Catalyst (31 page)

“You understand, sir, we have to follow procedure,” Jared said. “The proper entries must be made in the data banks, and the decision to release the animals must come through the proper channels. Otherwise it would look like favoritism, and you wouldn’t want that.”

“Look,” Klinger said, “be reasonable. My animals have remained unimpounded all this time with no harm to themselves or others, and now it seems there’s no threat after all. Can’t you just return to headquarters and get the orders before you upset my wife further?”

Ponty gave him a “there’s nothing we can do” shrug and shake of the head. “If it’s any comfort, sir, you have a lot of company. All
over the galaxy this epidemic scare has been a nightmare, the potential ruin of generations of careful breeding, the burning of farmland—”

“And the deprivation of countless ships of the services of the Barque Cats,” Janina added.

“Of course,” Ponty said, as if he’d suddenly thought of a loophole, “I suppose if you personally made the journey to Galipolis to confer with your uncle when he signs the documents ending the necessity for these measures, we could allow your stock to remain here pending further orders.”

“That’s reasonable!” Mrs. Klinger said, looking imploringly at her new husband. “Oh, Philly, do it. Leaf is coming into season. I don’t want her disturbed.”

“Fine,” Klinger said at last. His voice sounded smooth, but Janina noticed that he was perspiring.

Jared’s com buzzed. He checked it and looked up. “We need to return to Galipolis now, Mr. Klinger.”

“If you’ll just step this way, sir,” Ponty said firmly.

“I can follow you in my own craft.”

“That won’t be necessary, sir, since we’re all going to the same place anyway,” Ponty replied. “I’m sure you can catch a ride back with the teams that will be dispersed to release your neighbors’ animals from impound.”

“Very well, then,” he conceded when his wife made little shooing motions at him.

Janina wasn’t sure what had passed between the councilman and his nephew on the com, but she thought it odd that the councilman had single-handedly reversed the decision to impound animals because of the supposed epidemic. Of course, according to Jared, vets and animal owners all over the galaxy had been protesting to the council that the fairy dust syndrome was just an odd side effect of the ingestion of the beetles, but no one had paid attention so far, least of all Councilman Klinger.

Her heart lightened as she strapped herself in, Jared in the seat beside her, while Ponty piloted the GHA craft Jared had commandeered.

The small ship had two compartments—the bridge and a section normally reserved for passengers. The latter had been converted into a cage for carrying suspect animals, so the councilman’s nephew sat behind a grid of heavy black wire in a hastily reinstalled passenger seat. Before take-off, Philly Klinger had grabbed his personal entertainment system and was goggled and ear plugged, his body moving slightly to music only he could hear.

“You really think this will turn things around?” Jared asked Ponty. Poor Jared looked so haggard and frazzled. Janina reached over to him and with one hand began massaging the back of his neck. He let out a grunt of sheer relief as the tension in his neck muscles was released, and let his head droop forward so her fingers could find the tight spots more easily,

“Yeah, I think so,” Ponty replied.

“It’ll be a miracle if it does,” Jared told him. “My reports to the GHA and those of every honest vet I’ve talked to have consistently failed to show any harmful side effects connected with animals ingesting the bugs. The GHA has basically called us incompetent and dangerous for ‘failing to recognize and properly contain this sinister invasive organism.’ What sinister invasive organism, I ask you?

“What I think—and others agree with me—is that the beetles are nothing more than a latent emergence of a native species from one of the terraformed planets, one that’s either lain dormant until now or that mutated and merged with some of the imported species and entered the food chain of free range animals via the grasses and grains they ingest. Very few of the impounded animals I’ve examined have any signs of illness whatsoever. And I’ve examined as many as thoroughly as I can without being invasive myself.

“The ones that are sick are mostly sick from the stress of being snatched from their homes and stuck into cages in close quarters
with other unfamiliar animals. Of course, I’ve been dealing with the Barque Cats, who are exceptionally well cared for and a hearty species anyway. But if one of them were ill with something contagious, we could lose them all even without the idiocy of the GHA.”

Ponty had one hand on the controls as the other fished inside a flight bag between his seat and Janina’s. The bag moved with far more agitation than the slight twiddling of the man’s fingers seemed likely to cause. Abruptly he snatched his hand out and yelled, “Ouch, you little savage!”

Janina withdrew her hand from Jared’s neck and leaned down to look inside the bag. A grave furry face with a slanted white mustache and huge golden eyes looked up at her.

She reached down to pick him up, and he humped his back and curled his tail to be petted, but Ponty said, “Better not—Klinger back there might take off the gaming goggles. I need to keep Doc a secret.”

Jared was staring at the three of them—Ponty, the kitten, and Janina—evidently trying to understand what was happening.

“Jared,” Ponty said, “I don’t want to confuse the issue after all your fine arguments and research and such, but there might be this one little
teensy
side effect I maybe ought to tell you about, just among us friends …”

Janina wanted to throttle the man. He’d been holding something back! She should have known it. She had gone along with Ponty’s plan simply because it was the only one anybody had proposed that showed signs of working. It didn’t mean she trusted him. Knowing that he was Jubal’s father, she realized he had to be the person who kidnapped Chessie and probably set fire to the clinic to cover his tracks.

“How could you?” she demanded, keeping her voice low so as not to disturb their passenger. “Do you mean there
is
a real threat, and you know about it but you’ve
still
let Jared stake his reputation to participate in your charade?”

“I didn’t say it was a threat, young lady,” Ponty replied smoothly,
with a hint of amusement in his tone. “I said it was a side effect. And it might not be. I have to ask you something. Have any of the Duchess’s previous kittens developed psychic bonds with certain people?”

“Psychic
what?”
she asked. “You’re saying Chester can read someone’s thoughts? Jubal’s?”

