Catacombs (16 page)

I leaped back into the fray, but even as I did I heard the kittens making a terrible racket behind us and hoped they would not return to “help.”

I watched the flickering tongue searching for my mate, her handmaiden, my boy, and each time it flicked out, I darted forward and slashed it, then darted back before the great head could descend and drip venom on me.

Dancing sideways, I slashed and slashed. Snake blood slimed the floor, already moist with mist from the water. Jubal had found some sort of stake to jab at the snake.

I heard Renpet scream to the kittens, “Run!” We could hold the serpent at bay only a little longer before it devoured us all. Chione dove in and grabbed Renpet while the snake tried to strike Jubal.

A louder yowl sounded behind me. I lost focus long enough to listen, to turn my ears back, and the snake struck.

Chione was almost to the bridge, Renpet in her arms, when the snake arched over us and came down upon her, its right fang striking her to the ground. Renpet flew from her grasp, her back legs writhing against the slippery stone. The snake had uncoiled enough in its strike that its body now blocked Jubal from attacking its head. I skimmed the slick stone on my belly to reach Renpet.

But even before I reached her, doom fell upon the snake as the snake had fallen on Chione. The queen’s warrior cat and a delegation of the guard, my mother, my sire, Sol, Bat, Beulah, and a great multitude of battle-ready Barque Cats, closed on the snake. Balthazar was there too, not doddering now but using his walking stick to strike the snake’s snout over and over.

Beulah settled it by taking out a weapon and sending a bolt of light into the snake, which writhed and hissed and then dropped its head while all of the cats clambered onto it and worked on its hide with their claws, flaying it. The laser pistol hadn’t killed the snake but we cats did. Renpet kept clawing the tongue long after the long body stopped twitching. Bits of it littered the floor.

Then Balthazar knelt over his fallen daughter, shaking his head slowly. Renpet cried and would have licked at the blood on Chione’s shoulder, but Balthazar held her back. The blood would be mixed with venom. Jubal picked her up and petted her over and over again, trying to comfort her as she cried for the girl she had loved as deeply as I love Jubal. “Can you help Chione?” he asked Balthazar.

The girl’s sire looked up at him and shook his head. “Her spirit has flown.”

The cavern would be no haven for the new fugitives, full of unmoving and immovable reptile as it was.

Balthazar tried to carry Chione by himself, but he was old and the fight had taken most of his strength. The rest was sapped by loss. Jubal let Renpet down and took the girl from her father, carrying
her over his shoulders as I had once seen him do a sheep, taking her to the fruit grove. Beulah helped him lower the girl to the ground and then she and Balthazar began washing the body, cleaning away the venom with strips of cloth.

Pshaw-Ra chose that moment to check in. Did the refugees arrive safely?

Yes, but all is not well
, I told him, and related what had happened.

I suppose Balthazar won’t be much use to you then. You’d better get going. I’m not sure how long it will take Nefure to understand that the kittens, and many others, have truly disappeared as she wished them to. Go!

But—

There are many of them to tend to the burials and defense of the kittens. They have Renpet to lead them. There is only one of you. You must take that boy of yours and find help. Only then can we implement our reentry into the galaxy at large
.

From the way he put it, I knew he was much less interested in the welfare of any of us, including the kittens, than he was in pressing forward with his master plan. Stupid she might be, but the selfish Nefure was his daughter all the way.

When we reached the ships, Jubal took his former seat in the landing bay portion of the pyramid vessel and Pshaw-Ra guided me through the takeoff procedure. By now I was much more familiar with the picture writing.
If you touch the bird, the sun, and the pyramid, you will reverse our original course
, Pshaw-Ra’s dream self told me.
If you are not intercepted, you will eventually end up where we first met, drifting
.

I did what he said because our escape was also the beginning of us rescuing everyone else. But once the ship had broken Mau’s atmosphere and Pshaw-Ra’s thought-voice could no longer reach me, and after I had set the course as he directed, I began to shiver
and quake. Everything that had happened and that might yet happen swept through me, and I was suddenly very frightened. Having done all I could at the helm, I ran back down the gangway leading from the nose cone to the outer, human-sized portion of the ship, swam free-falling to the bay where Jubal sat lashed to his seat, and anchored myself to him with all of my claws, aching to be petted, to be told that we would be fine, that someone would save us.

