“That was before everyone used shipsuits when they traveled,” Uncle Joh explained helpfully.

  “Right,” Sesseli said. “Then, while the princess was falling in love with the cat’s master, Puss ran to the castle and killed the ogre.”

  “How did he do that?” Father asked. “If he was a little cat and it was a big shapeshifting people-eating ogre, wasn’t that a bit difficult?”

  “Oh, he lied a lot,” Sesseli said. “But it was for the Greater Good.”

  “Any lies in this story you think might be helpful strategically speaking to our particular situation?” Uncle Joh asked, fluffing his mustache.

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. He told the ogre that he was there to warn him that his master the marquis was coming to kill the ogre, and the ogre said how could he do that because, well, the ogre was an ogre. Puss said so was his master, and he’d just turn into a lion and eat him. So the ogre turned into a lion and—can you see where this is going already?”

  “He told him enough lies to turn him into a mouse, then he ate him?” Uncle Joh said. Khorii thought it was kind of mean of him to spoil Sesseli’s story, but the truth was that Uncle Joh really liked to be the main storyteller and somewhat jealously guarded his role.

  “You cheated,” Khorii said. “You’re human, and you already knew the story.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Why do you think I keep RK around? Security Chief in charge of ogre-slaying.”

  “I believe I comprehend your rather roundabout analogy, Sesseli,” Elviiz said. “What we need to do with the aptly designated inogres is much the same as Puss did with the ogres. We need to persuade them to turn into something we can kill.”

  Chapter 18

  Once they entered what had been, until recently, Federation space, all three vessels in the small convoy began transmitting messages to the ship that had been carrying Rafik Nadezda the last time Hafiz had heard from him. They received no replies until they entered the Solojo system, when their probe was met with a distress signal, a digitized loop rather than an actual message, live or recorded.

  The Condor’s scanner array, more sensitive even than the Balakiire’s, was the first to pick up the signal.

  “It’s coming from Frida,” Khorii said from the copilot’s seat. When the plague was in its early infectious stages, she had traveled to the moon’s colony to heal the surviving victims with a baptism in the community reservoir. She found that if she purified water containing submerged victims, she could heal them all at the same time.

  Uncle Joh opened the com, whistling for attention from the crews of the Mana and the Balakiire. “Listen up, people. We need to stop off on Frida Moon Colony. Rafik’s ship is signaling from there.”

  But when they tried to contact Frida for permission to land, they received no response.

  “That can’t be good,” Uncle Joh said. “Maybe we should rethink all of us trying to land. One or two in a shuttle—”

  “We should be the ones to go, Captain Becker,” Neeva said. “You and most of your crew are convalescents, and possibly weakened by your previous infection. We are well rested, our horns are opaque, and are better equipped to assist any possible sick or injured people in case there has been a disaster.”

  It took a while for the shuttle to reach the surface, time in which the rest of the crews could only wait and watch, helpless with worry.

  When the scouts landed, they found that there had indeed been a disaster, but there were no sick or injured people. There were no people at all. The Balakiire transmitted its view of the surface, and for the most part it showed nothing but an empty landscape, devoid of life.

  “Where’s the bubble?” Khorii asked, stunned. The bubble, or rather bubbles, had covered a large city of settlers, all of whom had been in perfect health when she left.

  “What was it made of?” Uncle Joh asked her.

  “Oh.”

  “I take your point, Captain,” Maak said. “The inogres most likely devoured the bubble, exposing the settlers to the inhospitable atmosphere of the moon.”

  Their remarks were transmitted to the other two ships.

  “Perhaps,” Neeva said, as their sensors showed a few ruined bits of structure where the bubbles used to be. “But we are not seeing any human remains here.”

  “Have you located the ship yet?” Mother asked anxiously. Rafik Nadezda was one of the asteroid miners whose ship had intercepted her escape pod when she was an infant. The three men had raised her and were the human side of her family.

  “Not—oh yes, that must be it.” The images transmitted by the Balakiire stabilized, and the next thing Khorii saw was Neeva and Melireenya with their helmet hoods and gravity boots in place. They strode toward the ruins, moving white pillars against the ruined moonscape, and stopped at a stunted structure protruding from the ground. The tallest piece rose no higher than their knees.

  They picked their way through it until Neeva bent down, then held something aloft.

  “What is it?” Ariin asked from the lounge.

  “A whiner,” Uncle Joh said. “I could tell from the signal. It’s a portable distress beacon not connected with the ship’s main computer but programmed with its codes. It can be activated independently if the ship’s other systems are disabled.”

  “Yes,” Neeva said. “We’ve encountered several of these both on the ground and in space during other rescue missions.”

  “The signal is definitely from Rafik’s ship?” Mother asked.

  “’Fraid so, princess.”

  “There is no evidence of any human remains, recent or otherwise, and with the decreased oxygen available on this moon’s unprotected surface, any remains would not have decayed quickly,” Melireenya said.

  “Perhaps they realized what was happening and evacuated, Joh,” Father suggested. “Rafik might have attempted to assist in the evacuation and lost his ship in the process. This does not mean he was also lost.”

