Catalyst

by Jody Wallace

  “I know you can both keep a secret,” Pumpkin said finally. “Please navigate into the sky pile until you reach the following coordinates.” He rattled off some numbers.

  “I have no idea what that means,” Wil said. “Forward or backward?”

  “This isn’t something you have to learn yet,” Su told him, but she hesitated before plugging the figures into the AI. “Pumpkin, the Moll isn’t really equipped to go in there.”

  “It’ll be fine,” Pumpkin said. “I promise.”

  The cat had saved both her and Wil, and she owed him. Casada was no longer an issue and she was well on her way to replacing everything she’d lost, even without a direct infusion of DICs into her factory account. Her uncle had, at last, admitted he’d been wrong about the Tank Union and begged her forgiveness, which Pumpkin took credit for, but she preferred to believe Hoff had simply come to his senses. Best of all, she’d gained a new appreciation for the art of dance.

  Especially when it was between the sheets.

  “All right,” she decided. She demonstrated to Wil how to plug the numbers into the AI, which would also calculate the trajectories of the nearby objects and maybe, possibly, avoid any damaging collisions.

  The Moll cruised slowly into the debris field. Pieces of ships, frameworks, mostly intact vessels, random garbage, and other items flashed around them. Su gritted her teeth whenever the AI announced an impact, but at last they reached the coordinates in the sky pile Pumpkin had told them to find.

  “See that ship?” Pumpkin, his front paws on the control panel, stared out the view screen in front of Su. He hadn’t offered to share the copilot’s chair, but it was fine. It was good for her to be on her feet, with all the paperwork she’d been doing lately, not to mention rolling around in bed.

  “The smashed up cruiser?” she asked. The white and grey of a large stellarship with the fat, clunky lines of pre-War construction filled the screen. Gaping holes decorated the hull, and it was missing most of its nose. It wasn’t one she’d noticed before, but she didn’t spend a lot of time in the sky pile.

  “Dock on it,” Pumpkin said. “Middle landing bay.”

  “Um.” Wil stood and offered Su the chair. “Trying to dock while we’re in orbit and the junk around us is in orbit and we’re all moving but not moving is above my pay grade.”

  “Oh, you mean zero?” Su laughed, because so far he hadn’t let her add him to the roster so he could earn a salary. He said he made enough DICs with the dance lessons, and since he shared pretty much everything with her, she knew it was true.

  But she also knew he wasn’t ready for this docking process. So she seated herself, clamped on the pilot’s headphones, and scooted the Moll bit by bit into the decrepit bay of the ancient vessel. Because it was riddled by large fissures, she could still see the outside. The scanners didn’t measure any dormant fuel cells, and the framework was picked clean to the point of scrap metal, just waiting for a tow to a factory.

  A second later, she was glad she was sitting down. Because once the Moll settled onto the half-missing flooring, the air outside the cockpit shimmered, and an entirely different sight came into view.

  “What the hells?” Wil said, leaning over her shoulder.

  The age and destruction that mottled the ship disappeared, replaced by an intact, fully equipped landing bay. The bay doors trundled closed behind them, right before the scanner registered breathable air.

  It also registered a functional Q-drive somewhere inside the ship. Because there were no longer any holes, she couldn’t see outside the landing bay, and the lights were definitely on.

  Was anyone home?

  Pumpkin hopped out of the seat, padded to the passenger exit door, and waited expectantly for someone to open it for him.

  “Is it safe for us to walk out there?” she asked him sternly. “You’re not pushing us or doing something hinky to the instrumentation or something?”

  “Hinky. As if. No, I am not.” He raised one paw to the door and scratched. Then he did it again.

  “Fine, fine.” She couldn’t believe this was happening. She couldn’t believe any of this had happened. But here she was, boarding a ship in the sky pile without so much as a breather suit on.

  She disengaged the seal on the passenger exit door and it hissed open, unfolding the narrow gangway to the deck. So far, nobody had been sucked into the vacuum of space, so she followed Pumpkin down the steep stairs. His tail tip had that crook that indicated his mood was good.

  Wil came to stand beside her at the foot of the gangway. “I am going to guess this is where Pumpkin is from.”

  “Come on,” the cat said, already near one of the doors that led deeper into the bowels of the mysteriously undamaged ship. “There is someone you need to meet.”

  But before they could reach him, the door opened and a woman stepped out of it. A woman and a flood of cats.

  “Oh my stars,” she said, pressing a hand to her chest. Cats continued to pile into the landing bay, converging on Su and Wil, sniffing their boots, rubbing against their legs, dashing up the gangway into the Moll, and generally taking up five times the space their small bodies actually needed. “Are you human?”

  “Yes,” Su said slowly. “Are you?”

