Crisis On Doona (21 page)

* * *

Ken got most of his anger blown out of his system on his way back to the ranch. Any Poldep inspector worthy of his rank would have seen the anomalies in hides with inappropriate markings. Data base errors! Duplication of freeze-brand numbers!
That
had never happened, not in the twenty-four years he’d been breeding horses. Nor had it happened to any other rancher, Hayuman or Hrruban.

That sly dig about Todd inheriting being presumptuous. Presuming what? That Todd would be found guilty and sent to a penal colony and denied the right to inherit colonial land anywhere?

Ken made himself calm down and warned himself not to even consider such an outcome. It was dark when he reached the ranch and the lights blazed out a welcome on the flower beds Pat had labored so long to surround the house. He was glad to see Kelly had been invited over for dinner again, but he hoped Pat wouldn’t be silly enough to push Todd. That lad didn’t push! He stood his ground and he was doing it now with courage and fortitude. Ken was prouder than ever of his son.

The moment Ken started recounting his discovery, Pat put dinner on hold and, instead of the meal, the big round table was spread with the hard copy. Ken had talked Fred into letting him take two of the hides home and he’d stopped by the vet lab to borrow a microscope for a good look at the hide marks.

“This is a real stumper,” Todd said, looking up from his turn at the microscope. He gestured for Kelly to take a turn at the eyepiece. “There’s no shadow of an original freeze mark. I’d swear this one was the first one, and genuine. Only it can’t be. ’Cause Cuddy was a pinto, not a leopard Appie.”

“Could they have used a chemical to neutralize the original brand mark?” Pat asked, studying the printout of the descriptions of the horses whose numbers had appeared on the wrong hides.

Ken shook his head. “There’s no chemical that can do that.”

“A laser?” Robin asked brightly, sure he’d come up with the logical solution. “That looks like chemical burns sometimes.”

“Black magic is the more likely answer,” Kelly said in a gloomy tone, leaning back from the microscope. “I’d swear that was genuine and the only mark that hide had ever worn.”

“You raise Appies, Kelly,” Ken began.

“Yeah, but we don’t sell our leopards. You know that. And if one of ours had gone missing, you know that Dad and Michael would have combed the planet to find it.”

Ken knew that was true enough.

“Todd, I got a job for you,” he said, placing an arm about his son’s shoulder. “We’ve got to get all the other ranches to let us do a read-only search of missing stock and the brands they wore. If we find a missing horse wearing one of those brands,” and he pointed to the lists, “we’ll have some solid evidence to give DeVeer.”

With a wry grin, Todd said, “The old fogey didn’t suggest that your son might be using his ol’ dad’s legitimate brand marks to sell stock off-world, did he?”

Ken wasn’t quite quick enough to mask his annoyance and dismay at Todd’s droll query.

“What’ll they think of next to hang on Todd’s neck?” Kelly demanded indignantly. “As if you could fit one horse in the
Albatross,
let alone seventeen or twenty!”

Ken snapped his fingers. “Damn, now why didn’t I think of that factor?”

“You were probably far too mad to do so,” Pat said, raising her eyebrows in amusement.

“You’re right about that. Now, let’s get back to work. Robin, have you had a chance to find out who’s missing stock?”

Robin produced a flimsy from his pocket. “And Mr. Hu said a rancher named Tobin’s been complaining that some of his stock has run off.”

“Let’s get details on those animals, then, and not just freeze brands, but full descriptions and markings.”

“Maybe Hrriss could ...” Inessa began, and then clapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes big with regret at mentioning that name in Todd’s hearing.

“You can ask him, Inessa,” Todd said evenly. “You’re not under any restraint. Find out if Hrruban ranches are missing horses, too. Maybe the rustling’s only aimed at Hayumans.”

“You can’t possibly mean to imply that Hrrubans would stoop to rustling?” Kelly asked, regretting the statement the instant the words were out of her mouth.

“They’d be the last to rustle hrrsses,” Todd said, whimsically using Hrriss’s pronunciation. “But someone might like to make it look that way.”

“Good point, Todd,” Ken said. “Now let’s ...”

“Let’s have dinner,” Pat interjected, “before it’s spoiled. The hides will keep.”

