by Kathy Tyers
“Size of a large house cat, just big enough to kill yabuts. Cream-colored with black-tipped bobtail, yellow eyes. Big ruff around the neck.” Yukio sketched in fluff below tall tufted ears. “Big feet.”
Trev smoothed his mustache, interested in spite of himself.
Yukio pulled back to eye his drawing, then stroked a series of panels to broaden the image. “That’s more accurate,” he pronounced. “Slim’s nice for warm-weather creatures, but cold tolerance means there’s a fat layer.”
“Uh-huh.”
“To reestablish the Lower Infinity Crater zone we’ll need a young male and two, preferably three, females. They pride, like lions.”
“Pride. Yeah.” Since when was pride a verb?
“You’re sure you can handle a twin-engine Mathis?”
Trev flattened both palms on the desk. “You take me for a habber. I’ve always lived on a planet. I prefer planets. The first place I stopped on this trip, I couldn’t breathe. I had to find a little room.”
“Huh.” Yukio glanced down at the time. “Okay. If we leave in half an hour, that’ll give us eight hours to overfly the southern region, find some kitties, and hopefully release them before solar noon.”
That wasn’t going to leave much time for sleeping tonight. But he wouldn’t have to lick Varberg’s shoes for a whole day. The floor supervisor hounded him constantly when Graysha wasn’t around. “Yeah, fine.”
―――
Yukio gave him full control of the Gaea plane. After an unimpressive takeoff, the Lwuite youth made no comment other than to guide him toward a notch in Axis crater’s southern wall. A huge strip mine passed below. “Surface oxides,” Yukio remarked as they overflew a dust cloud with a track-truck underneath it.
Vast stretches of bare rock lay to the left and right, and Trev gazed at them in satisfaction. Goddard had mountains, real craggy ones, on the port-side horizon. He would’ve liked to see the ocean, too, but evidently that was off in some other direction.
This place felt like home. He hadn’t realized how cramped and confined he had felt in habs, in spacecraft, and even down in Axis crater.
He might be able to hide out here, but not alone. He didn’t have Goddard survival skills yet. As they flew south, he watched the ground for signs of the prospectors he’d heard mentioned.
An hour later, Yukio stabbed one finger toward his window. “There. Bring us down about half a k from here, if you can find a runway inside the fenced zone.”
Runway. Right. Suddenly the ground looked less hospitable, pocketed with craterlets and pimpled with boulders. Yukio gasped when Trev started his first approach, so he pulled up, demanding, “You see any better place?”
“No,” his partner admitted.
Trev saw one, though, closer to the cluster of boulders Yukio had pointed out. He headed for it, crossed his fingers, and nosed down again.
A few meters off the stony ground, he flared up to let the rear wheels drop. The first touchdown felt like he’d blown off the landing gear, but he held steady until the Mathis shook to a halt.
Yukio unbuckled. “Yeah. Next time, maybe I fly.” Crouching, he shuffled toward the craft’s back compartment and sorted out several heavy cloth bags, two pairs of gauntleted leather gloves, and a small rifle. He racked it once. “Tranks. Won’t hurt them a bit.”
“I know what a trank gun looks like. What do we need gloves for?”
Yukio tossed him a pair. “Don’t put them on and you’ll find out. Oh, and bring the first-aid kit.”
Sounded serious enough.
They jumped down. Trev helped Yukio unload a pair of unwieldy metal crutches, invented during some dark period of human medicine. The Lwuite planted them under his armpits, then swung forward on them, keeping his heavily casted left ankle off the ground. “Look.” He pointed with a crutch.
An apricot-blond cat crouched atop the highest boulder, tufted ears forward, watching them. Trev shivered at the baleful expression in the creature’s yellow eyes. They’d been modified with weasel genes, right? For compactness . . . or was it for fierceness?
Yukio braced his good leg and crutches to form a tripod, shouldered the rifle, and pulled off a shot. The cat bounded down behind a rock into the nesting area.
“Get it?”
Yukio grinned, his face comical behind UV goggles. “Easy. It’s flushing the rest of them that’ll take time.” He dropped the rifle and let it dangle from its sling, leaned onto his crutches again, and hobbled forward.
