by Jody Wallace
Edge’s next suggestion was hardly any better. “Then we leave him here, and if they don’t find him in time…welp.”
“Frickin’ frack,” Briar said, hands on her hips. Her foot twitched, as if she was thinking about kicking Vex the way she’d kicked Steven Wat when he was writhing on the floor with a broken arm. Lincoln would need to be mindful that she had an itchy right foot and a steel-toed boot. And that their helpful friend Edge might be a bit of a sociopath. “We’re going to have to take Vex with us, aren’t we?”
Chapter 10
Briar stared at Gullim Vex’s motionless form in the makeshift jail cell and considered whether there had been a better way to handle him. Vex had woken up en route to Bunk Port, and Lincoln and Edge had basically had to sit on him to calm him down. Edge and Walter had learned more than Briar liked about Vex’s interpretation of her recent past. Not that he’d been accurate, but her ears still rang with the ugliness he’d spouted.
It had been Walter who’d jabbed the sedative from the med kit into Vex’s arm when the man had nearly wrenched his shoulder out of the socket trying to escape his bindings. Edge had been in favor of shoving him out the airlock and claimed to know just the right coordinates for a permanent solution.
“The little ones are always more vicious,” Walter had whispered to Lincoln, and since little included her, she’d offered them both a haughty sniff.
Now, in Su’s factory, where they’d arrived in the middle of the night, Vex had been secured in a hastily-emptied parts locker. They’d looked for a Tank Union chip to nullify, but he hadn’t had one—perhaps so only Steven would know the location of his minions. Su wasn’t happy that they’d brought him here, but agreed that leaving him in the roundabout, tied up and drugged, would have been too much of a loose end considering what they needed to accomplish in the next several days.
Soon enough, his absence would be noticed, as people on Trash Planet tended to keep track of one another. There’d probably even be a reward for information. Hopefully Walter and Edge wouldn’t betray them. Tank Union rewards didn’t tend to be as appealing as some other unions offered.
Now they were waiting on Hoff and a few others to gather so they could decide how to stop Steven from selling the part the Catamaran needed. Briar vacillated between guilt over treating a human being like a sack of organics and annoyance with that same human being for having fewer morals than a sack of organics.
“I should never have left you alone,” cried a small voice nearby. Briar turned to see Mighty Mighty trotting toward her, tail erect. “Humans do tend to get in so much trouble when they aren’t supervised.”
“Shhh,” she cautioned, finger to her lips. Vex did not need to know about sentient cats—or any cats. He could be faking unconsciousness.
Mighty halted at her feet, peered through the metal gridded door, and hissed. The hair along his back and tail rippled until his body seemed to double in size.
In her head, Briar said, Step away where he can’t see you. We don’t want him to know.
Mighty scampered back several paces. His pupils thinned to slits in the brightly lit corridor, and with the expanded blackness of his fur, he looked demonic. That one is very, very unclean. I shall push him.
“To do what?” Briar said aloud. Could Mighty use his psychic abilities to modify Vex’s evil nature? That was…disturbing.
“To stay asleep.”
Briar couldn’t tell if anything changed in the jail cell, but after a minute, Mighty seemed very pleased with himself and started giving his ears a bath. He licked his paws and scrubbed them over his head repeatedly, as if eliminating the stench of his mental connection with Vex.
“There you are!” Hoff exclaimed from down the hall in the opposite direction. He and Lincoln strode toward her, and she couldn’t tell if Hoff was talking about her or the cat.
But Lincoln was definitely the one she wanted to see.
Now that they weren’t trying to save their own asses, they might have to actually discuss what had happened on the train between them. She avoided his gaze in case he was thinking about her crush on him, but she could feel her cheeks heat up. With her skin tone, it was always so obvious. It was one emotion she always failed to hide. She’d mastered the composure needed for negotiations and sales, but that mastery didn’t extend to social situations with people she wanted to see naked.
“Wil got back, everyone’s up, and Su’s ready.” Hoff bent over, hovering his hand over Mighty. “Pets?”
