Powers That Be (7 page)

Sean flicked a gaze at Yana, and she quirked her lips in a smile.

“Charlie-boy’s not the one to irritate folk,” Sean said. “Wonder why they posted him off-planet.” But he put his cup down and, with a single fluid movement, spun on one heel to an overburdened wall cabinet from which he unerringly extracted a recording device. Not, Yana realized as she saw the face of it, an obsolete affair but nearly state-of-the-art from the last time she had been issued one. The cabinet was crammed with technological gadgets of all kinds, half of which she couldn’t put a name or use to. She watched as Sean negligently pushed back into place equipment that would have been worth a small fortune on any planet, much less a technologically starved one like Petaybee.

“Half of it doesn’t work,” he said, without seeming to have noticed her attention. “Petaybee’s hard on any kind of instrumentation and machinery.”

“How do you manage your work then?” she blurted out.

He gave a diffident shrug. “I improvise. We do a lot of that on Petaybee.” He handed her the recorder. “Do you understand this type?”

She examined the display keys more closely and nodded, deciding to limit her comments. “Had one almost like this on my last assignment.” She slid the thin rectangle into a thigh pocket. Then she nodded at the big cats. “I haven’t seen anything like them here.”

“Them?” Shongili looked half-surprised, half-amused. “My track-cats. When they’re of a mind, they’ll even pull a sled.”

“They’re big enough.” Yana moved slightly on her buttocks. She was near enough to the stove to begin to feel the heat. She shrugged her jacket open a little more. “Do they always look at a person like that?”

Sean laughed. “They’re always interested in new things.”

“Did you design them like that?”

Sean’s mobile eyebrows developed a quizzical quirk. “Design them? They designed themselves,” he said with a shrug.

“Yes, but I thought you and your . . .”

“Not them. What he did; what I do is check on adaptability, not evolution or even mutation, but something in between as each species makes subtle improvements to survive in conditions their ancestors never had to cope with. Petaybee is a prime example of survival of the fittest.”

“He’s off,” Bunny said with an air of resignation, and let herself fall backward into the chair she had been perched on. There she struggled out of her outer layers, preparing to endure. She shot Yana a grin to quell any apprehension.

“Like cats whose ears are no longer susceptible to frostbite?” Yana asked, remembering Clodagh’s offhanded comment.

“Exactly.” Sean grinned. But the humor in his silvery gaze held more than acceptance of her statement. He was probing, too, and a lot more deftly than Colonel Giancarlo could.

“Why haven’t you done as much for the humans stuck here?” Yana asked, not quite certain she could tease this unusual man, but suspecting she could.

“Ah, them.” Sean waved a hand. “We genetic manipulators aren’t allowed to help humans. They have to do it the hard way.”

“Have they?”

Sean cocked his head, his amusement not one whit diminished. “I’d say there have been . . . adjustments made. Learning what furs, for instance, are most suitable for the purpose of keeping human bodies warm.”

“That’s intellectual, not biological,” Yana said.

“Mankind’s intelligence distinguishes us from the animals, my dear major. And allows adjustments much faster than animals can alter their genetic codes.”

“Do they? Here on Petaybee?”

“Over the last two hundred years, they’d have to, to survive. Wouldn’t they?” He drained his cup. “Of course, the original Admin was sensible about some of the species they sent, which helped.”

“Which ones?” Yana asked.

Bunny snorted, obviously knowing the answer.

Sean grinned, a grin of pure unadulterated mischief. “Why, the curly-coats.” When Yana cocked her head at him inquiringly, he beckoned to her. “I’ll show you.”

“They’re his pride and joy, Yana. You’re in for it,” Bunny said, propping her feet up on a footstool and obviously not intending to join Sean and Yana.

“I asked.”

“The curly-coats are equines,” Sean said, and as he cupped her elbow with his hand, she experienced the same electric shock of contact. “Originally from the Siberian area of the Eastern Hemisphere. They exist comfortably in extreme temperatures, having a spare flap in their nose that closes off frost. They survive on vegetation that wouldn’t keep a goat alive. Small, sturdy, able to maneuver on tracks even a sled has trouble running.”

