by Jody Wallace
“Are you too ignorant to recognize the very thing you came here for?” Steven shook his head as if disbelieving. Yep, the employees were getting an earful. How was he so bad at this? Tim, searching for the cats, flinched every time Steven spoke. He was definitely not pleased with his boss.
“This is a carbon monoxide monitor.” She rose and kicked the box, hard. It flew into Steven, careening off his leg. He yelped and danced aside.
“But this is the part they gave me at the warehouse,” Steven lied. Tank Union’s central parts warehouse was near their shipyard, and Steven hadn’t had time to travel there and back since she’d arrived. “They said it was…you know. The part. My gift. That I’m allowed to give to people because I’m a director now.”
“Come here, Tim,” she demanded, snapping her fingers. The directors did sometimes hand out corporate gifts, but not pieces from a zheng ship. “What is this part?”
Tim glanced between her and Steven nervously. As far as he knew, Steven was attempting to literally sell him out. But would he anger a representative of Selectstar? Would common sense win out over his loyalty to his slimy boss?
“It’s an industrial carbon monoxide monitor,” he said.
“Would an employee of the parts warehouse mistake this for a Mozim power converter? I am hardly such an employee myself, and even I can see the two items are clearly different. Even if your boss cannot.”
“Uh.” Tim rubbed the back of his neck. “We hired new people?”
“Oh, did you? Perhaps your boss thinks some of his current people may be about to disappear.” She stared straight at Tim, and his lips twisted in a grimace.
“Look, we’ll go to the warehouse and you can pick the part yourself,” Steven said. “Don’t get your panties in a wad.”
“I’m not wearing panties,” she said smoothly. It sounded exactly like something Jenna would say. As did… “The only thing that’s going to be in a wad is your headquarters, after we take your people and raze it to the ground.” The last part she whispered.
“That seems drastic,” Tim said, alarmed. He was a smarter man than Steven Wat. And he knew exactly what she was meant by the disappearing employees. “We can get you the part. It’s in the building.”
“Is it indeed?” she said archly, turning toward Steven. “How about that?”
Steven blinked, blinked again. His narrowed eyes threatened pain and suffering for Tim and something more for her.
“Fine, it’s in my office. But if you want it, you need to come upstairs with me.” He lowered his voice. “If you don’t, I’ll go upstairs alone, and I swear to you, I’ll smash it.”
Briar’s heart stuttered, but she smiled as if she didn’t care. “Would you really? Give up so much money? After all the things you promised to sell me.”
The skin around his lips had gone white with rage. The white rage was different from his standard rage. The white rage was when Steven was actually dangerous, because he threw caution aside in order to achieve his goal. She’d seen it a few times, most recently when he’d ordered Vex and Tim to kill her in the zheng ship.
His nostrils flared, and they had also turned somewhat white. “Do you want to make another bet with me, Jenna? Do you think you’ll win this one?”
Steven might be more vengeful and petty than he was greedy. He would definitely smash the part. If Lincoln and Pumpkin had managed to steal it already, one of the cats would have told her. Her best option was to stick to him like black ice on a roadway and avoid the poisoning some other way.
The part was the goal. The part would save the ship and everyone on it.
“I don’t know why you have to be so difficult,” she told him in a low, disappointed voice. “It’s a simple exchange. One you sought out in the first place.”
He smirked. Steven had driven her into an impasse, yet her brain worked furiously for another solution. What distraction would force Steven to linger downstairs? Had she undermined Tim’s loyalty enough that he’d be willing to switch sides?
And where were the cats? She could use a boost from one of those pushy little hairballs right about now.
As if in response to her dilemma, Axel strode into the cafeteria.
“I have captured one of the two animals.” The robot cradled a satisfied looking Pumpkin in his arms. “But my sensors indicate there may be more on the premises. This was not projected by my algorithms at all.”
That was when the screaming started.
