Free Second Wave by Anne McCaffrey

feline first mate, leaped from the captain’s shoulder to Acorna’s.
    “Beam us up, Maak,” Becker said into the com he’d just installed on the robolift.
    “How do I do that, Captain?” the android asked in a mystified tone.
    “You can’t, buddy. I just always wanted to say that. You don’t really have to do anything. I’ll push the button like I always do.” Acorna and Aari smiled at each other. The captain was so pleased with something that his mustache was absolutely fluffy with joy. He was also carefully shielding his thoughts so they could enjoy the surprise element of the news he wished them to hear for themselves.
    They ascended to the cargo deck, then up to the bridge. The robolift previously had gone only to the cargo deck. “This is a wonderful surprise, Joh,” Aari told him. “Making the lift go all the way to the bridge is both logical and practical.”
    “Yeah, well, I thought of it when I was getting my strength back after the plague. The stairs were just too much, you know? But this is nothing!” He snorted and waved one sausage-fingered hand dismissively at the lift. “Come on, can’t keep His Hafizness waiting. He made me promise not to tell you so he could.”
    Becker capered ahead of them and then, with a low bow, as if presenting royalty, indicated Hafiz Harakamian’s impatient countenance on the com screen.
    “Acorna, most felicitous of female foster offspring! And Aari, supremely salubrious son-in-law. Greetings!” Hafiz nodded, a deep blue catseye chrysoberyl winking at them from the center of the peacock-feather fan adorning his turquoise turban. “Sit down, my dears, make yourselves company. Jonas, are you a barbarian? Serve your guests cakes—er—seed cakes, of course, and a sparkling libation. The tidings I bear require celebration, think you not?”
    Hafiz himself was seated, and behind him a flowing curtain of amethyst and violet draperies indicated that his beloved Karina was hovering in the background. This impression was confirmed when her purple-catseye-encrusted hands caressed the teal-and-gold brocade shoulders of her husband’s robes.
    Aari and Acorna sat. Roadkill walked from Acorna’s shoulders to the back of the command chair and draped himself across it, his bushy tail tickling her cheek.
    Acorna knew the form Hafiz preferred, especially when he wanted to spin out a story, as he seemed to wish to do now. “How have you been, Uncle Hafiz? I trust you and Karina are well and that your enterprises flourish?”
    “How kind of you to inquire, my child. I am well as is my beloved. As for my enterprises, as you know they faltered somewhat while the disastrous disease threatened to eradicate life in our home sector. Your father, Rafik, tells me that our losses are so great he has been unable to calculate them accurately as yet. So many of our employees in so many of our enterprises have succumbed that data has been difficult to gather.”
    “But Rafik is well?”
    “He is. As are your other fathers and their families. Your people retrieved and cleansed many of our vessels and other properties, so House Harakamian is in better order than the businesses of its—for the most part late—competitors.”
    “We were all happy to have the occasion to repay your fathomless kindness to us and our worlds, Uncle Hafiz,” Aari replied. “Have you had any news of Khorii?”
    Aari was much less accustomed to the circumlocutory manners that were Hafiz’s habit. As Joh Becker put it, Aari liked to “cut to the chase.”
    “Ahhhh.” Hafiz smiled deep into his beard and mustache, leaned back in his chair and laced his fat, ring-encrusted fingers across his royal blue sash. Had RK favored a palette of blues instead of his brindled gray coat, he would have looked much the same after hiding a particularly well aged deceased rodent amid her bedclothes. “That I have, my children, that I have. I received a most encouraging relay mere moments ago from the Balakiire. Khorii is