Catacombs (20 page)

The tractor beam apparently stayed in place. The boarding tube began wiggling with the movements of the people inside it. I felt an almost irresistible impulse to pounce on the bouncing thing and bite and claw it.

We tried the same maneuver with the ship that had the
Ranzo
trapped in its tractor beam, darting in closely. There was a flash and a concussion, and we ricocheted off the picture symbols from one wall to the other before the pyramid ship righted itself.

“They fired on us!” Pshaw-Ra cried triumphantly, giving a couple of stiff-legged hops from side to side as a victory dance.

“That’s a good thing?” I asked.

“You watch.”

We zoomed back in more closely, but this time when we veered off, the pirate ship followed course while the
Ranzo
slipped away.

“Mouse-hole time!” Pshaw-Ra exclaimed.

The symbols I had seen once before appeared—the great snake, whom I now recognized, opening its mouth to swallow our tiny ship. The pirate ship followed close on our tail. Before the hole could close, Pshaw-Ra steered our craft back toward the opening, skimming the belly of the pursuing craft now headed the wrong way, and we flew back into the sector where the pirate woman still held our friends in thrall. The hole closed behind us—and the second pirate ship was somewhere else. I didn’t know where that was, but they wouldn’t know either. They would be lost, lost, lost, and it served them right!

Now we were free to help the
Molly Daise
, and so was the
Ranzo
—if we were not too late.

Jubal hoped Chester’s plan would work, because he didn’t think this was something Pop was going to talk his way out of.

The
Molly Daise
was a peaceful trading ship and had even fewer arms than the
Ranzo
. Captain Vesey ordered the passengers and crew, including Jubal, to lock themselves in their cabins.

Pop handed a protesting Doc to him as he left the bridge. “Take care of him, son, and yourself,” Pop said with a seriousness that was scary. “Mavis doesn’t exactly take rejection well. I’m afraid she might hurt Doc if she finds him. And she might not draw the line at hurting you, even though you’re a kid, since you’re my kid.”

“I’ll take care of him, Pop,” Jubal promised.

As Jubal locked the door to the purser’s cabin behind him, he
heard Mr. Yawman say, “I’m ex-Guard, Cap’n. If we organize, we can take ’em.”

He sounded excited, not at all like the careful records keeper who figured every credit the ship and her personnel earned or spent.

Over the cabin’s screen now displaying the bridge, he saw Pop saying to the captain and purser, “No need for anyone to get hurt. Mavis is a businesswoman. She’ll rob you blind, true, but as far as killing anybody goes, she might kill me, but probably not …”

To his surprise, Jubal saw his mom enter the bridge with a laser rifle she held as comfortably as she did the shotgun she’d used to run Pop off the farm. “Killing Carlton is still my privilege,” she said, “and that old harpy will have to go through me to get him.”

“Now, Mrs. Poindexter—” Yawman began, but she froze him with a look. She was good at that.

“May I remind you that in addition to this sorry excuse for a husband, I have a boy on this vessel, and I do not intend that he be harmed or sold into slavery or any such piratical nonsense.”

Then the screen switched to the feed from the security camera positioned near the maintenance hatch, the one the pirates’ boarding tube had clamped onto. The hatch blew and the boarding party crowded in.

Huddled on the floor in front of Chester’s kittens, Jubal heard the ring of booted footsteps on metal as the armed crewmen ran down the corridor, toward the hatch in the aft section of the ship.

Looking up at the screen again, he saw the pyramid ship pop back into view.
Chester?
he asked.

Here, mission accomplished!

The pirates have boarded. They’re in the maintenance air lock
.

But Chester didn’t respond this time and moments later Jubal heard the patter of paws running down the hall. He knew it couldn’t possibly be Chester so soon, but it might be some other cat following the running crewmen.

Jubal opened the door and slithered out, closing it behind him, then slunk along the wall calling, “Kitty kitty,” softly.

There was an excited cat noise from farther astern, and he hurried after it. All the fighting would be at the docking bay lock, so if he could just intercept the cat first, at least he could keep him safe.

It didn’t help that the lights had been dimmed throughout the ship, which made it difficult for him to see where he was going, but then it would have the same effect on the pirates. And by now he at least had some idea of the layout of the decks.

