Catacombs (27 page)

I didn’t sense him before
.

Being inside a cabin on a ship aboard another ship was not the best way to learn what was going on. The military ship was very stingy about sharing its com messages with the guest ships, to the disappointment of the kittens who still lurked near Beulah’s com station, waiting for a chance to send their résumés to prospective human partners or to get a flash of intuition that told them which person on the other end of the com might be their particular telepathic match.

Balthazar said, “The fleet commander and the scientists I have been assisting from shipboard and from Mau-Maat at first questioned how we could know how to combat the evil that has befallen this star. I say to you that such a thing has happened before in our history, long before our sacred furred guardians came to Old Earth and showed us the way. With them they brought tales of the time when the great serpent Apep ate Ra, the sun, and how Bast the cat slew him with her sword. The young cats in this place are the descendants of Bast, and like her, are the ones necessary to defeat the serpent’s new form. To that end my colleagues and I have provided the Guard scientists and technicians with the schematic for individual barques in which the sacred animals will ride to slay the serpent.”

Jubal recalled the drawings he had seen on the tunnel wall beneath the City of the Dead, the ones with the cats and knives and snake bits and sun disks. That was all very well for an old drawing, but Balthazar was proposing to use real cats.

The instructor wore a guarded look, and Jubal reckoned he wasn’t comfortable with Mauan mythology as a basis for a mission.

He wasn’t the only one. Captain Vesey stood up, dumping two black kittens off his lap, and said, “With all due respect to you and the ambassador, Commander, and to cultural beliefs and differences and all that, this is the biggest load of kitty litter I have heard in all my days in Galactic space. You don’t mean to tell me that you have this enormous problem and you intend to fling
half-grown kittens at it? That’s just plain cruel! What has this galaxy got against our cats anyway? First you try to destroy them one way, and now you want to throw them at a sun? For heaven’s sake, man, have you no nuclear weapons, no lasers, no other kind of computerized electronic force you can exert to dispel this thing?”

“We’ve tried everything we’ve got, of course,” said the instructor, who was in fact a commander as well. “Every time we fire on the damn thing it grows larger.”

“Of course it does,” Balthazar said. “These remnants of Apep, when dismembered, turn into more snakes. In this aspect, Apep reproduces by a very virulent form of mitosis. The resulting spawn feed on the energy of the sun, and your weapons feed them with similar energy.”

“So you want them to feed on our cats instead?” Captain Vesey said. “I thought you people liked cats.”

“We not only like them, we revere them. Precisely because they are known to be able to thwart such a threat.”

Captain Vesey started to stalk off when Captain Loloma put a restraining hand on his arm and spoke to him. Then Vesey sat back down. He had not been on Mau, and Captain Loloma had picked up a little of the culture surrounding the cats during the time the crew was stranded there.

The wraparound view port closed and the lights went up. The view they had been engulfed in was now much reduced and shown on a screen off to the side of Balthazar and the instructor.

“These are the barques custom-constructed for the cats, equipped with weapons that may be operated by the merest flick of a toe.”

The holo projected before them was shaped like a shallow bowl, with two extensions and what looked like suckers on the ends folded over the transparent covering like arms trying to meet across a full belly.

“Each cat will operate his or her own barque,” Balthazar continued. And at that point, on either side of the crews, machines
bearing large pallets covered with little objects similar to those in the picture of the barque drove in and deposited the flats on the deck.

As soon as the noisy machines had withdrawn, Chester jumped down from Jubal’s shoulders and strolled over to investigate the barques. Before he had taken the first sniff, he was surrounded by the younger generation of felines, at first trying to sniff what he’d sniffed and then sniffing adjacent barques. He gave the barque a tap with his paw and it spun into two others, making Mugger jump out of the way. Whereupon Mugger smacked another of the barques and it went spinning into five more and made several other cats jump out of the way. The other cats joined in and soon there were barques and cats all over the deck.

The commander gave a phony chuckle. “At least we know they’re durable.”

