Catalyst

by Jody Wallace

“He disappeared.” Wil revved the truck motor and shot forward several meters in a threatening manner. The goons hesitated, conferring.

  “And how did your crate end up on that garbage ship?”

  “Me.” The cat perched between them with his tail wrapped around his paws. “I assume Wil has explained my many talents. I simply pushed the right people so that Wil’s crate was misdirected and taken to the disposal area.”

  She stared at the cat. The cat stared back. She couldn’t believe that she was going to go along with this, but… “So you can talk.”

  “That should be obvious by now.” The cat’s mouth moved a little when it formed words. The voice was sharp and high-pitched but not outside the realm of human. Su sank into the seat, almost expecting one of Trash Planet’s earth tremors to shake her up as much as the cat just had. “I would rather not push you into believing.”

  “He can’t disappear when people are looking at him,” Wil explained. “But the minute you look away, bam. That’s how he escaped.”

  “Want me to demonstrate?” the cat asked. “Close your eyes.”

  “I’m…I’m good.” Hells, maybe cats could always talk and that information had been lost during the Obsidian War. The more immediate problem was the Gizem Station goon squad marching toward the truck, eating up the distance. “We need to make some decisions, fast.”

  “They won’t lay hands on me, don’t worry.” Pumpkin, to her surprise, climbed into her lap, claws pricking through her pants into her thighs. He stepped around as if softening her up and then presented her with a view of his butt.

  She batted his tail aside, fingers tense on the trigger of the leg gun. It was insufficient defense against six guys with boomsticks.

  “I’m more worried about the hands they’re going to put on us,” Wil said. “I nearly died, Pumpkin. That was never part of the deal.”

  The cat’s ear bent as he presumably watched the approaching suits. “Your death would be inconvenient for me.”

  A goon raised a gun, aiming at Wil in the driver’s seat. Unlike the ship’s blasters, the precision of boomstick would ensure Wil died but the truck and cat survived.

  “Hand over the cat,” Casada yapped through the comm. “Now.”

  “Drive,” Su decided. “To the right. We can make it.” The minute the cat was no longer in their possession, they were doomed.

  The cat cocked his head. “I don’t think that’s a….yowl!”

  Wil’s sudden acceleration interrupted the cat’s disagreement. The truck’s hardy Trash Planet engineering ground forward in a rush, forcing the goons to scatter. One or two might have thudded on the side.

  Su ducked into the floorboard, covering the cat with her body. Just in time. A beam pierced the headrest right where she’d been a moment ago.

  Wil cursed and swerved. Shots reflected off the armor of the truck once…twice…and then got through. A boom juddered the truck but it held together, closing on the Tomen.

  “Halt at once!” Casada screeched. “I order you to halt.”

  The cargo area’s fire extinguisher swooshed on, and Su realized she could hear it far too well. She popped up from the floor. The laser had pierced the cab, creating a large hole between the cab and the cargo area. Well, drakh. That reno was gonna suck.

  Casada became increasingly hysterical. “Stop, you’ll hurt the cat, stoooop!”

  “Almost there,” Wil said urgently. “I think we’re going to clip it.”

  Wham!

  The truck rebounded off the ship, skidding halfway off the pavement. Wil jerked the wheel, hard, and they jounced back onto the road in time to fly into the murky tunnel.

  “Stay in the floor,” she ordered the cat, getting to her knees on the seat. She leaned out the open window and squeezed off a succession of blasts, hoping for a lucky shot into the engine of the Tomen.

  She missed, but she’d made her point.

  “Do you think I don’t have the other end blocked?” Casada shouted. “I will find you, and I will take that cat.”

  “For a minute I thought he was going to threaten to find us and kill us.” The yellow tunnel lights were half on, half out, as usual, but the tunnel had an unusual reddish glow. Flickering shadows danced everywhere.

  “What’s that smell?” Pumpkin asked, whiskers erect. His eyes gleamed up at Su from the floorboard.

