There was a smaller girl clutching his tunic, now, marring the elegant drape of the fabric, and a boy jumped up and down and swung from his arm as if he were some kind of climbing toy. Why hadn’t that plump little woman warned him that the moon base was full of children? Pre-pubes, their psychic abilities still latent, were not susceptible to the mental projections that could be used to calm adults … and apparently that particular developmental factor was true across species, or at least it was as true of these beings as it was of his own race. But he had no other projection, nothing else to try! Frantically he projected (You don’t see anything unusual) (Nothing is happening) (Need to get back to work).
“But I do see you. Lady Epona, I do! I do!” squealed the smallest girl.
Khetala, the oldest of the group, loosened her embrace and backed off a step, puzzled. Why had she thought this was Acorna? It was obviously only a tall miner … she squinted . . with silver hair … and a horn… .
“Don’t you remember me. Lady Acorna?” she asked, hurt and puzzled.
Hajnal was too high on success and escape even to be touched by the projections. “Whaddaya screechin’ about now? I know my Lady Lukia of the Lights!”
Thariinye gritted his teeth and redoubled the force of his projections, but the children were jumping up and down, shrieking with excitement, and far too hyper to receive the calming influence he was trying to put forth, even if they had been old enough to pick up his mental images. Not only that, but they seemed to be insane. They expected him to cuddle them. They thought he was… .
Under sufficient stress, Thariinye stopped trying to remember the words of the alien language and just used them without thinking.
“Lookh, yuuu hiteli twerpis,” he hissed in rage, “I-aam- naat-a-ghiril! See?”
And, just as the security guard requested by Gill arrived at the workings, Thariinye yanked open his blue tunic to display irrefutable evidence that he could not be the “lady” these brats were greeting so ecstatically.
The guard, unlike the children, was affected by Thariinye’s projections; so he saw nothing unusual in the sight of a sevenfoot horned male with a cascade of silver hair falling down his neck. What that male was doing, however, was both unusual and strictly forbidden on Maganos Moon Base.
“You’d better come along with me, mister,” he said.
Haven, Unified Federation Date534.05.1S
That’s Hoa,” Markel mouthed in Acorna’s ear’ as ????? down the vent at the first of the innermost security cells, much smaller and more closely guarded than the row where Acorna had been kept.
“Who?”
“Ho-A,” Markel separated the syllables. “He’s the guy the Palomellese spaced my”-he had to swallow-“my father for-to get control of his work. If he hadn’t come aboard the Haven, everything would be all right. He’s how Rushima’s being flooded, burned, blasted, or stormed until they pay Nueva Fallona’s gang protection money.”
“He?” And Acorna looked down again at the dejected, darkhaired man sitting with his head in his hands. What she could see of his skin had a faintly yellow cast that reminded her of Delszaki Li and made her instinctively wish to trust him. “Then why’s he here”-she pointed one hand down-“and not up there with them?”
“Because he trusted our Speakers-my father and Andrezhuna and that Gerezan.” The last name was expelled like a Gurse, and, in the light from the cell below, Acorna could see the tears begin to form in Markel’s eyes. He brushed them aside with impatient fingers, taking a deep breath. “He didn’t know about what they”-Markel jerked a contemptuous finger upwardplanned. He was scared stiff that the governments of Khang Kieaan, where he used to live, would’ve figured out that he couldn’t just predict weather, he could manipulate it.”
“Ooooh.” Acorna’s mind made leaps of conjecture on how that could be used. “So that’s what happened to Rushima?” Markel nodded.
“But how could Hoa give that sort of power to renegades like them?” Now she, too, pointed upward.
“He didn’t. He thought he’d be safe on Haven … and he would’ve been, only Nueva and those traitors Gerezan and Sengrat planned a coup and got rid of all the rest of the First Generation. …” Markel gulped.