Acorna’s Quest Read online

  “Are you sure even Rafik won’t be able to deduce our course, Calum?” Acorna had asked when they were outside the heliopause of the Kezdetian primary.

  “Not even Rafik, Acorna. He may be subtle in dealing with people, but I’m the engineer and navigator,” Calum said proudly.

  “But they all know our destination: the Coma Berenices quadrant.”

  “Ah,”—Calum’s smile was devious as he held up one finger—“there are nine and sixty ways of getting there, and we’re taking almost, but not quite, the most illogical. I don’t trust Rafik not to think of the most illogical, so I plotted in the course he is least likely to suspect. Therefore, there is no logical or illogical way for him to figure out what way we did go. See—here’s the space we’re navigating in.” He put his hands in a position to encircle a globe, then drew out the left side. “Milky Way,” he explained, “then we are going down…” He let his right hand describe a direct downward line. “That is NOT the shortest distance to where we want to be.” And his right hand made his planned deviation. “Except that, actually and spatially, it will be. But I don’t have to make a course correction for a few days.”

  “Well, in that case…” Acorna allowed herself to be reassured, at least that they could not be followed and talked out of their project by Rafik’s eloquence. “I am surprised, now that we’ve been gone nine hours, that they haven’t discovered we’ve gone.”

  The com unit bleeped.

  “You spoke too soon,” Calum said.

  “Urgent you return to Dehoney immediately. Acc—”

  Calum’s hand disconnected the com unit. “Well, I’m surprised it took them so long.”

  “‘Acc?’” Acorna asked, blinking a little anxiously. “Maybe we should at least listen to the message? It sounded like Provola.”

  “So? They all know we respect Provola and might listen to her, where we’ve given UP listening to them!” His tone was caustic.

  “But she’s never been an alarmist,” Acorna responded, weighed down once again with guilt about their stealthy action.

  Calum shrugged. Provola Quero was now in charge of the Saganos operation; she couldn’t have anything that urgent to say to them; she was probably just relaying the expectable protests from Acorna’s other “guardians.”

  “We can’t swerve from this departure, Acorna, love, or they’ll just find another way of stopping us.”

  It was not until the third day out that their euphoria at escaping so neatly received a slight check. Acorna had by then used up the greens and vegetables that she had brought on board. She also needed to replenish Calum’s supplies from the storage area. She came rushing back into the main cabin.

  “It’s not there anymore,” she cried, her silvery eyes wide with distress. “What could have happened to it?”

  Calum rose from the pilot’s chair and took her by her slender arms, which were far stronger than they looked.

  “Easy, girl, what’s not where?”

  “My escape pod.”

  “What? But it was there when I inspected the ship five days ago.”

  She followed him as he ran to where he knew, damned well certain he knew, that the escape pod in which they had found her five years ago had been carefully netted in. The net was still there, but the escape pod was not.

  “Blast Pal and his retrofitting nonsense. It was there.” He picked up a piece of the netting as if by shaking it he could restore the missing escape pod. “They must have removed it for safety before they started their damned defense installations. The tubes would have had to be settled against the inner hull. Damn!” And he forcefully threw the netting down again.

  “Oh, well, it is not all that essential,” she said, now taking the role of comforter. “After all, there is no counterfeiting me,” she said, giggling as she swept her hand down her obviously alien length.

  “Yes, but the glyphs…they might establish your lineage or rank or something.”

  “We have holos of them in the files. For that matter, I can draw them quite well, you know.”

  “Yes, petal, I know you can.” Calum absently patted her arm. But he, too, was shaken by the disappearance of the pod—not crucial in itself, but what else might they have overlooked in their eagerness to get away?

  The second shock to their seemingly smooth escape was the failure of the legume crops to sprout any pods as they should have done by this point in their growth, followed the next day by a decided yellowing in the stalks of alfalfa. Acorna spent a good deal of time on the agri channel and the microscope, trying to determine why that crop was failing.

