Catacombs

by Anne McCaffrey

  “Shut up, you. Let her talk. Let her out.” And to everyone’s surprise, Mavis hunkered down on her haunches, stuck her saber and pistols into a gaudy sash belted around the middle of her spacesuit, and rubbed her fingers together, saying, “Come, kitty. Come, my Fury.”

  Everybody was watching Mavis, so no one told Jubal to go back when he hunkered down beside Pop. The old man’s eyes were narrowed and his hand went to his pocket flap like an old-time gunfighter about to draw.

  A tiny black-and-white-striped paw whipped out and slashed his hand. “Ouch! Damn, kitty!”

  Mavis laughed. “Let her go or she shred you same like government papers, Ponty.”

  “If we let you have this cat, instead of Doc, you gonna go back to your ship and fly away, all forgiven?”

  “No no. Still take you guts for garters, but will have this kitten. Better kitten than phony one.”

  Jubal spoke up. “Do you know that you’re cut off from your ship, and I’m pretty sure something may be eating it?”

  “Huh?” she asked, and in some dialect Jubal didn’t know directed one of the pirates to go look. He came back squawking and pointing back toward the air lock.

  “Never mind. We just use this ship for a while.”

  “Not on my watch, lady,” Mr. Yawman said, drawing a bead on her.

  “Belay that,” the captain said. “Nobody’s been killed yet and we don’t want to start if we don’t have to.”

  “Yeah,” Jubal said. “But just so everybody knows what the stakes are, I think you should know, Captain Mavis, that your backup ship mysteriously disappeared. Once the Ranzo was released from its tractor beam, it locked the Grania in its own beam.”

  “Who that?” Mavis searched the barricades, which were as dimly lit as was strategically feasible, to see who was talking.

  “My boy,” Pop said, putting a hand on Jubal’s shoulder.

  “Sure. I know that,” Mavis said, and made an exasperated face, though her expressions were a little hard to read, what with the wrinkles, the tattoos, and the shiny things stuck into her skin, not to mention the general grime.

  But when Pop moved his hand, the kitten in his pocket made a break for it and with a mighty leap cleared the heads of the crewmen and the barricade, and made a four-point landing on Mavis’s shoulder. Fortunately for the pirate, she still had on the space suit, and the top was impervious to claws, among other things. The pirate queen reached up two jeweled fingers. Jubal expected her to lose them, but the kitten leaned against her cheek and purred loudly enough for him to hear it from behind the barricade.

  Ponty shook his head. “Maybe there really is someone for everyone,” he said, and winked at Jubal while nodding toward his heavily armed mother. Fortunately for Pop, she had her eyes trained on the pirates and didn’t see, or he might have been the first casualty.

  Chester’s voice mewed in Jubal’s mind, calling him.

  Jubal called back, Where are you, boy?

  We’re docked in the Molly Daise shuttle bay. Pshaw-Ra wants someone to get your sire’s shuttle out of his ship. It’s heavy and makes flying tricks harder.

  Obviously none of the adults still glowering at each other and rattling their weapons would be free to get away, so Jubal whispered to his dad, “Good luck. I have to go pee,” and put up with hearing the pirates—and, he suspected, some of the crew—laugh at him as he walked quickly back toward the bow.

  The shuttle bay was within sight of everyone so he had to keep going, even though he wanted to see Chester. He didn’t know how to fly that shuttle anyway. Janina did, though! Or at least she could fly a shuttle. He knocked lightly on the door to her cabin and got no answer. “It’s me, Jubal,” he said in a loud whisper. “I need your help.”

  There was a security camera right outside her door, and he looked up at it and waved. The door opened a crack and he slid inside.

  “Are the pirates gone?” she asked.

  “No, but we’re working on it.”

  “The captain said we should stay locked in our cabins and take care of the kittens.”

  “This will only take a little bit, and it may help evict the pirates. Chester and Pshaw-Ra need someone to move the pirate shuttle out of the pyramid ship’s bay.”

  “Why can’t the pirates go back the way they came?”

