Acorna's Rebels Part 3

"To what do I owe this honor?" she asked the cat, closing the hatch. "Could it be that you're looking for sanctuary?" She lay down again on her bunk, cradling her friend in her arms.

RK growled softly and burrowed his face into her hand.

Then the ship lurched and she was catapulted from her berth. The cat laid tracks on her flesh right through her shipsuit as he shot out into the room and bounced off the far wall. The ship bucked again. The artificial gravity on board fluctuated wildly once more from Federation standard to zero G and back again. Acorna's first impulse was to head for the bridge and see what the trouble was, but until things were a bit more stable, that didn't seem to be wise. Rolling down the corridors and ricocheting from the ceiling would hardly be helpful. She lay back down on her bunk and strapped herself in, searching for Becker's thoughts. The process didn't involve much mind reading at the moment. The captain's mental voice was very loud when he was upset.

(Fraggin' Khleevi piece of decomposing roach manure, who would have thought they'd put the warp drive where the brakes ought to be? Fraggin' cat playing fraggin' Tarzan with the fraggin' levers.)

The ship's gravity failed again. RK levitated from the place where he landed during the first lurch. He swam expertly to the hatch, b.u.mped against it, and when it did not give, roared his complaint. He wanted out and he wanted out now, with the same intensity he had formerly exhibited expressing his desire to come in.

The Condor lurched and shuddered. Acorna could only imagine what was happening to the ship. It felt roughly like it did when Captain Becker took the Condor through a patch of what he called "black water," where s.p.a.ce was full of wormholes and pleats that either offered shortcuts to their original destination or landed them somewhere far removed from where they entered.

Cautiously, Acorna unfastened her berth strap, moved hand over hand along the wall to the storage locker, found her gravity boots, and did a few somersaults while pulling them on, fastening them, and activating them. It was a bit tricky making sure her feet were pointed at a place that would not endanger the rest of her when they grabbed hold of the surface. Her quarters were small and, while not as cluttered as they had been during Becker's "bachelor" days, when the Condor's crew consisted solely of him and RK, they were still barely large enough for Acorna to stretch out full-length. RK continued to howl and claw at the steel door hatch. Acorna opened it and the cat swam out like a newly launched torpedo. Becker's thoughts were still thoroughly profane. Nadhari was attempting to soothe him, but being soothing was not a natural role for her.

Hearing panicked bellows and pounding noises, Acorna made her way to the hold where the Wats were incarcerated. Through the viewport, she saw the two hirsute men floating and flailing, their faces distorted with terror and their mental state much too confused to make any sense of the thoughts she was trying to read.

Mac must be on the bridge, helping Becker, she decided.

Unlocking the hatch, she ducked between the airborne Wats and found the storage locker there. She pulled out gravity boots for them. Snagging one of the struggling Wats by the arm, she tugged at him. His arm shot out and caught her on the side of the head and his hand tangled itself in her mane. Shaking her head to loosen his grip, she reached for his foot.

"The Thunder G.o.d is dropping us!" he was screaming.

"Calm yourselves," she mentally commanded both of them in their own language. It was the first time she had actually spoken to them since she read them back on MOO. "The thunder G.o.d has nothing to do with this. This is simply a navigational difficulty, such as you would have with one of your ships. The captain has it under control." The Condor lurched again. "Almost under control. Put these boots on and you will regain control of the... the air, which will once more stay properly above your heads while you keep your feet on this... deck."

"You speak sooth?" asked the red-haired one, who was not the one she had grabbed to begin with.

Acorna was having some success radiating calm and courage at them, reminding them mentally that they were warriors on a more perilous journey than any of their kind had ever dared. Why, if they were back where they came from, the deeds they had done and the tales they could tell would be beyond belief, but if such stories were believed, would elevate them high above their former liege lord in the estimation of their fellows.

Acorna was frankly winging it in these a.s.surances, for she had only the most shadowy idea of what their society must have been like. She would have to find some vids and books about old Terra, she thought, and realized she should have done this sooner.

But her glorification of their adventures-which carefully omitted the part about their being terrified and completely at the mercy of people they considered mortal enemies or prey-served its purpose. The Wats' bellowing stopped, their breathing slowed, and their muscles relaxed. Then Acorna read a thought going through the head of the sandy-haired one-that now would be an opportune time to overpower her and take her horn.

She recoiled, calling mentally to Nadhari as she did so. "You are incorrigible!" she shouted at him, aloud this time, and quickly translated her sentiments into the closest approximation in his own tongue, an idiomatic expression rustic at best. "What good would that do you? We are about to make a forced landing on an unknown - no, not a star, a world. If we landed on a star we would burn up. My horn is of the greatest possible use to you now firmly attached to my head, where it belongs. As we told you before, the liege lord you wish to impress has been dead for several thousand years. You are the last of your kind. We are trying to rehabilitate you enough so you will have a place in our universe, but you will not impress the authorities-who are known as the Federation-by butchering a Linyaari amba.s.sador, which is what I am. You really must stop thinking of your old mission and switch gears. Oars. Whatever!"

The red-haired one pried his friend, who had one boot on and one boot off, away from Acorna, putting himself between them, and said, "She is no beast, but a lady. The lady G.o.ddess herself now, I am thinking. If we displease her, well, you know what she will do to us. We will be turned into swine. Perhaps we do not realize it and are already swine, as she said she is trying to turn us into men who will be pleasing to the lords of this place."

"I know no lord but Bjorn, to whom I'm sworn," his blond friend said stubbornly.

