Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [54]
“What am I going to do?” he asked the cave walls. “I suppose people have always had to ask that at some point or the other. Do I betray my home by letting others take it from me? Or do I betray my family by endangering them? I can’t find it in me to do either, even if I knew how. What are we going to do?” He tasted salt in the water running from his hair and knew that it wasn’t river water, even as it flowed back into the stream. “I need help.”
“Help!” the echo screamed back at him. “Help!”
It sounded like another person entirely, not an echo of himself—the echo at the wedding had used the same tonality. In spite of his pain, he sat up straighter and looked and listened. Then he said aloud, “That’s right. We need help. Yana’s been taken by more people who want to tear you to pieces. Yana needs help.”
“Help Yana! Help Yana! HELP YANA! YANA! YANA!!”
Her name echoed around the cave until Sean was about to jump into the water to escape it. Then suddenly the echo changed again.
“Help! Help us!” And suddenly the slight phosphorescence that was always in these caverns organized itself into a straight line and grew and grew.
For a moment, Sean just stared. The purposeful echo, the purposeful line of the phosphorescence—neither of these had ever been manifested by Petaybee before. But after all, Petaybee was a young planet, still discovering its own abilities, and it had recently been exposed to new stimuli. Its responses were becoming more and more interesting.
He followed the phosphorescent track, trying to keep up with it, until he was back in the river and found himself in the midst of a vast school of fish—every kind of fish—all swimming with purpose and determination in a single direction.
Aboard the pirate ship
Yana was awakened out of a deep sleep by the sensation of warmth and vibration at the base of her throat. It seemed to emanate from the little bag of dirt around her neck as if it held some tiny animal instead of merely dirt. She clutched it, comforted, and as she did so a picture sprang into her mind of Sean, calling for her, so that her own name rang in her mind, as clearly as if someone in the same room were speaking to her. The voice sounded so anguished she wished she could offer some comfort, but before she could form any sort of reply, she felt the tickle that prefaced a coughing fit.
She clutched harder at her talisman, as Petaybee and Sean continued calling her, a voice in her mind crying her name. The cats talked to other cats and Clodagh, the dogs to their humans, and everyone talked to the planet. Why shouldn’t the mighty voice of a planet be able to call across the cosmos if it set its mind to it? Interesting thought, one that tumbled around and around as the image of Sean and the tickle evaporated, and the voice faded.
She lay awake for a long time, fondling the bag, wondering if she had just dreamed the warmth and the powerful mind-echo. Because it was tremendously reassuring to think, even for a moment, that Petaybee was somehow on her psychic wavelength, she wanted it to be true. In the past when she had dreamed someone was calling her name, they often had been, and it was the captain or the drill sergeant or the corps commander. This time she was alone in the bowels of wherever they were, and the only sounds were the sleeping restlessness of her fellow prisoners.
Then they were all abruptly aroused as the door of their prison burst open to be filled at once with a brawny crewman, the ever-ominous Megenda, and Dinah O’Neill, who seemed to be using all of the strength in her petite frame to restrain Megenda. Megenda clanged something hard against the metal of the doorframe: a laser pistol. “Get off your butts, you lazy lot of worthless harlots.”
Part of Yana thought, Uh-huh, I was right. He does fancy himself as an old-style pirate. Who used the word “harlot” anymore, really?
But he looked very fierce indeed, and Dinah O’Neill appeared