Catalyst

by Jody Wallace

  The light faded, leaving an afterimage on her retinas. Su rubbed her eyes, smearing tears down her cheeks. Was that…

  A pile of cats.

  A pile of cats had appeared on her deck, and as she watched, they sprang in all directions, mewing, tails fuzzed, rushing away as if they’d been burned. Beneath them was a figure in blackened grey coveralls with a very familiar face.

  “Wil!” Su used every bit of superstrength in her leg and leapt for the deck. She hit hard enough to offend her good ankle but didn’t slow down.

  “Don’t touch him!” Pumpkin materialized abruptly in front of her. She windmilled her arms, trying not to smash his small orange body.

  “How did you do this?” Of course, she had an idea. The blue light, all the other cats—Pumpkin and his cohorts had joined forces to skip Wil across the void of space. “Never mind that. Why can’t I touch him?”

  “He’s covered in toxic waste and you don’t have good nanobots,” Pumpkin said. “It’s inside the coveralls, too. Do you have decontamination equipment on board?”

  “Fuck yeah, I do.” Su no longer cared what was going on outside her ship. She sprinted for the hazmat lockers and yanked out the foamer. It would do for now, enough to slow the burns and tamp down the radiation. Javier could fix the rest. He’d saved her, after all, and Wil hadn’t even lost a leg.

  She hit the trigger and coated Wil’s body with the pinkish substance that would begin the sanitization process. She longed to touch him, press her fingers against his throat and reassure herself that his pulse beat as strongly as it had when they’d said goodbye, but Pumpkin wouldn’t have gone to this trouble for a dead body. Wil was alive. He had to be.

  Su grabbed a hazmat suit out of the locker next and shimmied into it in record time. “Do any of the cats need medical attention?” she asked aloud.

  But again, Pumpkin was nowhere to be seen. None of the cats were. What the hells?

  She’d have to trust that they knew how to care for themselves. She clicked the bulky, protective gloves into place and waded through the layer of pink foam to Wil’s body. Pumpkin had said the waste was inside his coveralls. Perhaps it was some torture Casada had devised.

  Her fingers thick and fumbly, she worked as fast as she could in the slippery foam to untangle Wil from his clothing. The parka unsealed easily, but untying the boots was a freaking nightmare with the gloves.

  Once she got the boots off, she was shocked to see brown sludge pour out of them like saliva from a bristler’s mouth. She hadn’t grown up in a hazmat factory and not learned to recognize toxic waste when she saw it. Next she worked on his coveralls, peeling them off. More sludge had soaked the lining of the pants. Wil moaned when she removed his underlayer, and his flesh beneath was burned and red.

  How fast could the Moll on barely any fuel get her to Javier and the last of their emergency nanobots?

  Su coated Wil’s bare body with more decontamination foam, rolling him carefully to ensure she treated his back. The majority of the injuries appeared to be to his legs and feet, though he hadn’t gained consciousness.

  The foamer hissed and spat out its last dribble, so Su headed for the pilot’s seat and the radio, yelling for Pumpkin.

  The cat didn’t appear. She checked the Moll’s status—entering the atmosphere, almost no fuel—and opened up comms to the factory, to Hoff’s factory, to anyone she could call on for an assist.

  By the time she landed at the box factory, sputtering on fumes, a crowd had gathered. She opened the cargo bay before the Moll’s engines powered down. Javier, in the front of the crowd, had crew members arranged around a stretcher.

  Su thought her heart might burst as her crew, her family, sprang into action. And when Hoff himself waded through the decontamination foam and carefully hoisted Wil’s body onto the stretcher, she let him give her one of his three-armed hugs.

  She was home.

  Chapter 17

  A shock of cold shoved Wil out of a comfortable, warm stillness. His body smacked into rough flooring, and he gasped and coughed, vision blurry.

  Frost blistered against his skin. His brain didn’t want to work. His hair hurt. A strange, mineral smell filtered into his nostrils. And he wasn’t wearing any clothes.

  If he was naked in a trash ship again, he would…be alive.

  Warm hands grasped his shoulders and arms. “Wil. Wil, it’s me.”

