“If there are any Khieevi left,” Becker said. “Come to think of it, maybe we’d better try to head the bad guys off at the pass even before we check the wreckage.”
“There are Khieevi here,” Aari said. “I can feel them.”
RK, back up and tail brushed, apparently agreed with him.
They made their way cautiously down the beach, weapons at the ready. Acorna felt a little foolish trailing behind, preoccupied by the feeling that she knew Maati and Thariinye were here somewhere-alive-but she couldn’t tell where. She only had a vague sense of them. Why couldn’t she at least reach Thariinye? She couldn’t shake the feeling that her friends were alive, but in trouble.
They saw wrecked Khieevi shuttlecraft lying in the dunes, broken up but considerably more intact than the Khieevi ship, lying in the dunes further up the beach. Something brown lay crunched around the edges, and a green fluid tinted the blue sand turquoise.
“Any Khieevi who survived were most likely in that shuttle,” Becker pronounced. “Look at their ship. I doubt they could live through a wreck like that. The ship is toast, but the shuttle-well, that looks like it was spaceworthy till the last minute. No convenient vacuum or decompression to kill all the occupants for us.”
As they drew nearer they saw movement and heard a sound that made Acorna’s skin twitch-the klickklack she had heard so often on Aari’s video. The light wind carried a terrible stench-rot combined with vomit. RK stopped, dug his claws into the ground, and hissed like a tea kettle. Aari’s steps slowed. Becker surged ahead like a missile, Mac outpacing him with nonchalance in the face of danger that only an android-particularly one who had once been the face of danger himself-could achieve.
“It appears we’ve got a live one,” Becker growled as he rounded the dune where the shuttle lay. “Though it’s half buried under that shuttle. It’s not going anywhere fast. I’ll just put this cockroach out of its misery,”
“Please, wait,” Acorna said. “We must question it. Aari knows their language, at least enough to get something useful out of it. Perhaps we can get more from the LAANYE. We have to find out if this ship was alone or if others will be coming, where the main swarm of Khieevi is now, and where they are heading next. If my people are threatened again, they must know at once.”
Aari found his voice and his feet, and in six more strides stood beside Becker. Acorna approached cautiously, curiously. The creature snapped its mandibles and reached for Becker with its pincers but the captain sidestepped smartly and beckoned for Acorna to give him the cargo net.
She wondered suddenly why it had occurred to her to bring it. Then she glanced at Aari and saw him smiling at her with both approval and triumph. That was it, of course. Aari had sent her the suggestion. He thought he. couldn’t intentionally send any longer, but he was clearly mistaken. He had certainly just done it. Why hadn’t he asked her aloud, she wondered? It would have been a reasonable request. How odd.
Aari was carrying the very large and heavy weapon which he’d retrieved when his torturers fled the death throes of Vhiliinyar. He trained it on the monster. Maybe that was it. Acorna had been the logical one to bring the net-but, still, he usually communicated with spoken words. She looked up at him again, frowning this time, but he was concentrating on the Khieevi.
“Okay,” Becker said. “Aari, Acorna, and I are going to capture this thing. When we have the net over it and solidly anchored, Mac, you maneuver the shuttle off its leg and thorax, okay?”
“Yes, Captain.”
Acorna was the only one who could use two hands, but fortunately the creature was trapped and rather badly injured by the crash. Much of its back end was crushed beneath the shuttle, from what she could see. It still gave her cold chills to be this close to a live Khieevi, no matter how much was wrong with it. When the android lifted the broken piece of the shuttle from the back of the Khieevi and tipped it aside, the Khieevi struggled mightily against their titanium net, but in vain. Mac then aided his crewmates in finishing netting the monster’s hind parts. The monster klicked and klacked and gnashed its mandibles at them as best it could through the impediment of the net, but they paid it no attention. Finally it -was well wrapped enough that they could risk transporting it.