Cat and Company by Tracy Cooper-Posey Page B

ship looks different.” He looked at Brant who stood between the two chairs, holding the backs of them. “They were purpose built. What they did collect was the design.”
    Bedivere focused on one of the ships that Connell had described as “spiky”. They did look spiky. The front of the ship, where presumably the flight deck was located, if there was one at all, formed a head, attached to the body of the ship by an articulated and elongated structure that had panels or baffles mounted along the center line. Spikes.
    The front of the flight deck had observation windows that glinted crimson in the light of Canum’s red sun.
    “Dragons with red eyes,” Brant murmured. “Where’s Kashya?”
    “Behind us,” Connell murmured.
    “Hang on,” Bedivere said and switched the rear screens into active mode.
    The view swapped over and Bedivere caught his breath. “Glave save us…” he muttered, using Brant’s favorite oath. “That isn’t the Kashya we looked at before we jumped.”
    “That was an image in the datacore,” Connell said. “This is the real Kashya.”
    Kashya, as registered in the datacore star catalogue, was the third planet of Canum. It had a highly inhospitable and thin nitrogen and ammonia atmosphere with a swirling permanent cloud cover. The original generation ship that had built the gates had lost all but a handful of their landing party on the surface. The three survivors had only lived a handful of years after that before needing regeneration, because the atmosphere was corrosive, eating at most metals and humans, too. The ores on the planet were resistant, which made them particularly valuable and explained why someone had registered the mineral rights. If a cheap way of extracting the metals could be found that didn’t kill off their labor too quickly, a profit could be made down below the cloud cover.
    What they were staring at now was bare rock face, with patches of green. There was no cloud cover, yet there was a shimmer where the planet curved away from the naked eye.
    “Atmosphere,” Bedivere said. “Only…not the atmosphere that used to be there.”
    “They changed it?” Brant breathed. “Terraformed it…so quickly?”
    “Who are they?” Connell demanded. “No one can terraform a whole planet in a few days or less. We’re still perfecting the technology and even then it takes decades.”
    “Wasn’t there a mining colony under a dome, here, Bedivere?” Brant asked. “Where is it?”
    “It should be on the dawn line right now,” Bedivere said. He looked at the emerging edge of the slowly turning globe. There was more green, more bare earth and rock. He magnified the view so that something as small as a large house would show.
    For long minutes they scanned the section of the globe, quartering it with the long range viewer.
    “It’s gone,” Brant said bleakly. “Everything…and everyone.”
    “Whatever they use to terraform…it must wipe out everything already in place,” Connell said slowly, staring at the view. “Like a big meteor hitting a planet and destroying the atmosphere.”
    Bedivere looked at the armada of ships floating around them, silent and still. “They hit it with something from up here. Something big that destroyed the atmosphere and all life, then replaced it with something they wanted in its place. An atmosphere favorable to them.”
    “They’re down there, then?” Connell whispered.
    Brant rolled his eyes.
    “I think so, yes,” Bedivere told him, except that something was niggling, trying to sit up and talk to him. He left it alone. The idea would arrive when it was ready.
    “We should leave,” Brant said. His voice was hoarse. “Someone with the ability to wipe out an entire planetary ecosystem…I don’t want to meet them.”
    “We came for information,” Bedivere reminded him. “I’ve been scanning since we landed. I’m nearly done.”
    “Who could do this?” Connell was still whispering.
    “Hurry up,” Brant