Catacombs (17 page)

He had come to a mutual respect with the vet and Janina, from
whom he’d “borrowed” Chester’s mother, Chessie, to begin his short-lived career as a Barque Cat breeder, while teaming up with them to try to save the Barque Cats from the idiocy of the galactic politicians. There didn’t seem to be any hard feelings on that end. He wasn’t so sure about the crew of the
Molly Daise
, but he guessed he’d find out for sure when they reached Alex Station.

Meanwhile, how to keep kid and cat in good health until reinforcements arrived? Of course, the cat hadn’t actually said the kid was with him, but since the boy had crossed the galaxy (and in an even gutsier move, defied his mother), Ponty figured that where the cat was, his boy was too. He would need to take them some supplies.

He set about gathering up protein bars, water (which was not in great demand on Alex Station—if he’d tried to stockpile booze, someone would have noticed right away), and cat food.

Boss, not my food!
Doc complained, dogging—well, catting—his footsteps. He didn’t have to worry too much about being disturbed on the
Grania
while she was docked here because Mavis and most of the crew preferred the bars to shipboard for doing their business. Occasionally someone returned to sleep, but he was pretty much left alone, supposedly working on his cat cloning project. Ponty picked up the kitten—cat now, and a pretty big one at that—and scrubbed his ears, stroked his soft gray back, and tweaked the fluffy end of his plumed tail.
It’s for Chester, Doc
.

Doc indicated that family feeling and philanthropy stopped at the rim of his food bin.
I’ll tell Mavis
, he threatened.
You’ll get in trouble, boss
.

Ponty knew Doc couldn’t actually talk to Mavis—this telepathy thing seemed to be one to a customer—but he could maybe draw her attention to the fact that he and some parts of the cargo were not where they were supposed to be. It was a little hard to get Mavis’s attention these days, but she did have that weakness for cats.

Tell you what
, Ponty said.
Why don’t you come with me? Maybe
they have some ultradelicious cat food they’re keeping to themselves on that ship. Besides, it’s from a planet where cats are worshipped. Don’t you want to see a ship from someplace like that?

It can’t be too great or they wouldn’t be back now, looking for us to pull them out
, Doc said shrewdly.

Okay. Have it your way. I may have to just stay with them and go back to that place too. I hope you’ll be real happy here
.

That’s not going to work
, Doc said, but he jumped into the hatch of the G
rania
’s shuttle before Ponty loaded the last of the food and water, enough for two people and two cats, and took a seat himself. He hoped nobody would sober up in the next few hours.

Touching reunions were not the order of the day, but Jubal told his old man thanks for bringing the provisions, and Doc was interested to see how a cat could fly a space vessel without human help.

Jubal asked after his mom, and Ponty asked a lot of questions about where they’d been and what they’d been doing, but all Jubal said was, “It’s a long story. You’ll see soon enough if you’re coming. Meanwhile, hadn’t you best get back to the space station before they miss you?”

“Here’s the thing, son,” Ponty told him. “I don’t think they’re likely to miss me right now, but it might not be so easy to get away next time. Especially since I have their shuttle and Doc with me. So what I’m thinking is, Doc and me should sign on with you and Chester and we get our tails out of here before Mavis finds out I’m missing. I have the coordinates for the route the
Molly Daise
will take to get here. How about we meet them halfway? You got enough fuel and oxygen and that kinda thing? I brought provisions to see us through.”

Jubal consulted with Chester, who was having a hissing contest with Doc, seemingly just for old times’ sake.

It’s not like he can steal
this
ship
, Chester pointed out.

Jubal knew that was true enough, since the old man was no
more able to fit into the pyramid ship’s nose cone than he was. Still, he had been ready for a nice quiet rescue mission with Chester, not having to listen to his dad’s BS for the duration of the journey.

But if his dad’s boss was going to make trouble for them, then he had to agree that the best thing was to leave the area, meet the
Molly Daise
, and fly back in with reinforcements.

Actually, catching the old man up on what had happened since they last met turned out to be easy compared to what came next.

