Power Lines

Chapter 8

Dinah heard the noise before Bunny, footsteps coming down from the hill above. The dog strained forward, listening, doing the whine-yip, whine-yip that preceded her full-throated "woo-wooing" cry.

Bunny, still feeling queasy from her experience in the cave, held on to a handful of brush to pull herself to her feet. She heard Dinah scrabbling up the path, icy rock slipping under her paws.

"What is it, girl?" Bunny began, turning toward the sound of the dog. But about then, Dinah yipped and fell silent.

"Dinah?" Bunny whispered into the dense shadows, reaching for the comforting warmth of the dog's coarse thick fur "Dinah?"

Her out stretched hand was suddenly clasped in a vise and Satok stepped out of the shadows.

"Slainte, pretty Shongili snocle driver. How sweet of you to come and meet me. Where's your boyfriend?"

"What have you done to Dinah?" she hollered at him. "Let go of my hand."

Instead, he captured the other one. "The dog? I knocked her fraggin' skull shut. She should know better than to bark at the shanachie. The other dogs learned. Go ahead, scream. I'm waiting for your boyfriend to come to the rescue, and then I can send him to keep his dog company." Bunny did scream, and kicked, and hollered, but the whole time he dragged her up the path to his house, no lamps lit in the darkness of the village below, no faces peered out windows or doors to see what the commotion was about. Not at the Connellys', nor anywhere else.

As he dragged her away, her hand brushed against Dinah's still warm fur, sticky with what could only be the faithful dog's blood.

But the boys must have heard her. They must have.

Once, she thought she saw the shine of coppery eyes from one of the surrounding rocks, but otherwise, there was no witness to her abduction at all.

When they were well above the village and beyond the cave mouth and no help appeared, she decided to save her strength for later, and allowed herself to be led with only token resistance to the man's house.

Several outbuildings dotted the rocky mountain meadow where the sturdy stone house stood. It was the finest Bunny had ever seen, without a bit of scavenged material in its makeup. Thick stone walls, a roof of some sturdy material Bunny recognized from her trips to SpaceBase as similar to the stuff on the barracks buildings, and real windows of thick plasglas, heavily draped.

A high corral fence contained many curlies, among them Diego's Cisco and Bunny's Darby. A team of dogs, snarling and snapping and for all their red fur as unlike the gentle and intelligent foxhounds of Kilcoole as they were unlike caribou, were tied in the open, a short distance from the house. She could smell the filth of their leavings even through the icy wind.

Satok misinterpreted her lack of struggle and perusal of his holdings.

"Ah, so you're impressed, eh? Well, girl, all this comfort and luxury can be at your disposal if you're nice and do as you're told. Come in now, while the night is still young."

She tried to struggle again, but he was very much stronger and she was in the wrong position. She knew that once he got her indoors, her chances of escape and her danger from him were much greater, but she also thought that perhaps the secret of his hold over these people who wouldn't come help a girl when she was screaming bloody murder was inside this fine house.

She was surprised at herself, at how analytical and calculating she was being. Her anger at what he had done to Dinah, to the planet, and to these people had turned to cold calmness, as cold as the profound loneliness she had felt in the cave. It was even lonelier here, with a man who had to be crazy to even attempt to do this to the planet. Bunny knew that she needed to keep her wits about her, if she was going to learn what she needed to and keep him from killing Diego and Krisuk as ruthlessly as he had murdered Dinah.

He hauled her indoors. She didn't give up all show of reluctance, feeling that that would alert him, and indeed, she had trouble suppressing the panic she felt at being alone with him in his house.

The first thing she thought was it was no wonder he wanted a woman there. The place was a mess. The second thought she had was that it was an interesting mess. She hadn't known there was this much technical gear on Petaybee outside of SpaceBase and, maybe, Sean's lab.

