Chapter One
“Stand to quarters!” Gershom Taylor barked, leaning forward in the pilot’s seat of the scout-trader Sibyl and taking firmer hold of the controls in his long hands. “That ship’s coming about again. Dammit, who are they?”
Dr. Shona Taylor, his wife and partner, sprang up from the crash chair next to his to make room at the console for Eblich, the co-pilot, then ran aft along the narrow corridor of the Sibyl toward her laboratory. A sudden lurching turn made the metal panels screech against one another, and threw her into the bulkhead. Handing her way along carefully, she dragged herself toward the lab module.
The growing feeling of uneasiness she had been nursing since the shipyard two days before had blossomed into certainty. After months of careful maneuvering, redirecting their subspace calls and messages through two or perhaps three dummy numbers, paying their bills through an anonymous credit line for supplies, they had made a single mistake which pinpointed them in space for anybody trying to find Shona Taylor. Evidently, somebody was still looking.
It had been a mistake to stay so long in the shipyard at the edge of the Venturi system, but the necessary refit of the Sibyl had taken that much time.
The Taylor Traveling Medicine Show and Trading Company had originally consisted of four people. Gershom, as captain, also acted as the outside man, negotiating trades. Ivo, the shuttle pilot, was Gershom’s second in making deals and getting the cargo from warehouse to ship and out again. Eblich, the co-pilot, also acted as bookkeeper, calculating the value against gross profit of the stores maintained on board by Kai. They were a tightly knit functional team. All at once, three years past, two more humans had been added, with a third one present but not yet accounted for, plus all of Shona’s animal team and the impedimenta of a working physician who was also an environmental illness specialist.
Shona always felt apologetic for the hardships caused by her signing on permanently aboard the Sibyl. The crew, whom she loved like family, had pushed away her apologies, but she knew that having her there all the time had changed their gestalt, taking up room they were accustomed to using. Not that they ever acted like it, but she was an intruder. She brought with her a big lab, which could not be reduced in size, a child, and then an infant, and a vaccine dog, a chemical-sniffing cat, two rabbit food-tasters, several mice, and an ottle. Though the additions were anticipated and welcomed by the extant crew, the inevitable growing pains could not be ignored. Gershom couldn’t yet afford to move up to a larger ship. Renting a ship for such a high-risk occupation as trading was out of the question. Expansion had been the answer. A new addition would give Shona space of her own and enable the men to realign their own living quarters and personal space with her as an integral part of the whole. The Venturi yard had been approached in the greatest of secrecy to undertake the refitting.
For a small additional fee, Venturi was persuaded to stretch the rules just a little bit to enlarge the ship without registering her engine numbers in the galactic database, as required, until the job was done and the Sibyl was safely on her way to another system.
With the help of Shona’s uncle Harry Elliott, a loan officer at a major bank on Mars, the Taylors negotiated a renovation loan which was simply added without fanfare to the balance of their mortgage, paid by monthly debit from their credit account.
The Sibyl, always over-engined for her configuration, had had her nose sliced off and the body behind it divided in two to add a third cargo hold between the others for Shona’s laboratory module. The space forward of the hold gave the Taylors the additional room they needed for living quarters and more storage, reached by a hatch between the starboard hold and Shona’s complex. An atmosphered corridor fitted with airlocks divided the port hold from the lab. With the new generator installed at the head of the addition, both storage bays could circulate full life-support systems when what they were carrying required it. Before, the holds had been a cold, uncomfortable place to sleep, as Shona herself could testify.
Shona saw to it that Gershom was kept busy during the major work on his ship, to keep him from whimpering over its well-being. He loved the Sibyl like a friend, a close cousin, another woman. Shona, indulgent rather than jealous, had to find ways to distract him from hanging around the shipyard. Even her natural cheerfulness had been strained by the time the work was finished. Venturi was a main stop for colonists and traders outbound to unexplored quadrants of the galaxy beyond. The people looking for the Taylors could have chanced upon them at any moment. With great care, they had avoided any references to their pasts, use of last names that were familiar or traceable, and paid cash or bartered for supplies. The data leak had to have occurred in the shipyard itself.