  “It’s kind of a long story. If the crew gives the pirates the shuttle to return to their ship in, the pyramid ship needs to be long gone first or I wouldn’t be surprised if Mavis tried to take it too.”

  “Who’s Mavis?” Janina looked scared and angry at the same time.

  “She’s the pirate captain Pop was working for. Like I said, a long story. Could you do it? Please?”

  “The cats—” she began.

  “It will only take a minute.”

  Chessie was not buying it. With a reproachful look at Jubal, she shot out into the corridor ahead of Janina, and fell in step with them as the girl and Jubal sprinted toward the shuttle bay.

  CHAPTER 20

  As soon as Janina piloted the hijacked pirate shuttle clear of the confines of the pyramid ship, the Molly Daise’s outer hatch opened and the pyramid ship whirled out into space.

  Where’s Pshaw-Ra going? Jubal asked Chester, who had climbed into the shuttle too.

  Who knows with him? He took a look at those things attacking the boarding tube, said, “Uh-oh,” and told me to call you. He doesn’t want pirates looking too closely at his ship.

  In which case he had left not a moment too soon. When the docking bay hatch closed and the O2 gauge said it was safe to exit, Jubal, Chester, Janina, and Chessie stepped out onto the bay’s deck in time to see the pirates being marched in. Mr. Yawman’s jaw was tight and his eyes hard as he watched every move the captives made. Jubal thought the purser was disappointed he hadn’t been allowed to shoot any of them. Mom looked like she was in a real bad mood too, but Pop was smiling, running his mouth the whole time, like he was leading the pirates on a tour of the ship.

  Mavis stopped and Mr. Yawman’s laser rifle dug into her back, which didn’t bother her at all. “Ahhh,” she said, eyeing Chessie and Chester, and reaching up to stroke Spike. “Cat shortage not so short now, eh?”

  If only she knew! He hoped Spike wouldn’t tell her about the other cats.

  Chester caught his thought and exchanged glares with Spike. No danger of that for now, I think. Spike doesn’t want her new best friend to even see other cats. Look how she’s bristling, just because that Mavis noticed Mother and me.

  But as the pirate queen climbed into her shuttle, she gave Jubal a nasty wink, as if to tell him this wasn’t over.

  Dad let his breath go at the same time the shuttle left the bay. “You’re even with her now,” Mom said.

  He shook his head. “That was only round one.”

  But they returned to the bridge and the captain ordered that the all-clear signal be given. People, most of them cuddling at least one cat or kitten, poured into the corridors and headed to their duty stations, awaiting further orders.

  The pyramid ship was nowhere to be seen, but the shuttle was fast approaching its mother ship, the outline of which was blurred by a layer of whatever had destroyed the boarding tube.

  It looked so innocent somehow. They could see the shuttle bay hatch open and light try to spill out into the blackness of space, but it was swallowed at once by the stuff covering the ship. It all rushed toward the opening at the same time as the shuttle.

  On the bridge of the Molly Daise, the cats who had accompanied crew members—Chester and Chessie included—lined up along the view port, hindquarters twitching and jaws chattering.

  The shuttle did a 180 and the pirate queen’s voice came through the com. “Change mind, we stay with you.”

  Captain Vesey declined to invite the pirates back on board. After all, just because Mavis reported that there was no response from the crew left aboard the pirate ship didn’t mean that anything was wrong—or even that what she said was true.

  �
��They’ve got their shuttle back,” Mr. Yawman said. “Let them fly that for a while.”

  Jubal’s mom growled worse than he’d ever heard from any of the cats, who had wandered off now or were under the consoles sleeping, preening, or grooming each other.

  But the Ranzo had a different attitude. Captain Loloma said, “You confiscated their weapons, right?”

  “Of course,” Captain Vesey said.

  “We’ll toss them in our brig, then,” Captain Loloma said. “You maybe aren’t seeing from your side what we see from ours. Something has attached itself to the Grania’s hull. The spooky thing is, we saw it leaving our ship, creeping along the path of the tractor beam.”

