He had tried to insist that Shongili and Clodagh both be sent off-planet in detention cells pending the hearing. Whittaker Fiske and Marmion Algemeine had immediately blocked that, just as they’d quashed the off world reassignments he tried to engineer for captains Greene and O’Shay.
He let himself be consoled by the fact that it was only a matter of time for all their little petty tricks to come tumbling down about their ears. Once he presented his evidence at the hearing and it was seen how these two-bit shamanistic charlatans were preying on the people’s fears and hopes to influence them against the company, Shongili and Clodagh and all their helpers would be evicted from their cushy company homes and Maddock, Greene, and O’Shay would be busted back to KP duty.
The workload was overwhelming. While he seemed able to gain momentum in his search for truth, his assistants, who had previously seemed so promising, had grown unaccountably bumbling and incompetent. Their reports did not have bottom-line conclusions that satisfied his requirements. And then the computers kept developing break downs and suffering from sporadic erasures.
The locals, including company troops, were hostile; the working conditions were appallingly primitive, and the weatherhow he loathed wild weatherwas unspeakable. Lashing rains and electrical storms alternated with spitting snow and heat far above the comfort zone. The SpaceBase facility was constantly quaking with unexpected convulsions on land that had originally been tested as geological
stable. Matthew longed for the sane and sanitary shipboard ambiance, one engineered for human comfort by rational minds such as his own. No mold grew there, as it did on the walls of his lavatory despite the repeated scrubbings of some low-ranking corpsman. No thunderclaps disrupted his concentration, and despite the fact that one was always moving in space, one never experienced sensations of bobbing like bubbles in a test tube as buildings bounced.
To make matters worse, another volcano erupted, ten klicks to the northwest, sending ash into every crack and crevice. This emergence occurred in a meadow, near nothing else, and didn’t even cause copters to falter over flying it. However, a seaquake of 9.3 on the Richter scale had a mid-ocean epicenter that caused tsunamis in every direction and quite devastated the small facility at Bogota.
The company would simply have to face facts. This planet was not working out. The terraforming was faulty, the terrain had not fully stabilized, the whole place should be evacuated, scraped clean, and either abandoned or reformed with more modern techniques. It would put an end to all this talk of sentience and settlements.
Chapter 14
Yana couldn’t shake a sense of foreboding, something she would not give voice to, even to Sean. At least his wound was closing with extraordinary rapidity, thanks to a poultice and Clodagh’s expert attention. That bit of doctoring had happened before Matthew Luzon’s asinine notion of putting Clodagh under “house arrest.” That wasn’t as bad as Luzon’s original orders to send both off-planet. Sean had been immediately hidden in Bunny’s snocle, which had been decommissioned for the “summer” and stored in Adak O’Connor’s garage. Clodagh had shrugged off the threat and maintained it wouldn’t come to that. Which it hadn’t, with the forceful help of Marmion and Whittaker Fiske. Only someone totally ignorant of the situation on Petaybee, as most of the company brass were, or someone so hostile as to be beyond reason, as Luzon was, would think that putting Clodagh and Sean in any sort of detention made sense.
Yana couldn’t quite believe, or hope, that Luzon had failed to realize the function of the cats in Clodagh’s and the planet’scommunications network. Torkel knew. She wondered why he didn’t try to round up the cats and put them under house arrest as well. It would have been just about as ridiculous.
When they knew the order was for house arrest rather than transfer off-planet, Sean, with his customary imperturbability, emerged from hiding like a bear from hibernation and smilingly chose Yana’s as the “house to be arrested in.” She was glad to have him near for several reasons. Although the wound was healing so well, the arrow had torn muscles and almost severed one tendon. She could keep an eye on it and him better if she didn’t have to worry about concealment. She knew it was unrealistic to think she could single-handedly protect him from the company if they tried to take him, but she would do what she could. And now that she was well again, she could do quite a bit. With her years of training and experience, she was not without resources. And quite aside from that, it just helped having him there. He calmed her. Here his world was on trial and he was able, with a look. a smile, or a joke, to soothe her fears.