Anne McCaffrey - Acorna 1 - Acorna

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The Acorna Series

Volume 1

ACORNA

Anne McCaffrey

Preface

The space/time coordinate system

they used has no relationship to

Earth, our sun, the Milky Way, or

any other point of reference we could use to find

our way around, and in any coordinate system we

use, they're so far off the edge of the chart that

nobody has ever contemplated going there, even

with the proton drive. So let's just say that they

were somewhere between the far side of nowhere

and the near side of here when their time and space

ran out, and what started as a pleasure cruise ship

turned into a death chamber. They are like us in

many ways besides appearance. They didn't want

to die if they could possibly avoid it; if they

couldn't live, then at least they wanted to die with

dignity and peace instead of in a Khievii torture

cell; and they would happily have thrown away life,

dignity and everything else to save their youngling,

who didn't even know what was about to happen

to them.

ANNE McCAFFREY AND MARGARET BALL

And they had time to talk; what amounted to

several hours by our reckoning, while the Khievii

ship closed in on the little cruiser that had run out

of places to flee to.

"We could offer to surrender if they'd spare

her," she said, looking at the net where their

youngling curled asleep. It was a mercy that she

slept so well; she talked well enough that they'd

have had trouble disguising their meaning from

her if she were awake.

"They make no terms," he said. "They never have."

"Why do they hate us so?"

"I don't know that they do hate," he said.

"Nobody knows what they feel. They are not like

us, and we can't ascribe our emotions to them. All

we know? is what they do."

And they both fell silent for a while, unwill-

ing to speak of what the Khievii did to prisoners

of other races. No one had ever survived capture

by the Khievii, but the images of what happened

after capture were broadcast by the Khievii, in

full three-D reproduction, with sound and color.

Was it a calculated ploy to terrorize, or simply a

display of triumph, as members of a more

humanoid race might display the enemy's flag or

captured ships? No one knew, because the same

things had happened to the diplomat-linguists

who went under sign of peace to make a treaty

with the Khievii.

"Cruel ..." she breathed after a long while

•watching their sleeping child.

"Their only mercy," he said, "is that they have

already let us know to expect no mercy. It won't

'A.corna. -^^ 3

happen to us, because we won't be alive when they

reach here."

Since the third broadcast of Khievii prisoner-

torture, shortly after the beginning of -what history

might know as the Khievii Invasion, no ship of

their people had gone anywhere without certain

necessary supplies. The only prisoners taken were

those caught away from a ship or without time to

use those supplies. The others were always far

beyond the reach of pain when the Khievii caught

up with their bodies.

"But I don't like to go without striking even

one blow," he said, "so I have made certain modifi-

cations to our engines. There are some privileges

to being director of Weapons Development; this

system is so recently designed that even the Fleet

has not yet been fitted with it."

His hands were not quite as flexible as ours,

but the fingers worked well enough to key in the

commands that would activate those modifica-

tions; commands too dangerous to be activated by

the usual voice-control system.

"When anything of a mass equal to or greater

than ours approaches within this radius," he told

her, pointing at the glowing sphere that now sur-

rounded their ship in the display field, "the dimen-

sional space around us both will warp, change,

decompose until all the matter within this sphere is

compressed to a single point. They will never

know what happened to us or to their own board-

ing craft." His lips tightened. "We've learned that

they don't fear death; perhaps a mystery will

frighten them somewhat more."

4 -^-? ANNE McCAFFREY AND MARGARET BALL

"What happens to the space around us when

the compression effect is triggered?"

"No one knows. It's not something you'd want

to test planet side or from a close observation

point. All we know is that whatever exists within

the sphere is destroyed as if it had never been."

She said nothing, but looked at the baby. The

pupils of her eyes narrowed to vertical slits.

"It won't hurt her," he said gently, seeing and

understanding her grief. "We'll take the abaanye

now, and give her some in her bottle. I'll have to

wake her to feed her, but she'll go to sleep after-

wards and so will -we. That's all it is, you know:

going to sleep."

"I don't mind for us," she said, •which was a lie,

but a loving one. "But she is just beginning to live.