“Kitty?” he called, and for a moment the kitten ahead of him stopped and turned to fix its big eyes on him. They were glowing through the gloom, and he got a distinct impression of annoyance and impatience.

He didn’t recognize the kitten at first, but whoever it was, it shouldn’t be in the midst of a pitched battle.

He had a few loose pieces of Chester’s favorite treat in his pocket and he pulled one out to lure the cat, hunkering down to proffer it gently. “Here, kitty. This is no place for you now.”

The cat ignored him and ran on. Three doors down the darkened corridor the noise from the direction of the lock was growing increasingly distinct—reverberating blasts at the door, shouts, cursing, his mother’s distinctive snarl, his father trying to BS his way through the barriers and out of trouble. The kitten turned suddenly and trotted back to him.

He knew who she was now. One of Nefure’s daughters, the funny looking one with the spiky red lion’s mane and the black-and-white-striped legs and tail. Chester said Space Jockey had named her Spike. It fit. “Hey, Spike, hi there girl, want a fishy treat? You remember me? Come on now, a people fight is no place for a kitten.”

She bit his finger as she snatched the treat, then dashed down the corridor toward the fray.

Jubal started after her, sparing one backward look for Chester’s kittens, still hidden in the purser’s quarters.

We are here
. Chester’s thought-voice broke through his concentration on the kitten.
We took the second pirate ship into the mouse hole and left her. The
Ranzo
now has the pirate ship in
her
spaceship-pulling thing
.

That’s good
, Jubal said.

There is something funny happening out here
, Chester told him.
There’s a kind of long skinny dust trail winding all around the pirate’s tube, like a great serpent trying to mate with it. I’m not sure whether I should enjoy watching it or hide from it
.

Let me see
, Jubal said, and he saw through Chester’s eyes, looking out into space, where there was indeed a dark twisting column wound around the boarding tube he had seen on the
Molly Daise
com screen. It looked like dust. The gleam of distant stars was visible through its particles, but it was oblivious to the tractor beam, neither dispersed nor controlled by it, and it was squeezing the boarding tube, which had to be made of pretty strong stuff, and pulling it away from both ships. If there were any pirates still inside it, they were about to go for a swim in deep space. The boarding tube collapsed, detached, and floated away from the ship.

But the thing was already attached to the pirate vessel. Now it fanned out across the ship’s hull, making it look like it had just been for a drive down a dirt road.

Huh. Unfortunately this meant the pirates who boarded the
Molly Daise
had no mother ship to return to.

He drew back from Chester and shook his head hard to regain his bearings. He was still standing in the middle of the corridor, and the sounds of fighting were louder. The kitten had skedaddled while he conferred with Chester. Should he follow orders and go back and lock himself in with Chester’s family?

He heard a kitten scream, and that settled it. He could no more help running toward the sound than he could help loving Chester.

The fighting had spilled into the aft corridor, where the crew had taken cover behind barricades of heavy cargo crates, and the pirates, having breached the air lock, slashed at the barricade with
big whopping knives. Nobody was actually shooting at that time. Laser rifles were known to damage hulls.

In the midst of all of this, the spike-maned kitten screamed and screamed, though nobody was hurting it. In fact, Jubal’s old man had caught it and tucked it into the pocket where Doc used to ride when he was a baby.

Mavis, the pirate captain, held up her hand, ordering her crew to stop hacking while she listened to the bawling kitten. “Let her go, Ponty,” she told him, pointing to his pocket.

“You got no claim on this cat, Mavis,” Pop responded, but Jubal thought he could hear the beginnings of the-old-man-starting-to-negotiate in his tone.

“That not what she say,” she told him.

“This here is a royal kitten, Mavis,” Pop told her. He had, of course, made a point of learning as much as he could about the genealogy and possible value of each of the feline passengers. It was the sort of thing he did. “Why, she’s probably worth more than all three ships put together.”

“Shut up, you. Let her talk. Let her out.” And to everyone’s surprise, Mavis hunkered down on her haunches, stuck her saber and pistols into a gaudy sash belted around the middle of her spacesuit, and rubbed her fingers together, saying, “Come, kitty. Come, my Fury.”

