Powers That Be

by Anne McCaffrey

  Yana took a couple of steps toward the tent before the smoke from the fires wafted toward her. She felt her throat seizing up and stepped back, silently cursing her weakness. How the frag was she going to survive on a cold planet if she couldn’t breathe in the presence of fire?

  Bunny, her shoulders bowed as she hauled one of the thermoses with both hands so that the container bumped against her shins, nodded to Yana to return to the snocle. Yana was relieved not to put her lungs through any further ordeal. She turned with more enthusiasm than was prudent and her feet promptly slid on the ice underlying the thin covering of drifted snow. She placed her feet more cautiously then, and managed to make it back to the snocle without falling.

  Seamus set the other water thermos in beside her and ran a mitten across his face, an accustomed gesture that dislodged some of his facial icicles. “Welcome to Petaybee, such as it is, Major. You need something, you just ask Bunny here.”

  Yana nodded. “Thanks.” It was just possible that, if her official guide turned out to be anywhere near as inept as she herself was in this environment, she would find Bunny’s unofficial assistance more useful.

  They arrived at Yana’s new quarters long after darkness had fallen, though by Yana’s calculation it was no more than late afternoon. She looked at the small single house standing alone on pilings beside others of similar construction. It had one window and one door that she could see in the gloom, and the window was small. Whatever. It was bound to be roomier than some of the berths she’d had, and compared to her place on the ward at the space-station hospital, it looked palatial, as well as incredibly private.

  Bunny hefted her duffel out of the snocle for her and pushed open the door. The interior was spare, white as the outdoors, and contained a cot, a small table on which rested her survival pack, a chair, and a stove for heating and cooking.

  “It’s too late for you to inprocess today. Sorry it took so long,” Bunny said. “Look, wait here and I’ll get some blankets. You’d better take this water, too. No one’s given you your ration.” She nodded toward the thermos on a shelf beyond the stove.

  “That’s for your auntie, isn’t it?” Yana asked. “And I can scarcely take your blankets, too.”

  Bunny shook her head. “They won’t care about the water, and I can spare the blanket. You’ll be issued your own tomorrow.”

  She drove away in the snocle and, in a short time, returned on foot, carrying a bundle of puffy cloth and a packet. “Smoked salmon strips,” she said, indicating the packet.

  “What?”

  “Fish. It’s good,” Bunny said patiently. “You’ll like it.”

  Yana’s day had started back at the station hospital nearly thirty hours earlier, and she couldn’t face anything more taxing than rolling up in blankets and going to sleep as fast as possible. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Okay, then. Shall I pick you up in the morning to meet your guide? I could get the blanket then, too.”

  Aha, Yana thought, a little blackmail here to ensure the continuing custom. Very enterprising. “That’ll be fine,” she said with a weary lift of her eyes that would have to pass for a smile. Bunny showed her how to light the stove before she left and promised to help her organize more fuel the next day.

  Without waiting for the room to warm up enough for her to remove her outerwear, Yana arranged the chair at the head of the cot, sat down, and stretched her legs out on the bed. She had chewed only a couple of bites of the oddly spiced salmon strip before she fell asleep, as she had for the last few weeks, sitting up.

  Bunny Rourke returned to her aunt’s house after delivering the blankets to her client and returning the snocle to its special shed.

  “I’ll need to check it out again in the morning,” she’d told Adak O’Connor, the dispatcher and guard.

