“Dearest ambassadors, tradesmen, students, and scientists, this is your vilzaar speaking,” said the woman, who was not the viizaar at all, not unless Khornya had rapidly risen to power. She was speaking in her rather broken version of Linyaari, so Melireenya was inclined to doubt she had become the planet’s administrator already. Beside her was a fellow who was vaguely familiar, and yet, different somehow. Melireenya was far too weary to try to place him. “Dr. Vaanye” Khornya indicated the man beside her who was hardly old enough to be the Dr. Vaanye who was her late father-“has finally succeeded in widening the band of our broadcast so it can reach to the various planets upon which you should now be posted. We have had no word of you in a long while. Have you lost your way home? Have you forgotten how to contact your loved ones? In case such a disaster is happening, we will rebroadcast our coordinates on this band only.”
Ikwaskwan was impatiently gesturing to a soldier who dragged Neeva and Virii, bound at wrist and ankle like the young Starfarer couple, out into the arena.
“Well, Ambassador? What’s the message?”
Neeva raised her filthy face, her mane matted and chunks of it torn loose in parts, her horn barely visible.
She spat.
Ikwaskwan roared. “Let Nadhari have them both and bring me their horns when she’s done with them!”
Melireenya and Khaari passed a signal between them and Melireenya sprang up and cried, “No! General, please don’t hurt them any more! I’ll tell you what it says! I know it will harm the rest of my people but I simply can’t take it any more! Please let Neeva and Virii go and I’ll tell you anything you want to.”
Khaari ran into the arena after her and tried to pull her back. “Melireenya, you don’t know what you’re saying. You mustn’t betray all of us for one person, not even Neeva.”
Perhaps the general would not notice in the heat of the moment that they were both speaking Standard, for his benefit.
The message overhead was in a loop, repeating over and over again. Melireenya, babbling, stumbling over her words, forgetting the Standard that she had learned from Khornya’s people what seemed like ghaanyi and ghaanyl ago, told Ikwaskwan what the transmission said. She hesitated over the coordinates until he threatened Neeva and Virii again, and then she allowed herself to cave in under the weight of his cruelty, as she had wanted to do for days. She lay in the dirt of this strange moon beside her poor tortured friends and wept and wept and wept until she thought her weeping would never cease. When at long last someone, Khaari, thought-touched her and she looked up, everything around her had changed. The most drastic change was that the bleachers were empty, with most of the soldiers, Ikwaskwan and Ganoosh, gone. Although the broadcast was still playing and replaying overhead, it was infused with far more light, and Melireenya realized that this was because there were no longer the shadows being cast by the towering fence of bullet-shaped troop ships that had surrounded the biosphere bubbles. All of these ships were also gone, and the atmosphere outside the bubbles was clouded only by settling dust and debris. The bubbles still resounded with the roaring of the troop ship drives as they lifted off.
That roaring seemed to continue for an awfully long time, Melireenya thought. With the games over, Nadhari was netted, sedated, and Melireenya and the other three on her shift -went to work healing her. This day there were no wounds except the psychic ones from the drugs and the shame she suffered to be so badly misused. So far this day she had maimed no one.
The lone sentry left to guard the Linyaari ship bubble was surprised to see two troop ships land so soon after the others had left. He thought he understood when he saw the cadre of uniformed Federation Forces men and women pushing one of the corns in front of them. This one was lipping off to them in her own horsey-sounding babble.
“Got another live one for the general,” the short, barrelchested master sergeant said. “He’s gonna want to interrogate this one personally.”