When Yana saw the range of her fellow captives, her heart sank. Clodagh was as composed as usual, even though she was surrounded by nets of her potions and salves and medications. Hadn’t witch-hunts gone out three centuries ago? Yana wondered numbly. Sinead looked furious, lips tightly compressed, while tears ran down Aisling’s face, making her oddly more appealing than ridiculous. ‘Cita was terrified and clung to Bunny, who had taken her cue from Clodagh and was holding her head proud. Adak looked frightened, as frightened as probably everyone else felt. He had always been the one in the know, the community’s link with the base, as well as being a responsible company employee. Now he was just another ip, an “inconvenient person,” as Bunny called herself and her fellow Petaybeans. Poor Adak seemed to shrink in on himself when he saw first Yana and then Sean pushed into the shuttle. Then he seemed to gather himself and twitched his shoulders to sit more erect on the hard metal seat.
As Yana was pushed down, she wondered if Diego, Frank, and Whittakernaw, they wouldn’t dare remand a company director, would they?were missing from the roll of those Matthew considered dangerous dissidents. Then a large male body crowded in between herself and Sean. Looking around, she saw that every Petaybean was separated from another by a troopera big, heavily armed trooper.
She grinned broadly. What a back handed compliment.
“Wipe that grin off your face,” the nameless lieutenant ordered.
“Son, I outrank you and I’ve five times as many first-drop bars as you do,” Yana said, sounding quietly amused but putting commander-steel in her voice and narrowing her eyes at him. “You can barge into my private quarters and arrest me without due process, but by all that’s holy, don’t you dare try to deny me the right to react to this whole ridiculous operation!”
The lieutenant, all too aware that she had outfaced him once before and determined not to let her get under his skin again, laughed. “Nothing’s ridiculous about this operation and you’d better start believing it now … Major!”
“You mean, it isn’t ridiculous that it took two squads of heavily armed non-Petaybean troopers transferred from Omnicron Three, Plexus-Four, and Space Station One-Thirty-One to arrest unarmed citizens of a backward, low-tech world.”
With a snarl, the lieutenant had gone as far as drawing his hand back when a voice from the cockpit abruptly ordered him forward.
Yana was proud that she had not so much as tensed to take the immininent blow and that her smile had stayed in place. No one spoke, of course, neither Petaybean nor alien trooper, but ‘Cita and Aisling stopped weeping, and Clodagh’s lips turned up just that little bit.
The moment the shuttle took off, Yana’s courage seemed to leak out of her and fear pressed against her guts. She noticed that Clodagh’s smile vanished and her lips were set. Bunny, too, looked more apprehensive. It wasn’t until the shuttle landed a familiarly short distance away, where the heavy fog was pierced by a great quantity of bright lights of the kind employed only at SpaceBase, that her courage returned. Ah, but she was once more in touch with the planet. Somehow, some way, as yet inexplicable, the planet was aware: and Yana saw that Clodagh’s smile had returned.
Yana’s apprehensions returned, doubled, the moment they were marched out of the shuttle, which had landed right by an anonymous block of temporary housing. Though it was hard to see more than a few feet beyond her, Yana could tell from the only glance she had time for that they were at the far end of SpaceBase. It wasn’t that large a facility by company standards, but being at the far end would place them at an awkwardly long distance from the administrative area and any help from Marmion Algemeine or Whittaker Fiske, if he was still at large.
Inside the building, bare corridors were brightly lit, and lined with doors, depressingly close together. That made this, she thought glumly, a temporary detention center: small cells, no amenities, and no communication between the reluctant residents.
A sergeant with a clipboard merely pointed a stylus to the right and they were led that way. Yana was thrust in the second room, and the door closed behind her with the odd thunk of a noise-proofed construction. A single strip of bright lighting, a blanket, a toilet, and a washbasin completed the furnishings. The temperature would have been chilly to those accustomed to space stations, but Yana was comfortable in it. Score one! She used the toilet, washed her face with her hands, and dried herself on one edge of her blanket. She took off her boots, tunic, and pants and laid them neatly on the rough carpet, then rolled up in the blanket and told herself to go back to sleep.