So everyone pitched in and worked for hours gathering the cargo and transporting it to the ship. After they got it all stacked ready to stow, they watched Mac open his forearm and extract a paint-scraping tool. Then the android punched a button just under the skin of his wrist that switched him to what looked like a holovid on fast forward. With rapid sweeps, he cleaned the robolift of sap and stored the sticky stuff carefully in one of Captain Decker’s ceramic yogurt containers-after first evicting the yogurt and cleaning the dish, of course. “What am I to do with this, Captain?” Mac asked. “Stow it in one of the outer holds, not a temperaturecontrolled one. The sap was doing just fine out there in the cold vaccuum while we traveled here. I don’t want to mess with a working system. Great stars and asteroids, -will you look at my hull?” The ConSor was normally a silvery metallic color but now was covered with broad trails of the yellowish sap as vines would cover a quaint cottage. “I guess this stuff “was frozen in space and is having a field day here thawing out.”
Acorna stopped relaying his words to the non-Standardspeaking newcomers, and suggested, “Captain, -we should make certain none of the sap is left behind since it is alien to this ecology, and may greatly damage it.”
“I was gonna say that next,” Becker told her. Once the lift was cleared and they were sure no sap remained on the ground, everyone helped load the cargo. Mac returned from stowing the sap and carried the heavier items such as the nearly intact Khieevi shuttle. Becker cast a regretful glance at the hull of the Linyaari vessel. “I really want to take that with us, but I can’t justify the time it would take to grab it, disassemble it, and stow it. Well, I guess since you guys came with it, it’s not really salvage anyway.”
Acorna thought he was going to cry in his mustache at leaving such a valuable item behind, so she patted his arm and said, “When the crisis is over. Captain, we can always return for it.”
“That’s right,” he said, and brightened up immediately. She translated for the newcomers again and Kaarlye said, “Yes. Perhaps when he returns the captain could retrieve our escape pod as well. We’re very fond of it. It saved our lives, you know.”
I think -we’d all like to know how you came to be here and what has happened to you since you left narhiiVhiliinyar,” Acorna said much later to Kaarlye and Miiri. Becker, RK, and Mac were manning and catting the helm. Aari and Acorna led their new guests to the hydroponics gardens to graze.
“There’s not much to tell really,” Miiri told her. “We left as soon as Maati could be cared for by someone else.” She ran her hand over Maati’s mane. “You do understand, my dear, that we didn’t think we would be gone long, and we didn’t wish to endanger you, should the Khieevi still be in the area of our old home. We hoped somehow our boys-you, Aari, and-”
“Laarye died. Mother, -while I -was a prisoner of the Khieevi,” Aari said. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t save him.”
“Yes,” she said simply. “I felt it.”
(Did you feel me, too, Mother? Did you feel my suffering?) At his mother’s shocked look, the stolid, mildly bored look Aari wore as a mask left his face and he, too, looked shocked. “I didn’t say anything,” he said a little pleadingly to Acorna. She let out the breath she had sucked in when he spoke to his mother.
(You used thought-speak, as you did with me earlier -when the Khieevi attacked me.)
(I-did not think anyone could hear me. I did not realize-)
(I heard you,) Acorna said. (I heard you this afternoon when the thing -was attacking me. It gave me courage, knowing you were coming.)
“I heard you, too, my son,” his mother said. The light in the hydroponics gardens was dim now, simulating nighttime to give the plants a rest. The air smelled sweet and fresh down here. The rest of the ship’d had a very pungent odor when the six Linyaari boarded. Even though Mac had dragged the Khieevi corpses into another outer hold, and cleaned the sap and the Khieevi blood from the decks, the Condor reeked. Of course, the Linyaari horns cleansed the air. But it still seemed like the dead Khieevi could stink up the place a little faster than the Linyaari horns could clean it.