Pet Noir

by Pati Nagle

  Elsa’s anger faded, replaced by sadness. “Megalink’s a shambles. It’ll take a miracle to save the Gamma branch. Hoyden’s made such a wreck of the finances it might even take down the parent company. And I helped him do it,” she added with an angry sob.

  “You were coerced.”

  Elsa closed her eyes, shaking her head. “I can’t let this get into the news. I owe it to my family.”

  Devin stood up and went to her, putting his hands on her shoulders. She looked at him, eyes going wide. I thought she would smack him, but instead her arms dropped limply to her sides.

  I will never understand humans. One minute they’re talking business, the next they’re courting.

  Devin leaned close and spoke softly. “I think you should get out of this robe—”

  “I-I beg your pardon?”

  “—put on some clothes, and come with me to Security. You’ll feel better once it’s done and Hoyden’s locked up for good.”

  She hung her head. “I can’t,” she said in a plaintive voice.

  “Come and talk to my boss. He’s got connections. I bet he can keep your name off the feeds.”

  She lifted her head and gazed at him for a long moment, then nodded and stepped away, going into the bedroom. Devin watched her go, a strange smile on his face. He pulled out his pocket com and flicked it on.

  “Connect Nathaniel Wright, status urgent.”

  While Devin was arranging to meet the chief, I got in a little more nuzzling with Leila. My plan was to stay behind when Devin and Elsa left, then slip out with Leila for some romping in the park.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way.

  Elsa came back wearing the lilac dress I’d seen her in before and carrying the matching handbag. “I’m ready,” she said.

  “Great.” Devin smiled at her as he went to the door and thumbed the access pad. “You won’t regret this.”

  The door slid open to reveal Hoyden, rumpled and decidedly pissed off. When he saw Devin he let out a growl, shoved Devin back, then stepped into the apartment. The door swished shut behind him.

  Devin got up in his face. “She doesn’t want to see you, Hoyden. You’d better leave or I’ll bring you up on trespassing charges.”

  Hoyden sneered. “You and your charges. You already wasted half my evening. Get outta my way.”

  Devin didn’t budge. “You’d better—”

  Hoyden clocked him one on the jaw. Devin dropped like a stone.

  Elsa’s eyes widened in fright, then she raised her chin. “Get out of my apartment!”

  “Not a chance.”

  Hoyden stepped over Devin. Elsa ran for an elegant com unit mounted on the wall.

  “I’m calling Security!”

  Hoyden grabbed her wrists. “No you don’t. We’ve got unfinished business.”

  Devin moaned, but showed no sign of getting up. I decided it was time for me to get in on the action.

  “Stay here,” I murmured to Leila, giving her a kiss for luck. I crept to the edge of the table and peered out.

  “Let me go!” Elsa cried, struggling. The handbag bounced around wildly, dangling from her elbow.

  Hoyden just laughed, a nasty, ill-intentioned laugh. He started dragging Elsa toward the couch.

  I darted out and went to Devin. Hoyden was busy with Elsa and didn’t see me. I gave Devin a lick on the cheek and he moaned again, but that was it. No use trying to bring him around. I dove for his pocket and scrabbled for the com unit.

  Elsa let out a startled “oof.” I glanced up and saw that Hoyden had pushed her down on the couch. She kept struggling and started to scream. Hoyden shoved a cushion into her face.

  I pulled the com out of Devin’s pocket. Had to use both paws to get it turned on. I hit the emergency Security call button.

  “Security, this is Agent LX. Code 4, repeat code 4! Send backup to Beta Parkview apartment 723 now.”

  Muffled squeaks and grunts from the couch told me Elsa was still kicking, but there wasn’t much time. Hoyden was fumbling with his pants.

  “Agent LX, code 4 confirmed,” came a voice from the com. “Backup is on the way.”

  I didn’t bother shutting off the com. I leapt over Devin, took a bounce off the end table and landed square in the middle of Hoyden’s back. He made a startled noise and straightened up, so naturally I dug in my claws to hold on.

  Hoyden let out a howl fit to raise the dead. He started flailing his arms, trying to reach me. I took a few hits, but managed to hang on. I bit him for good measure, and he howled even louder and started stomping around the room.

