Catacombs

by Anne McCaffrey

  I know, I know. I’ll tell them, and directed his thoughts at the other cats. Pshaw-Ra says we’ll have to use our new toys to mush the snake back into a big solid to kill it, not scatter the little ones.

  The barques swiftly changed tactics and began zipping out to retrieve drifting debris and herd it back toward the mass. Of course, the rays of light were no help whatsoever. And some of the kittens, especially those with no telepathic links with their controllers, still preferred to chase the space junk instead of herding it. One or two headed away from the mock battlefield and had to be drawn back to their shuttles.

  It would have been amusing if it weren’t so serious. What kind of weapon could kill something that was apparently not killable? Not only that, but in its diffuse form—countless smaller serpentine shapes writhing in space—Apep had expanded to be much much larger than it had ever been in the tunnels—large enough to obscure a sun from the planets orbiting it. How could the cats possibly cover so much space and zap enough snakes to neutralize the monster? It all seemed pointless, hopeless, and he would have said needless, except of course you couldn’t have snakes eating up suns whenever they wanted to, not really. Not if Pshaw-Ra and Balthazar were right and they could be stopped.

  All too soon, after not nearly enough practice, the commander announced that they were ready to launch their offensive.

  CHAPTER 26

  CHESTER, MISSION COMMAND POST

  Before we arrived at what the noisy man at the front of the room called “the mission launch coordinates,” Pshaw-Ra, Renpet, and I went around to every cat on the ship while Pshaw-Ra told them that I was in charge, especially of coordinating the cats who hadn’t found a special human yet.

  “Why should he be?” asked Metaxa, one of Zvonek’s kittens by a Mau queen. “He’s no better than us.”

  “Because I am the Grand Vizier and this is your queen, and if you do not mind Chester and yet somehow you survive, we will smack you. And that, my child, is why.”

  As the two of them turned, Metaxa gave a tiny snarl in their direction, but I put my paw around her neck, pinned her down and licked her nose. “Believe it or not, it is for your own good,” I told her. “I don’t like this either, but I’ll try to keep you alive and get you back safe.”

  Two naps, a couple of mouthfuls of kibble, and a thorough grooming and petting session with Jubal later, we boarded the shuttle and got in line with the others to exit the mother ship. While en route, our weapons were installed where the light beams had been.

  “What if the kittens don’t understand the difference and use it on one of the other ships?” I had asked Pshaw-Ra.

  “It is a snake-specific weapon,” he assured me. “It would harm you and your craft no more than the beam of light you used in practice.”

  Meta was behind me, her shuttle controlled by a soldier. I sent out reassurances to her and all of others who were going out without their own person.

  “Oh, stick it up your tail, Chester,” Bojangles told me. “Cats have been hunting way before any humans could read any cat thoughts. Get over yourself. This is going to be fun!”

  Then the bay doors opened and the shuttles streaked out into space, the central feature of which was the serpent-infested star, all blinding orange fire around the top and bottom with a black snake middle.

  Even from back there—probably thousands of miles away by Standard reckoning—I could see those snakes wiggling, and it made my paws itch with the urge to smack some scaly tail.

  The shuttles fanned out as they got closer to the snakes.

  “Good luck, buddy,” Jubal said as I patted the top of my barque and hopped inside. The lid closed after me. It was cozy in there, but it smelled a little different—the weapon, I thought. The weapon had a sharper smell than the light beam.

  For another moment I was inside Jubal’s head, hearing his heart beat fast and tasting his fear that I would never return, that he was sending me to my death, and then I was back out in space as I had been in practice, a free agent, a mighty hunter stalking something that had invaded this great vast territory that was mine to defend. I tried to take it all in but it was so enormous, just the enemy in the middle of that hypnotizing heat …

  Engage, Chester, Jubal said inside my head.

  What?

  Sic ’em, boy. Those little boat things will sustain you only so long.

  Right! I said, and shifted my weight to shoot forward, as we’d been shown.

  My vessel obeyed and homed in on the target, just as I did. How far it was exactly, I had no way of knowing, nor how close to the sun we would have to go to engage our foe. The snakes feeding on the sun’s light and heat did not dull its power nearly enough to suit me.

  The shuttles were positioned about halfway between the Quanah Parker and the snakes, close enough to stay in thought and radio communication with our barques but far enough away to be out of the fray and away from the sun’s heat that was not being absorbed by the snakes.

