“Works for me,” she said. “Hey, you hangin’ around with any other Murms from different hives?”
“You’re the only Murm I know—or have ever seen, for that matter,” I said, “except on video.”
“I’m just smellin’ somethin’ rotten, like one o’ them unsavory hives that gives honest Murms a bad name.”
“There are dishonest Murms? I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.”
“Can the comedy. See ya ’round, chump.” Chit spread her wing covers and took off for the tunnel, a buzz of electric blue with hints of yellow and white.
I knew I didn’t have anything to worry about. I’d bailed out her abdominal segment plenty of times.
Chit first flew in a circular pattern to reconnoiter then landed on a section of crime scene tape, sampling it with her antennae and mandibles.
“You may want to turn off the audio,” she said. “This could get noisy.”
“Roger,” I said, though I wasn’t sure she could hear me.
I could see that she was holding on to a segment of the tape and beating her wings at various speeds and orientations. After some experimenting she must have found the right sonic pattern to disrupt the molecules in the adhesive because the crime scene tape detached from the door. Chit flew back and forth along the lengths of tape until it dangled then fell to the floor. I grabbed my backpack tool bag, opened the door and left the network room.
“That was slick, thanks! Now I’ll have plenty of time.”
“Don’t mention it. Makes me glad I’m a worker, not a breeder.”
“What do you mean?” I said, holding out her bottle and tossing in a chocolate covered cocoa nib as an extra thank you.
“My brain is still workin’ right and yours isn’t,” she said, climbing in. “G’wan, get outta here. You’ve got a date t’night.”
It’s good to have a friend.
I got.
Chapter 6
“Never try to outstubborn a cat.” ― Robert A. Heinlein
I was glad to be out in the sunlight and fresh air again after being stuck down in the dank sub-sub-basement with the rent-a-thugs and deputies. It was a beautiful spring day in Atlanta, the pollen capital of America. When I got to the parking lot south of the capitol building I saw that my white van was now tinted yellow by pine tree pollen. I opened the driver’s side door, got inside, put on my seat belt and pushed a button on the dash touchscreen to send an electrostatic charge through the frame that made the pollen fly off the external surfaces of the van and back into the air. I’d paid extra for the option and would be pushing that button a lot for the next month. It might even increase the odds of the pollen landing on a pine cone, not my vehicle, so I was doing my part for pine tree procreation.
I pulled out of the lot humming a cheerfully random tune that wove around the G-below-Middle-C note my van made to announce its presence. When the world’s vehicles shifted from internal combustion and diesel engines to silent congruent tech-generated electric power there were quite a few pedestrian collisions and fatalities until the Vehicle Grand Harmony Standard was announced. Most passenger cars were assigned Middle-C or the notes a major third and fifth above it. Motorcycles got C-above-Middle-C and commercial vans like mine were given G-below-Middle-C. Buses had the E below that and large trucks were assigned Low-C. Individual manufacturers were assigned various instruments through an auction system. I was fond of the mellow bassoon sound my Honda-Ford van made as I drove around the city. Glasgow’s Caber Motors’ proposal to use bagpipes for their vehicles was still under review by the harmonic standards committee but my understanding was that they would stand firm and only allow pipes to be used for military vehicles.
I was just on the leading edge of rush hour so I should be able to get to my apartment with plenty of time to handle essential daily corporate chores then prep for tonight. Traffic wasn’t bad on Peachtree Road headed north. My place was in Buckhead, the wealthy Atlanta neighborhood with every amenity for the one percent and those aspiring to that status. Under normal circumstances I’d never be able to afford to live there but the dotstar boom made things anything but normal.