“That’s about right,” he said. “Any of Chessie’s previous kittens done that sort of thing?”

She shook her head, then amended it. “Not that I know of. No. I’m certain somehow I’d have known.”

“You don’t have that kind of link with her?”

Janina loved Chessie very much, but she had no idea what the cat was actually thinking, aside from what she could understand from Chessie’s body language. Janina felt a little cheated. She was the Cat Person, Chessie’s Cat Person. If Chessie had psychic kittens, she should have been the first to know about them—perhaps bond with one herself. On the other hand, even she couldn’t have cared more for a feline friend than Jubal cared about Chester. It hurt to think of how the boy must be feeling now that Chester had been lost to the derelict ship and its peculiar COB.

Jared took a more scientific approach. “You’re just taking this on faith about your son and the kitten, aren’t you? Is it possible he was misleading you to reinforce his position? Besides, one connection like that wouldn’t mean that all of the exposed cats or even all of Chessie’s kittens—”

Ponty shook his head. “You can’t kid a kidder, Doc. Besides, it’s not just the two of them. There’s this little guy.” He pointed into the box. “Though, technically speaking, and just between you and me, he isn’t one of the Duchess’s line. She adopted him. But he’s adopted me, for some reason.” He tipped his head backward, toward the passenger section. “How do you think I learned how to catch a rat?”

Dr. Agneta Wren, DVM, regarded with disdain the creature who should have been cowering before her. He stared at her with huge yellow eyes, coiled and uncoiled his tawny snakelike tail and purred aggressively. The others in the cages had an injured innocence in their stares, as if they couldn’t believe what was happening to them. Of course, the ones she examined had turned into the nasty, hissing, scratching furies she knew them to be before she immobilized them, but this one was different. He was clearly behaving in a shamelessly obsequious manner because he wanted something. Loose, probably.

“Purr all you want, beast. You’re about to become dogmeat,” she told him. She had no time for evasive feline antics. She had been able to perform only one autopsy, and that was spectacularly inconclusive. Her colleague, the absent Dr. Vlast, had performed exactly zero autopsies since he arrived, and had no findings whatsoever. She wondered if he’d been sacked for slacking off. He was a troublemaker. He refused a direct order to sacrifice a few of the animals for testing, and she suspected that under his instigation other relocated practitioners had done the same. He had failed to contain the specimen beetles, which she spotted scuttling along the walls of the laboratory. His conduct was unprofessional and unscientific, and it would serve the man right if his decision had sacrificed his license and career.

The tawny cat’s big yellow eyes gazed up at her, no doubt plotting his next move. She had a feeling that if she dropped her own gaze, he’d spring at her quicker than a striking snake, ripping her flesh and biting her as that other cat had done so many years ago.

Her mother, also a veterinarian, had been much too kind-hearted, and took in all sorts of strays without considering her main responsibility, the welfare of her own child. That last feral cat had seemed tame enough, purred and accepted the milk from her cereal bowl, followed her around and allowed her to touch his fur with her uncoordinated childish hands.

But a year later, when he was lying on her bed as she started to get dressed, he waited until her shirt was over her head and attacked her with tooth and claw. Surgery had repaired the worst of the outer scars but she still bore internal ones.

Until lately, focusing her career chiefly on horses and other useful animals, she had even stopped the nightmares. But as she looked into the urine-colored eyes of the devious, cunning beast before her, the old claw marks began to throb. She knew that as soon as she closed her eyes again the nightmares would return.

She had the needle poised, and broke eye contact long enough to grab the cat’s ruff and pin his struggling haunches.

The door from the cage room burst open then and Weeks rushed in. His face was stricken and his voice not quite steady as he said, “Dr. Wren, I have something I need to show you.”

“Not now. Can’t you see I’m busy?”

“I know, and I wouldn’t interrupt, but it’s important. I think I’ve been infected, and you might be too.”

She lowered the needle but didn’t release her grip on the cat, who hunkered under her hand, though she could feel his muscles tensed to spring. “What makes you think that?”

“The fairy dust effect. I’ve got it too. I took a specimen. Look!”

He held out a specimen jar with a lump of shiny yellow phlegm in it. “I’ve had a cold, but since I had to work a double shift today, I haven’t been back to my quarters to pick up my cough medicine.” He hacked, turning his head.

“Cover your mouth, for goodness’ sake, Weeks, and set the specimen down over there.” She shook her head. This whole assignment had been so badly mismanaged. They were impounding millions of large useful animals all over the galaxy, where her expertise would be truly useful, and they assigned her to temporary duty testing a bunch of cats. And on top of that she had to fill in for colleagues who were not up to the job, and make do with one lame assistant—at least on this watch.

She pointed at a counter, and Weeks set the specimen down. “You do know how to prepare a slide, don’t you?” she asked.

“Uh …” his voice trailed off and he shook his head.

“Where
do
they find these people?” she muttered to herself.

“You need another cat to work on?” Weeks asked.

“Of course not. I haven’t finished with—” She looked back to her hand, now empty. The cat was nowhere to be seen.

Just then the com buzzed and pandemonium erupted in the cat room.

T
he latch on our cage clicked. I looked up from my own bath, having finished Mother’s, to see a line of the tiniest kefer-ka extending from the latch in all directions to the other cages.

I watched the latch as carefully as I had once watched the larger, juicier kefer-ka. I couldn’t see very well so I stuck my nose through the wire and tried to look around the front of the cage.

The smaller kefer-ka crawled into the round lock, clicking faintly. Two of their larger kin tried to pull the lock free. I pulled my nose back, changed position, and stuck a paw out, giving the lock a tap that pulled the heavier bottom part away from the catch. With a nudge of my head, the door swung open.