Chester pawed and pawed at the pictures on the control panel but could not figure out how to make the mouse hole work. He sat in front of the panel for hours at a time watching it in case it tried anything tricky that would give him a hint to its secrets. It didn’t help that Doc kept making helpful suggestions, touching the controls with paw pats or sticking his nose against them and asking, “What does this do?”

At least with Doc there, the old man could also see what the bridge looked like.

Come on, boy
, Jubal told Chester finally.
Pop checked our course and he says we should be back in Galactic space soon enough. The mouse hole could lose us permanently if we don’t know how to work it
.

Chester growled with frustration and whipped his tail back and forth twice before following Doc’s example and abandoning the bridge for a snack and a nap.

However, in warp drive, the ship entered Galactic space inside two more weeks. By then the old man had caught Jubal up on what had been happening in the galaxy, as far as he could tell from com traffic at Alex Station, and Jubal and Chester caught him and Doc up on what it was like on Mau.

Jubal’s mom, along with Janina Mauer and Dr. Vlast, were waiting
outside the
Molly Daise
’s docking bay when the pyramid ship landed inside Chester’s old ship.

Jubal’s mom hugged him so hard she almost crushed Chester, who was cuddled in his boy’s arms. Then she stepped back, scanning him, walking around him, looking scarily fierce.

“Hi, Mom,” he said.

Behind her back he saw the old man take Captain Vesey, who was giving him a flinty-eyed look, to one side, before the captain signaled for Janina and Dr. Vlast to join them in a walk up the corridor, leaving Jubal alone with his mom and Chester.

“You’re taller,” she said accusingly.

“Am I?” he asked. It wasn’t like there’d been a lot of mirrors down in the tunnels. She nodded. He swallowed and asked, “So how are you, Mom? How’s the farm?”

“I lost it,” she said, and even though she didn’t put a lot of emotion in her voice, Jubal knew how upset that made her. The farm had been her family’s before she married Pop. “I’m sorry, I tried. I went to work for Mr. Varley, but when Dr. Vlast got your call, he and the girl came after me. Mr. Varley paid my way.” Her voice softened a little. “It’s good to see you again, baby.”

Jubal took a deep breath, stepped forward, and hugged his mother again. Though always strong and sturdy, she’d never been a large woman, and now it felt like she was all bones. Whether it was losing the farm, losing track of him, or a combination, he could tell how hard all of this had been on her. “It’s okay, Mom. I’m okay. Chester’s okay. Pop’s okay.”

She snorted at the last but didn’t make any overt threats, which was a hopeful sign, Jubal thought.

Dr. Vlast examined the cats and pronounced them fit for duty.

“In that case,” Captain Vesey said when the vet had made his report, “we’d appreciate it if Chester and his friend would take care of some of the rats and other pests infesting the ship.”

Chester and Doc needed no persuading. They headed for the ventilation ducts and other hunting grounds even before Jubal and
his dad relayed the message. There was no need to ask a cat to hunt. Chester, who already knew the
Molly Daise
from kittenhood training with his mother, led the way.

Jubal, his parents, Janina, and the vet sat down in the galley for a real cooked meal.

“Jubal Poindexter, don’t bolt your food,” his mom said.

“I can’t help it, Mom,” he said through a mouthful. “This tastes so good. I haven’t had much but fish for months. This tastes as good as what you used to cook.”

His mother looked pleased. “That’s because I cooked it. The cook they had knew how to use a replicator but he had no idea at all how to prepare the food properly once he got it out of the machine.”

Jubal nodded and looked down at his almost empty plate. “What kind of meat is this?”

“It’s not meat,” Janina said. “It’s a bean-based substitute. Most of the animals that are left since the epidemic are too valuable to slaughter. They’re being used to rebuild breeding stock. But Mrs. Poindexter has done a wonderful job of making this taste like chicken.”

“Pop was telling me while we were on the way here that you and him and Dr. Vlast got that big shot in the government to admit that the epidemic was all a hoax. Too bad all the animals got killed first.”

“Yes,” Janina said. “And I feel awful that we couldn’t do it before Chessie and the others left. Is she well, Jubal? How are they all doing?”