And I know just when it happened, too, Shona grumbled to herself. I knew it when they entered our number on-line with the alterations for the GG registrar. Everyone was shaking hands and beaming at each other over finishing the job at last. We were so thrilled about the beautiful refit; I didn’t think to delay them. For two days it’s been irking me what was wrong with what should have been a lovely moment. Someone was watching the communications net, waiting for a clue to where we were. And they got it. And here they are.
Shona could see the moment replayed in her mind over and over again like a looped piece of data. It was her own fault. All she’d had to do was reach out and stop the master of the shipyard from entering that last keystroke, ask him to wait until they’d lifted ship, and darn it, she hadn’t.
She was flung against the bulkhead as Gershom negotiated a braking turn, putting on the port aft thrusters and firing the starboard rockets forward. The much bulkier ship responded ever so slightly more slowly than she had before. Even Shona could sense it. She knew the other crew members were hanging on in agony, urging the ship forward with their very wills. Too late, lines of warning lights illumined down the corridor, stepping in series toward emergency stations. Howls, both mechanical and animal, resounded off the metal-and-plastic walls. She handed herself the rest of the way into her lab as a crash shook the ship. They’d taken a hit, but no sirens wailed.
“Thank goodness, not a hull breach,” Shona thought, then realized she’d spoken aloud. She swung in the door of the laboratory module. With its hull made of space-grade ceramic and its reinforced metal skeleton, it was the safest place on the ship.
Her foster daughter, Leilani, looked up with huge dark eyes. The girl had been trying to urge Shona’s shaggy black dog, Saffie, into her crash cage set against the bulkhead underneath the worktable. The big dog didn’t want to go, and was scrabbling at the padding with desperate feet. She whined at her mistress through the thick mesh as Lani latched the door behind her.
“Who is it?” Lani asked, hurrying to catch Shona’s Abyssinian cat, Harry, who saw involuntary imprisonment ahead of him and was obstinately staying out of reach. The howls of distress were coming from him.
“Mama!”
Shona grabbed up her two-year-old son, Alexander, who was toddling unsteadily along the perimeter of the room, handing himself along the cabinets in true spacer fashion. With deft fingers, she slipped him into a backpack-style carrier attached to the wall and strapped him in.
“There you go, sweetie,” Shona said, pecking him swiftly on the cheek. He reached for her, but she turned away to help gather up the other animals. The rabbits and mice were in their boxes. Only the cat remained free.
“Mama, down!”
“There he goes, Lani.” Shona dropped to her knees and crawled toward the corner where Harry had spotted an open cabinet door to hide behind. Together they lunged. Shona snapped the door shut, and Lani tackled Harry. As the cat protested shrilly, they locked him up in the crash cage next to Saffie. There was one more warm body to be accounted for. “Where’s Chirwl?”
The ship changed direction again, and mother and daughter slewed across the floor. Shona helped Lani crawl on all fours to the crash seats on the opposite side of the room and buckled the restraints around her.
“Is it him?” Lani asked in a whisper, looking around.
“How could it be?” Shona said, without having to ask which “him.” “He’s in prison.” Lani shivered, and Shona put a gentle hand on the girl’s arm. A normally cheerful woman of thirty, Shona glanced about her with worried brown eyes. Two smile lines, like single quotation marks at the corners of her generously made mouth, indented sharply in concern. The fact that he was in prison billions of klicks away didn’t mean they were out of the reach of Jachin Verdadero, and they both knew it.
Verdadero had once been the chief operating officer of the Galactic Laboratory Corporation, the largest, most diversified company in the galaxy. Up until the time he attempted to use Shona as a dupe to cover his conspiracy to commit mass murder, he had been coldly killing off entire populations of outdated planetary colony settlements for the billions of credits that the contracts were worth. He had considered the personnel to be unnecessary and costly liabilities, and had treated them accordingly.
