Second Wave Read online

  Thunder boomed, rattling the windows in their panes, followed closely by a dazzling crack of forked lightning that briefly illuminated the campus and courtyard. Odd. The sheets of rain and hail almost seemed to assume amorphous shapes, silver-blue veils of mist drifting across the paved courtyard, rolling across the splashes and hailstones rebounding from the hard surface. The strobe of lightning was gone in an instant, and the outside was plunged into darkness again. Inside the tunnel, lights flickered in their overhead grids. Something white and silvery blew across the corridor from one side to the other ahead of them. Another silvery shadow capered ahead of them.

  Sesseli let out another squeak, and Khorii squeezed her hand, saying in thought-talk, because anything above a whisper seemed too perilous here, “Condensation, probably. Little localized clouds, carried by drafts.”

  Sesseli crowded close to Khorii’s thigh as the two walked across the bridge, cautiously and slowly at first, as if expecting at any moment that the glass would implode or the bridge would fall. Halfway across, Khorii quickened her pace until she was almost dragging Sesseli with her in her haste to cross. Finally, by unspoken agreement, she hoisted the little girl into her arms, set her on her hip, and galloped the rest of the way to the laboratory, her hard hooflike feet thudding against the thin carpeting.

  Khiindi sat yowling indignantly outside the closed laboratory door.

  Sesseli lifted him and rubbed her face into the soft fur of his side. He mewed in a pitiful tone. Wasn’t it terrible the way these people treated harmless cats and little girls?

  Khorii opened the laboratory door. With the soundproofing in the building, Elviiz would be the only one who could hear noises beyond that door.

  He was there, as was Jalonzo, staring at the floor.

  Beyond them, the door to a cooling container hung open. At their feet, shards of broken curved objects, liquids spilling from them.

  “The formula,” Jalonzo told her, not looking up. “Someone tried to destroy it.”

  “Tried to?”

  “I have my handwritten notes,” he said, shrugging. “I can make it again if I can find more of the right ingredients.”

  “I also have Jalonzo’s notes,” Elviiz said. “I uploaded them as soon as we returned from our mission, Khorii.”

  “It’s a good thing we came back when we did,” Khorii said. It helped her feel a little less guilty about not being out with the rescue teams, knowing that because of their return Elviiz was in time to back up research that might find a permanent cure for the scourge of the known universe.

  Hap Hellstrom came in, trailed by Sesseli, still holding Khiindi. “What happened here?” the tall lanky boy with the pale hair asked.

  Jalonzo told him, ending with, “No harm done, really.”

  “Not this time,” Hap said darkly, “but who would do something like this? A cure for the plague will benefit everybody.”

  “I can’t imagine who would be so destructive,” Khorii agreed.

  Sesseli stuck out her lower lip, and said, “I can.”

  Khorii knew who she had in mind. “No, Sesseli, I don’t think Marl can leave Dinero Grande, especially with no cure for the plague. That house where I left him was full of it except for the areas I cleared. I feel kind of badly about it, really.”

  “He’d have done the same to you,” Hap said bluntly. “To all of us. He was going to blow us up, remember?”

  “I know. Still, I wonder if we should not return with help and put him under more conventional restraints somewhere safer.”

  “It won’t be safe once Marl’s there,” Hap said.

  “This guy must have been a real winner,” Jalonzo commented. Khorii had dealt with Marl before the Mana landed in Corazon.

  “You don’t want to know,” Hap said. “This is just the kind of trick he’d pull.”

  “But how would he know about it?” Jalonzo asked. “Or even get in? I lock up when we’re not here, and the door was still locked when Elviiz and I arrived.”

  “The guy’s a born crook. He’d know how to do that if anybody would,” Hap insisted. “He’d do something like that just to mess with our minds.”

  “Maybe,” Khorii said. “But I think you give him too much credit. This gives us even more reason to return and check on his whereabouts. If he is not still in the house on Dinero Grande, then we can worry about Marl. If he is, then we must secure him somewhere away from the disease. It is ka-Linyaari—against our ways—to kill, but it is also frowned upon to leave anyone, even an enemy, to die when we could save him. And then we can worry about our real danger.”