* * *

After dinner, in which theory and speculation were rife, everyone went off on their designated searches. Robin took the family flitter and zoomed away to visit the Dautrish farm. Kelly went off in hers, promising to do a thorough search of the Solinari records and see if perhaps the leopard Appie had been bred by another rancher. Ken used the office system to double-check his records at source and Todd settled in at the computer terminal in his room.

He put up a mail message to the hundreds of ranches on Doona, asking permission to do a read-only on their stock files, and leaving his user number and name as the signature. Then he put a control list of the numbers and hides that his father had gone through. Before he finished that, three ranchers had flashed back permission. First he listed missing stock, by number and description. He set up a separate file to isolate description matches. When he thought of going to Main Records to obtain numbers of hides returned to Doona for leather processing, he used the ranch number, in case his was unacceptable to Treaty Island. He berated himself for the growing paranoia he sensed as a result of his house arrest, but he needed this information too badly to wish to be denied access.

He didn’t dismiss the possibility that someone had made illicit use of the Reeve Ranch freeze-mark files. And although rustling had been an ongoing problem for ranchers, that sort of illegal entry smacked of a very long-term effort. Rustlers were in and out, making a quick profit from their hauls. They certainly wouldn’t plan so precisely how to confuse records and an entire, viable industry. Or would they?

It
was that leopard Appie hide with a blatantly Reeve brand that really baffled him. He knew he couldn’t rest until he’d found where that horse had been bred and who had owned it.

As he was to discover in the next few days, lots of people had missed horses that they never traced, never found the carcass of, and had never bothered reporting. Every rancher expected to lose a few to natural calamities. But the more he looked, the more he came to realize that no ranch had lost as many over the past ten years as the Reeves.

Branding an animal with some other ranch’s ID simply wasn’t the sort of practical joke ranchers played on each other. Not by the dozens, certainly.

While one bay hide could look like another bay hide, swirl marks were taken when an animal was registered. Broken-color horses were far easier to identify from their birth diagrams, which plainly indicated the shapes of the darker hair.

Then a thought struck him. Maybe these weren’t Doonan horses at all. At least the ones whose hides Ken had found. Maybe that was the deception: horses stolen from another planet marked with Doona brands to satisfy innocent purchasers. No wonder there was a Zapata provenance. When he discovered how many colonial worlds bred horses, with vast herds far too large to be individually marked, Todd decided he’d leave that option till last.

He’d look first for those animals which had been discovered dead. The cause of their demise would be in the records ... and there were quite a few. All with the initials
MA
for Mark Aden, Lon Adjei’s former assistant.
SS
meant ssersa poisoning,
MS
for snake,
M
for mda,
A
for accident—broken leg or some other injury which resulted in euthanasia. The unexplained disappearances, however, began to increase over the last few years.

The fact that the Reeve Ranch suffered the most losses and that the spurious hide marks were all Reeve brands as well worried Todd. Admiral Landreau was back on Doona. Any example of incompetence, any whiff of dishonesty that could be charged against the Reeves, could be seized on and used by Landreau and others to try and get them deported, could work against the welfare of the entire colony. This was too precarious a time for him to be trapped by a home arrest, out of circulation, out of action when he was most needed. Anger suffused Todd. Ever since he set foot on Doona, he had defended the ideal it exemplified—harmonious cohabitation. He knew to the marrow of his bones, the cells of his blood, the lungs that breathed clear Doonan air, that Hrriss felt an equal dedication.

Why had he decided that they had to answer that Mayday? He answered himself. Because, being who he was, reared as he was, he could have done nothing else. And someone very clever had counted on that! He couldn’t quite see Admiral Landreau being so psychologically astute. Rogitel, now, he might. But Todd had had little intercourse with the commander—only that one meeting on Hrretha. Not really time enough in desultory formal responses for even a trained psychologist to have taken that kind of measure of anyone.

Another file for a missing horse recalled him to the task at hand and he punched the print button. The stack of films beside him was growing.