  “No shuttles due from SpaceBase for another week,” Adak said, removing his headphones and turning away from the radio that connected him to SpaceBase and the few other places on Petaybee that had such advanced equipment. He scowled at his record book, which contained the schedules for the port and kept track of the whereabouts of the vehicles—both of them. Bunny was licensed to drive one, Terce the other: they were the only authorized drivers to and from Kilcoole. The shuttles belonged to InterGalactic Enterprises, known as Intergal, the omnipresent if not omnipotent corporation responsible for the existence of Petaybee, and the boss of all Bunny’s people. Bunny had qualified for her license only because one of her uncles was an important man and owned his own snocle as well as dogs. When Bunny’s parents had disappeared, Uncle had taught her to drive the snocle to help her make her own way in the village so she wouldn’t be a burden. She was Uncle’s driver on the rare occasions when he preferred the snocle to his team. She also made the trip out to his place to keep the machine running for him and repair it when it broke down—usually from neglect. Her uncle was a brilliant man but not mechanically inclined. Bunny took after her Yupik granddad: she could fix anything. And six months ago, on her fourteenth birthday, she had obtained her license to ferry passengers from SpaceBase to Kilcoole and back.

  “I know there’s no shuttles,” she told Adak, “but my fare has to inprocess in the morning.”

  “Can’t she walk or go by sled?”

  “Nah. She’s an important dama. An officer. But she’s puny. Said something about being at Bremport.”

  “The massacre where the Shanachie’s boy was killed? Ah, the poor dama. And how is she puny?”

  “She coughs. Bad. But she seems nice. Anyway, the snocle is authorized for official functions, so I want to take her round to the outpost as quick as possible so she can settle in, like.”

  “Good child. You’ve taken to this dama, have you?”

  “She’s sleepin’ this night under the quilt Auntie Moira made me.”

  “Then by all means take the snocle in the morning, but mind you, no sight-seein’.”

  “Thanks, Adak,” she said. “I’ll bring you one of Auntie Moira’s cakes in the morning when I come, shall I?”

  “That would be very welcome, Bunny. Good night now.”

  “Good night,” she said, and headed back to the shed behind her aunt’s house.

  Ever since her older male cousins had turned a little too inquisitive about her development, Bunny had preferred to sleep out here, in back of the kennel where Charlie kept his team of noisy and protective dogs, who warned her of anyone approaching. She wasn’t really scared, though. Most of the people who came to see her brought her things—fish or moose chops, zucchini or tomatoes in the summer—though some came just to visit. She was personally related to a large percentage of the village, and she knew who would help her and who to avoid. There were a few people she didn’t want coming to her place—Terce, for one, but he was scared of Charlie’s dogs. Mostly, everyone looked out for her. That would have made her feel like a child except that she looked out for them, too. That was how it was in Kilcoole. She was actually very adult for someone her age, trusted with the responsibility of living on her own and holding down her own job.

  Approaching her house, she was greeted by the hounds, who set up a good welcoming howl as she walked quickly through them, unclipping the lines from Pearse and the lead dog, Maud.

  She was pleasantly surprised to see smoke rolling up from her chimney to the sky. As she followed its path she saw the lights were on display tonight: a simple pale green band whipping across the black sky, dancing and twisting and sequined with stars. The smoke from the chimney smelled grand—nutty and warm. Maud whined and stuck her long muzzle in Bunny’s pocket. The dogs were more used to Bunny, who had time for them and who usually fed and exercised them, than they were to Charlie, who was their owner. Bunny petted Maud absently. Even with her stove getting a head start on the chill, without her quilt she would need the dogs for warmth tonight. She would let them in to get toasty by the fire while she ate her supper.

  The big red dogs with their thick soft coats took up most of the floor space in the little s
hed. It contained her berth, a scrounged unit cut out of one of the dead ships at SpaceBase, a shaky tabletop pegged into the wall and placed so she could sit on her berth to eat, plus the stove and the shelves she had built from old storage crates to hold her few belongings. She had the three books left her by her parents, a set of tools—a gift from her uncle upon obtaining her license—and a selection of shells, rocks, and mushroom-shaped tree tumors, as well as hand-me-downs from the cousins and what little gear she had. On the table was a mare’s-butter candle; it gave a fairly bright light, though it didn’t smell very good. Her shed was built of stone, of which Petaybee had plenty. She had caulked it with mud two breakups earlier and reinforced it with some plasti her Cousin Simon had scrounged for her at the SpaceBase when he first joined the corps, before he shipped out. The plasti had originally been used to repair the bubble around the SpaceBase garden, and it did well in the cold, never cracking or contracting.

