Werehunter (anthology)

by Mercedes Lackey

  The Lacu’un had just opened their planet to trade from outside, and the Brightwing was one of several ships that had arrived to represent either themselves or one of the large Companies. Only Captain Singh had the foresight to include SKitty in their delegation, however, for only he had bothered to research the Lacu’un thoroughly enough to learn that they placed great value on totemic animals and had virtually nothing in the way of domesticated predators themselves. He reckoned that a tame predator would be very impressive to them, and he was right.

  SKitty had been on her best behavior, charming them all, and taking to this alien race immediately. The Lacu’teveras, the female co-ruler, had been particularly charmed, so much so that she had missed the presence of one of the little pests, which had bitten her. Enraged at this attack on someone she favored, SKitty had killed the creature.

  For the Lacu’un, this was nothing short of a miracle, the end of a scourge that had been with them since the beginning of their civilization. After that moment, there was no question of anyone else getting most-favored trading status with the Lacu’un, ever.

  CatsEye got the plum contract, SKitty’s kittens-to-be got immediate homes, and Dick White’s life became incredibly complicated.

  Since then, he was no longer just an apprentice supercargo and Designated Shipscat Handler on a small Free Trader ship. He’d been imprisoned by Company goons, stalked and beaten within an inch of his life by cold-blooded murderous hijackers, and had to face the Patrol itself to bargain for SCat’s freedom. He’d had enough adventure in two short Standard-years to last most people for the rest of their lives.

  But all that was in the past. Or so he hoped.

  For a while, anyway, it would be nice if the most difficult decision I had to make would be which of the Lacu’un nobles get SKitty-babies and which have to make do with shipscat washouts.

  Those “washouts” were mature cats that for one reason or another couldn’t adapt to ship life. Gengineering wasn’t perfect, even now; there were cats that couldn’t handle freefall, cats that were claustrophobes, cats that were shy or anti-social. Those had the opportunity to come here, to join the vermin-hunting crew. Thus far, thirty had made the trip, some to become mates for the first litter, others to take up solitary residence with a noble family. There were other washouts, who didn’t pass the intelligence tests, but those were never offered to the Lacu’un—they already filled a steady need for companions in children’s hospitals and retirement homes, where the high shipscat intelligence wasn’t needed, just a loving friend smart enough to understand what not to do around someone sick or in pain.

  There were still far more Lacu’un who urgently craved the boon of a cat than there were cats to fill the need. Thus far, none of SKitty’s female offspring had carried that rare gene for fertility—when one did, that one would go back to BioTech, to be treated like the precious object she was, pampered and amused, asked to breed only so often as she chose. There was always a trade-off in any gengineering effort; lack of fertility was a small price to pay in a species as notoriously prolific as cats.

  Meanwhile, the proud parents were in the last stages of educating their current offspring. There was a pile of the dead vermin just in front of Vena’s desk; every so often, one of the half-grown kittens would bring another to add to the pile, then sit politely and wait for his parents to approve. Sometimes, when the pest was particularly large, SCat would descend from Dick’s lap with immense dignity, inspect the kill, and bestow a rough lick by way of special reward.

  Dick couldn’t keep track of how many pests each of the kittens had destroyed, but from the size of the pile so far, the parents had reason to be proud of their offspring.

  The kittens certainly inherited their parents’ telepathic skills as well as their hunting skills, for just as it occurred to Dick that it was about time for them to be fed, they scampered in from all available doorways. In a moment, they were neatly lined up, eight identical pairs of yellow eyes staring avidly from eight little black faces beneath sixteen enormous ears. At this age, they seemed to consist mainly of eyes, ears, paws and tails.

  The Lacu’un servant whose proud duty it was to feed the weanlings arrived with a bowl heaping with their imported food. She was clothed in the simple, silky draped tunic in the deep gold of the royal household. The frilled crest running from the back of her neck to just above her eye-ridge stood totally erect and was flushed to a deep salmon-color with pleasure and pride. She started to put the bowl on the floor, and the kittens leapt to their feet and ran for the food—

  But suddenly SCat sprang from Dick’s lap, every hair on end, spitting and yowling. He landed at the startled servant’s feet and did a complete flip over, so that he faced his kittens. As they skidded on the slick stone, he growled and batted at them, sending them flying.

  “SCat!” Vena shouted, as she jumped to her feet, horrified and angry. “What are you doing? Bad cat!”

  “No he’s not!” Dick replied, making a leap of his own for the food bowl and jerking it from the frightened servant’s hands. He had already heard SKitty’s frantic mental screech of :Bad food!: as she followed her mate off Dick’s shoulders to keep the kittens from the deadly bowl.

  “The food’s poisoned,” Dick added, sniffing the puffy brown nodules suspiciously, as the servant backed away, the slits in her golden-brown eyes so wide he could scarcely see the iris. “SCat must have scented it—that’s probably one of the things Patrol cats are trained in. I can’t tell the difference, but—” as SKitty held the kittens at bay, he held the bowl down to SCat, who took a delicate sniff and backed away, growling. “See?”

