Catalyst

by Jody Wallace

  Wil had known he might have to surrender himself since Casada had first captured him and threatened to kill him in order to get the cat. He was ready.

  “I can’t let anyone be hurt because of me.” Wil released the restraints and stood, not bothering with the kitty carrier. Since he’d already tucked Su’s MUT and the gun into his pockets and cinched the chrono on his wrist, he also left the duffel.

  “You sit back down, Wil Tango!” Hoff roared around the bulkhead separating the passengers from the pilots. “We’re not giving you up.”

  And guarantee everyone died instead of just him? Wil ignored him and jogged, a little shakily, toward the back of the freighter, Pumpkin in his arms. The escape pods should be in the center along the outer walls, unless this freighter wasn’t like other freighters he’d been on.

  Hoff’s heavy footfalls chased after him. “Stop, Wil. How much money did you steal from him? I’ll pay him. I have the money, or I can get it.”

  “It’s the cat, not the money.” Pumpkin had stopped growling and hunkered in Wil’s arms like a ticking bomb.

  “Jesu.” Hoff placed a huge hand on the access handle for the escape pod, preventing Wil from entering. In another hand, he carried the crate. “Then give him the cat. We’ll box him up, send him over.”

  “He can’t do that, Hoff,” Pumpkin said in a voice almost as snide as Casada. “Yes, I’m talking, no, I won’t tell you how, yes, you need to keep it a secret, no, you can’t sell me, yes, there will be very unfortunate consequences for you if I find out you tell anyone. Very. Unfortunate.”

  Hoff opened and shut his mouth several times in quick succession before grabbing his left shoulder. “I’m dreaming.”

  “Yes, the accident was your fault for hiring those lazy bums,” the cat said next. Hoff leaned against the wall, completely pale beneath all that hair. “Yes, you owe Su more than a fake leg. Yes, you already know this.”

  “Push him however you need to,” Wil told Pumpkin. He couldn’t blame the cat for punching the guy when he was down, but if he didn’t survive, he wouldn’t have a chance to make up with Su. The seconds ticked by. “Unless you have any last minute escape plans that involve him?”

  To Wil’s surprise, Pumpkin stretched up and rubbed his whiskers against Wil’s chin. “I don’t know how to protect you, Wil. I can’t convince Casada that we’re dead. I tried, but he confirmed with Garza that nobody had died in the fight on Su’s property. You have been a true companion. I will never forget you.”

  “Oh.” Wil hadn’t expected the cat to come through in such dire straits, but he also hadn’t expected the cat to have tried so hard already. “Did you talk to your contacts?”

  “I can tell you and Su, but not him.” Pumpkin indicated Hoff with his paw, claws sheathed.

  “I can’t believe this,” Hoff moaned. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”

  “It’s a panic attack,” Pumpkin said. “Combination of guilt and fear. Calm down.”

  Since Hoff drooped and sighed after Pumpkin spoke, Will assumed he’d also pushed the suggestion into Hoff’s brain. “We have to fly to Casada’s ship. That much is obvious. After I’m gone, can you prevent him from hurting Su and her people? Or Hoff and his?”

  “I will leave at the appropriate time,” Pumpkin said, ears flat. “I simply resent how the uncleanliness of humans forces me to make such stupid choices.”

  “I don’t suppose it matters if you tell me anything now.” Wil flicked open the handle for the escape pod. The trap door eased outward with a hydraulic hiss, revealing the short-range capsule that could barely be called a ship. “Pick a seat, any seat.”

  Pumpkin jumped from Wil’s arms and landed on the cat crate. “I don’t want to do this.”

  Wil swallowed down the nervousness that bore very little resemblance to stage fright. “Once he kills me, give him time to fly away from this planet before you skip back. That way he’ll never think Su has anything to do with it.”

  Pumpkin turned to Hoff. “Go to sleep.”

  The man promptly closed his eyes and heaved out a snore.

  Then the cat sat on the crate, studying Wil. “His ship is a Q-ship. Skipping is not that long distance.”

  “Then wait until you can skip somewhere safe,” Wil said earnestly. He’d said goodbye to the woman. Now for the cat. “Talk someone into bringing you back here. Su’s your best bet for whatever it is you need. I’m sorry it won’t be me.”

