Acorna’s Search Read Online Free

Maati pointed out the windscreen and cried, “Look! Those long lumpy trails, aren’t those—?”
    “Khleevi scat,” Thariinye said, disgusted. “Maybe it’s my imagination, or bad memories, but I think I can smell it from here.”
    “I smelled it back at the cave,” Maati said.
    Aari snorted. (The stench has not left my nostrils since we first landed.)
    (It has been so for me, as well.) Even as she replied, Acorna tried not to broadcast the other disturbing recollection she’d had from the scout reports she’d reviewed. The reports had spoken of Khleevi young being bred in the rivers and streams of Vhiliinyar. She shuddered, recalling her own single encounter with the Young, so voracious and vicious as to form the driving force behind Khleevi conquest. But surely all of the Young were dead now, killed on their horrific home world where they were both protected by and avoided by the adult Khleevi.
    Aari picked up her concern and, to her surprise, he was the one to comfort her.
    (I can sense when the Khleevi are close,) Aari told her. (And I do not sense them now.)
    Acorna sighed. (Yes, they must have moved on once they had destroyed all the resources here, and returned to their home world. I’m sure you’re right.)
    (They’re gone now, yaazi, ) Aari repeated. (Nothing of them remains to harm us or others.)
    Gratefully, she allowed her special talent for sensing the mineral composition of any substance she chose to probe—something she’d developed while working with her asteroid-miner foster parents—to preoccupy her with the data it fed her senses. Instead of smelling Khleevi scat she smelled, tasted, mentally touched, each major mineral deposit in their flight path as they passed above it. This was a vital part of her plan to map the planet. The few survey maps they had were short on biological detail, but extremely precise when it came to mineral deposits. She could take what she learned on their surveys of Vhiliinyar as it existed now and use it to reconstruct the planet topology as it had been before the Khleevi had attacked.
    The work was a welcome distraction from the ugliness below her, and from the cold bleakness that overcame Aari as he withdrew to that inner place where he found protection when reminded too forcefully of his ordeal among the Khleevi.
    Long stretches of alluvial deposits containing copper, gold, garnets, agates, and other, rarer gems indicated riverbeds, and when Acorna sensed these she noted their coordinates on the flitter’s computer. The distribution of these minerals and gems would help her trace the rivers to their origins in the mountains and their endings in the seas. Limestone deposits in large quantities indicated former ocean floors—even recent ocean floors, since the Khleevi had diminished as well as befouled the planet’s oceans until they were turgid, lifeless swamps.
    Salt deposits provided another indication for the oceans, and basalt deposits often outlined original shorelines. Acorna’s talent for sensing minerals, a trait apparently unique among the Linyaari, was invaluable here. She could use it to help Hafiz and her people reverse engineer Vhiliinyar from the mess it had become and return it, she hoped, to something at least approaching its original beauty and vitality.
    The terrain abruptly changed and she increased the flitter’s altitude to avoid the vast ranges of tumbled boulders before them. This landscape was in constant motion, like a terrified animal pinned down and writhing to escape torture. Showers of stones plummeted from precipices, landing with puffs of dust on the hills newly formed from the avalanches. These in turn were blasted apart by subsequent slides. Plumes of ash and smoke rose from three vast craters gaping in the range like festering pockmarks on the planet’s face.
    After the calderas were some distance behind them, the ground finally stabilized a bit. For the first time they could see vegetation growing, low and scrubby at first,