Lani’s natural family, and the whole population of her native planet, Karela, had fallen victim to an engineered virus let loose in its midst by a hireling of Verdadero’s. The perpetrator had also died in the plague, leaving no way to trace the connection to the top office at GLC, or so Verdadero had hoped. Only Shona’s tireless care saved the child from sharing her people’s fate. In the process, she had also inadvertently foiled Verdadero’s purpose in slaughtering the colony. Instead of devolving to the Corporation, the wealth of Karela fell to Lani, leaving her an heiress, but orphaned. It took months of negotiation with the Galactic Government, but the Taylors had obtained permanent custody of Lani and were in the process of adopting her. A stable and loving family had done much to erase the trauma the child had suffered, even though Shona had to admit that the Sibyl’s crew was hardly what one would call a traditional family environment.
The increasing number of fatal coincidences in her wake had alerted Shona to the fact that there was more going on in the targeted colonies than environmental breakdown. Verdadero’s final crime was engineered so that Shona would fall victim as well, posthumously taking the blame for the rash of plagues that had seemed to follow her across the galaxy from Corporation colony to colony. She survived to expose Verdadero’s plot to the authorities.
For dethroning him just before he was about to accomplish a spectacular feat of embezzlement, Verdadero harbored a deadly grudge against the Taylor family, Shona in particular. Though forbidden outside contact while in prison, he had managed to put out a “dead or alive” contract on her through the great communications net that tied the settled systems and spaceways together. The file containing the contract was periodically wiped from the net by the system operators, but it seemed always to reappear. Investigators couldn’t tell how it was reentered, or who was responsible, since the source code was different every time. Assassins greedy for the spectacularly large award turned up now and again to try their luck. Shona had to admit that only purest good fortune had kept her family and the Sibyl’s crew from falling victim to one of them. She prayed that their luck would hold once more.
The intercom line from the bridge opened. “Are you all right back there?” Gershom asked.
“We’re fine,” Shona assured him. She tightened her grip on Lani, who huddled down tightly under her arm.
“Daddy! Gemme down!” Alex shouted. Concerned, Shona glanced up at her son. In his cocoon, the baby was safer than they were.
“Getting a look at them now,” Gershom said. From where she was crouched, Shona craned her neck to see the video link. The scout ship displayed on the screen didn’t look that much different from their own. Shona could see the streamlined forms of sophisticated engines, probably capable of executing long jumps without juddering like the poor Sibyl did. And also, Shona noted with a wince as a brilliant white tracer beam shot out of her bows, the Sibyl wasn’t armed with anything more deadly than a sonic probe to burst small asteroids heading for the hull.
“Lasers! Damn them,” Ivo’s voice rumbled through the intercom. He was at the third command position, monitoring telemetry.
Gershom must have been anticipating such an attack, because the ship slewed sideways beneath them. Lani grabbed Shona’s shoulders as her foster mother slipped and landed on her rump.
“Ow!” Shona clutched the restraining straps of the empty chair as she clambered to her knees. “That hurt.”
“One must making it stop!”
The cry came from underneath Shona’s examination table in the center of the room. She let go of the straps and wriggled forward on her belly. Bracing herself with one arm on the table leg, she fished underneath with the other hand. It emerged grasping a fistful of black-brown ottle fur. The ottle, protesting, came with it.
The humans who discovered their first sentient alien neighbors described the creatures as possessing a muscular, oval, almost disk-like body that was flexible to an extreme, quadrupedal with the pair of extremities nearest the small, round-eared head having opposable digits capable of sophisticated manipulation. The tail, though of no great length, was strong, and used by the littoral creature to aid in water propulsion. In fact, it looked rather like an Earth turtle crossed with an otter, hence the term “ottle.” In an effort to promote understanding of them among humankind and learn more about their new friends, several ottles had volunteered to leave their homeworld of Poxt and live among humanity. These volunteers were to be returned upon demand to their home planet, but in the meantime would be free to observe humanity and teach their hosts about their species and culture. Shona had submitted an application to have one of the ottle ambassadors come to stay with her. To her delight, she’d been approved. Chirwl had been with her now for over seven years, but had lately decided that he wanted to return to his homeworld. Shona greatly regretted that their long and warm association was shortly coming to an end.