He’d had to make a joke out of DeVeer suspecting him of doing the smuggling for profit. And yet, with all those valuables found on the
Albatross,
it wouldn’t be so hard for someone else to accept that possibility. But for anyone to think that he, Todd Reeve, or Hrriss, son of Hrrestan, Hrruban leader of Rrala, would sully all they had lived for, worked for... that was very hard to swallow. The beautiful dream that was Doona was inexorably slipping away from his grasp, deny it though he might. Ilsa had never understood his passion for Doona. And really, neither did Robin or Inessa, but they had never lived under the restraints of Earth society, so they’d no idea what they’d lose. He wished for the millionth time that he could talk to Hrriss. If it wasn’t for the support of his family, the often stumbling reassurances of old friends, the wisdom of Hrruvula, his counsel, and Kelly’s daily visits, he would find that unendurable.

The cheery “One Moment Please” graphic appeared on the screen again. Todd felt another rush of hot rage, which he fought to dispel. It didn’t do any good to tear himself up, but he was frustrated and angry. Instead of being out there, offering support for the ongoing Treaty talks which would cement permanent relations between Earth and Hrruba, ensuring Doona’s continuance, Todd was being used as a pawn to break the colony and the alliance. Every time he answered one charge or began to solve one problem, another cropped up to claim his attention. It was curious, because everything seemed centered on him or his father. And that incontrovertibly led to Admiral Al Landreau as the most likely origin of this complex conspiracy. He had no proof nor the freedom of movement to secure any.

Why did animosity consume Landreau to the point where his revenge on the Reeves, father and son, embraced Doona, and all the good that had been achieved over a quarter of a century?

Todd searched his memory of those early days on Doona. Of course, he had arrived after Ken and the other ten colonists had struggled through an unbelievably long and cold winter to build homes for their families when the ship arrived in the springtime. Eleven men, placed alone on a supposedly uninhabited planet, had to make all the decisions of socialization and civilization that would frame a new world. They courageously faced physical hazards and the incredible moral obligation. When Ken had discovered the Hrruban village, they had been ready to leave in obedience to the prohibitions which had been hammered into their heads almost from birth: cohabitation with another species could only result in the destruction of the other species. But the Hrrubans were no gentle, vulnerable, sensitive ephemerals.

Circumstances had swept the Terrans along at a furious pace, and they had found themselves cohabiting, with no way to adhere to their decision to leave Doona. Todd grinned, wishing he had been more aware when his father had lost his temper at the various bureaucrats who had blamed the colonists for the untenable situation. Once the mutual benefits of this trial cohabitation had been understood, Alreldep, with Admiral Sumitral, and Codep had accepted with fair grace. But Landreau, the Spacedep representative, never forgot and showed no hint of forgiveness.

Todd took a break from the computer and got up to stretch. He raised his arms over his head and heard the crack as muscles protested being forced to remain too long in the same position. At some point, his mother had quietly left a pitcher of juice, some buttered bread, and the final wedge of the dinner pie on a tray on the worktop. Gratefully he poured a glass of juice and, with the pie in one hand, walked to the window. He was thankful every day for the abundance of real and tasty food. He still remembered the metallic taste of childhood meals, the sameness of each supposedly nutritious meal. He had always felt hungry.

He pushed open the window and leaned his elbows on the frame. The sun was starting to drop behind the trees over the river at the bottom of the pasture. He wished he could be out and doing, back at his job, able to visit his friends. Even when he was a small boy, he had hated confinement. Never mind that his prison was the many acres of his father’s ranch: his freedom of movement had been severely curtailed and he was unused to that. It was, however, better than a genuine incarceration in a four-by-four-meter cell. The only times he had been allowed to leave the ranch over the last two weeks had been to appear on Treaty Island, for more questioning. Each time, he had hoped for a glimpse of Hrriss, but their visits didn’t coincide. The prosecutors were being careful to keep them strictly apart.

The incriminating evidence of illegal artifacts found on the
Albatross
was quite enough to convict them of criminal activities inconsonant with the positions of trust both he and Hrriss had held. With Landreau and Rogitel briefing their attorneys, this could call into question the success of the Doona Experiment of Cohabitation. That would be a rather farfetched allegation, since one Hayuman and one Hrruban were involved, not two members of the same species working against the interests of the other.