"Lift! Lift! Lift!" Torkel yelled as the pilot made as if to investigate the damage.
Yana privately enjoyed the planet's antics very much, though she was crammed in the backseat between Giancarlo and Ornery-eyes's massive torso. The latter had folded his arms over his chest and was staring straight ahead, ignoring the almost- 180-degree view afforded by the bubble-shaped Plexiglas windshield. Yana, however, took the scene in eagerly.
Craters pocked the surface of the great field. As the vehicle came around and headed north-northeast toward Kilcoole, she saw the village below; then, as the copter angled off toward the mountains, she gasped as she caught glimpses of the river, seamed with dark, steaming cracks. Its surface was littered with snocles, either capsized into the cracks or stranded on larger blocks of ice. A few, back toward SpaceBase, were being off-loaded by men stripped down to their shirts, while farther ahead men and women scrambled to save each other from drowning and pulled each other ashore. A couple of snocles were attempting to find snow firm enough for the runners to ski on while one soldier broke trail, planting markers to show where the snow had not yet turned to slush.
Yana hoped that Bunny's snocle wasn't out there among the stranded, or that the girl hadn't been arrested when Yana was. She also wondered just where Scan was, but one thing was sure: he wouldn't be where this copter was taking them.
It landed in the pasture that had once held the curly-coats. She thought she caught sight of one of the dark ones, hiding in the copse, but it could have just been a big brown-branched bush the height of a curly-coat. The house, when the troopers entered it, weapons drawn, had the feeling of a deserted place. At least that was what Yana sensed from the still, cool air inside. Not so much as a whisker of one of Sean's unusual big cats, either. Torkel led the way down the link to the laboratories, Giancarlo with him, Ornery hauling her along in their wake.
"I want every disk, file, paperwork, notebook, everything," Torkel called over his shoulder to the lieutenant in charge of the squads. "Everything taken back to the base. I want this place under strict surveillance and rigged to catch anyone who steps inside."
"The animals are all gone," Giancarlo said savagely. "He obviously got back here to let them all loose. We could have learned something from them."
Yana could see from the condition of the pens that they hadn't been occupied for a while. That must have been the first thing Scan had done when he had separated from her.
"You certainly didn't expect to find them here, did you, Colonel, tamely waiting for us?" Torkel asked, resuming his pose of amused condescension.
"Dammit, Fiske, I told you we should have moved in on him earlier, right after that all-night binge the natives had."
"But I thought that was too good a chance for my undercover operative to miss," Torkel said, leaning against the wall. Just where Scan had leaned, Yana thought, the first day they had met. "Is that where everyone got their orders, Yana? Is that where you switched sides?"
"I haven't switched sides, Captain Fiske. I'm still a company woman, trying to help the company all I can."
Giancarlo raised both fists, and she stared back, daring him to carry through his threat.
"You both wanted me to see what I could find out. I did just that," Yana went on. "Not my fault I can't tell you what you want to hear. No one's told me what that is."
"Terce said you'd sold out," Giancarlo shouted. "He saw you go with the others, to plot treason."
"Where'd he see us go?" she asked, hoping her hunch was correct. "We were in the hall until daybreak and then most of ui went to the hot spring to clean up."
"That fat woman, the one with all the cats, is the ringleader."
"Clodagh?" Yana allowed her incredulity and astonishment full rein and laughed. "If that's what Terce told you, Colonel, you must be the only one on Petaybee who doesn't know that he isn't playing with a full deck."
Just then the comm unit bleeped, and Torkel toggled it on. He listened, and in the next moment, disbelief, consternation, and finally horror swept across his face.
"Back! Back to the copter!" His arm swept them before him with great urgency. "Shuttle's crashed!"
Yana wondered from Torkel's reaction if his father, old Whit-taker Fiske, had been due to arrive in that particular shuttle. Briefly she considered departing in the confusion. Ornery was up ahead of her in the corridor: she could slip away very easily right now. But she was certain she had weakened Giancarlo's accusation. She could do more if she hung about. Maybe, with a little luck, she might get Torkel to listen to what she was saying. And, if his father wasn't dead, maybe she could beat some sense in that old man's head. She would certainly prejudice the case she had been making by doing a flit right now. Petaybee ought to have one advocate in the company's court. Sauntering, she caught up with Ornery just as he realized she wasn't nearby.
"Miss me, big boy?" she asked, and walked past him, out to the waiting copter, where she slid in next to Giancarlo, leaving Ornery to compress his mass into the space between her and the copter's bulkhead. Ignoring the commotion and Torkel's demand for more information on the accident from the copter pilot, she was perhaps the only one looking out past Ornery toward the river, newly freed from ice thrall. She sat up straight, unable to believe her eyes, as a dark object that she first thought was a boulder turned into a seal and suddenly moved with astonishing speed and grace to slip into the water.
Now, how long had that been there? Had it actually been watching the house? Or was her imagination working overtime?
The regeneration is all the more remarkable as it's so totally improbable," the medic was saying to his companion as they preceded Diego down the hospital corridor. "Never saw anything like this. And in such a short time. Woman was hacking her lungs out and not likely to live the year out."
The man beside him asked a question that Diego could not hear, but he figured they had to be talking about Yana.
"No, no, can't be a transplant. I'd believe that more than a natural remission but there're no scars: not even a 'scope hole."
They turned to the right at the next corridor and he went on, thinking hard. Bunny had mentioned that Yana's health had improved since her arrival on Petaybee. He snorted. His father's sure hadn't. What if… And he halted in his tracks for a long moment. Then he was jolted out of his reverie by tremors underfoot- which reminded Diego of other half-understood remarks by Bunny. Why wasn't she around when she was needed? Why had she skitted out of the base as if something was after her?
More than anything now, he wanted to get Dad to Kilcoole and Clodagh. Petaybee had messed his dad up and now Petaybee could damn well cure him, like it had Yana!
It was, as Diego had hoped, slack time in the ward. Dad was sitting up in his chair, and dressed, which might have been a battle. Diego had stuffed another parka under his own, a real drag with the heat so high. Even his dad was sweating a bit. Diego got (he wheelchair and, for the benefit of the other men in the ward, started his chatter.
"Dad, you wouldn't believe the weather out today, so I'm goin' to take you for a little stroll. See if we can't chase the cobwebs out of your head. Here now, easy, you just sit tight, huh?"
His father, as usual, didn't acknowledge his words with so much as a lifting of the eyes.
Diego wheeled him out of the ward, down the hall, and onto the ramp outside the infirmary.
For the first time he became acutely aware of how noisy it was at SpaceBase, of the change in the temperature and the air. Snocles that had once zipped down the snowy paths between buildings were racing their engines to escape being mired in slushy, melting snow. New vehicles, forklifts and track-cats, toiled to move the tons of equipment freshly delivered to the loading docks. One of the smaller track-cats was trying to shift a snocle entrenched in a snow bank.