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became fewer, leading off into the countryside where horse farms such as Varley’s occupied square miles of fields. The businesses along each spoke were separated into malls according to the sort of wares they sold. There was a food mall; a hardware and repair mall; a clothing, shoes, and fripperies mall; a children’s mall; a housewares mall; and a livestock mall containing feed, horse tack, and home veterinary supplies. She’d heard new settlers express wonderment at the strange arrangement of their town, but the prefab wedges that formed around towns had been the shape carried most easily in the early round-hulled ships. Some of the houses had been delivered that way too, but other, humbler and more primitive dwellings were made of native organic plant life and stone. She liked the look of them, as each was different from anything she had seen before.
    While Jared went into a café in the food mall to order their picnic, she ducked into the adjacent clothing spoke to shop for the gifts Captain Vesey had requested she purchase for his family. It was nice that he made an effort to show them he was thinking of them no matter where he was.
    Bypassing the sections containing uncomfortable-looking shoes and colorful clothing, she headed for the jewelry and accessories. Captain Vesey’s oldest daughter was horse-crazy, so Janina selected a bracelet beaded with running horses for her. For Mrs. Vesey, she found a hood and collar of soft loden green mohair, locally grown. The hood and collar were a nod to the hero of Terra’s original Sherwood Forest. The colony’s marketing team had decided on that theme for their souvenir industry, but this was a new product,something Janina hadn’t seen before. That was why Captain Vesey liked the dirtside malls. The space station’s shopping center held a far more cosmopolitan array of goods and services, but each planet had certain lines of items that could be found only on the surface. They made fine collectibles, and the captain said Mrs. Vesey was an original who liked unusual things. Janina had seen pictures of the captain’s family and thought the hood would suit Mrs. Vesey’s green-gold eyes and rather dramatic bone structure very nicely. For the youngest girl, she found a little lavender drawstring bag decorated with a bow and arrow motif outlined in shiny purple crystals. Her shopping complete, she returned to the tracker. Chessie had switched positions so that her face was now to the wall. Janina held her breath for a moment, thinking Chessie seemed too still, then a delicate ear tuft quivered and the long tips of her upturned whiskers twitched. Janina relaxed. Poor Chessie had needed this rest badly.

CHAPTER 3
    C arlton Pontius—Ponty to his shipmates, Carl Poindexter more familiarly to his local Sherwood associates—had not forgotten his son Jubal’s birthday cat at all. Or rather, he had momentarily forgotten his promise but remembered it immediately when he saw the
Molly Daise’s
Cat Person and her prize queen.
    Ponty was a man whose capacity for inspiration had often come to the assistance of his aspirations. Like the cat in the little lady’s arms, he usually landed on his feet and got the cream while he was at it.
    He had been a soldier until he saw the light and started working as an arms dealer and a sales rep for pharmaceuticals of both legal and illegal status. He had served in every conceivable rank and capacity aboard ships, chiefly those that smuggled prohibited technology from world to world for a price. His sales experience had made him a valuable asset to such crews. His was a competent medic and a mostly self-taught geneticist, having reared several clones from test tube to maturity en route to their most lucrative destinations. Among his other less legitimate talents, he was a consummate con man.
    But even he had never in his wildest dreams imagined that he would someday include cat rustling in his résumé.
    Oddly enough, it was his child’s innocent