Two computers and a vast array of hand tools scales, and rock samples were interspersed with bones, a couple of small skulls, feathers, and desiccated bits of animals. She noted that there was a wide choice of objects that would make good weapons.

The tools were spread across several makeshift tables, but there was no proper eating table, and no chairs, though there were cooking facilities-greasy and covered with dirty utensils-and a large mattress spread on the floor.

Once inside, Satok released her and she edged as far away from that mattress as possible, though she'd had enough run-ins with her pubescent cousins to know that a mattress was not strictly required for her to be in deep dog shit.

Before he could say anything, she decided how to act in the same deliberate way she decided what to do when she was stranded on her snocle, or she and her dogs were attacked by a moose. She wouldn't provoke him until necessary. In fact, if he thought she was stupid just because she was a girl, she was prepared to let him go on thinking that for a while.

"Wow!" she said, with a nervous giggle she hoped didn't sound too forced. "What a place!"

"What's the matter, little Dama Shongili? Not good enough for you?" he sneered, setting his staff by the door and shedding a couple of layers of clothing.

"No, it's great," she said, ignoring the fact that he wasn't calling her by her own name. She wasn't sure she wanted her name in his filthy mouth, much less any of the rest of her. "I've never been anywhere except SpaceBase where they had two computers. Are they both yours?"

"Yeah," he said.

"Gosh, where'd you get them?"

"They were part of my retirement benefits," he said and started for her, but she danced away and picked up another piece of equipment. It was fairly heavy and made of steel.

"What's this?" she asked.

"Come off it. You're not interested in that stuff. I got something to show you over here," he said, and grabbed his crotch.

She pretended not to notice while she was examining the heavy object more closely. I am too interested in this stuff. I take mining expeditions out all the time and they always have the most interesting stuff. Usually they disappear before I get to see it work, though."

"Don't worry, baby, I'm not about to disappear. I know this planet's ways, and I'm way too smart to fall into its traps."

He started walking toward her and she put one of the many work benches, little more than two saw horses and a flat piece of junk, between her and the self-proclaimed shanachie.

"How do you do that, really?" she asked. casually, though the very thought of what he could have possibly done to the cave made her furious. But not afraid. She couldn't afford to be afraid. "You're not from around here, are you?"

"I was born on this planet, if that's what you mean," he said. "I know about the caves. I also know that's the easiest access to the goodies Intergal and other companies are ready to pay big dinero for."

"Looks like you know all about how to get those goodies too, huh?" Bunny asked with her impression of girlish enthusiasm, an imitation of her boy-crazy cousin Nuala. The technique featured opening her eyes very wide and looking a little like a rabbit that'd been suddenly blinded by the lights of an oncoming snocle. "How'd you learn to do something like that if you're from Petaybee?"

"In the company corps, how else?" he said. I did the standard hitch until I got in trouble. Lucky for me I managed to find more lucrative employment before my court-martial."

"Here, you mean?"

"No, this came later, when I was ready to settle down with a good woman."

Bunny made something that she hoped could be construed as a cooing noise. She thought it was very strange that he hadn't found this at odds with her struggle on the way up here, but she did know that where girls were concerned, some fellows didn't consider that logic or even thinking entered into their behavior. He probably thought she had been protesting out of form, but now that she was here she was as overwhelmed by all this stuff and his manly charms as she pretended to be.

She gave him Nuala's one-shouldered shrug and asked hesitantly, "Well, yeah, but where then?"

"Intergal's not the only one who can do business, baby. I joined up with an independent firm engaged in the import-export business. Ever heard of Onidi Louchard?"

Bunny shrugged again. As long as she could keep him talking, maybe he'd say something useful. The conversation also gave her a chance to tuck something as pointed as an ice pick into the back of the band of her pants.

"Maybe," she said in a semi-interested tone of voice to keep him talking. "I think maybe some of the soldiers mentioned that name-not a businessman though…"

He laughed, showing a lot of his yellowed teeth-kept strong and even by company dentistry, no doubt.

