Catalyst

by Jody Wallace

  Finding substitutes in this day and age had been difficult.

  “Who said I have?” Lincoln motioned toward the comm station. “Mind if I radio ahead to the factory? The comm on the roundabout’s busted after the last hailer.”

  “Certainly, good sir,” Boson Higgs told Lincoln, while Mighty puzzled over the human’s curious statement. Of course Lincoln had learned all the lessons needed—or he wouldn’t be in the trust circle. “Tell Tama and Javier we expect them in two days for the rest of the physicals.”

  “Will do.” Lincoln contacted the box factory, relayed the requested information, and asked them to check into the location of the target gen ship. While most of the cats could skip themselves through space as desired, Lincoln and other humans in the trust circle had to shuttle to the planet’s surface. They did so under the pretense that they were scavenging the Catamaran—it was officially “owned” by the Hazer Union and Hoff Abfall. He was one of Mighty’s favorites of the new humans because he had three hands, not just two, for extra petting.

  “Yeah, that gen ship. It’s the best chance of getting the right power converter for these pods,” Lincoln said to the person on the other end of the line. “We’ve got to have it faster than fast if we want to…” Lincoln broke off and coughed. “Link out.”

  “If you want to what?” Mighty knew the cryopod system better than anybody. His human was chief engineer. Sometimes, if he was exceptionally lucky, he could sleep on top of her pod and listen in on her dreams.

  He missed her so much.

  “Nothing,” Lincoln said grumpily. “I’ll see you when I see you.”

  Mighty didn’t like the look on Lincoln’s face or the tone of his voice. In addition to being harder to push than other humans—some cats had developed the ability to slip into a human’s brain and implant suggestions—Lincoln was also nearly impossible to mindread.

  “I will accompany you to the box factory,” Mighty said, exchanging a glance with Boson Higgs, who gave a subtle blink. He could skip to the surface, but it was draining, and Lincoln would probably pet him on the way down. “We will inform Su what needs to be done together.”

  “What needs to be done,” Lincoln repeated, the tone Mighty didn’t like in his voice shifting to disbelief. “You’re going to tell Su Abfall what needs to be done?”

  “Well, of course I am.” Mighty gave Lincoln just a teeny push to pick him up and carry him to the roundabout shuttle. To his pleasure, it worked, and he snuggled down in the big, strong arms of his friend. “I am a cat. Su is a human. It is my job to tell my humans what needs to be done.”

  * * *

  CHAPTER ONE

  “We don’t negotiate with Tank Union,” Su said, the frown line between her eyebrows so deep that it looked like a war wound. It matched the scar across her cheek. “They’re scum. If they have it, they can keep it.”

  Lincoln had reached the planet’s surface without the roundabout giving him any hell, but his boss, Sulari Abfall, had given him and Mighty enough hell to make up for it. “It’s the part we need.”

  He didn’t want to say in front of the cats that, by his assessment, the clock was seriously ticking on the cryopreserved humans and felines still stuck in pods. Mighty Mighty was the closest thing the Catamaran had had to an engineer for two years, but the cat’s absorption of his human’s brainwaves didn’t extend to realizing the Mozim power converter was expended.

  “Find it somewhere else.” Su pointed a finger at the black cat in the chair beside Lincoln. “And you. Stop poking in my head to make me cooperate.”

  “I am doing no such thing,” Mighty protested. His long tail wrapped around his paws in complete innocence. “Lowering your anxiety level regarding your past trauma is not the same thing.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Pumpkin did advise me that you were rude,” Mighty said. “Nevertheless. This is one of the few parts we haven’t been able to replace in the cryopod system, because it’s so rare. So very, very rare. Isn’t it, Lincoln?” Wary of Su’s temper, Lincoln nodded once. “It’s bound to be the one that will allow us to revive our people. At last.”

  Lincoln rubbed a hand over his scalp. The cats had this kind of naive arrogance that reminded him of the elites. Completely convinced of their own superiority. The difference was, the cats were possibly superior, while elites, royals, people in the upper realms of Obsidian Rim societies—they were no better than the next person.