  “We saw something of the sort, but the Grania had deployed a boarding tube on our side. All anyone reports seeing is a collection of wiggly things, like a cross between dust moats in a sunbeam and a herd of worms, but it was fast and powerful enough to swarm up the tube until it reached the Grania, leaving the tube crushed behind it.”

  “We weren’t all that alarmed when our own running lights picked out the—like you said, a herd of worms—sort of flowing away from our hull, following the tractor beam. You can’t see the beam, of course, but we saw these wiggly things writhing off toward the Grania and disappearing into the darkness between the ships. Then when they got in range of the Grania’s lights, the worms reappeared along the same path before they flowed across the Grania’s hull. They were glowing then with a light of their own. I suppose they might have picked up some kind of energy charge from the tractor beam? Some kind of parasitic thing? Because once they’d spread out across the Grania, her lights dimmed and then went dark. I hailed the Grania’s bridge—we’d already demanded surrender—but got no response. We cut our tractor beam damn quick, I can tell you. But what the heck can those things be, and why did they seem to come from us but didn’t attack us?”

  The bridge of the Molly Daise was full of noncommand personnel then, including Jubal and Balthazar, who looked very pensive. He had been quiet and sad since Chione’s death, and Jubal thought he might have survived only because of his link with Pshaw-Ra. Now he cradled the listless Renpet, stroking her fur and rocking her a little now and then.

  “You got any ideas about that, sir?” Jubal asked Balthazar, indicating the dark and drifting pirate ship.

  “Perhaps it feared the ships guarded by so many of its foes,” Balthazar said slowly. “It has always been said that the great serpent Apep cannot be destroyed.”

  “Apep? What has Apep got to do with it?” Jubal asked. “We killed him. And besides, this was a whole swarm of snakes, and Apep is just one big one!”

  “Apep has many aspects. And although it is said that only the sacred cats can defeat Apep, even they cannot destroy the serpent utterly. After those fleeing the wrath of Nefure were safely moved to a new place of concealment, the vizier and I returned to the great snake’s corpse, to dismember and remove it, only to find that neither it nor its remnants remained in the cavern. It is also said that Apep never dies, only transforms.”

  “But that’s just a story. It was dead as dead—wasn’t it?”

  The old man shrugged. “So it appeared. But our oldest chronicles tell us that when Bast defeated the serpent in material form, it transcended that form by breaking into many parts and ascending to the sky, where it tried to eat the very sun.”

  “I saw a drawing about that—on this long wall back in the City of the Dead.”

  Balthazar looked stricken for a moment. “You saw that? Then you were outside the serpent’s lair, built to contain it in dormancy when first it reemerged on this world as the monster you saw. Had Bast not flown to the rescue of Ra the sun, the world would have been ended.”

  “But why would you bring a thing like that with you when you came?”

  “Perhaps it or one of its parts came as an ordinary serpent and grew into the monster. The crossbreeding may have revivified it.” The old man shrugged again. “But it came, and once before the vizier, in his cunning, contained it in the lair you found.”

  “This was—uh—recently? Before we came?”

  Balthazar said, “It was before my time, and before my grandfather’s time. The vizier is a very old cat.”

  Jubal gave a low whistle. “I guess he is. I’m still not clear how that humongous dead snake turned into the worm herd.”

  “It is clear to me that Apep simply changed form, the large serpent breaking into many small ones fueled by its inner fire, so they could take flight on the hulls of our vessels in order to ascend the skies. When your friend fired her weapon at it, the power from the weapon may have begun Apep’s transformation into its space traveling form, a dispersion of its mass into energy-hungry particles that may be carried on the wind—or on the hull of a departing ship.”

  “Why didn’t it eat us, then?”

  Balthazar shrugged. “Perhaps it had not yet reached the stage in its growth where it could do so. The serpent is no mere serpent, any more than the vizier is a mere cat. It is cunning and even wise. Even in its altered shape, it may have sensed the presence of you, its foes—but the pirate ship had no such protection. And the beams of attachment were natural conduits for its spawn.”

  “Spawn? It had babies?”

  “Its more diffuse aspect,” Balthazar corrected himself.

