“Is that all you can think of? Your company?” Mather snapped. “Be reasonable, Captain. We’re up against something outside both our experience. I don’t understand it, you don’t understand it, and no one else understands it—except, perhaps, whoever is actually doing these things—but we’re never going to understand it if you keep jumping to conclusions and making wild accusations. Now, I just tried to tell you that I called the hold before leaving my cabin, and I was assured that everything is still secure. Your own security people confirm that no one has passed through that door.”
“That isn’t possible!” Lutobo said. “There were paw prints this time, dammit! Maybe they’re teleporting—I don’t know. But I won’t have it. I want you to get rid of the cats.”
“You what?”
“You heard me. I want the cats destroyed. You can have Doctor Hamilton put them to sleep, or I can have my security men blast them, or we can jettison them in space—I don’t care how it’s done, as long as it’s done quickly. But I want them gone. I want them off my ship!”
“Lutobo, you didn’t hear a word I said about the importance of those cats, did you?” Mather replied. “If they don’t reach Tersel alive, I don’t care to be around to answer for the consequences.”
“That can be arranged, too!”
“Can it, then?” Mather said, leaning both hands on the edge of the desk to stare down at Lutobo. The movement opened his jacket so that the butt of the needler under his left arm was partially exposed.
“How dare you bring a weapon into this office?” Lutobo whispered, suddenly afraid. “Courtenay?”
But before he could push the button to call for help, Mather was leaning across to block the button, his wide hand pinning Lutobo’s smaller, darker one.
“Mister Courtenay is more intelligent than to try disarming an Imperial agent, Captain. So, I would have thought, are you.” He released the hand and straightened menacingly. “I hadn’t thought it necessary, but perhaps I should remind you again who you’re dealing with. Wallis and I receive our orders directly from the Imperial High Command. We are accountable to Prince Cedric himself. Now, it will take you about two hours to verify that and to confirm, for your own edification, just how slight are the limitations on our authority.
“While you’re checking on that—and I have no doubt that you will—I intend to go to the hold and inspect the Lehr cats again—and to remain there with them until we reach Tersel, if necessary, to ensure that they come to no harm. If I should discover that the cats are, indeed, responsible for the attacks aboard this ship, then I will personally take appropriate measures, regardless of the animals’ value. But in the meantime, I will brook no interference in the performance of my duties, either by you or by any member of your staff. Have I made myself perfectly clear?”
Lutobo, sitting stiffly upright in his chair, was almost white with suppressed rage by the time Mather had finished, but he was still sufficiently in control to realize that the agent probably would not dare to bluff under such circumstances. With icy calm, he stood and leaned forward with both hands on his desk, so that there was only a meter or so of shiny leatherine between them. His dark eyes shone like polished stone in his impassive face.
“I understand you perfectly, Commodore.” His words were crisp, precise, cold with anger. “And now I want you to understand something. I intend to communicate with your superiors again, as you have suggested. And I intend to secure whatever authority it takes to ensure that your Lehr cats are destroyed and that you are broken in rank and ruined for this. You have your two hours, Commodore. But after that, we shall see whether your Imperial Command will allow you to abuse your authority to the endangerment of private citizens. The Gruening Line is not to be trifled with, Seton. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly,” Mather said. “And now, by your leave, Captain”—he made a brisk, formal bow and clicked his heels precisely—“I’ll continue about my business. You know where to find me.”
He stopped at the new murder site on the way, but there was little there that he had not seen before. The bulk of the bloodstained carpet had been cleaned by the time he got there, and maintenance personnel were replacing a section where a guard said the paw prints had been. The piece had already gone to the laboratory for further examination and preservation until forensic chemists on Tersel could run detailed tests.
“Was it the victim’s blood?” Mather asked a technician.
The man shrugged. “Well, I don’t think it was cat blood, if that’s what you’re really asking, Commodore. As to whether it was the victim’s blood, I couldn’t say until I’ve seen the lab results.”
“What about the force-blade?”
“That’s gone to the lab, too.” The man cocked his head at Mather. “Be honest with me, Commodore. Do you think we’ve got some kind of maniac loose on the ship, rather than the cats doing all of this?”
Mather only shrugged. “I’ll let you know when I’ve formed an opinion.”
Ship’s Security was still in evidence outside the door to the hold when Mather got there, and the Rangers had installed even more stringent security measures during the night. After Mather had put his palm to the ident scanner that now activated the outer door, he stepped into the door lock and felt the brief tingle of sensors scanning his body for weapons, pausing on his needler. Then, just before the inner door slid aside, he was caught briefly in a tangle field that jangled every nerve ending in his body. Closing his eyes, he ceased all movement and forced himself to relax immediately, not even breathing as the energy tendrills wound around him; he waited while the Ranger on the other end scrutinized him and then deactivated the field. It was Webb.
“Sorry for the inconvenience, Commodore,” Webb said, holstering his own weapon as he approached his superior. “You’re the first to try out our new security system. I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
Flexing his muscles experimentally, Mather shook his head. “No, you did fine. Next time, though, tell me when I’m going to walk into a tangle field.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Mather glanced toward the area of the cats’ enclosure as Wing and three more Rangers came out of the security station toward him. Still in the little room, Peterson and Casey swiveled toward him, Peterson keeping one eye on the outside scanners.