The city of Atlanta, Fulton County and the state of Georgia, in a rare example of cross-party-lines cooperation, had built a thirty-five story office, shopping, hotel and condo complex that took up four city blocks in the heart of Buckhead. Politically well-connected developers handled the actual construction, of course. It was called Ad Astra and billed as the region’s gateway to the stars. The complex was designed for Galactics visiting and living in the city. It was faced in light gray limestone with plenty of glass, though it looked more organic than Bauhaus in a misguided attempt to appeal to off-planet sensibilities. Ad Astra included spaces tailored to the needs of specific species—over-sized suites for large species like Dauushans, high open apartments for flying species, rooftops for basking species and artificial caves below the subterranean parking garage for species that didn’t feel comfortable without tons of rock above their heads. There was even a secure, park-like central courtyard filled with imported alien flora and fauna to make Galactic guests feel more at home. It was popular for elementary school field trips, by appointment.
The local consulates or trading offices for many species and GaFTA companies were in the complex and the place was filled with Galactic technology. That’s how I was able to afford to live there. I’d helped Ad Astra’s developer by translating for vendors brought in to implement anti-snooping and security systems. I talked my way into getting a contract to maintain and support those systems and other galtech used across the complex. The developer saw the wisdom in having someone on-site who could speak several galactic languages and smooth over communication issues. He let me stay in a garden apartment off the central courtyard for a substantially reduced rent.
Ad Astra’s underground parking structure filled the entire city block below the complex. My assigned parking spot wasn’t close to my apartment so I liked to take the elevator on the far side of the central courtyard and walk through it, especially in nice weather. That’s why I ended up with the joy and privilege of helping a little girl get her cat out of a tree, sort of.
The little girl was named Terrhi and she was a pre-pubescent Dauushan the size of a Shetland pony who still had juvenile blue spots on her bright pink hide. I’d met her earlier in the week on a previous walk through the courtyard. She’d said she had just moved to Terra to stay with her father, who was probably one of the members of the diplomatic or trade delegations.
Dauushans are hexapods. Sometimes they stand on six legs, sometimes four. Adults are the size of full-grown African elephants. Imagine an elephant version of a centaur with arms the size of six feet of telephone pole ending in three-fingered hands with each digit the size of two soft drink cans stacked together. Their heads are shaped like equilateral triangles with three eyes facing forward at the pointed top. They’ve got three elephant-like trunks coming out of the base of the triangle and each trunk trifurcates for a total of nine ends useful for pulling leaves from trees and building high technology civilizations.
I had just stepped out of the elevator from the parking level and was walking across the central courtyard to my apartment when Terrhi saw me. She’d been standing under a large, sprawling native Dauush tree shaped something like a banyan that had huge fan-shaped pink leaves. Now she was galloping in my direction. I stood my ground and prepared to dodge if necessary. Young Dauushans can be boisterous—which can be dangerous for less sturdy species.
“Mister Jack, Mister Jack, can you help me please?” she said in English as she abruptly stopped in front of me. I looked down and saw that the gardening staff would have a large patch of displaced turf to replace.
“How can I help?” I said in Dauushan.
“No, English is fine,” she said. “I watch a lot of cartoons in English.”
I smiled. She had a high, piping little girl voice that was far from an adult Dauushans’ deep basso bellow.
“So
rry,” I said in the requested tongue. “How can I help?”
“My cat is up a tree and he won’t come down.”
I had a bad feeling about this. I knew something about the fauna on Dauush and understood that adult Dauushans weren’t the size of elephants by evolutionary accident. Their size protected them from the depredations of most of the more aggressive carnivores on their planet—but I wasn’t the size of an adult Dauushan. I was, however, an Eagle Scout. I helped citizens of all species, ages, genders and sexual orientations cross the street, found lost dogs and got cats down from trees. I was even proud of being a scout again now that the Boy Scouts of America had come to its senses and moved its headquarters from Dallas to San Francisco.
“Where is your kitty?”
“Up there,” she said, pointing into the dense foliage on the Dauushan banyan. “He’s been up there for a long time.”
“What’s his name?” I hoped for something non-threatening like Fluffy or Snowball.
“Spike.”
I had a bad feeling about this.
“Okay.” I wondered if it would make more sense to call the fire department. Probably not—the Atlanta Fire Rescue Department didn’t have a lot of experience dealing with this sort of cat.