The small alien permitted himself to be hauled by his scruff over to the impact seats. He turned his bright black eyes longingly toward the limp leather pouch that was his sleeping bag, hung high on the wall next to the baby carrier. Shona clutched him tightly to her middle and pulled the shock webbing around them both.
“I am being after not trusting the other machine—urk!” Chirwl squeaked as the belts and webbing tightened. Harry the cat wailed in sympathy.
“Neither are we,” Shona said. “It’s the laser. I never trust anyone who shoots at me.”
“Why does not the Sibyl it tell to go away? They are of the same species.”
“Stop talking,” Shona said, angling her head away from his. “Your whiskers tickle. Anyhow, ships can’t talk to each other. They’re non-sentient.”
“Mama!” Alex called, stretching out his arms to her over the lip of protective padding. “Mama, down!”
“No, sweetie,” Shona said in as calm a voice as she could muster. “Not yet. You stay up there for a while where it’s safe.”
“Down, now!”
“No ID,” Ivo’s voice said over the intercom. “They disconnected the black box. We should’ve done that, too.”
No black box. Shona fought the chill of fear that rolled down her spine. A spaceship engine could not legally be manufactured without the identifying chip that broadcast its identity to any receiver, and did not function without it, unless the chip was bypassed in an illicit shipyard. In some security-conscious parts of the galaxy, the lack of an answerback signal was grounds for a shoot-to-kill order. This ship wouldn’t care that the Sibyl knew about the bypass, because it didn’t intend that she should get away to tell anyone about it.
Shona glanced at Lani, whose eyes were saucer-wide. She tightened her arms around Chirwl and plumped him on her lap as if he were Alexander.
“Well, they can’t get us this easily,” she said cheerfully. “I don’t believe luck has run out yet for the Taylor Traveling Medicine Show and Trading Company.”
“No,” Lani agreed nervously. She stared up at the screen. The other ship was wheeling, attempting to get below them. Gershom was following their every move, tilting the Sibyl’s axis to fall alongside their attacker. The lights in the lab dimmed slightly, and Shona braced herself. On the screen one of the enemy’s hull plates shifted by itself, and the ship veered away from the point of impact. Gershom must be using the sonic probe as a cannon, hoping to dislodge something vital in the other ship’s defenses.
“Our business name has a little joke to it. Do you know what a medicine show is?” Shona asked, drawing the girl’s attention back to her with a little nudge at the shoulder. Lani shook her head.
“Well,” Shona said, using her best storytelling voice, “back in the pre-electronic age on Earth, salesmen who traveled between primitive, isolated towns offered potions with miraculous properties for sale. They promised these potions would wipe out pneumonia, make you taller and sexier, fix your rheumatism, fill dental cavities, and grow back hair!” Lani giggled. Alexander, hearing someone laugh, put in a stentorian burst of merriment. Shona smiled. “Sometimes they’d have entertainers traveling with them, who put on a performance to attract the attention of the folks living around there. There might be other useful goods for sale. Then, once the pretend doctor—they were called quacks—had the audience’s attention, he’d start his sales pitch. ‘Step right up, folks,’” Shona said, waving one arm in the air. “‘Try our am-aaaaz-ing tonic, guaranteed to cure what ails you—and only one credit—I mean, one dollar—a bottle!’ In those days, a dollar was a lot of money, but such a fantastic elixir was worth it.”
Lani listened seriously, not cracking a smile.
“What happened? Have the formulas been lost since then?”
“No, they were fraudulent,” Shona said, her eyes twinkling. Lani’s face fell. “The most genuine thing about the potions were the corks in the tops of the bottles. Sometimes the bottles themselves contained nothing more than water. The quacks hoped to be well out of town before the townsfolk caught on to the charade. It was the presentation that was the important thing, the illusion that their particular preparation could cure all ills. Once away from the town, the fake doctors were safe from all retribution by those people who thought they were going to grow hair or get younger by drinking the phony medicine.”
Lani’s eyes went wide. “But no town told the others?”
“They couldn’t. In those days people could only travel from place to place with great difficulty,” Shona explained. “Distances between towns were very short by our way of thinking, but people had to go on foot or use horses or ride in oxen-powered carriages. They had no energy tracers, no computers, no mass communication nets they could use to spread the word—only simple linear systems from one specific place to another.”