  Vena’s expression darkened, and she turned to the servant. “The food has been poisoned,” she said flatly. “Who had access to it?” They both knew that Shivari, the servant, was trustworthy; she would sooner have thrown herself between the kittens and a ravening monster than see any hurt come to them. She proved that now by her behavior; her crest-frill flattened, she turned bright yellow—the Lacu’un equivalent of turning pale—and replied instantly.

  “I do not know—I got the bowl from the kitchen—”

  She grabbed Vena’s hand and the two of them ran off, with Dick closely behind, still carrying the bowl. When they arrived at the kitchen, Vena and Shivari cornered all the staff while Dick blocked the exit. He had a fair grasp of Lacu’un by now, but Vena and Shivari were talking much too fast for him to get more than two words in four.

  Soon enough, though, Vena turned away with anger and dissatisfaction on her face, while Shivari began a blistering harangue worthy of Captain Singh. “There was a new servant that no one recognized on staff this morning,” Vena said in disgust. “Obviously they were smart enough to keep him away from the food meant for people, but no one thought anything of letting him open up the cat food into a bowl.”

  “Well, they know better now,” Dick replied grimly.

  “I’ll put the Embassy on alert—and give me that—” Vena took the bowl from him. “I’ll have the Marines run it through an analyzer.”

  Embassy guards by long tradition were called ­“Marines,” although they were merely another branch of the Patrol. Dick readily surrendered the poisoned food to Vena, knowing that if SCat could smell a poison, the forensic analyzer every Embassy possessed—just in case—would easily be able to find it. Relations with the Lacu’un were important enough that Vena had gone from being merely a trade advisor and titular Consul to a full-scale Ambassador, with the attendant staff and amenities. It was that promotion that had persuaded her to remain here instead of returning to her former position in the Scouts.

  Dick himself went to the storage vault that held the imported cat-food, got a highly-compressed cube out, and opened it over a freshly washed bowl. The stuff puffed up to ten times its compressed size once it came into contact with air and humidity; it would be impos­sible to tamper with the packages without a resulting “explosion” of food. The entire feline family flowed into the kitchen as soon as his fingers touc
hed the package; the kittens swarmed around his legs, mewling piteously, but he offered the bowl for SCat’s inspection before allowing them to engulf it.

  His mind buzzed with questions, but two were uppermost—who would have tried to poison the kittens, and why?

  * * *

  SCat and SKitty herded their kittens along like a pair of attentive sheepdogs when they’d finished eating, following behind Dick as he left the palace, heading for the Embassy. The Marine at the entrance gave him a brisk nod of recognition, saving her grin for the moving black-furred flock behind him.

  A second Marine at a desk just inside, skilled in the Lacu’un tongue, served double-duty as a receptionist. “The Ambassador is expecting you, sir,” he said. “She left orders for you to go straight in.”

  Dick led his parade past the desk—a desk of cast marble reinforced with plastile, which would serve very nicely as a blast-and-projectile-proof bunker at need. The door to Vena’s office (a cleverly concealed blast-door) was slightly ajar; it sensed his approach and opened fully for him after a retinal scan.

  “Have you ever wondered why our peaceful hosts happen to field a battle-ready army?” Vena asked him, without even a preliminary greeting.

  “Ah, no, I hadn’t—but now that you mention it, it does seem odd.” Dick took a seat, cats pooling around his ankles, as Vena tossed her compuslate aside.

  “Our hosts aren’t the sole representatives of their race on this dirtball,” Vena replied, with no expression that Dick could see. “And now they finally get around to telling me this. It seems that there is another nation entirely on this continent—we thought that it was just another fief of the Lacu’ara, and they never disabused us of that impression.”

  “Let me guess—the other side doesn’t like Terrans?” Dick hazarded.

  “I wish it was that simple. Unfortunately, the other side worships the kreshta as children of their prime deity.” Vena couldn’t quite repress a snarl. “Kill one, and you’ve got a holy war on your hands—we’ve been slaughtering hundreds for better than two years. The attempt on the Octet was just the opening salvo for us heretics. The Chief Minister has been here, telling me all about it and falling all over himself in apology. Here—” She pulled a micro reader out of a drawer in her desk and tossed it to him. “My head of security advises that you commit this to memory.”

  “What is it?” Dick asked, thumbing it on, and seeing (with some puzzlement) the line drawing of a nude Lacu’un appear on the plate.

  “How to kill or disable a Lacu’un in five easy lessons, as written by the Patrol Marines.” Her face had gone back to that deadpan expression again. “Lieutenant Reynard thinks you might need it.”

  The prickling of claws set carefully into his clothing alerted him that one of the cats was swarming up to drape itself over his shoulders, but somewhat to his surprise, it wasn’t SKitty, it was SCat. The tom peered at the screen in his hand with every evidence of fas­cinated concentration, too.

  He was Patrol, after all. . . . was his second thought, after the initial surprise. And on the heels of that thought, he decided to hold the reader up so that SCat could use the touch screen too.