Chapter 16
Lincoln reached the directors’ private bathroom without being spotted. Not that he expected anyone to be present, but given all the setbacks they’d experienced trying to obtain this part, it wouldn’t have surprised him. When he opened the door to the fourth stall, Mighty Mighty was perched on the toilet batting a piece of tissue back and forth.
“Lincoln!” The cat swiped the tissue to the ground and lifted his chin for Lincoln to scratch under it. His confident, high voice rebounded through the large gold and grey restroom. “Are you ready to save the day, my friend?”
The stall was roomy and spotless but bore no evidence that a hidden safe had been mounted inside somewhere. The silvery grey stall door shut them off from the rest of the room except at the very top. Gold tiles covered the walls, with coarser grey floors designed for secure footing. A holo screen was mounted on the back of the door.
“Anyone around?” he asked Mighty in a low voice. He slipped a multitool out of his pocket. Tim and Steven would soon grow suspicious about his absence, and he hoped to be long gone with the power converter before they came looking for him. They wouldn’t be able to blame Jenna for the part’s disappearance because they were with Jenna, and if they blamed Vex—oh, well.
“Just us.” Mighty rose to his hind legs, stretched up the wall, and batted at the buttons used to activate the flush, bidet, and other cleansing features. “It’s behind here.”
“Do you know if we need to worry about a security system?” Briar said there were no cameras anywhere on this level except what had been secretly installed by Steven, apparently, but they couldn’t be too careful.
“I have not received an update from a messenger in some time, but I’m sure that is a concern our hacker would already have investigated for us. She is a very clever human.” Mighty used his paw to press the various buttons, activing the features of the toilet in a random sequence. Flushing, spraying, and whooshing sounds echoed beneath the lid. “This is a much fancier accommodation than the one that was converted for our use. It is giving me ideas for upgrades.”
“Are you playing with the toilet or getting us into the safe?” Lincoln inspected all the creases in the wall, where the panel with the buttons lay flush against the pale tile. Nothing looked fishy, but Lincoln was a mechanic, not an interior decorator.
“I’ve almost got it.” Mighty patted the bidet several times in succession. The reverse waterfall sprayed out around the closed lid. The cat peered over the edge of the toilet, watching the water trickle to the floor with fascination. “Oopsie.”
Good thing they were alone. People would wonder what was happening in here. “What?”
“That was not the right combination.” Mighty swiped a paw over his ears, doing some quick grooming where water droplets had sprinkled him. “Pumpkin mind-read Steven and relayed it to me and perhaps I misremembered.”
Lincoln ran the multitool’s tiny, intense light around the crack between the button panel and the tiles. It wasn’t as flat as he’d assumed. That might be where the safe would emerge from the wall. None of the caulk between the other tiles seemed as if it had been disturbed.
But a specific combination of flushes and bidets seemed like an unrealistic way to open a safe. What if someone playing around with the toilet triggered it on accident?
“Was it six flushes, two bidets, and an ultrasonic followed by a flush, three ultras, and eight bidets?” Mighty mused. “I distinctly remember six-two-one-one-three-eight. Of something.”
“Can you ask Pumpkin?” he
asked.
“He’s too far away to contact,” Mighty confirmed. “I shall attempt this combination one more time.”
The cat reached up again, his black paws tapping away at the buttons. This time, the eight bidets at the end caused enough overflow that the ground flooded.
The safe did not open.
Shit. Lincoln opened the stall door, and a wash of water seeped into the bathroom.
“It definitely won’t work with the door open,” Mighty asserted. “It has to be closed.”
Ignoring the cat, Lincoln hopped through the fresh puddle and listened at the door of the bathroom. Silence. He returned to the stall and closed the door behind him.
Mighty perched on the toilet with his ears half-flat against his head. “Now I shall need to be carried,” he informed Lincoln. “I cannot stand to get my feet wet.”
“We can’t go anywhere until we figure out how to open the safe.” With a sigh, Lincoln tried to wedge the thin blade of the multitool into the panel crack at different spots, with no results. “Did Pumpkin say anything else? You’re going to have to go find him.”