He led her down a corridor from the main room, past closed doors, and into a link between the house and a spread of other buildings that she took for research and laboratory facilities. The link passed in front of other closed doors, some with security keypads. She was adept enough at sussing her immediate surroundings without appearing to do so, yet she had the sense that Sean was aware of her automatic scanning. They came to the end of the link, which opened onto a paddock with snow fences keeping the drifts from its surface. In the paddock were a dozen small horses, curly-coated to the point of being shaggy, with long fur icicled under their throats, and long feathers curling down from their sturdy barrels and down their short thick legs. At first she wasn’t sure which end was which, since the manes were as long as the tails and just as thick. There were several brown animals, but most were a creamy color; they were all browsing on what looked much like the icicled spines she had seen on the riverside three days before.

“You’d never spot half of them in this terrain,” was Yana’s first comment.

Sean chuckled, apparently pleased by her remark. “They’re survivors!”

“What do you use them for?”

“A variety of things. Their milk we can drink, fresh, frozen, or fermented, or make into a butter which we use in our lamps.”

“I have,” she said, restraining herself from wrinkling her nose.

“It smells but it’s better than nothing. Their coats we can comb and use for wool.” Yana thought of the warm soft blanket she had seen in Clodagh’s. “We can eat their flesh, drink their blood—” He glanced at her to see if that repulsed her, but she had eaten far worse than curly-coated equines in her time—worse and tougher than these little animals looked. “We can ride them, use them as pack animals, use them as extra blankets if we’re caught out in bad weather. They don’t object to sleeping with humans . . .”

She looked at him then, for the undertone to his comment was both risible and dogmatic. His silver eyes glinted with the mischief that seemed an essential part of his public self.

“They are amenable to anything we can think up for them to do. And they never complain or balk.” That seemed to be of paramount importance. “They’ve saved many a team from hypothermic death and starvation. In fact, you can bleed them quite a bit before they are weakened.”

“Useful.”

“Indeed.”

“Were they used by the teams that disappeared?”

Sean was surprised at that question and scratched the back of his neck. “Been given a few ghouly stories to keep you awake at night?”

“Not ghouly to me,” she said with a shrug. “I’ve been first-team on a few company planets, a couple where I’d’ve been glad to have a few curly-coats along.”

“Oh?”

She could see interest sparking the glint in his eyes. He leaned back against the plasglas, propping his arms on the wide sills, apparently not affected by contact with the cold surface, whereas she could feel the frost of it oozing into the semiwarm link.

She gave a laugh. “Don’t get
me
started on that phase of my life. It’s over.” She made a cutting gesture with her hands.

“Then it’s time to sing about it. You came through.”

“Sing? Me?” She ducked her head in denial. “Not me—couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.”

Sean smiled—almost challengingly, she thought. “Inuit chants can’t be called tunes, not without a stretch of the definition, but they do grab the mind and make audiences listen. I think they’d like to hear your songs.”

Yana was not affecting modesty: she just didn’t think any of her experiences were worth hearing about, and certainly some of them she wouldn’t talk, much less sing, about.

“I’m serious, Yana.” He spoke her name with an odd lilt. She shot him a quick look and saw that he was, indeed, serious. Then his expression turned sly. “The spring latchkay’s coming up soon. You’ll be coming, and there are some folks hereabout would like to hear a song about Bremport.”

“Bremport?” She went rigid.

He laid a light finger on her arm. “You were at Bremport. Charlie picked up on that when he got a copy of your orders and the briefing on your medical history.”

“That should have been confidential,” she said, feeling less guilty about Charlie than she had the day before.

“Charlie’s older brother Donal was at Bremport, too, so it was of more than casual interest to him. So were three other sons of Petaybee and two daughters, and us here knowing nothing about their deaths but that they are dead.”

Damn Charlie anyway. Giancarlo had been right to transfer him—the boy’s loyalties had been too mixed for him to be an effective company representative here. Still, she couldn’t blame him, but—damn. She remembered to exhale then, and swallowed hard on all the things she didn’t wish to remember about Bremport.