  “Somehow, the valve to the nutrient reservoir has been tampered with. Damn it.”

  Her mild cussword surprised Calum enough, but the fact that she had not spotted the problem earlier was even more unnerving to him. Acorna was usually instantly aware of the slightest change in atmosphere or water.

  “It’s just fed the entire stock of trace elements into the water supply at once—zinc sulfate, copper sulfate…no wonder the chard looks so sick!” Acorna sighed deeply.

  “Something the matter with your famous nose?” Calum asked, since Acorna could often just smell an imbalance.

  “The ship has many new smells, most of them chemical. I guess I thought it was just normal.” She paused, thinking. “Maybe we should listen to Provola’s entire message. ‘Acc’…where you shut her off, could have been the beginning of ‘accident’ as well as the start of my name.”

  “So we will now dutifully listen.” Calum keyed in the interrupted message.

  Urgent you return to Dehoney immediately. Accident risk warning! Supervisor’s report lists a broken valve in the hydroponics’ unit, which was to have been repaired first thing this morning. Only you left before they could repair it. There was a hint of humor in that final sentence, and Acorna winced. Advise immediate return to effect such minor repairs which could totally damage entire hydroponics and grazings if not made. It won’t take long.

  The plea was unmistakable even in Provola’s unmistakably prosaic tone.

  “Now, now, petal,” Calum reassured her. “At least it was a mistake.”

  “Like unloading my pod?” Acorna asked, then thinned her lips over her front teeth.

  “How bad is it?” Calum asked anxiously.

  “Well, the chard could be toxic. The old, tough spinach leaves”—Acorna wrinkled her nose—“should be okay since they were fully grown when we left, and one vat of timothy was well grown before the trace-element dump, but the rest I’m not sure about. I’ll have to purify the rest of the ’ponics…and the alfalfa will have to go; if it’s picked up even a small percentage of that zinc, I’ll come out in spots.”

  “Now just a moment,” Cal said soothingly, and twirled his chair around to the astrogation-control panel. A flash of knowing fingers across the touch pads, and he beamed. “We’re not that far, spatially speaking, from Rushima. We can stop there…two, three days. Basic agri world, colonized by the Shenjemi Federation. It’ll have everything we could possibly need.”

  “Well, I suppose I can exist on what’s available,” Acorna said with a sigh. She swallowed hard and scratched a bit, thinking about how near she’d been to chewing her way through her original notion of lunch—a long swath down the alfalfa bed.

  Two

  Haven, Unified Federation Date 334.04.06

  The unused ’ponics tank was cold and hard. The lightweight protective mat that covered it and hid Markel also blocked the warmth of the sunlamps that fed the plants in the working tanks with a steady diet of golden, artificially balanced light. He had padded his sleeping place as best he could with fragments of worn-out mats, but it was still so cold that he was unable to take advantage of the space he’d exulted in when he found this hideout. He slept, when he slept at all, curled around himself like a sprout coiled within its pod, trying to hold on to the warmth of his own body. It was so dark and cold under the mats…almost as cold as the empty space that surrounded the Haven…. He was not, he told
himself firmly, going to think about that. He curled up, arms wrapped around his knees, and drifted off into an uneasy doze. The hard white surface of the tank was soft, he was floating, spinning, and the stars floated around his head…. No, they didn’t. If you were spaced without protective suiting, your eyes and everything else exploded, and you couldn’t see anything!

  Markel jerked awake, shivering. He wasn’t going to think about his father, Illart, floating forever in absolute cold and darkness, empty eyes gazing unseeingly on the stars that he had loved. He wasn’t going to think about anything except the immediate practical problems of surviving another day on the Haven without getting caught.

