Catalyst (16 page)

“I’m pretty sure Carlton brought him,” she said, her eyes shifting to the side, indicating she was hiding something.

“Why?”

“There was—a note,” she said. “And Carlton—Jubal’s father—is an old spacehand. This is where he
would
come. It took me awhile to catch a ride with one of the neighbors who was coming here. I need them to search the station and find my boy. If he didn’t get on board the ship with the cat, he could still be here.”

“You should be talking to station security, missus, not to me,” Jared said.

“I intend to. I came here first because I figured if that girl and the cats were here, I could take the other deal—less money for the mother but keep the kitten for Jubal. I don’t know why, but the kid was really attached to that little cat. He didn’t speak to me till the next morning, but then he seemed to be all right for a couple of weeks, didn’t mention the cat again. He’s a good boy and a big help to me with his old—his dad gone, but he’s stubborn. Gets that from me, I guess. I should have known he had something up his sleeve when he was so quiet and cooperative. He was just biding his time, I guess. Carlton’s more slippery than stubborn, but once that boy sets his mind on something … well, the thing is, Doctor, if I get my boy back and not the cat, he’s not going to stay and I know that now for a fact.”

“Still, I think you’d be better off finding your son first, ma’am. The kitten is on board the
Molly Daise
, and he’ll be safe with Janina until you can work something out. But I don’t know about your son. He’s probably here at the station, if what you say is true, waiting
for the
Molly Daise
to return, but if not, ships come and go all the time and he could have boarded one of them.”

“I’ll do that, but meantime you contact that girl, okay? Tell her I can pay what they wanted for that kitten and to be sure to bring him back with them.”

“I’ll relay your message,” he promised as she turned on one shiny new boot heel and stomp-clicked her way from the clinic. He wondered why—when she and her son brought Chessie back—the reward money seemed to matter to her so desperately, and now she was willing to return a large portion of it in exchange for the kitten. He didn’t think she was willing to relinquish the funds solely because of her son’s disappearance.

Then his assistant Bill called from the waiting room that they had an emergency. The passenger liner
Tesoro
had brought in their cat, Tess—short for Galactic Treasure—a purebred like Chessie, injured in an accident.

By the time he finished operating on Tess, Jared had forgotten all about the woman.

When Chessie jumped as gracefully as ever onto Janina’s chest to alert her that it was time for their next watch, Janina smelled the cat feces right away. She thought she might have forgotten to clean the box so she rose and sleepily pulled on her shipsuit and then her boots, which had fallen over sometime while she slept. The kitten, probably. Chessie was always as neat about Janina’s things as she was about her own fur.

Her toe was only partway in when she discovered the source of the stink. She pulled her foot out quickly. “Chester? Did you do this, you naughty kitten?”

But to her surprise he wasn’t there. She looked down at Chessie, who was standing with her tail to the boot and industriously scraping her paws back toward it, trying to bury it. Janina retrieved her boots, slipped on clean socks, and said, “Madame Chessie, I’d like
a word with your son,” and set off down the hall, stopping to throw her soiled socks down the laundry chute outside the female crew’s loo. There, she scraped the contents of her boot into the commode, scrubbed it clean, and spritzed the inside with odor neu-tralizer. She took off her sock and washed her foot for good measure, then put the sock back on, dried the inside of her fortuitously waterproof boot, checked the other one carefully, and slipped them on.

Janina was wondering where to start looking for Chester when the intercom exploded with a long string of oaths followed by a shout of, “Kibble!” that could easily be heard from the forward corridor without the benefit of the intercom.

As she ran up the corridor, Chessie trotted behind her and the intercom ordered,
“CP Janina Mauer report to Captain Vesey’s quarters on the double.”

She opened the door to the captain’s cabin, and Chester’s furry form flashed out the door past her, heading toward the bridge. Chessie took off after him.

“I found this when I came back from my watch,” the captain told her, pointing to his bunk, where a damp spot on the pillow reeked of cat urine. “It looks to me as if this falls into the scope of your duties. The little devil went for the one part of my bed that isn’t waterproof.”

“He was missing when Chessie woke me for our watch. I wonder how he got in here?”

“Probably snuck in when I went on watch myself,” the captain replied. “I must have shut him in.” The normally mild-mannered Vesey was cooling off, calming down. “You checked him for UTIs?”

“No, sir, but I will as soon as I find him,” Janina promised.

“You go do that, then, and I’ll have someone else clean this up.”

She clicked Chessie’s locator. She was on the bridge, two doors down from the captain’s quarters.

For the second time in as many minutes someone bellowed, “Kibble!” and she ran for the bridge, where chaos reigned.

Crew members leaped and lunged, those who were trying to cajole the kitten rampaging across the control panels shouted down by those demanding that he stop. Chester hopped from one console to the next, landing squarely on control buttons while Chessie chased him across the same panels trying to corral her offspring.

Janina calmly planted herself in Chester’s path, preparing to grab him before he could climb up one side of her and down the other. The scratches on the faces and hands of others in the crew testified that their attempts at similar maneuvers had been futile. She was very glad she had trimmed his claws earlier or someone could have been injured far worse.

Chester pounced again on another bank of keys, and Janina thrust her hands forward to catch him. She knew she was going to miss when suddenly Chester and his mother levitated toward the ceiling while crew members began floating, then swimming in free-fall.

Chester gave a startled mew. His legs and tail flailed in every direction until his mother caught him with a precision free-fall pounce and grabbed his ruff in her teeth. Someone keyed the buttons the kitten had activated, slowly reintroducing gravity so that cat, kitten, and crew gently sank to the deck.