  I saw Elsa getting up from the couch. I was glad to see she was OK, but didn’t have time to worry about her. I had to keep Hoyden busy until backup arrived, and it wasn’t going to be easy. Especially after he thought of backing into the wall.

  The first shot knocked the wind out of me, but I managed to hold on. Glimpsed Elsa digging in her lilac handbag. Hell of a time to check her makeup, I thought.

  Hoyden slammed me into the wall again. I saw stars, and my grip went slack. I dropped to the floor, gasping. Hoyden turned, and an ugly scowl curled his lip as he started to reach for me.

  “This time I’m going to wring your scrawny little neck!”

  “Freeze!” Elsa commanded.

  Hoyden glanced at her and froze. Elsa stood tall, her feet planted firmly apart in designer sandals, an elegant silver pistol in her hands, aimed right at Hoyden’s head.

  Hoyden’s eyes narrowed and he slowly turned to face her. “I bet you’ve never even fired that,” he said, shifting a foot toward her.

  “Don’t move or I’ll shoot,” Elsa said coldly. “I’ll show you my practice targets later if you like, but I don’t think you want me to demonstrate my grouping on you.”

  With Hoyden distracted, I managed to limp out of his reach, around the corner of the kitchen counter. Leila came over to me and with an anxious little mew started licking my head.

  Elsa held Hoyden at gunpoint until Security arrived. Chief Wright himself was first in the door. He glanced at Devin, still out cold on the floor, then shot an anxious look around for me. When he saw I was alive he relaxed a little. He pointed the four Security guys who had come with him at Hoyden, then stepped toward Elsa, thoughtfully avoiding kicking Devin in the head.

  “Ms. Grippe? I’m Nathaniel Wright, Chief of Gamma Security.”

  Elsa lowered her gun as the guys cuffed Hoyden. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Mr. Wright.”

  She looked up at him and her pupils dilated. The chief was taller than Elsa, and as usual he wore an impeccable business clingsuit.

  Uh-oh, I thought. Devin, you’ve got competition.

  ~

  After Hoyden was hauled away we all went out into the park to unwind. Chief Wright listened sympathetically to Elsa’s story. Devin got a word in here and there, but he wasn’t feeling too hot, and with the ice bag he was holding on his jaw he didn’t look terribly romantic. Elsa seemed content to place her reputation in the chief’s hands.

  “Don’t worry, Ms. Grippe,” he told her. “We’ll keep your name free of scandal.”

  “S’Hoyden whosh gonna have a shcandal,” Devin put in.

  “Yes,” the chief agreed, “and as one of Megalink’s senior officers, I’m afraid you will probably be asked to make a statement.”

  “I don’t mind that,” Elsa said. “And I don’t mind testifying about his tampering with Megalink. I just don’t want the sordid details—especially tonight—to get out.”

  The chief smiled at her. “Rest assured. You’ll come out of this smelling like a rose.”

  She smiled back at him, looking a little starry-eyed. I figured it was all over for Devin, but oh well. She was really too classy a dame for him anyway.

  I felt a nudge against my shoulder and winced, then purred as Leila nuzzled under my chin. I could ignore the bruises. They’d fade, eventually.

  “You are Mamselle’s hero now,” Leila murmured.

  I
had my doubts. Elsa had balked a little at letting Leila come to the park with us, and I had the feeling she only did it because she felt she owed me one. I glanced at her, but she only had eyes for the chief.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” I said to Leila, gently nipping her ear. “Let’s go see what’s under the bushes.”

  6. The Cygnius sedonai Caper

  Life took on a comfortable routine until the Cygnius sedonai Caper came down. I was growing steadily, and managed to sneak an occasional visit with Leila despite Elsa’s disapproval.

  Gamma isn’t the roughest assignment around, I’ll admit, in fact it’s fairly quiet most of the time. You got your fugitives, bail jumpers, your occasional small-time smuggler of cheap knockoff wetware or nanoporn—they’re usually easy to sniff out because of the fear sweat—and a whole lot of ordinary tourists and emigrees who trip up ‘cause they just don’t know the rules.

