“Well, he’ll have to do it when he gets back from the Linyaari home world then,” the sentry smirked.
“What?” “Didn’t you get the message? The stupid corns broadcast to all of their ships, which -we intercepted, of course, the coordinates to their planet. The general and the boss have taken off with most of the personnel to check it out.”
“No kiddin’? Well, we’ll just park her with the others then.
What’d they have in the mess hall tonight?”
The sentry told him while the rest of the cadre marched the corn past him, and past the ships, into the biosphere where most of her kind were kept.
“Where’d you find her?”
“Pleasure house on Rahab Three.”
“No kidding? You mean somebody wanted to do it -with one of…” The sentry didn’t finish his sentence. Something banged against the backs of his knees, knocking him into the sergeant. The last thing he saw was the sergeant’s belt buckle as the newcomer raised both fists and brought them down hard on the back of the sentry’s skull.
Acorna heard the thump when the sentry hit the ground and saw only a brief flash of movement as Aari penetrated the biosphere. He had an uncanny talent for taking on the coloring of his surroundings, she saw. It was augmented by smearing himself with soil, but it was more in the way he became whatever was around him, though she would have said if asked previously that it was impossible for anyone to blend with a plastic bubble.
Khetala was giving the next trooper they encountered the same story Becker had about Acorna being a special prisoner they’d found in a pleasure house. Meanwhile Reamer guided her to the bubble where many other Linyaari were crammed into a place far too small for them. They were very subdued. At first she thought they all wore horn-hats to mute their thoughts, but then she saw that their horns were in very bad condition that they were emaciated and filthy, their bones protruding and their postures drooping.
She began to pick out the ones who looked the strongest and ablest and used her horn judiciously on them, meanwhile broadcasting in thoughtspeak, (We have come to take you home. Please be ready. Do as you are directed and with any luck, we will all leave here safely.)
(Khornya?) Her name spoken in her aunt’s thoughtspeak sounded as if Neeva was seeing her as a ghost. Acorna waded through her people until she found an adjoining bubble where four Linyaari were laying horns on Neeva and a male Linyaari, and also on someone who vaguely resembled the Red Bracelet who had once been Delszaki Li’s chief of security, Nadhari Kando.
(Neeva!)
(We are doing what we can for her, Khornya, but she and Virii have been badly abused.)
(Melireenya! Khaari, I am so glad to have found you. Stand aside a moment-no, wait.) She laid her horn on all of them and in a few moments, except for looking very thin, they had recovered to the point that they once more resembled her old shipmates and her aunt.
(Oh, Khornya! You see how low we have fallen. Thanks be that your horn is still fresh. Can you help Nadhari? They have almost killed her with their wicked drugs that make her do terrible things to us all.)
Nadhari was feverish, and her eyes were staring, the blood vessels in her neck and upper chest standing out like those of her arms, seemingly in spasm. Acorna laid her horn against them and Nadhari relaxed.
Becker poked his head in. “Khetala, Reamer, Markel, and Hafiz’s people have taken care of the guards. You got enough pilots for the Linyaari vessels?”
“Yes. But none of them are very strong.”
“That’s okay. They don’t have to fly far. I swept all the ships for homing devices. Learned that lesson once already. Let’s go, then.”
“It is a fortunate thing that all of my gardens are not of the illusory variety,” Hafiz said as he, Acorna, and Aari watched the Linyaari former prisoners stripping his hydroponics gardens like locusts in a field. The gardens in the Linyaari ships, which could have fed the prisoners, had been deliberately killed by Ikwaskwan’s men or allowed to die.