Isn't there some way "we could give her a chance?

If we cast her out in a survival pod — "

"If we did it now, they'd see and intercept it,"

he said. "Do you want to think about -what would

happen then?"

"Then do it when the ship explodes!" she cried.

"Do it when we're all dying! Can't you rig those

controls to eject the pod just before they reach the

radius, so that they won't have a chance to change

course and take her?"

"For what? So that she can spend her last

hours alone and scared in a survival pod? Better

to let her go to sleep here in your arms and never

wake up."

"Give her enough to make her sleep, yes," she

said. She could almost feel her wits becoming

sharper in these last moments. "Make her sleep for

A coma •-•—~' 6

more hours than the pod has air. If only she -were

old enough to ... well, she isn't and that's that. If

the air runs out, she'll die without waking. But

some of our people might find her first. They

might have heard our last distress signals. They

might be looking. Give her that chance!"

She held the baby and fed her the bitter

abaanye mixed with sweetened milk to make it

palatable, and rocked her in her arms, and kissed

her face and hands and soft tummy and little kick-

ing feet until the kicking slowly stopped, and the

baby gurgled once and breathed deeply in and out,

and then lay quite limp and barely breathing in her

mother s arms.

"Do you have to put her in the pod now?" she

cried when he stooped over them. "Let me hold

her a little longer—just a little longer."

"I won't take the abaanye until I see her

safely stowed," he said. "I've programmed the

ship to launch the pod as close to the time of det-

onation as I dare." Too close, he thought, really;

the pod -would almost certainly be within the

radius when the Khievii approached, to be

destroyed with them in the explosive transforma-

tion of local space. But there was no need to tell

her that. He would let her drink the abaanye and

go to sleep believing that their baby had that one

chance of living.

She willed her pupils to widen into an expres-

sion of calm content while he was closing the pod

and arming it to eject on command.

"Is all complete?" she asked when he finished.``````

Yes.

6 - -—-' ANNE MCCAFFREY AND MARGARET BALL

She managed a smile, and handed him a tube

of sparkling red liquid. "I've mixed a very special

drink for us," she said. "Most of it is the same vin-

tage as the -wine we drank on our vows-day."

He loved her more in that moment, it seemed

to him, than ever he had in the days when they

thought they had long years of life together before

them.

"Then let us renew our vows," he said.

At first Gill assumed it was just

another bit of space debris, wink-

• ing as it turned around its own

axis and sending bright flashes of reflected light

down where they were placing the cable around

AS—6-4-B1.3. But something about it seemed

wrong to him, and he raised the question when

they were back inside the Khedive.

"It is too bright to have been in space very

long," Rafik pointed out. His slender brown fin-

gers danced over the console before him; he read

half a dozen screens at once and translated their

glowing, multicolored lines into voice commands

to the external sensor system.

"What d'you mean, too bright?" Gill

demanded. "Star,) are bright, and most of them have

been around a good while."

Rafik's black brows lifted and he nodded at

Calum.

"But the sensors tell us this is metal, and too

8 - -—— ANNE McCAFFREY AND MARGARET BALL

smooth," Calum said. "As usual, you're thinking

with the Viking-ancestor part of what we laugh-

ingly refer to as your brain, Declan Giloglie the

Third. Would it not be pitted from minor colli-

sions if it had been in this asteroid belt more than

a matter of hours? And if it has not been in this

part of space for more than a few hours, where

did it come from?"

"Conundrums, is it? I'll leave the solving of

them to you," Gill said with good humor. "I am but

a simple metallurgic engineer, a horny-handed son

of the soil."

"More like a son of the asteroidal regolith,"

Rafik suggested. "Not that this particular asteroid

offers much; we're going to have to break up the

surface with the auger before there's any point in

lowering the magnetic rake . . . Ah! Got a fix on

it." An oval shape, regularly indented along one

edge, appeared on the central screen. "Now what

can the sensors tell us about this little mystery? "

"It looks like a pea pod," Gill said.

"It does that," Calum agreed. "The question is,

what sort of peas, and do we want to harvest

them, or send them gently on their way? There ve

not been any recent diplomatic disagreements in

this sector, have there?"

