“Thanks,” Yana said, ignoring the war hero comment and hoping to restore herself to his good opinion after that flash of aggro. “You’re very kind.”
His silver eyes glinted as he handed her the cup. “Bunny would skin me alive if I never asked you where your mouth was,” he said, and winked with pure mischief before he presented Bunny with her mug.
“Too right, Unk,” Bunny said, “and Scan makes a good bev.”
Yana clasped it in both hands, to warm numb fingers, taking her time about sipping a liquid she knew would be too hot to drink immediately. The rising steam carried a spicily inviting odor to her nostrils.
“Charlie’s gone, I hear,” Sean went on, hitching his hips up onto the nearest flat surface.
“Yah! With barely time to say goodbyes, and no song,” Bunny said, then cocked her head at him, smiling winsomely. “Which is why we wondered if we could have the recorder. The major here knows all about equipment like yours, and she volunteered to help us send him a letter. To make up for his sudden departure, like.”
Sean flicked a gaze at Yana, and she quirked her lips in a smile.
“Charlie-boy’s not the one to irritate folk,” Sean said. “Wonder why they posted him offplanet.” But he put his cup down and, with a single fluid movement, spun on one heel to an overburdened wall cabinet from which he unerringly extracted a recording device. Not, Yana realized as she saw the face of it, an obsolete affair but nearly state-of-the-art from the last time she had been issued one. The cabinet was crammed with technological gadgets of all kinds, half of which she couldn’t put a name or use to. She watched as Sean negligently pushed back into place equipment that would have been worth a small fortune on any planet, much less a technologically starved one like Petaybee.
“Half of it doesn’t work,” he said, without seeming to have noticed her attention. “Petaybee’s hard on any kind of instrumentation and machinery.”
“How do you manage your work then?” she blurted out.
He gave an diffident shrug. “I improvise. We do a lot of that on Petaybee.” He handed her the recorder. “Do you understand this type?”
She examined the display keys more closely and nodded, deciding to limit her comments. “Had one almost like this on my last assignment.” She slid the thin rectangle into a thigh pocket. Then she nodded at the big cats. “I haven’t seen anything like them here.”
“Them?” Shongili looked half-surprised, half-amused. “My track-cats. When they’re of a mind, they’ll even pull a sled.”
“They’re big enough.” Yana moved slightly on her buttocks. She was near enough to the stove to begin to feel the heat. She shrugged her jacket open a little more. “Do they always look at a person like that?”
Scan laughed. “They’re always interested in new things.”
“Did you design them like that?”
Scan’s mobile eyebrows developed a quizzical quirk. “Design them? They designed themselves,” he said with a shrug.
“Yes, but I thought you and your …”
“Not them. What he did; what I do is check on adaptability, not evolution or even mutation, but something in between as each species makes subtle improvements to survive in conditions their ancestors never had to cope with. Petaybee is a prime example of survival of the fittest.”
“He’s off,” Bunny said with an air of resignation, and let herself fall backward into the chair she had been perched on. There she struggled out of her outer layers, preparing to endure. She shot Yana a grin to quell any apprehension.
“Like cats whose ears are no longer susceptible to frostbite?” Yana asked, remembering Clodagh’s offhanded comment.
“Exactly.” Scan grinned. But the humor in his silvery gaze held more than acceptance of her statement. He was probing, too, and a lot more deftly than Colonel Giancarlo could.
“Why haven’t you done as much for the humans stuck here?” Yana asked, not quite certain she could tease this unusual man, but suspecting she could.
“Ah, them.” Sean waved a hand. “We genetic manipulators aren’t allowed to help humans. They have to do it the hard way.”