In the center of the room, everything appeared to be as he had left it the night before. Electronic baffles cut off whatever sound might have been coming from inside the cats’ cage, and the force nets around the cage area reduced the interior to a blurred, not-black glimmer that almost hurt the eyes to look at directly. Everything appeared to be all right—but suddenly Mather had the premonition that he did not want to see what lay beyond.
“Sir, can you tell us what’s happened?” Neville asked as he and the others clustered around.
Mather brought his attention back to them reluctantly, unable to shake the waves of foreboding that were assailing him continually now.
“There have been two more attacks during the night, gentlemen—one of them fatal.”
“Well, it can’t have been the cats, then,” Perelli murmured.
“Aye, we were watching every indicator, every alarm,” Fredericks said. “There was nothing out of the ordinary.”
Wing shifted from one foot to the other. “You said that only one attack was fatal, sir. What about the other?”
“The other victim is still alive—or was, when last I heard. It was one of the Aludrans—a female named Ta’ai. Wallis has gone to assist.”
“Then maybe this Ta’ai can tell us what attacked her,” Perelli said. “It just can’t have been the cats, sir. There’s no way they could have gotten out without us knowing.”
“I know.” Mather sighed, clapping the man on the shoulder in reassurance as he moved a few steps closer to the first of the defenses around the cages.
“All right, Mister Peterson, let’s see inside, shall we?”
Peterson ran his tongue across dry lips and turned back to his control
console, setting recorders and backup circuits in operation and rechecking all systems one last time.
“Ready when you are, sir.”
“Let’s take ’em down, then.”
There was the low whirr of the additional recorders and sensors cycling in, the snick of a needler safety being thumbed aside by one of the Rangers, the tension amplified snap of the power switches being thrown. As the nets flickered out of existence, the mournful howling of three Lehr cats rose eerily in the hold. The fourth cat, who was the reason for their howling, would never howl again. His end of the cage was practically awash with blood.
“What the—”
Faster than a man his size had a right to move, Mather was beside the cage, peering in at the slaughtered Lehr cat and automatically activating the big cage scanners. The dead cat’s mate, the smaller of the two females, stood her ground, her wails turning to snarling defiance as Mather tried to look closer. The Rangers did not move, too shocked and stunned even to murmur among themselves as to how the thing could have happened.
CHAPTER 8
“I’m sorry, Doctor, but both doctors probably will be occupied for at least another hour,” a nurse told Wallis when she entered the outer reception room in Medical Section and asked to see Shannon. “Please excuse me. I have to get back.”
The nurse had come out only to dispense a headache remedy to an adolescent boy, who turned anxiously to Wallis as the woman disappeared back into the innards of the medical complex.
“She called you doctor,” the boy said, almost accusingly. “Are you a medical doctor?”
Wallis gave the boy a reassuring smile. “Yes, but I’m not part of the crew—just a passenger like you.”
“Well, do you know what’s going on?” the boy insisted. “People are getting pretty scared. Somebody said that there are some big blue cats down in the hold and that one got out during the night and killed someone.”
“Oh? Who told you that?” Wallis asked. “It can’t have been anyone very responsible, to go spreading such rumors.”
“Then it isn’t true?” the boy replied. “Well, that’s a relief! They are handling some kind of medical emergency in there, though. I think it has to do with one of those aliens.”
“Really?”
“Hmmm.” The boy nodded as he drank down whatever the nurse had brought him for his headache. “Right after I got here, one of the security guards brought in one of those aliens that bundle up all the time—with the feathers on top of their heads.”
“An Aludran,” Wallis supplied.
“Yeah, I guess so. He looked awfully shaky. They took him inside, and it was ten minutes or so before anybody came out to see what I needed.” The boy grimaced and rubbed at his temples. “I think I’ll try a nap, to get rid of this headache. Maybe it’ll be gone by dinnertime.”
“I’m sure it will,” Wallis said politely.
But when the boy had gone, and a quick glance outside revealed no one coming, Wallis went cautiously to Shannon’s office door and touched the latch plate. To her surprise, the door slid back immediately. Heartened, she slipped inside and closed it behind her, heading immediately for the master console on Shannon’s desk.
The controls were clearly labeled. Running her finger down the row of monitor switches, Wallis tried surgery first—empty, except for an orderly cleaning up—then looked in briefly on one of the treatment rooms, where Shannon and an assistant were performing an autopsy, presumably on the murdered engineer. After that, she punched up surgical recovery. Deller’s back blocked most of her view of the bandage-swathed patient he tended, but the erratic life readings Wallis called up on another monitor identified the patient as Aludran—an Aludran very close to death. A crimson-robed Muon sat close by, his feather-crested head bowed over a bandaged hand that trailed tubes and wires, so the patient could only be the unfortunate Ta’ai.
