Johnny explained as politely as possible that Lonciana could not accompany them to rescue La Pobrecita.
“Then Buneka must, for she will know her” Lonciana said.
“Well you’re not leaving me behind if I have to ride on top,” Diego said staunchly. “If Bunny goes, I go, too.”
No one even tried to deny him.
Carmelita and her sisters had told Bunny enough about La Pobrecita that Bunny was quite willing to help rescue her.
“Look, worst comes to worst,” Bunny said, peering into the copter. “The Major has every reason to be down here, too, checking folks out, same as Matthew Luzon. And if Luzon doesn’t help us get ‘Cita out of the clutches of that pervert, he certainly won’t want all his fine friends knowing he went along with a vile thing like that, now will he?”
Johnny looked at Yana, not as certain as Bunny that Luzon could be shamed into helping free Pobrecita just because she was in a tough spot and it was the right thing to do. From what Johnny had seen, Luzon was unacquainted with shame. Probably Luzon’s friends, if he had any, were no more disturbed by doing “vile things” than he was.
“There is a CIS rule about forcing prepubescent children into marriage,” Yana said. “Are we sure she is pre-puberty? She looked at Lonciana.
“She has no breasts, but that, starved as she was, is not the final test,” Lonciana said with a scowl. “But she knows nothing about her courses, though she knows that there is a bleeding sickness and that some girls remain barren. She knows too much of the wrong things, La Pobrecita!”
“Okay, I’m game,” Johnny said. “Checking up on Luzon’s current whereabouts ‘cause he’slate to our rendezvous is within the scope of my orders from Dr. Fiske.”
Precious time was spent in gathering the ore and loading it onto the shuttle so it could be hauled to SpaceBase. First Satok had to take the shuttle out to each village and set down in a remote area, make contact with the shanachie, and wait for the stuff to be brought and loaded. He certainly couldn’t show his face at this stage, since the people of McGee’s Pass had been turned against him by those outsider kids and half the village was trailing his ass with murder on their minds. He had to keep alert not only for human trackers but also for any of the spying, slinking felines that he knew carried information back and forth between the villages, though he’d never learned how they did it. Ought to have vivisected one of the sneaky buggers and tried to figure it out, he thought.
He ended up back at Savoy for the last load, and as the faded womanLuka, that was her name; frag, you’d never know she was the same neat piece he’d first hadloaded the last of the ore on the shuttle, he thought of how much work it would be and announced to Reilly that he was taking her with him. “We’ll look like a regular momandpop placer mining team then,” he told Reilly. “Besides, I need someone to help me unload the ore and do the grunt work.”
“You’re welcome to her,” Reilly said. “Work’s about all she’s good for anymore, though she’s a lazy slut and never lifts a finger without a beating.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Satok told him, as he raised a mockthreatening fist to Luka, who cringed away from him as she obediently climbed into the shuttle.
It took four hours to fly to SpaceBase under ordinary circumstances, and with the craft loaded with ore, it took six. The base, which had always before been open, now boasted a fence and a gate, just beyond the bend in the swollen river that used to be the road to Kilcoole. The shuttle was an unauthorized one, and the ore was too valuable to simply put it within reach of the fingers of any passing soldier, so he set the craft down in the strip between the gate and the woods, where trees and underbrush had been recently cleared and burnedfor security reasons, he suspected. The company seemed to be taking these hicks seriously. He left a cowering Luka locked in the shuttle and strode to the gate as if he were a bird colonel, at least.