Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [60]
Sean put both hands to his mouth and uttered the ululating call they always used to cover long distances. One figure responded, straightening up, and looking around.
“Sinead!” he called then.
The sound of her name reverberated under her feet. Then a piercing distant whistle from the far side of the lake indicated that Sinead had not only heard, but seen them.
“Let’s go.”
“Isn’t there anywhere we can go besides near her?” Minkus asked plaintively.
Sean chuckled to himself as he led the way down the slope. Somehow this encounter had restored him in a way not even the swimming could. Or maybe it was a case of both. The planet healing and then revealing what it was he had to do. Organize the influx and protect it as best he could.
He was reminded again of the influx as, halfway back to Kilcoole, they met Clodagh leading the white robes like a mother duck with her ducklings behind her. The white robes broke formation, however, and hurried forward to fuss.
“You poor men, we heard your cries!”
“You couldn’t’ve,” Mooney said. “We weren’t that loud.”
“It was awful,” Clotworthy said to Sister Agate. “I can’t stop shaking.”
“It’s the cold, poor dear.”
The hunters confided to the other offworlders about the cat, the unicorn, and their injuries.
“Poor Mr. de Peugh,” Brother Shale fretted. “Whatever is wrong with him?”
Clodagh shrugged. “Looks to me like he lost an argument with Petaybee.”
“The Beneficence?” Brother Shale asked. “The Beneficence did this to these poor men?”
“Oh surely not,” Brother Schist said nervously. “That wouldn’t be very . . . benevolent . . . would it?”
“Sin,” Sister Igneous Rock said firmly. “He sinned against the planet and it smote him?”
“Now, you just cut that out!” Clodagh said. The hunters weren’t the only frustrated people that day. “Petaybee hasn’t invented sin yet.”
“They did what?” Dr. Matthew Luzon said in a volume that blasted the eardrums of the party on the end of the comm link.
“The PTS transporter license has been revoked and the vehicle impounded.”
“That can’t be done!” Luzon angrily stamped the cane he still had to use into the thick carpet. There weren’t half enough people down on the planet’s surface yet, and he hadn’t been able to infiltrate enough of his agents to effect the sort of damage he had planned on creating. Makem hadn’t reported in since he landed either, and so Luzon had no idea if the Asian Esoteric and Exotic Company had reached the surface. They had been so eager to slay the unicorns for their horns, long believed to have aphrodisiacal and healing powers, and to acquire the whiskers of the orange cats, which they had been told had similar powers as well as life-extending properties. He had also given them a list of therapeutic plants and lichens, which incidentally included all the vegetation so far catalogued on the planet’s surface. The way those fellows worked, a forest could be hewn, chopped into splinters, and removed quicker than one of those disgusting felines could blink. And then the “renewable wealth” of Petaybee would be past history . . . but first he had to get enough people down there to do the job!
“The remote device was removed from the cockpit and there’s one of those propulsion unit clamps that would blow the vessel into trash if someone tried a manual takeoff. That ship is grounded.”
“But that’s a totally prohibited perversion of basic Commercial Venture rights. All the proper forms have been accepted by—”
“They’ve just been disaccepted, Luzon. The credit account has had its assets frozen, and mail, messages, or credit transfers addressed to PTS are being returned to sender.”
Matthew Luzon, fuming and sputtering and sorely tempted to throw the comm unit across the room into the mock-marble fireplace, was trying to figure out how the carefully constructed and protected PTS operation could have been discovered and blocked. Who? Unless that twit-brained Makem had been corrupted down on