Third Watch (17 page)

“That was many generations ago,” Neeva pointed out. “There is no guarantee that their descendants will recognize you. In fact, the race may well have died out. Certainly I have never encountered their descendants in my travels.”

“The thing is,” Ariin said, “we may need to time travel, and this is the only ship capable of it as far as we know.”

“It’s the cronos that permit the time travel, as you very well know,” Khorii protested indignantly. “We could give one of them to Neeva or Captain Bates, and they could time travel as easily as we can.”

“We couldn’t do it without landing. Besides, I’m not giving mine up, so you’d have to do it.”

Khorii considered that. The problem with surrendering all of the time-travel capability was that she felt some residual loyalty to Grimalkin. Admittedly, he was not himself all that loyal, but he made a good kitty, and she thought he would eventually redeem himself. If only he could return to his original form, he could convince the people who forced him always to be a small cat to unfreeze his form. She didn’t want him to have to be her cat just because he had to be.

So she said nothing further as they descended to the planet’s surface. She realized it should have changed somewhat since their last visit, but the landscape had altered in the particularly barren and horrific way that all of her people recognized as the result of a Khleevi invasion.

At first she thought the serpents had survived, because she saw long squiggles on the landscape as they descended, but the closer the ship came to landing, the more she saw that the squiggles were monstrous long mounds covering the planet’s surface. No trees, water, or other living things remained. She grieved for the beautiful serpents that had been here. It seemed to her such a short time ago.

Ariin said, “Well, it looks like we found the alien monsters in their new incarnation anyway.”

“No,” Khorii said. “That’s Khleevi scat.” Ariin wouldn’t know about it, of course. She had been raised in the time before the first Khleevi invasion and had been into space only one round-trip in contemporary times. Khorii had seen the devastated worlds during her travel to Kezdet. Stories of what Vhiliinyar had looked like before the terraforming were rapidly becoming legend in her culture, with her parents (and Ariin’s, she reminded herself, and Elviiz’s) playing a major role.

“Khleevi?” Ariin asked. “But they’re all dead, aren’t they?”

“Yes, but so are most of the worlds they invaded. Ariin, I don’t think we should land.”

“Why not? We landed before.”

“Because your theory seems to be correct. I believe the mutable dwellings and the plague and this planet are closely related. If we land here, we may expose ourselves and the ship to the original plague at its strongest. All of our horns combined wouldn’t be powerful enough to cleanse us. If we didn’t die, we’d probably end up in quarantine, and before you say that would be good, it might be a totally different quarantine than the one our parents and Uncle Joh are in.”

“We have to land. If we don’t, it’s a wasted trip. You’re just saying this to prevent me from finding the cause and the cure for the disease. I can see how the mutable dwellings are connected with the last phase of the plague’s development, but not the earlier part.”

“I can’t see that either, but I’ll bet it has something to do with the Khleevi. I promise you that you do not want to time travel on this planet without knowing exactly when to go to avoid the Khleevi. If they had anything to do with the plague, and it did involve the beings on this planet, we won’t find out any more here without going back to that time.”

Ariin said, “We can put the cat out with the extra crono, and he can time travel back to meet your bug-eyed monsters.”

Khiindi hid behind Khorii and hissed at Ariin.

Elviiz said, “We are joining our companion vessels in orbit.”

Khorii felt ashamed. She had been so busy arguing with Ariin she’d forgotten that Elviiz was actually in charge and would, of course, take the most prudent course.

“Thanks, Elviiz,” she said. “Guess we’d better let everyone know we came a long way to learn very little.”

“That is not precisely true,” her brother said. “As we skimmed the surface, I was able to take readings that may be useful.”

“How did you do that?” Ariin demanded.

But Elviiz simply smiled enigmatically and, Khorii thought, in the same smug way he used to smile in his former incarnation.

Once the three ships were well away from the Khleevi-ravaged world, Elviiz said into the com unit, “I suppose you would all like to know what I have inferred from the evidence I gleaned on the world we just visited.”

“Pray enlighten us,” Khaari said.

“Don’t tease, Elviiz,” Jaya chided him. “What was that all about?”