"Ah, but that's where you're wrong, baby. Onidi knows supply and demand like no woman in the world."

He seemed to be drifting off into a reverie of his own. Bunny noticed that, oddly enough, there was a rug spread across a small area of the unswept desolation of the house's floor.

"Ah!" Bunny said. "Yeah, I remember now. She's sort of a pirate, isn't she… a black marketeer? Didn't they say she'd supplied the gas and the arms to the rebels at Bremport?"

He seemed pleased at the recognition. "That's her, okay."

"Wow, you worked with her? That must have been so exciting. I've never been off-this planet-myself," she said, managing to sound regretful.

"Oh, that can be arranged, baby. I'll teach you a few things. Then I know lotsa people who'd be glad to show a cute little thing like you around."

"What's it like-out there?" she asked wistfully.

She thought she could hear sounds beneath the floor, fortunately muffled and indistinct, for Satok didn't seem to hear them.

He picked up a bottle; not Petaybean blurry like Clodagh made, but off-planet stuff that Bunny could smell clear across the room. He locked the front door from the inside, something she had never seen anyone do before except herself when she'd had to barricade herself against her cousins. He settled down on the mattress alone with the bottle.

"You wouldn't appreciate most of it," he said with a lewd grin, then shrugged and gave her a hideous wink. "Or who knows, by the time I'm finished with you, maybe you will."

Bunny suppressed a shudder and continued to inspect his tools and computer screen while he told her about whore-houses on planets in several different galaxies, not excluding the impressive tricks he'd seen performed by humanoid alien exotic entertainers with a wide variety of sex organs and practices.

The subject made her a little queasy, especially the lip-licking relish with which he related it and the way he kept eyeing her as if she were already undressed. She realized he was in no hurry at all. In fact, he seemed to be relating these stories with the expectation that she might want to try some of the things he was talking about. They did give her a good excuse to make loud, shocked exclamations, which covered up the noises coming from beneath the rug. Still trying to appear fascinated, she worked her way backward while he swigged from his bottle until she shoved a corner of the rug back with her foot. A rectangular trapdoor was concealed beneath it.

Maybe the lout would drink himself to sleep.

No such luck though. Having exhausted the topic, he kept patting the mattress, then hoisted himself up, his expression growing ugly again.

"So," Bunny said quickly. "What made you decide to give up something as glamorous as shipping with Onidi Louchard to come back to Petaybee?"

He was less steady on his feet now than he had been and his next words were slurred. "When my shipmates found out I was from Petaybee, they told me what idiots we all were to be sitting on the biggest cache of raw ores in the known universe and pretending it wasn't there. I told 'em the company kept us all barefoot and pregnant, so to speak, which is what I heard all the time I was growing up here. Then I realized I'd bought into the whole Petaybee trip ever since I was a kid: how the planet doesn't want us to take this and the planet doesn't want us to take that." His voice slipped into a mocking whine. "So I thought, screw the planet. The company's going to do it sooner or later, so how about me? I knew how the planet and the people get around the company, and how the company could get around the planet and the people if it had the balls to come down and take what it wants, so I 'borrowed' a little company technology, showed up in one village or another on foot, parking my shuttle out on the tundra, looking wise and finding out who might be in need of a shaman. McGee's Pass had come in for a few of the planet's less benign tricks and they had no shaman. I did a little recon, set up my base, and arranged for a disaster in the local communing place."

Bunny strove to keep her voice steady and sound shocked instead of simply furious as she asked, "W-why? Why did you do that?"

"Because, the first time I saw the way raw ore looks before it comes out of the ground, I realized I'd seen it back when I was a kid and the planet was scaring the shit out of me for not being real interested in all the little mind tricks it plays on people around here. Don't you get it? There's a good reason your so-called elders feed you all this bunk about the communing places that makes you scared to go in there without them."

