Deluge
- Автор: Маккефри Энн, Скарборо Элизабет
- Серия: The Twins of Petaybee #3
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Deluge». Краткое содержание книги:
Meanwhile, the powerful and avaricious Company is making another attempt to take over the world of Petaybee for its resources, and the twins parents, Yana and Sean, along with the entire planet, must fight for the independence of their sentient world once and for all...
Clodagh, being Clodagh, had somehow known she was needed and had a fire going in her stove and a kettle boiling on top. The kettle was dented, and he saw that many of the bunches of herbs she had hung from the rafters to dry were strewn around on the floor and crushed. The kitchen table was still overturned, and one of the villagers dashed past him to set it right, propping up a broken table leg with a spare log.
Deirdre, Clodagh’s apprentice, dragged her bed close to the fire, and Sean laid Yana down on it. She promptly sat upright, brushing off with wet mittens all offers of assistance but his and Clodagh’s. The ice melted from her hair and lashes and made her look as if she’d been caught out in the rain.
He peeled off her mittens, and Clodagh cut off the heavy military boots that for some reason she was wearing instead of her mukluks, which were lighter and worked much better during Petaybean winter than the Corps-issued ones. He meanwhile shrugged off his own outer gear and peeled the dry suit off to halfway down his chest, then took her bare hands in his and placed them between the suit and his skin.
Her hands were as cold as the ice itself, but he felt the warmth coming back into them in answer to his own body’s heat.
Clodagh examined Yana’s feet, then took Yana’s hands off Sean’s chest one at a time and examined them. The blue-white of frostbite had already begun fading. She put Yana’s hands back against his chest.
“You’ll mend,” she said with her usual economy of speech. Then she beamed at Sean. She had a beautiful smile and a beautiful voice, and her huge roundness had always seemed to Sean to be Petaybee personified. Healing, comforting, protective, even maternal. Without saying anything, she was clearly telling him it was a good thing they had a selkie in the village.
Yana caught the look and shook her head, disgusted at herself. “Once more the little human in the family needed rescuing. Thanks, love. Some hijacker I turned out to be.”
“I don’t see a ship on the pad, and the crew are under guard in the longhouse. I’d say you did a pretty good job, acushla.”
“I could kill Aidan,” Yana muttered.
“What did I do?” her threatened homicide victim asked in a wounded tone.
“Why did you need to cut a fishing hole in the ice so early in the season?” she asked.
He turned a stricken face to Sinead, who entered with much stamping of boots and slapping together of mittens to rid them of snow before hanging them on hooks beside the fire. No doubt she had tended to the dogs before coming in from the cold herself. Aisling helped her with her parka and brushed the snow from her short dark hair, saying, “Yana’s mad at Aidan about the ice hole.”
“My fault, Yana. He’s not to blame.”
“See, you can keep murder in your own family,” Aidan said, holding up his hands as if in surrender, “I was just following orders.”
“I had our people set a few little surprises for our guests,” Sinead said. “I’d have mentioned it, but things were moving a bit fast by then and there was no chance to warn you.”
“Petaybee knew,” Sean said. “I felt a quake, and a warm channel opened up from one of the springs, right past where Yana was. I had been thinking it was the warm current that thinned the ice and caused her to go bathing so early in the season, and with her clothes on too.”
“Very funny,” Yana said. She stuck her tongue out at Sean, but since she was within two inches of his face already, he took advantage of the gesture to give her a lengthy demonstration of how glad he was that she was safe.
“Well, then,” Sinead said, “I think it’s high time for the rest of us to interrogate our prisoners. Come along, you lot.”
Clodagh pulled on her parka too.
“We’ll be good, Clodagh,” Sean said.
“Shush,” the big woman replied, following the others. “I’m needed elsewhere.”
SKY FLIPPED ONTO his back with great difficulty, his jaws aching with their burden. Land was far away. Hundreds of waves. Hundreds and more hundreds. Otters swam well, but wet cats were very heavy.
He knew she was alive because he could hear her crying inside. Also, she did not smell dead. There was a very sharp difference between alive smell and dead smell, and she still smelled alive, mostly.
The waves washed over them fast and slapping. Then Sky, who had been focused on his passenger, heard the engine, and then he did not.
Someone with a human voice called, “Shut ’er down, Lloyd, and come and have a look at this. I swear, this planet must be in retrograde today or some such foolishness, because as long as I’ve lived here I’ve never seen anything but stiffs and squid. Now all of a sudden there’s seals and this! Look to the stern.”
“What is it, sir? I can’t make it out,” the other voice said.
“I couldn’t swear to it, but I think it’s a river otter carrying a drowned rat or something.”
River otter? This man obviously did not know a river otter from a sky otter! “Isn’t that something. Looks like they’re headed for shore. I’ll steer around them, shall I?”
“No-no, Lloyd, I know you’re not going to believe it, but that’s no rat, it’s a pussycat, and look at how that otter is struggling to keep her head above the water. Either that otter is trying to save that cat or this tub is a luxury cruise liner.”
“No kidding?”
Sky swam toward their voices, which were friendly and also coming from the right direction. Then he stopped. The boat smelled like old death.
“It’s okay, little feller, bring the kitty here. Ol’ Cap’n Terry won’t hurt you or your little buddy. I like cats. Never liked otters all that much, but one that would try to rescue a drowning cat is an otter I’d like to meet.” His voice had a pleasing rumbly singsong to it, the same sort of tone as Father River Seal and his sister and other humans who did not eat otters. The boat smelled bad, but Sky’s sense of smell was very good at picking odors apart from each other. He could read all of the secret meanings of a scent poem or even an otter scent epic. These were usually travel tales of places visited but also told who the otter leaving the epic was, as well as his parentage, ancestry, mate, offspring, and how many fish each had caught lately.
Cap’n Terry’s scent was good, like Father River Seal’s, and Lloyd’s scent was also good. Sky swam to the death boat.
“Dip net!” the captain commanded. A round hoop with a net in it came into the water. At first Sky tried to turn and just put Zuzu into the net, but her head went under, so he swam backward himself, into the net.
It raised him into the air. He told himself that that was fine. Sky otters were used to the air. He wasn’t sure about cats, but he thought that at this moment Zuzu was probably glad to be anywhere but in the water.
They were hauled over the side of the boat and lowered to the deck. One of the men reached for Zuzu, and Sky unclenched his jaws, which were aching from holding on to her with the right amount of pressure to keep her skin between his teeth while not biting through it.
With Zuzu on her tummy, the man pushed on her back and water poured out of her nose and mouth, but still she didn’t move. Putting her on her back, the man tilted her small wet head to one side. Water did not actually make cats look good. Zuzu’s fur did not look sleek like an otter’s-it glued itself to her body and made her look thinner than she was, so that every cat bone showed. Her whiskers drooped and her curly tail looked tiny and sad without its fluff. It was good they had been swimming in warm water. On Petaybee she would have frozen. With one finger the width of a large eel, the man gently pushed the cat’s jaws apart and pulled out a bit of seaweed. More water followed. Then he put that finger on her chest and began moving it up and down. After the first hundred finger pushes, he bent very low.
“Hah!” Sky exclaimed, and scrambled to his paws. It looked as if the man was trying to eat Zuzu. He covered her mouth and nose with his own mouth, but he did not bite. He puffed with his own chest, then removed his mouth and pushed her chest some more.