“From geological and thermal time signatures, I can definitively say that this world was the last visited by a particular swarm of Khleevi, who did so at the same time their fellow monsters were being exterminated by their own young after attacking narhii-Vhiliinyar.”

“There was more than one swarm?” Ariin said. “I never heard anyone talk about more than one swarm. I thought our parents had eradicated them.”

A chill shot through Khorii like a laser bolt. “Then that means there are still Khleevi alive, conquering innocent planets like this one and eating them up?”

“That cannot be,” Neeva said. “We would have known.”

“We didn’t know they existed to begin with until they invaded our sector,” Khaari reminded her. “The universe is immense, after all. These may have gone somewhere else.”

Elviiz held up a hand so that all could see he had more to say on the matter. “I do not believe they survived as Khleevi.”

“You think the serpents killed them?” Khorii asked.

“The serpents or some other life-form on the planet at that time,” Elviiz replied. “My sensors detect extremely large deposits of a mineral now known to our scientists as khleevium because it was not known before the Khleevi came. It is found in their carapaces. Interestingly enough, as much scat as there appears to be on the planet’s surface, it is not enough to indicate a Khleevi occupation of great length and intensity. Allow me to show you something.” He tapped a small circular socket on the instrument array, and a picture of the planet’s surface as they had just seen it appeared on the screen. The image rotated, showing that, despite Elviiz’s implication that the occupation had been comparatively short, nothing much was left on the surface except for the mounds of Khleevi scat. Elviiz highlighted one of these and zoomed in.

“Do you see how this has been interrupted? A chunk has actually been removed. Here, here, and here”—he highlighted and zoomed in on a scattering of other scat—“we see the same thing. Something came along after the Khleevi were no longer there to prevent it and devoured their scat.”

“Ewwwww, gross,” Jaya said. “Elviiz, I didn’t really need to know that.”

“Yes, Jaya, I believe you did. I believe it is very important to the creation of this plague, if my sister Ariin’s assumptions are correct, and the beings of this world are connected to what seem to be by-products of the plague.”

“Do you think the Khleevi and these serpent creatures completely destroyed each other then, Elviiz?” Captain Bates asked.

“Yes, I do. Of course, it is also likely that although the serpents ultimately destroyed the Khleevi, the Khleevi had damaged the planet so profoundly that there was no longer sustenance available for the serpents, completing their own eradication. But this is mere conjecture on my part. I do not have sufficient data to confirm my hypothesis.”

“Do we need to go back there, then?” Khorii asked. “Could you tell more if we did?”

“Not in the present time, no,” he said.

“It’s too bad there’s not a time device on this planet like the one on Vhiliinyar,” Ariin said. “Then we could track everything that happened on the chart without having to go there.”

Khorii shook her head. “The Khleevi invasion on Vhiliinyar destroyed the waterways and conduits for the time machine. It kept it from working properly there, and it probably would here, too.”

But Neeva said, “Not necessarily, Khorii. The remote part of the timing device was damaged, which was why people kept disappearing from the scouting parties. But the device itself was intact, and it was possible, with a few minor repairs, to trace time backward, if not forward. Nevertheless, such a device does not exist here, and physical travel is too risky without some way to determine when the Khleevi actually invaded.”

Elviiz said, “I believe I can do that,
Visedhaanye Ferlii
Neeva, and I would gladly take the risks upon myself to broaden our database, but my father says he is too temporally grounded to time travel. I suspect the same is true of me, unless you think the recent modifications in my structure may have altered that?”

“I can’t say, Elviiz,” Neeva replied. “They may have, but none of us are going to try. Not only would we endanger ourselves by risking interacting with the Khleevi again, but we risk their gaining access to the present time. They almost did during Khornya and Aari’s last encounter with them, when the master device was damaged.”

“My father has spoken of it. He was at the controls when the Khleevi came through,” Elviiz said. “He valiantly fought with them to defend my Linyaari parents and our world.”

“Yes, he did,” Neeva agreed. “He was very brave.”

