Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [28]
Millard smiled. “Ah, the collies at work.”
“Why’re they called that?” Bunny asked.
“Watch how they herd the ships in,” Millard said. “Their names are actually the Megabite and the Maggie Lauder, but we call them Meggie and Maggie.”
The speedy work vessels did indeed seem to be nipping at the skids of the drones, angling them into the correct alignment with their ultimate destination on the lower docking circle. But he was specifically pointing to the sleek, taper-ended vessel, clearly no drone, nearly the last one on the long drone tether. “I wonder what holed that.”
“Meteor, probably,” Millard replied, looking up and frowning slightly at the company the obvious spacecraft was keeping.
“Looks big enough to have been holed by a shuttle craft,” Diego said. “And a big one at that.”
“Would the crew have survived such a holing?” Bunny asked, coming out of her slump long enough to peer about.
“Depends on the speed with which the crew reacted to the disaster,” Millard said.
“Cost a pretty pile of credits to fix it, I’ll bet,” Diego said.
“Someone who can afford a craft that size has the credit,” Sally said. “This is the biggest repair facility in the quadrant, so they’d have to come here for that sort of major restoration.”
The collies bracketed the nose of the vessel now, maneuvering it carefully down half a degree, to port another fraction, and then forward slowly until it moved out of sight from their viewpoint.
“Wonder what happened to it,” Bunny said.
“We could go see,” Diego suggested.
“Could we?” she asked, brightening and turning to Millard.
“Bailey has some cronies down in the ship dock,” Millard said. Their faces fell. “You really will have to wait until Bailey and Charmion are available,” he said, and then his wrist set bleeped. “Excuse me.”
He read the message that came in, then turned to Yana. “This is interesting. The PTS is newly registered as a tourist transport in the civilian section of the Intergal Station. A ‘B. Makem’ is listed as owner.”
“B. Makem?” Yana blinked. The name was somehow familiar, but after last night’s inundation of names, she couldn’t put the name to a face.
“Braddock Makem?” Sally asked in a startled tone as she looked up from the report she was working on.
“One of Matthew’s little men?”
“He isn’t one of Dr. Luzon’s men anymore,” Sally said. “Luzon fired him. Scuttlebutt is that when Luzon woke up with broken legs, loss of pride, and that massive deflation of ambition, he fired the lot of them.”
Yana grinned. “Anything else, Millard?”
“Funding’s low, but it’s got a waiting list and paid passages for twenty on each of three weekly scheduled flights from Intergal Station.”
Yana gasped “There isn’t room at Kilcoole for twenty extra bodies, much less a hundred and twenty. What is Makem up to?”
“I’d hazard Makem isn’t up to anything,” Millard said, his eyes narrowing, “but I’d suspect Matthew Luzon is. Does Sean say who’s been landed?”
Just then Marmion came into the room, a flimsy in her hand and a look of total exasperation on her face.
“Once again, there can be no meeting,” she said, waving the sheet.
“But Phon Tho was coming back this morning. He said we’d hear today,” Yana said in protest.
“We did,” Marmion said grimly, with another crisp flutter of the message. “But not at all what we hoped to hear. Really, I think we are just going to have to do something.” She tapped her index finger across her lips and then brightened. “Of course! We will put it about that you’re leaving!”
“But—but what good will that do?” Yana asked, almost wailing with disappointment. Of course, she wanted to be back with Sean, to help him with these unexpected visitors—if only to shove them off-planet as fast as they arrived. She was feeling deprived. She hadn’t finally married herself again to spend her time away from the man of her heart and the father of her child. But she didn’t want to have to come back here again whenever the CIS Council finally got its act together and all its members in attendance, just so she, Bunny,