  I kept busy slinking around the rotunda, mostly, and reporting transgressions and suspicious behavior to Devin. People will do things in front of a cat they would never do in front of other humans, which is what keeps me in kippers. That’s why I put up with the petting and cooing, even let the rugrats get away with grabbing occasionally. It’s part of my job.

  No pulling the tail, though. That’s where I draw the line.

  It’s a tempting tail for the brats, I admit. My genetic ancestors were Maine Coons, and as I matured the tail got long and very full. My coat lost the last of the kitten fur and became a dark blue tabby-stripe, with silvery tufts inside my ears and a matching silver bib on my chest, which is why some of the two-leggers persisted in calling me Tux. I suppose I would have been less conspicuous with more average-cat genes, but I wasn’t exactly in control of the process, and my breeders were looking for even temperament.

  In my job, you have to stay cool. Interstellar criminals are no easy cheeses, and despite the fact that most of our collars were small fry, Devin and I ran into a few that would make your average house cat shed a week’s worth of dust bunnies in a flat second.

  The Cygnius sedonai Caper was one of those: a whole different kettle of fish. If I hadn’t had a good team put together—something the chief failed to appreciate at the time—it could have ended very badly indeed.

  The day it all came down started out like any ordinary day, except that Devin was gone when I got up. I took the lift up to the rotunda and started on my usual morning rounds in the market rings before heading up to the customs gate to watch the first inbound shuttle load get dumped into Gamma Beta.

  The cleaning crew had just been through, wiping up all the really good, gritty smells, leaving behind their usual chem odor and that fresh-clean slickness to the floors. My claws ticked a little on the polished surface. I drew them back so as to prowl silently.

  The customs gate is in the rotunda, fed by a dedicated lift that runs straight from the shuttle dock. Incoming passengers get their first look at Gamma under the highest ceiling anywhere in the station, a full ten meters high, with beautiful soaring arches supporting the starview walls of the dome.

  The beams are also stuffed full of cameras and recorders of every imaginable variety. The theory is that any suspicious characters who come on station, even if they’re just passing through, will have to come to the rotunda, so that’s the place to get a look at them. That’s why all the food and the shops are there.

  Things can be hidden from cameras, though. Shielded with a turned shoulder or a strategically placed piece of luggage. That’s where I come in.

  The shops and kiosks were all open but not doing much business. Everyone, local or pass-through, was glued to the nearest holopad. That was unusual, so I kept my ears up as I worked my way through the market.

  The news feeds were all full of the same story. Someone had broken into the Cygni C IV Global Aviary and stolen a pair of rare Cygnius sedonai, a bird native to Cysgee Four and never successfully raised in any other environment. Big news, and since Gamma is the closest station to the Cygni system, definitely worth my attention.

  I went on past the game stands and duty-free shops, keeping an eye on the feeds until I got to Ling-Ling’s Lightspeed, where I settled down in my usual spot underneath the end of the lunch counter. The place had a double advantage. Not only did it have a prime view of the inbound post-customs tunnel, but Ling-Ling and crew made the best fish dumplings on the station, and I had dibs on the day’s trimmings every morning.

  I had to actually meow before Ling2 noticed and gave me my scraps. That’s how engrossed everyone was with the news.

  After a glance around to make sure there was no suspicious activity in view, I settled down with a dish of fish tails and ripe, stinky guts, and turned my attention to the news feeds. I crunched my roughy tails while I waited for the headline to roll around again.

  Cygnius sedonai were prized as songsters and for their rare plumage. The feathers were not only a spectacular blend of rust-reds and brilliant, shimmering blue-greens, but had medicinal properties that were just beginning to be explored. The tail-feathers had already been the source of cures for cystic fibrosis and spider-veins, and that was only six months after the research began.

  The stolen pair were the only two sedonai that had survived in captivity for a significant length of time. The Executive Director of Cysgee Four’s aviary was beside himself with anxiety for their safety. The feeds ran a bite of him: skinny, elderly guy with glasses and tufts of silver hair that stuck out in odd directions.