Trev adjusted his own goggles, guessing he looked just as insectoid. “Want to let me try that rifle?”
“Not if you’ve never shot one before. We’ve only got so many cartridges. You go around to the other side of the nest and throw some rocks in at them. I’ll put them down for their nap when they come out on my side.”
Trev set down the first-aid kit and pulled on the long gloves. They came almost to his neck, where shoulder straps secured them front and back. Then he picked a way to the other side of the nesting ground. Human feet, he realized, had probably never walked this graveled sand before. He liked the sensation. Eps Eri rode halfway up the sky, red through his goggles.
He could call this place home. Easily.
He picked up a fist-sized chunk of volcanic stone, hefted it, and tossed. It landed loudly at the center of the boulder pile. Immediately, Yukio fired the tranquilizer gun. Crack . . . crack, crack—
A black-tailed yellow creature bounded out of the shadows faster than Trev would have believed—straight for him. Another one chased it. This wasn’t in the plan! As he bent for another rock, the first creature leaped at his face. He screamed, ducked his head to protect goggles and eyes, and flailed both arms. In the icy cold, something dug like knives into his scalp. Something unbelievably strong seized one glove. “Yukio!” he shrieked.
The trank gun crackled on.
One cat clamped jaws shut on his pants. Bracing his legs, he pulled both hands into fists inside the gloves and flapped empty leather fingers at the cat on his leg. “Shoo!” he shouted, “get away!”
“Don’t move!”
Impossible—but he did it. Two more crackles echoed off the rocks, and flapping blue darts sprouted from both kits’ rumps. Expecting the creatures to go limp, he waited for an instant, then beat at them again. Blood splattered from his chin onto one cat’s fur.
They were bigger than he expected, the size of large overweight house cats.
Using both crutches, Yukio flung himself down the boulder pile. “Two minutes,” he shouted, “and they’ll be out.” Dropping one crutch, he bent for a stone and tossed it toward Trev. A cat loosened its grip. Trev kicked it off his pant leg. Yukio hurled another stone. The second cat merely went for Trev’s head again.
Icy little knives raked one cheek, then across his nose. He yelled. Startled, the cat drew back its paw to strike again. Trev slugged it with his other glove. It dropped, shook its head, then batted at his bleeding leg.
“Shoot it again,” he cried to Yukio.
“Overdose’d kill it!” Yukio shouted back, half-kneeling, flailing both crutches to create a cat-free zone. “And I think it’s a female.”
Trev kicked at her, and finally she lay on her back panting. He would have liked to stomp her.
Instead, he drew off one glove and pressed a hand to his cheek. It felt warm and greasy, the deep gouges in his nose full of fire.
Maybe it’d scar. Wouldn’t that just suit his father? If Blase found him before his face healed, he’d get one good look at something really ugly.
At Trev’s feet, the Dutch cat curled into a wide-eyed ball.
Yukio climbed back onto his feet. “What’d you do, throw a rock into the middle of the nest? You’re supposed to hit the entrances!”
“You never said so.” Now he could look around. An icy breeze fluttered the fur on the limp little cat near his feet. Between him and the boulders were four more of them. “What do we do now? How long will they be out?”
<
br /> “’Bout forty-five minutes. Get the sacks. I checked the nest and threw a trank bomb in—the mommies and the littlest kits we want are in there.”
“What’s wrong with these?” Besides the fact that they’d tried to kill him!
“Too old. There should be some barely weanables in the nest, and they’ll suit us better.” Yukio wrinkled his nose. “You look pathetic. Can you walk?”
“Oh yeah.” Trev took an exploratory run at the boulder pile. Nothing felt broken, but he did visit the first-aid kit before doing anything about bagging cats. He smeared greasy salve onto his cheek, nose, leg, and the back of his head, where his hand came away streaked with blood.
Then he clambered into the rocks, taking the shortest route up and over the rough surface. Again, the eerie sense that no other human hands or feet had ever touched this stone thrilled him.