Everybody was watching Mavis, so no one told Jubal to go back when he hunkered down beside Pop. The old man’s eyes were narrowed and his hand went to his pocket flap like an old-time gunfighter about to draw.

A tiny black-and-white-striped paw whipped out and slashed his hand. “Ouch! Damn, kitty!”

Mavis laughed. “Let her go or she shred you same like government papers, Ponty.”

“If we let you have this cat, instead of Doc, you gonna go back to your ship and fly away, all forgiven?”

“No no. Still take you guts for garters, but will have this kitten. Better kitten than phony one.”

Jubal spoke up. “Do you know that you’re cut off from your ship, and I’m pretty sure something may be eating it?”

“Huh?” she asked, and in some dialect Jubal didn’t know directed one of the pirates to go look. He came back squawking and pointing back toward the air lock.

“Never mind. We just use this ship for a while.”

“Not on my watch, lady,” Mr. Yawman said, drawing a bead on her.

“Belay that,” the captain said. “Nobody’s been killed yet and we don’t want to start if we don’t have to.”

“Yeah,” Jubal said. “But just so everybody knows what the stakes are, I think you should know, Captain Mavis, that your backup ship mysteriously disappeared. Once the
Ranzo
was released from its tractor beam, it locked the
Grania
in its own beam.”

“Who that?” Mavis searched the barricades, which were as dimly lit as was strategically feasible, to see who was talking.

“My boy,” Pop said, putting a hand on Jubal’s shoulder.

“Sure. I know that,” Mavis said, and made an exasperated face, though her expressions were a little hard to read, what with the wrinkles, the tattoos, and the shiny things stuck into her skin, not to mention the general grime.

But when Pop moved his hand, the kitten in his pocket made a break for it and with a mighty leap cleared the heads of the crewmen and the barricade, and made a four-point landing on Mavis’s shoulder. Fortunately for the pirate, she still had on the space suit, and the top was impervious to claws, among other things. The pirate queen reached up two jeweled fingers. Jubal expected her to lose them, but the kitten leaned against her cheek and purred loudly enough for him to hear it from behind the barricade.

Ponty shook his head. “Maybe there really is someone for everyone,” he said, and winked at Jubal while nodding toward his heavily
armed mother. Fortunately for Pop, she had her eyes trained on the pirates and didn’t see, or he might have been the first casualty.

Chester’s voice mewed in Jubal’s mind, calling him.

Jubal called back,
Where are you, boy?

We’re docked in the
Molly Daise
shuttle bay. Pshaw-Ra wants someone to get your sire’s shuttle out of his ship. It’s heavy and makes flying tricks harder
.

Obviously none of the adults still glowering at each other and rattling their weapons would be free to get away, so Jubal whispered to his dad, “Good luck. I have to go pee,” and put up with hearing the pirates—and, he suspected, some of the crew—laugh at him as he walked quickly back toward the bow.

The shuttle bay was within sight of everyone so he had to keep going, even though he wanted to see Chester. He didn’t know how to fly that shuttle anyway. Janina did, though! Or at least she could fly
a
shuttle. He knocked lightly on the door to her cabin and got no answer. “It’s me, Jubal,” he said in a loud whisper. “I need your help.”

There was a security camera right outside her door, and he looked up at it and waved. The door opened a crack and he slid inside.

“Are the pirates gone?” she asked.

“No, but we’re working on it.”

“The captain said we should stay locked in our cabins and take care of the kittens.”

“This will only take a little bit, and it may help evict the pirates. Chester and Pshaw-Ra need someone to move the pirate shuttle out of the pyramid ship’s bay.”

“Why can’t the pirates go back the way they came?”

“It’s kind of a long story. If the crew gives the pirates the shuttle to return to their ship in, the pyramid ship needs to be long gone first or I wouldn’t be surprised if Mavis tried to take it too.”

“Who’s Mavis?” Janina looked scared and angry at the same time.

“She’s the pirate captain Pop was working for. Like I said, a long story. Could you do it? Please?”

“The cats—” she began.

“It will only take a minute.”

Chessie was not buying it. With a reproachful look at Jubal, she shot out into the corridor ahead of Janina, and fell in step with them as the girl and Jubal sprinted toward the shuttle bay.