  Something plopped down beside her onto the table and mewed up at her. She reached down to stroke the rust-and-cream stripes of one of Aunt Clodagh’s cats, though which she couldn’t say since so many of the Kilcoole felines were orange-marmalades. The cat pawed the door, and Bunny smiled and followed, chattering to the cat.

  “So Clodagh already knows about my passenger, does she, and left you here to tell me to report? Glad to, cat, as long as there’s a bite in it for me.”

  The dogs in the shed had ignored the cat; the ones in the yard did not bark as it led her through the kennels. No one’s dogs ever barked at Clodagh’s cats. They went where they pleased and knew where everything was and what everyone was doing—as did Clodagh.

  2

  The official guide—only a second lieutenant, Yana noted—stood up when she entered the room.

  “Major Maddock,” he said, saluting and flashing her quite an energetic smile. “Lieutenant Charles Demintieff, first Petaybee military liaison officer, at your service, dama.”

  “Relax, Lieutenant,” she said. “I’m reporting to you, not the other way round.”

  “Yes’m. It’s just that I’ve read your file, and we don’t get many heroes back here.”

  “Most heroes don’t make it back anywhere,” she said.

  He laughed as if she had said something extremely witty. “Then we’re luckier still to have you, Major. Colonel Giancarlo from SpaceBase snocled in this morning to welcome you personally. When you’ve had your chat with him, we’ll go over the routine stuff.”

  Walking into the adjoining room, Yana felt as wary as if she were entering the bridge of an enemy-held ship. If the SpaceBase brass wanted to talk to her, why hadn’t he done it at Inprocessing and saved himself, a long, cold ride?

  The colonel, in contrast to the lieutenant, did not look happy to see her. His insignia was one she had seen only occasionally: Psychological Operations, a euphemism for the Intelligence branch. She reported, and he waved her into a chair while he continued typing something into a terminal.

  “Well, Major,” he said after she had been sitting there long enough to become impatient and uncomfortable in her heavy gear. “What do you think of Petaybee so far?”

  “Seems friendly,” she said cautiously. He was testing her somehow, but she wasn’t sure for what. “The air is clean, pretty cold. Fairly primitive technologically. New recruits from here need extensive training in the simplest equipment, and it’s pretty obvious why, from what I’ve seen of my quarters and the village. Am I missing something?”

  “If you are, you’re not alone,” he said, his eyes shifting from the terminal to hers and boring into them. “There shouldn’t be anything here that we didn’t put here. This planet was nothing but rock and ice when Intergal claimed it. The company terraformed it, upgrading it from frozen uninhabitable rock to a merely arctic climate. For the last two hundred years, it’s been useful as a replacement depot for troops, a relocation center for the peoples who were being displaced by our other operations. Because the climate is rough on machinery, only SpaceBase contains much in the way of modern comforts. The transportation needs of the inhabitants are mostly supplied by experimental animals bred for the purpose.”

  “Experimental?” Yana asked. “Like lab animals?” She had been born on Earth but had spent her childhood being shunted with her parents from one duty station to the next. Lab rats and monkeys were somewhat familiar to her, along with a number of different alien species, but she was unfamiliar—except from pictures—with the beasts she had seen on her way here today.

  “Not exactly, although I suppose their ancestors did some time in a lab—originally. The company hired Dr. Sean Shongili to alter certain existing species to adapt to this climate. That’s how the resident equines, felines, and canines, and many of the aquatic mammals, come to be here.”

  “I see,” she said, but she didn’t. The dogs obviously worked as sled animals, the cats to keep down rodents. But she couldn’t understand why Petaybee supported equines, too. Horses, from what little she knew of them, seemed rather inappropriate for such a climate. And considering the need for hacking and burning holes in ice to secure water, wasting such effort on domestic pets seemed totally unproductive.