  “What? The plague?”

  “No, finding who or what did this,” she said, indicating the damage. “And how they gained access.”

  Chapter 3

  You need more rest, Khorii,” Jaya said. “You’ve been working much too hard if you think I am ever going to let that thug back on my ship.”

  “We need him where we can keep an eye on him,” Khorii replied.

  “And this time we can take restraints from the police station. Jalonzo wants to go, too, along with a couple of his larger gaming friends. Marl will have an entire jail to himself here.”

  Captain Bates hadn’t said anything as Khorii outlined her plan to Jaya. Khorii, Jaya, Captain Bates, and Sesseli sat around one of the round tables in the common room while Abuelita clinked dishes in the kitchen. Each of them had a fragrant and steaming cup of chocolate in front of her, and Jaya, Captain Bates, and Sesseli each had a cinnamon pastry. The scent from the large batch Abuelita had baked earlier still filled the common room. She made dozens of batches at a time actually, something easily accomplished in the cafeteria’s industrial kitchen. Later, people would come and pick up the rolls and other foods Abuelita prepared and take them around to places where survivors gathered. At midmorning, additional people, mostly women and girls but some of the boys and a couple of men as well, arrived to assist Abuelita in cooking food that would sustain anyone who came to the cafeteria from midday until darkness fell. Some of this cooking would also be distributed among those who could not easily walk. There were other kitchens in the area, in former restaurants, schools, and churches. Soon the people helping Abuelita would leave to staff those feeding stations, but for now, with everyone still so frightened and grieving, it was comforting to come to one place to find a meal and so many other survivors. The Linyaari rescue teams had suggested this sort of arrangement be adopted on other worlds, in other cities and towns.

  Khorii used the roof garden for her own grazing, sure that no one had died or was buried there. It was small but easy to maintain, with its own water supply and plenty of sunshine. Well, part of the day. The funny thing about the rainy season was that usually the sky was sunny and warm during the early part of the day, but in midafternoon the rain began and by evening at the latest, the rains turned to violent storms.

  “I think Khorii has a good point,” Captain Bates said. Her wavy brown hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck, around which she wore a stunning beaded necklace with long, sparkling fringes that matched her earrings. It was a startling transformation since none of them had ever seen their astrophysics and astral navigation teacher in anything but utilitarian clothing before. But it turned out that for most of her life before she was a teacher, Captain Bates had been making beautiful things when she finished the prodigious amount of work she seemed to accomplish each day. “I don’t need much sleep,” she told them. “So I need something quiet to do.”

  Before the last Linyaari rescue ship took Khorii on her mission, the captain had come to her with a sheepish expression on her face. “This is very selfish of me, I know, but I need you to cleanse a place for me. It’s not very large, but it’s something I need, and I think it can be used to help some of the survivors as well.”

  Khorii had felt very low at that time, since her parents and Captain Becker had gone into self-imposed exile among the Ancestors on Vhiliinyar. Asha Bates had led her to a small shop on the fringes of the ci
ty, between the downtown district and the factories, warehouses, and residential facilities where Jalonzo and Abuelita had lived prior to the plague.

  “I was helping the team with search and rescue in the areas your parents couldn’t cover, Khorii, driving a supply shuttle with fresh untainted grasses and water for them if they needed it. While they were working in an apartment building, I noticed a shop next door. I only read a little Spandard, but the hanks of beads in the window told me what was sold there. I was embarrassed to ask the team to cleanse the shop for me when they had so much to do to help others. But, well, making things is therapeutic. When I was a kid, my mother and I got parked on the terraformed moon the colonists call the Bosque Redondo. Most of the settlers were Dine and Lakota people, tribal people who were resettled there from Old Terra. Their original homelands were among the first to be rendered uninhabitable, long before the rest of the planet. Anyway, they named the moon after a historic prison camp where the Dine had once been forced to live far from their homeland. But it wasn’t intended to be a prison, and people could bring with them whatever they liked. High-tech stuff was useless to most of them since the power supplies were limited there, so they brought the low-tech traditional things their ancestors had used. This time, though, they were able to bring the means to create and manufacture the materials they needed to make beads and fabrics as well. It turned out to be one of the best places I ever lived. If I had been the crying type, I’d have cried when we left there. My mother was busy fascinating the local men and cheating them at cards and dice; but the women felt sorry for me and taught me to bead and weave, sew blankets and quilts. I wanted to teach classes to the kids at Maganos, but Phador thought beading was beneath the dignity of an astrophysics instructor.”

