“I am at the city’s outskirts now,” Pshaw-Ra said.
“Stay there,” Vala-ra said. “I will meet you.”
Minutes later the two tawny sleek-furred cats met in the middle of the road farthest from the temple.
“Got her tail in a twist over something, does she?” Pshaw-Ra asked when he saw Vala-ra’s face.
“I’m afraid you must come with me, Grandsire,” Vala-ra told the vizier, who was in fact his oldest living ancestor. Pshaw-Ra had cut quite a swath among the ladies. “She doesn’t care for the looks of the new kittens.”
“Looks? Who cares about looks? Didn’t she see those amazing paws? Does she fail to—excuse me—grasp that with those paws and the superior intelligence of our race, our progeny will be able to do without humans altogether?”
“She doesn’t like the paws. Viti said she might settle for cutting off the extra toes of the kittens instead of killing them, but she finds the kittens ugly. Even her own.”
“You think she’ll listen to me?”
“I think from what Viti said about the mood she’s in, she might have you skinned and thrown into the desert to die.”
“Why in the name of Bast did you let that fur-brained female take control of the throne? Renpet was supposed to be crown princess.”
“Was she? That is not what Nefure told everyone. She had a circle of toms to do her bidding when she made her move, and they and their servants pursued Renpet and Chione with weapons. They would have killed them if they’d caught them. By the time the guard found out, Renpet was gone, Nefure had assumed the throne, and when you returned and deferred to her, that validated her rule.”
Pshaw-Ra snorted. “I wish everyone would stop trying to interpret my moves or divine my motives. I am highly mysterious for a good reason. I don’t want others to know what I’m doing.”
Vala-ra knew that this was precisely the problem with trusting the vizier to exercise any sort of leadership, even by inference, and his ears flattened with irritation. “Look,” he said, “if you get away, I can always claim you escaped. You could disappear. You do that well.”
“Is that censure in your voice, grandson? Never fear. I have a plan. I always have a plan. Right now this is my plan. I will keep Nefure busy, and you evacuate the new kittens—I have a feeling you had better evacuate the Barque Cats as well. Take them underground and lead them to the River Apep.”
“Then what? Drown them?”
“Certainly not! Do I have to think of everything? You will see my apprentice Chester. Tell him all is in readiness and if I am not there when it is necessary to contact the outer worlds, he should start without me.”
Vala-ra passed the message on to Viti-amun when he and the Barque Cats, kittens, and those of the Mau who wished to join them, caught up with Viti and the kittens. “I will return to assist Grandsire,” he told his sister.
She inclined her head, and like the warrior she was, headed the column of cats and led them through the maze of tunnels, halls, caverns, and corridors, always west, toward the Apep underriver and the Valley of the Royal Dead.
———
Pshaw-Ra could not believe he had sired such a stupid daughter.
“They are an abomination,” she declared. “I cannot believe you talked me into defiling myself with one of those creatures—polluted the purity of our race by having us mate with the outsiders to produce such ugly kittens.”
“Majesty, I—” he began, but even he could not talk fast enough to stem the great sandstorm of Nefure’s rage.
“I want those kittens destroyed. I want the outsiders destroyed. I want them all expunged from our genealogy for good.”
“May I remind Your Majesty that our genealogy is at an end without the contributions of the Barque Cats?”
“That is your fault. If we can have kittens with them, we can have kittens among ourselves if you’ll only apply yourself to the task and stop running off to conquer the universe all the time. After all, the late queen and you produced me.”
He badly wanted to say that she was proving his point about the decline of their race but merely purred assent and bowed with his tail curled over his back. “As you wish, Majesty. I will return to my laboratories at once.”
“I will see to it that you do. Phylla!”
A grizzled black queen stalked toward them from the shadows of the temple. “Majesty?”
“Escort the Grand Vizier to his laboratory. Post a guard to stay there with him. Do you understand?”
“I do, Majesty. It shall be done.”