I don’t suppose you preloaded any food, did you?
Jubal asked.

This was not what I wanted to hear.

B
y Jubal’s reckoning, he and Chester wandered and drifted the best part of a month before they made contact. They went through different scenarios about what would happen, what they should say. They were still fugitives, so they knew it would be a mistake to invite rescue and risk bringing an extermination team down on themselves and all of the other survivors. They couldn’t just board any passing ship that might take an interest in them. They needed to find someone they could trust to return with them to Mau and rescue the others.

Fortunately, food wasn’t as desperate a problem as they’d feared at first. Pshaw-Ra had provided a good swarm of kefer-ka, and someone, most likely Balthazar, had stocked dried fish, fruit, and water.

Nevertheless they had to be on short rations. Chester dreamed about food so much he was amazed when all of a sudden he found himself dreaming about his milk brother Doc instead.

Checking the charts on the bridge, he showed Jubal that they were approaching a space station. They had crossed two star systems close to Mau already but were not yet back in the main space lanes. This station would be an outpost of some kind, if not a derelict.

Does it say which one it is, or if it’s still working?
Jubal asked.

Not that I can tell
, Chester said.

Jubal hadn’t seen a space station on the trip to Mau, but then he
wasn’t thinking about the scenery on their flight from the pursuing Galactic Government ships. If this were a human ship, like the
Ranzo
, he could find out soon enough, but the cats of Mau—at least Pshaw-Ra—did not seem to find the same details relevant that humans did. That kind of thing apparently bored them.

I’m tired
, Chester said, yawning, emerging from the bridge to climb onto Jubal’s crossed legs and settle down for a nap.

It’s true I was a little sleepy, but mostly I was curious. While I was with Pshaw-Ra on the pyramid ship before Jubal came for me, the old cat showed me how to dream-travel and to use dreams—mine and those of other cats—to board passing ships, get answers to my questions, even to plant messages.

When I closed my eyes this time and relaxed into Jubal’s lap, I let my mind wander, searching for another cat mind. Honestly, I didn’t expect to find one. I thought most of the surviving space cats would be those we’d left behind on Mau. But to my surprise, I locked dreams with a very familiar fellow dreamer, one who had shared my very earliest dreams. My milk brother, Doc, brother of Bat, was on that space station. My littermates and I had been cared for by his mother, Git, while our mother recovered from a birthing gone wrong. And when Git was killed while protecting us on a hunt, my mother took over care of Doc, Bat, and their brother Wyatt. Doc, apparently not a good judge of character, had bonded with Jubal’s father, a wily old human called Ponty.

I felt around in the bond with Doc, and sure enough, Ponty was there too.

Jubal had dozed off, and I reached out and grabbed him by the dream to pull him in with me as I made the mental leap through space, as easily as if I were jumping onto a bunk, through the view port of a battered old ship that could have been a derelict but
contained Doc and Ponty. Here, surely, was the help we needed. I needed to be careful not to sound too desperate, however. Ponty, unlike Jubal, was not entirely trustworthy.

My dream self found Doc and Ponty on the man’s bunk, Doc curled up sleeping on the man’s chest. The man’s eyes were closed too, but when I jumped up, he opened them and looked straight at me. I thought he must be looking through me, but no. He spoke to me.

“Did you know it was okay to come back now, boy?” he asked softly, waking Doc. He repeated to Doc,
Did he know?

That was too much for me. I didn’t want to deal with Jubal’s crooked sire head-on, even in my dream form. I had to up the “cat of mystery” illusion here—which was hard to do with a man who had been there practically at my birth.

I jumped down and trotted away, beckoning Doc to follow me, which he obligingly did.

Jubal’s old man was still talking to my tail, knowing who I was if not what I was, and evidently glad to see whatever part of me he was seeing.
Yeah, everything is fine and everybody really misses all you cats and wishes you’d come back. Jubal’s mother and I miss him too. Is he okay? Doc, dammit, can’t you talk to him?