  Cleansing the shop hadn’t actually required much effort since Khorii had found ways to decontaminate large numbers of things and heal large numbers of people using water to conduct the power of her horn. As it turned out, most of the shop wasn’t contaminated anyway. Khorii saw the blue dots she identified with plague hovering around only certain displays in the store. Sesseli, young enough to be immune to the hormone-related disease, happily hauled plasgrass baskets full of glittering crystals, glowing pearls, and shiny seed beads as well as trays of intricate creations Captain Bates said were made with the use of a torch. Each basket was then immersed in the old-fashioned bathtub of the shop’s lavatory. Like many shops in many places, it had once been a home, and the new owners left the sanitary facilities as they were. Khorii dipped her horn in the water, purifying it, and the cleansing was transferred to the basketsful of beads as well. The shop’s books, videos, computer, and some bead looms were the only items that needed individual attention.

  The next morning, Captain Bates had presented Khorii with a beautiful blue-and-silver bracelet beaded with the pattern of the constellations visible in the night sky of Vhiliinyar. “I got the rescue team to pull up the configuration on their computer,” the captain told her. “This way you will be able to look at the same stars as your folks.”

  Khorii did not wear it all the time because she did not wish to dirty it while she was working. She kept it in her travel pack and sometimes before she went to sleep pulled it out to admire it, pretending for a moment that the silver beads were the stars of Vhiliinyar and that they would beam her love and longing to her family.

  Jaya looked balky for a moment, but she trusted Captain Bates and Khorii, so she finally said, “Okay. I guess we’d better collect Marl and get it over with so Khorii will have a chance to rest up before she has to rejoin the rescue teams again. But I want him locked up tight and guarded all the time.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” Captain Bates agreed.

  Dinero Grande was a short commuter hop from Corazon, and the Mana was fueled and ready to go with all hands on board by midafternoon.

  Captain Bates and Jaya landed in the private space dock of La Villa de Estrella, house of stars, the mansion Marl Fidd had marked as his own share of the booty. He had forced Khorii to go with him so that she could cleanse the house and anything else he wanted, but she had outsmarted him, then outrun him, leaving him shaking his fist at Captain Bates’s shuttle as it left him behind. Had he not been so awful, she’d have felt bad that she had not thought to rescue him before now, but somehow even suggesting to the Linyaari teams that there might be anyone in this area had totally slipped her mind, what with all of the other people she had to help.

  She had cleared the kitchen for him, so if he was smart, and he was, he would plant himself in there and wait for help. He would have enough to eat and drink and could sleep on the floor, but unless he got desperate enough to risk infection from the bodies littering other rooms of the villa, he was trapped with no shelter except one that offered a full fridge and a nice wine cellar.

  His lodgings on Corazon would be a big comedown.

  The recapture was uneventful. Once within Dinero Grande’s orbit, the Mana dispatched the roomiest of the three shuttles aboard, Elviiz at the helm.

  With Khorii leading the way, they left the shuttle and entered the opulent mansion, where she, Elviiz, Hap, Jalonzo, and his burly gaming buddies made their way through the grand entryway and connecting halls to the kitchen.

  Khorii blinked incredulously. There were no longer any of the blue plague dots sparkling in the air. She hoped Marl hadn’t figured it out that apparently she had either cleared the place better than she had believed or that it had somehow dissipated. But if the plague had vanished, it was the only contaminant in the air that had. The place was rotten with the stench of decay from the decomposing bodies in other rooms.