Mighty tilted his head to the side, inviting a cheek and whisker scratch. “The cats are also ready.”
“How many?” Lincoln asked with a tiny downward tilt of his lips. “After that one time, you know Su doesn’t like it when there’s twenty plus.”
“I get to meet more cats?” Briar asked, clasping her hands. What would they be like? “How exciting.”
“No pushing,” Lincoln told Mighty gruffly when the black cat settled himself into the crook of Hoff’s third arm. “Just let us be.”
“It is the agreement,” Mighty said with a long-suffering sigh. “Even if it would hasten matters and be much more convenient in general.”
Since the heist planning committee had expanded, they repaired to one corner of the barracks’ common room in what Su called the shoot-the-shit circle but others called the gab circle. Stuffed chairs and couches were positioned around a decent-sized pedestal holo emitter. A handsome, slim, dark haired man Briar didn’t recognize lounged on the couch beside Su, and everywhere else she looked, there were cats.
Striped cats, white cats, grey cats, spotted cats. A white cat with orange legs and tail and ears. An orange cat with white legs and tail and ears. Cats with long hair, short hair, and one cat who appeared to have no hair, just wrinkled skin and the most beautiful blue eyes and giant dark ears she had ever imagined could be on an animal.
“The Originals have convened,” Mighty said in a portentous fashion. He squirmed out of Hoff’s grasp and trotted into the circle, leaping onto the holo pedestal as lightly as a flake of snow. Hoff followed him. Was Mighty the boss of the cats? Or did he just like to be the center of attention?
“Oh, and me,” said a plump, kind looking woman with pale skin and upswept grey hair that Briar guessed was Barbara Ann Collins. “I’m an Original.” She waved at everyone with a cheery grin. Briar didn’t know why she was part of the planning committee, but she had yet to meet the woman formally.
The other humans in the common room sensed something was up and yielded the space, though the smallest children stared longingly at the cats and fussed at their guardians to let them go.
“Hey, Frank.” Lincoln lifted a hand toward a tall, broad-shouldered man with a crew cut and a nose that looked like it had been broken and healed wrong. The man carried a wide-eyed toddler on his hip. “This is Briar.”
Frank ambled over and extended his fist. “Nice to meet ya. This is Kiki. Kiki, how do you say hello to a new person?”
Kiki waved a slobbery fist at Briar. Her other fist clutched a gnawed-on protein bar, the hard kind used for teething. “Kiki!”
“Briar,” Briar responded, bumping fists with the child and then her father.
“Kiki kitty?” the child asked next, waving at the gab circle. “Kitty!”
“Not right now, sweet cheeks.” Frank bounced Kiki a little. His short sleeved shirt revealed any number of tattoos and intricate designs on his light skin and even one creeping up around his neck.
“Kit-ty,” Kiki repeated in a louder, more insistent voice. She started to squirm and held out her arms to Lincoln, leaning toward him so endearingly Briar wanted to snuggle the child herself. “Linco kitty.”
“She thinks I’m a sucker.” Lincoln’s hands remained at his sides. Did he not want to hold the child? How could he resist?
Frank laughed. “It’s because you’re a sucker, Linco.” He tugged a sock back onto his daughter’s foot before her squirming completely kicked it off.
“I can’t take you to the ki
tties,” Lincoln told Kiki very gravely, as if she were an adult instead of a young child. “The kitties need to have an important discussion.”
Kiki studied Lincoln just as gravely and subsided. “Peepee,” she said next, and that provoked a much more immediate reaction out of her father, who whirled and headed at a fast clip toward one of the doors.
“She’s potty training early,” Lincoln explained, tucking his thumbs into his pockets. “But it’s too cold here to let them run around without pants and, you know, figure it out themselves.”
“That sounds messy.” Briar remembered smaller children from the crèche, and indeed they had not run around without pants.
“They learn quicker than you’d think.” Lincoln gave a sigh and glanced across the room. “I need to ask you for a favor.”
She blinked up at him, surprised. “Of course.”