The swallow was a mistake. Somehow it went down wrong and she started to cough. Hard as she tried to limit it to the one cough, another burst past her lips, and the next thing she knew she was racked by a paroxysm. She fumbled in her coat for her syrup and dragged the bottle out. But she moved too swiftly: it flew from her groping fingers and smashed on the stone floor of the link. As if the loss of the syrup were a signal, the coughing fit intensified. Sean’s very strong fingers gripped her arms, supporting her convulsing body, and he began to hurry back the way they had come, though she had trouble keeping on her feet. She had to bring her knees almost to her chin to keep the spasms from tearing her abdominal muscles.

“What’s the cause, Yana? The gas at Bremport?”

She managed to nod a yes. Then he was assisting her into a laboratory, flicking up lights, and settling her onto a nearby stool before he sprang across the room to the large array of cabinets there. Without fumbling, he poured out a dose of a clear yellow liquid and returned to her side.

“Something of Clodagh’s that makes cowardly coughs evaporate on its fumes,” he said. “We all take it now and then.”

Yana was in no condition to object to anything anyone might consider remedial. Between one spasm and the onset of another, she knocked back the liquid—and rolled her eyes, inhaled, and then exhaled gustily, for the medicine had a kick in it that could only reduce any cough to tatters. And the next spasm didn’t materialize.

Surprised, Yana took several short breaths, fully expecting each one to deteriorate into a cough. Sean regarded her with a growing smile curling his lips.

“See? Guaranteed effective.”

“What was in it?” she gasped respectfully, still aware of the taste of it in the back of her mouth.

The mischief returned to Sean Shongili’s eyes. “Well, now, that I don’t know. Clodagh won’t pass on the secret of her elixir. She just makes it.”

Yana was aware of the plethora of laboratory equipment from slidetrays to electronic microscopes—and not obsolete ones, at that. She waved her hand at them.

“You look as if you could analyze the contents . . .”

“Ah . . .” Sean held up his hands. “It’s unethical to plumb the secrets of another professional. I do animals; she does humans.”

“But isn’t there an overlap somewhere along the line?” Yana asked.

“How so?”

“Those cats of hers. And you’ve cats that are totally different.”

Sean grinned so broadly that Yana knew she would never get an honest answer on that score. “So I do.” Then he turned from her and went back to the cabinet. He held up the bottle. “I can spare this since it seems to have been so effective for you.”

Yana hesitated. She had had to use up far too much of her personal baggage allowance for enough bottles of the syrup to see her through her recuperation. But there was no question that Clodagh’s was more effective. She sighed, cutting that loss and accepting the bottle. Maybe it would suffice to see the cough to an end before she had to go back to the prescription stuff.

“Clodagh makes it up in huge batches every fall to cope with coughs,” Sean said, tucking the bottle securely in the inner vest pocket. “You can get more as you need it.”

Yana felt another twinge of resentment against a system that did not supply her with enough money for even basic needs, much less medicinal niceties.

“Can you give me a few helpful hints about this place?”

He regarded her in surprise. “Bunny’s good at that.”

“Yes, but when I ask how I am to repay someone for leaving fuel by my door when I haven’t asked for any, or giving me fish I don’t know how to cook . . .”

He laughed with kindly amusement at her disgruntlement. “I see what you mean. It’s so obvious to her that she doesn’t realize how new and confusing it could be for you.” He tucked her arm under his and guided her out of the laboratory, firmly clanging the metal door closed behind him. “Well, now, everyone knows you’re new, and new to the ways of Petaybee, so they’re helping you out. Old custom . . . especially for people they want to like . . .”

“Want to like . . .”

The silver eyes glinted. “They like heroes. No, they genuinely do,” he amended when she snorted in disgust. “You’re worth your weight as a role model . . .” Then he took a second look at her gauntness. “That’ll improve,” he said kindly. “So they’ll sort of ease you into the environment the best way they can. What you do”—He held up one admonitory finger when she started to protest. —“is return the courtesies to the next stranger who arrives on our frozen shores. Or,” he said, giving her that sly sideways glance that challenged her, “you compose a song to chant at the next latchkay.”

“I don’t think they really want to know about Bremport,” she said very slowly.

His arm pressed hers encouragingly against his side. “They’re tougher people than you realize. And they have a need to know, Yana. As much as you have a need to sing about it, even if you don’t know it.” His eyes were somber.