Acorna’s relationship with Hafiz, and the one between Hafiz and Rafik, had improved after that to the point that Acorna now used the name Harakamian, along with that of her good and gentle mentor Mr. Li, as a surname. Dear Mr. Li had passed on a few months ago, but the more durable Uncle Hafiz had recently married his second wife and was now enjoying his retirement in her company.
Acorna, along with her uncles and Mr. Li, had succeeded in rescuing the children imprisoned in the camps on Kezdet, a planet whose economy had once depended on the exploitation of child labor. They had been ably assisted in this task by the intelligent and resourceful siblings of the Kendoro family, Pal, Judit, and Mercy, themselves former victims of the camps. Together, Acorna and her friends had been instrumental in changing the planet’s laws and ridding it of the Piper, the ringleader responsible for the most heinous of the abuses. They had gone on to establish a mining and teaching facility on one of Kezdet’s moons, Maganos, to nurture and educate the children they had rescued from the horrors of the labor camps.
Later, Acorna and her uncle Calum, while trying to locate her home world, had helped quell a mutiny among the Starfarers, human voyagers on a large colony ship. After being forced to watch their parents’ murders during the rebellion, and the subsequent bloodshed, murder, and exploitation that the ship’s new masters “were intent upon, the children of the ship were able, with Acorna’s help, to wrest control from the mutineers and destroy them. In the process, they rescued the famed meteorologist Dr. Ngaen Xong Hoa, and his weather control system. The people who had seized the ship had used Dr. Hoa’s new system to destroy the economy and ecology of the newly colonized planet Rushima. The mutineers were spaced by the triumphant youngsters, just as the mutineers had spaced their victims, when the children regained control of the ship.
While returning with Dr. Hoa to repair the damage to Rushima, Acorna, her adoptive family, and the children fell under attack by the Khieevi, a vicious bug-like race responsible for the death of Acorna’s parents. Fortunately, Acorna’s aunt Neeva and the delegation from narhiiVhiliinyar had arrived in time to warn everyone of the impending invasion. With Acorna’s help, the resources of Kezdet and the Houses of Harakamian and Li had been mobilized to rout the Khieevi.
In the course of all this, Acorna had become something of a mistress of disguise, and had used her horn to purify an entire ship’s poisoned air and the waters of Rushima as well as to heal the wounded in all of the hostile encounters with which she’d been involved.
This was all quite aside from her abilities to divine by seemingly magical means the mineral content of each individual asteroid her uncles wished to mine, an ability which had earned her their respect while she was still quite young. So Acorna had actually packed a great deal of activity into a relatively short life. Consequently she did not feel particularly childlike most of the time.
Nevertheless, she was a child to her mother’s sister Neeva, a Linyaari Envoy Extraordinaire, or vw^haanye ferllii She was considered a youngling by all the other Linyaari aboard the Balakiire as well: Khaari, the navigation officer or gheraaiye mallvii in the Linyaari tongue; Melireenya, the senior communications office or gheraaiye ve-khanyli; and Thariinye, the young male whose function was still not exactly clear to Acorna, even after their travels together, but who seemed to think that without him, the mission could not have succeeded. What had been taken by Acorna’s human friends for talent was apparently standard issue for her race. And many of the talents the other Linyaari possessed seemed to have been carefully developed. For instance, none of them neecfu) words to communicate with each other and all of them could read the thoughts of the others on the ship-including hers, a fact which she found rather unnerving at times. She had so very much to learn. Fortunately, if her shipmates were typical examples, her people were kind and forbearing.
“Khornya, this is my counterpart in the Gamma Sector, Vt^e^haanye FeriUi Taankaril,” Aunt Neeva told Acorna. Khornya was the Linyaari version of Acorna, the name given her by her human “uncles.” The introduction pulled her attention once more from the spectacle of the ships outside the viewport. Acorna dipped her horn, as did the vLfe()haanye ferllii, a woman who, like Aunt Neeva, Khaari and Melireenya, was of an indistinguishable age, at least indistinguishable to Acoma.