  “Could be bristlebacks.” The endangered species was monitored by SPA, the Species Preservation Association, one of the few Rim-wide organizations in existence. It checked on the numbers of such species regularly to ensure that humans didn’t ruin anything important on the few planets in the Rim where animals had evolved. “They nest in this tunnel sometimes.”

  “No, it’s not an animal. Wil, whatever have you been eating?”

  As if conjured by the cat, a harsh chemical odor invaded the cab. One that wouldn’t be in her truck or this tunnel unless…

  “Oh, shit!” Su threw herself toward Wil and smacked the decouple button.

  The cargo area of the vehicle separated from the cab with a metallic clunk. Its front end skidded into the pavement at far too many kilometers per hour. The cab practically wheelied without the weight of the loaded back end. Su twisted around, staring through the large laser hole, and cursed some more when she saw the flames destroying two thirds of her truck. Her best, most reinforced, most hail-proof truck.

  And all the gloss salvage she’d scored today.

  A great deal of which was fuel cells and batteries.

  “Floor it,” Su barked. “There’s gonna be…”

  KABOOM!

  The cab of the truck flew forward much faster than its good old-fashioned Trash Planet motor could carry it.

  Chapter 4

  Wil and Su bounced around in the cab like balls inside a bingo cage, but after a moment he managed to grab the hand brake. He threw his weight into it, and the truck squealed in protest before crunching into the tunnel wall.

  The stream of curses coming from Su reassured him that she’d suffered no physical injuries, and Pumpkin could fend for himself. He attempted to calm his racing pulse with the meditative breathing he’d been taught to use before performances. It didn’t work.

  Narrow escapes from death were so much worse than stage fright.

  “Fracking fuck hot damn slimer vac sucking spawn of a pirate!” Su’s creative rant came to a temporary halt. “You still whole?”

  “Not my ears. Pumpkin?” He peered into the floorboard, glad to see the little orange fucker completely unharmed. He hated that cat, and he loved that cat. It baffled him, but no amount of magical mental pushing could have created this clash of emotions inside him. It was as authentic as anything he’d ever felt.

  “That was most unsatisfactory.” The angry cat crouched in the floorboard and eyed Su askance. “Perhaps I chose the wrong human to enlist, after all.”

  “You mean me?” Meeting the cat anger for anger, she pointed at the crumpled and steaming nose of the cab. “You two schemers just ruined my truck. And now I have to fear for my life. And you think you chose wrong?”

  “Casada ruined your truck. He is a cretin,” Pumpkin said. “Now, if you’ll kindly look somewhere else, I will once again come to the rescue and see what the cretin and his hammer-faced idiots are planning.”

  Various items from behind the bench seat had distributed themselves all over the cab. Wil started sorting through them to see if anything would be of use in the challenge ahead. Whatever that challenge was going to be. Like, say, a pair of size forty-six men’s shoes.

  “I will not look somewhere else,” Su hissed. “Cat, it’s one thing that you can communicate, but this nonsense about instant transportation is—”

  Wil poked her in the ribs, and she jerked around to face him.

  “What?” she snarled.

  “The fire should give us a few minutes before Casada’s men can get in here. How far is the other side of the tunnel?” He averted his gaze from Pumpkin, focusing on the way the tanned skin of Su
’s indignant face tightened around the scar. The redness of the injury made her look even more pissed off than she was.

  Her gaze dropped below his face and then back up again. “Several minutes at normal speed. And I bet he does have it blocked, or we’d have seen people drive past by now. I’ve sent out a call for help.”

  “You have police?” he asked, surprised.

  “Don’t need cops. We have unions.” She let out a hiss. “But we’ll need to get closer to the surface for me to call anybody else. Like to get a ride. Reception inside the mountain is a no-go.”

  The large industrial tunnel was poorly lit and filled with smoke. Along the sides, there was debris and a curb with a service walkway high above the road. He couldn’t hear anyone yelling, but obviously their time to hang around and chat about law enforcement was limited.

  Hells, his time to be awake was limited. He’d seen people come out of temp cryo before, and when you crashed, you crashed heavy and hard. “What are my chances of getting some shoes? I assume we need to proceed on foot.”