CHAPTER 15
CHESTER: THE WORM RE-TURNS
I didn’t have to wait for the fugitive cats to arrive to know what I had to do. Pshaw-Ra came to me while I was having a nap and instructed me to go to the pyramid ship, which he said was fully fueled, and take it into space to try to find someone to help us leave the planet.
I rose and found Jubal, who was fishing at the underground river. He pulled out his net full of fish and hauled them onto the bank, saying, Okay, but I’m coming with you.
Carrying the net with him, he returned to the nest Renpet and Chione had made for the kittens. “More cats are coming,” I told Renpet. “Your sister has rejected her own kittens and ordered the deaths of them and all of the others, and she is not very fond of my kind either.”
Renpet spat. “She would! Do you think the exiles would help me mount a revolt against her?”
“Why bother? The boy and I go now to bring help to evacuate us all—no need for you and the youngsters to stay here among cats so stupid they put up with your sister as queen. Frankly, my dear, we’re all too good for them.”
Renpet froze suddenly, her ears back and her fur as puffed out as it would go.
“Chester, I am afraid …”
“Of her? Pffft! By the time she finds you, if she does, the kittens would be able to send her hiding under a bunk. She’s a bully-girl, Renpet. You’re worth ten of—”
“I’m not talking about her. I—I hear the great snake.”
“You said you thought you had but—”
“Not had. I hear it now. Listen.”
She was laying down, and when I lay still beside her, I felt it too—the same ominous thump-bump thump-bump I remembered from our first encounter with the worm.
“Can Chione block him from us with her wall-controlling thing?” I asked.
Renpet consulted with her handmaiden. “She tried.”
Jubal questioned Chione a little more, and told me, She felt the snake break through the last barrier she put in front of it. We’d better get out of here. We can’t go too far, though, because those other cats are on their way. We don’t want them to walk right into the snake.
Can it cross the river?
I don’t see the river giving it any major obstacle, but I think it’s a good idea to get the river between us and it.
The kittens were now too big to make carrying them in our mouths any kind of an advantage, but Jubal and Chione scooped them up. Jubal lifted Shahori and one of his sisters onto his shoulders, where I usually rode, and Chione extruded the bridge, using her little device, then scooped the last two kittens into her skirt and crossed the burbling water. Jubal was right behind her, and Renpet and I were on their heels.
But something else was right behind us.
The fresh smell of the water had masked the snake’s musk until it was upon us. Renpet shrieked and I spun and leaped at the same time, sounding my own battle yowl and landing on the snake’s long forked meaty tongue, knocking my mate off it.
Chester! Jubal cried behind me.
I stared, for a split second transfixed by the bobbing head and dripping fangs, and back down the stinking grinder that was the snake’s inner musculature, good for swallowing me whole and crushing me inside it.
I was too young to die! As the snake tried to flick me back into its throat, I pulled backward with my front claws, raking the sensitive tongue. The snake spasmed, shrinking from the damage dealt it by my built-in rapiers,
and I jumped off, twisting in midair to land on my feet.
The serpent had pulled itself into a huge coil inside our cave, filling it halfway to the ceiling.
Hearing a strange cry, I saw Renpet was trapped between the serpent’s lower jaw and a cave wall. She raked at its hide with all of her claws but the serpent didn’t notice her or the scratches.
I ran toward her but Chione was ahead of me. Jubal picked me up and flung me backward, onto the riverbank beyond the cave. I slid just short of the edge and scrambled back up again. He jumped around hollering and made jabbering noises at the snake, drawing its attention from Chione, who hugged the wall as she reached for Renpet.
I leaped back into the fray, but even as I did I heard the kittens making a terrible racket behind us and hoped they would not return to “help.”
I watched the flickering tongue searching for my mate, her handmaiden, my boy, and each time it flicked out, I darted forward and slashed it, then darted back before the great head could descend and drip venom on me.
Dancing sideways, I slashed and slashed. Snake blood slimed the floor, already moist with mist from the water. Jubal had found some sort of stake to jab at the snake.
