"Joh! What do you mean bringing Khorii out here among these dead bodies?" Father demanded.
"I didn't, Aari, honest, but you can be proud of her. She handled herself really well and kept me and the cats from joining these poor corpses in that great nebula far, far away."
"Of course she did, Captain," Mother said, sounding stern. "And we are very proud of her." She linked her arm with Khorii's and patted her hand. "We are simply wondering how you came to be here in a state that required her assistance so desperately that you did not think of the effect seeing so many lifeless people might have on a sheltered female in her formative years?"
"Oh, Moth-er," Khorii said, disentangling herself from the maternal grip in disgust. "Really. From what Uncle Hafiz and my human grandsires have told me, you were freeing child slaves and confronting criminals at my age. I think I can handle seeing a few deceased people. It isn't as if they could hurt us. Well, not on purpose. I think they must have died from some kind of poison gas that my horn purified when I walked into the corridor."
Khorii had a lot to live up to-or down. Her mother, called Khornya among their own people, was known and revered as the Lady Acorna Harakamian-Li to the fierce and warlike Terrans. She was the first Linyaari to go among them, well, not on purpose exactly. The human grandsires, asteroid miners at the time, rescued and raised Mother when they found her escape pod traveling where no Linyaari had gone before.
On top of that, Khorii's father Aari was the only one of their people to have survived being captured and tortured by the horrible Khleevi. Together her parents had, in a most ka-Linyaari fashion, fought and vanquished the Khleevi in two time zones. Of course, the first time they had had help from Mother's human friends as well as from some other Linyaari who helped in a passive way. And the second time, which was actually earlier, they had been aided by her grandsire, or mother-father, as the term literally translated from Linyaari to Standard, the language spoken in the quadrant where Mother was raised. Khorii's grandsire and grandam were no less remarkable than her parents, both having recently returned from the dead.
So, really, with a lineage like that, Khorii did not want anyone to think she could not handle seeing a few dead people. RK and Khiindi were no longer in the corridor with the captain and Khorii's parents, who were standing in a cluster, engrossed in discussing what had probably happened to the people aboard La Estrella Blanca. Probably the two cats had gone back to the ship, but Khorii wandered up the corridor, shining her flashlight on the path ahead, just in case they'd decided to explore further. Cats did like to explore and, according to Karina, one of her human aunties, curiosity had been known to kill cats in the past, as it had almost done just now. So she thought she had better make sure.
If she didn't find them on the path, she would look upward again, though the bodies overhead were distressing to look at because of their contorted faces, which were empty of everything that made a person a person. Mostly they seemed very sad. She wondered who they had been. From the way they were dressed, they were at a party when they died. Had they been having fun then? Had they died happy? Most of them were probably the equivalent of her parents' age-very old, of course, but not as old as Uncle Hafiz in human years. You couldn't tell as easily with a Linyaari, of course. Her grandparents on her father's side seemed much older than her grandparents on her mother's side, but apparently they were all about the same age as cranky old Liriili, who was very bossy, having once been administrator of narhii-Vhiliinyar, and whose attitude made her seem ancient.
But however old they were, she was sure these people were rather young to have died as they did. She felt sorry for them. She felt even sorrier for their kids. They probably had some, at home, being watched by their grandparents or aunties, as she so often was when her parents were off on a mission. How long would these people have been gone now? Did their children know they were dead even? Probably not. They must still be wondering what had happened to their moms and dads.
At the end of the corridor there were lifts and a very handsome shiny silver-colored spiral staircase extending the length of the ship, descending far below the corridor where Khorii stood, where the engine rooms and cargo holds and other utilitarian spaces were located, to far above, where the bridge would be. In her experience, cats didn't care for the smell of engine rooms so she would try the upper levels first. She reached down and flipped off the antigrav setting on her boots, held her arms over her head, lowered them sharply to her sides, and gave a jump that sent her up the stairwell without actually needing to use the steps. That was usually the run way to do it, but now the passage was occasionally blocked by a dead crew member. In adjoining corridors branching off the stairwell she saw more bodies. An unusual number of people seemed to have been heading away from the bridge and cabins. Perhaps they had decided to abandon ship but died before they could reach their own private vessels or the ship's shuttles.
At the top of the stairs she turned on her boots again and walked out onto the corridor leading to the bridge and the crew's quarters. Still no cats and many more dead crew members. All seemed to be humanoid at least, if not as human as Uncle Hafiz and Auntie Karina, but that wasn't surprising. Unlike the quadrant of space containing Vhiliinyar's native star system, which had many different species of people, in this quadrant almost all sentient life was human or humanoid, according to Mother and Captain Becker.
And, of course, according to Elviiz's know-it-all data banks. It was totally unfair, in Khorii's opinion, to put a person's school inside a person's already far too superior foster brother. Anyway, it sounded monotonous to her, to have only one kind of people no matter what world you were on. What was the point of going to other planets if everybody else was just like you? That was, she supposed, the best thing about Elviiz. He was different from anyone else on Vhiliinyar, being an android created specifically to be Khorii's companion, teacher, and protector by his father android, Maak, the Condors android first mate (as opposed to the feline first mate, RK. Uncle Joh was very democratic in his assignment of titles for crew members). As birthing gifts went, she supposed Maak's gift of the ever-present, ever-in-her-way Elviiz was preferable to pricking her finger on a spindle when she was sixteen (by then she would be quite mature of course, in Linyaari years) and falling into a deep prolonged sleep, rather like hypersleep, as the princess in the fairy tale had done.
She'd read that story, along with many, many others, among the books in the captain's extensive dump-rescued library. The Condor, with its junk hard-copy library, computerized references, and seemingly endless supply of vids, recycled ancient knowledge as well as refuse. Much of the data Maak had imparted electronically to his son had come from those sources. The way Elviiz acted sometimes, though, you'd have thought he invented all the stories himself. When Maak gave her the birthing gift of Elviiz, unfortunately he had also given Elviiz the birthing gift of both ego and attitude, something previous androids had been without.
It didn't do any good to complain about him to Mother or Father. Maak had been their friend as long as Uncle Joh, and they said they could never have defeated the Khleevi without him. They were sure Elviiz was really as dear to her as Maak was to them. But Maak did not correct every single thing they said or try to stop them from doing anything really interesting, as Elviiz always did with her. In fact, she was surprised to have gotten away from him this long. She expected to hear the clomp of little android boots catching up with her at any moment, telling her to return to the Condor while he, Elviiz, got to explore with the grown-ups. Not that she was exploring. She was looking for cats. Really.