“Convincing that man will take considerable effort, time, and probably a miracle, although we’ve had the next best thing to one, and that doesn’t seem to have impressed him either.” Whit paused, his shoulders slumping in momentary defeat. He saw Clodagh’s eyes on him and straightened up, his attitude once more decisive. “We’ll just have to outwit him.”
“Or,” Faber put in, turning to Clodagh, ‘let the planet do it?”
She pulled at her lower lip. “A man doesn’t hear what he doesn’t want to hear. Your son’s like that, too, Whit, sorry as I am to say it to your face.”
“I’m sorry, as well, Clodagh, but for your sake, not mine.”
“Matthew’s not begun his investigations,” Marmion said, breaking off pieces of another cinnamon bun and chewing to aid her thoughts, “so we’ve a little time in hand. He loves to have plenty of hard copy to support his claims even before he makes them. He’s got all those physically fit young men running about SpaceBase. I wonder …” She turned to Faber. “I wonder if they’d be the place to start. And as soon as possible. We’ll leave Braddock Makem till last. I thought at first I might win him over, but since then I’ve noticed that he apparently rather relishes Matthew’s brand of management, instead of resenting it as one would expect. Indeed, of all of the minions, he appears to be the most in accord with Matthew and the least open-minded. Doing the others first will slow Matthew down to a crawl.” She began to smile at everyone around the table as she popped the last of her roll into her mouth and happily chewed it down. “Well, let’s get started. Clodagh?”
Chapter 8
Dinah heard the noise before Bunny, footsteps coming down from the hill above. The dog strained forward, listening, doing the whineyip, whineyip that preceded her full-throated “woo-wooing” cry.
Bunny, still feeling queasy from her experience in the cave, held on to a handful of brush to pull herself to her feet. She heard Dinah scrabbling up the path, icy rock slipping under her paws.
“What is it, girl?” Bunny began, turning toward the sound of the dog. But about then, Dinah yipped and fell silent.
“Dinah?” Bunny whispered into the dense shadows, reaching for the comforting warmth of the dog’s coarse thick fur “Dinah?”
Her out stretched hand was suddenly clasped in a vise and Satok stepped out of the shadows.
“Slainte, pretty Shongili snocle driver. How sweet of you to come and meet me. Where’s your boyfriend?”
“What have you done to Dinah?” she hollered at him. “Let go of my hand.”
Instead, he captured the other one. “The dog? I knocked her fraggin’ skull shut. She should know better than to bark at the shanachie. The other dogs learned. Go ahead, scream. I’m waiting for your boyfriend to come to the rescue, and then I can send him to keep his dog company.” Bunny did scream, and kicked, and hollered, but the whole time he dragged her up the path to his house, no lamps lit in the darkness of the village below, no faces peered out windows or doors to see what the commotion was about. Not at the Connellys’, nor anywhere else.
As he dragged her away, her hand brushed against Dinah’s still warm fur, sticky with what could only be the faithful dog’s blood.
But the boys must have heard her. They must have.
Once, she thought she saw the shine of coppery eyes from one of the surrounding rocks, but otherwise, there was no witness to her abduction at all.
When they were well above the village and beyond the cave mouth and no help appeared, she decided to save her strength for later, and allowed herself to be led with only token resistance to the man’s house.
Several outbuildings dotted the rocky mountain meadow where the sturdy stone house stood. It was the finest Bunny had ever seen, without a bit of scavenged material in its makeup. Thick stone walls, a roof of some sturdy material Bunny recognized from her trips to SpaceBase as similar to the stuff on the barracks buildings, and real windows of thick plasglas, heavily draped.