I heard Renpet scream to the kittens, “Run!” We could hold the serpent at bay only a little longer before it devoured us all. Chione dove in and grabbed Renpet while the snake tried to strike Jubal.
A louder yowl sounded behind me. I lost focus long enough to listen, to turn my ears back, and the snake struck.
Chione was almost to the bridge, Renpet in her arms, when the snake arched over us and came down upon her, its right fang striking her to the ground. Renpet flew from her grasp, her back legs writhing against the slippery stone. The snake had uncoiled enough in its strike that its body now blocked Jubal from attacking its head. I skimmed the slick stone on my belly to reach Renpet.
But even before I reached her, doom fell upon the snake as the snake had fallen on Chione. The queen’s warrior cat and a delegation of the guard, my mother, my sire, Sol, Bat, Beulah, and a great multitude of battle-ready Barque Cats, closed on the snake. Balthazar was there too, not doddering now but using his walking stick to strike the snake’s snout over and over.
Beulah settled it by taking out a weapon and sending a bolt of light into the snake, which writhed and hissed and then dropped its head while all of the cats clambered onto it and worked on its hide with their claws, flaying it. The laser pistol hadn’t killed the snake but we cats did. Renpet kept clawing the tongue long after the long body stopped twitching. Bits of it littered the floor.
Then Balthazar knelt over his fallen daughter, shaking his head slowly. Renpet cried and would have licked at the blood on Chione’s shoulder, but Balthazar held her back. The blood would be mixed with venom. Jubal picked her up and petted her over and over again, trying to comfort her as she cried for the girl she had loved as deeply as I love Jubal. “Can you help Chione?” he asked Balthazar.
The girl’s sire looked up at him and shook his head. “Her spirit has flown.”
The cavern would be no haven for the new fugitives, full of unmoving and immovable reptile as it was.
Balthazar tried to carry Chione by himself, but he was old and the fight had taken most of his strength. The rest was sapped by loss. Jubal let Renpet down and took the girl from her father, carrying her over his shoulders as I had once seen him do a sheep, taking her to the fruit grove. Beulah helped him lower the girl to the ground and then she and Balthazar began washing the body, cleaning away the venom with strips of cloth.
Pshaw-Ra chose that moment to check in. Did the refugees arrive safely?
Yes, but all is not well, I told him, and related what had happened.
I suppose Balthazar won’t be much use to you then. You’d better get going. I’m not sure how long it will take Nefure to understand that the kittens, and many others, have truly disappeared as she wished them to. Go!
But—
There are many of them to tend to the burials and defense of the kittens. They have Renpet to lead them. There is only one of you. You must take that boy of yours and find help. Only then can we implement our reentry into the galaxy at large.
From the way he put it, I knew he was much less interested in the welfare of any of us, including the kittens, than he was in pressing forward with his master plan. Stupid she might be, but the selfish Nefure was his daughter all the way.
When we reached the ships, Jubal took his former seat in the landing bay portion of the pyramid vessel and Pshaw-Ra guided me through the takeoff procedure. By now I was much more familiar with the picture writing. If you touch the bird, the sun, and the pyramid, you will reverse our original course, Pshaw-Ra’s dream self told me. If you are not intercepted, you will eventually end up where we first met, drifting.
I did what he said because our escape was also the beginning of us rescuing everyone else. But once the ship had broken Mau’s atmosphere and Pshaw-Ra’s thought-voice could no longer reach me, and after I had set the course as he directed, I began to shiver and quake. Everything that had happened and that might yet happen swept through me, and I was suddenly very frightened. Having done all I could at the helm, I ran back down the gangway leading from the nose cone to the outer, human-sized portion of the ship, swam free-falling to the bay where Jubal sat lashed to his seat, and anchored myself to him with all of my claws, aching to be petted, to be told that we would be fine, that someone would save us.
I don’t suppose you preloaded any food, did you? Jubal asked.
This was not what I wanted to hear.