Yukio knelt down in a hollow, near a furry pile that was apricot-blond with occasional black bobtails. “That one.” He pointed toward a slender creature, smaller than the ones that had attacked Trev. “Put him in his own bag.”
Trev made sure his gloves were pulled clear to the shoulders before bending toward the kitten. It hung limp when he lifted it onto the bag. He drew heavy browncloth over its body, pulled drawstrings, then slid the clamp tight. Hefting it, he guessed the kitten weighed four or five kilos.
“They’re not very big.” He joined Yukio. “You sure these are mature enough to take from their momma?”
“And feed them yabuts? Yeah, they’ll make it. That one, and her, and her. They could go in together, but that’ll make a heavy load. Give me the male.”
“Huh? Oh.” As he handed over the small sack, a weird thought struck him. These fierce babies were cute. Did their mommas think so?
Did his momma ever think he was cute? He’d seen pictures of her, but he didn’t remember her. Not at all.
Clenching his teeth against a sudden urge to cry, he bundled the females, two in one bag and one in the third. Then he hesitated. “Can, uh, these kitties be tamed?”
Yukio looked up. “Only if you get them so young they still need milk, and they can draw a lot of blood looking for it. I wouldn’t try it.”
“I would. Find me one.”
Yukio stared him up and down. “You’re bleeding crazy.”
“Yeah. Find me one.”
With one foot Yukio flipped a large mother cat, exposing three kittens. “Take your pick. But get a male. They’re surplus out here.”
Trev reached for the smallest. “You, runt. C’mere.” The kit didn’t put up any fight as he placed it in a bag.
“Starve it for a day or two,” Yukio advised him. “It’ll be glad to see you then, if ever. I’ll take this little guy. You take the females.”
Trev balanced the bagged females over his shoulders. Yukio dangled the two smaller sacks, and they both hobbled toward the aircraft.
“Easy ride, girls,” Trev told his own burden. “You’re heading for the cold country.”
Down here out of the wind, it felt warmer than at Axis. When he bent his arms, the parka folds didn’t feel frozen. His right leg was getting stiff, though. He laid his bags in the Mathis’s rear compartment and then reopened the first-aid kit. From a bottle labeled Sulfas, he shook out a horse pill and gagged it down.
“What are you doing that for?” Yukio asked.
Trev choked once more, swallowed, and got the pill unstuck from his esophagus. “I’ve been handling animals, and I could have brought something along on my skin. I work for Micro, you know.” He opened another bottle and popped two painkiller caps.
“Yeah. You’ve spent too much time on the Micro floor with the crazy people. Latch that grate. The big ones aren’t supposed to wake up, but . . .”
“Yeah. But. Should we bag some more while these are asleep?”
“Mmm, no. Too territorial for more than one male at a release point, and three females to one male is the optimal breeding ratio.”
“Sounds good to me,” Trev said. Yukio snorted agreement. Trev managed the lock, then plunked down in the pilot’s seat and took a deliberately slow breath. So this was frontier life. He couldn’t remember feeling this excited, alert, and alive. “Leaving the rest of the nest asleep’s okay?”
“I do know what I’m doing.” Yukio stowed his crutches beside his seat. “How do you feel?”
Every claw mark burned. “Like I took a bath with three Veneran eels. Let’s finish and get home.”
He started the engines and took off.
Half an hour later, Yukio asked, “So what’s Venera like?”
Gripping the Mathis’s yoke, Trev stretched his shoulders. The pain pills had taken effect, and really, he probably shouldn’t be piloting. “You don’t have to call it Venera for my sake,” he said. “Warmer. More plants, but we have to irrigate. Most of it, between domes, is desert or scummy ocean.”
“Home sweet dome?”
Trev grunted. He’d heard that joke too many times.
“You descended from settlers, then?” Yukio raised one eyebrow, a smile beginning in the set of his mouth.
“No,” Trev said shortly, and reality crashed back down on him. He eyed the Lwuite youth, wondering how much he should say. “My old man has too much money. I grew up in a guarded compound on a hilltop. Lots of water, plenty to eat, and nothing to do except watch the old man’s vidis.”
“Huh,” Yukio said as they passed over a series of low buff-colored hills. “Sympathies, I guess. You obviously didn’t want to stay.”
