Page 2 of Galactic Search and Rescue
At least the CPS valued her minder talent and taught her to use it. Of course, they’d also insisted she needed addictive enhancement drugs to make it reliable. That, she soon discovered, was the same story they gave all minders in the telepathic and telekinetic categories. The higher the level of talent, the more powerful the drugs they needed. She wasn’t the only transferee who’d quickly decided that was a mech-load of manure.
To start with, drugs weren’t required for everyone in the Minder Corps, just the so-called heavy talents like telepathy and telekinesis. Filers with perfect memories, and forecasters who could spot patterns in a sea of data and predict the future, were exempt. So were animal-affinity minders like Rylando.
He’d said he’d known he was a minder before the first round of testing at age twelve, so it hadn’t been a shock. By joining the CPS GSAR division right after his age-seventeen test, he’d gotten nova-class veterinary-medic training for free and a well-paying career working with animals. On the other hand, he’d had to put up with people calling him subhuman and worse all his life. That had to have tanked.
Stop thinking about the sexy man you can’t have,she told herself,and get back to work.
After she cleared three more heavy crates, she filled a flat cart with smaller items. Rylando helped, and so did the two dogs. Energetic Shen identified candidates for the pile, and Moyo, the larger and stronger dog, helped pull and carry them.
Moyo wasn’t like any other hellhound Taz had ever met. The pet trade originally created them as terrifying fantasy-style guard dogs for the wealthy. The military liked them so well they confiscated the patent and bred them to seek, track, and kill.
As to Moyo, while most hellhounds were star-void black, she looked like she’d been in a glow-paint fight. Plus, she loved everyone, two- or four-footed. Rylando said it made her too trusting. He kept her away from the other teams and their working dogs. She suspected there’d been trouble in the past.
That wariness extended to Taz. Which kind of hurt, if she was honest. Granted, she was the noob, with only one hundred fifty-two days in the unit. He’d only recently begun letting her look after some of his animals while he was away. Maybe in time, he’d realize she would never, ever hurt an animal or take advantage of Moyo’s good nature. If she stayed long enough to prove it to him.
With a flurry of wings, a small but very long-legged brown owl landed on the left shoulder of her assist frame. She froze in mid-lift so as not to frighten the bird. “Hello, Mariposa.”
The owl ignored her in favor of staring intently at the far corner of the storeroom, beyond where Lerox had been wrestling with the padding.
She followed its gaze. “Rylando, did you put the insect habitat in the far-left cabinet like usual?”
The cabinet’s doors had gone missing, and the contents of the shelves were heaped in front of it.
He turned to look. “Frelling hell.” Exasperation sharpened his tone. “That’s two weeks’ worth of treats scurrying their way into everything.”
Insects were a vital part of successful terraforming throughout the galaxy. They were also unstoppable stowaways in the human diaspora, even on military space stations. However, GSAR Unit Leader Bhayrip would use it as a new excuse to again pressure Rylando to decommission the non-standard animals that dined on insects. It irked the captain that CPS regulations protected animal-affinity minders from being ordered to get rid of their animals without extraordinary cause.
“Could Lerox help Mariposa find them?” She pointed to the big weasel, who was now trying to get his mouth around the arm of a fallen chair.
Rylando laughed. “I’ll admit that Lerox will eat practically anything, alive or dead, but he draws the line at beetles and grasshoppers. Once we’re done here, I’ll lower the lights and see if Otak will help.”
Otak was another non-standard rescue animal. According to Rylando, the giant pouched rat was a genius. Humans had bred thousands of generations of them to detect scents in the nano-parts-per-billion range. Each family line specialized in one particular scent, such as explosives or plant pests. Frontier planet settlers swore they were more reliable than the most sophisticated detection tech. And a lot cheaper, too, considering the outrageous markups that settlement companies charged for everything.
From what she gathered, the breeder sold Otak to Rylando for half price, thinking the rat’s nose was defective. Rylando’s talent told him that Otak’s sense of smell was fine, he was just confused by the number of scents he could distinguish. So far, Rylando had trained him to alert on eleven distinct scents and was working on a twelfth. He’d named the rat for a famous polymath from the First Wave of human expansion into the galaxy.
A tone sounded in her earwire. “Either of you free to bring me a mealpack? I missed morning food service, and the cupboard in Comms is bare again.” Jumper Captain Hatya Wa’ara exaggerated her musical Islander accent. “If I have to gnaw on the upholstery, I’m claiming Lerox did it.”
Rylando tapped his earwire but spoke aloud rather than subvocalizing. “I’ll bring you three, just to be safe. Lerox is still on the stink-eye list for chewing holes in Soong’s home-brew beer pouch.” A big head bumped into Rylando’s hip hard enough to knock him sideways a step, making him chuckle. “Moyo wants to come, too.”
Ordinarily, the job of monitoring status and answering staff pings fell to the unit’s six comms techs, but they’d all deployed to the emergency with the rest of the teams. In the GSAR, comms techs were even rarer than rescuers, and transferred out even faster. Silver Team only had a designated pilot because Hatya was on loan from the CPS’s elite-force Jumper Corps. Bhayrip would need half a dozen CPS approvals to get her officially reassigned to a different team.
Taz caught Rylando’s eye. “Tell her I’ll take a four-hour shift at twelve hundred after I grab a few hours of sleep. She’ll listen to you. She’s supposed to be training for her upcoming physical-fitness test, not stuck sitting on her ass in Comms because farkin’ Red Team commandeered our whole bin of secure-net earwires.”
Hatya was great with people and command, but she had the typical Jumper habit of thumping misbehaving equipment. Since everything in the GSAR section of the space station misbehaved, it got a lot of thumping.
In her random off-hours, Taz put her mech-maintenance experience to good use, repairing and improving Silver Team’s tech. She spent too much of her own money on parts, but it gave her something better to do than brooding about the bed she’d made for herself.
“Good idea,” said Rylando. “I’ll take a shift after that.”
He wove his way through the jumble and left, Moyo capering excitedly at his side. Most hellhounds lumbered.
Captain Bhayrip couldn’t send Silver Team out until they got replacement rescuers. He skirted GSAR policy and temporarily lent her and Rylando to other teams. She’d just got back from a Blue Team response to a downed sky skimmer with mass casualties on Floris Delta. When Rylando wasn’t deploying to disasters with his animals, he trained dogs and birds for the regular military.
It wasn’t her business, but she worried that Rylando hadn’t had a downtime shift in several ten-days, or even the opportunity to visit the CPS’s post-trauma therapist. GSAR rescuers sometimes needed help dealing with horrific experiences, or the stress would eat them up inside. He’d worked five back-to-back disaster deployments and just got back from a dog-and-handler training session on Alyphorux, another one of the planets their unit covered. Captain Bhayrip seemed to think Rylando’s training trips were a twisty scam he’d cooked up to get free vacation time.
Bhayrip wasn't the worst unit leader Taz ever had, but he was a close second. She avoided him as much as possible. One unfinished year at a CPS Minder Academy in his youth seventy years ago had apparently made him an expert on everything related to minders and talents. His idea of management was jumping in with gravity boots, causing chaos, then blaming everyone else when it blew up in his face. He couldn’t be bothered to pay attention past the first thirty words of anything. Unfortunately for disaster victims everywhere, he was determined to stay on active duty and deploying for rescues until the mandatory retirement age of one hundred thirty.
Shen barked at her and nipped at a leg pocket flap on her loose uniform pants.