CHAPTER 16
By Jubal’s reckoning, he and Chester wandered and drifted the best part of a month before they made contact. They went through different scenarios about what would happen, what they should say. They were still fugitives, so they knew it would be a mistake to invite rescue and risk bringing an extermination team down on themselves and all of the other survivors. They couldn’t just board any passing ship that might take an interest in them. They needed to find someone they could trust to return with them to Mau and rescue the others.
Fortunately, food wasn’t as desperate a problem as they’d feared at first. Pshaw-Ra had provided a good swarm of kefer-ka, and someone, most likely Balthazar, had stocked dried fish, fruit, and water.
Nevertheless they had to be on short rations. Chester dreamed about food so much he was amazed when all of a sudden he found himself dreaming about his milk brother Doc instead.
Checking the charts on the bridge, he showed Jubal that they were approaching a space station. They had crossed two star systems close to Mau already but were not yet back in the main space lanes. This station would be an outpost of some kind, if not a derelict.
Does it say which one it is, or if it’s still working? Jubal asked.
Not that I can tell, Chester said.
Jubal hadn’t seen a space station on the trip to Mau, but then he wasn’t thinking about the scenery on their flight from the pursuing Galactic Government ships. If this were a human ship, like the Ranzo, he could find out soon enough, but the cats of Mau—at least Pshaw-Ra—did not seem to find the same details relevant that humans did. That kind of thing apparently bored them.
I’m tired, Chester said, yawning, emerging from the bridge to climb onto Jubal’s crossed legs and settle down for a nap.
CHESTER: ON THE PYRAMID SHIP AND, SIMULTANEOUSLY, ALEXANDRA STATION
It’s true I was a little sleepy, but mostly I was curious. While I was with Pshaw-Ra on the pyramid ship before Jubal came for me, the old cat showed me how to dream-travel and to use dreams—mine and those of other cats—to board passing ships, get answers to my questions, even to plant messages.
When I closed my eyes this time and relaxed into Jubal’s lap, I let my mind wander, searching for another cat mind. Honestly, I didn’t expect to find one. I thought most of the surviving space cats would be those we’d left behind on Mau. But to my surprise, I locked dreams with a very familiar fellow dreame
r, one who had shared my very earliest dreams. My milk brother, Doc, brother of Bat, was on that space station. My littermates and I had been cared for by his mother, Git, while our mother recovered from a birthing gone wrong. And when Git was killed while protecting us on a hunt, my mother took over care of Doc, Bat, and their brother Wyatt. Doc, apparently not a good judge of character, had bonded with Jubal’s father, a wily old human called Ponty.
I felt around in the bond with Doc, and sure enough, Ponty was there too.
Jubal had dozed off, and I reached out and grabbed him by the dream to pull him in with me as I made the mental leap through space, as easily as if I were jumping onto a bunk, through the view port of a battered old ship that could have been a derelict but contained Doc and Ponty. Here, surely, was the help we needed. I needed to be careful not to sound too desperate, however. Ponty, unlike Jubal, was not entirely trustworthy.
My dream self found Doc and Ponty on the man’s bunk, Doc curled up sleeping on the man’s chest. The man’s eyes were closed too, but when I jumped up, he opened them and looked straight at me. I thought he must be looking through me, but no. He spoke to me.
“Did you know it was okay to come back now, boy?” he asked softly, waking Doc. He repeated to Doc, Did he know?
That was too much for me. I didn’t want to deal with Jubal’s crooked sire head-on, even in my dream form. I had to up the “cat of mystery” illusion here—which was hard to do with a man who had been there practically at my birth.
I jumped down and trotted away, beckoning Doc to follow me, which he obligingly did.
Jubal’s old man was still talking to my tail, knowing who I was if not what I was, and evidently glad to see whatever part of me he was seeing. Yeah, everything is fine and everybody really misses all you cats and wishes you’d come back. Jubal’s mother and I miss him too. Is he okay? Doc, dammit, can’t you talk to him?
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