"None that would inspire the placing of mines,"

Gill said, "and that's not like any space mine / ever

saw. Besides, only an idiot would send a space

mine floating into an asteroid belt where there's no

telling what might set it off and whose side might

be worst injured."

"High intelligence," Rafik murmured, "is not

ftcorna. .--—> 9

inevitably an attribute of those who pursue diplo-

macy by other means . . . close reading," he com-

manded the console. "All bandwidths . . . well,

well. Interesting."

"What?"

"Unless I'm mistaken . . ." Rafik paused.

"Names of the Three Prophets! I mu^t be mis-

taken. It's not large enough . . . and there's no

scheduled traffic through this sector . . . Calum,

what do you make of these sensor readings?"

Calum leaned over the panel. His sandy lashes

blinked several times, rapidly, as he absorbed and

interpreted the changing colors of the display.

"You're not mistaken," he said.

"Would you two kindly share the great

insight?" Gill demanded.

Calum straightened and looked up at Gill.

"Your peas," he said, "are alive. And given the size

of the pod—too small for any recycling life-

support system—the signal it's broadcasting can

only be a distress call, though it's like no code I've

ever heard before."

"Can we capture it?"

"We'll have to, shan't we? Let's hope—ah,

good. I don't recognize the alloy, but it's definitely

ferrous. The magnetic attractors should be able to

latch on—easy, now," Rafik admonished the

machinery he was setting in action, "we don't want

to jostle it, do we? Contents fragile. Handle with

care, and all that. . . . Very nice," he murmured as

the pod came to rest in an empty cargo bay.

"Complimenting your own delicate hands?"

Calum asked caustically.

Acorna 1 1

ANNE MCCAFFREY AND MARGARET BALL

"The ship, my friend, the Khedive. She's done a

fine gentle job of harvesting our pea pod; now to

bring it in and open it."

There were no identification markings that any

of them could read on the "pea pod," but a series

of long scrolling lines might, Calum surmised,

have been some sort of alien script.

"Alien, of course," Raflk murmured. "All the

generations of the Expansion, all these stars

mapped and planets settled, and we're to be the

first to discover a sapient alien race ... I <)on't

think. It's decoration, or it's a script none of us

happens to know, which is just barely possible, I

think you'll agree?"

"Barely," Calum agreed, with no echo of

Rafik s irony in his voice. "But it's not Cyrillic or

Neo-Grek or Romaic or TriLat or anything else I

can name ... so what id it?"

"Perhaps," Rafik suggested, "the peas will tell

us." He ran delicate fingers over the incised carvings

and the scalloped edges of the pod. Hermetically

sealed, of a size to hold one adult human body, it

might have been a coffin rather than a life-support

module . . . but the ship's sensors had picked up that

distress signal, and the signs of life within the pod.

And the means of opening, when he found it, was as

simple and elegant as the rest of the design; simply a

matter of matching the first three fingers of each

hand with the pair of triple oval depressions in the

center of the pod.

"Hold it," Calum said. "Better suit up and open

it in the air lock. We've no idea what sort of atmo-

sphere this thing breathes."

Gill frowned. "We could kill it by opening it.

Isn't there some way to test what's in there?"

"Not without opening it," Calum said brightly.

"Look, Gill, whatever is in there may not be alive

anyway—and if it is, surely it won't last forever in

a hermetically sealed environment. It'll have to

take its chances."

The men looked at each other, shrugged, and

donned their working gear before moving them-

selves and the pod into the airlock.

"Well, Calum," Rafik said in an oddly strangled

voice, seconds after the lid swung open, "you were

half right, it seems. Not an aduit human, at any

rate."

Calum and Gill bent over the pod to inspect

the sleeping youngling revealed when it opened.

"What species is it?" Gill asked

"Sweet little thing, isn't she?" Gill said in such

a soppy tone that both Rafik and Calum gave him

an odd look.

"How'd you arrive at the sex of it?" Rafik

wanted to know.

"She looks feminine!"

They all admitted to that impression of the little

creature which lay on her side, one hand curled into

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