Trigger frowned. "But what could be the connection—"
Quillan reached across the table and patted her hand. "You've got it!" he said with approval. "Exactly! No connection. Some day I'm going to walk down those rows and give them each a blast where it will do the most good. It will be worth being broken for."
Trigger said, "I thought that catassin planet was being guarded."
"It is. It would be very hard to sneak one out nowadays. But somebody's breeding them in the Hub. Just a few. Keeps the price up."
Trigger grimaced uncomfortably. She'd seen recordings of those swift, clever, constitutionally murderous creatures in action. "You say it looked like catassin killings. They haven't found it?"
"No. But they think they got rid of it. Emptied the air from most of the ship after they surfaced and combed over the rest of it with life detectors. They've got a detector system set up now that would spot a catassin if it moved twenty feet in any direction."
"Life detectors go haywire out of normal space, don't they?" she said. "That's why they surfaced then."
Quillan nodded. "You're a well-informed doll. They're pretty certain it's been sucked into space or disposed of by its owner, but they'll go on looking till we dive beyond Garth."
"Who got killed?"
"A Rest Warden and a Security officer. In the rest cubicle area. It might have been sent after somebody there. Apparently it ran into the two men and killed them on the spot. The officer got off one shot and that set off the automatic alarms. So pussy cat couldn't finish the job that time."