Her regular military experience with big equipment and her new talent made her a good candidate for the CPS’s Galactic Search and Rescue division. She’d jumped at the chance. Helping people was why she’d joined the military in the first place.
At least the CPS valued her talent and taught her to use it. Of course, they’d also insisted she needed addictive enhancement drugs to make it reliable. That, she later discovered, was the same story they gave all minders in the telepath and telekinetic categories. The higher the talent level, the more powerful the drugs. She wasn’t the only transferee who’d 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. Joining the CPS GSAR division got him good 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 and get back to work, she told herself.
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 fantasy, scary-looking guard dogs for the wealthy. The military liked them so well they confiscated the patent and bred them to hunt, track, and kill.
For one, while most hellhounds were star-void black, Moyo looked like she’d been in a glow-paint fight. Plus, she loved everyone. Even four-footed and winged everyone. Rylando said it made her too trusting, and 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 newbie, with only one hundred fifty 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, 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 bird ignored her in favor of staring intently at the far corner of the storeroom.
“Rylando, did you put the insect habitat in the far-left cabinet like usual?”
The doors had gone missing, and the contents of the shelves were heaped in front of it.
He turned to look. “Frelling hell. That’s two weeks’ worth of treats scurrying their way into everything.”
Insects were an inescapable part of the human diaspora, even on space stations. However, GSAR Unit Leader Bhayrip would probably use it as an excuse to again pressure Rylando to decommission the nonstandard animals. 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 trying to get his mouth around the arm of a fallen chair.
Rylando smiled. “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. A lot cheaper, too, considering usurious settlement-company profit markups.
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 different 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 up for bringing me a couple of mealpacks? I missed first meal, and the cupboard up 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.”
Ordinarily, the job of monitoring status and answering staff pings fell to the three comms techs, but they’d all deployed to the Uttara Phalguni emergency with the GSAR 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 Jumper Corps, and Bhayrip needed half a dozen CPS approvals to get her officially reassigned to a different team.
Rylando tapped his earwire but spoke aloud rather than subvocalizing. “I’ll bring you three, just to be safe. Lerox is still in hot water for chewing holes in Soong’s home-brew beer pouch.” A big head bumped into Rylando’s hip hard enough for him to stumble, making him laugh. “Moyo wants to come, too.”
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. 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.
Bhayrip couldn’t send Silver Team out until they got replacement rescuers. He skirted GSAR policy and lent her and Rylando to the other teams. Taz 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 for the regular military.
It wasn’t her business, but she worried that Rylando hadn’t had down time 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 had 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.