Bunny thought he must have had a much different elder than Clodagh to think that anyone was barred from talking to Petaybee any time they felt like it, but most times people just got by on what was offered on the surface until it was time for everybody to go visiting.

"The communing places are also the entry way to the planet's goodies. Frag it, girl, you don't even have to dig very deep or blast your own tunnel in the surface. Ore's right there staring at you every time you go talk to the rocks."

"Really?" she asked. But she was running out of things she wanted to know and trying to think of what to ask next to keep him talking. "Well, I've got another question. Why take me? Aren't there local girls…"

"That's just the problem. They're local. You're from a powerful family in Kilcoole, and they think you're special because you drive a snocle Your family and friends in Kilcoole shoot their mouths off a lot about how mines are so evil for the planet. Maybe if they know mining the planet is in your best interests, they'll be a little quieter. Really," he said. "It's been real nice chatting with you, baby, but now that we know each other better, I want to get to know you real well. So are you going to come over here to me, or are you going to tempt me to get a little rough? Both ways are fine with me."

Bunny backed away from him, and he rose and lunged across the table she'd been using as a shield.

She dodged and ran, but was as trapped as she'd ever been. She knew she couldn't elude his grasp forever, and even though she had the weapon, he was bigger and stronger than she and not much out of shape either. She knew she had no chance against him in a fight, but she could keep out of his way as long as possible. She jumped back to where the trapdoor was and risked slowing long enough to pull at the ring. She pulled the door partially open, hoping against hope that she could slide down into it before he caught her.

The door was heavier than she thought, and he was quicker. He grabbed her hair and jerked her across the open door, as she screamed and beat at him with one hand while reaching for the ice pick with her other.

The planet had not been Petrasealed to death in the lower cavern, but it had been gouged and blasted. There was a pool there, too, foul from chemicals and dense with residue from the damage that had been done.

Diego touched the scars and felt as if he were seeing the wreck his father had been all over again: he was so full of sadness and pain.

Krisuk, who had grown up with this particular place, but grown gradually accustomed to its death through Satok's machinations over the years, touched the blasted areas once and reeled back as if he'd been punched.

Both boys stood at the juncture to the corridor, shaking.

"How could you let him do that?" Diego accused.

"We didn't know he was doing anything in here!" Krisuk said. "We thought it was all buried, like he said. You forget there's a wall between this and the outer cave, and a lot of tunnel between. There's got to be. We feel the mountain shake sometimes, but it's not like you hear anything."

The truth of the last statement was sharply illustrated for the boys as they stepped from the Petrasealed inner cave into the meeting room and through the bush, out into the cold wind whipping down the pass. The rock Bunny had been sitting on was empty.

"Bunny?" Diego asked. "Dinah?"

A whimper rode down the wind from the path above them.

Diego scrambled up the path, almost tripping over Dinah's prostrate form. He began feeling the dog all over, which was difficult because there was a lot of blood. She was terribly still when he first began, but her respiration's picked up a bit as he handled her.

Then he called for Bunny and called again, but he didn't see her. Meanwhile, Krisuk ran back down the hill to his own house and flung the door open.

Diego picked Dinah up in his arms and stumbled down the hill after him. Krisuk had a lamp lit. The family was not in bed but hunched together around the table, staring guiltily toward the door.

Diego entered the house and carried Dinah's body to the table. He knew from the expressions of the Connellys that they knew exactly what had happened to the horses, the dog, and Bunny.

"What kind of people are you anyway?"

"Don't ask them anything," Krisuk said disgustedly. "She's at Satok's. You can bet on it. He took her."

"Then I'm going to get her," Diego said.

"You can't!" Iva said. "He can kill you-kill us all-he might turn the planet against us again, make it swallow us up. He's too powerful for any of us to fight."

"He sure is if you just sit there," Diego said. "And the planet has no reason at all to like him. If you looked a few yards beyond the ends of your noses, you'd know that."

"You're not going alone," Krisuk said.

