In The Beginning, Gail Daley [red white royal blue .TXT] 📗

In the interest of peace, Katherine assigned Jayla her own room, keeping Juliette in the same room as Violet and Lucinda. She pretended not to hear Lucinda’s snide aside of "well isn’t she a real princess," to Juliette.

Surprisingly, Sooka appeared to like Jayla and the feeling seemed to be mutual. Of course, breeding Quirkas were known to be finicky. Katherine just hoped it would last until they got home to Vensoog.

She did take the precaution of taking the three younger girls aside and asking them to be tolerant of Jayla. "This is all very new to her," she remarked. "Not everyone reacts as well as you three to changes in environment and living conditions. I would appreciate it if you three wouldn’t try and make her life miserable for the next few weeks."

"Sure," Juliette responded blandly. "We’ll be just as nice as pie to her."

Trick Or Prank

RETURNING from A meeting with Captain Heidelberg and the representative of Clans DeMedici and Yang, Katherine had missed lunch with her new family and she was tired. The meeting to set up the accommodation allocations with Captain Heidelberg during the trip home had run overtime. He had wanted all three clans to barrack together; a recipe for disaster in Katherine's opinion. They had finally agreed to utilize one of the empty barracks the ship hadn't yet converted back into a cargo hold providing portable partitions were set up to ensure that no unsupervised interaction between newly adopted members of each clan took place. During the long meeting, they had ironed out an agreement for scheduling use of the exercise area and holo room.

She had particularly wanted a Recreation area for the children, of which Clan O’Teague now had gained quite a number. Besides Zack and Gideon's seven, at least ten more new clan members had requested accommodations for family and children. This had proved an unexpected bonus for Katherine because Private Jayne Muler was expecting her two toddler age children and was quite happy to earn some extra credit supervising Zacks crew when Katherine or Corrine were busy with other duties. The necessity for supervision of some kind had been borne in on Katherine very soon after the children had taken up residence. Keeping five very bright and very bored children out of mischief had proven to be a challenge.

Lucas of course, was of an age to spend much of his time in the barracks with either Gideon or Vernal. Jayla had spent most of the time since she had arrived either pouting in her room or on her personal communicator with the friends she was leaving behind. It was Zack’s new family who kept getting into mischief. They squabbled with each other constantly and Juliette and Lucinda deliberately seemed to find subtle ways to irritate Jayla. During the time since taking charge of them, Katherine was subliminally aware of being tested; the children were carefully watching her reactions to their various misbehaviors.

Katherine had had her first inkling of trouble when she discovered that the body cleaner in one of the bathroom dispensers used by the girls was not only coming out green but that the color apparently had been treated with a staining agent. Jayla had been so hysterical when her hands and face turned green that Katherine had taken her to the base doctor. There, she discovered the doctors were treating a rash of base personnel for green or blue faces and hands, and in one case that was fast making its way through the gossip mill, someone's rump. She didn’t even want to know how that had happened! Since Jayla had rarely left their quarters except for meals, Katherine had a pretty fair idea of whom the pranksters had been. Given that Jayla had been the only victim in their quarters, she suspected one of Zacks crew of pranking Jayla to get back at her for displaying a "princess" attitude with the other girls. The doctor prescribed a topical bleaching cream for Jayla, and Katherine had acceded to her request to take her meals in their quarters for the next two days. She had said nothing to the other children about her suspicions, but she had immediately subjected all the body dispenser cleaners in their quarters to minute inspection; none but the one used by Jayla had been treated with the stain.

The day after the children arrived at the base, everyone who ate meals in the commissary was treated to random farting and burping noises accompanied by realistic stinks. It had taken maintenance three hideous days to find out where the noises and smells originated and put a stop to it.

During this same period there had been a programming glitch in the robocleaners used by the base: it seemed the machines had taken to racing each other down the halls with little or no regard for the safety of any humans unfortunate enough to be in their vicinity.

Although Zack had displayed an unseemly amusement when Katherine explained the necessity for hiring a governess for the children, he had recommended Jayne Muler, a dark eyed woman from the planet Azteca who was expecting the arrival of her twin boys any day. Although Azteca had survived the war intact, the economy had been devastated, and Jayne’s prospects for earning a living there had been bleak.

"Once we arrive home the children will be linked into the planetary education network and receive lessons from there," Katherine had explained to Jayne. "Your duties will mostly consist of ensuring they actually do those lessons. Hopefully we won’t have anymore green or blue stains going into any dispensers!"

Jayne’s dark eyes lit with amusement. "That was them?" she asked, chortling.

"Well, I don’t have any actual proof," Katherine admitted, "But I’m pretty sure the staining ingredients came out of Lucinda’s paints and Rupert’s tests did show an aptitude for chemistry."

"But I heard that one of your girls got ‘greened’ too," Jayne protested.

"That was probably