It took every last credit she had to charter a scout craft to Zonzalo's last known location. Lucky thing it was a base the pirates used all the time. She hadn't intended to stay once she had rescued her brother, but face-to-face, the pirates were a truly pathetic lot. Their equipment was a hundred years outdated, but even bad equipment will work if maintained. Their diet was so unbalanced that crew members were going down sick with fragile-bone disease and scurvy, even the ones who weighed 160 kilos. Mirina needed so badly to be needed that when Zonzalo and a younger, much handsomer Aldon Bisman pressed her to stay, she did. Central Worlds had rejected her, but these people wanted her. They'd pay her anything she asked, just to stay. At the time the offer was hard to resist.
It took two years before she had them whipped into a kind of military order that preserved resources and actually allowed them to build their network outward. She was a good organizer, but for eight years now, it seemed, she'd operated on autopilot. She found it harder every day to break away. The activity kept her from thinking too hard about where she had come from, about Charles, and the horrifying accident that killed him, and what she was doing.
At long last Mirina was thinking again. She needed to take Zonzalo and leave, cease aiding and abetting criminals. She had become one herself. Little niggles and twinges from her conscience told her that she still owed something to Central Worlds. Even after all the wrong CW had done her, she'd never have met Charles and shipped with him if it wasn't for the brainship program. He had been the single most wonderful thing in her life. An old-fashioned but worldly gentleman, Charles himself would have said it was Mirina's duty to turn herself and the others in, and he'd be right. She shouldn't be here. Not that she ought to try and return to the brain/brawn program: she couldn't. She couldn't even go back to the Central Worlds and try to fit into the mainstream. No job would be safe for her. The authorities undoubtedly had a criminal file on her that would cover a small continent, and she would rather die of torture than be locked up groundside. The Don family would have to ship out on their own, skipping from remote outpost to remote outpost forever. Again the sensation of desperate lack of belonging rose out of her belly and clutched her throat until she gasped, sobbing. Mirina sat up in bed and braced herself, elbows akimbo with hands on her knees, just breathing. She was doing good here, too-she was! The work they had done with the Thelerie was benevolent and worthwhile. Look at the advances the winged ones had made in only a few years! She hated to leave that, but she needed to go away and take Zonzalo with her.
A good organizer knows how to organize. She lay back on her bunk, and began to take stock of her assets.
Chapter Twelve
The Cridi were green, in every way. They were inexperienced, scared witless, and, well, physically resembled the chorus line for a production of the comedy musical Frogs In Space. Keff's natural exuberance and energy were proving to be just shy of what it took to buoy up an entire crew of aliens through their first experience of long-term space travel. Every day brought new anxieties and fears that just proved how quickly a space-going race can forget how it once adapted. He fell into bed at night, completely exhausted.
Things were slightly better now that they had passed the halfway point. Their passage around the trapped magnetic Oort debris, pooled at the balance point between the Cridi system and its sister sun, when all of Carialle's sensors had gone briefly insane, had caused hysteria among the Cridi. It had taken all Keff's tact and patience to keep the other ship's crew from mutinying against Narrow Leg and diving through the anomaly-fatally-back toward their homeworld. Carialle's suggestion, voiced at thunderous volume over all speakers, that both systems must be of identical galactic mass and weight to hold this particular configuration, lured some of the scientists out of their emotional shells to study the phenomenon of twin systems. Narrow Leg and Tall Eyebrow rallied everyone into the project. Keff spent plenty of time answering questions and supplying telemetry scans for their use. An intelligent people, they understood that to occupy their minds fully would help defy the dark. Yet, bogeys crept back nightly, leaving Keff to buoy their hearts up again in the morning.
As he staggered out into the main cabin at the beginning of his shift, in the middle of the second week in space, he glimpsed Cridi from the corner of his eye in half a dozen screens, all staring. They relaxed perceptibly when they saw him. Keff deliberately met each pair of eyes in turn, smiling with confidence. They must have been up since the dot of first shift, waiting for him to appear. Tall Eyebrow, Small Spot, Long Hand, and Big Eyes were in the corner of the cabin near the food synthesizer, the only ones who didn't look nervous.
"I'm not used to this much company," Keff growled under his breath to Carialle. "We've had too many years alone, just the two of us."
"It won't last forever," the brain reminded him, speaking through his aural implant, the lone communication signal that they kept as a private channel. All the others had been left on open broadcast to the Cridi ship so the amphibioids could monitor what was going on, Carialle was also tapped into the frequencies of both functioning Cores. She kept her frog image on the wall of the CK-963 and on one screen of the Cridi ship in case they needed to ask questions while Keff was busy or asleep. "We're doing a public service for them, and they're out to help us with our mission."
"But they're still so scared," Keff said, frustrated.
"They'll get over it once there's something to do."
"I hope so," Keff said. He sat down at the control console, and let out a huge yawn. "They're wearing me out." On the screen over it, two of Narrow Leg's crew stared out. He smiled at them.
"Hello, Gap Tooth and Wide Foot."
"Good mor-ning," they chorused in Standard, faltering only a little over the dipthong.
"That's very good," Keff said, nodding encouragingly. "Have you been studying the drama videos I sent so you could practice listening to colloquial speech?"
"Have," the first one said, then fell back on a combination of sign and numeric squeak. "Interesting, times two-times three! Terror, fire, exciting! N is greater than zero tongue trill sounds. Why?"
Keff stared, baffled. "What do you mean? Which tape were you watching?"
The other Cridi, Wide Foot, held up a card and pronounced the title with great care as she followed the words with a finger. "Gone With The Wind," she said, and turned puzzled eyes to him.
"Oh!" Keff smiled, enlightened. "It's a dialect. Trill sounds were sometimes replaced with aspirates in some regional speech patterns on Old Earth."
"Sounds soft," she said, and gave him a timid smile in return. "I like to he-ah such speech. I may adopt it."
"Oh, wonderful," Carialle said, much amused. "A frog with an American Southern accent."
"I think it adds character," Keff said. "I encourage you to experiment," he told Wide Foot.
"I shall."
As Tall Eyebrow and his companions had already proved, the Cridi were rapid learners. They absorbed the Standard As a Second Language videos that Carialle dredged out of her memory, and were speaking a form of pidgin by the end of the first week. Keff's own grasp of the Cridi spoken language was increasing every day as a result of answering so many questions. Having no residue of the tongue in his memory, Keff was finding it slower going than the three Ozranians did. Tall Eyebrow was now participating fully in discussions with his long-lost cousins.