He began relating some of the adventures he’d had with Chester on Mau, and ended by saying, “There are a lot of kittens now.” Janina smiled, showing dimples, and Dr. Vlast squeezed her hand.

The hull and bulkheads and the deck under their feet rattled and thumped and occasionally squeaked.

After quite a ferocious yowl, Jubal anxiously called out,
Chester?

Later, I’m hunting
.

I remembered the
Molly Daise
as a very clean place with the worst infestation being the kefer-ka. Now the keka bugs were nowhere to be seen, and instead squeaks and skitters, rattling and banging, came from the inner hull, the ventilation ducts, the overheads, and from beneath the decks. We had not been on deck two seconds when a rat sauntered across the corridor in front of us.

Doc and I had a little discussion about the new breed of vermin while still aboard the pyramid ship en route to the rendezvous with the larger ship. “They’re super smart and extra mean,” he said. “They’ll strip a ship or a man down to the bones. There was one old cat at Alex Station, mostly slept all day, and they killed him too.”

“That’s just wrong!” I said, my skin twitching with horror.

“The bugs are bad too, but the rats are the worst,” Doc said. “They eat the insulation from the walls and from around the electrical wires and start fires. One reason Mavis let me stay onboard with Ponty was that I kept the rats down. I am only one cat, though, and Alex Station was full of the boogers, so as soon as I cleared out one, two came in to replace him.”

Needless to say, the rat who sauntered across our path didn’t live to saunter anywhere else. Doc was all over him before I could lift a whisker or the rodent could utter a squeak.

Not that I was any slouch. I was, after all, a cat who had fought the great snake—twice. Rats were no big deal, at least not one at a time. Or even in twos and threes—but there were dozens in the ship, maybe hundreds. I lost count. We cleaned out the biggest nests in the first few days, stopping only to eat—other stuff, that is—and sleep. It was a terrible time. In my sleep I heard them crying, “Mother!” and “Head for the outer hull! I’ll try to hold the monsters off.”

In the ducts, one of us would go in and start luring them out, and the other one would pounce them as each one emerged. If
two came, we both pounced. Sometimes we were surrounded by rats. They tried a pincer movement on us but we were bigger, smarter, and seasoned warriors against vermin like them, whereas they had had it easy—I doubt any of them had even seen a cat before.

Tackling the ones in the wiring got tricky. The rats didn’t care if they got electrocuted or not. Doc and I were not so reckless.

We surprised four of them gnawing on the electrical system that fed power to the engine room.

“Avast there, ratty,” Doc said. He didn’t expect them to understand him. “Belay that chewing now!” Doc had picked up a few piratical phrases at Alex Station.

Not on your life, catty
, the biggest of the rats responded—thought-talk, the first time we realized they could use it just like us. It had been kind of creepy hearing their dying squeals and interpreting them as last words, but I thought I’d been imagining things. But it figured that if eating the kefer-ka could let cats share thoughts with humans, the same might be true of cats and rats. I didn’t like it, but it seemed to be the case.
You may kill our families but we are going to go down gnawing
.

Go down is right
, Doc said.
But you won’t be alone
.

Oh yeah?

The. Ship. Is. Under way. Rat-brain. If. You. Destroy. The. Wiring. It. Cannot. Fly. And. How. Long. Do. You. Think. Anyone. Will. Last?
He spoke slowly and used simple words, mostly. The rat thoughtfully chewed the plastic it already had in its mouth.

Huh. You
might
be right about that. But we’d take you with us, aha!

Nah, we’d just get into our special cat ship with our humans and fly away
, Doc said.
You and your families would be
wishing
we killed you, though, as you die from lack of oxygen or sudden decompression that will flatten you like someone stepped on you
.

We’d be just as dead
, the rat said.

How about if we make a deal with you?
I asked.
We’re tired of
killing you rats, but we can’t let you wreck the ship either. Our job is to protect it. If you stop doing damage, we’ll make sure you get enough to eat and drink during the rest of the trip, but as soon as we land—off you go. No more ship rats
.

You’re going to offload us someplace where there’s no oxygen, is that it?
he asked.
You cats are sly
.

We were. But it had nothing to do with oxygen.