  It was easier to disable a Lacu’un than to kill one, at least in hand to hand combat. Their throats were armored with bone plates, their heads with amazingly thick skulls. But there were vulnerable major nerve-points at all joints; concentrated pinpoint pressure would paralyze everything from the joint down when applied there. When Dick figured he had the scanty contents by heart, he tossed the reader back to Vena, though what he was supposed to do with the information was beyond him at the moment. He wasn’t exactly trained in any­thing but the most basic of self-defense—that was more in Erica Makumba’s line, and she was several light-years away at the moment.

  “The Lacu’un Army has been alerted, the Palace has been put under tight security, and the caretakers of the other cats have been warned about the poisoning attempt. However, the mysterious kitchen-helper got clean away, so we can assume he’ll make another attempt. My advisors and I would like to take him alive if we can—we’ve got some plans that may abort this mess before it gets worse than it already is.”

  SCat’s deep-voiced growl showed what he thought of that idea, and Vena lowered her smoldering, dark eyes from Dick’s to the tom’s, and smiled grimly.

  “I’d like to put a Marine guard on the cats—but I know that’s hardly possible,” Vena continued, as SCat and SKitty voiced identical snorts of disdain. “But let’s walk back over to the Palace and talk about what we can do on the way.”

  SCat looked up at him and made an odd noise, easy enough to interpret. “SCat thinks he and SKitty can guard the kittens well enough,” Dick replied, as Vena waved him through the door, a torrent of cats washing around his ankles.

  “I’m sure he does,” Vena retorted. “But let’s remem­ber that he’s only a cat, however much his genes have been tweaked. I hardly think he’s capable of under­standing the danger of the current situation.”

  “He isn’t just a cat, he was a Patrol cat,” Dick pointed out, but Vena just shook her head at that.

  “Dick, we don’t even know exactly what we’re into—all we know is that there was an attempt to poison the cats by an assassin that got away. We don’t know if it was a lone fanatic, someone sent by our hosts’ enemies, if there’s only one or more than one—” She sighed as they reached the street. “We’re doing all the intelligence gathering we can, but it’s difficult to manage when you don’t look anything like the dominant species on the planet.”

  The street was empty, which was fairly normal at this time of day when most Lacu’un were inside at their evening meal. The sky of this world seemed a bit greenish to him, but he’d gotten used to it—­today, there were some clouds that might mean rain. Or might not, he didn’t know very much about planet-side weather.

  SCat’s squall was all the warning Dick got to throw himself out of the way as something dark and fast whizzed through the place where he’d been standing. SKitty and the kittens fairly flew back to the safety of the Embassy, SCat whisked out of sight altogether; a larger, cloaked shape sprang from the shadows of a doorway, and before Dick managed to get halfway to his feet, the grey-cloaked, pale-skinned Lacu’un seized Vena and enveloped her, holding a knife to her throat.

  “Be still, blasphemous she-demon!” it grated, holding both Vena’s arms pinned behind her back in a way that had to be excruciatingly painful. She grimaced but said nothing. “And you, father of demons, be still also!” it snapped at Dick. “I am the righteous hand of Kresh’kali, the all-devouring, the purifier! I am the bringer of cleansing, the anointed of God! In His name, and by His mercy, I give you this choice—remove yourselves from our soil, take yourselves back into the sky forever, or you will die, first you and your she-demon and your god killing pests, then all of those who brought you.” Its voice rose, taking on the tones of a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher. “Kresh’kali is the One, the true God, whose word is the only law, and whose minions cleanse the world in His image; His will shall not be flouted, and His servants not denied—”

  It sounded like a well-rehearsed speech, and probably would have gone on for some time had it not been interrupted by the speaker’s own scream of agony.

  And small wonder, for SCat had crept up unseen even by Dick, until the instant he leapt for the assassin’s knife-wielding wrist, and fastened his teeth unerringly into those sensitive nerves at the joining of hand and wrist.

  The knife clattered to the street, Vena twisted away, and Dick charged, all at the same moment; his shoulder hit the assassin and they both went down on the hard stone paving. But not in a disorderly heap, no; by the time the Marines came piling out of the Embassy, alerted by the frantic herd of cats, Dick had the miscreant face-down on the ground with both arms paralyzed from the shoulders down. And, miracle of miracles, this time he wasn’t the one battered and bruised—in fact, he was intact beyond a few scrapes!

  He wasn’t taking any chance
s though; he waited until the Marines had all four limbs of the assassin in stasis-cuffs before he got off his captive and surrendered him.

  “Do we turn him over to the locals?” one of the Marines asked Vena diffidently.

  “Not a chance,” she growled. “Hustle him into the Embassy before anyone asks any questions.”

  “What are you going to do?” Dick asked sotto voce, following the Marines and their cursing burden.

  “I told you, we’ve got some ideas—and a couple of experiments I’d rather try on this dirt-bag rather than any Lacu’un volunteers,” was all she said, leaving him singularly unsatisfied. All he could be certain of was that she didn’t plan to execute the assassin out-of-hand. “We caught him, and we’ve got a chance to try those ideas out.”

  He continued to follow, and was not prevented, as Vena led the way up the stairs to the Embassy med-lab. The entire entourage of cats followed, and Vena not only let them, she waved them all inside before shutting and locking the door. The prisoner was strapped into a dental chair and gagged, which at least put an end to the curses, though not to the glares he cast at them.