His head tilted toward the gab circle, where Hoff was greeting every single cat by name and several other people had taken seats. Barbara had chosen an armchair and had four cats in her lap already. “I’ve got an idea for how to do this, but the cats… They’ll want to be in charge. Not sure they should be. Can I count on you to have my back?”
He could, but Briar never agreed to anything blindly. “What if I don’t like your plan, either?”
“You may think you don’t, but the cats…” He rubbed a hand across his jaw as if it made him uncomfortable to have this discussion. “You push easy, Briar.”
Briar had changed into a set of spare greys since they hadn’t been able to retrieve her luggage from the Green Port Express station. Right now she wished she had on her coveralls so she could whip her pistol out of the hidden pocket and pretend to clean it. Just for effect, of course. “I push easy. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The cats don’t know when they do it. I mean, they know, but they don’t care and we think it’s half-instinctive.” Hoff waved for them to join the circle, and Lincoln continued, faster. “They change your mind. Temporarily, but they do. They can’t do it real good to me, and that’s why I don’t trust anyone else’s plan to be theirs and not the cats’.”
She’d heard them mention Barbara in pitying tones, Barbara who’d spent two years being ordered around by cats. But she, Briar, was still one hundred percent herself. She lowered her voice. “Lincoln, I do have some common sense. You think I won’t recognize when my opinion has been influenced?”
“I know you won’t.”
She stared at him, unsure if she felt hurt or offended or what. He stared back. He wanted her to support him without question, no matter what he said. Backing him required a level of trust and commitment that…
Wait a minute. Pushed easy. “Do you think I’ll agree to whatever you say because I’m attracted to you? How shallow do you think I am?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I thought you wanted to pretend those ten minutes didn’t happen?”
Why had she brought that up? He wouldn’t have answered the question honestly if it had been true, so it was stupid to ask. “What ten minutes?”
“The… All right. It never happened.” He took a deep breath. Blew it out. And then he started to talk.
“I don’t mean this as an insult, Briar. You’re obviously smart. Your idea to go to the zheng cruiser would have been great, except you couldn’t predict Steven Wat. But the cats don’t know enough about humans—the way humans are now instead of the humans in those cryopods—to imagine things that could go wrong.
“Like with Steven. They’ll insist on a plan that only they, the cats, will be able to execute. They won’t care about a plan B, and they won’t admit to any weaknesses. Mistakes. They steered Barbara like a mech dolly and got away with it for two years. But it’s different now. We can’t let them be so involved. It’s dangerous, and I reckon we need to protect them from themselves.”
“They are sentient…individuals,” she said, not sure what to call them since their existence was a first—beings whose intelligence equaled or even surpassed humanity. “They can choose for themselves. We’re not their keepers.”
“I know, I know.” He flexed his fingers with obvious frustration. “I just…I’m worried. And I don’t want them choosing for us.”
“Come on, you two,” Hoff called. “Enough time for that later.”
“I’ll consider your testimony,” Briar told Lincoln. She wanted to feel chilly toward him, disrespected, but she believed him. His primary goal was to save the cats. He was so careful and methodical that he might actually be the best one to mastermind the scheme. Gods knew Hoff was terrible at schemes, considering his idea of a corporate mole was one who’d discount his purchases, while Su was too blunt for trickery. One of Lincoln’s own weaknesses was that he’d only been on Trash Planet three months and had limited familiarity with the locals.
But she and Lincoln together—with her knowledge of ship sales, negotiations, and Steven Wat and Lincoln’s steadiness and experience with cons—would they be the perfect team?
“And that is how we shall take possession of the entire ship, including the Mozim power converter, in case we need spares of anything in the future,” Mighty finished from his perch on the holo pedestal.
“Brilliant, as always,” Barbara said, clapping her hands. Her enthusiasm nearly dislodged a fluffy white cat from her knees.