"No?"

"No. Come on, Da, Mother. You kids," Krisuk added addressing his younger brothers and sisters. "You go wake the neighbors. Bring them to the meeting cave." His siblings looked up at him as if they'd been stunned, unmoving till his five-year-old sister, Marie, jumped to her feet.

"I'll go!"

"Me, too," one of the younger brothers said.

Diego had stripped one of the quilts from the beds to cover Dinah, while one of the older sisters began cleaning the dog's wound.

Seeing that the dog was in good hands, Diego grabbed a knife from its hook above the stove and ran out the door again and up the path.

"Wait!" Krisuk said. "Diego, not that way. You'll be too good a target."

"I'm not going to just let him have her because you're all scared of him," Diego shouted back, never shortening his stride though the wind battered him. He didn't hear what Krisuk said in response.

Diego was about to pass the cave entrance when Krisuk caught up with him and pulled him back.

"Look, you can't just go confront him," he hollered above the wind. "But remember the upper passage? I'll bet it leads up to his house."

Diego paused for a moment. He had read a lot of hard-copy books, and many of his favorites had secret passages and tunnels in them, something he had previously related only to the ventilation systems in ships and space stations. "Maybe so," he said. "But if it doesn't, we lose a lot of time. We don't know how much we've lost already."

Krisuk said, "According to Da, they heard Bunny hollering about an hour ago. Look, I can get them to follow me into the cave. I want to show them what Satok's done. But they're too scared to go to his house. It's a strong house and he's armed."

Diego shook his arm loose. "If you want to go that way, then you go that way. I'm going straight to the house. I'm not going to risk Bunny's life again because your folks don't want me to stand up to Satok."

"Okay then, I'll try the cave and if it doesn't work out, I'll come up and help you, so take it easy, okay? Unless you see he's actually-well, unless she really needs you right then, don't jump in until I get there "

Diego was already striding forward. "I'll handle it," he said, and began to climb up the hill leading to Satok's.

The house was visible from the top of the path, a stone building about a half a mile away set back in a meadow. The windows were lit, and as Diego approached, a banshee chorus of howls heralded his arrival.

Satok pinned Bunny to the mattress and snatched at the band of her trousers. She tried to kick him, but he'd pinned one of her knees down with one of his own. Her right arm, stuck between her back and the mattress, groped for her weapon, which was digging into her hip.

All of a sudden the dogs began to howl. Satok swore and rose, grabbing a weapon as he turned toward the door. Almost as an afterthought, he turned on Bunny. As he struck her open handed across the face, her teeth bit into her cheeks with an explosion of pain.

"Don't move," he said, waggling his finger with mock playfulness.

Of course, she did move the moment he threw the bolt on the door. It was hopeless to dart past him into the night, and the trap door was too far away, but at least she was able to pull out her ice pick.

"Shut up, you lazy pack of mutts, or you don't eat for another week!" he bellowed out the door. The howling quieted to a whine. He took a long look around, then turned back to Bunny.

Fresh out of more subtle tricks, she jumped up and ran back to the trap door. She was smart enough not to show her weapon.

"Don't you touch me again, mister," she said, lisping a little through her cut lip.

The dogs began howling again, but this time Satok refused to be diverted. He reached Bunny in two seconds flat, and Bunny, backing up, found she was against a wall with nowhere to run, not a good position for any animal to be in. Further more, Satok was standing on the trap door as he closed in on her, his hands going for her throat.

The front door slammed open, flooding the room with strong icy wind.

Bunny punched upward with her ice pick and felt the pointed tip sink into meat. Satok's grip on her loosened, but he had twisted away from her to face the front door and her weapon didn't make the lethal strike she intended. She was trying to loosen her neck from his arm and her weapon from his wound when another body crashed into them, almost strangling her as the impact drove Satok's arm against her wind pipe.

As Satok whirled to meet the new attacker, Bunny dove out of the way, searching for another weapon.