“He’ll never get the cats to stay inside them,” Beulah whispered.

As if he heard her, Pshaw-Ra strolled up to the nearest barque, which at that point was standing on edge, flipped it over and patted the top with his paw. It lifted and he jumped inside and curled up in it as if it were a basket.

“And comfortable!” the commander continued in his new cheery tone.

Jubal stood up. “But are they safe? If they open that easily, how do we know the cats will be secure? And what about life support? Those things can’t hold much oxygen or food and water. I don’t see any weaponry either. I’m not letting you send Chester on a suicide mission.”

“What I’d like to know is how you manufactured all of these things so darn fast,” Captain Loloma said. “Research and development alone—”

“As I mentioned before,” the commander said in a tone that implied
if you’d been listening
, “Ambassador Balthazar sent us the schematics and specifications by secure transmission shortly after the invasion began. We can move very fast when doing so means
preserving trillions of dollars worth of terraforming on the inhabited worlds.” Then he added, “Not to mention the lives of the settlers, of course. That goes without saying.”

“And tell us, how are the cats supposed to survive in these crafts?”

“Each barque will be individually keyed to the ID chip on each cat so only that cat’s paw can open it from the outside. There is an oxygen recirculating system built into the hulls that keeps the cat supplied with air as long as it is breathing. Water and liquid nourishment are fitted into a special compartment prior to each short journey. The barques also have homing devices so the barque will always return to its base, regardless of the state of the cat inside. That ought to be pretty good, since the material from which these are constructed was used in the lenses of the solar monitors operating continuously at a distance twenty times closer than the nearest planet to the central stars of each of our systems. They are heat, cold, pressure, and impact impervious.”

Jubal said. “Maybe the ambassador’s cat, Pshaw-Ra, could show us how one works and what our cats are supposed to do?”

“Such is our intention,” Balthazar said. “But first each unit must be fitted to each of the noble felines. Pshaw-Ra’s paws are not as dextrous as those of the new breed, but he will do his best to demonstrate.”

The class was dismissed, though the cats continued playing shuffleboard with the tiny spacecrafts until someone noticed it was time for food.

Cuddled with Chester in their bunk, Jubal was still troubled.
Toy spaceships or not, I don’t see what you and the kittens can do about all those acres of snakes
.

I don’t either. Let’s sleep
.

No, I mean really. There’s something fishy about all of this
.

Where?
Chester asked, yawning and curling his pink tongue back inside his mouth.
And is it in the form of a treat?

Jubal smiled and scrunched Chester’s thick soft black fur with his fingers.
You sound like your old self again
.

It was worrisome being a family cat
, he said.
I’m glad the kittens have people of their own now and Renpet is going back to her people—if Pshaw-Ra doesn’t get her killed first
.

I wonder about the kittens who don’t have people yet
, Jubal said.
I almost think they came for us because if we disappear, nobody will really know the difference, especially about the kittens. They don’t have anyone
.

The soldiers are trying to make friends
, Chester replied.
It doesn’t really work that way, but they don’t realize that
.

Or don’t care
. Jubal said. He lay his hand across the warm back of Chester’s neck.
Don’t worry, boy. I won’t let them put you in any little flying saucer and send you into the sun to fight snakes. No way
. He’d steal a shuttle if he had to and go hide out somewhere where the GGoons would never find either of them. He didn’t know how he could possibly save the other kittens, but he would save Chester.

Scritch scritch scritch
. Someone was scratching at my door. Jubal was still sleeping. I jumped down and went to the door. Thanks to copying the exercises Pshaw-Ra had taught the kittens, I could now use my own paws in a much “handier” way, and I easily stretched up high enough to flip the latch.

Pshaw-Ra and Renpet stood on the other side of the door. I slipped out into the corridor. Renpet rubbed against me in a friendly way and Pshaw-Ra actually purred at me.

“What?” I asked, puzzled by the visit and especially by the purr.

“Catling—I must not call you catling any longer, for you have become the leader of our hope for the future—we are here to brief you.”

