“Serves them right,” Ariin said. “Off chasing riches while we look after the refugees and I gather important information about our mission. Akasa may have been the main one to infect people, but we still need to follow those coordinates and find Odus. Much as I will hate seeing him again, he does seem to be the key to this whole thing.”

  Mother replied, “I couldn’t agree more, daughter. If we’re to avert further disasters, we need to keep everyone on task.”

  From the Condor there was a rattle, a swoosh, and another rattle as RK let himself out the Condor’s cat door. Rather than wait for the robolift, he leaped from the hatch to the ground, no short distance.

  “Good thing for you that Aari, Acorna, and their family are here, cat,” Uncle Joh called to the feline first mate, who rested after impact to wash his paws. “You could have broken your legs or your darn fool cat neck with that little stunt, but you knew they were here and could fix you, didn’t you?”

  Ignoring the captain completely, RK headed for the shuttle, tail in the air, though his footsteps were a bit more careful than usual. Khorii couldn’t help herself. That had been quite a landing, and it was a very long way. She scooped the massive brindle-coated cat upside down into her arms while he wriggled, hissed, and growled in an intensely annoyed fashion. RK’s fur was so soft, yet his personality was so not. She bent her horn carefully to each paw, then flipped him over and did his spine. “There. Just in case anything was hurt but not badly enough to show right away,” she said, stroking his back before he freed himself. But he twined around her ankles twice, purring in thanks, before continuing his mission.

  He stalked up to the shuttle, circled it, selected a spot near the hatch, and hunkered down, hissing. Having vented his feelings verbally, he turned his back on the vehicle, lifted his tail, and, with a mighty shaking and quaking, thoroughly sprayed the offending spot.

  “You allow your animal to slime your transport?” Coco demanded.

  “He probably objects to pirate spoor aboard his personal property,” Uncle Joh told him.

  RK selected another spot and repeated his marking. It was a heroic display of feline repudiation of alien invasion as the Condor’s resolute protector walked the twelve-foot circumference of the vessel, stopping every two steps to back up to the ship and, with mighty quiverings of his stern, rechristen the shuttle again and again as his own. When he had completed the first round of spraying, he turned to face the offending vehicle and attempted to leap atop it. Due mostly to his own exertions, however, the hull had become excessively slippery.

  Without warning, the cat flew at Uncle Joh, hitting him in the chest and climbing upward. Uncle Joh swatted him down, growling. “No, RK, I am not going to carry you around and around so you can reach the entire hull.”

  “If the animal was aboard my ship, he’d be in the messmate’s pot by now,” Coco said. RK continued growling and looking for a way to reach the shuttle’s roof. Uncle Joh was careful to keep himself out of claw range.

  “We must have picked up a stowaway when the inogre that ate Hafiz’s treasure tried to catch us,” Uncle Joh said. RK abruptly sat down and washed his underside, soiled from his exertions to secure the shuttle. Dabbing at his lacerations, Uncle Joh chuckled, and told Coco, “RK is a real stickler for passengers paying their fares, and he doesn’t want anybody else damaging his stuff.” His flash of humor vanished, and he ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Fraggitall. I just finished upgrading this shuttle, too. Filthy inogres gotta wreck everything.”

  RK looked up at him as if to say that the ship’s cat, at least, was on the job and would have been more thorough still, had the captain not hindered him in the performance of his duties.

  “Sorry, old man, good try, but even you don’t have enough juice to cover the entire ship, not that it would do any good if you sprayed every panel inside and out.”

  “We just found this spot,” Neeva said. She and the Balakiire’s crew stood near their ship, watching the proceedings. “And now your stowaway will grow and endanger the ships and the refugees.”

  “Nah, I’ll space it,” Uncle Joh said. Grumbling, “Waste of a perfectly good shuttle…” he ducked into the hatch, no doubt meaning to set it into space on autopilot, but RK bolted past him into the vessel.

