Cat and Company (24 page)

“Nichol,” she said, using as reasonable a tone as she could manage, “no one was looking at me. They wouldn’t have noticed.”

He roared. The sound was horrible and even outside, beyond the walls and the gate, she heard someone say in an alarmed voice, “What was that?”

Nichol swung his arm up from his side in a frighteningly fast strike. The blow caught her under the chin and lifted her off her feet. She fell on the flat surface of the courtyard, her shoulders and hips taking most of the impact. Her head rapped against the floor sharply, leaving her dizzy.

Grit moved under her elbows, biting into the flesh.

I won’t let it rain. It’s my fault
, she thought.

Then Nichol’s big, strong hand gripped the front of her dress and hauled her upward and she let herself be afraid, at last. There was nothing she could do to stop it now.

* * * * *

“What the hell?” Lilly demanded, pushing herself back from the desk, as Connell emerged from his room, scratching at his head and mussing his hair even more than usual.

“Gremlins?” he asked sleepily and tugged at the bottom of the ornate shirt he had put on, trying to straighten it properly.

“You should go back to bed,” Brant said from behind the piano, where he had been plunking out unmusical notes, his mood mellow and his mind in neutral. “You’ve only had a few hours’ sleep.”

Connell frowned, looking at Lilly. “What’s wrong?” he said sharply.

“The whole datacore just…flickered,” she said. “Everything disappeared, then came back again. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Brant got to his feet. “It couldn’t have gone out completely. Connell is still standing.”

Connell’s jaw flexed. “What’s happened while I was asleep?” he demanded.

“Nothing. A hearing, that’s all,” Brant said. “Why?”

Connell turned to face him. “Where is Yennifer?”

“I suppose she’s at home,” Lilly said. “It’s getting late.”

Connell shoved his hair back roughly with his fingers, heading for the door. “Send me the location of her house,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ve never been there before.”

Lilly looked at Brant, her eyes wide.

“Do it,” he told her, getting to his feet. “I’ll go with Connell.”

She pressed her lips together, then nodded and turned back to the desk.

Brant hurried after Connell, who had already moved out of the suite.

* * * * *

Connell shook his head when Brant asked him what he thought was wrong. “I could be wildly wrong and I don’t want to be unjust. Let’s just see, first.”

Brant had a vague idea where the house was, although he had never been there, either. With a start, he realized that all of them could probably say the same thing. Yennifer visited their suite often and not just to work directly with Lilly, yet they had never been invited to hers and Nichol’s house. Ever.

What could possibly have Connell looking so worried? The Varkan all went through this emotional upheaval process. It was part of their maturing process.

Connell was striding through the aisles of mostly sleeping people with his jaw set and his gaze ahead. As he refused to speculate, it left Brant to himself to do just that and he could come up with no possible scenarios that would justify Connell’s reaction.

They reached the tall, blank gate, which stayed closed. “Lilly, over-ride the security and let me in,” Connell said, speaking to the gate. Then Brant realized he was vocalizing a digital message he had sent to Lilly, back at the suite.

“Thank you,” he added, a second later.

The gate locks turned with a soft clink and the gate shuddered open a few centimeters. Connell thrust it all the way open and moved in to the courtyard beyond and Brant followed. His gut was churning, but he didn’t know why. Connell’s unspoken fear was communicating itself.

The gate shut behind them as Connell made a soft sound and hurried over to where the courtyard turned into the house proper, the roof of the rooms shielding the floor from the rain.

Yennifer lay in a huddled heap on the floor, looking far smaller than usual.

Brant’s jaw slackened, then he closed his mouth and hurried after Connell. They bent over the woman and Connell touched her shoulder.

The touch was enough to make her roll onto her back with a soft groan. Then they both saw her face and Brant straightened with a snap. “Don’t touch her anymore until the clinic can scan her and can tell us it’s safe to move her,” he said, squeezing Connell’s shoulder.

“I’m already talking to the clinic,” Connell said stiffly.

“Where is Nichol?” Brant muttered.

