unified Federation Date 334.05.11

  Acorna’s office in the Dehoney facility on Maganos Moon Base was far too full for her comfort, and the meeting had been going on so long that she was developing an alluring fantasy about escaping the comfort of the base for the freedom of a good planetside gallop—any planet, anywhere, just so it offered her clean firm earth to run on and a horizon very far away. The need for earth and sky and open space was becoming almost an obsession for her as the meeting dragged on—just as dreaming up all these new ways to stop her and Calum from starting on their mission to find her species’ home world had become an obsession for Pal.

  She tried to compose herself, remembering that it was probably even worse for Calum. He considered finding her home world his first duty to her, even before his love for Mercy. The sooner Acorna could release Calum from that self-imposed quest, the sooner he and Mercy could marry. Acorna understood why some of her friends were reluctant to see the Acadecki depart. Gill and Judit were happily settled now, overseeing the care and education of the bondchildren still arriving to study and work at Maganos; and Rafik was presumably satisfied with his new career as assistant and heir apparent to his uncle Hafiz, the head of House Harakamian. But couldn’t they see that Calum needed to complete his quest for her home planet—and that she needed to find her own people before she could be content anywhere?

  Pal continued inexorably to read on from the notepad in his hand. “Supplies and munitions are still not completed. But right now”—and he looked directly at Acorna and then Calum, shaking his head sadly—“the worst problem is that of reinstalling and testing the Acadecki’s defense system. My people estimate it will take at least four weeks to be certain that the new defenses are accurately installed this time.”

  “Wait a bleeding minute!” Calum jum
ped to his feet. He and Acorna exchanged a glance that told her he felt sure this was yet another one of the many phony little delaying tactics thought up by Pal in collaboration with his sister Judit and Gill. Possibly even Delszaki Li had had a hand in this one; although the Acadecki had been supplied by Hafiz Harakamian, Mr. Li had offered to finance its refitting to make it the perfect vessel for this long-distance quest. Had that generous offer really been a sneaky way of seeing that Delszaki Li retained control over the ship and could drag out the refitting until they gave up the search?

  Calum shot a second, almost accusing glance at Mr. Li, who was floating quietly in the chair which allowed him such mobility as his increasing paralysis permitted. Some people had made the mistake—sometimes a fatal mistake—of underestimating Delszaki Li because of his great age and the debilitating neurological disease which had all but paralyzed him. Not Calum! He was all too aware of the clear, penetrating mind encased in that ancient body. Delszaki Li was a force to be reckoned with—benevolent, powerful, astute, and, Calum thought wryly, about as straightforward as a spiral staircase in an Escher print.