  Uncle Joh said something rude again, then called to Maak, who was walking down the path from the house where, Khorii suspected, he’d been downloading the contents of the computer files. “Stay back, buddy,” Uncle Joh warned him. “Our four-legged alien invasion indicator is saying the shuttle is infested with the inogres. You’d be worse off than your boy if they got you.”

  “Indeed, Captain.” Maak halted a prudent distance away from the suspect vehicle.

  “Is anybody hailing your chest?” Uncle Joh asked, referring to the com screen Elviiz’s father/creator had installed in his thoracic cavity. “Someone was on the com screen inside the shuttle, but RK slimed it before I could see who, and now I can’t make them out. He also shorted out the audio.”

  Maak unzipped the upper portion of his shipsuit, revealing the screen. An unfamiliar woman was speaking. She had short dark hair, large dark eyes, and was wearing a uniform that Khorii had seen somewhere but couldn’t think where. Her words seemed scrambled.

  “Tell me it isn’t another fraggin’ distress call from a long-dead ship,” Captain Becker moaned. “Those used to be so much fun, and the inogres have just ruined it. The salvage business will never be the same.”

  But Ariin said, “No! I know her. She’s a tech—one of the Friends’ servants who keeps things running. Her name is Sona.”

  They stopped talking to give their full attention to the transmission. It was quickly evident that Sona was speaking to them in real time, not in a looped and generally broadcast distress message.

  While Ariin translated what Sona was saying for the others, Sesseli burst out of the mansion and ran across the broad lawn, crying, “Khorii, Khorii, there’s a lady on the com in the house, and she’s found your kitty!”

  “Khiindi?” Khorii asked. “But he’s not on Maak’s screen, Sess. Where did you see him? Is this the lady?”

  “They have a really big screen in the house,” Sesseli said. “You can see everything inside. It looks like she’s flying one of your peoples’ egg ships, everything all rounded and in pretty colors and the controls made for your fingers. But the lady has regular, human-type fingers, and Khiindi is sitting in her lap.”

  “Will you be still?” Ariin demanded. “She’s saying something about ‘Lord’ Grimalkin and ‘Lady’ Akasa.”

  Meanwhile, Melireenya had reboarded the Balakiire. In a few moments Maak’s chest went blank, and he said, “The transmission appears to be over. I’m afraid that I do not have that tongue in my linguistics program.”

  “I do and I got most of the message,” Ariin said. “Although it would have been helpful if certain other people had kept quiet while I was listening. Sona said they are trying to find us—she and Grimalkin.”

  Uncle Joh whistled. “No wonder RK was having a cat fit,” he said.

  Melireenya soon rejoined them. “Sona and the cat are on their way,” she said. “I provided coordinates. She did not explain her mission except to say that Lady Akasa had sent them.”

  A Linyaari ship nestled beside the Balakiire in the overgrown meadow grass. RK emerged from the shuttle’s reeking interior and stalked up to the new intruder.

  “Little bugger didn’t care about the aliens one way or the other,” Uncle Joh said. “He knew Khiindi was on the com—don’t ask me how, but he knows this stuff—and was venting his extreme displeasure. Which could mean that the shuttle isn’t infested. Good thing I didn’t ditch it yet.”

  “I don’t see how you could actually want to ride in it again,” Captain Bates said, holding her nose.

  “Easy. Maak, shut off your olfactory sensors, scrub down the shuttle, and check it for inogre-type damage. Then, Khorii, honey, if you would be kind enough to purify the air?”

  “I’ll do it, Joh,” Father said. “Khorii should check the newcomer and her cat for signs of plague since they seem to have been in contact with the female who began it all.”

  “That’s command thinking, that is, Aari,” Uncle Joh said. “Thanks, buddy.”

  The Linyaari ship’s hatch opened, and the strange female emerged, but not before she had been knocked backward by a catapulting Khiindi headed straight for Khorii.

  “Daughter, don’t let him touch you,” Mother said.

  “I could cut him down with my laser,” Coco suggested hopefully, taking aim.

  “No!” Khorii said, and ran forward to meet Khiindi, who leaped to her shoulder.

  “I’m a good shot,” Coco said. “I could drop the cat without hurting the girl.”