We walked to the base of the pseudo-banyan together. It was too big for me to stretch my arms around the trunk and the branches didn’t really start until about eight feet up. I’d need to get out my pole-climbing spikes since my gecko gloves wouldn’t hold well on bark.
“I can give you a boost,” she said.
I started to say “No, thanks,” but before I could get the phrase out or extract my climbing spikes Terrhi had picked me up with her trunks and stood on her hind legs, leaning against the tree for support. I was mashed against the tree, feeling like an elephant was standing on my chest—which wasn’t far from the truth. Then I was being lifted until Terrhi’s trunks grasped my feet. Before I could react she smoothly tossed me up into the lowest branches.
“Uh, thanks,” I said, feeling double-plus nonplussed.
I pulled myself more securely into the tree and took stock. There were several broad branches with rough pinkish gray bark extending above me. The interior of the tree was dappled with reddish sunlight and shadows. A dense canopy of fan-shaped fuchsia leaves filled much of the space but was thickest at the ends of the branches. Golf ball-sized pink seed pods covered with burrs hung in clusters at various junctures like fuzzy pastel cherries. I pulled my telephone lineman’s spikes out of my backpack tool bag and fitted them over my boots. I also found a pair of gripping gloves covered with sharp studs that helped my hands grip the bark. As my eyes adjusted to the dim light I picked a branch and started to climb.
“Here kitty, kitty, kitty…” I said, without much hope or desire for success. I wish I had something I could use as a weapon. I just knew I was forgetting something important.
After rising about ten feet to a point where the main branch I’d chosen split into smaller limbs I stopped to catch my breath and slow my heartbeat. The spikes and gloves made it easy to climb but my nerves jangled like I’d overdosed on Starbuzz. I sensed movement above me—a blur of gray jumping from one upper branch to another. It was just a squirrel but it chittered at me. I can’t speak squirrel but my brain made an approximate translation. “Get out of my tree, you overgrown idiot.”
Something else saw the squirrel. My eye was drawn to a slight movement—a long, lean shape the size of a panther with stripes in darker and lighter shades of pink that blended almost perfectly with the leaves was slowly inching toward the squirrel. The creature was sinuous, like a ferret, and I saw that the alien feline had six legs, not four. Its tapered triangular head was massive—and needed to be.
I now understood why Terrhi called him Spike. Three gleaming white over-sized incisors bigger than Bowie knives pointed down from the front of its wide jaw. Like saber-toothed tigers built to latch onto and bring down mammoths, convergent evolution in all probability had designed this cat to do the same to Dauushans. Some deep part of my hindbrain said “Get me out of here!” I shifted in place and the bark beneath my boots crunched. Spike backed away from the squirrel and focused all three eyes on me. I could have done without the attention.
Like a boa constrictor seeking new prey Spike flowed sinuously around, reversing course so that he was pointed down the tree at me rather than up the tree at the still chittering squirrel. The six-legged tri-sabertooth flexed his muscles and wiggled his hindquarters like he was ready to jump the distance between us and turn me into a snack. I was considering whether or not I could pull my backpack around fast enough to interpose it between the cat’s jaws and my body when one of the fuzzy pink seed pods hit Spike on the top of his head.
Spike and I both looked up. The squirrel’s chittering grew louder and it was joined on nearby branches by a dozen of his aggressive little squirrel friends. All were dropping seed pods on Spike. One or two of them came close to hitting me but I clearly wasn’t viewed as the primary threat. I expected Spike to bound up the tree and attack the squirrels, tossing them in his massive jaws by their fluffy gray tails until they learned better manners. Instead, the cat seemed afraid of the pods that stuck to his fur. He tried to rub them off against a branch but they were firmly attached. Then he tried to bat them away using his middle pair of legs but they stuck to his paws. From Spike’s expression—as best as I could read it between his fangs—the pods’ sharp burrs were painful.
I tried again. “Here kitty, kitty, kitty.”