Lani sneaked a glance at the screen. “Wish there weren’t any nets now. They know.”
“Oh, honey, this won’t go on forever,” Shona said, forcing optimism into her voice.
“These mechanical nets are too efficient, as well you realize,” Chirwl said, following Lani’s thoughts. “How is it our assassin-payer is not supposed to be communicating and he is, always? To tell him no communication he makes, yet to stop him talking not to those who still may use those services—Urk!” he croaked, as Shona squeezed him.
“Chirwl, you’re no help,” she said crossly. “I would like to converse on a topic other than our possible demise at the hands or devices of our determined pursuers. Do you mind?”
“Ah!” Chirwl said, with an apologetic twitch of his whiskers. “I am following. Perhaps to speak on the beauties of my homeworld which I to look forward am?”
“That would be nice.” The small alien settled himself more comfortably amidst the restraining straps on Shona’s lap.
“Of trees and rivers I dream,” said the ottle, his soft voice whistling. “One infinitely tall and the other infinitely long. There do I go between always. Those my friends and I to rest on the bank under sunlight and speak long about theories and speculations of why that have been passed down through many generations and never solved. The rain that falls with a tip-tap-tap on the back of my sleeping pouch soothes, and the wind sings songs in the branches.” The picture he painted was so vivid and beautiful, Shona was transported away for a moment. She let out a wistful sigh.
“That sounds wonderful.”
“I miss weather,” Lani said in her small voice. “Even storms.”
Suddenly, the ship jumped and juddered, and a vibrating hum ran through the hull plates at their backs.
“Me, too,” Shona said, bravely keeping her voice level. “I want to get into the outdoors and breathe non-recirculated air. It’s been more than four months since we were on a planet with atmosphere. I’d like to walk a mile in one direction without running into walls. Not on a treadmill!”
“There is plenty of long direction,” Chirwl said eagerly. “I shall show you the best way to walk, near my home-place and heart-tree.”
“I want to meet your family, Chirwl. Are your parents alive?”
“The generative ones who raised me, yes.”
“Generative ones? That doesn’t sound … loving, if you know what I mean. Don’t you have names for them like Mama and Dada or something like that?”
Chirwl chittered in his own language. “The deficiencies language of Standard to blame for that. I am thinking to name otherwise but it does not translate as I would wish. In my tongue one calls these names to the raising ones.” Here Chirwl cooed and whistled a series of distinct, different, and liquid phrases in his own tongue. “And here are what they are called by loving offspring.” He emitted some softer phrases.
Shona attempted to repeat the first series. “I can’t say that without whiskers and an overbite,” she admitted. “Weren’t there three sounds? Do you have three parents?”
Her voice was swallowed up in a hurricane of noise from the engines and thrusters. The first hard jerk in the ship’s momentum threw her head backward against the padding in the jump seat. Alex’s cry of surprise when he too bumped his head added to the cacophony of Saffie’s barking and Harry’s yowling. Shona, Chirwl, and Lani huddled together in their midst, silent, listening. The video screen recovered from the white afterimage of an explosive blast thrown at them by the other ship, and they heard the orders barked out by the crew on the bridge. Shona gave up all hope of maintaining a cheery conversation, and clutched her loved ones to her. She wondered what orders the attackers had been given. Did they have to bring back the Taylors alive, or just proof of the kills?
The strain of living under constant threat had begun to tell upon Shona. Never knowing whether something as simple as giving her comm number to a new friend might result in another attempt upon their lives constricted her. She was used to being open and friendly with everyone she met, and wanted her son and daughter, and any future children she might have, to grow up the same way. Her deepest fears were not for herself, but for them.
“How are you doing back there?” Gershom’s voice asked over the intercom.
“I take this as a personal insult,” Shona shouted over the whining of hull plates. “I was just about to download my mail for the first time since we went incommunicado! More than four months’ worth!”
At her bravado Gershom let out a bark of laughter that ended in a whoop. The ship lurched to one side, and Shona watched bolts of light shoot past their port hull.