  Huddled in another cramped position, he worried at the problem with his conscious mind. A person could get warm enough in the heating vents that led to the food center. He would try that in a little while, but he didn’t dare now; he was so tired, he might fall asleep in the vent and be scalded to death when the steam blasted through to clean and sterilize it. He would have to wait, and if he timed it right, he might be able to nip out of the vents and steal some scraps of food from the recycling bins. His body needed protein to supplement the fresh greens he stole from the working ’ponics tanks in tiny nips and pinches.

  And he needed to steal a blanket from somewhere. Due to recent events, there should be enough to spare now…enough blankets and warm clothes for anybody. He wondered if one of Nueva’s lieutenants had moved into his family’s old quarters, or if he dared try and make it back there to get some of his clothes…. No, not his clothes, that might make them suspicious. Illart’s. They knew his father was dead—everybody knew, had seen….

  Markel struggled soundlessly against the dream of space, the cold and the brightness of distant suns and the pressure of his own blood exploding outward; he snapped out of the nightmare once more and felt his heart thumping in his chest. It had all happened so fast, almost as quickly as the dreams that trapped him whenever he tried to sleep.

  Only three, no, five shifts ago he had been safe in his own quarters, and the only thing that worried him about the quarrel between Illart and Sengrat was that Ximena would take her father’s side. She’ll never look at me now, he had thought—as though she had ever noticed him before! But he’d been a child then. Five shifts ago. Or was it six? It seemed terribly important to remember.

  Somebody had to remember. Somebody had to tell the truth, counteract the lies they meant to spread about…about the ones who could not speak for themselves anymore. The ones who would never be warm again.

  The quarters Markel had shared with his father were spacious by Haven standards, as befitted Illart’s rank as one of the three Speakers of the Council. Naturally there were separate sleep bunks for the two of them, with their own carefully engineered storage areas for personal belongings; any citizen among the Starfarers was entitled to that much space, and any working citizen, or parent raising small children, was also allotted a private sitting space and a desk console.

  But nobody else Markel knew, even Third Speaker Andrezhuria, had a space so large that all three Speakers could sit down at one time without even feeling crowded. Where else, except in a public hall, could a person enjoy such luxury? Markel could never understand his father’s wry comments about how his rank in Council as First Speaker bought him almost enough room to swing a cat. But then, Markel’s only knowledge of cats came from the vids he called up on his personal console, and he never had figured out why anybody would want to swing one.

  The Old-timer generation was full of quaint sayings like that, like their insistence on calling a period of two and a half shifts a “day.” Ximena said it was better just to humor the old folks and not to demand explanations for all their quaint old folk sayings.

  Anyway, it wasn’t the presence of the other two Speakers that had made the sitting area so crowded that Markel had retreated to his sleep tube with his personal console; it was Sengrat. Really, Markel thought, it was Sengrat’s overinflated ego that seemed to fill up all the space and use up all the oxygen. The man had a voice like a file going through sheet metal; once you started letting it get to you, it could saw through earplugs and ruin your enjoyment of a good classic music vid. Markel blinked twice to stop the vid. No sense in letting his pleasure in the ancient music be ruined by irritation at Sengrat. He would just wait until the visitors left.

  Sengrat was always going on about something; it seemed he never agreed with any of the Council decisions. And Illart said he wouldn’t speak up during open Council; he just sat there and simmered and waited to buttonhole one of the Speakers in private, later, and tell them how wrong they were. Right now he was disputing the decision to leave their present orbit as soon as the nav officer on duty identified a good pattern for quadrant departure.

  “We’ve done what we came to Khang Kieaan for, Sengrat,” Andrezhuria said wearily. “We’ve presented our case, we have the promise of their support in the next Federation meeting….”

  Sengrat snorted. “‘Presented our case,’” he mimicked Andrezhuria’s precise, cold tones. “’Zhuria, wake up and smell the kava! We’ve been presenting our case for ten years now. All the moral support in the world won’t make Amalgamated Mining cede Esperantza back to us—and if they did, they couldn’t repair the damage they’ve already done to the planet. It’s time to move on, make a new life for ourselves.”