“I have a better idea. Let’s search Steven’s office for the combination.” Mighty’s yellow eyes gleamed with excitement. “Did I mention I have seen many a holo program about how to conduct a heist? He will no doubt have a secret drawer in his desk with the combination in a leather notebook or on a tiny scrap of paper. He wouldn’t risk preserving it in digital form.”
“Uh.” Since they weren’t getting anything accomplished here, Lincoln scooped Mighty up and traipsed through the sheen of water on the floor into the foyer. A small, circular grate gurgled slowly, draining the water. Steven had locked his office door, but Mighty had no trouble remembering the correct code for the touchpad that he, or someone, had stolen from Steven’s head.
Too bad he didn’t remember the correct code for safe in the bathroom.
But inside Steven’s office, they quickly realized there wasn’t anywhere to hide a leather notebook. Or a scrap of paper. The desk was a transparent, glassy plastene. The chair was clear. Everything in the office, like what Lincoln remembered of Briar’s office, was frosty, gleaming, and very impractical for hiding things.
While Mighty prowled through the room and sniffed everything, Lincoln pressed all over the desktop and holo console with Gullim Vex’s fingerprints, seeing if any touch-activated drawers emerged. In the corner of the room, where Steven had a small cooling unit and protein dispenser, Mighty let out a ferocious sneeze.
“Something,” Might said, before sneezing again. And again. “Something bad is over… Katchoo! Here.”
His last sneeze contained a touch of whiny meow, and he skittered away from the food and drink station as if it was spitting water at his feet.
Lincoln crossed the room and investigated. Frowning, because he smelled something unusual as well, he eased open the door of the cooling unit. Inside were a number of slurp packets and a fist-sized metal tin with the outline of a scraggly bush etched into the top. No rotten food, severed heads, or anything else obvious.
“Don’t touch that!” Mighty said with a hiss when Lincoln reached for the tin. “It’s bad. Oh, be careful, Lincoln. You’re too precious to me to die like this. I don’t think you should touch that. I said, be careful, would you?”
Between Mighty’s harangue, the multitool, and a flattened slurp packet, Lincoln managed to pry the lid off the tin. Inside the lid were very precise instructions for consuming the red powder to relieve “occasional bouts of impotency” with dire warnings about the painful death resulting from overdose. He assumed that the tiny white spoon stuck most of the way in the coarse powder would measure the non-deadly amount.
This, then, based on the acrid smell, would be the chefo poison. Steven must have been in a hurry if he’d swiped Director Vidal’s entire supply, and it couldn’t be that lethal if Steven was willing to stash it in the same place as his food. In fact, a smear of red powder lay against the bottom of the fridge’s white interior like tiny, deadly freckles.
Lincoln secured the lid and looked from Mighty to the desk to the tin. The loose powder in the bottom of the fridge suggested Steven had already extracted the powder—enough to poison Briar? No sense giving him access to more. Lincoln slipped it into his pocket, intending to dispose of the whole tin, and bundled up Mighty to return to the restroom.
They didn’t have much time left. Their DNA masks could start to fade in the next hour, and his bathroom break was long past normal. Mighty was going to have to skip downstairs and read Steven’s mind, or this heist was going nowhere.
Right before they were about to enter the restroom, a faint metallic clanging emerged from the direction of the stairwell. It was difficult to tell because the walls of the directors’ suite muffled sound.
He and Mighty froze to listen. “Is someone coming?” he asked the cat.
Mighty stiffened in his arms. “Uh-oh.”
The front door hissed as it began to open.
Caught in the act after breaking into a director’s office and stealing poison.
Or were they?
“Something bit me!” a person shrieked.
“There’s a monster!”
“Oh my gods, it’s ship rats!”
Workers plunged from the closest offices into the wide hallway, stomping their feet and batting at their appendages. Axel swiveled his head one hundred and eighty degrees to view the commotion, while Tim jogged into the hall to check on the ruckus.