  Su? That was worth opening his eyes for. He blinked about twenty times until her face coalesced in front of him.

  “Am I in the trash?” he said, his throat crackling with disuse.

  A smile spread across her face. More hands clasped him, lifting him to his feet and back into a…some kind of narrow bed. A medical stretcher.

  “Young man, you have just been awakened from temp cryo and you are in my medical clinic.” Su’s doctor, Javier, stood before Wil with a test tube full of green sludge. Hoff—incongruous in a set of white scrubs with three sleeves—and a woman who looked vaguely familiar also hovered nearby, having helped him onto the bed.

  But the only face he cared to see was Su’s. Her hair was restrained, so there was no lush cloud of black distracting from her beautiful eyes and smile. “How?”

  “Pumpkin has friends,” Su said. “A lot of them.”

  That didn’t really answer Wil’s question, but memories of Casada’s ship started to filter back to him one at a time. Ending with his body covered in cats and that brilliant blue fire.

  “I guess the folks present know about Pumpkin?” Hoff knew, for sure, but now Javier did and the small lady with the striking green eyes who glided across the floor like…

  Oh, right. She’d been one of his students for the odri bailarma, the one who’d already known part of the steps. Ianthe.

  “He’s told a few more.” Su tucked thick grey blankets around his shivering form and pressed her warm cheek against his cold one. She smoothed her hand across his hair, flicking out pieces of cryo ice. “But not anything new besides that, really. Says he’s waiting for you.”

  Wil remembered the clinic from his first visit. The mineral smell was interlaced with fresher, greener odors, plants and cleanser. Now that his vision was clear, he realized he was in a small back room that had several hospital beds with a quietly beeping machine beside his.

  “Casada?” he asked.

  “We were hoping you could tell us.” Su cocked her hip onto the narrow mattress, the press of her body anchoring him to reality. He wriggled a hand out from under the blankets and grasped her warm fingers. “Three days ago, you and Pumpkin knocked Hoff out, stole an escape pod, flew to Casada’s cruiser, and somehow blew it up.”

  “The space scavengers are having a heyday, I tell you,” Hoff added, not seeming all that put out by what Wil and Pumpkin had done to him. “The pickings are grand. I’ve got a crew up there making us rich.”

  “Pumpkin didn’t explain what happened?” The cat had probed Hoff’s mind enough to indicate which toxic waste to put in the cat carrier, pour down his pants, and load into the pod. Or, Wil assumed Pumpkin had gotten that knowledge from Hoff. The cat may have faked it.

  But based on the sensation in his toes and calves when he wiggled them, he was going to recover. Everything felt cold but unexpectedly normal.

  “Oh, he’s being very Pumpkin on that matter,” Su said with a hand wave. “Coy and mysterious, when he’s not demanding food or playing with the children. You should see him with the kids. It’s almost as if he actually likes them.”

  “If you haven’t heard from Casada, I’m going to say he’s very dead,” Wil said. A vision of a screaming, melting casino boss shuddered across his memories. There weren’t enough nanobots in the universe to fix that. “Probably most of the people who knew about Pumpkin, too. Present company excluded.”

  “Not all of them. But this is where it gets better.”

  “Better than Casada being dead and all of us being alive?” He never thought he’d be relieved to have killed someone, but he couldn’t fi
nd it in himself to feel guilty that he’d crossed that moral line. Well, a modicum of guilt. Some of those soldiers hadn’t been a danger to Pumpkin. And at least one had disliked Casada a great deal.

  “Most of people on the cruiser ejected. Really, only half of it blew up. The fighters outside the ship performed a lot of rescues and some took escape pods to Trash Planet where—”

  “They did it!” Tama burst into the back room, waving a handheld comm. “SPA! They arrested all the people who injured or killed a bristleback. The people still alive, anyway.”

  Wil had heard of SPA, of course, and Tama and Su had discussed their involvement with the bristler population, but he hadn’t realized they had the power to actually arrest people. “Nobody knows I shot one, right?”

  “The cameras installed in the tunnel only showed what Casada and his people did. The one near us wasn’t working.” Su grinned. “Apparently it got really bloody after we melted that door behind us. It’s what took them so long to come after us.”

