Watching the antics of Khiindi and RK, he chortled and said, "Okay, if everything's okay for the two bouncy cats out here, I should be fine." He removed his helmet, adjusted the infrared camera, and began recording the contents of the docking bay.
The com unit screen broadcast these pictures. While Khorii watched eerie shots of the various silent space yachts in their next-to-last resting places, Uncle Joh uttered appreciative whistles and remarks about what they would bring as salvage. Looking like a strange being with three heads, one of them tucked under his arm, and a third one-eyed head perched slightly to the left of the one sticking out of the neck of his space suit, the captain made his way to the inner hatch and left the docking bay.
The shimmery dark images jiggled as Becker carried the camera down the corridors, silent but for the creak-thunk of his antigrav boots, his breath, and an occasional "whewee!" when he found something particularly luxurious to record with the camera. Khorii found the details hard to make out, especially since she didn't know exactly what she was looking at.
That is, until the hand appeared. A human hand, dangling limp in front of the camera. The captain uttered an expletive and panned the camera up, then back down again.
"You shouldn't be watching this, kid," he said into the microphone, his voice grim. "It's not a pretty sight. There are bodies floating everywhere. I …" His breathing was quicker and shallower now, she noticed. "I think I'll come back now. We can do this later. I'm not really feeling all that great." This sounded so unlike Uncle Joh when he had treasure to salvage, even when there were bodies in the mix, that Khorii got really worried.
She was going to ask if she should go get her folks when suddenly Becker tripped, his boots went out from under him, and the camera skewed sideways, to capture the bright red image of an unconscious RK, trapped beneath a body and floating just beneath it in the zero G.
Becker's gloved hand reached up and grabbed his first mate by the tail, hauling him down. She heard both their hearts thumping through the speaker. There was nothing else to hear except … there was a familiar plaintive mew off to the right. Khiindi! Had he injured RK in a catfight? Was that why the Condor's first mate was drifting unconscious down the salvage ship's corridor?
Khorii loved cats, but she did not understand what it was in the natures of these two that made them so angry with each other. Her mother Acorna had told her that once when they were on a mission together on Makahomia, before Khorii was born, RK and Acorna had briefly forged a telepathic link. Her mother told Khorii that RK was a perfectly reasonable and highly intelligent sentient creature who simply chose to communicate in his own way the majority of the time. Khorii could hardly wait until her own telepathic talents manifested themselves, as they did for all Linyaari. Perhaps she would be able to communicate with both cats all the time, having been raised with Khiindi and RK. Mother had not met RK until she was really quite old, nearly ten ghaanyi.
Uncle Job. would not be able to manage the camera and both cats. She abandoned the bridge and slipped into her own shipsuit and antigrav boots, then punched the button for the robolift, which cranked toward her far too slowly. At the last moment, she remembered to grab a flashlight and stepped aboard the lift as it descended into darkness.
Once out of the halo cast by the Condor's running lights, Khorii felt as if she should be creeping forward through the darkness on tiptoe, but she couldn't very well do that while wearing antigrav boots. She did, however, keep the beam of her flashlight rotating in a circle around the path in front of her. Twice the beam picked out a white, dead face staring blankly through the viewport of one of the docked ships. Once the face was black. But no bodies floated or lay across her path.
Leaving the docking bay for the central corridor where she had seen the captain and RK, she was gradually aware of little motes of something fleeing from the beam of her flashlight. They were so concentrated that when she stepped into the corridor, for a time she could not see even with the flashlight because it was clouded by the presence of these-whatever they were. But they fled quickly, and every movement of her flashlight revealed the scene before her more clearly. She almost wished it hadn't.
The dead floated around her like idle swimmers in a lake on a hot afternoon, though they obviously had not had any fun in a long time. There was no smell because the atmosphere was so depleted, and anyway, her horn would have removed the foul odors had they been there. But the dead eyes, the protruding tongues on some of the corpses, the death grimaces on their faces: all of them so sad. Some ladies were dressed in beautiful gowns, some men in fine uniforms with golden braid. They bore no wounds that she could see, though with the lighting so poor, she might have missed them. Then she saw Uncle Joh. To her surprise, he was crawling, not walking, toward her, dragging his inert first mate behind him by the tail.
"Uncle Joh, what is the matter?" she asked. "Did you hurt yourself?"
"I don't feel so good, sweetie. Better call your mom and dad. RK's sick, too. He's still alive, but just barely."
"But you were stricken so suddenly!" she said. "I am afraid to return to the ship, Uncle Joh. I do not know if you will survive until Mother and Father came. Besides, that isn't necessary. I have a horn, do I not?"
"Yeah, but you're just a little bit of a thing."
"It does not matter. Some of the elders say that the healing power is more concentrated in us younglings. Oh, poor RK!" Khorii said, lifting the first mate into her arms and extricating his tail from the captain's fist. Lowering her horn to his head and tummy she said, "Wake up, cat. You must help me help the captain."
RK did, of course. With a wiggle and a flip he was out of her arms and swimming anxious circles around the two of them. As she lowered her horn to the captain's head, RK paddled off into the darkness. By the time Becker was back on his feet, RK had returned, this time with the nape of Khiindi's neck between his teeth while her own cat's head lolled and his limp paws and tail trailed beneath the floating older cat's belly.
"You're a good first officer, RK," Becker said, giving the cat a pat as Khorii relieved him of Khiindi. "Got to look after the passengers, even if you don't especially like them."
RK yawned and paddled back toward the ship. He had had enough. As Khorii touched her horn to the fur between Khiindi's ears, her cat reached for the horn with his front paws, patted it, yawned, and stretched in her arms, then settled against her shoulder, kneading his claws in her shipsuit and drooling with relief.
"Come on, Uncle Joh," Khorii said, extending her free hand. "I will carry your helmet for you. We should return to the ship now. This is a very bad place."
"Yeah, you're right. We need to get reinforcements in here. This liner is way too big for me to catalog the contents alone. Maak can do it much faster than I can manually, and with Elviiz to help him, I'll know how rich we are much sooner! Fortunately, you Linyaari are here and can clean out all the nasty germs or whatever the hell hit me, so all my cargo is nice and negotiable and we can put these poor devils to rest."
"Yes," she said. "Maak and Elviiz can also identify each of these people and which belongings aboard the ship belong to which person so their things may be returned to their heirs. You know, as it says in the Federation Unified Code of Conduct? The one you told Elviiz to make me memorize?"
"Touche" he said glumly. "You should think about going into politics yourself, sweetie. You sure know how to take the fun out of everything."
Chapter 2
They did not need to return to the ship to fetch her parents or Maak and Elviiz. The landing had awakened Mother and Father, who rightly guessed it had something to do with salvage. They did not realize the extraordinary circumstances of the stop until coming out onto the bridge, where they tried and failed to raise the captain on the intercom. They activated Maak and Elviiz and met Khorii and the captain halfway down the corridor.