  “Husk it, you’re right.” Her anger dissolved, and she, too, began searching for useful items, which she stuffed into a satchel. “We can access the maintenance tunnels from here and lock it behind us. We gotta get you somewhere safe before you…hey, where’s the cat?”

  “He’s gone to see what Casada is planning,” Wil said. That was why he’d focused on Su’s face and distracted her. Pumpkin insisted he could only work his magic when nobody was watching, although Wil had never confirmed if it was due to science or some weird self-consciousness on the cat’s part. “He’ll be back when he’s ready.”

  “Well, shit shit shitty shit.” She smacked her hand to her forehead. “I can’t believe this. He talks. He transports himself. Can the little fur bag really mind control me?”

  Su cussed more than anyone he’d ever met, and he’d been associating with hardened gamblers, criminals, tourists, and rich people for the past four hundred days. The cat trusted her, and so did he. The way she spouted off whatever was on her mind suggested that she’d be a terrible liar.

  You could trust a bad liar. By his and Su’s age, bad liars had given up trying and gone full honesty.

  “He can kind of read human minds and convince you to do things,” Wil said, giving Su full honesty, too. She’d earned it. “But I wouldn’t call it mind control.”

  When he’d met Pumpkin—and Pumpkin had never satisfactorily explained why he’d picked Wil in the first place—the cat hadn’t tried to push him. Not right away. He’d been outside a dance studio, grateful to have a paying gig but needing a break from a passel of adult students who’d gotten handsy. When Pumpkin spoke, at first he’d thought the women had drugged him.

  But he’d seen enough of the Obsidian Rim as he traveled wherever people would pay him to realize that unexplained phenomena were not uncommon. Things science couldn’t prove or disprove. So when the cat had talked to him, telling him things nobody else was supposed to know, he’d quickly believed.

  Su produced a pouch, unsealed it, and pulled out a handful of capsules he recognized as thintech survival wear, but no shoes. Then she rolled up the thick, soft grey of her pants to reveal a metallic limb that didn’t even try to mimic a human leg except for the boot at one end. She snapped the short barreled weapon into a clever groove along the calf.

  “Got one for me?” he asked, wondering how far up the limb extended. She didn’t limp, that he had noticed. Was it an implant? She must possess a lot of innate grace to master such fluid movements with a leg that wasn’t her own.

  She smirked up at him. “Leg or gun?”

  His face heated with embarrassment, and she handed him a satchel of tools. “Clearly I don’t mean—”

  “I’m kidding. Yes, I have another gun. Or two. Come on.” She shouldered another satchel and pushed herself out the truck, giving it a wistful stare. “I don’t know how I’m going to get you fixed, baby girl, but if it’s going to happen anywhere, it’s going to happen on Trash Planet.”

  Outside the truck cab, the icy pavement bit into the soles of Wil’s feet. He hid his flinch. If he’d been close to asleep in the truck, it would have jolted him awake like a klaxon. A strange musky odor, not one he’d expect in a tunnel, hung in the air. The area was cold, dirty, rough—everything he’d avoided since childhood. Everything his parents had wanted him to escape.

  Some never had the chance. And some didn’t want to. Which one was Su?

  She trotted to the middle of the road and flipped her goggles over her face. They weren’t like any goggles he’d ever seen, brassy and covered in gears and dials and strange miniaturized tech. “Fire’s still filling the tunnel.” She whirled the other direction and adjusted a dial. “If your buddy sent anyone from the other side, they’re not here yet. Let’s move.”

  Firming his lips and his resolve, he strode after her as carefully as possible, hoping she wouldn’t want him to run. His physical condition was better than peak, considering his occupation—but it would tear the fuck out of his feet. Nanobots couldn’t work miracles, and eventually bloody soles would slow him down.

  He couldn’t afford to be a hindrance. He and Pumpkin were relying on Su to…

  What? Hide them? Protect them? Get them off Trash Planet? Provide a new lease on life? His bank accounts contained all the DICs he’d need to book passage to the other side of the Obsidian Rim, but Casada had a lot of DICs, too.