  It was true—Casada hadn’t hassled Wil and Su until the next day, and even then, Wil and Su had wandered into an ambush with Casada and a single minion. Ironically, Casada and his men distracting the bristlebacks might have saved Wil and Su’s lives.

  “Pumpkin was telling the truth,” Wil realized. “Do you think he had anything to do with the bristler attack?”

  Su shook her head. “It’s hard to tell.”

  “You’re never going to believe who else they arrested,” Tama said, dancing with impatience. “Garza. For aiding and abetting and failing to protect the Bristleback Range endangered species population as the union most responsible for its maintenance.”

  “Awww, I wanted to kill him myself.” Su squeezed Wil’s fingers under the blankets. “I wonder who told SPA when she was interviewed by them about how deeply Garza was involved in Casada’s rampage? Some asshole who wanted him dead, I guess.”

  “SPA just doesn’t know what happened to the babies,” Tama added. “They track all the nests, including the one Scrapper and I scared the bristlebacks out of. So you could sneak out of the caverns, remember? But there were supposed to be babies in it, and SPA confirmed the babies got, well, eaten.”

  “There are a number of species on Trash Planet that will eat a bristleback baby,” Su reminded her. “It’s why they have such huge litters. Ship rats will eat pretty much anything, and if the mama bristler was out of the nest, it would have left the babies vulnerable. I guess when you and Scrapper scared her off, that’s when it happened.”

  “But when Scrapper and I lured the mama out, the babies were already gone,” Tama said.

  Su shrugged, looking as mystified as Wil felt. “Are they trying to pin it on anybody? Like you and Scrapper?”

  “No, and we sure as vac didn’t tell them we’d disturbed the nest,” Tama said. “But I thought we did it ethically. Well, I’m going to go comm my friend. Glad you feel better, Wil.” She burst out of the room as energetically as she’d burst into it.

  “With Garza out of the picture, are you going to step up as Bristler president?” Hoff asked Su. Obviously a great deal had changed between them while Wil had been unconscious. The fact Hoff was here, on her property, must mean some of the estrangement between then was gone. “Being president of a union runs in our family, you know.”

  “So does an extra arm, and I’m fine with what I’ve got,” Su replied, rolling her eyes. If Hoff was encouraging her to get political in her union, she must not be switching to Hazer like he wanted. Wil didn’t know the details yet, but now he would have time to learn them. “Omar supports Estelle Gee for our next president, and I do, too. She’ll be so much better than Garza we might push Hazer off its top perch.”

  “Never gonna happen,” Hoff said grandly. “I might even steal your medic.”

  “Never going to happen,” Javier said less grandly—but firmly. Su caught Wil’s eye and smirked. “Now if you young people will allow it, my patient needs his fluids and minerals replenished.”

  “He’ll need his strength back if he’s going to teach us the rest of the odri bailarma,” Hoff said, his cheeks, or what Wil could see of them through his facial hair, red with embarrassment. But it could be radiation burns.

  “He’ll discuss his availability with his agent,” Su responded before Wil could gratefully agree. “As well as his fee scale.”

  “You’re gonna play hardball with your old uncle?” Hoff clapped her on the shoulder and waggled her back and forth, and she heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Can you believe you refused to learn to dance all your life…wouldn’t even watch the South Rim Royal Dance Competitions with us…and here you are head over heels for Wil Tango? Did you know your man won more South Rim Royal Dance Competitions at the professional level than anyone in two centuries?”

  “I can neither confirm nor deny whether or not I watched any South Rim Royal Dance Competitions,” Su said.

  “She was such a sulky teenager,” Hoff confided in Wil. Su groaned. “I think she hated dance just to spite us. I remember this one time—”

  “It can wait.” Javier had been waiting patiently with his evil test tube since Wil awakened, but apparently his patience was at an end. “I’m going to induce Wil’s cryo lag and cleanse his system,” he told them. Su slid off Wil’s bed but didn’t let go of his hand. “There’s no reason for any of you to stay.”

  “I’ll keep helping Amatist with that little problem, then?” Ianthe asked. Wil had wondered why she was here since she hadn’t spoken to him or assisted Javier with anything.