  “I would prefer we both escape.”

  “He won’t leave anyone alone until he’s dead or we are,” Wil pointed out. He couldn’t force Pumpkin into the escape pod. He couldn’t force Pumpkin to skip, to stay, to listen, to cooperate. It completely changed the dynamic that humans inflicted on creatures—or people—they considered animals. It might be a good thing if humanity were to realize they were not the only sentient inheritors of the universe.

  But only if the cats—if there were cats, plural, and not just one amazing, cantankerous orange feline—could protect themselves from the inevitable fallout. The inevitable fallout that might be easier to withstand if you, say, had a secret hideaway on your own planet.

  “Does that mean we can kill him now?” Pumpkin asked, his tone more eager.

  Wil had never truly considered it. He didn’t want to commit murder. But he did have a gun in his pocket. To defend Su and Pumpkin and everyone who’d helped him on Trash Planet, this was a boundary he was willing to cross. “How would you suggest we do it?”

  Pumpkin scratched the top of the crate. “Bloodily.”

  “You’re telling me you can kill a full grown man?” Wil withdrew the small weapon from his pocket and checked the charge. Luckily it was simple enough that even a dance teacher could figure it out.

  “Well. Not without some serious pushing, and even then I can’t trick a person to do anything too far from their desires.” Pumpkin glanced at Hoff and back at Wil. “Are you a good shot?”

  So Pumpkin had no plan to commit the murder and mayhem required to stop Casada. Wil tried again. “How many of his people has he told about you?”

  “A good number,” Pumpkin admitted. “He keeps close tabs on them. He’s afraid they’ll run to Zev. He’s already killed one himself.”

  One gun, one multitool, one cat, one chance. Wil could possibly wound or kill one person before they took him down, provided he leapt out of the escape pod shooting. They wouldn’t expect a grand jeté, that was for sure, and wouldn’t you know it, he’d just practiced his. “And you can’t erase memories?”

  “I only just learned to put someone to sleep.” Pumpkin hopped off the crate, nosed Hoff, and paced back to Wil. “I told you that some things have not been fully explored.”

  “By you and the other cats,” Wil guessed, but Pumpkin gave him a blank stare.

  “Are you willing to cooperate with whatever Casada wants so he won’t kill me?” Wil asked. “Claim you and I are mentally bonded or something and if I die, you die?”

  “I can’t let myself be used that way when I have other responsibilities,” Pumpkin said, looking up at him with big orange eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Day of days. Pumpkin had apologized for something.

  Su had often said she was willing to kill to keep people safe. When they’d first met, she’d made a serious attempt to shoot down Casada’s Tomen with her EE-gun. She’d also fired missiles at Casada when he had attacked her factory. Hoff’s freighter wasn’t a war ship and had no chance at defeating Casada and his fleet, but what if there was a way Wil could manage it from the inside?

  What if there was a way he could blow up the whole ship with Casada on it—Casada and the people who knew? If that included Wil, well, he was going to die one way or another.

  “Can you jump from one ship to another?” he asked. “Like from here to Casada’s ship?”

  “Yes,” Pumpkin said. “I’ve already done it twice.”

  Wil stared at the cargo hold full of toxic waste, in containers and tubes of all sizes, and came up
with a plan of his own.

  “Casada’s ships are where?”

  Su wanted to tear her old comm in half with rage, but her leg was her bionic feature, not her arm. Ianthe, who had braved the hail dunes all the way to the ship to share this information with her privately, shrank back from Su’s shout.

  “A heavy cruiser and a bunch of fighters arrived from Gizem and they cut Hoff’s freighter off,” Ianthe said in a soft voice. “Nobody can confirm, but we think they boarded the Q-ship. They’re not answering calls.”

  Su, in no mood for company, had been alone in the Moll, cataloging the supplies Nan had given her to help recover from the bombing. Scrapper and the others were visiting with friends in the cafeteria now that the fence between Hazer Union and Su’s factory was mended. Slightly.