Connell looked at him, his gaze baleful. “I hope he is a very long way from here.”

“He needs to know what’s happened,” Brant pointed out.

Connell stood up. “They’re scanning,” he said shortly. He faced Brant. “Nichol August doesn’t need to be informed about this. He’s the one who did it to her.”

For a moment, Brant’s mind went blank. It tottered. “No,” he whispered.

“Yes,” Connell said firmly. Then he held up a hand, his head down. “No,” he said shortly. “If she can be moved, I’ll bring her to you. Stand by.”

The clinic, Brant realized. They’d finished their scan.

Connell bent and picked Yennifer up in his arms. She groaned again. Her eyes, black with bruising, stayed closed. Possibly, she
couldn’t
open them because they were both so swollen.

The blood that coated her face smeared over Connell’s pristine white shirt. He said nothing. Instead, he wheeled and strode for the gate. Lilly was clearly monitoring a directed feed, because the gate opened as Connell reached it.

Brant followed him, sliding out through the closing gate. Finally,
finally
, his thoughts were pulling together. Dismay and a deep bewilderment were still fogging them, though.

“
Why
would he do something like this? Yennifer is sweet and…almost innocent! He outweighs her nearly twice over!” He kept his voice down to a murmur as they passed the sleeping forms in the streets of the village.

“Does it matter?” Connell asked, his voice tight with fury. “He did do it.”

“I don’t understand!”

“Look it up,” Connell said shortly. “It’s one of the ancient diseases that were eradicated when Glave’s precepts came into practice. When humans gave their children over to experts for rearing, the hostile environments that created people like Nichol disappeared.”

“The College,” Brant breathed. This was something he knew well, only his understanding came laterally. Glave had strongly believed that perfecting the rearing and education of children, instead of leaving it in the hands of individual, untrained parents would advance human development faster than mere generational evolution could manage.

Clearly, in this respect, Glave had been right.

“If the disease has been eradicated, then how could Nichol have it?” Brant asked. In this regard, Connell was a walking answer machine to whom he had no problems asking stupid questions. Connell was already tapped into the datacore.

“Something must have gone wrong with his rearing,” Connell said shortly. “Or perhaps he’s just defective. It happens.”

It did, but the more obviously defective humans were dealt with in childhood. That was part of the College’s mandate. Nichol August had been hiding this part of his nature his entire life, if he had been allowed to leave the College as a functional adult.

“This is going to cause another College flurry,” Brant muttered. “Lilly will be beside herself.”

“She isn’t the only one,” Connell muttered and kept striding.

Sunita System. FY 10.187

Four weeks slid by unnoticed as the
Hana Stareach
worked alongside every other Varkan ship in the known worlds to help evacuate the rest of the Sunita system. Catherine lost track of days. Instead, her life revolved around keeping the systems on the ship functional while it ran consecutive jumps to Sunita to pick up another load of refugees.
All
the systems needed constant maintenance, including the Varkan and human contingent aboard and the passengers they carried, who were often suffering some degree of trauma.

The AI that she had assigned to monitoring the physical and mental welfare of the crew and passengers became her personal assistant simply because she drew so heavily upon its expertise and help. After a week of using the board to talk to it, she demanded it find itself an avatar.

Toby presented himself in her room the next time she woke from a short sleep and rolled reluctantly to her feet. He was tall and thin, with a sharp jawline and even sharper eyes.

“I’m Toby. I hope this is sufficient?” he asked, waving his hands to indicate the hologram body.

“If you walk and talk without me having to hold something, that’ll do just fine,” she replied.

Toby had swiftly become the entity she spoke to most on the ship. He stayed beside her wherever she went. As she rarely left the ship, the one place he could not follow, that meant he was constantly with her.

The evacuation of the Sunita system was a massive project. There had been eight settled planets and a dozen moons with mining colonies and cities of their own. Nicia, the least populated planet, had thirty million people living in its floating cities. Every single living, sentient person in the system had to be lifted out of there, as there were no gates left for them to leave by themselves. Bedivere had successfully destroyed them, which contained the Periglus inside the Sunita system.

