The Legacy of Lehr Read Online Free PDF Page B

was likely to remain a mystery for the present. Meanwhile, she decided that she had time to cool off and change to a fresh uniform before going below to look at these strange creatures that apparently had precipitated the aliens’ distress.
    And in the cargo hold assigned to the creatures in question—a square, high-ceilinged compartment perhaps twenty meters on a side—Mather’s Rangers had already secured most of the equipment brought aboard from the shuttle. What was not battened down along the perimeter or stowed in storage lockers had gone into the small security room opening off the larger area, where two of the men were splicing it into the existing security system—much to the mystification of three men from ship’s security. Just in front of the hold’s exit door, Mather and two more Rangers were assembling something that looked very much like an airlock made of plasteel mesh. The other three, under Wallis’s supervision, worked at jockeying the four cages into position for reconnection, one of them hooking up the big scanners atop each cage to switch from battery to ship’s power—all to the raucous accompaniment of four disgruntled Lehr cats.
    Actually, Wallis decided as she circled the long line of cages and took random readings with her hand scanner, the cats had weathered their transfer from B-Gem reasonably well, displaying real hysteria only when the anti-grav lifters were first attached to their cages and they began to float.
    But terror had fast faded to apparent curiosity when weightlessness did not seem to harm. And when lessened weight did return once the cages were ensconced aboard the shuttle ship, Empire Standard gravity being lighter by a sixth than B-Gem Normal, the cats found themselves accordingly lighter, more agile, and almost a little intoxicated by the time docking was made with the Valkyrie . The only other anxious moment had come when the cats had been moved from the shuttle to the Valkyrie and vented their displeasure on the ears of everyone in the vicinity of the shuttle bay.
    Not that the big cats had really settled down yet. Nor would they, until the cages were reconnected and they could be fed. Periodically, and for no apparent reason, one or another of them would let out a great roar—much to the chagrin of the three ship’s security guards, who had even closed the door to the security office in an effort to shut out the noise.
    But at least there was none of that frenzied clashing against the wire mesh, which the big cats had sometimes tried on B-Gem to amuse themselves. The two males looked quite befuddled by it all, and the female called Emmaline had even settled down sufficiently to nap, her oval topaz eyes shuttered to mere slivers beneath twitching, tufted ears. The other female had always been the least amiable of the four, and continued to pace back and forth in her cage, growling and lashing her tail against the mesh. She was also the one who seemed to be making the most noise.
    â€œWell, old Matilda is certainly vocal enough,” Mather said to Wallis as he came to look over her shoulder at her medscan readings. “Do you suppose she knows about hyperspace jumps?”
    Wallis grinned and glanced sidelong at him. “You haven’t been telling her, have you? Some people don’t need jump medication to get them through, and most people don’t react worse from the pills than they do from the jump. You’d better hope our little pets take after their ‘mom’ rather than their ‘dad’.”
    â€œI’ll settle for them making it through alive,” Mather said. “Casey, are we nearly ready to activate that lock?”
    A sandy-haired Ranger back at the entry portal gave a thumbs-up in response.
    â€œTwo minutes, Commodore.”
    â€œGood. Webb, how’re we coming on the reconnections? I think that a lot of this caterwauling is going to stop, once they’re back together