Fuzzy Nation Read Online Free Page A

be.
    Regardless, Holloway scanned the platform and through the foliage to look for climbing cables and the like. Nothing. The other option would be that someone dropped in from above, from a hovering skimmer, which then took off. But Holloway would have been pinged about any traffic within a hundred-klick radius when he set the autopilot. He hadn’t been.
    So: Either there was a super-awesome ninja assassin lurking in his cabin, knocking over pottery, or it was just some dumb animal. While Holloway wouldn’t put it past Bourne to put a hit out on him, especially after today, he also doubted that Bourne could shake out a competent assassin on short notice. The best he would be able to do was some of the less intelligent ZaraCorp security types, such as the aforementioned Joe DeLise. They (and particularly DeLise) wouldn’t have bothered with sneaking up on him.
    Chances were excellent, then, that this was a dumb animal; probably one of the local lizards, in fact. They were the size of iguanas—just small enough to avoid impalement on the spikewoods—vegetarians, and dumber than rocks. They would get into absolutely everything if you gave them a chance. When Holloway first came to Zara XXIII and had his treetop compound built, the place was infested with them. He’d put up an electric fence at first, but discovered that waking up every morning to the sight and smell of barbecued lizard depressed the crap out of him. Then another prospector told him that the lizards were utterly terrified of dogs. Carl arrived shortly thereafter.
    “Hey, Carl,” Holloway said to his dog. “I think we got ourselves a lizard problem.”
    Carl perked up at this. He very much enjoyed his role as solver of lizard problems. Holloway smiled, took the skimmer off STOP-HOVER mode, and went in for a landing.
    Carl was out of the skimmer as soon as Holloway turned off the engines and opened the cockpit. He sniffed happily and headed off in the direction of one of the storage sheds.
    “Hey, dummy,” Holloway said to Carl’s tail, which was whipping back and forth. He walked over to his dog and whacked him gently on the flank. “You’re going the wrong direction. The lizard’s in the house.” Holloway pointed in the direction of the cabin. He looked at the cabin at the same time, catching the image of the cat staring at him through the window over his work desk. Holloway stared back at the cat. It took him a second to remember that he didn’t own a cat.
    It took him a second after that to remember that cats didn’t usually stand on two legs.
    “What the hell is that?” Holloway said, out loud.
    Carl turned at the sound of his master’s voice and saw the cat thing in the window.
    The cat thing opened its mouth.
    Carl barked like a mad dog and bolted toward the cabin door. His lack of opposable thumbs would have brought him up short had Holloway not installed a dog door after he’d gotten tired of being woken up in the middle of the night to let Carl out to pee. The dog door’s locking mechanism picked up the proximity signal from the chip in Carl’s shoulder and unlocked the door roughly a quarter of a second before Carl jammed his head and body through it, bolting effortlessly into the cabin.
    From his viewpoint, Holloway saw the cat thing fling itself away from the window. Less than a second after that, Holloway could hear the sounds of many things breaking.
    “Oh, shit,” Holloway said, and ran for the cabin door.
    Unlike Carl, Holloway did not a have proximity chip implanted in his shoulder; he fumbled for the key to open the dead lock on the door, barking and crashing continuing nonstop as he did so. Holloway undid the bolt and cracked open the door just in time to see the cat thing running toward it.
    The cat thing looked up, saw Holloway, and skidded, desperately trying to change its vector of direction. Carl, directly behind the cat thing, leapt up to avoid the braking creature and twisted midflight, connecting his flank with