As they neared the village, they were met by a pride of cats, all of them striped bright rusty orange and all of them meowing and purring and twining dangerously around the large snowshoe-sized hooves of the shaggy, curly-coated horses.
“What a welcoming committee!” Yana said as Marduk, or at least she assumed it was he, hopped up behind her and rubbed his head against her back briefly before hopping down again. “Did you call them, Clodagh?”
Clodagh shook her head. “No, but I was worried, before we left, about how committed the other villages were to the planet. So far the PTBs have only questioned us, but I figured they’d get around to asking some of the others sometime soon. These little ones scattered as soon as we left, and here they are back again.” She tilted her head as she looked down at the cats.
“What’s got ‘em so antsy?” Bunny asked.
Clodagh reined her curly-coat to a halt. Immediately the cats converged on her, stropping the legs of the pony, who regarded this activity with mild surprise and didn’t so much as twitch a muscle.
“You’ll get muddy doing that,” she told the cats, since the pony was coated up to and including his belly with good Petaybean wet earth. With a groan, she heaved one leg over the saddle and dismounted, ignoring the fact that her skirts immediately became as dirty as the pony’s legs. “Now, what’s all this?” she asked, hands on her hips, looking from one upturned cat face to the next.
Clodagh’s special relationship with her cats was knownor at least suspectedby everyone in Kilcoole. So the other villagers, except for Sean, Bunny, and Yana, rode politely around the cats and pretended not to notice anything more than a woman being greeted by overly fond pets.
Frank Metaxos, in whose healing process the cats had had a rather unusual role, remained behind, too, along with his son Diego. The two were returning to Kilcoole without Frank’s partner, Steve Margolies, who, still on the company’s payroll, had stayed on at SpaceBase.
Both cats and Clodagh waited for the rest of the village to parade past before the mewing and chirruping began.
Ordinarily the cats would have sat down to impart what was evidently a long story, but the mud offended their dignity. So they prowled around her, twitching their tails high, as they communicated their messages. The humans waited patiently.
Sparks of uncharacteristic anger flickered in Clodagh’s eyes as she looked up at Sean and Yana “We got all kinds of trouble now.” She gave a disgusted snort. “Seems like some villages want Intergal to come down and mine, while the mining’s good and they can get paid for working.”
Sean frowned and Yana told her heart to stop racing. “How many dissidents? she asked.
“Four towns that the cats know of.” Clodagh’s usually merry face was solemn.
“Which ones?”
“Deadhorse, McGee’s Pass, Wellington, and Savoy.”
Sean let out a burst of sour laughter. That figures.” Clodagh had named villages which in recent years spurned contact with the others. He sighed deeply. “Have the cats any good news?”
“Yes, out the bad news is they haven’t had a chance to check everyone out. If four villages oppose us …”
“How many more might be disaffected and looking to please Intergal for the sake of wampum? Sean asked.
“So, the good news? Yana prompted with a sigh.
“Well, we do have at least twelve communities behind us solid. Tanana Bay, Shannonmouth, New Barrow, Twin Moon Village, Little Dublin, Oslo Inlet, Harrison’s Fjord, Kabul, Bogota, Machu Picchu, Kathmandu, and Sierra Padre.”
“Most of the closest ones,” Sinead said, looking encouraged.
“And the ones,” Clodagh went on with a pessimistic expression, “that have the most Petaybean boys and girls in company service.”
“What bothers you about that?” Yana asked. “Wouldn’t they be on their folks’ side in this?”
“Might be, if they weren’t required to lean on their folks to do what the company asks,” Clodagh said gloomily.
“Oh!” Yana sighed Dirty tricks department Farringer Ball and Matthew Luzon would pull every one they needed out of storage to see that their interpretation became the official one. “Could you be wrong about which side of the blanket the Petaybean troops would fall on? The pilots, O’Shay and Greene in particular, gave us some support during the volcanic crisis.”