  He knew good from bad, all things considered. If it hadn’t been for his good friend Frank, whose brother Bart had gotten them the jobs here at Su’s factory, he’d still be in a bad place.

  A place he had no wish to revisit. Plus, anything he did, any mistakes he made, might reflect on Frank, who had a kid to take care of.

  “There’s not another ship like that in the sky pile? Or one of the ship graveyards?” Su asked. “We have access to the junker catalog through Hoff now. All the stellarship carcasses that wind up on Trash Planet are listed in it.”

  Su’s box factory belonged to the Bristler Union, which was a collection of factories located around Bristleback Range and Bunk Port. Her uncle Hoff ran Hazer Union, for hazardous waste, and if you weren’t careful, the big man would corner you and lecture you about the ethical cleansing of toxic sludge for hours, making you late to your shift and your boss pretty annoyed with both of you.

  Mighty flicked an ear toward Lincoln as if waiting for him to respond, but he didn’t, so the cat answered. “Boson Higgs accessed that. This is the only appropriate generation ship anywhere in your Planet Trash databases or your cyberspace network.”

  “Trash Planet,” Su corrected the cat.

  “What’s Catamaran listed as?” Lincoln had used stellarship scrap databases for jobs in the past, and he didn’t like the idea of the Catamaran being in the scraproll—or the gen ship they needed the part from. It was one thing when it was floating in the sky pile, a hunk of anonymous metal. It was another when the parts got itemized.

  “Heavy cruiser, stripped down to the framework,” Su said, which did not describe the Catamaran at all. “The other one’s listed as a zheng model gen ship, which I take it is accurate?”

  “Yeah,” Lincoln said. Both ships were zhengs, and zhengs were few and far between. Once whoever had towed the ship to the surface did the physical inventory, they’d transmit those records beyond Trash Planet. Then other people would come sniffing around for parts.

  And if anyone wanted to buy components specifically for cryopod systems, some might come sniff around for sleepers. A need for antique cryopod parts often indicated a pre-War gen ship—and a captive population. Which was exactly what he’d warned Mighty and Boson Higgs about earlier today.

  Either way, the zheng ship’s existence—and somebody uploading its actual inventory—could attract exactly the wrong people to their little icy corner of Paradise.

  “Is there a way to buy things anonymously?” Lincoln asked. If they could buy the ship, take the part they needed, and return the carcass to the sky pile as if it never left, that could sidetrack anyone interested in cryopods and who else was using them. Stop the inventory before it started.

  “Not really,” Su said. “Unions will raid each other sometimes, but we know who’s who and we keep track of things. The right parts can make a profit or save a life, and that’s just on the planet itself.”

  “Can we raid the people who took it?” Lincoln asked. The idea didn’t suit him—he wasn’t the raiding type—but when on Trash Planet…

  Su gave him a look. “We don’t raid.”

  He thought, but didn’t say, Good. Instead he said, “Then you’re going to have to offer for the whole ship.”

  “Did I not just get through saying I’m not going to negotiate with Tank Union?” Su leaned back in her seat, shaking her head.

  It was probably time to tell Su the bad part. “Can I talk to you alone for a minute?”

  “Without ME?” Mighty asked, eyes wide with shock. “Lincoln. Whatever do y
ou have to say that you can’t share with me?”

  Lincoln, three months ago, had not known sentient cats existed. The entire Obsidian Rim didn’t know sentient cats existed, but he thanked the stars every day that the cats couldn’t read his mind as easily as the other humans. “That’s kind of the point, catto. I don’t want to share it with you.”

  “There is nothing you can’t say to me,” Mighty objected.

  Su spread her hands. “It’s not like you can make them leave. He’ll just pop back in here uninvited.”

  “I would not,” Mighty said, but his gaze slid to the side.

  “It doesn’t matter if I wanted the whole ship,” Su said. “We don’t have the funds.”

  “We do in the casino account,” Mighty argued.

  “Not if you’re buying from Tank Union, you don’t. They’re greedy scammers.” Su leaned her head against the back of the chair and stared at the ceiling. “Are you positive the one part you need is in that gen ship and is functional?”