  “Oh, right, I forgot.” Su released Wil’s hands and fussed over his blankets again. “We’re looking into other ways to unfreeze your accounts. Word on the cybbie is that Zev’s thrilled Casada got into something over his head and is absorbing his assets, so we need to, ah, liberate your money before Zev gets it.”

  “It shouldn’t be difficult with both of us hacking,” Ianthe reassured them. “Come on, Hoff. Let’s give them a minute.”

  “But…” Hoff protested as the small woman dragged him out of the recovery room.

  “You, too, my dear,” Javier said to Su. He handed Wil the test tube, and Wil drank it down grimly. It was just as awful and gummy as he remembered. “He’s going to be asleep. You won’t miss anything.”

  “Just need to verify something.” Su looked Wil in the eyes and took a deep breath. “Do you want to stay here with me? It’s not luxurious but—”

  “Yes,” Wil said. “I do.”

  She nodded as if ticking an item off a list. “Do you want to share my room?”

  “Yes,” Wil said. He’d been in Su’s quarters, as well as some of the other rooms. While he was worried about whether anyone remained who could tell the Rim about Pumpkin, he did have one larger concern. “Can we get a bigger bed?”

  She smiled. “It’ll need to be big enough for you and me and Pumpkin. He’s become a pretty permanent fixture here.”

  “Speaking of which…where is he?” Wil was disappointed the bossy little beast hadn’t shown up to check on him, but Pumpkin had never been one to do what was expected of him…especially not if he knew what was expected of him.

  “When you finish recovering, he says we’re going on a little trip.” Su shrugged, kissed him, and let Javier shoo her out of the room. “Sweet dreams, Wil Tango. I’ll see you on the other side.”

  Pumpkin hadn’t been in a rush for that trip he’d promised to take Su and Wil on, but the day finally came that he let Su know it was time. Luckily she’d had the Moll refueled, and here they were, orbiting Trash Planet, waiting for the cat to make up his mind.

  “Do you want to go in or out?” she asked him, holding the door. Why she had to open and close the door for the damn cat, she didn’t know, since he could skip wherever he wanted to go. Though she hadn’t seen him do it since he and the other cats had saved Wil’s life.

  “In. No, out.” Pumpkin minced across the threshold into the cargo bay, sat down on the catwalk, and stared at her. “Yo
u could just leave the door open.”

  “I’m trying to save fuel,” she said, “and if we seal this door, we don’t have to maintain life support in the cargo hold.”

  “What’s going on back there?” Wil called from the flight deck. In addition to teaching dance classes, he’d been learning to pilot various Trash Planet vehicles and stellarships. “We’re almost to the sky pile.”

  “In,” Pumpkin said, and crossed back into the passenger cabin.

  “I am not getting up every three minutes to do this,” she warned him. “Settle down.”

  Pumpkin stalked to the copilot’s chair—her chair—jumped into it, and began to wash his bottom. He paused for a moment to say smugly, “Leave the room, lose your spot.”

  “That’s not nice,” Wil said, gripping the control levers with normal fists instead of the white knuckled fists he’d sported during his first solo take-off.

  Su leaned on the back of the copilot’s chair. “So here we are. The scene of the crime. What now?”

  This close to the sky pile, it was hard to tell which of the pieces of debris were remnants of Casada’s ship or pieces of junk that had already been there. The Endeavor Union and Hazer, as well as a few independents equipped for it, had stripped it down already. The Moll’s hull armor was enough for smaller pieces that might drift their way, but she didn’t like bringing her girl this close to the mess of broken, floating machines.

  She could probably afford a tow package in a couple more months, now that she got first round picking privileges, but the EE-shielding she’d need to withstand the sky pile was a pipe dream.

  A new ship would be cheaper.

  Maybe a nice Tomen.

  Scrapper was trying to restore one of the Tomens Casada had owned, along with the Hail Buster along with the little roundabout, and… Yeah, she could afford to buy a new ship sooner than Scrapper succeeded with one of those quests.

  Either way, here they were, in orbit, waiting for Pumpkin to tell them why. His butt had to be squeaky clean by now, since he seemed to be putting off the big reveal. Whatever it was.