Approaching her house, she was greeted by the hounds, who set up a good welcoming howl as she walked quickly through them, unclipping the lines from Pearse and the lead dog, Maud.
She was pleasantly surprised to see smoke rolling up from her chimney to the sky. As she followed its path she saw the lights were on display tonight: a simple pale green band whipping across the black sky, dancing and twisting and sequined with stars. The smoke from the chimney smelled grand-nutty and warm. Maud whined and stuck her long muzzle in Bunny's pocket. The dogs were more used to Bunny, who had time for them and who usually fed and exercised them, than they were to Charlie, who was their owner. Bunny petted Maud absently. Even with her stove getting a head start on the chill, without her quilt she would need the dogs for warmth tonight. She would let them in to get toasty by the fire while she ate her supper.
The big red dogs with their thick soft coats took up most of the floor space in the little shed. It contained her berth, a scrounged unit cut out of one of the dead ships at SpaceBase, a shaky tabletop pegged into the wall and placed so she could sit on her berth to eat, plus the stove and the shelves she had built from old storage crates to hold her few belongings. She had the three books left her by her parents, a set of tools-a gift from her uncle upon obtaining her license-and a selection of shells, rocks, and mushroom-shaped tree tumors, as well as hand-me-downs from the cousins and what little gear she had. On the table was a mare's-butter candle; it gave a fairly bright light, though it didn't smell very good. Her shed was built of stone, of which Petaybee had plenty. She had caulked it with mud two breakups earlier and reinforced it with some plasti her cousin Simon had scrounged for her at the SpaceBase when he first joined the corps, before he shipped out. The plasti had originally been used to repair the bubble around the SpaceBase garden, and it did well in the cold, never cracking or contracting.
Something plopped down beside her onto the table and mewed up at her. She reached down to stroke the rust-and-cream stripes of one of Aunt Clodagh's cats, though which she couldn't say since so many of the Kilcoole felines were orange-marmalades. The cat pawed the door, and Bunny smiled and followed, chattering to the cat.
"So Clodagh already knows about my passenger, does she, and left you here to tell me to report? Glad to, cat, as long as there's a bite in it for me."
The dogs in the shed had ignored the cat; the ones in the yard did not bark as it led her through the kennels. No one's dogs even barked at Clodagh's cats. They went where they pleased and knew where everything was and what everyone was doing-as did Clodagh.
Chapter 2
Theofficialguide-onlyasecondlieutenant,Yana noted-stood up when she entered the room. "Major Maddock," he said, saluting and flashing her quite an energetic smile. "Lieutenant Charles Demintieff, first Petaybee military liaison officer, at your service, dama."
"Relax, Lieutenant," she said. "I'm reporting to you, not the other way round."
"Yes'm. It's just that I've read your file, and we don't get many heroes back here."
"Most heroes don't make it back anywhere," she said.
He laughed as if she had said something extremely witty. 'Then we're luckier still to have you, Major. Colonel Giancarlo from SpaceBase snocled in this morning to welcome you personally. When you've had your chat with him, we'll go over the routine stuff."
Walking into the adjoining room, Yana felt as wary as if she were entering the bridge of an enemy-held ship. If the SpaceBase brass wanted to talk to her, why hadn't he done it at Inprocessing and saved himself a long, cold ride?
The colonel, in contrast to the lieutenant, did not look happy lo see her. His insignia was one she had seen only occasionally:
Psychological Operations, a euphemism for the Intelligence branch. She reported, and he waved her into a chair while he continued typing something into a terminal.
"Well, Major," he said after she had been sitting there long enough to become impatient and uncomfortable in her heavy gear. "What do you think of Petaybee so far?"
"Seems friendly," she said cautiously. He was testing her somehow, but she wasn't sure for what. "The air is clean, pretty cold. Fairly primitive technologically. New recruits from here need extensive training in the simplest equipment, and it's pretty obvious why, from what I've seen of my quarters and the village. Am I missing something?"
"If you are, you're not alone," he said, his eyes shifting from the terminal to hers and boring into them. "There shouldn't be anything here that we didn't put here. This planet was nothing but rock and ice when Intergal claimed it. The company terraformed it, upgrading it from frozen uninhabitable rock to a merely arctic climate. For the last two hundred years, it's been useful as a replacement depot for troops, a relocation center for the peoples who were being displaced by our other operations. Because the climate is rough on machinery, only SpaceBase contains much in the way of modern comforts. The transportation needs of the inhabitants are mostly supplied by experimental animals bred for the purpose."
"Experimental?" Yana asked. "Like lab animals?" She had been born on Earth but had spent her childhood being shunted with her parents from one duty station to the next. Lab rats and monkeys were somewhat familiar to her, along with a number of different alien species, but she was unfamiliar-except from pictures-with the beasts she had seen on her way here today.
"Not exactly, although I suppose their ancestors did some time in a lab-originally. The company hired Dr. Sean Shongili to alter certain existing species to adapt to this climate. That's how the resident equines, felines, and canines, and many of the aquatic mammals come to be here."
"1 see," she said, but she didn't. The dogs obviously worked as sled animals, the cats to keep down rodents. But she couldn't understand why Petaybee supported equines, too. Horses, from what little she knew of them, seemed rather inappropriate for such a climate. And considering the need for hacking and burning holes in ice to secure water, wasting such effort on domestic pets seemed totally unproductive.
"Well, Intergal doesn't, entirely," the colonel said, as if he had read her thoughts. "The animals we commissioned are here, but there have been sightings of other types that indicate perhaps Dr. Shongili and his assistants were a trifle more creative than was covered by their authorization. The current Dr. Shongili, also Sean, is certainly an odd bird, not what you'd call a team player. We've monitored his records, however, and can't find any evidence that he's been exceeding his instructions. We could, of course, move him, but this is not a research area favored by many in our employ, and the Shongilis have done so well at producing viable species for arctic conditions that we're reluctant to remove the current Shongili without more concrete evidence. Trouble is, unauthorized species are not the only anomaly. Something else is going on here-our satellite monitors have detected deposits of important minerals on this planet. When we dispatch teams, they either can't find the location of the deposits, or else they simply don't return."
"That's why psyops is interested?" she asked, relaxing a little.