Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [70]
“Thank you. Well, let me repeat: No, Louchard tends to deal in inanimate cargo, which is why I’m really surprised to see him turn to abduction.”
“Cargoes being unable to testify in court, right?” Yana remarked cynically.
“Exactly, and once sold on can rarely be traced, since so often they are the raw materials which are turned into different goods entirely.”
“Tell me,” Yana said with a sudden surge of mirth, “does Louchard then steal those goods and sell them on?”
Namid’s face and eyes lit with answering amusement. “I really haven’t been with this happy band of free-souls long enough to have observed that.” Then he sobered. “I can only extrapolate from what Dinah used to tell me. And, of course, I’d no idea that she was generally transporting stolen goods.” He sighed unhappily, and now it was Marmion’s turn to console him.
“But you do agree that we’re breathing a different kind of air right now, don’t you?” Bunny insisted.
“I do,” Marmion said, and the others nodded. “Clever of you to have noticed, Bunny. Although why the pirate ship remained so long at Gal Three . . .”
“That’s the easiest part to guess,” Bunny said impatiently. “Who’d look on the station for us?”
“A good point,” Marmion said magnanimously. “Your pirate captain is indeed a devious man.”
“I wonder if he’s an orphan,” Namid mused, trying vainly to cheer himself up.
“An orphan?” Bunny exclaimed in surprise. She’d been one most of her life and had never found the condition easy. She nearly lost Namid’s response, because thinking about being an orphan reminded her that, if the pirate should waste them all, ’Cita would be all alone again and lose what precious little self-confidence she’d gained since knowing she was Bunny’s sister and a Rourke.
“Yes, an orphan,” Namid went on briskly. “To further the analogy of the pirates I mentioned earlier.”
Bunny forced her mind off sad thoughts and listened while, with such music and words as he remembered from the score of The Pirates of Penzance, he regaled them and thus passed the time until their next meal as pleasantly as their circumstances allowed.
“They call this ‘spring’?” asked Zing Chi, chief representative of the Asian Esoteric and Exotic Company Ltd., as he glanced around the desolate sweep of the broad valley, soggy with melt, yet burgeoning with insect life and the blooming of plants that the insects were helping to germinate. He was thoroughly disgusted and wanted to leave when they’d only just managed to get to Petaybee South. The transport service on which he had booked his team had been terminated and their monies returned, but the refund alone was barely sufficient to bribe their way to the planet’s surface, to this particular, comparatively unsatisfactory setdown point. The southern pole of the planet did contain some of the botanicals listed, but it was the northern continent that was the documented source of what he had been assured were riches of herbal gold—and those elusive qualities in unicorn horns and cats’ whiskers for which his company could charge their oldest customers vast fortunes.
Zing Chi was one of the best field operators, able to strip acres of plants by bloom, leaf, stem, and root in no time at all. Some of the vegetation in sight looked familiar and was supposed to be plants that had been brought to Petaybee during the initial terraforming so they could adapt to this new world. But the nearest were only ground cover, cultivated to keep topsoil from being blown away.
He had been given no warning that his entire team would have to do all of their collecting on foot. They had seen no villages so far, no cities, no place to purchase transport of any sort. Zing Chi began to fear that there was none to purchase.
Fortunately, his people were very good walkers and walk they did, gathering, stripping, and neatly cataloguing anything vaguely resembling the plant materials listed, even those available elsewhere.
After five days, they had laid bare a strip approximately fifteen miles long and a half a mile wide. It took all the animals they could find to feed them,