  “Oh my stars. Yes.” The woman rushed forward, nearly tripping on a fat white cat, but stopped abruptly before she came within arm’s reach of them. “There hasn’t been another human on this ship in years. Years. The cats have been telling me they were going to bring me one but…”

  The middle-aged woman was soft, plump, and wholesome looking—basically a person completely foreign to Su’s experience. Her brown hair was piled atop her head in some sort of wad that had two thin sticks pronging from either side, and a pair of spectacles perched on her nose. She was average height, no obvious scars or fake limbs, and the flowing wrinkles of her face indicated she didn’t currently have access to anti-aging nanobots.

  She pushed the spectacles up to her eyes and peered at them. “I’m…I can’t believe I’m talking to people, after all this time. Oh, I’ve talked to people, but not people who knew the truth. People on the ship. I should warn you, I think I’ll start talking and never stop. Can I shake your hand?”

  She bounded forward and took Wil’s hand in both of her own. Su had not been ready to touch this stranger, but Wil seemed to understand what she needed. She pumped his hand up and down, petting it, gazing between his face and Su’s with unabashed pleasure.

  “Oh, you are a sight for sore eyes. Both of you. Oh, my kitties, finally bringing some more people here to help me.”

  “Help you with what?” Wil asked calmly. Pumpkin ambled over to Su and rubbed his body against her leg.

  “My name is Barbara Ann Collins, and this is the Cat Ship. But I can’t get any of the other people to wake up.”

  Thank you for reading this science fiction romance novel set in the amazing world of The Obsidian Rim! If you feel inclined, here are some things you can do to help others discover this book, too.

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  Jody Wallace grew up in the South in a very rural area. She went to school a long time and ended up with a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing. Her resume includes college English instructor, technical documents editor, market analyst, web designer, and general, all around pain in the butt. She resides in Tennessee with one husband, two children, four cats, one dragon, and a lot of junk.

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  SNEAK PEEK—Catapult by Jody Wallace

  Buy at https://jodywallace.com/books/catapult/

  Mighty Mighty, pink nose to the view screen, watched in horror as the stellarship carcass he and Lincoln intended to scavenge was towed out of the throng of dead vessels in orbit around Trash Planet. The one part they needed to replace in order to reboot their own cryosleep system was being dragged out of range by some dog-damned, pesky humans in a fleet of short-range cruisers.

  “Lincoln!” Mighty yowled at the top of his lungs, hurled himself off the control panel, and raced to the last place Lincoln had been refurbishing the many ancient components on the Catamaran. Boson Higgs, their long-haired tabby pilot, stared at Mighty in shock when he raced past. He reached the nearest waste room in the flick of a tail. “They’re stealing our ship, they’re stealing our ship!”

  “What?” Lincoln bolted upright, thonked his head on the underside of the specialized disposal unit, and glared at Mighty. “Nobody in this part of the galaxy can pierce this camouflage. They can’t possibly be stealing the ship.”

  It was true. The Catamaran, a very unusual ancient generation ship that had set sail into the stars over three thousand years ago, was protected by a reflective force field that prevented most of today’s sensors from detecting its worth. Or its occupants. Standard scans read it as one of the junkiest hunks in the sky pile.

  “That’s not the ship I’m talking about. Obviously. It’s the one with the cryopods like ours.” Mighty placed an insistent paw on Lincoln’s leg, a gesture that rarely failed to motivate humans in the desired fashion. “You know these trash people. I insist you go stop them at once.”

  “For the last time,” Lincoln said, “I don’t know most of the people on Trash Planet. I’ve only worked here for a couple of months.” The human’s scalp, devoid of hair, showed a faint red mark where he’d smacked into the cat toilet. Lincoln rubbed it, smearing a bit of grease on his brown skin.

  “Then call your boss,” Mighty said, undeterred by mere facts and a sluggish human. “She will stop them. Hurry. They’re getting away!”

  A couple of months ago, the Catamaran’s fundraiser, Pumpkin, and his human assistant, Wil Tango, had landed in a spot of trouble on Trash Planet and had been rescued by Sulari Abfall, the owner of a box recycling factory. Granted, Pumpkin had saved the day in the end—as cats do—but Su had proven to be a clean and honorable human, worthy of knowing the secret.

  “You’re already pushing it with Su,” Lincoln reminded Mighty. He stroked his big hand down Mighty’s sleek black fur a few times. Some of the humans asked permission before they touched a cat, but some seemed to sense when the time was right for a pet. Lincoln was one of the latter. “She hired me to work on the mech and tech, not your ship, but I’m up here more than I’m down there.”

  “Our cause is more crucial, and Su knows that,” Mighty said with a sniff. Lincoln had been selected for the trust circle, but he wasn’t as easy to push as a cat might have wished. He was stubborn of head and slow of body but reliable enough, as humans went. “If you won’t do it, I will skip down and talk to Su myself. She is a woman of science and will listen to reason.”

  “She can’t stop whoever’s taking that gen ship framework. We always knew it was a possibility.” With a sigh, Lincoln started packing his tools. While he did, Catpernicus, one of Queen Bea’s kittens, skidded into the room, bounced off the wall, and jumped onto the waste disposal unit.