Diego was riding the big man's back, punching at him with a dagger, but Satok reached back and wrested the dagger from the boy's hand as if he were taking a rattle from a baby. Bunny groaned. Diego was good with books and computers-he wasn't a fighter.

She picked up a wrench and danced around the two of them, trying to get in a lick here and there but she was afraid of hitting Diego.

Satok looked annoyed, but hardly worried. Still standing on the trap door, he reached back and grabbed Diego's head in both hands and started pulling him over his shoulder.

Bunny dropped to her knees, threw herself forward, and whacked the big man hard with the wrench, first on the knees, then the shins. He whirled around, still holding Diego's head in a vise, and she slammed the wrench against the backs of his knees. He fell to the ground with a crash that swept Diego's legs against the computer table and toppled the machine to the floor.

But when he and Diego fell forward, they cleared the trap door, and the pounding under the door that had been obscured by the sounds of the fight became clear. Bunny crawled to the door and pulled up the ring. Through the widening crack, Krisuk's arms and head appeared, and with a shove he pushed the door back across Satok's calves.

Satok was slamming Diego's head against the floor.

Gaining confidence at the sight of Krisuk climbing out of the hole, followed closely by his father, Bunny dove toward Satok's head and brought her wrench down over it. Again, the man twisted at a crucial point, and Bunny's wrench only tore loose the back of his ear just as a third person emerged from the secret passage.

Satok grabbed the injured ear, staggered to his feet, and ran, Krisuk and the others after him.

Bunny knelt beside Diego. "Are you okay?" she asked.

He blinked at her twice, rubbed the back of his head, and said ruefully, "I came to your rescue."

She kissed him, bloody nose and all. "You sure did. Are you hurt bad?"

His hand came away bloody "Not bad. I think. My dad always said my skull was the hardest part of me."

Iva was kneeling beside them now. "Come on and I'll bandage that for you." she said. "We've seen what Satok did to the planet. Some talk he had! The others will catch him and he'll tell his lies no more."

"No," Diego said. "We've got to get to Sean and Yana and tell them what Satok's done."

"How did you know he was a pirate?" Bunny said.

"If we go back through the cave, you'll-" Diego stopped and stared at her. "What do you mean, pirate? As in pirate pirate?"

"He's one of Onidi Louchard's shipmates," Bunny said. "I think he's still working with them to loot Petaybee."

"Frag! We gotta warn the others!"

"Shh," Iva Connelly said. "You're not going anyplace till I bandage your wounds. You, too, young lady."

Diego and Bunny insisted on leading the curlies back down to the village. Meanwhile Krisuk and some of the others returned, empty-handed.

"Satok got away. Kev Nyukchuk and his sons are trying to trace Satok by the tracks and blood in the dark," Krisuk told them.

"Where's your father?" Iva asked.

"He stayed to feed the dogs. You remember Satok taking Tarka's pups?"

"Yes."

"They're half-starved and mean now, but Da recognized them and he's going to try to tame them again. The curlies were in bad shape, too, and we found more cat skulls…"

The next morning at first light, Bunny and Diego, carrying a carefully bandaged and bundled Dinah, were back out on the trail away from the river, the Petaybean wind at their backs, pushing them toward the Fjord.

Matthew Luzon was as amused as he was capable of being that Marmion Algemeine thought she was controlling him by contradicting his theories, cultivating the enemies of the company, and trying to seduce his staff away from him. Of course, she was incapable of understanding a man like him. She was nothing but an over aged debutante whose inherited greed made her good at acquiring more wealth. She couldn't begin to understand someone like him, someone motivated not by money or personal aggrandizement, but by a strong, totally altruistic commitment to truth and the scientific process.