  “Well, Intergal doesn’t, entirely,” the colonel said, as if he had read her thoughts. “The animals we commissioned are here, but there have been sightings of other types that indicate perhaps Dr. Shongili and his assistants were a trifle more creative than was covered by their authorization. The current Dr. Shongili, also Sean, is certainly an odd bird, not what you’d call a team player. We’ve monitored his records, however, and can’t find any evidence that he’s been exceeding his instructions. We could, of course, move him, but this is not a research area favored by many in our employ, and the Shongilis have done so well at producing viable species for arctic conditions that we’re reluctant to remove the current Shongili without more concrete evidence. Trouble is, unauthorized species are not the only anomaly. Something else is going on here—our satellite monitors have detected deposits of important minerals on this planet. When we dispatch teams, they either can’t find the location of the deposits, or else they simply don’t return.”

  “That’s why psyops is interested?” she asked, relaxing a little.

  “You got it.” Suddenly he grinned at her, an expression that did not make him any more attractive. “That’s where we can help each other, Major.”

  “Sir?”

  “You’re here this morning technically to be demobilized. You’re a medical retiree due to spend the rest of your days on this iceberg, which is unfortunate for you. However, your experience as an intercommand investigator, and your earlier work with preliminary data-gathering landing teams, is of some interest to us, despite your disability, as is your record of combat experience. You don’t realize it yet, of course, but being a combat veteran carries considerable cachet in this place where most families have at least one, and usually several, relatives in the corps. Furthermore your genetic stock is similar to these people’s.” He eyed her, and Yanaba knew he was assessing the sprinkle of white in the black hair that Bry used to claim had an auburn cast under bright light, the high cheekbones, the rather bleached-out olive complexion, and the slightly tilted green-gold eyes. Her body had once been lean and athletic, but weeks of illness had reduced her to brittle gauntness at a weight she might have enjoyed had her strength not deserted her along with the extra kilos.

  “How’s that?” she asked, mystified.

  “The people on this continent are a mixture of Irish and Eskimo—we’ve resettled cold-weather natives all over the planet to assist the others in assimilation. In this area it’s Eskimo: in other settlements, ethnic Scandinavians and Indo-Asians.”

  “I don’t exactly fit then,” she said, smiling as tolerantly as possible.

  “Well, of course, you were practically born into the company, but your father was Irish and your first name, Yanaba—”

  “Yanaba,” she corrected. “That’s Navajo—my mother’s people. It’s a war name, l
ike a lot of traditional Navajo names. Means ‘she meets the enemy.’ The Navajo, by the way, were desert dwellers, not snow people.”

  “Close enough,” he said. “Desert can get damned cold midwinter.” He dismissed her objection with a wave.

  That told her she had made a tactical error by showing up his ignorance before she heard what he wanted. But she had a fierce loyalty to her family. All she had of them now was the history recorded in the computers for her by her parents before their deaths. It was about all she had had in her life that hadn’t been Intergal-issued.

  “We think you can fit, Maddock,” he told her. “And we want you to do just that, because we need to know what’s going on. We want you to get to know the people, find out what or who exactly is responsible for these problems: if Shongili is concealing experiments in producing new life-forms on this planet, we need to know about it. If the geologic survey teams are being deliberately ambushed and eliminated, we want to know that, and we want to know whom we have to deal with. You don’t have enough technical knowledge to locate the deposits yourself, but we want you to find out who’s preventing our teams from locating them. If there’s some kind of sabotage or incipient insurrection brewing, help us put a stop to it.”

  “Wouldn’t it have been more effective to recruit a local informant?” she asked.

  Giancarlo snorted. “There’s something screwy about all of them. They all stick together all the time, and every time I’ve had one of them in my office for any length of time, they start sweating and turn red. Why would that happen if they’re not scared, hiding something? Even Demintieff sweats like crazy every time he comes in while I’m here. This office is always freezing when I arrive, and even while I’m here, he keeps that outer office way too cold. These people also have gatherings that nobody from SpaceBase is invited to, and if you ask one of the new recruits from here about it, they just shrug.”