Second Wave Read Online Free PDF Page A

no one had died or was buried there. It was small but easy to maintain, with its own water supply and plenty of sunshine. Well, part of the day. The funny thing about the rainy season was that usually the sky was sunny and warm during the early part of the day, but in midafternoon the rain began and by evening at the latest, the rains turned to violent storms.
    “I think Khorii has a good point,” Captain Bates said. Her wavy brown hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck, around which she wore a stunning beaded necklace with long, sparkling fringes that matched her earrings. It was a startling transformation since none of them had ever seen their astrophysics and astral navigation teacher in anything but utilitarian clothing before. But it turned out that for most of her life before she was a teacher, Captain Bates had been making beautiful things when she finished the prodigious amount of work she seemed to accomplish each day. “I don’t need much sleep,” she told them. “So I need something quiet to do.”
    Before the last Linyaari rescue ship took Khorii on her mission, the captain had come to her with a sheepish expression on her face. “This is very selfish of me, I know, but I need you to cleanse a place for me. It’s not very large, but it’s something I need, and I think it can be used to help some of the survivors as well.”
    Khorii had felt very low at that time, since her parents and Captain Becker had gone into self-imposed exile among the Ancestors on Vhiliinyar. Asha Bates had led her to a small shop on the fringes of the city, between the downtown district and the factories, warehouses, and residential facilities where Jalonzo and Abuelita had lived prior to the plague.
    “I was helping the team with search and rescue in the areas your parents couldn’t cover, Khorii, driving a supply shuttle with fresh untainted grasses and water for them if they needed it. While they were working in an apartment building, I noticed a shop next door. I only read a little Spandard, but the hanks of beads in the window told me what was sold there. I was embarrassed to ask the team to cleanse the shop for me when they had so much to do to help others. But, well, making things is therapeutic. When I was a kid, my mother and I got parked on the terraformed moon the colonists call the Bosque Redondo. Most of the settlers were Dine and Lakota people, tribal people who were resettled there from Old Terra. Their original homelands were among the first to be rendered uninhabitable, long before the rest of the planet. Anyway, they named the moon after a historic prison camp where the Dine had once been forced to live far from their homeland. But it wasn’t intended to be a prison, and people could bring with them whatever they liked. High-tech stuff was useless to most of them since the power supplies were limited there, so they brought the low-tech traditional things their ancestors had used. This time, though, they were able to bring the means to create and manufacture the materials they needed to make beads and fabrics as well. It turned out to be one of the best places I ever lived. If I had been the crying type, I’d have cried when we left there. My mother was busy fascinating the local men and cheating them at cards and dice; but the women felt sorry for me and taught me to bead and weave, sew blankets and quilts. I wanted to teach classes to the kids at Maganos, but Phador thought beading was beneath the dignity of an astrophysics instructor.”
    Cleansing the shop hadn’t actually required much effort since Khorii had found ways to decontaminate large numbers of things and heal large numbers of people using water to conduct the power of her horn. As it turned out, most of the shop wasn’t contaminated anyway. Khorii saw the blue dots she identified with plague hovering around only certain displays in the store. Sesseli, young enough to be immune to the hormone-related disease, happily hauled plasgrass