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

build their own headquarters. It looked from the half-finished buildings as if
SolarQuest was going with a motif taken from their own logo of a stylized
sunburst; UVN was going for geometrics in their wall-decor.

There were four ships here at the moment rather than the authorized three; for
some reason, the independent freighter that had brought in the twenty
shipscats was still here on the landing field. Dick wondered about that for a
moment, then shrugged mentally. Independents often ran on shoestring budgets;
probably they had only loaded enough fuel to get them here, and refueling was
taking more time than they had thought it would.

Suddenly, just as they passed through the doors of the building, SKitty
howled, hissed, and leapt from Dick's shoulders, vanishing through the
rapidly-closing door.

He uttered a muffled curse and turned to run after her. What had gotten into
her, anyway?

He found himself looking into the muzzle of a weapon held by a large man in
the nondescript coveralls favored by the crew of that independent freighter.
The man was as nondescript as his clothing, with ash-blond hair cut short and
his very ordinary faceтАФwith the exception of that weapon, and the cold,
calculating look in his iron-gray eyes. Dick put up his hands, slowly. He had
the feeling this was a very bad time to play hero.



"Where's the damn cat?" snapped the one Dick was coming to think of as "the
Gray Man." One of his underlings shrugged.

"Gone," the man replied shortly. "She got away when we rounded up these three,
and she just vanished somewhere. Forget the cat. How much damage could a cat
do?"

The Gray Man shrugged. "The natives might get suspicious if they don't see her
with our man."

"She probably wouldn't have cooperated with our man," the underling pointed
out. "Not like she did with this one. It doesn't matterтАФWhite got the new cats
installed, and we don't need an animal that was likely to be a handful
anyway."

The Gray Man nodded after a while and went back to securing the latest of his
prisoners. The offices in the new CatsEye building had been turned into
impromptu cells; Dick had gotten a glimpse of Captain Singh in one of them as
he had been frog-marched past. He didn't know what these people had done with
the rest of the crew or with Vena and Erica, since Vena had been taken off
somewhere separately and Erica had been stunned and dragged away without
waiting for her surrender.
The Gray Man watched him with his weapon trained on him as two more underlings