"Mercedes Lackey - A Tail Of Two Skittys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

SKitty described them only as "nasty," but she hunted them gleefully anyway.
The Lacu'un opened their world to trade just over a year ago, and some of
their artifacts and technologies made them a desirable trade-ally indeed. The
Brightwing had been one of the three ships invited to negotiate, in part
because of SKitty, for the Lacu'un valued totemic animals highly.

And that was what had led to Captain Singh of the Brightwing conducting the
entire trade negotiations with the Lacu'unтАФand had kept Brightwing
ground-bound for the past year. SKitty had done theтАФto the Lacu'unтАФimpossible.
She had killed kreshta. She had already been assumed to be Brightwing's
totemic animal; that act elevated her to the status of "god-touched miracle,"
and had given the captain and crew of her ship unprecedented control and
access to the rulers here.

SKitty had been newly-pregnant at the time; part of the price for the power
Captain Singh now wielded had been her kittens. But Dick had gotten another
idea, and had used his own share of the profits Brightwing was taking in to
purchase the leases of twenty more "failed" cats to supplement SKitty's four
kittens. BioTech cats released for leases were generally sterile, SKitty being
a rare exception. If these twenty worked out, the Lacu'un would be very
grateful, and more importantly, so would Vena Ferducci, the attractive, petite
Terran Consul assigned to the new embassy here. In the past few months, Dick
had gotten to know Vena very wellтАФand he hoped to get to know her better. Vena
had originally been a Survey Scout, and she was getting rather restless in her
ground-based position as Consul. And in truth, the Lacu'un lawyer, Lan
Ventris, was much better suited to such a job than Vena. She had hinted that
as soon as the Lacu'un felt they could trust Ventris, she would like to resign
and go back to space. Dick rather hoped she might be persuaded to take a
position with the Brightwing. It was too soon to call this little dance a
"romance," but he had hopes. . . .

Hopes which could be solidified by this experiment. If the twenty young cats
he had imported worked out as well as SKitty's four half-grown kittens, the
Lacu'un would be able to import their intelligent pest-killers at a fraction
of what the lease on a shipscat would be. This would make Vena happy; anything
that benefited her Lacu'un made her happy. And if Dick was the cause of that
happiness. . . .

:Dick go courting?: SKitty asked innocently, salting her query with decidedly
not-innocent images of her own "courting."

Dick blushed. No courting, he thought firmly. Not yet, anyway.

:Silly,: SKitty replied scornfully. The overtones of her thoughts wereтАФwhy
waste such a golden opportunity? Dick did not answer her.

Instead, he thumbed the lock on the crate, a lock keyed to his DNA only. A
tiny prickle was the only indication that the lock had taken a sample of his
skin for comparison, but a moment later a hairline-thin crack appeared around
the front end of the crate, and Dick carefully opened the door and looked