  He didn’t really want to decide on his next move until he survived this particular one.

  After a dubious glance at him, Su reached the wall and jumped higher than expected, straight up in the air. She grabbed onto the railing separating the road from the narrow service walkway, which was about four meters above the road.

  It surprised him that she could afford a prosthetic with that kind of strength. Did trash pay better than he thought? She curled herself over the railing as agilely as a gymnast and got to her feet on the other side. “Now you. There are ladders every couple hundred meters.”

  Wil couldn’t let his new friend think he was useless. He blew out a breath, backed up, and ran straight for the wall as fast as his legs and stupid bare feet could carry him.

  He leapt, hit the wall foot first, and managed enough momentum to do a vertical run to the railing without the aid of a robot leg.

  By the time he vaulted over the top, Su was staring at him in astonishment. “What?” he said. “I work out.”

  She set her bag down with a little smile. “What about the cat?”

  “He does not work out.”

  Su stared at him with more astonishment before bursting into laughter.

  Her amusement was like the sun coming out on…Trash Planet. It brightened the whole tunnel. No, wait, that was the lights flicking back to full strength.

  She wiped her eyes and sighed. “I needed a good laugh. When do you think the cat will come back? We can’t wait for him.”

  “When he feels like it. He can find us anywhere.” Wil wasn’t sure how far the cat could transport, or through what spaces or materials. The cat declined to explain, but why question a talking cat who cuddled with you at night and was helping you make millions?

  Because they might need a deeper assessment of the cat’s abilities if they were going to survive this mess, muttered a voice in his head that sounded like Su’s. And he hadn’t even known her half a day.

  “I hope he feels like it soon because I’m worried about him. There are carnivorous creatures on this planet that would eat him up in one bite, and the bristlebacks come in the tunnel. That’s why it smells like butthole in here.”

  He wouldn’t call it butthole, but the odd, musky scent could be animal. “Are they big?” he asked.

  She stopped, and he almost bumped into her. “Why don’t you take this?” she suggested, handing him a small blaster from her pack. “You know. Just in case. Can you use it?”

  “Point, pull the trigger, run.” So the bristlebacks were big.

  They arrived
at a metal door in the concrete wall that looked like it had never been used. Corrosion lined its edges and it had no knob, just a keyhole. The flickering yellow bulb in a wire basket above their heads chose that moment to blink out, along with all the lights in their area.

  “Could be an earthquake coming,” Su said. “Messing up the power. Or it could be your friend Casada. I don’t like it.”

  In the near-darkness, the musky smell seemed to intensify. A deep, ragged snarl echoed through the tunnel, and in the remaining light Wil spotted a coarse, humpbacked shape further down the walkway.

  It spotted them, too.

  “It’s just one fucking thing after another, isn’t it?” Su cursed into the dark. He took her shoulders and twirled her until he was between her and the bristleback. Bracing his gun hand against his opposite wrist, he aimed. Would it attack or was it just annoyed?

  From behind, Su patted him on the hip. “I was going to say cover me while I get this door open, but thanks.”

  “Is it locked?” He couldn’t see much of the bristleback besides its shadowy bulk. Most of the light came from behind it.

  “Of course it’s locked.” He heard rustling, metal scraping against metal. “Can’t let the bristlebacks inside the shelter or we’ll never get them out. They love them some tunnels. They’re burrowers, you know. Most animals on the planet are.”

  “Uh-huh.” The bristleback advanced slowly, claws tapping the concrete. The light above them zizzed, and their quadrant of lights clicked back on.

  He got a good look at the bristleback and almost shot it right there and then. He’d never seen a living creature that ugly. Thickly muscled and covered in blackish fur, the front claws on powerful legs were longer than his hand. Huge shoulders with spikes all over them blocked his view of the rest of the body, but the face was a thing of nightmares. Big, deep-set eyes, a wide, flat muzzle, and so many horns Wil couldn’t tell where the fangs were.

  Who needed fangs when you could rip things apart with your cheeks? And forehead? And chin? Then it threw back its head and keened, its face splitting apart in a red maw that boasted multiple rows of teeth.