  “These birds are practically irreplaceable,” he said in a mournful voice. “We had hoped that they would be the first Cygnius sedonai to breed in captivity.”

  The feed switched to a rotating full-spectrum still of the two birds, all scarlet and blue with green highlights. I sat up, sniffing to try to catch the olfactory track, but Ling-Ling’s holopad was too cheap and I was too far away from it. All I could smell was my breakfast. I lay back down to polish it off.

  Who would want, and be able, to steal a couple of highly conspicuous, highly valuable birds? Someone with access to them, and who knew how to exploit them, I figured. Either a contract from the sort of private collector who didn’t care about robbing the public, or someone in the med industry who thought they could make a few gigabucks off the plumage.

  “Halva, halva, halva!” barked a nasal voice at my shoulder.

  I looked up at Ling-Ling’s annoying mini-Peke, a pampered, papered show-pup. His real name was a mile long and totally unpronounceable. We all—by which I mean all the quadrupeds around the station—called him Hosehead.

  “Morning, Hosehead.” I spoke amiably, but bent a little closer over my dish.

  “Halva bite of that for me?”

  He never failed. Despite all the chow he got from Ling-Ling—and by the roundness of him he got a lot, pure caviar for all I knew—he always hit on me for some of my meager handout.

  I looked down at my bowl. I was down to the spiny bits anyway, so I stood up and moved aside.

  “Sure. Be my guest.”

  Hosehead dived in. I sat down and started washing my face, wondering what Ling-Ling saw in such a useless, funny-looking beast. He had a black, pushed-in schnoz, round brown eyes that watered perpetually, and sandy-colored hair so long it dragged around his paws.

  A lot of the time it looked like dreadlocks, but he must have been to the groomer’s lately, because today it was fairly tangle-free and the stuff on top of his head was caught up into a stupid blue bow. Over the next few days the bow would loosen and finally fall out, but at the moment it was still tight enough that he could probably actually see.

  I glanced up at the holopad, where the sedonai story had rolled around to the top again. There were no details I hadn’t already caught, so I looked back at Hosehead. Might as well see if I could get some useful bit of information in exchange for my breakfast. I liked to keep tabs on everything going on at Gamma.

  “So, Hosehead, buddy. Where’s your boss this morning?”

  He raised his head, licked the fl
at place where he ought to have a nose, and sneezed. “Shopping for a big dinner. Fancy catered affair. Important client.”

  “Anyone I know?”

  He swallowed a mouthful of fish bones. “No. Some doc from off-station. One who did her.” He nodded his round little head in Ling2’s direction.

  “Oh.”

  That made sense. Ling-Ling had probably offered the doc a fancy dinner in exchange for a break on the clone.

  “Well, I’ll have to go by later to see what she’s cooking up.”

  I had eaten some of the weirdest stuff by the back door of Ling-Ling’s big, industrial kitchen, which was out in the outer ring of the rotunda, surrounded by her other three restaurants. Lightspeed had only a tiny prep kitchen, used to finish cooking food that had been assembled at the main kitchen.

  I watched Hosehead finish the last of my fish trimmings and lick up the juice in the bottom of the bowl. Ling2 came to pick up the empty dish, pushing a strand of black hair behind her ear before bending down. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved top and trousers made of jade-green silk, and smelled like sandalwood.

  Hosehead sniffed eagerly at her hands until he figured out she wasn’t carrying anything edible, whereupon he waddled off toward the kitchen without so much as a thank-you. Ling2 glanced at me, gave a rueful smile that told me she knew exactly what had transpired, and reached out to stroke my head.

  “Nice kitty Tux.”

  I gave her a purr. I liked Ling2 better than her boss.

  Ling-Ling was too busy for friendly gestures most of the time. She was a tough businesswoman. Not only did she run the most popular food kiosk on station, the other three places were some of the hottest spots in the rotunda, including the five-star Imperial Gardens.

  She catered out a lot, too. Anything from kid’s birthday parties to elaborate fusion banquets with exotic dishes from all over the galaxy. That was why she’d had herself cloned. It was too much work for one, and Ling2 was the perfect stand-in when she had to be in two places at once.