Read Online Third Watch by Anne McCaffrey - Free Book Online

else he might have been a merchant, making his living by importing exotic fabrics, jewels, foods, spices, and furnishings. However, the Friends did not seem to have anything like an economy that she could see, at least among themselves.
    “If people don’t pay Pircifir for what he brings back, how does he pay for the items in the first place?” Khorii asked Ariin, who had spent a lot of the time in their cabin sulking.
    “How should I know?”
    “You grew up with them. Didn’t you learn anything about them?”
    “No, I was too busy being studied,” Ariin snapped.
    “You didn’t notice where the meals were produced, or the clothing?” Khorii persisted. “I didn’t see anything that looked like industry there, yet they have spacecraft and the time lab, all of these scientific things.”
    “Why don’t you go ask your cat?” Ariin asked. “Not that he’s very truthful.”
    “Maybe I will,” Khorii said.
    But when she asked Grimalkin, he just smiled in the same way he had when he was a cat and had caught something particularly tasty in a particularly clever way. “If you have an asset that’s important enough, you don’t need to have a lot of others, youngling,” he told her. “When we dock at the next port, you’ll see. But don’t interfere. Remember the larger mission.”
    That aggravated her so much she forgot how irritated she was with Ariin. “He was such a nice kitty,” she said, mourning the loss of her pet who, now that he walked on two legs, acted more like Elviiz than Khiindi, all superior and lording over her.
    “I tried to warn you not to let him loose,” Ariin said.
    “I didn’t. He found me. You took him back to before his friends made him stay a cat all the time.”
    Ariin repeated a word that Captain Bates sometimes used when she was mad, after which the captain usually mumbled an apology. Ariin didn’t bother, however.
    “For once you could have let me handle this on my own, you know,” she groused. “You don’t have to hog all the credit for everything all the time.”
    “We were going to,” Khorii told her. “But once you got on board, the ship didn’t come back like it was supposed to, so we came early enough to join you. Look, I don’t really care about credit at this point. I’ll be glad to tell everybody that everything was your idea—then they can look sad and disappointed at you because we ran away and scared them…”
    “We’ll use the crono and be back before they miss us,” Ariin said in her own superior way, as if Khorii was being tedious.
    “We’ll still have to let them know about the mission,” Khorii replied. “If we find the origin of the aliens invading everything, we’ll probably still need help stopping them.”
    “Maybe. Maybe not,” Ariin said.
    Khorii privately thought the Friends relied on their cronos and the time device too much. If it wasn’t for the time map, they wouldn’t know whether they were coming or going.
    She didn’t know the half of it.

    W hen they docked on a green planet paisleyed with deep blue oceans, Pircifir and his crew trooped out on foot to a nearby marketplace that reminded Khorii of the nanobug market on Kezdet.
    They heard and smelled the market four blocks before they actually entered it. Vendors either cried their wares or broadcast prerecorded advertisements and jingles. Strange music blared, accompanying every variety of entertainment and many of the sales pitches. Engines drove both the machinery on display and the machinery used to transport and display it. Animals roared, brayed, growled, and chattered. Intertwined, over and under and all around these noises, were voices babbling in many tongues, bartering, admiring, disparaging, or just trying to make themselves heard in shouts and sometimes screams.
    The medley of conflicting aromas, scents, fragrances, and stenches was exciting, but slightly sickening, too. Spicy foods, sweat, cooking meats, baking sweets, more sweat, excrement, pungent incense,