Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [10]
Sinead grabbed him by the hair and pulled his face back so that he could only see her cross-eyed glare. “You figured wrong, wormbreath.”
“You should,” Sean told the men, “have been patient. How did you get here anyway? SpaceBase is only transporting official personnel these days.”
“We—uh—we caught the shuttle.”
“What shuttle?”
“The PTS shuttle our soldier buddies told us about.”
“Excuse me,” Sinead said.
“Stands for Petaybean Tourist Service,” the man whose hair she had hold of said quickly. “Looks like it’s brand new—arrived on MoonBase a few hours before we did.”
The other man said, “I demand that you and this—this amazon of yours—”
“The lady,” Sean said, “is my sister.”
“That you and your sister untie us and inform us of what laws we have broken and notify our ambassador at once. I am Dr. Vincent de Peugh, vice-president in charge of resource utilization for Intergal’s Terra Section Delta, and this is my colleague, Dr. Raymond Ersol, vice-president in charge of air quality control. We do not intend to spend our vacations being victimized by your government on some trumped-up charges.”
Sean rose from behind the paperwork, lifted several sheets from the head and shoulders of Dr. Ersol, and neatly replaced them on the desk, which he then leaned against, ankles and arms crossed.
“Well, gentlemen, I can see that you’ve been misled. You’ve broken no written law, as such, since we have yet to write any. Quite simply, the people who live here know that one hunts only to live on Petaybee, and one takes only the game which offers itself. What I would like to see from you is your authorization to be here at all. As far as I know, at this time only official personnel and designated settlers approved and transported by Intergal are allowed to be here—not offworld employees looking for what you consider recreation. What we, as Sinead has so tactfully explained, consider wanton murder of an allied species. You see, and as a resource manager, Dr. Peugh, I’m sure you’ll understand this, we of Petaybee, people, animals, plants, and planet, have a system, and we all depend on each other. You’ve just gone and upset that system something terrible. Now then, Sinead will be glad to release you after you’ve accompanied her to make due restitution to those you’ve offended.”
“And our property?” Ersol nodded to the rifles.
“We’ll return it to you on Earth, if you’d care to leave a forwarding address. Might take a while though. Backwater place like Petaybee, the postal service is atrocious. No doubt that’s why I never received your request, or if I did,” he added with a gesture to the piles of paper, “I haven’t got around to answering it yet. Sinead, I think maybe you might get Liam to accompany you, and maybe Dinah. She’s been driving Liam nuts since Diego left. And you could loosen the hobbles on these gentlemen so you don’t have to carry them outside again.”
Sinead gave him a mock salute and hauled her prisoners back outside.
Sean sighed. It didn’t look as if he was going to be bored while Yana was shipside, anyway. Now he’d better see if he could enlist Whit Fiske to help him find out about this Petaybean Tourist Service shuttle business.
Yana, Bunny, Diego, and Marmion were all together in the forward viewing lounge as the great sprawling array of interlocking circles that was Gal Three grew from a glittering spot of light to its real majestic splendor. The circles were stacked five deep horizontally and, in places, nine in vertical alignment. There were two more thick, squat circles at nadir and zenith of the complex, which housed its defensive equipment. Yana stared in fascination. She’d never had such a view of the facility: both of her trips here had been made in the belly of a troop transport. She rather thought they’d been docked on one of the nadirward circles.
Diego was explaining the various levels