“But not very familiar with the device,” Ariin said. “Had he been, or had our parents been more skilled with it, such a thing might not have happened. It was always perfectly safe during the time I lived near it in Kubiilikaan. It simply requires a skilled technician.”

Her gaze narrowed as it settled on Khiindi, who blinked up at her innocently.

Khorii caught her look. “Stop it, Ariin. There’s no device like that here for him to operate, even if Khiindi was Grimalkin and not a little cat again. We’ll just have to find another way.”

“Okay,” Jaya said. “I have another question that has nothing to do with time machines. Elviiz, if the Khleevi and the snakes killed each other, and they do have something to do with the plague, how did the plague spread to other planets?”

“Yeah,” Hap said. “And if someone found the disease here and took it to the Solojo system, where it’s supposed to have started, how did they get there without dying?”

“Does your data tell you anything about that, Elviiz?” Neeva asked.

“Maybe,” he said. Khorii had never heard him use the term of uncertainty before. It indicated to her that he had indeed become more organic, and perhaps more fallible. “I will reexamine the images with a sensor I am now designing that will determine where there have been landings within the period between the Khleevi’s invasion and now.”

Elviiz, although somewhat differently configured, appeared to be fully recovered from his injuries. After a brief interval, he said, “Yes. One vessel did land here. You can clearly see its imprint in this section—” He zoomed in on another highlighted portion of the planet, where a slight round indentation roughly the size of the landing surface of a Linyaari ship could be seen if one squinted. A lot. “You may notice that the track of the ship resembles one of our own egg-shaped vessels. In fact, according to my calculations, it is exactly the same landing pattern as the VL58PK series, as it is now known.”

“You think one of us landed here and created and spread the plague?” Neeva asked.

“I did not say that. I merely indicated that the person or persons who did so landed in a vessel that makes a print identical to that of one of our own models.”

“Perhaps one of the rescue teams, or a scouting mission, landed here briefly,” Khaari suggested. “I will check our fleet’s collective memory.”

Her search took longer than it had taken Elviiz to design his program to detect the ship. Finally, she looked up, shrugged, and said, “It wasn’t one of ours, Elviiz. They’re all accounted for. Except for our recent excursions as rescue teams, we haven’t taken many journeys. For one thing, not many of our ships survived the dual invasions of the Khleevi. We took what we could with us to narhii-Vhiliinyar, but during the second attack, the ones still docked on our new world were destroyed. Including all of the VL58PK series.”

“Nevertheless,” he replied, “the print matches.”

“There weren’t many made to begin with,” Melireenya remarked. “A dozen were ordered, though only eleven were ever registered with our fleet. That is odd. I wonder why? There’s another possibility, too. Khaari, check and see if our emissaries—the ones the Khleevi murdered—were flying VL58PKs at the time.”

“Do you think the Khleevi captured the ship and used it to land here?” Khorii asked.

“It seems doubtful. Khleevi are larger than we are, and the controls would be difficult for them to operate. I would suspect they’d have simply eaten the ship, as they did everything else in their path.”

Elviiz said, “As the more recent menace has done? The plague devours organic matter, at least at a certain stage of development, and the after-product devours the inorganic matter.”

“But why here?” Ariin asked.

“The Khleevi destroyed worlds indiscriminately, Ariin. They did not have reasons or an overall plan as we know them,” Khorii said.

“I don’t mean why did the Khleevi attack this world. I mean why did something on the world apparently survive the attack or at least mutate the Khleevi into the form of the plague and its aftermath? And how was a ship that apparently belonged to our fleet involved? This is beginning to remind me of something, too.”

“What do you mean?” Khorii asked.

“Think about it,” Ariin said. “Which race had a connection with this planet and used beings from it to make their lives more comfortable? Which race is so self-involved they might have come here, seen something they didn’t like, changed it to be—I don’t know, more portable, easier to control, prettier—and taken it away again without any concern at all about the consequences? Whom do I know well and whom have you met recently who might do something like that?”

“Surely not!” Khorii said. “But why?”

“It was probably all a clumsy, stupid mistake,” Ariin replied. “For all their arrogance and supposed abilities, they’re a bit slipshod at times.”