Briar had focused on Mighty’s explanation but kept in mind that, according to Lincoln, the cats might try to influence her. She didn’t think it had worked. She felt completely normal, if slightly nervous because she was seated next to Lincoln on a sofa and their legs kept touching. She didn’t want him to think she was cuddling him on purpose. She had, however unwillingly, expressed her interest in him, so now it was up to him to decide if a liaison was to his liking.
She peeked at the man in question. A frown marred his perfect brow. He hadn’t seemed to enjoy Mighty’s discourse, though the rest of the humans, except for some questions in the beginning, had been supportive of the scheme.
And Briar could admit, that made her a little suspicious.
“So we’re going to buy the whole ship,” Briar said as slowly as Lincoln, had he felt like talking. It wasn’t unusual for him to be taciturn, though she would have expected a little resistance after what he’d told her. “After you make Steven give us the converter, the cats will push the right people and Tank will hand the ship over for the negotiated price.”
When Lincoln had offered her three times what the union had paid for it, she’d turned him down. It had been a bad deal. But he hadn’t had a cat’s assistance. Was Mighty Mighty onto something?
Mighty regarded her with approval. “Oh, yes, we’ve done it before, on a smaller scale. Right, Dear Barbara?” The older woman wiggled her fingers in a gesture that could have been agreement and could have been hello. “For this larger scale, we will simply involve more cats.”
The smug orange tabby sprawled between Su and Wil chimed in. “That humanoid waste of cells won’t tell the others we got the part because then he’d have to admit he swiped it in the first place.”
“Absolutely, my dear Pumpkin.” Mighty rose and unrolled himself on the pedestal, his hind end rising into the air while he splayed out his front paws. When cats stretched, it was as if their bodies went into slow motion. “Now that that’s settled, I would like for the framework to be on Su’s property since I have heard that too much time spent in toxics can prevent successful matings.”
“Are you counting on having more kittens after your first litter?” Hoff asked, tickling the small grey cat balanced half on his shoulder and half on the back of the chair. “That tiny black fella called Catpernicus looks just like you.”
“Doesn’t he?” Barbara agreed. “And Catpernicus was the first to wean. I’m so proud of him.”
“I am sure that many cats on the ship desire to reproduce,” Mighty said primly. “Boson Higgs will explain how we will transport the zheng framework to Su’s property using the Catamaran’s camouflage system so as to be untrack
able by the level of technology on this particular planet.” Mighty leapt to the floor and padded over to Lincoln, an intent expression on his hairy little face. Lincoln sighed and uncrossed his legs to create the desired lap.
A long-haired black and brown cat of very large stature headed toward the pedestal next. He circled it, sat down next to it, and stared at something in the distance. His broad nose lightened toward his mouth, turning almost orange, and the black stripes on his forehead were so distinct they looked painted on.
Boson Higgs continued to pinpoint…something…with his very fixed gaze. After a moment, Briar turned to see what it was. The windows high on the wall of the two-story common room gleamed with the dreary light of midday, but she couldn’t see anything unusual.
“Is it the red dot?” whispered a cat crouching at the feet of the human closest to Boson Higgs.
“I don’t see anything,” Barbara said. “But these old eyes don’t work as good as they used to.”
“No one has seen the red dot since we woke,” offered the hairless cat in a raspy voice. She perched on a side table next to Javier, Su’s elderly medic. Briar was assuming the cat was a female based on...well, nothing except the cat’s demeanor. It would have been rude to ask or to check her backside, and it was unimportant. “It is believed to have expired during the Obsidian War.”
“Red dot?” Briar asked. “Is a red dot needed in the plan?” She had her doubts about Tank Union selling the whole ship to them, but the cats seemed convinced it would work. They could read minds and influence people, plus they had remained undiscovered for two years. It seemed likely they knew what they were talking about, and Lincoln had misjudged them.
It wasn’t as if he’d argued with them.
Come to think of it, nobody had argued with them. Hoff hadn’t thrown in his two DICs aside from comments about how the cats should come work for him. She didn’t know Javier, Tama, Scrapper, Barbara, or Wil well enough to assess whether they were quarrelsome, but Su hadn’t even argued.