  “Yeah,” Uncle Joh said. “But then, why hasn’t he contacted Hafiz? And for that matter, I don’t see any of those inogre thingies, do you?”

  After relaying their findings to Uncle Hafiz via LaBoue, they continued to Paloduro, whose chief city, Corazon, had been a base for the rescue teams and housed a university that was the headquarters for research and rescue throughout the Solojo system.

  There had been a spaceport there, but no longer. It and much of the city had collapsed. More of it was evident than had been the case on Frida, but it looked as if an earthquake had shaken everything down to its foundations. Instead of streets, undulating rolls of the sludgy inogre rippled and waved through the city. Puddling out from its center, the alien organism oozed tentacles into the ruined buildings on either side of the streets. When the tentacles withdrew into the main part of the beast, the ruins shuddered and collapsed to the ground.

  “Where are the people?” Sesseli asked. Her voice quivered. “Abuelita and Jalonzo?”

  “I don’t know, but we’re not landing here,” Uncle Joh said.

  Mother suddenly leaned forward and seemed to be concentrating very hard on something with a certainty that indicated she was using her special gift that told her not only the mineral content of asteroids and other objects, but had developed to the point where she could also intuit the contents of spaces beyond those she could actually see. Or maybe she was just reading the minds of some of their Corazonian friends, Khorii wasn’t sure. She herself wasn’t picking up any thoughts from them.

  “They’ve fled the town,” she said at last. “There are farmlands and fields surrounding the city. Since the inogres don’t harm organic beings, the survivors are safe enough there, but because the plague blasted the plant life when it killed so many people, there’s very little for them to eat.”

  “We still have supplies,” Jaya said. “We can drop them some until they can be rescued.”

  “That may be a long time if all of the other plague planets are similarly afflicted,” Neeva said.

  The Condor had flown out of the city, past its industrial hem, and was overflying a field. The inogre had eaten the highways leading out there but appeared to have retreated back to its main body once the nourishment was consumed. Scallops of the sludgy creature protruded from the city’s streets but didn’t extend into the countryside.

  “Maybe Rafik will be among the refugees in the field,” Father said consolingly to Mother. “They probably evacuated Frida before the inogres took over the city.”

  “Doubtful,” Maak said. “Elviiz was attacked in Corazon many weeks ago, so the city has been under attack since then.”

  “I’m afraid he’s right, Mother,” Khorii said. “We didn’t hear anything about Frida being under attack before we came. Jaya, did you learn anything about the attack when you returned Jalonzo to Corazon?”

  “We didn’t. He went back with the ship and a crew supplied by Lord Hafiz. Look! There they are.”

  From their appearance, the crowd of people occupying acres of blasted fields could have been campers or attendees at some sort of festival. They wore everything from pajamas to very dressy clothing. Blankets and gourds littered the ground not covered by people, and a number of blackened areas marked spots where cookfires had smoldered. Most of the people were children, of course, since they were the age group least affected by the plague, but there were many elderly people among them, too. Because the Linyaari had healed the survivors, the eldest were in better health than they had been for many years. On the city side, a litter of pots and pans, small household devices, and other inorganic matter that might be attractive to the inogres formed a wide perimeter around the encampments.

  Every face was turned skyward at the trio of ships approaching. The ships were directly over three of the occupied fields when Khorii saw the eyes of several people widen, their mouths make o’s as if they were screaming, and their fingers pointing before they scattered in all directions.

  “Uh-oh,” Uncle Joh said. “We have stalkers. Hold on.” He banked into a turn that aimed the bow toward Corazon again. What was left of the city was obscured by a towering tentacle of inogre, rising like a giant cobra about to strike.

  “Remind you of anyone?” Ariin asked.

  Khorii nodded. “The serpent. Do you suppose there’s another connection there?”

  “Probably.”

  Uncle Joh circled again, this time bypassing the fields to approach from the other side.

  Captain Bates announced, “We’re out of here, folks. We’re less maneuverable than the Condor or the Balakiire. We’ll return to orbit, load up a shuttle, approach from the unoccupied side of the encampment, and land long enough to bring supplies.”

  “Can’t we evacuate some of them?” Jaya asked. “Jalonzo and Abuelita at least?”

  “I doubt they’d come,” Captain Bates told her. “And we don’t have room for everyone. Besides, we’re bound to run into a similar situation other places, and other than the room we have left on the ships, where do we evacuate them to? For the short term at least, if we can get supplies to them, they’ve probably found the best solution.”

  Khaari on the Balakiire said, “The tentacles have receded again. We’re going to set down long enough for Neeva and Melireenya to attempt to regenerate the fields and see to anyone who may have been injured during the evacuation.”

  “Good idea,” Mother said. “We can help with that.”

  When all of the Linyaari had been dropped off at the encampments, the ships returned to orbit to send shuttles to the Mana to resupply the refugees.

  The first thing the Linyaari did was purify the air, which reeked of human excrement from the privy trenches. The smell was not improved by the odor of food rotting in the sun.

  Abuelita and Jalonzo had made their way to the landing zone and embraced their Linyaari friends. Children clung to their shipsuits, patting them, squealing for attention, or just looking up at them with pleading eyes. They all had been through so much already, especially the younglings who had lost their parents, and now their second homes, to the terrible scourge.