  “Since the cat we have nourished as our daughter’s beloved pet happens to also be a shapeshifting trickster and fraud who has caused us no end of trouble, you have no idea how tempting that is to a mother, even a Linyaari one,” Acorna said.

  “No blue dots,” Khorii called. “He’s not infected.” Khiindi pressed his entire furry body hard to the side of her neck, throbbing deeply with rumbling purrs. His claws kneaded her shipsuit shoulder, and a drop of cat drool rolled off his chin and onto hers.

  She wiped it away and watched the female, Sona, approach. No blue dots there either. “The pilot is also clean,” she called again over her cat-free shoulder.

  Sona said, “Lady Akasa spoke to us via com unit, miss. We were not in physical contact with her once we left Odussia.”

  “Odussia?” Ariin asked, scoffing. The other observers from the field had formed a shallow crescent around Khorii and Sona. RK rode Uncle Joh’s shoulder and hissed at Khiindi, who delicately turned on Khorii’s shoulder to show RK his fat, fluffy tail.

  “That is what Lady Akasa and Lord Odus decided to call the world the illustrious elders chose after leaving Vhiliinyar. I had been commanded to take Lord Grimalkin back to Vhiliinyar to begin his exile frozen in form as your cat, miss. I was also entrusted with Lord Grimalkin’s crono and ordered to use it to return to Vhiliinyar of old, just before the exodus of the illustrious elders, and pack up Lady Akasa’s old house and bring it to her.

  “I fully intended to obey those commands, but not necessarily in that order. Lord Grimalkin has always been gracious and good to me, favoring me with his regard, and I felt that since I had to time travel back before his exile, I owed it to him to revisit his original form.

  “Once we arrived there, he requested an additional regression, and I could not deny him. Though I lost track of him for some time, he kept his word and reappeared, returning with me to the time of the exodus.

  “I finished compressing milady’s house and stowing it aboard the new ship, and traveled forward in time to your birth, miss. Milord shrank and befurred himself and mewed acquiescence to his fate. Already, miss, your infant self was attempting to stroke the small, golden feline that would merge with milord’s magnificent gray self as he was forced through that loop of time once more. But before I could put milord out to meet his fate, we received a hail.”

  “Akasa!” Ariin said, pronouncing the elder’s name with accusation in every syllable. Her pupils changed shape, slitting with the depth of her anger. “She told you to find us?”

  “Not precisely. She told us to return to Odussia shortly before we’d left, before Lord Grimalkin reentered his bodily exile. We were to use his crono to force Lord Odus forward into the future to see the results of his frivolous research. I have never beheld Lady Akasa in such a state.” Her voice shook as she said this. “I am accustomed to seeing her in many guises, but never before have I seen her devoid of beauty or grace.”

  “What did she look like?” Ariin asked, this time with what Khorii felt was an unhealthy relish.

  “Her eyes were sunken in her skull, their color faded and over-laid with milky spots. Her noble brow draped over them, and the skin of her face that was not deeply creased and folded was covered with red-blue lines, broken blood vessels, I suppose. Her flesh hung in wattles beneath her chin. Worst of all, her magnificent mane had been reduced to a few snowy strands poking from her skull. Even the melodious tones of her voice had been altered until it was so cracked I had difficulty understanding her orders.” Sona shuddered.

  “Why would she turn into an old lady?” Khorii asked aloud, puzzled.

  “The disease,” Ariin said.

  “But she didn’t appear altered in the vid,” Khorii said.

  “That was before she boarded the Blanca,” Elviiz reminded Khorii. “Possibly, although she did not immediately exhibit symptoms, as some others did not in the early stages, by the time she had infected those aboard the plague ship, her own energy was too diminished for her to maintain her young and vibrant shape. You have told me how our shapeshifting forebears never appear to age but have been alive while generations of our people have been born, lived their own comparatively long lives, and died. I suspect that their youthful appearance is itself a shape they can assume but that Akasa might have been unable to do so once the disease diminished her vitality.”

  “The boy’s got something there,” Uncle Joh said. “I know I sure felt a lot older when I was sick.”