“Oh really?” I sat down for a good clean under my tail. “Brief me on what?”

“On how you must conduct the mission to save the star from the serpent horde,” he said.

“Jubal says we’re not going,” I told him. “And that suits me fine. Buttercup is back at the farm with Jubal’s mother. My mother is with her Kibble. I might like to go hunt mice in the fields for a while and be with my boy.”

Renpet looked at me with big sad golden eyes. “I would wish to
be with my Chione too, Chester, but the serpent slew her. Please, for me, slay his new form in return.”

My ears went back in annoyance. “Oh sure. Anything for you, fish breath,” that being a private endearment between me and her. “How do you propose I do that? It’s impossible. Jubal’s right. The soldiers just want to kill us, and you two are encouraging them.”

“No, no, you should know, catling—I mean, Chester—that I would never put our very special young in the path of danger for naught. There is a way, as Balthazar told the humans, based on the story of the first time the serpent sought to swallow the sun.”

“Jubal says that was something called a myth, which is like a lie only really old.”

“Just because Jubal does not understand it does not make it a lie,” Renpet said softly. “Our kind had knowledge of space and its hazards long before we came to Earth, remember.”

“I can’t remember any such thing,” I told her. “I’m not one of you, not really.”

“But you are, mate. All cats are. The humans think we came from the forests, but before we were in the forests we traveled among the stars and brought to the humans of Mau the wonders of which you have heard, many now faded. But all cats spring from our divine heritage, including you. Adaptations occurred over the centuries, and the thousands of centuries: some traveled far, some grew furry, some grew large, some grew small, some grew the wonderfully spreading papyrus paws you share with the young. But all sprang from our kind originally. Think, remember, and you will know the truth of what I say.”

I did feel
something
, some kinship, some hint of a memory, but it was very fleeting.

“If you know all about this mythic historic mission to kill sun snakes, Pshaw-Ra, why don’t you lead this one?”

“Alas, neither of us have the paws to operate the new barques. The humans are nonconversant with our language, as are many of the new kittens, so the technology suitable for our paws in ships
like mine would be too difficult for them to grasp on such short notice. But the individual barques can be easily operated by the papyrus-pawed, such as yourself, with the assistance of a human in one of their small crafts. You and the other human-affiliated cats must lead the way in the binding of the serpents.”

“Binding?” I asked. “I thought we were going to kill it. Them.”

“Apep is immortal but its fangs can be pulled—figuratively at least,” Pshaw-Ra said.

Renpet gave a little shudder, her fur rippling all the way down her back, thinking, I knew, of the fang sunk into her Chione.

“I have with me the spell of binding,” Pshaw-Ra continued. “With it, you and the other cats will weave over, under, and through the assembly of serpents.”

“What? We just think the spell to ourselves and do a lot of flying until it catches us? I don’t think so. You want it done, Pshaw-Ra, you do it yourself.”

“No, of course, you do it with the sword of Bast,” the old cat said.

“I thought if you cut that thing up it turned into more snakes.”

“It does, but the sword you will use does not cut it asunder, it cuts it together,” he said.

Having done under my tail, I had only the top of my tail to wash to show what I thought of this logic.

“Like all magic, there is sound science behind it,” Pshaw-Ra said. “The Sword of Bast is not, as has been translated, a short sword, it is a
light
sword—a sword of fusion not fission. It will bind the snakes one to the other as you weave them into this pattern …”

He showed me a complicated wrapping that looked like a mummy wrapping.

“Me and all of these wild kittens?” I asked. “I don’t see that happening.”

“You don’t understand how serious this is, Chester,” Renpet said.

“What’s one solar system more or less to me, right?” I asked in a
voice that would have scratched her if it had been a claw. “Of course I understand it’s serious, but …”

“Should any of the serpents remain free, they can repeat this sun-eating throughout space, and the universe will truly go dark,” Pshaw-Ra finished.

I tried to imagine that, and could not. “Meh,” I said softly. “Okay, what are we supposed to do again?”