Sighing helplessly, Wallis shook her head and flicked quickly through the half dozen infirmary rooms, glancing only in passing at other patients sleeping or resting, a few of them attended by a tense-looking nurse or orderly. Then she stopped to look more closely as another alien crest caught her eye. It was Ta’ai’s brother, the quick, articulate Bana, sitting dejectedly on the edge of the bed where the technicians had left him after drawing his blood for Ta’ai. He was shivering, despite the thermal blanket he had pulled around himself against the cold of the ship’s normal environment, but his own discomfort seemed to affect him very little. His eyes were fixed unwaveringly on the view screen a few meters across the room—the monitor in Ta’ai’s recovery room—and occasionally he swayed weakly and shuddered. Once, his slender hand reached out as if to hold the motionless image on the screen before him, but the very act betrayed his knowledge of its futility. Only a miracle could save Ta’ai now, and miracles seemed to be in short supply.
Wallis watched for several seconds, sensing the despair that the little alien must be feeling, then noted the location of the room she was viewing and switched off her console. Less than a minute later, she was entering the room. Bana turned around as she came in, recognition flickering in the pained yellow eyes.
“Why have you come? Have you not done enough?”
“I’m sorry about Ta’ai,” Wallis murmured, moving around to sit on the end of the bed near Bana. “I know that you hold us responsible because we brought the cats aboard the Valkyrie, but—Bana, I don’t know how to say this without its sounding as if I’m just trying to defend the cats, but Mather—Commodore Seton—and I aren’t convinced that the cats are to blame.”
“Not to blame?” Bana interrupted hotly. “How can cats not be to blame? You saw body of first passenger killed, Doctor. You see Ta’ai, dying there on screen. How can you say cats be not to blame?”
Wallis exhaled heavily. “I can’t prove it yet, Bana. But I can tell you that Commodore Seton found an electronic device near the cats, after the first man was killed. It was putting out a psychotronic—a mental ‘sound’—that made the cats angry and afraid—and also everybody guarding them: the Rangers, the crewmen. And it may have been what upset Muon so much the night before.”
“Electronic device?” Bana said blankly. “Machine?”
“That’s right, a machine,” Wallis agreed, trying to shift her terminology to a vocabulary that Bana could understand. “Maybe the cats didn’t scare Muon at all. Maybe the machine scared Muon, but he thought it was the cats. Maybe someone put the machine there to make the cats angry and afraid and then killed the people, so it would look as if the cats killed them.”
“Why someone want to do that?” Bana asked. “Besides, we know cats kill people on ship. Ship’s officers find fur and cat tracks. Muon see death in worship trance. Now you say maybe cats not kill?”
Wallis shook her head. “I can’t explain what Muon ‘saw,’ Bana. I do know what was found. But the cats can’t have been out of the hold. We’ve got a lot of sophisticated equipment down there, which would have told us if they had. It doesn’t lie. Besides, our cats are different from the ones you know and fear. Maybe blue cats don’t act the same as green ones.”
Bana bowed his head for a moment, then looked up wearily at the screen. “And maybe it not matter what color cats are, Doctor. Ta’ai, my czina, my sister, is dying, and they—will not let me be with her.”
His voice broke at that, and he turned his head away and would not look at her. Thoughtfully, Wallis glanced up at the screen again—at Ta’ai connected to her life-sustaining machines, at the solemn-faced Deller monitoring the function of those machines, at Muon hunched beside Ta’ai and holding her hand.
“Why don’t you come with me, Bana?” Wallis said, standing to gently lay a hand on Bana’s blanketed shoulder. “Much as I’d like to undo what’s happened, I can’t—but I think I can get you in to be with your czina.”
Minutes later, she was back in Shannon’s office and watching the surgical recovery room again. Deller had left, but Bana now sat on Ta’ai’s other side, his very presence apparently str
engthening Muon, at least—though Ta’ai’s life readings grew weaker with each passing minute.
Satisfied—for there was nothing more she could do for Bana or for Ta’ai—Wallis changed the scene again until she relocated Shannon. The younger physician, the autopsy completed, was stripping off soiled surgical gloves and gown while she listened to a concerned-looking Deller. He spoke too low for the microphones to pick up what he said, but Shannon’s face fell at his words, and she stood silently for several seconds after he left. Then, as her assistant began gathering up the surgical instruments they had used, Shannon reached wearily above the table and removed a data cassette—and headed for the door. Wallis heard a door sigh open and closed in the outer office, and quickly turned off the console as footsteps approached.
“What are you doing here?” Shannon asked dully as she entered and tossed the data cassette onto the console. She pulled off a blue surgical cap and shook out her short curly hair, then sank down in a chair opposite Wallis and closed her eyes, leaning her head against the chair back.
“I thought I might be able to help,” Wallis said, watching the younger woman carefully. “I guess it’s been pretty bad, hasn’t it? And not enough sleep to deal with it well, either, I’ll bet. We shouldn’t have hit you with that vampire business last night. How much sleep did you get?”
Shannon shrugged but did not open her eyes. “Who knows? Two hours? Three? Deller called me to surgery just before six. It’s nearly ten now, and already I’ve been through an extensive surgery and an autopsy, on top of what happened yesterday. My work isn’t half over, either. There’ll be another autopsy before the day is out. Ta’ai isn’t going to make it.”
The Legacy of Lehr Page 11