  To her relief, they found Marl in a drunken stupor on the kitchen floor. He was a far cry from the vain and elegant young tough she had deserted by hopping into the shuttle.

  He’d grown fat from having nothing to do but eat the rich food stored in the kitchen and drink the wine she’d glimpsed in storage racks along the walls. His dark hair, formerly close-cut, was long and matted. He stank. There was much to drink in the kitchen but since he could not reach the villa’s generator from the kitchen or any of the places he had seen Khorii clear, he had not been able to reactivate the water pump.

  One corner of the room he had used as a toilet and in other areas he had vomited. Many times.

  Surprising the others, who regarded the sleeping thug with distaste, Jalonzo ignored the stench and knelt beside him, tapping him on the shoulder. “Hey, amigo, wake up.” When Marl grumbled, sputtered, and drooled but otherwise made no response, Jalonzo, who had organized care for plague victims in an auditorium full of his gaming friends and become used to the foulness of human illness, maneuvered Marl so that he could lift his shoulders, then nodded for the others to help him. Together, they hauled him out to the waiting shuttle.

  Khorii struggled with her conscience. She was supposed to rest so she could help with the search and rescue missions but really, she still felt fine, with lots of energy again and no signs of depletion of her horn’s power. The plague seemed to be absent from the areas she’d previously cleared, so she thought it would be no trick to decontaminate the rest of it. The mansion could serve as a center for rebuilding the area once survivors migrated this far. She didn’t want them to blunder back into the plague. Besides, she was curious to see if the plague still lingered in the other rooms. If it was gone there, too, and she could determine why, the contamination throughout the galaxy might be far less prolonged than they had dared hope.

  Her shipmates were dead set against her returning to the mansion.

  “You know the rules, Khorii,” Elviiz told her. “Every bit of cleansing work you do when you should be resting may mean one less sick person you can heal.”

  “But I hardly heal anyone on those missions, Elviiz!” she protested. “The teams are so afraid I’ll get so tired that I won’t be able see the plague anymore that they won’t let me do anything else. You can tell by looking at my horn that I’m fine. I really am. If survivors blunder into a
n area as contaminated as this one, they could start the plague all over again. And you know how it mutates.”

  She won, as she knew she would. Who was the one with the horn among them, after all? Who was the one who could see the plague? She was.

  Besides, she didn’t think she would be taxing her horn at all going back in there. If the plague was gone, she’d have spent none of her horn’s energy except maybe to make the place smell better.

  She didn’t win when she tried to persuade Elviiz to stay with the shuttle. He insisted that he come with her while the others returned to the Mana and secured Marl Fidd. Then the shuttle could return for Khorii and him. Khorii had to agree that this was a good plan. Although she hated to tell him everything since he already knew so much more than she did, his data-collecting capabilities would doubtlessly be helpful in trying to determine the various conditions in the atmosphere, aside from her horn’s power, that might have caused the plague to dissipate.

  They began a systematic search of the mansion. She had previously glimpsed bodies in some of three rooms, but although the stench from them remained, the plague was not in those rooms either. And except for the skeletons and a few scraps of flesh and clothing, plus quite a lot of very fat insects, little remained of the corpses. Khorii was glad of that.

  Meanwhile, having collected the data and samples she requested, Elviiz decontaminated the kitchen. The android activated the water pump without the aid of the larger generator and pulled what seemed like a vein from his leg, pulling and pulling until it reached the required length, attached it to the faucet of the lake-sized sinks, and sprayed down the floor. It was made of a solid sheet of granite aggregate and sloped into a drain in the floor opposite the sinks, something Elviiz had noticed immediately that seemed to have escaped Marl’s attention during all of the many months he had remained in the room. Once the liquid waste was disposed of, Elviiz used his laser on a low setting to turn the solid waste to dust, which he also washed down the drain.