  “You say this woman told you to go to another world—Odussia?” Mother asked. “How did you come to find us then?”

  “We went there, as she said, lady,” Sona replied. “But no matter how early we arrived, Lord Grimalkin could not seem to take Lord Odus or any of the others into the future. It was as if time was broken, or at least as if the crono was malfunctioning—even when, in desperation, I borrowed a crono from another elder, the result was the same. It was truly heartrending to behold Lord Grimalkin’s efforts. Inevitably, he was prevented from stopping Lord Odus until the time came when he transformed into a cat, and I had to listen to his piteous cries, mewing his failure over and over again across many galaxies.”

  Khorii shook her head, and said to Ariin, “It must be the way it was with Pircifir. Once one of them dies or perhaps when some profound change happens in their lives, it can’t be undone with intervention by crono, just relived.”

  Ariin smiled rather terribly. “I wonder if turning into an aged hag qualifies as profound in Akasa’s case.”

  Sona said, “We must find Lady Akasa and let her know we’ve failed. She had intended to return to Vhiliinyar when she traveled with the doomed ship, but after seeing what happened there, and suspecting that she might have been the cause, she dared not return there. So if she still lives and is not still drifting through space in her vessel, she would have returned to Odussia. Even if she cannot recover completely from her illness, we can at least offer her the comfort of her own home. It is still aboard my ship. Even though it was already aboard when Lord Grimalkin and I returned to Odussia, because of the incessant time loop we never had the opportunity to give it to her.”

  “Certainly we must try to help her,” Mother agreed, casting a reproving look at Ariin. “And hope she can help us put an end to the harm she and this Odus have done.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Coco said. “You lot plan to return to the planet where you think the plague and these ship-eating beasties were invented?”

  “Only Sona, the cat, and the Linyaari will go dirtside,” Uncle Joh told him. “Maak and Elviiz and I will stay aboard the Condor.”

  Coco scratched, then shook his head. “And people say that our clans go looking for trouble…well, good luck, in any case, however…” he said with a speculative gleam in his eye. “Perhaps we should accompany you as well—after all, it would be a shame if something happened to you, and your ship was just left to drift.”

  Aari and Khornya practically had to drag Joh, hurling verbal imprecations at Coco the entire way, onto the Condor, he was so incensed at the pirate captain’s suggestion.

  Chapter 23

  Odussia, red and gold with veins and plains of blue-green, filled the viewscreen of Sona’s ship. Khorii’s family had transferred from the Condor to Sona’s Linyaari ship over Uncle Joh’s loud objections. Not even he, however, could deny that only the Linyaari were equipped to face the plague—again. However, he gained unexpected allies in the Balakiire’s crew, who said that they should be the ones to go instead.

  “Khornya and Aari may be weakened by their prior exposure,” Aunt Neeva argued. “They could be dooming themselves to permanent isolation.”

  “On the other hand,” Elviiz countered, “although we have no evidence one way or the other, their previous infection may have conferred immunity on them that you do not have. And my sister must be among the first to go, of course, since she is able to detect the plague by sight. Our family has been divided too long already by this thing.” He’d looked around at the rest of them with an expression that on a human might have suggested modesty or shyness. “I am new at feeling the emotions of others, and cannot yet thought-talk as freely as the rest of you, but I think I can safely say that I speak for us all in stating that we wish to face this danger together.”

  “Then we’ll go, too,” Neeva said.

  “Me, too!” Mikaaye said, stepping past Coco to stand with Khorii’s family. “I will go with Khorii. Aari is only one male, and Elviiz cannot risk his inorganic parts being destroyed again by the inogres. The females will need another male to protect them.”

  “You will not!” Coco commanded in an unnecessarily loud voice. “Don’t forget, you are still under my command, and besides our own people, we’ve got the rest of this useless lot, including the crew of my new ship, to take care of. I’m going to need a healer. In fact, I could use more than one.”

  Melireenya surprised them all by saying softly, “Then let my son do what he thinks he must, and I will remain in his stead.”