  “As positive as we were able to be without entering the ship itself,” Lincoln said. They’d been on the verge of sneaking into the ship using some cobbled together technology from the Catamaran’s camouflage system, but it wasn’t working yet. Ships in the sky pile were not fair game. “The chances of finding another zheng with that part are…not good.”

  Su swiveled her chair back and forth as she voiced her thoughts. “You can’t buy just the part you need or the wrong people will want to know why you need it. You can’t afford to buy the whole thing because we don’t have the funds. And I don’t want to work with Tank Union anyway. They suck. I don’t trust them.”

  “I will read their minds and ensure they can be trusted. And I can nudge the deal,” Mighty reminded them. Barbara had often posed as a rich eccentric from the planet Raaea who owned a cat, so the cat was able to give her some mindreading backup. “Deals are never a problem when you have my help.”

  “And the minute someone from Tank Union realizes we have cats plural instead of just Pumpkin, who everyone on the planet knows about by this point, they’ll tear the place down trying to find you and sell you,” Su said. “That would put all of you at risk, not to mention my factory. It’s one thing for you to appear here or Hoff’s visitor’s center, but Tank Union is absolutely not trustworthy and clean.”

  Mighty stewed on that while Lincoln tried to decide if he should tell the cat—or anyone whose mind the cat could read—about the cryopod deadline. Before the job he’d had with Pish where he’d met Frank, he’d mostly worked on gen ships. Cryopod systems were not permanent or fail-proof, and if they couldn’t wake the humans and remaining cats soon, they’d never be able to wake them at all.

  He knew the signs. Not many people did, because people and animals rarely remained in cryopods as long as these had.

  But telling the cats? Who knew what kind of panic that would cause? Their determination to do whatever they thought best was rivaled only by their devotion to their friends in the pods. He’d never seen anything like it, except parent to child. The reason some of the cats had woken before the humans was because they’d been on a separate power grid, and it was possible that their waking of Barbara was what had fritzed the rest of the pods in the first place.

  He didn’t want them to know that, either. That if they’d left well enough alone, the cryopods would have released their occupants as the system entered the end of its functional period—like it had with the Original cats.

  “I have a suggestion,” Mighty offered at last. Some cats never quit talking. Lincoln appreciated that Mighty was able to maintain silence on occasion. “If you cannot afford the ship and aren’t willing to stand as our agent, we can go to Hoff.”

  “I’m not getting help from my uncle.” Su crossed her arms, looking even angrier about that than the suggestion she negotiate with Tank Union. The woman was a successful business owner and treated her employees well, but her mountainous grudges made Bristleback Range look like gentle, rolling hills. “It’s one thing that Hoff helped Wil and now practically lives here. It’s another to be completely indebted to him.”

  “That’s all right. You don’t have to be involved, cat friend,” Mighty assured her. The humans had asked the cats not to call them foccers—friend of cat—though some still did it with a whiskery smirk. “We’ll ask Hoff ourselves.”

  “Stop.” Su pressed her fingers to her eyelids as if she couldn’t bear to look at them. Lincoln shifted uncomfortably in this chair. Had he made a mistake coming here with Mighty? Riling his boss up? But he wanted to help the cats. He didn’t want the folks in the pods to die.

  “Before you make up your mind…” Lincoln began.

  “My mind is made up,” Su interrupted without looking at him.

  “There’s something you need to know,” Lincoln finished.

  That got both Su and Mighty to stare at him. Lincoln didn’t talk much. He didn’t have that much to say, and before he could figure out the best words, the topic of conversation had bypassed him anyway. But Su and the cat waited patiently for him to finish, and there was no putting this off any longer.

  “The people in the pods are in cryo decline,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Mighty said. “Is it because the part is broken? Our system is so old. Didn’t you tell me you’d never worked on an older gen ship, Lincoln? We have got to get that part.”

  Su held up a hand. “Let him finish, Mighty.”

