Third Watch

Chapter One
Now and Then
Now
Elviiz, with all of the time changes we've been through during our journey and the disappointment of not being able to get Mother and Father out of quarantine, we cannot sleep a wink. So we decided to go visit the LoiLoiKuans and see how they're settling in to their new home in our ocean with the sii-Linyaari. Please tell everyone so they won't worry. We'll be back before you know it.
Love,
Khorii, Ariin, and Khiindi, too. (You know how he is about fish.)
Khorii left the message on Elviiz's portable com--the one he needed now that he was fully organic and missing his critical android modifications.
Then, with the moons shining down on them, she and her twin walked down to the pearl-crested sea, Ariin carrying Khiindi.
"He'll walk if you want to put him down," Khorii told her twin. "We could stop to graze on the way. It would make our story more believable."
Ariin frowned. "He really does need to come with us, and he's so unpredictable."
Khiindi took matters into his own paws by hopping down, waving his tail as if beckoning them to graze. The girls assumed grazing posture and bent to taste the tantalizing grasses growing in the meadows sloping down to the sea. Their horns, a single shining gold one in the center of each of their foreheads, glowed softly in the silver moonlight.
When they were done, Khiindi dodged Ariin's questing hands and trotted ahead, just out of reach. The cat was not about to let the young Linyaari use his crono to spirit Khorii off to the distant past and get her into who knew what kind of trouble without him there to protect her. Nor, for that matter, was he going to miss a chance to escape the little kitty form into which he'd been frozen by his fellow shape shifters, all because of a very slight miscalculation during a mission with which they'd once entrusted him. If they insisted on continuing to hold their grudge, he would be better able to act freely back in the time before the monstrous Khleevi had destroyed the large time-traveling device. The buglike aliens wrecked everything they touched, and they had wreaked havoc not just with the time machine, but with the whole planet. The ecological damage had been repaired, but the time machine was no longer functional.
And, of course, the fish were lovely, too. The LoiLoiKuans saw the three of them approach. The younger ones, well trained by Khiindi back in the days when they were pool pupils, or poopuus, at the school on Maganos Moonbase, flipped a sleek, fat fish out of the water directly into his mouth. Good. Delicious. They had not forgotten the tribute due to their patron cat.
He barely had time to devour it and no time at all for a good wash and brushup before the twins stepped into the water. Khiindi jumped in after them. Makahomian Temple Cats, his lineage in more ways than one, did not mind a nice swim now and then. However, he remembered the first time he had met the aquatic dwellers, after suffering at the hands of that brat Marl Fidd, who had hurt him badly, then thrown him into the pool back at Maganos. The large brown LoiLoiKuans with their fused legs and flippered feet swam up to surround them. They were joined by their watery hosts, the sii-Linyaari, who were as indigenous to Vhiliinyar as anybody was.
Aari, the twins' father, had transplanted the sii-Linyaari to the current time from a previous one in which they were about to become extinct. They were not an attractive species, at least, not to anyone except others of their kind. They were examples of a failed attempt on the part of Khiindi's people, known to the Linyaari and the Ancestors as the Friends, to create the Linyaari race. Like Khorii and the rest of her race, the sii-Linyaari also had horns--many little ones growing all over their heads. Some had long, waving hair, some had none.