Acorna's Search Part 18

This gave her a moment of pause. Why had the door been sealed? Was there something harmful above? But she had felt no fear in that mora.s.s of emotion that had come to her through the walls. Grief, yes, but not the same sort of grief she was so familiar with in Aari's makeup. "It was sealed long ago," Acorna said reasonably. "It cannot have been sealed to keep us in or out after all this time. Use caution, but open it."

Mac gave a short nod of understanding and backed up a little distance, as they all did. With a slight flick of one finger he caused his pick to grow a handle. It extended far enough that he was able to sling the point of the pick into the rectangle on the ceiling. It did not give when he pulled, but as soon as he jerked the pick back, the sealed door creaked slowly open.

Mac flipped the pick back up so it caught the upper edge of the exposed ceiling.

He glanced at Acorna. "I believe Captain Becker has indicated that it is courteous to allow ladies to precede one through a doorway, Kh.o.r.n.ya."

Acorna looked up into the darkness, her lamp's beam swallowed before it reached the top of the hole.

"I suppose I could go first, but may I begin by standing on your shoulders again, Mac?" she asked.

"Or," he countered, grabbing the pick with his other hand, and walking himself up the wall until his feet were even with the ceiling, "we could try this." "Now what?" Thariinye asked.

"Now I release my hand from the pick, and do a flip that will insert my lower body into the s.p.a.ce beyond the hole. Then I haul the pick up, reattach my hand, and lower the pick to pull the two of you up behind me," he said. He no longer sounded peevish. Now he sounded smug.

Apparently RK thought so, too. With a light and graceful feline leap he launched himself from the floor to the small of the android's back, then delicately put first one paw, then the other, on the top of the hole, sniffed, meowed, and jumped up, the slightly twitching tip of his brushy tail the last they saw of him for a second. Then suddenly his eyes and teeth appeared in the opening once more, looking down at them as if from a tree.

"Hmmm," Acorna said. "I wonder if someone has been reading to RK from Alice in Wonderland." "What?"

"It's a book," Acorna said, as Mac performed the inhumanly flexible maneuver he had outlined and thrust the pick down for them to latch onto. "And I think RK may be borrowing from its pages." Above them, the cat vanished into the dark, its grin last of all.

Getting Liriili into the flitter had been hard enough, but getting her to shut up and allow the pilot to deliver her to the ship was proving to be tedious in the extreme.

"I demand to be taken back to the Council on narhii-Vhiliinyar immediately," Liriili declared with as much hauteur as if she were not only still viizaar of that planet, but also High Commanding Queen of the Universe, had there been such a t.i.tle.

Madame, we have explained to you " Yaniriin began, but to no avail. He was fortunate enough to have escaped previous encounters with Liriili, but he had heard stories, and from what he could hear, they were all true.

Again, I demand to return to my old world and be presented to the Council. I have endured an ordeal beyond belief and my story must be told. I alone "

If you are going to say that you alone have experienced what you've been through, lady, I doubt that," Yaniriin interrupted her this time. "You disappeared, sure, but so have a third of the people we sent to scout Vhiliinyar for rehabilitation." "Yes, I noticed that," she said loftily. "I turned my back for only a moment and when I looked, the laboratory and all of its staff had vanished. I notice, of course, that someone has slyly put the building back now, but where is the aagroni! I thought he had too much pride to stoop to such cheap tricks."

Yaniriin said carefully, "The aagroni has vanished along with the others, Lady, and is still missing. But he was there when you vanished, and he was there for days afterwards. Did you not see him where you went when you disappeared?"

"I would hardly be complaining of his behavior if I had, would I?" she said.

In between fielding her remarks, Yaniriin was speaking with Lady Kh.o.r.n.ya and her companions in the search mission. He was almost relieved when Kh.o.r.n.ya told him she wished for him to keep Liriili on the site so she could interview her. It kept her out of his ship for however long it took for the interview to be concluded.

If he thought Liriili would be pleased by this decision, he was informed of his mistake at once.

"I, who have been deprived of food, water, and the company of my peers for lo these many days and nights while I shivered on this desolate Khleevi-ravaged place, fearing who-knows-what horrors to be visited on me, am to wait on the pleasure of that chit of a girl?"

"Lady Kh.o.r.n.ya hopes that if she interviews you here, Madame, she will gam clues to where you have been and where the others might be. It is her mission "

"It has been her mission from the very beginning to undermine my authority, and now she wishes to endanger my life with her dallying? And you, a man responsible for commanding a starship, permit this?"