Captain Vesey walked onto the bridge, carrying a stack of bedding he shifted under one arm before he bent and picked up a printout from the floor, saying, “That kitten is a menace.” His voice was mild, even amused, as he looked down at Chessie, who was growling through a mouthful of fur. “Keep him on a leash, Janina, until he learns some manners. If he doesn’t learn to use his box properly, we may have to give up on him as a breeder and have him fixed. He’ll not fetch such a good price that way but we can’t allow cats like this to taint Chessie’s line.”

“Yes, sir,” Janina said, and bent to retrieve Chester from his mother. The kitten laid his ears back and hissed, but Janina kept hold of his ruff while he
grrred
ferociously and lashed his tiny fuzzy black tail.

Captain Vesey pulled a pillowcase from his stack of bedding and tossed it so it landed on her shoulder. “Put him in that until he calms down,” he told her. Janina was shamed. She was the Cat Person. No one else, not even the captain, should have to tell her how to manage her charges.

She expertly swaddled Chester in the folds of the pillowcase and carried him off the bridge. Behind her the crew began returning things to normal, but there was a lot of muttering.

“Is that really Chessie’s kid? She’s always been such a sweetie.”

“I told you we should have looked for a better sire than the Jockey,” Charlotte’s voice answered.

“Dr. Vlast checked him for rabies and distemper, didn’t he?”

“I think he’s got mad cat disease.”

“What’s that? Is it serious?”

“Sounds like they’d have to euthanize the animal for that,” was the last comment Janina heard.

“A
re you mad, little cat?” Kibble asked as she carried me into the quarters she shared with us. “Did you hear that? They’re talking about destroying you, and these are people who admire and respect your mother and your species.”

Once inside, I expected her to release me. Instead she opened the door, grabbed a carrier from under her bunk, and popped me inside without removing my shroud.

I had been planning to let her know I was sorry about her boot. Now I wished I’d done the other one too. If my eyes had been death rays they’d have incinerated her where she stood. As it was, a squinty glare and an indignant hiss had to suffice.

I thought she and Mother would then go on patrol, but instead Kibble set me upon the little table where she wrote out her reports of Mother’s patrols. “Kitten,” she said sternly, “I know you’re just a baby and you probably do not understand what I am saying to you, but I think you are an intelligent little cat so I will try to explain this nonetheless. You must never again do what you did just now. Captain Vesey is as kind and caring a skipper as any in the universe. Wetting on his pillow was a naughty, wicked thing to do. But your rampage through the bridge was much worse because it was very dangerous. You could have caused us to lose life support, destabilize our navigation system, any number of things that could cost us all our lives.”

All that for pushing a few buttons? Surely Kibble was exaggerating.

Mother was washing her flank with quick little licks. I thought she would agree that the girl was overreacting but when I mewed inquiringly at her she raised her head, laid her ears flat against it and spat at me, saying, “Ignorant offspring, what has gotten into you? The older you get, the more you resemble that tom who sired you. You’ve disgraced me in front of my crew. Even Kibble is cross and she is never cross.”

And now that she had finished her tirade, Kibble’s eyes filled with tears and she sniffled a little, then wiped her face impatiently with the heels of her hands. She took another box from the locker beside the head of her bunk and withdrew some interesting looking articles. With her fingers, she quickly wove a little web like the one the boy had called a cat’s cradle. He, of course, had invited me to destroy it. It had been one of our games. But she attached shiny things to it and a very long snake. She emitted little wet hiccups as she did so.

“You made her cry!” Mother scolded, and rubbed Kibble’s ankles, then hopped onto the bunk beside her, not even trying to leap onto the web thing.

“You love her more than you love me, your own son!” I accused.

“Well, of course I do. Kittens are fine when they’re very small but they are very selfish and do nothing but take all of your milk and time and attention and then go to some other home. I wish you had done that too, instead of spoiling my work and angering my crew. Kibble is good to me and takes care of me and loves me. All you do is cause trouble.”

“The boy was good to me and took care of me and loved me, and your girl took me away from him and brought me here,” I said. “And if that’s the way you feel, I won’t even let you know when I leave. I’ll just be gone and then you’ll be sorry.”

Kibble let loose of her work long enough to reach over and stroke my mother’s beautiful soft fur. My mother didn’t love me
anymore! But she didn’t understand how much I needed to find my boy. I could have done without my tail more easily because he had been half of what was me. Now he was gone and I was left with nothing but a lot of heavy boots waiting to step on me, faces I had to crane my neck to see, and small dark places made of metal. No trees, no chickens, no cows, no brothers or sisters, no reading under his blankets at night, just a mother who hated me.

I didn’t mean to do it. I meant to be haughty and disdainful, to show these people how little their opinions and missions counted to me, that they did not, as they thought, own me. But I was suddenly so sad that a mew escaped my mouth like a mouse might slip through my paws.

Kibble opened the carrier and took me out. I hadn’t the strength to fight her, nor, as she cuddled me and petted me and made soothing sounds, the will.

“There there,” she murmured. “Look, I’ve made you a pretty new harness, suitable for the enormous cat you are becoming. This will keep you tethered to Chessie or me and out of trouble.” And she slipped the web she’d woven over my head and across my back, holding me with one hand and fastening it with the other.

Mother was not fooled by Kibble’s sugarcoated explanation of the new harness. “Now Kibble will walk you like a dog,” she said, her eyes still slitted. “You will hate it but you’ve brought it on yourself.”

So naturally I decided I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of thinking they’d bested me. I pretended to admire the hateful thing and batted—charmingly, if I do say so myself—at the lengthy bit that attached my harness to Kibble’s hand.

Kibble petted my back but told Mother, “I fear he will not like this once we begin our patrol.”