  Lincoln stretched an arm toward the small black kitten. “Catto, hold on, I haven’t switched—”

  But Catpernicus was already doing his business. The acrid odor of urine filled the room. Catpernicus squeaked as it doused his paws instead of being absorbed by the disposal unit like it was supposed to be.

  “I haven’t switched it back on.” Lincoln hit the button and the unit gave a quiet, reassuring hum. The kitten scratched around, sniffed, and flew out of the room without so much as a thank you.

  “Kittens today,” Mighty said. “They don’t know how good they have it. Why, when we cats first woke into the new dawn, we had to use human toilets. Can you imagine? The balancing was insanely precarious. And I don’t even want to talk about the food.” Mighty Mighty had been one of the Originals—the first felines to pop out of their cryopods and realize they were changed, with enhanced intelligence and other satisfying abilities. It had been days before he and the others had managed to wake a human, dear, dear Barbara Ann Collins, to perform the tasks that required thumbs.

  Unfortunately, Barbara was the only human they’d been able to release from the thousands of cryopods in two years. They also hadn’t been able to wake all the cats. They’d spent that time combining their efforts to repair the ancient ship, rouse their colleagues, and figure out what had happened to the galaxy during their long sleep.

  Now they had some new people—humans on a cold, dingy little rock called Trash Planet—who were proving to be very useful. Lincoln was useful, if slow. But you had to appreciate a human who always thought before he spoke, always watched his feet, and never accidentally stepped on a sleeping cat’s tail.

  Lincoln finished packing his tools and joined Mighty at the view station on the bridge. The disappearing gen ship and its escorts were a blip on the screen, heading toward the planet’s surface.

  “I believe they’re headed to the Market District of the planet, based on their trajectory,” Boson Higgs relayed as he monitored the status screens. With one white paw, he increased the magnification so they could watch the gen ship burn through the planet’s atmosphere. All the controls had been altered to suit his specifications. “Who in that part of the world would have the ability to harvest a ship?”

  The toilets weren’t the only parts of the Catamaran that had been altered to suit the cats in the past two years. Dear Barbara had proven capable as long as a cat was there to give her proper instructions, but it didn’t compare to a real mechanic like Lincoln who didn’t need pictures and blueprints fed painstakingly into his brain.

  “I imagine there’s more than one factory that tears ships apart,” Lincoln said. “Just don’t know the names yet.”

  Trash Planet was run by unions instead of governments or corporations. Not that there was much about Trash Planet to run—the barely habitable equatorial band was where the humans built their stenchy, loud factories to recycle the galaxy’s garbage, suffering bad weather and constant hail storms and long, dark seasons that could drive a cat mad.

  Boson Higgs flicked through a bunch of data on the wide touchscreen, which whizzed past faster than Mighty could read it. “There are facilities in Hazer Union, Endeavor Union, Builder Union, and a few independent operators. Endeavor Union owns most of the ships in the sky pile and does a lot of trade in parts, so that’s the most likely culprit.”

  A handy union to cultivate when you and all your friends dwelled on a stellarship. Granted, they had to keep their ship a secret. This galaxy wasn’t ready for the awesomeness that was sentient cats, and humanity’s tendency to destroy what it feared meant secrecy was paramount. That and the threat to their sleeping humans if pirates and slavers were to discover their gen ship.

  Humans had not improved in three thousand years. They had arguably devolved while cats had done the exact opposite. It was a disappointment, to say the least.

  “How much money do we have left?” Mighty asked. Their funding had be
en cut off after Pumpkin and Wil Tango got fingered in some ratty casino—probably because of something the human did—and wound up on Trash Planet.

  “We would have to confirm with Jacobus, but enough that we could make an offer for the part we need,” Boson Higgs said, tail curling. “All we need to do is send Dear Barbara down to buy it.”

  “Can’t do that,” Lincoln said, shaking his head.

  Mighty looked up at the big man. “Why not? It’s worked for two years.”

  Dear Barbara, in addition to maintenance, had been their agent in all the purchases and interactions with the sadly devolved humans around the Obsidian Rim. It wasn’t as if the cats could go haggle themselves. They had learned cats were so rare in the galaxy after the foolish Obsidian War—which was what happened when you left humans to their own devices—that the mere sight of a cat turned humans into avaricious lunatics.

  The approved areas on Trash Planet were the lone exception.

  “Anybody who knows you want just the Mozim power converter will know you’ve got a gen ship on your hands,” Lincoln said. “And if they figure out you’ve got this kind of gen ship, full of sleepers…”

  “They will try to take it,” Mighty finished with a growl. Human greed and evil were constant annoyances, and the cats did not appreciate the threat to their people. “Why has humanity not found your better selves, Lincoln? Why are you like this?”

  Lincoln, his dark face impassive and his lips firm, shrugged his shoulders. “Everyone has to learn their own lesson.”

  “When did you learn yours?” For a human to be accepted into the trust circle, the cats had to be able to sense they were clean inside. Someone who wouldn’t betray. Someone who would put the cats first in order to protect. Someone the way all their sleeping humans were.