He hadn't known what to say to this, and had consulted with Nadhari Kando, asking if perhaps Kh.o.r.n.ya's wishes should be disregarded. Liriili, who no doubt, was) still suffering from exposure certainly, from what the shuttle crew who treated her initially said, she was dehydrated and rather thinner than before. Should she be taken straight back to MOO.

Commander Kando was emphatic that Kh.o.r.n.ya's instructions be followed, however a fact which he was about to relay to Liriili when the first of the monsters was spotted by the ship's scanners.

He immediately dispatched two other shuttles, but the craft which could reach the team quickest was the one already on the planet's surface. That, of course, was the same one being monopolized by Liriili's dramatization of her own experience, and by her general disagreeableness.

"It seems you will get your wish after all, Madame," Yaniriin informed her. "The recon and rescue team is in peril and the shuttle must be dispatched to its a.s.sistance."

"What sort of peril?"

"A monster, or wait make that monsters seem bent on attacking oh, no, they are under attack now!"

"Khleevi? That stupid girl said she had destroyed the Khleevi. Oh, I told the council how untrustworthy she was, and here they are back again."

"No, ma'am, not Khleevi."

"You needn't think I am going to allow you to put me in the path of those Khleevi again for her convenience," Liriili said with increasing shrillness. "She'd like that, if they killed me "

"Vilii Hazaar Miirl?" Yaniriin addressed the shuttle captain directly.

Aye, sir:

"You will proceed to these coordinates. If Lady Liriili wishes to leave the planet's surface, she may accompany you. If not, leave her there and a later shuttle may find time to transport her when the crisis is over."

Aye, sir.

"You are not leaving me behind?" Liriili cried, aghast. "Not if you cease and desist all verbal communication and load yourself aboard immediately, Madame. Otherwise, leaving you behind is exactly what we will do," the captain said with satisfaction so profound that it was no doubt uncharitable and unbecoming in an officer of the Linyaari s.p.a.ce fleet.

Liriili opened her mouth but Vilii Hazaar Miirl, who had initially entertained kind feelings for the castaway, as well as compa.s.sion for her plight, started to shut the shuttle door in her face. Miirl was actually hoping Liriili would utter just one more word, but the former viizaar pulled herself together, haughtily opened the door, boarded, and dumped herself into one of the seats, her mouth clamped into a hard thin line. She didn't bother to shield her thoughts at all, but with a nod from Miirl, the crew chief shoved a horn helmet over Liriili's horn, m.u.f.fling her outraged ruminations. "For your safety, lady," the chief said with deliberately officious crispness.

While it did not take the shuttle nearly as long to reach the coordinates Yaniriin dictated as it would have taken a flitter, a great deal happened while they were en route.

Yaniriin kept Miirl and her crew apprised of what the ship's sophisticated long-range visual scanners were showing.

"The beasts are s.h.a.ggy, covered with what appears to be coa.r.s.e fur or hair. Their movements indicated bewilderment initially, but that has turned to aggression. One attempted to board the flitter, but when it was unable to do so, it attacked the craft with a weapon of some sort.

"Oh! Wait! Here comes the second creature, joining the first one. They appear to be allies, and do not attack each other, which is perhaps unfortunate for us. The second one is also attempting to board the flitter. No. Perhaps it was sniffing the craft, for now it is less tall, as if it has hunched over. Now it is slowly proceeding along the route taken by Kh.o.r.n.ya and her team to the place where they dug the tunnel leading to the the cave."

Silence interrupted these reports, while Yaniriin communicaited with Kh.o.r.n.ya, Thariinye, and their android and pahaantiyir a.s.sociates.

Suddenly Yaniriin said, "Oh, no. The team has emerged from the tunnel. Now it appears that the monsters have seen them, and they are attacking! Have you a st.u.r.dy net aboard your craft, Vilii Hazaar Miirl?"

"Aye, sir," she answered. "And there's a very strong tractor beam on this craft, too it is one of House Harakamian's, used for construction, and capable of moving heavy ground equipment, I understand."

"Excellent. Kh.o.r.n.ya and her friends will have need of that. If you can increase your speed at all, please do so."

"Unfortunately, this sort of craft isn't actually built for speed, sir, but we will do the best we can," Miirl promised. "Perhaps if we offloaded extra personnel?"

"Nice try, Miirl, but I'm afraid I cannot condone abandoning your pa.s.senger for that reason."

"It was worth a try, sir," Miirl responded.

Liriili couldn't hear her over the craft's drive and, with the horn helmet on, couldn't really read her well either.