  Jubal felt his eyes widen as he looked at what was left to be seen of the pirate ship. “So these are like little snakelets that came from the big snake, like the kefer-ka come from the cat mummies.”

  Balthazar shrugged and Renpet gave a little cry of distress and buried her nose in his armpit. “It has not happened before,” he said. “Or not for a long time.”

  Jubal wanted to ask more but the old man turned abruptly and left the bridge. His step faltered and the lines in his face seemed deeper than before.

  Captain Vesey was not nearly as interested in the snaky things as Jubal was. He was busy talking with Captain Loloma, and both of them agreed that if the things were going to attack something, the pirate ship was a good target. It sounded almost as if they wanted to think of the Apeplets as an ally. Bad idea.

  CHESTER IN FLIGHT BACK TO THE NORMAL SPACEWAYS

  I couldn’t sit still. I paced, and prowled, and hunted. I almost wished I was back in the pyramid ship with Pshaw-Ra.

  Even though Jubal and I were together now, often our link was broken, our shared experiences interrupted, by so many distractions.

  Renpet was gaining strength, and Mother had taught the kittens all of the basic cat things, but now she too was unhappy. “So many cats and not one of the young ones is getting a proper education,” she complained. But there wasn’t room to move. When the ship was quiet, the kittens could charge up and down the corridors and expend some of their energy, but mostly they ate and slept.

  Sleep. I could not seem to get a complete nap without someone interrupting my rest. The crew knew about my link with Jubal, so every time they needed to know something about us cats, Jubal and I had to act as interpreters.

  One day I crawled deep into one of the ventilation ducts and curled up and slept for several hours. I was sorry that Jubal couldn’t come and nap with me, but he was busy taking care of other cats and trying not to get between his mother and father, who fought every time they passed each other, as my mother and Jockey would have done if they weren’t perfectly content to ignore each other. It wasn’t fair. His attention should be for me, doing things with me, even if it was just sleeping or sharing something to eat. He wanted it that way and so did I. He was my boy. We were supposed to be together.

  In my dream, I was back in the barn again, listening to Git, our first teacher, telling us to watch out for canines. Just then something swooped down from the rafters and picked her up. She had been silent when she was killed that day in the field, but in my dream she mewed like a tiny kitten, piteous and heartbreaking.

  And then I realized that what I was actually hearing was a kitten. It was my kitten, crying to himself. Lonely, he was
saying. So lonely.

  This was the one Jubal called Junior, the kitten who looked like me, crying over and over again. I knew somehow that Kibble was sleeping beside him, along with his sister, Mother, Bat, and Sol, but still he cried as if he’d been abandoned.

  That woke my daughter, who picked up his thought and echoed it. “Lonely.”

  It was infectious. Soon kittens cried all over the ship; my ventilation duct echoed with their mews. I put my paws and tail over my ears but it did no good.

  Jubal, who had been kept busy as assistant Cat Person to Kibble, asked, Chester, what’s wrong with them?

  I don’t know except that they’re lonely.

  How can they be lonely? There’s a jillion other kittens here! Maybe they’re just bored.

  I jumped down from my hiding place, halfway up the inner hull, and padded back to our cabin. Jubal met me there.

  The crew will be returning the Barque Cats to their original ships if they’re willing to pay the finder’s fee, Jubal told me. But they want to keep the kittens for new homes in other places.

  Mother sat upright between us, looking up into Jubal’s face and then over to me. She understood Standard very well from years of being a ship’s cat. Kibble confided in her all the time.

  “They are not ready for new homes,” she said to me. “There are so many of them, and some of the poor mites, the ones whose mothers were left behind on Mau, have only their sires to instruct them, and you males are a total loss at kitten training.”

  We stood in the open doorway of the purser’s cabin, while he was on the bridge. My sire trotted up to us, tail high, trailed by three kittens trying their best to imitate him. Their tails were not very long or bushy yet but they held them straight up and strutted behind their sire. Of course, they got a certain amount of strut from Nefure too.

  “Says you, babe,” Jockey told Mother. “Spike found herself a home already, and Duke, Prince, and Princessa here will be the first to find new ones.”