She clutched it for a moment, her emotions so strong that she was unable even to thank Miiri. Then she kissed the little disk and tucked it into her tunic.
Miiri enfolded Acorna in an embrace that was the most comforting thing Acorna had felt since Aari was lost. When Acorna finally released Miiri, she turned, ready to face Hafiz and Becker and agree to what they asked of her.
Becker barely glanced at her, nodded, and turned to Hafiz. "Tell you what, HH. You send Nadhari along with us to protect Acorna from the Wats, and you got yourself a deal."
Two
You didn't need me, Jonas," Nadhari said once they were well away from MOO. "MacKenZ is strong enough to subdue our hairy friends, or you could have tied them up and locked them in an inner cargo hold."
"Yes, sweetie, but I wanted you to come," Becker said, twirling the ends of his mustache. "You know how much more secure I feel when you're here to protect me. I just used Acorna as a smoke screen so nobody else would know what a wuss I am."
Acorna added, "Nadhari has a point, Captain. Mac fought the Wats when they attacked Thariinye, Maati, and me. They regard Mac as a superior warrior. Him and RK both."
RK was draped across Nadhari's shoulders like a fur stole, his tail describing lazy Js against the insignia sewn to the sleeve covering her left arm. The cat's face, framed by its furry mane, was so large it looked as if Nadhari had two heads.
"Our Temple cats are ferocious fighters," the woman warrior said, running a finger along the cat's curl of tail.
"I believe it, having seen RK in action," Acorna agreed. "However, he doesn't have Mac's facility for alien languages. I think, Captain, that since Mac mastered the Khleevi utterances well enough to fool their ships, he could certainly pick up the tongue the Wats are speaking among themselves.
"Our people have tried using the LAANYE on their language, but those two don't seem to carry on normal conversations and the only words that consistently appear in their thoughts when faced with most of us are, 'Maim, kill, destroy, rend,' and that sort of thing. Most of my people find that too disturbing to pursue, not to mention it being too limited a sample to build a language base from. If Mac can communicate with them consistently, then perhaps we can start teaching them current languages and manners. It must be very frightening for them to suddenly be among us. We should try to help them assimilate so they can continue their lives in this time in a somewhat normal way."
"If you say so," Becker said. "Personally, I think we should just send them back to whenever it was the old-timers had banished them to." He grinned at Nadhari. "At least they were a bargaining chip for me to get Hafiz's security chief off MOO for a while."
Acorna watched attraction spark between the captain and Nadhari like static from RK's fur. The two humans still cared for each other, that was clear. With a sigh, Acorna turned to go speak to Mac.
The android readily agreed to her proposal. "You mean you want me to modify the Wats in the same way you modified me? An upgrade of their memory banks?"
"Yes, sort of. Though they are very backward and superstitious."
"What is superstitious?" Mac wanted to know.
"Hmm, some people would say it means to believe in any sort of magical charms at all, but I think it is more the belief in false magical charms that presuppose a cause-and-effect relationship between events or incidents that are actually unrelated."
"Then there are true magical charms as well as false ones?"
Mac asked.
"I don't know. I suppose that depends on the definition used for magic. In some places, the ability my people have to read minds, or the way that I can discern, from a distance, the mineral content of planetary bodies throughout their mass, would be considered magic. We cannot actually explain these abilities yet, and some people consider all unexplained events as magic. Many phenomena for which we now have scientific explanations were considered to be magic before we learned those explanations. There were no scientists that we know of in the time Wat and Wat came from, so all events and phenomena must seem magical to them."
"Ah," Mac said, "that may explain their hostility to you and your people. Is it possible that they wish to kill your people because they believe you are magicians with evil powers?"
"No, they kill us because they want to steal our horns. Their leaders believe that our horns have the power to make them more virile, to keep them from being poisoned, all that sort of thing. It's even true, but what they don't understand is that if they'd befriended our Ancestors and asked for help nicely instead of killing every horn-bearer they saw, things would have worked out better on both sides. As it was, their ruthless pursuit of 'magic horns' back on Old Terra meant that soon there were no more 'magic horns' to pursue."
She and Mac worked as a team, spending hours on end with the Wats. She read their thoughts and supplied the images to Mac, who asked questions in their guttural language, which he understood very quickly. "It is, as Captain Becker discovered, a very early version of Standard, with some Teuton and old Norse mixed in. Many sentences are actually not very different from those spoken by Captain Becker and other Terrans, but the inflection and accent make the words sound foreign."
Acorna had already noticed this, and was picking up on the similarities and learning the accent, but since the Wats were the ones who would have to assimilate to the dominant cultures around them now, it was more important for them to learn modern languages than for her to learn ancient Wat.
Now that the Wats were actually in a mood to communicate, thanks to Acorna's telepathic skills, Mac made rapid headway teaching them words and concepts. The android tried to explain to them that they were flying through space in a spaceship. They asked him in awed tones if the Thunder God had his hand on the Condor, guiding the vessel across the heavens.
"Did you explain it to them?" Acorna asked, amused.
"I tried, but in the end I said no, it was more as if we were riding the Thunder God's lightning bolt. They seemed not only satisfied with that explanation, but impressed and proud."
Though neither Wat had as yet directly addressed her, Acorna felt that great progress was being made in their socialization. She had no idea at what point in their temporal incarceration the time rupture had released them, but they were still relatively young men.
The red-haired one with the amorous intentions toward Karma was taller than his companion and was heavily muscled through the chest, shoulders, and arms. He had a blue-eyed stare that at some times was direct and at others seemed to be looking back into his past and asking many questions. Reading his thoughts, Acorna saw that he had several mates and many children in scattered villages.
The other Wat had sandy hair and blue eyes as well, and was more of a warrior by disposition. His glance was suspicious and his questions were sly, as if he thought to catch his captors out in a lie. He kept alert to escape opportunities.
Acorna cautioned Mac to watch that man. Though his outward behavior was less aggressive than that of the red-haired Wat, he was the more dangerous and less civilized of the two.
What they had taken for the red-haired Wat's crudeness was simply a healthy lust that had stood him in good stead in his homeland while siring his dynasties. He also had a certain sort of gregariousness, a willingness to found new dynasties no matter where his circumstances took him. Hafiz, with some justification, considered the man a barbarian rapist, but of the two Wats, he was actually far less hostile and more amenable to learning. Even his actions toward Karina would, in his own culture, have been a compliment. Acorna had deduced that the Wats' world had some remarkable differences from modern human society.