Spike looked up at the squirrels, looked at me, looked at the squirrels again and decided I was the lesser of two evils. Crouching low on the branch he worked his way down until he was close enough for me to touch him.
“Nice kitty,” I said. “Good Spike.”
His light-reflecting eyes gave me a wary look but he didn’t back away.
Holding on with my left hand I reached out with my right and stroked Spike’s back with my gripping glove, removing several attached seed pods in the process. Spike butted me in the chest, rubbed his large incisors against me and pushed back against my gloved hand. It wasn’t hard to translate his body language—“More.” I kept rubbing his back and shifted my glove to remove all the seed pods that had attached themselves to his fur. Then he leaned into me and started to make a thrumming, buzzing sound that made my body resonate. It was both terrifying and somehow endearing. He was purring.
Spike extended one of his mid-paws to me and I carefully removed a pod that had anchored itself in its center. He seemed grateful but I wasn’t sure if he’d end up as my friend, like the fable of Androcles and the Lion, or would turn out to be more like the scorpion who killed the frog helping him cross a river. I hoped for the former.
The squirrels were still dropping seed pods in our direction but they stopped after I threw a few back at them, catching one square in the nose and unleashing a torrent of protests. I started to back down the tree and Spike followed me, greedy for more rubbing from my glove. I used my pole-climbing spikes to ease down the main trunk of the tree. Spike jumped the last eight feet to the ground while I descended more slowly. He was immediately embraced by Terrhi.
“Oh, Spike, you bad bad boy,” said Terrhi in her high singsong voice.
Spike looked at me then looked at Terrhi then looked back at me as if to say, “Hey, let’s go back up in the tree, buddy.” The two of us mutually commiserated for a few milliseconds then Spike looked over my shoulder and broke into the six-legged cat equivalent of a smile.
Without warning I was pulled off my feet and held four yards off the ground by powerful adult Dauushan trunks. A deep voice below me said, “I saw you profane our holy Princess by stepping on her person to climb that tree.”
“Huh?” How a six-ton adult Dauushan snuck up on me I’ll never understand.
“You must pay the price for your blasphemy,” rumbled the voice.
“Daddy!” said Terrhi, with juvenile exasperation.
Then I relaxed. I�
��d heard enough to recognize who was talking and canceled my high adrenaline fear-fight-flight response.
“Terrhi’s your daughter? The next time her cat gets stuck up a tree, you can climb up and rescue it, Your Excellency,” I said.
“Hey, I was just messing with you,” said the deep voice. Dauushans have an odd sense of humor.
I was spun around and gently lowered to the ground facing Tomáso Kauuson, the head of the Dauushans’ Atlanta consulate. He was full scale bull African elephant-sized centaur, much larger than his daughter’s petite Shetland pony size. I’d worked closely with Tomáso on the details of his consulate’s security systems. We liked and respected each other even if I did have to be careful to avoid being stepped on when I was around him.
“That wasn’t very nice, Daddy,” said Terrhi as she tried to maintain her hold on her squirming cat. “He rescued Spike for me.”
“I’m sorry, Princess,” said Tomáso. “I was just teasing.”
“Well don’t do it anymore,” said Terrhi. “It upsets Spike.” She was squeezing the cat and petting him vigorously.
Spike looked at me and then at Tomáso, his eyes pleading. Translation, “Get me out of here.”
It wasn’t going to happen.
“So Terrhi is your daughter?”
“We don’t like to advertise the fact.”
“Daddy!”
“Seriously,” Tomáso said, “Thank you for rescuing Spike and helping my little girl. I don’t think you want me climbing trees.” He sounded like an amused tuba.
“I’ll second that. I was glad to help,” I said. Once a Boy Scout, always a Boy Scout.
“I’m in your debt. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you,” said Tomáso.
“Well, there is one thing.”
“Name it.”
The entire time I’d been up in the tree I was convinced I was forgetting something important. Only when Spike was safely rescued and the pressure was off did I remember what it was.
Xenotech Rising: A Novel of the Galactic Free Trade Association (Xenotech Support Book 1) Page 5