Briar attempted to follow but Steven grabbed her wrist. His bulky ring pinched her skin. It occurred to her that it wasn’t that smart to run toward a possible ship rat infestation, except that she knew something Steven didn’t.
She had a passel of hyper intelligent cats on her side.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked. “Let them handle it. Why don’t you prove you brought the money before we fetch the part?”
“I mean…now?” she asked, astonished. “With all this?”
The hallway was crowded with distinctive sparks of blue, scurrying, furry critters at floor level, and screaming, capering humans who couldn’t get a close look at the invaders since said invaders kept…disappearing.
Urgency and fear permeated her brain, almost overwhelming, except she also recognized the whisper of feline influence. The cats, in addition to popping in and out of the headquarters to provide a distraction, were pushing all the humans to panic. To see ship rats instead of cats.
“There are no ship rats,” Axel said. “Be calm. There is nothing to fear.”
Everyone ignored him. Screams and running feet dominated as the cats chased the humans one way, then another, hissing and clawing. She’d never seen so many cats at once—but hardly anyone in the entire Obsidian Rim had seen cats in thousands of years.
A blue blip by Axel’s head appeared right before a very, very large cat Briar didn’t recognize popped into existence and bounded off the side of its head, causing the robot to stumble.
Then the big cat disappeared.
Pumpkin, in Axel’s arms, went ballistic, much like Mighty had done to her, but Axel couldn’t be harmed by claws. He swiveled his head to face his front again and somehow maintained possession of the squirming orange cat.
“This town is going to shit,” Steven cursed, squeezing her wrist. “We’ll stay in here until it’s over. Axel will guard us.”
She could probably take him down—even in this body—which would interrupt his plan. Unfortunately, she didn’t have time for him to be unconscious. Once Jenna’s face was gone, she lost all her advantages.
The cats had created a diversion, at some risk to themselves, and it was up to her and Lincoln to make full use of it.
Pumpkin finally slipped free of the robot’s grip, scrambled to Axel’s head, and performed a sort of slice and dice on the back of the silver neck. Axel’s whole body jittered, like electricity had coursed through it, before going limp.
Axel wouldn’t be guarding them.
Pumpkin leapt to the ground and hauled ass toward a man trying to outrun three white kittens that did look eerily like ship rats. Briar tamped down an instinctive lurch in the opposite direction. Pumpkin sideswiped the man’s leg, and the man bellowed with pain.
“What in all the blazes is happening… Oh my stars, it’s raaaaaaaaaats!” screamed an elderly woman. One Briar recognized. Director Nelda, Briar’s favorite.
She yanked free of Steven, breathed deeply to calm herself, and ran toward the six terrified directors who had emerged from the conference room. Too much shock could precipitate a heart attack in the elderly. While they’d promoted a lowlife like Steven Wat instead of a much better candidate like herself for reasons she couldn’t begin to fathom, that didn’t mean she wanted them to keel over.
“Come back here!” Steven yelled after her.
“No, you come with me! The stairs are this way.”
“Shit,” he cursed. She didn’t wait to see if he followed.
“It’s okay, it’s okay!” She waved her arms, dodged eight cats terrorizing some staff, and nearly ran into the wall. How the hells many cats were involved in this mess? She hoped they could sense her because she feared she might stomp on one.
After she dodged again, a man flew out of the closest office, colliding with her, and sent them both tumbling. Briar slid into the wall with a painful thud. It was Tim, carrying a satchel of some sort. His flailing fist struck her in the cheek.
Briar saw stars, gasped, and scrambled to block his arms. When her vision cleared, she looked down to see Boson Higgs with his teeth sunk in above Tim’s knee right through his indoor coveralls. His front paws wrapped around the man’s leg, and his back feet raked his calf. His eyes were wide and his pupils had dilated with what she recognized as excitement.
“Knock it off!” she yelled out loud and in her head. Boson Higgs froze, raised his gaze to hers, and lowered his eyelids nearly all the way. Then he raked Tim’s leg, slowly, one more time.