Something plopped down beside her onto the table and mewed up at her. She reached down to stroke the rust-and-cream stripes of one of Aunt Clodagh’s cats, though which she couldn’t say since so many of the Kilcoole felines were orange-marmalades. The cat pawed the door, and Bunny smiled and followed, chattering to the cat.
“So Clodagh already knows about my passenger, does she, and left you here to tell me to report? Glad to, cat, as long as there’s a bite in it for me.”
The dogs in the shed had ignored the cat; the ones in the yard did not bark as it led her through the kennels. No one’s dogs even barked at Clodagh’s cats. They went where they pleased and knew where everything was and what everyone was doing-as did Clodagh.
Chapter 2
The official guide-only a second lieutenant, Yana noted-stood up when she entered the room. “Major Maddock,” he said, saluting and flashing her quite an energetic smile. “Lieutenant Charles Demintieff, first Petaybee military liaison officer, at your service, dama.”
“Relax, Lieutenant,” she said. “I’m reporting to you, not the other way round.”
“Yes’m. It’s just that I’ve read your file, and we don’t get many heroes back here.”
“Most heroes don’t make it back anywhere,” she said.
He laughed as if she had said something extremely witty. ‘Then we’re luckier still to have you, Major. Colonel Giancarlo from SpaceBase snocled in this morning to welcome you personally. When you’ve had your chat with him, we’ll go over the routine stuff.”
Walking into the adjoining room, Yana felt as wary as if she were entering the bridge of an enemy-held ship. If the SpaceBase brass wanted to talk to her, why hadn’t he done it at Inprocessing and saved himself a long, cold ride?
The colonel, in contrast to the lieutenant, did not look happy lo see her. His insignia was one she had seen only occasionally:
Psychological Operations, a euphemism for the Intelligence branch. She reported, and he waved her into a chair while he continued typing something into a terminal.
“Well, Major,” he said after she had been sitting there long enough to become impatient and uncomfortable in her heavy gear. “What do you think of Petaybee so far?”
“Seems friendly,” she said cautiously. He was testing her somehow, but she wasn’t sure for what. “The air is clean, pretty cold. Fairly primitive technologically. New recruits from here need extensive training in the simplest equipment, and it’s pretty obvious why, from what I’ve seen of my quarters and the village. Am I missing something?”
“If you are, you’re not alone,” he said, his eyes shifting from the terminal to hers and boring into them. “There shouldn’t be anything here that we didn’t put here. This planet was nothing but rock and ice when Intergal claimed it. The company terraformed it, upgrading it from frozen uninhabitable rock to a merely arctic climate. For the last two hundred years, it’s been useful as a replacement depot for troops, a relocation center for the peoples who were being displaced by our other operations. Because the climate is rough on machinery, only SpaceBase contains much in the way of modern comforts. The transportation needs of the inhabitants are mostly supplied by experimental animals bred for the purpose.”
“Experimental?” Yana asked. “Like lab animals?” She had been born on Earth but had spent her childhood being shunted with her parents from one duty station to the next. Lab rats and monkeys were somewhat familiar to her, along with a number of different alien species, but she was unfamiliar-except from pictures-with the beasts she had seen on her way here today.
“Not exactly, although I suppose their ancestors did some time in a lab-originally. The company hired Dr. Sean Shongili to alter certain existing species to adapt to this climate. That’s how the resident equines, felines, and canines, and many of the aquatic mammals come to be here.”
“1 see,” she said, but she didn’t. The dogs obviously worked as sled animals, the cats to keep down rodents. But she couldn’t understand why Petaybee supported equines, too. Horses, from what little she knew of them, seemed rather inappropriate for such a climate. And considering the need for hacking and burning holes in ice to secure water, wasting such effort on domestic pets seemed totally unproductive.