“Right.” Smoke rose from a hill off on Trev’s left. “What’s that, a baby volcano?”
Yukio stared. “Probably prospectors. We sent out a few less sociable souls, mapping and looking for valuable minerals.”
Prospectors! He didn’t expect them to look this obvious. Hastily he checked the location, noting it on the map panel. “And beyond? Is that Center’s haze out there?”
“Probably just dust. Center’s a small settlement.”
“How come?”
Yukio shrugged. “We picked up a few Einsteinians before the crossing who wanted to settle Goddard but really didn’t belong to our group. Adventurers, mostly. That’s what the Colonial Affairs people call them, anyway. Nearly all the outsiders live at Center. Except Gaea staff, of course.”
Another tempting possibility!
On second thought, that might be the first place Blase would look. “Your people let them come?”
“Gaea needed twenty thousand.”
“Huh. DalLierx makes it sound like extra bodies aren’t welcome.”
“Oh, they have their place. There’s room for other colonies on this world. Whole countries, really. Some day.”
He tried to imagine Goddard broken up into petty little countries, like war-torn old Earth. “What gives DalLierx authority, anyway?”
“Election, of course. He’s only in charge at Axis, not the whole colony.” Yukio rubbed the back of his neck. “You don’t like him, do you?”
Whoops. Did he say too much again? “I don’t know him. Not really.”
“Well, I don’t like him. He’s always asking for extra projects in our spare time. Okay, correct your course half a degree east.”
By the time Yukio directed him to Lower Infinity, which was a double crater with rims that touched, four distinct voices yowled in the rear compartment, scarcely pausing for breath. Blase could use them for backup harmony.
Yukio glanced backward.
“What do we do?” Trev asked. “Drop the sacks, slit ’em, and run?”
Yukio grinned, showing lots of teeth. “You’ll see.”
Incongruous metal fences guarded the craters’ rims, forming a compound of several hectares. The fenced area had been planted. Sticks protruded from the ground inside, leaves fluttering from some. Brown yabuts the size of his Dutch cats scattered like roaches as he swooped down to land.
“I assume someone fixed the problems with the fence?” Trev idled the engines.
“Yeah. Stay here.” Yukio worked his way toward the plane’s tail and opened a hatch. Then, from a shelf, he took down an aerosol can and sprayed all three of the large brown sacks. He slid the squirming cat bags toward the opening, then eased each to the ground. “Right,” he said after resealing the hatch and limping back to his seat. “Taxi about a quarter klick away and turn the plane around so we can watch. You’ll like this.”
As Trev swung the Mathis’s nose around, a dust cloud streaked down one edge of the crater. “Over there.” He pointed. “What’s that?”
“Happens all the time. Little quakes, little rockslides. Clears the crater walls.”
He didn’t mind that at all, so long as the rocks missed his plane. Once in position, he watched incredulously. Yabuts swarmed the bags, a brown mass writhing and wriggling.
Yukio leaned back and grinned. “They’re going to nibble our kitties to freedom. I sprayed the sacks with their favorite flavor. Vegetable puree.”
“You rat.” Trev grinned, too.
“There’s too many cats for us to safely cut them out and too many yabuts here for the plant cover. Once cats eat in a place, they decide it’s home.”
Trev filed that bit of information at the back of his mind.
“We’re doing the yabuts a favor,” Yukio added, “thinning down the population. Pretty soon the greens will come back. Everyone will be happy.”
“Except the yabuts that get to be kitty food.”
“That’s life, Trev.”
How true. Sometimes you got to eat. Sometimes you got eaten.
One cluster of yabuts scattered like an explosion of fur. A female Dutcher made a dash for freedom, then saw dinner running alongside her. She pounced, tearing joyfully at the creature.
“The trank doesn’t hurt their appetite, does it?” Trev’s stomach lurched.
Yukio laughed. The second and third females burst their sack. Their chase landed them on top of the male, still a captive in his bag.
“Poor guy.” Trev rested his chin on the Mathis’s control yoke. “If the females chase all the yabuts away from his sack, it might be a long time before he gets loose.”