For now.

Every Varkan who had learned how to access Interspace leapt to find some sort of passenger-capable vessel that they could use to shuttle people out of the system. And everyone, human and Varkan alike, settled into the work.

Catherine knew that Connell had given away all his craft, except for the big bus that he was using himself. She saw the bus occasionally. Usually she was too busy herself to monitor the feeds or even go to the flight deck to look out the windows.

There was a small contingent of single-man Varkan skivvers that patrolled the system while they worked, keeping an eye on Varnham and the Periglus fleet assembled in space around it. It was one of the skivvers that had spotted the first Periglus ever to be seen, when it had been completing a risky, fast fly-by of the surface of the planet, slicing through the atmosphere in a slingshot curve that brought it within a few kilometers of the surface at the closest point of the curve. Long range monitors had captured images of their new enemy and the feed had shot like lightning around the galaxy. Experts had analyzed the footage and others had speculated and extrapolated.

The Periglus were big. That had been confirmed with trigonometry and scaling tests. The individual that had been recorded stood five meters high at the highest point of their body.

What no one had anticipated was that they were longer than they were high.

“They’re not bipedal!” Toby had exclaimed, looking over Catherine’s shoulder as she watched the feed for the first time. “They’re…slugs!”

“They’re warm blooded,” she said distantly, concentrating on the feed. “Just because they have six legs, doesn’t mean they’re insects.”

“Four legs and two arms, from the way that one is moving. The arms are shorter. Evolution, I suppose. Is that clothing it’s wearing over the rest of the body?”

“Or armor,” Catherine said. The remainder of the body was long and flat, the four legs supporting it. The Periglus had a distinct head and round disks that she assumed were eyes and that the experts later confirmed
were
eyes. There was no mouth she could see. There
were
antennae, though, and these waved incessantly. They were shorter than the arms and far thinner.

The arms had jointed ends that served as hands, with an opposable digit—a thumb. The thumb would allow them to grasp objects and use tools.

Because they were warm-blooded, they had a hide instead of a carapace. This one’s skin was a dark brown, with mottled blue markings. As these were advanced, sentient creatures, it was possible either the brown or the blue were decorations. Or make-up. Or their version of clothing.

Until they saw a lot more Periglus, there was no way to tell.

Now they knew what the enemy looked like and the experts were begging for more data, more images. The planetary governors were all screaming protest over that, insisting that Sunita be evacuated first, before anything else.

Popular opinion supported the governors, so the work continued at a frantic, non-stop pace, while the rest of the settled systems offered support in any way they could, including providing space for the millions of refugees.

Charlton had long since reached beyond capacity in that regard and Lilly had sent out a request that some of the refugees be taken off the city before the city-wide systems collapsed under the pressure.

So now the
Hana
and other ships that called Charlton home spent just as much time finding out where to take their refugees as they did actually picking them up. That challenge was Devlin’s and Catherine was more than happy for him to wrangle the governors and politicians who didn’t want any more luckless, homeless people on
their
planets and space stations, draining resources and energy. Everyone agreed that Sunita must be emptied, but that belief turned to reluctance as soon as the refugees impacted their own systems.

The ship fell into a routine of three jump-runs from Sunita to the planets where they were dropping the refugees, then back to Charlton to sleep, recharge and for ship maintenance, which Catherine asked Toby to keep a general eye upon, for they were down to a skeleton crew of ten Varkan, three of them the pilots that spelled each other in the pilot chair. The remaining Varkan were off piloting their own rescue vessels.

After six hours of sleep and frantic maintenance and repairs, the
Hana
would return to Sunita to start the cycle over again. That was how four weeks slid by without Catherine noticing.

When the passengers had been off-loaded on Cathain, the last of three jumps, and when Toby declared that all passengers who had been counted boarding had been accounted for as they left, Catherine moved wearily through the empty and echoing corridors and up to the flight deck. Devlin always had fresh coffee sitting on the table in front of him and she would grab a cup before they arrived back at Charlton.