Doc was following my lead, however, and I led him to the bridge. I projected my message onto the com screen. I could not yet type at that time, but it was my dream and I was in control of what was in it. Even the parts others saw. Thank Bast for spell check. I jumped up to the chair and put my paws on the keyboard, moving them as if I were typing.

The com screen filled with words, glowing green on a black background.

Some of us are ready to negotiate
, the screen said.
The planet of Pshaw-Ra is all that he said it was, more or less, but it is also hot
. I proceeded to list our complaints about Mau, with the general idea that while it had sounded like a nice idea to live on a planet where we were worshipped as deities, it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

How is Jubal?
Ponty tried asking me mentally, but I wasn’t about to turn around. Instead I segued from “It’s okay but we’re ready to go” into my list of demands.

Some like it here very much, but some are ready to negotiate. Kibble should come, and Weeks. And the doctor
.

Come where? Are you and Jubal ready to come back, Chester boy?

That was my cue to disappear, letting the last few letters remain on the screen like the smile of that cat in the fairy tale Jubal once read to me. I wrote,
Some are willing to negotiate
. Then, as I had seemed to, they disappeared.

“You’re giving him too much credit, Chester,” Doc told me. “He’s a human. You’re going to have to show him where to go.”

I let him see me again, sitting beside the navigation screen. Doc joined me, saying, “See, there’s us at Alex Station.” I told him the boy reckoned we were two solar systems away, and he helped me find Mau. I made it blink.

Ponty was rather amusing, moving in slow motion as though he thought he was still dreaming. With a click of a button he saved the chart.

Good man! Smart man!

I touched noses with Doc, thanking him for the help, then rubbed my dream self against Ponty’s arm, suggesting that he could feel my fur.

Sending one last message to the com screen, I leaped through the view port and back through space and the hull of the pyramid ship, safely back in my body on Jubal’s lap. I hoped Ponty got my last message about the fishy treats.

Carlton Pontius, aka Carl Poindexter, known as Ponty to his shipmates, had just the tiniest little conflict of interest when it came to rescuing the cat and his son aboard the derelict ship, and ultimately from the Planet of the Pussycats, as he thought of the place where they’d gone.

His current berth was on the
Grania
, which was just a crossed bone short of a pirate ship. On the plus side, the captain, Mavis, did like cats, and officially Chester’s milk brother Doc was hers. Doc saw things differently and considered Ponty his. Ponty walked on thin ice all the time trying to keep Mavis from getting jealous, when she noticed the cat at all. She probably would have liked it if Doc had ridden on her shoulder like a parrot, but Doc disliked the incense sticks she sometimes tucked lit into her dreadlocks.

On the minus side, since the Barque Cats had been MIA and the other cats pretty much exterminated by the wisdom of the Galactic Government, the vermin problem had reached disastrous proportions and any cat was worth tons of money, which made this whole rescue thing an important business opportunity for Mavis.

Ponty was still trying to come up with cat clones, but he’d forgotten a couple of ingredients at their previous port, and Alex Station didn’t offer much but booze, drugs, and extra-large rats, both four- and two-legged.

Still, his kid was involved.

So he got busy on the com. “
Molly Daise
, this is Poindexter at Alex Station. Did you copy my transmission about the pyramid ship? … What do you mean, am I sure it’s them? You’d better get here before someone hijacks it. The local populace are inclined to see anything not nailed down as salvage. Which sorta reminds me, did I mention you should bring weapons?”

Then he commed the vet, Dr. Vlast, and Janina Mauer, Chessie’s girl, the
Molly Daise
’s Cat Person. He told them briefly what was going on and asked if they could pass word on to his almost ex-wife, Dorice, that Jubal was okay and coming home,

He was glad when they promised to pass on the message because he much preferred to deal with Dorice indirectly. She was a bit high-strung, but if he didn’t let her know he’d heard news of the kid, he would be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life, which might be cut tragically short once she got hold of him.