Others laughed when he called himself a scientist, but Matthew was devoted to science in a way that few were. A literal-minded man, he was nevertheless fascinated by the lies people were fond of telling themselves about the universe in which they lived, despite all of the evidence pointing to the fact that the average human being was powered by electro-chemical impulses in the same way that computers were powered by electronic ones, and the universe itself was a large, marvelous accident.

Most of the scientists and troops within the company believed as Matthew did, but few had his zeal not only for believing the truth, but for exposing the lies and self-deceptions that weakened the sentient mind, every inhabited sector of the universe, and the company, as well.

There was a sort of brain fever that people contracted once they left civilization. Matthew had seen it again and again, not just among the inhabitants of colonial outposts like this, but also on space stations and ships too long away from port. People encountered a few mysteries that had not yet been properly investigated, and they suddenly decided that even the things they understood had some sort of strange causation. They started believing in myths, anthropomorphized machinery, and nonsentient life-forms; they talked to plants and animals. Ridiculous, but there it was. Matthew considered himself to be something of a deprogrammer/reformer/reformationist.

Usually, he had found, there was a ringleader, or maybe more accurately, an opinion maker, generally someone suffering from the borderline schizophrenia that passed for "creativity." These people had to be stabilized and adjusted, or eliminated. Elimination was not the preferred option, simply because one such person would invariably be replaced by another leader, whereas if one used the power they had already built up among their fellows for one's own purposes, results were much quicker.

As an anthropologist, he had made a particular study of the sort of beliefs people were apt to indulge in, and from what he'd heard of Petaybee, their mass illusion was not an especially unusual one.

They thought their planet was sentient. Quite likely all these seemingly remarkable incidents of meteorological and geological shifting were merely coincidental, possibly a delayed reaction to the TerraB process-and he faulted Whittaker Fiske for not remarking on that probability. Certainly these natural occurrences should not be attributed to some gigantic powers or some sort of immense alien life-form, dabbling in so-called adaptive changes.

He was no fool. He had studied the autopsies and all of the Kilcoole group's other "evidence." He was more inclined to think that the claims were more in the nature of a local belief than a planet wide one. The "adaptive changes," which bordered on extremes, were no doubt mutations from some latent toxins contained by this world which had previously gone undetected. They would, of course, need to be eliminated-or the inhabitants removed, which would suit Intergal's purposes quite well.

But the commission wouldn't do so on his unsupported opinion. His wisest course was to find other opinion leaders who held beliefs different from those of the people in Kilcoole, to demonstrate to the commission that local superstition on the Fact of one group should not be allowed to be taken as a planet wide condition.

To that end, he ordered a helicopter for his own use while Marmion was out and busy charming the locals. He was told that a pilot named Greene could be made available to him.

"Destination, sir?"

"I wish to travel to the settlements on the southern hemisphere," Matthew said. "I will need transport and accommodations for myself and three assistants."

"I'm sorry, sir," the woman said with an apologetic wince. The only craft now available has room for the pilot and two other people. That's all."

"Then make another craft available. Do you think my work is so trivial it can be performed unaided?"

"You said that, sir, not me."

"What is your name?" Matthew sputtered.

"Rhys-Hall, sir. Captain Neva M. Rhys-Hall, communications officer. No offense intended, sir. If it's the pilot's name you're wanting, sir, it's John Greene. He's scheduled for Harrison's Fjord anyway at 1220 hours, can refuel there and take you southward. If you can be ready and at the field by then, you'll save time and be there before dark."

"And accommodations?"

"You're on your own there, sir. Up till recently, the company never considered this planet worth two depots and command centers. I'd take a sleeping bag and a survival tent, if I were you."

"Thank you for the advice, Captain. I will not forget it." Or you, you impertinent bitch, he told himself.

One assistant, then? The decision was not difficult to make. Braddock Makem, a man who thought much as Matthew himself did, was the most trusted and resourceful of his assistants. He found Braddock in his spartan quarters, studying the various reports, and told him what was required of him, in perfect confidence that the gear and Braddock would be ready at the appointed time.