The redhead reached out and clasped Acorna's waist with one large paw, and kicked up a large foot, currently bare. He nearly bowled himself backwards in the process, and his fingers slacked their hold on her. She grabbed his hand and extended her other arm with the boot. He got it on, and then the other one, then extracted a peace bond from his friend before helping him with his remaining boot. "You will not harm her? "

"How can I? We are unarmed."

"True," his comrade agreed. "You are safe from us, lady unicorn G.o.ddess."

"I'm very relieved," she told him. She thought it might be best to let them get used to all of the other new concepts that would be confronting them in the current time before officially renouncing her divinity. Just now, being a G.o.d in their eyes could come in handy. Later, if all went well, she would lose her divinity in their minds as the Wats became better oriented, and she'd never have to confront the problem directly at all. "Now that you know you can walk, I suggest you strap yourselves into your berths. We may be making a rough landing."

"We do not die lying down," said Red Wat, as she was starting to think of him, "There is no honor in that. If there is mortal danger, we will face it, and since we have no weapons, shake our fists at it."

"Very effective, I'm sure," she said. "The captain does that all the time, so it's certain to be very useful."

Becker's thoughts were calmer now and she intruded long enough to send a mental message. (Captain, the Wats wish to observe the landing. Have I permission to bring them forward?)

(Why not?) The response was weary, but she sensed that much of the danger had pa.s.sed. (I was going to get them to help us unload the Condor so I can get to the Niriian shuttle in cargo bay four that has a control panel I can patch together. I'm going to offload all these stinkin' Khleevi parts when we make our pit stop. They're about as worthless as the bugs who made them.)

Acorna didn't reply but motioned for the Wats to follow her. In case either of them changed his mind about her divine nature and decided to attack her from behind, she kept a tight monitor on their thoughts until she stepped back and allowed them to precede her onto the bridge.

Nadhari, Becker, and Mac were all seated, their heads below the tops of their chairs, so the Wats looked straight past them out the viewport into s.p.a.ce.

The surface of the burgeoning sphere where the Condor was preparing to land occupied a third of the port. The Wats gaped at it, stricken by something close to awe, then knelt as if they couldn't support themselves on their feet any longer. Their minds were literally numb.

Becker glanced back around the side of his command chair, and jerked a thumb at the open-mouthed men. "Wot's with the Wats? They look like they got religion all of a sudden."

"That's the least of it, I believe, Captain. I don't think they've ever been permitted to see s.p.a.ce since they first traveled to Vhiliinyar. They're a bit overwhelmed. They've been under the impression the Condor is being carried through s.p.a.ce by the Thunder G.o.d."

"Thunderstruck, eh?" Becker asked, then held up both arms and rotated his wrists to show first the backs of his hands, then the palms. "But you're wrong about the G.o.d! Look, Ma, no hands! We're landing under our own power-but just barely."

Acorna got a sudden sense of the upcoming world's mineral composition. "Captain, I don't think you'll want to linger here. This world is extremely wet and the air, while breathable, is full of sulfurous effusions."

'Beggars can't be choosers." The viewport was taken up -with the planet's surface except for a slender halo of atmosphere surrounding it. "Strap in, folks, gravity is about to grab us."

Acorna helped the Wats secure themselves in the auxiliary seats behind the command post and buckled in herself. The ship shuddered, and the planet blossomed to fill the entirety of the viewport, its surface becoming more and more detailed. Streamlets, rivers, lagoons, ponds, lakes, and all manner of wetlands, laced together with heavy vegetation. There didn't seem to be any seas as such, just innumerable smaller bodies of water running in and out of each other.

Finally Becker said, "Look, Princess, there's a kind of flat plain there with a patch of gra.s.s. We'll set down in it."

"I hope you have diving equipment, Jonas," said Nadhari, who had been very quiet through all of this.

"Why?" Becker asked. "Is there something you'd like to tell me, babe?"

"Well, yes, actually, but there's not enough..."

They splashed down rather than set down, as Becker had planned. The gra.s.s was actually a sea of tall reeds and the Condor was in water halfway up to the robolift. And sinking.

"... time," Nadhari finished. "Perhaps, Jonas, you could do a quick repair on the Khleevi unit so it would allow us to move to a drier spot?"

He already had a torch and a screwdriver in hand. "I wonder if there it a drier spot," he grumbled. "This whole place is one dismal swamp, from what I can tell."

"Yes," Nadhari said. "And there are large, unfriendly reptilian life forms living in these "waters."

"How do you know about that? " he asked.

"Because I recognize this place. The Federation used it as a sort of boot camp for Makahomian recruits, to see if we qualified for the Corps. It is near enough to Makahomia that those who didn't make it through the training could be returned - dead or alive.

"Do tell?" Becker asked, scratching his chin. "Hmmm. We seem to have gone a little out of our way."

"I don't want to be rude, Captain," Acorna said. "But did you maybe detect some small differences in the functions of Khleevi navigational equipment as compared to that of other cultures whose salvage you have adapted to the Condor]"

Becker harrumphed and looked at the strange array he had installed, waving at it casually. "You mean this? Well, Princess, when you've been in the salvage business as long as I have you learn that there are just so many functions a ship is going to perform and that they are to some extent interchangeable. If it wasn't for that blasted"-he looked at Nadhari and RK, who were both eying him through slitted eyes, and revised his adjective- "holy cat swinging from the toggles and playing leapfrog across the b.u.t.tons..."

Acorna and Nadhari looked meaningfully at the watery landscape outside the viewport. The tops of the tall reeds were beginning to tickle the belly of the Condor by now.