Powers That Be by Anne McCaffrey, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough Read Free Book Online

didn’t have enough energy left to investigate. She had given the bed quilt back to Bunny, thinking she would get a new one today. Belatedly she realized that the bundle Charlie Demintieff had been carrying might have contained her thermal blanket and other authorized survival gear. In the confusion, it had been left at Clodagh’s.
    The cat looked up at her expectantly, and she sat back down at the table, wishing she had a console to work on. Nothing to read, write, work at, or interact with unless she wanted to put all those clothes back on and tramp about in the cold. The cat looked up at her and mewed.
    “Just as well we’re taking you home tonight, beast,” she told it, giving it a stroke. “Otherwise I’d go buggy, landed with so much solitude all of a sudden.”
    As if it understood her, the cat chirruped and hopped down from the table, where it began chasing the toggle string of her parka with every evidence of great concentration and ferocity. It leapt high with front paws spread and twisted in midair to land squarely upon the coat’s drawstring. Then the cat sat down, gave its paws a lick, and looked up at her expectantly. Other than the coat’s drawstring, there wasn’t a single thing to dangle or roll in the cabin.
    Finally Yana took off her webbed uniform belt and dragged the buckle on the floor for the animal to hunt, while it did its best to entertain her. After a while, they both fell asleep by the stove, Yana with her head on the table, the cat curled by her elbow, while the winter-muffled village of Kilcoole remained unnervingly free of clanging, computer beeps, and the hivelike activity of spacers.
    Yana’s sleep was light and her dreams fragmented with scenes of a surgeon using a horn growing from his head as a scalpel, twenty young troopers convulsing while clawing at a hatch as poison gas slithered into a hold that looked something like a crystal cave, and a tiny man she knew was Charlie Demintieff being pounced at by an orange cat.
     
    Diego Metaxos hadn’t been all that thrilled about being dragged down to Petaybee to watch his old man in action as a geological surveyor. In all of his sixteen years, he had never been planetside, and he expected life on Petaybee to be as dreary and routine as life on board ship. But when he saw the place, he was glad he had come, and when he met the dogs, he was even gladder. By the time the lady let him drive her dog team, he had been convinced that this trip was the most brilliant thing that had ever happened to him.
    At first he had been freaked out by the whole idea of the expedition, and with good reason. Even the shrink on his dad’s ship had told him that he had had a lot to be freaked out about recently. First of all, his mom had fallen for a company exec who liked Mom fine but didn’t want any other attachments. Mom, a senior astrophysicist, had never exactly been the warm type, and Diego had spent most of his life moving with her from ship to ship, or watching her come and go from various assignments while he sat in front of a teaching computer. Lots of the places Mom was assigned, there had been no one his own age, and very seldom did he find an adult who wanted to be bothered with someone else’s kid. At the last couple of stations, he had begun to pal around with a few of the younger corps troops, listening to their casual conversation and admiring the hard-core way they handled themselves, but he was always conscious that he wasn’t really one of them, and in case he forgot it, his mother made no bones about her displeasure in his choice of company. Then, too, about the time he started to gain a little acceptance and make one or two friends, they moved to a new station. He then had to fall back on the resources he had developed since he was a little kid, a good imagination and a quick brain. He didn’t really need any friends. Both his mom and his dad were brilliant, self-sufficient people, and he was, too. All he had ever needed was