  “Please. Khorii, can you save some of the food?” Abuelita asked. “Without containers it goes bad so quickly. It has made many sick already.”

  “I’ll take care of the sick,” Ariin said. “Where are they?”

  “Abuelita, Jalonzo, this is my twin sister, Ariin,” Khorii said. “She’s come to help, too.”

  Jalonzo grabbed Ariin’s hand and pulled her toward the outer edge of the encampment. “They’re here, señorita. A little ways from the others. Some feared that the plague was beginning another cycle and did not want the sick among the healthy.”

  By the time Neeva, Melireenya, Mother, and Father had purified the fields so that the grasses sprouted green and strong once more, the first shuttle had landed, and food was distributed among the people, who quickly removed it from any plas or metal containers. Groups of kids gathered the containers and carried them out to the barrier. Meanwhile, the adult Linyaari turned their attention to freshening the water supply, a small river flowing through the fields. When Khorii had saved what food she could, she joined Ariin among the sick people. There were over one hundred of them, but they were so sick and dirty that she didn’t think it wise to put them in the river to do a mass healing, and began curing them one at a time. She and Ariin were working on the last few when one of the Condor’s shuttles landed. Uncle Joh jumped down and began pulling more supplies out of the hold. “Stars! This plague thing is just the gift that keeps on giving, isn’t it?” he said. “How long have you folks been out here anyway?”

  “Two Standard weeks,” Abuelita told him. “It is very difficult with no shelter. Many are burned painfully by the sun, but at least the monsoon season is past.”

  Uncle Joh handed out the last of his supplies and jumped back into the shuttle. “Big load from the Mana coming next,” he promised.

  Captain Bates piloted this one, and Hap jumped out and began dispensing supplies.

  “Joh says you folks need shelter,” she said. “Anybody ever do any basket weaving?”

  The Linyaari joined her in leading the older children to the river, where the tallest reeds had been restored to healthy growth on previous visits. They gathered armloads of these and began weaving and teaching the techniques to everyone old enough to learn, making panels of basketry they hooked together into awnings, then shelters. All the while they worked, the shuttles came and went, leaving as soon as the supplies were dispensed so that the vessels didn’t draw the tentacles into the field again.

  Finally, they had completed four shelters and were sure that there were enough refugees who knew how to make them that the Linyaari and Captain Bates stood in the landing zone to indicate their readiness to depart. Shuttles from all three ships landed—the Balakiire’s on autopilot, since Khaari stayed with the ship. Hap was aboard the Mana’s shuttle and Elviiz piloted the Condor’s.

  The shuttles ascended with viewports turned toward the city and the passengers watched, fascinated in spite of themselves, as the inogre tentacles extended and stretched higher and farther out into the countryside, less like snakes now than the elongated tongues of frogs. This impression was heightened as the nearest tentacle receded, then whiplashed out, its tip touching the wii-Balakiire, wrapping around it as if to pull it down. Then it whipped back again, pulling off and away from the egg-shaped shuttle so quickly that it set it spinning. Neeva’s face grinned—with teeth showing for the unseeing benefit of the inogre. “It doesn’t seem to like the taste of our technology. No doubt the bioelectronics engineered by our two-horned allies is unappetizing to them.”

  But while their attention was on her, the tentacle lashed out again, and this time attached itself to the hull of the Condor’s shuttle.

  Chapter 19

  Accelerating,” Elviiz said, but though he pushed the engines until the little craft shuddered, the tentacle quickly filled the viewport with its sludging brown, and they heard the hull creak as the creature bit into it.

  “Mayday, Condor, we are under attack,” Elviiz said. Though his voice sounded as calm as Maak’s, Khorii felt a rush of panic from her brother. He had suffered badly from this life-form before and did not wish another close encounter.

  “Fire on them!” Uncle Joh’s voice boomed through the com. “I retooled that shuttle with top-of-the-line weaponry.”

  “I am Linyaari!” Elviiz protested, with an agonized look at his Linyaari family.

  “It eats metal for breakfast, boy,” Uncle Joh bellowed again. “Don’t think of it as attacking, think of it as giving it a meal. Be a philanthropist and feed the freakin’ thing everything you’ve got!”

  “Excellent point,” Elviiz said, and pushed the trigger, holding it down as the missiles shot into the shuttle’s captor. It shrank away from the hull to coagulate around the darting projectiles. Any explosions they might have caused were smothered in sludge that dragged them back to the surface with it.

  By the time Elviiz had the shuttle back on course, the other two vessels were far above them, ready to dock in their respective ships.

  Uncle Joh said a Standard word that the LAANYE translated only as “extremely rude.” At the same time Hap’s voice on the com said, “The Mana’s pulling away from us! Jaya?”

  “How in the cosmos did they get past my sensors?” Uncle Joh said, among other impolite words and phrases.

  “Who?” Mother asked.

  “Pirates!”

  “Not again!” Captain Bates sounded dismayed and annoyed. She had fostered among the pirates. “We had an agreement.”