He thought it was funny, but it was true. Shona felt personally frustrated, since she was normally a voluble correspondent. She’d pleaded with her many friends not to send news too frequently and only at random intervals, to throw off anyone who might be monitoring her comm number while they were stuck in one place. They knew she wouldn’t be messaging back until she was safely back in clear space. There might be fifty communications from her friends and relatives stacked up and waiting, out of reach. She’d been planning to wallow in the news, enjoy a good natter by proxy with people she hadn’t heard from in ages, tell them at glorious leisure what had been going on with her, what Lani had said, how Alex had grown, and then this anonymous brute of a scout ship had appeared out of nowhere to delay the pleasure she’d been denying herself for security’s sake. For four months, they’d been completely circumspect. One careless moment, and here they were running for their lives again. She willed all her strength to Gershom, hoping that they could outrun the assassins one more time.
The other scout had a canny helmsman. Gershom managed to stay level with the stranger, but could never maneuver to a vantage point that would let him go on the offensive. That first defensive shot with the asteroid sonic probe had alerted the other ship that the Sibyl was not completely helpless, so it paced him carefully. Still, Gershom had the advantage of experience. Guiding a scout ship might be less hazardous now, but Shona could still remember some of the tales he’d told her while she was still in med school. One was about a pack of rival traders making orbit all at the same time over newly established colonies. The survivor got the trading contract. Probably the settlers were afraid to say no to a bully who could drive away or kill all the competition. Gershom had managed to live through that time; he could make it through this.
She knew what kind of weapons rough traders tended to pack aboard their ships: crude mining lasers, sonar probes like their own, frictionless magnetic charges loaded with explosives that were as much a danger to the attacker as the one attacked. Their pursuer’s armament was sophisticated, and probably new. She guessed he must be a professional, like a bounty hunter.
Her head spun as the ship twisted under her. The hull plates groaned and shrieked with the strain. On the screen, the would-be assassin spiraled away. Gershom had pulled the Sibyl into a controlled maneuver that threatened to pull them apart, but it got them down and away from the other ship’s guns. They slowed, hang-gliding on a simple vector, waiting. The enemy craft, after a momentary pause for surprise, followed the same looping, graceful whirl, aiming to come level, but it had fallen into Gershom’s trap. As soon as the ship’s belly turned toward their viewscreens, its plates started shuddering. Even a thousand klicks away, Shona could tell they were in trouble. With a brilliant shot, Gershom had hit them in the sensitive joins between the engine housing and the scout’s main body. The Sibyl kicked into motion again, turning and twisting to follow the attacker, now turned prey, pummeling it with the crude sonic beam. Laser shots from the other ship went wide, lancing away into space.
Suddenly the enemy ship seemed to remember it should be the dominant player in the confrontation, and thrust over its central axis to face the Sibyl directly, training its lasers to burn and destroy. But by the time it did, the Taylors’ scout ship was a small, bright dot, shrinking toward singularity.
When the Sibyl went into warp, Shona and the others were once again pitched hard into the bulkhead. She’d recognized the singing of power growing in the engines just moments before it happened. There hadn’t been time to cry out anything more than “Brace yourselves!” before the air was squeezed out of her lungs. The Sibyl vibrated, while the images on the screen whirled into an impossible moiré of streaks and colors, then went abruptly black. In faster-than-light warp, exterior visual pickups were useless. Once they passed over the threshold of light speed, the harsh vibrations died away, and the ship’s ride was as smooth as if she were not moving at all. In the sudden silence Alex took a few experimental gulps of breath and burst into furious tears. From where she sat, Shona cooed at him.
“Come on, sweetheart, it wasn’t that bad, was it?”
“Yaaaaahh!” the baby wailed, nodding his head. Harry, always company whenever he heard misery, burst out in empathetic cries. Lani gazed from one to the other, her eyes worried.
“It’s just warping, honey,” Shona said smoothly to Alex. “You’ve been in warp lots of times, right? This time I didn’t have a chance to warn you. You’re always brave the other times. You want to be a big, brave boy for Mama and Daddy, don’t you?”
