“I won’t go back there!” she said with more spirit than he thought she had left. “I won’t!”
“Of course not, of course not, my dear child. I understand your feelings. You are deeply ashamed to have left the community under a cloud, to have been unable to measure up to the simple things your shepherd required of you. But I’m sure he will forgive you and allow you to separate from the community once I explain to him that you are more valuable out here, to me.”
“To you, sir” she asked, the hysteria fading from her voice and being replaced by awe.
“Why, yes,” he said. “I need a research assistant who is native to this planet, and who better than yourself? If you work out, I will adopt you as my daughter.”
“Your daughter, sir? This unworthy one?”
“Through hard work and appropriate behavior, you may yet become worthy. But first you must be very brave. Come along and I will show you what is required.”
She got to her feet and took his hand, with only one backward glance at the house of her erstwhile guardian. He knew very well what he was doing. By replacing the feared figure of the Shepherd Howling in her mind with himself, someone stronger, probably better spoken, and certainly more rational, he placed himself in the role of both master and protector. Oh yes, she would certainly obey him as unquestioningly as she had ever obeyed herhe smiled at the quaint crudity of the primitive notionbetrothed.
On the way back north, Johnny radioed in a coded report to Whittaker Fiske, along with an inquiry about the clouded big cat that had kept Geedee company. It wasn’t like any track-cat he’d ever seen. He received a terse acknowledgment. “Received and acknowledged. I designed no such cat. Ask Shongili, Happy buzzard-watching. W.F.
When Johnny finally stretched his legs at Harrison’s Fjord, Sean, Yana, Bunny, Diego, and Nanook had already started on their journey down the cave that had swallowed up Bunny’s parents twelve years before. The presence of Liam Maloney’s lead dog sleeping by the fire in the Souniks’ house naturally resulted in Johnny being brought up to date on all that had happened at McGee’s Pass.
“Satok used Petraseal to block the planet off!” Something very cold descended Johnny’s backbone. “Frag it, Fingaard. Do you know how much of that stuff is stocked at SpaceBase? Have you any idea what could happen if anyone, Matthew Luzon in particular, found out what Petraseal can do to our caves?”
Ardis’s face was stricken. “The boy, Diego, has made a song of it.”
“Well, let’s just bloody hope he doesn’t sing it.”
“He already has. What he had finished of it, at least,” Fingaard said in a deep bass whisper.
“Frag!” was Johnny’s explosive response. He was pensive for a long moment and then, with one blink of his eyes, became the affable, carefree copter pilot they knew so well. “I’d better get back and report in. Gotta get refueled, and then I just gotta come back this weary way again. See ya!” He tipped his peaked cap at Ardis and strode back to the copter, hands in his pockets, whistling.
With Nanook padding along in front of them, occasionally taking a short tangent before coming back, the four of them made forty klicks down into the cave at Harrison’s Fjord. Within the first hour they had swung away from the path that led to the fjord’s planet place and started descending. The slope was fairly steep at first, but soon began to have an easier gradient. Once the luminescence lit their way, they had no need of the artificial hand beams and carefully stowed them away.
“This isn’t at all like the other caves I’ve been in,” Diego remarked when they reached the easier gradient.
“I doubt you’ll find two even vaguely similar,” Sean said with a smile.
“Have you been in all of them?”
“No, I haven’t. That’d take a lifetime, I think,” Sean replied with a grin. “My grandfather found the first one, more of a cleft in the rock than a real cave. He knew, of course, that there were cave systems just under the surface. That’s the way Terraform B works, but his finding the cleft was pure chance.”