  “Are you saying we should have accepted Amalgamated’s joke of a resettlement offer?” Gerezan, Second Speaker, inquired. “A bit late to be arguing that, don’t you think?”

  Markel could tell without looking that Sengrat would have flushed a deep purple. His anger came out in the plummy resonance of his next words. “Don’t twist my words, Second! I’m not the one who’s living in the past—you three, and the Council members who follow you around like dullbots, are the ones who do that. You’re still talking as if we could get Esperantza back and settle to dirt farming. I don’t want to do that. I’m not even interested in that. Our ‘case’ against Amalgamated was settled in Federation court—”

  “Unfairly,” Andrezhuria cut in. “If we can get evidence of the bribes Amalgamated paid out and the records they had doctored, we’ll have grounds to reopen it. And we will get it; the kids in my data study group are sharper than any dirtside hackers, and they’re getting through Amalgamated’s data firewalls one at a time. Until then, our mission is to keep the story of Esperantza alive. Not to let anybody forget what an injustice was done, not to let Amalgamated get away with it!”

  “You’re dead wrong, my dear ’Zhuria,” Sengrat drawled. “Our mission is to survive. Anything else comes second. And in the interests of survival, as Chief Maintenance Officer, it is my duty to point out that the Haven is long overdue for retrofit and replacement.”

  “Well, I hardly think we should request permission to dock on Khang Kieaan for maintenance work,” Illart said, chuckling. “Even if we could afford it, some of the folks down there may just not feel too friendly toward us after the way we took over their planetary communications system to state our case. Sure, we got a lot of popular sympathy, but I bet the government’s going to be nervouser and nervouser the longer we hang around here. All three governments,” he corrected himself after a moment’s mental review of Khang Kieaan’s troubled political situation.

  “We don’t need to request anything of Khang Kieaan,” Sengrat snapped. “We had their communications system under total control. That should have paid for all the maintenance we need.”

  “Exactly how do you figure that?” Gerezan asked. “They weren’t going to pay us to run their planetary communications when they had a perfectly good working system of their own.”

  “But they didn’t, ’Zan,” Sengrat purred. The rasping tone was gone from his voice now, and Markel pulled the vid plugs out of his ears to hear better. When Sengrat’s voice softened, he was happy; when Sengrat was happy, there was trouble coming.

  Sengrat’d sounded just that way, smooth and velvety and jovial, when he told Markel th
at Ximena was too old for him, and he didn’t want any good-for-nothing teenage kids hanging around his daughter.

  “They didn’t have a working system of their own,” Sengrat went on, “not while we’d intercepted all communications to make our own ’cast. With a little diplomacy, we could have gotten a contract from the Night Sky Lightning party granting them exclusive use of planetside communications…through us.”

  “You’re talking about making them pay us to stop disrupting communications? We’re not racketeers,” Illart said sharply.

  “And just what do you think the Sun Behind Clouds and the Spring Rains parties would have done about that deal?” Gerezan demanded.

  “Nothing,” Sengrat said simply. “I checked. Night Sky Lightning is the only group with the technology to attack us in orbit; the other two parties are exhausted from three generations of constant fighting. The NSL is the clear technological leader; with a little help from us, they could control Khang Kieaan now. We’d be doing a public service, really. End the fighting now, instead of two or three generations down the line. And ensure Haven’s survival.” He sounded as though he was beaming, turning his face this way and that so that all three Speakers could get the benefit of his confident looks.

  “We don’t interfere in other planets’ internal affairs,” Illart said. “In case you’ve forgotten, that is part of the original charter agreed upon when we decided to refuse Amalgamated’s resettlement offer and live on our colony ship until we got justice. We offer to all other peoples the respect and noninterference we desired for ourselves. That is the way of the Starfarers.”

  “Your way, you mean,” snapped Sengrat.