  Su had no intention of falling in line with Hoff’s plans for her to inherit the hazmat business—or telling him she was sorry she’d rejected him when he’d killed all those people and almost killed her—but if Scrapper and the rest wanted to socialize with friends and family, she’d quit being a jackass about it. It hurt to think Nan had been back eight years without a peep, and Su didn’t want to hurt other people the same way Hoff and Nan had hurt her.

  “Are the freighter and the Q-ship still in one piece?” Su asked. She suspected the answer was yes or Ianthe would have led with that. Her heart had only just started beating again after saying goodbye to Wil, and now this? “Has he attacked them or disabled the engines?”

  Would it help if an old garbage scow that didn’t even have a tow package showed up and inserted itself into the melee?

  Ianthe checked her handheld tab, skimming the screen. “There was an exchange of fire. Now there’s nothing. Probably obstructing communications again. He, or someone, was doing that before, from Bunk Port.”

  “I thought you said the communications glitch was because of the hail.” Planetside, Su’s vintage comms could undermine localized jamming, but surface to space was another issue. It was possible she could bypass it if she were in space herself, but the Moll had zero weapons, zero EE-shielding, and zero hyperspeed. Since she hauled garbage and only garbage, any pirates who boarded her could take what they wanted—which was nothing. Not even the ship.

  Might be worth it to fly up there anyway. Be closer to…whatever was going on. Just in case. She had enough fuel for the trip, but if she used it on this, she’d be out for some time.

  “The hail was used as a cover for the covert comm disruption,” Ianthe said. She tapped the top of her tab. “I’m looking for ways to prevent it from happening again. Perhaps buried physical wires. Those are used on some more primitive planets and—”

  Su didn’t have time for the Evolution of Infrastructure 101. Not when she had rescue fantasies to talk herself out of. “What else do you know about the situation? I’ve got to take these supplies back to my factory.”

  The faster she could chase Ianthe off, the faster Pumpkin could show up and update her, if he had any intention of doing so. If he had any capability to do so.

  “That’s all, I’m afraid.” Ianthe glanced behind her, down the cargo ramp, at the hundreds of kilograms of hail being cleared by ground crews. “I hope you come to terms with your uncle, Su. He talks about you all the time. He misses you.”

  “I won’t forget how he helped Wil.” Su also wouldn’t forget that he’d refused her offer to garnish her factory profits. Would he stick to it? She was going to need all the money and luck she could get to bounce back from the bombing and loss of the truck, and she wasn’t sold on letting Hoff handle the repairs.

  None of that would matter if Casada blasted her uncle and Wil out of the sky in his attempt to kidnap the cat. She wished Pumpkin would pop over to Casada’s ship, push him to jump out an airlock, and pop back. That would solve the whole vaccing problem. She should have taken Pumpkin aside and plotted murder behind Wil’s honorable back.

  But the fact that Pumpkin hadn’t done it already suggested he couldn’t. It was for the best. If the little evolved bastard had opposable thumbs and unlimited mental prowess, he’d take over the Obsidian Rim and elect himself emperor within a year.

  All he wanted was his own planet. Which was how despots got their start.

  “Best of luck,” Ianthe said before hurrying into the grey day.

  Su set her comm beside the jetpacks before she flung it across the cargo bay in a fit of temper. It wasn’t fair that they’d crafted a foolproof plan to whisk Wil and Pumpkin out of danger and yet some fool busted it up anyway. Fucking Drejo Casada. If he did this, killed Wil and her uncle—she would take over the hazmat factory and learn how to funnel toxic waste into the very weapons that would erase Casada from existence. That was another area where the Abfalls refused to tread, but she’d tread it with her biggest boots right before she stomped all over Casada’s ass with a nuke.

  It was one thing to imagine Wil on some quiet backwater planet or space station, and it was another to realize that Casada might kill him within the next hour.

  What could she do? What could anyone do? Surges of anger and frustration blasted her so fiercely that her skin tingled. Her cheeks burned and her eyes watered.

  On impulse, she flicked the switch to close the cargo hold and give herself privacy. When it sealed, she called to the cat. “Pumpkin. Now’s a good time.”

