Chapter 13
No doubt in an effort to humiliate, harass, or annoy her, Giancarlo signaled Ornery-eyes to stay in the room where Yana was to dress herself. It would take a lot more than Ornery-eyes to perturb Yana. She was slightly flattered that Giancarlo thought it would! Ignoring her audience, she took advantage of the dressing-room shower to enjoy a quick wash before she dressed. She smiled as she noticed that she had been given ordinary-issue clothes, not winter gear. Torture could take many subtle forms: freezing wasn’t a common one.
When Ornery bustled her down the corridor to the assembly point, Yana was reasonably sure she’d had the best of that deal. For when they got outside, it was nearly as warm as the facility had been-and she was far more comfortable, in the lighter garments, than any of the others were.
She was shoved, just ducking her head in time to keep from cracking it on the doorframe, into a ground vehicle, which was already inhabited by several squads, sweating in their winter gear. They were conveyed out to the field where a troop copter waited. She caught a glimpse of other air-assault vehicles and some big land cruisers. She also saw two dark circles, one of considerable size, where the field, plascrete and all, had subsided. She wondered if the planet knew what to target or if it just pulled the plug where the terrain made it easiest.
They had barely gotten settled when the bulky vehicle tilted to one side.
“Lift! Lift! Lift!” Torkel yelled as the pilot made as if to investigate the damage.
Yana privately enjoyed the planet’s antics very much, though she was crammed in the backseat between Giancarlo and Ornery-eyes’s massive torso. The latter had folded his arms over his chest and was staring straight ahead, ignoring the almost-180-degree view afforded by the bubble-shaped Plexiglas windshield. Yana, however, took the scene in eagerly.
Craters pocked the surface of the great field. As the vehicle came around and headed north-northeast toward Kilcoole, she saw the village below; then, as the copter angled off toward the mountains, she gasped as she caught glimpses of the river, seamed with dark, steaming cracks. Its surface was littered with snocles, either capsized into the cracks or stranded on larger blocks of ice. A few, back toward SpaceBase, were being off-loaded by men stripped down to their shirts, while farther ahead men and women scrambled to save each other from drowning and pulled each other ashore. A couple of snocles were attempting to find snow firm enough for the runners to ski on while one soldier broke trail, planting markers to show where the snow had not yet turned to slush.
Yana hoped that Bunny’s snocle wasn’t out there among the stranded, or that the girl hadn’t been arrested when Yana was. She also wondered just where Scan was, but one thing was sure: he wouldn’t be where this copter was taking them.
It landed in the pasture that had once held the curly-coats. She thought she caught sight of one of the dark ones, hiding in the copse, but it could have just been a big brown-branched bush the height of a curly-coat. The house, when the troopers entered it, weapons drawn, had the feeling of a deserted place. At least that was what Yana sensed from the still, cool air inside. Not so much as a whisker of one of Sean’s unusual big cats, either. Torkel led the way down the link to the laboratories, Giancarlo with him, Ornery hauling her along in their wake.
“I want every disk, file, paperwork, notebook, everything,” Torkel called over his shoulder to the lieutenant in charge of the squads. “Everything taken back to the base. I want this place under strict surveillance and rigged to catch anyone who steps inside.”
“The animals are all gone,” Giancarlo said savagely. “He obviously got back here to let them all loose. We could have learned something from them.”
Yana could see from the condition of the pens that they hadn’t been occupied for a while. That must have been the first thing Scan had done when he had separated from her.
“You certainly didn’t expect to find them here, did you, Colonel, tamely waiting for us?” Torkel asked, resuming his pose of amused condescension.