He gave forth a hiccupping sob, but reined in the quivering lip that thrust up toward a tear-reddened nose, “Uh … uh-huh?” he managed uncertainly.
“Good, sweetie. I love you. You’re my hero, do you know that?”
“Uh-huh. Mama?” He fastened his brown eyes on her.
“Yes, Alex?”
“Down?”
“Soon. I promise.” Alex wasn’t happy, but the stormy tears abated.
Gershom’s solemn dark-eyed face appeared on the screen. “Are you all right back there? How are the kids? How are you?”
“Happy to be alive, thank you,” Shona said. “Good maneuvering.”
“Don’t thank me yet. We’ll be lucky if we don’t hit anything when we come out of warp,” Gershom said, shaking his head. “Because of our visitor, I had to bounce without finishing the calculations. We may have a surprise at the other end.”
“Well, we made it into warp,” Shona said firmly. “We will be all right. We always are.” Gershom smiled at her determined optimism, and Shona wished for his sake that she meant it. “How long will the jump last?”
“About an hour. That should confuse our pursuers, who probably think we’re going to take a long leap—that would be logical, to put as much distance between us as possible. After we clear, we have to figure out where we are, so it’ll take me a while to coordinate the next jump. Why don’t you plan to find the nearest beacon and listen to your messages?”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” Shona said. She smiled, feeling a little of her usual good cheer come trickling back. She unstrapped herself and set Chirwl down on the floor. The ottle shook himself, then described a forward roll with his flat body tucked into a hollow tube. Shona stood up with her hands over her head, stretching until every muscle in her back had unkinked.
The ottle shook himself all over, settling his short, plush fur. “How soon to Poxt?” he asked Gershom.
“I won’t know how far off course we went until we come out,” Gershom said apologetically. “I hope you’re not going to be jumping up and down with impatience.”
“I will not jump, if you ask not,” Chirwl replied, turning another somersault. “Though I will wishing to be at home more than soon.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Gershom said. “This shouldn’t lengthen our trip more than a few days. Is that all right?”
“All right is yes. I shall be swim,” he said, coming out of the somersault on all fours. “Thinking of Poxt makes me wish for water.” He trotted toward the bathroom.
“Fine and dandy,” Shona said. “I’m just happy to be alive.” She stretched again.
“Mama, down!” Alex said, holding out his arms to her.
“One second, sweetie.”
Before turning the baby loose, she freed the cat and dog, who hurried to their feeding station. Harry dashed ahead, spun, and held up a paw full of hooks toward Saffie, halting the dog in her tracks, then took a long drink. Shona guessed he was parched from yowling. The black dog waited her turn patiently, then slurped her noisy way to the bottom of the little reservoir. With a tiny whine, she looked up at her mistress.
“Nose it on, Saffie,” Shona said, pointing to the low-set lever. “Come on, girl. You know how.” The dog still hesitated. Shaking her head, Shona knelt and ruffled the dog’s fluffy ears, then kicked on the faucet with the heel of her hand. “I think she just wants me to do it to reassure her,” she told Lani. The girl knelt on the dog’s other side and put an arm over her shaggy back.
“She was scared.”
“So was I.” Shona stood up and went to take Alex down from the impact cocoon. She undid the fastenings around the backpack roll. “Here we go, sweetie.”
“No,” the toddler said, clenching his hands on the straps and fixing his mother with an obstinate gaze. He put out his lower lip. “Don’t want down now.”
With a sigh, Shona hefted the carrier onto her back. “I don’t know where you got that stubborn streak. Come on. You can help me listen to the mail. Here goes the horsey! Ready?” She galloped toward her cabin with the baby on her back shrieking his delight.
“Alone?” Lani said, from the floor.
“No, of course not,” Shona replied, turning around at the door. “There might be news for you from Aunt Lal—or Susan, since you so seldom send any messages yourself.” Lal was Shona’s pet name for her aunt Laurel Elliott who had raised her and embraced Lani as a new great-niece. Lani blushed. She was shy about sending messages, but she loved getting them. “Come on,” Shona urged cordially. Lani unfolded her long legs and hurried after them.