  Blue popped in the darkness and Pumpkin whirled into view. “Let’s go, human. Chop chop.” He raced past her and bounded up the narrow stairs to the second floor. “Get this bird in the air.”

  “Pumpkin, wait. What’s going on?” Su leapt the stairs four at a time to the upper catwalk, landing with bent knees and an oof. She chased him to the flight deck, where he was already in the copilot’s seat.

  “We have to be in position before the explosion.” His pupils had dilated so wide she could hardly see the orange of his irises. His tail was fuzzed up as fat as her arm. “You have to get as close as you can to Casada’s ship. It’s near Hoff’s freighter.”

  “Casada will shoot me on sight,” Su said, but she flung herself into the pilot’s seat, strapped in, and fired up the engines. The Moll roared to life. The activated jets spat through hail and ice, and Su didn’t give herself time to question or think.

  She clapped on the pilot’s headphones and flicked open the channel to Scrapper’s comm. “I’m going to…do something in orbit around the planet,” she told him breathlessly. Her heart thudded like the wakening engines.

  “Ianthe told us about Casada’s ships. Are you crazy?” Scrapper fussed. “You don’t have guns. Hold up. Nan is going to authorize the Hazer Union militia. Hoff’s ships are armed.”

  “I’ve got something better than guns,” she said, though it was true her uncle’s militia was the best on the planet. That wasn’t saying much when it only had to be better than the other militias on the planet. “I’ve got a cat.”

  Through the front view screen, she saw Scrapper, Tama, and several others burst through the front doors of the Visitor’s Center, but she was already lifting off. The Moll was armored to weather hailstorms on the ground, but it was small as cargo ships went. Her crew stumbled out of the hail backdraft in the wake of the Moll’s rapid exit.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” she ordered Pumpkin as soon as she set the ship on the same trajectory Hoff would have taken to reach his Q-ship. The land below grew smaller and smaller, and her old ship juddered at the speed.

  “Something is going to happen.” Pumpkin seemed unusually nervous, unusually upset, kneading the scuffed cushion in the copilot’s seat. She doubted it was due to the pressure and tilt of the ship as they skidded along at a hundred kilometers an hour and climbing.

  “You said there would be an explosion.” She bit her lip as she pushed the old scow harder than she should into the cloud cover. Hopefully it wouldn’t rattle itself apart or run out of fuel. While the rudimentary AI system did most of the work of running the craft, especially when it came to intraplanetary flight, the pilot still controlled the A
I itself.

  “That’s the idea,” Pumpkin said.

  “Who or what is going to explode?” she asked next, hoping the answer wasn’t “your ship’s engines” because “they weren’t made to fly this fast.” “Is Wil okay?”

  “I’m not with him at the moment so I don’t know.” Pumpkin turned to her, his eyes huge in his small orange face. “I don’t know.”

  She reached out and stroked him without asking permission. His hair crackled with static electricity, popping under her fingers. “We’ll do everything we can, little friend.”

  “It may not be enough.” The sky darkened around them as they soared into the stratosphere. “Humans are too much trouble.”

  “But you love us.” The Moll’s engines sputtered for a minute, and the fuel gage pinged a warning. “Come on, girl, it’s almost time to coast.” The creative mechanics on Trash Planet had learned to stretch a liter of fuel until it gurgled, but she echoed Pumpkin’s fear. Would it be enough?

  She didn’t even know what was happening. Why did she have to get close to Casada’s lethal ship? Why had she—

  “Yes, I pushed you,” the cat said. “I’m in a rush.”

  “Humph.” She didn’t turn the stellarship back to Trash Planet, though. If Wil and Hoff and the crew were in trouble, it made sense to have another ship close by—a nonthreatening ship whose only weapons were a cat and a one-legged trash picker.

  She just hoped if Casada decided to fire on her that her ship was maneuverable enough to dodge. It was her only defense.

  Chapter 16

  The escape pod glided into the landing bay of the heavy freighter without Wil having to touch the controls. Casada either had a tractor beam installed or had hacked the tiny nav computer of the pod. It settled into the clamps with bumps and a clang. Three beat-up Tomens and several more one-man fighters were also docked in the bay, speaking to the forces Casada could put into play beyond what he already had.