  Mighty’s long white whiskers twitched with impatience. Lincoln had been introduced to the truth about the cats after signing an employment contract at Su’s factory, and he still struggled to comprehend how the cats had come to exist. Not that there was a definite answer. Javier and Tama, the closest thing they had to cat medics, believed their evolution was related to the qubition bombs that ended the Obsidian War.

  But one thing Lincoln did know? The cats were a bona fide miracle, and it upset him to think of them suffering or abused.

  He was about to make the cats suffer.

  “Cryo decline happens to beings in pods too long, whether the system is functional or not,” Lincoln explained, choosing his words carefully. He hadn’t learned the neuro-preservation science behind it, but he understood how to identify it and how to tinker with the pods themselves. “The brain can’t sleep forever. It degrades and then the body breaks down.”

  “My human is breaking down?” Mighty stood up, hair rippling along his spine and his tail poofing out like a bottle washer. “She’s hurting? She’s dying? And all the other cats and people?”

  Lincoln held the cat’s gaze like he would a person he was giving bad news. Eye contact meant you were taking their pain seriously, like you should. Mighty Mighty had bright yellow eyes, except when he was this anxious, when they were all black pupil. “Yes.”

  Without another word, Mighty blinked out of the room in a spark of blue light. The cats called it skipping—another miracle the cats had been granted by whatever higher power or science settled such things.

  “Shit,” Su said. “They’re dying? All of them?” At last count, there were 4763 humans of all ages in cryopods, mostly women, and half that many cats. People who had wanted to travel the stars with their feline companions. The Catamaran had been headed to a partly settled planet as additions to a colony, not as groundbreakers. Or, the colony would have been partly settled by the time the ship arrived.

  Instead humanity had gone to war and nearly destroyed the universe.

  “I can’t put a timeframe on it,” Lincoln said. “But it’s soon. We need that part. And since the cat’s gone, I can tell you—when they woke Barbara up, they broke something. That’s why this is happening.”

  “That was two years ago,” Su said.

  “That’s nothing in the scope of the three thousand years they’ve been asleep,” Lincoln explained. “These ancient cryopod systems are a lot less finicky than new ones, and they have checks and balances. Best guess is it detected the onset of cryo decline and activated the wake-
up protocol. But then the cats interfered.”

  Su directed a piercing stare his way. Her long, dark hair was pulled sharply away from her face today, businesslike and tidy. “Why do you know so much about cryopod systems?”

  If he shared all of his history, she might fire him. He had a way of attracting trouble—or not turning it down when it looked at him funny. Bosses didn’t like employees who attracted trouble, except he never recognized it as trouble until the damage was done. “I apprenticed on them and worked on them.”

  “The people I know who use cryopods are slavers, prison owners, and medical research facilities.” He didn’t miss the slight narrowing of her eyes. “Which was it?”

  “I was born in Oka Conglomerate.” It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was the part of the truth that answered her question. “They have a lot of generation ships. They keep the pods in working order.”

  “All right.” It was clear Su didn’t one hundred percent believe him, but she let it go. “The cryo decline puts a whole different spin on this shit, doesn’t it? What do you think we should do?”

  She was asking him, her employee of three months, how to save the lives of over 4500 innocent people and 3000 cats? People trusted him, sure—they trusted that he was a soft touch. But the people on Trash Planet didn’t realize that about him yet, and he’d been hoping to shed that weakness.

  But was it weak to help the cats?

  “We need that part,” he repeated. “I guess we need to make the other union an offer.”

  “Can’t be me,” she mused, flicking on her cybbie screen and scrolling through a list. “Let’s just say I’m not welcome in their headquarters. And sending Barbara is a no-go.”

  The cats had relied on Barbara for two years. How the talkative, scatterbrained woman had managed to negotiate with pirates and mercs and other unsavory types, Lincoln had no idea. Javier feared that the constant mind invasions from the cats had harmed her mentally.

  “She’s done enough,” he agreed. She spent about half of her time in Su’s factory now, rejoicing in the presence of other humans. If there was a gathering of people, Barbara was sure to be part of it. “She deserves a break.”