  The barques were the swiftest things I’d ever been aboard, and they covered the distance between the shuttle and the snakes so fast that Jubal was just at the end of thinking Good and hadn’t yet thought luck by the time I arrived at the target.

  I flew right into the mass of wriggly things, quivering with the thrill of the hunt. Snakes surrounded me, big ones, little ones, snake heads, snake bodies trying to wrap themselves around my craft.

  Up go my front paws into sunbeam-batting mode, but now it is not the warm and life-giving motes of sunlight I slap around but the slithery things leeching life from the sun itself. Bat. Smack. Batabatabata!

  The weapons elongated and smashed the snakes together, right snake, left snake, all one snake.

  The snake wrapped itself around the extension and tried to pull. These little ones were as cunning as the big ones. Another head was coming toward me. I pulled it in with the unencumbered weapon rod, zapped it, and smacked it into the other head, zapping them both. The loose snake pulled, flopped, welded face-to-face with the one that had tangled my weapon arm. With no head guiding it, the body fell away and drifted off.

  That was it! A tactic!

  Fuse them head-to-head, I told the other cats in thought-talk.

  Three snake heads struck the top of the barque. To me a snake looks like a very angry if ugly cat, with flat ears, slitty narrowed eyes, fangs bared, and tail lashing. Venom floated up from their open mouths and they bit down again and again. A fang broke off. I automatically ducked back from their furious faces, my paws frozen by their glaring eyes. Their wiggling tails caught my own eye, though, and the paws came up, the barque paws shot out and fused their tails together. They fell back away from my craft.

  I didn’t wait to be attacked again but waded in, fusing tails together and heads together over and over again. Little snakes strung into big snakes, tails tails, heads heads heads heads tails tails flip the barque and do the ones trying to climb it, double flip and attack a new area, pouncing the barque sideways to duck clutching coils.

  Mrrryowwww help! Yow yow yow! It was Buttercup.

  Where are you? I asked, already leaning the barque.

  Here! she cried. It’s got me!

  Except for Pshaw-Ra, cats don’t do coordinates, and in space, direction doesn’t make a lot of difference—but I headed for my daughter as if she were a magnet drawing me through the wiggling coiling serpentine masses.

  I saw her then, between a snake’s jaws. The snake was enormous—not as big as the serpent of the tunnel but large enough to stuff a barque in its mouth with a cat inside. My poor kitten, her green eyes wide with horror, her paws pressing against the clear dome of the barque, her little pink mouth stretched into a long oval with cries I could hear only in my head, stared out at me as venom dripped down the front of the barque and the snake gathered itself to open and swallow. Suddenly, on her other side, Junior was there too.

  Can you make yourself heavy like Pshaw-Ra showed us? I asked Buttercup. Would his gravity-increasing trick work in space wh
ere there was only freefall?

  I can’t I can’t I can’t—

  Do it! I said, slapping the inner surface of my barque and fusing two passing heads together as I did so because the weapons followed the swipe of my paw. I used one of them to pluck the things up, and fused them to the inside of the hinge of the big snake’s jaw. Junior flipped over, fused two snakes, and brought them back to do the same thing on the other side.

  The fused lower jaw sagged as Buttercup stomped as hard as her mittened paws could stomp inside their enclosure. The jaw snapped downward and the barque floated free. Buttercup zoomed off and I thought she would be returning to her control shuttle, but she returned in a moment with a collection of snakes fused together into bundles in each barque extension, and fused these to the larger snake’s mouth, partially filling it. We worked together, trip after trip, to fill the gaping maw of this dangerous specimen.

  When it was done, we kept working together, our backs to each other as we rolled and spun, fusing any snakes that came near any of us. When my front paws were limp with exhaustion I flipped onto my back and kicked with my back paws, also bearing dextrous extra toes, fusing more serpents that way.

  I called to the others to work in teams with the barques nearest them, wrapping the fused snakes like a bandage around the smaller ones within, confining them. We looped around and around the snake, fanning out and joining up our links of fused serpents, weaving diamond-shaped patterns around the mass. It took a lot of flying. The thing had spread to circle the sun, so we too had to circle it in our pattern.

  I don’t know how long we fought before I became way too warm and the searing light blinded me to more snakes.

  Most of the other cat pilots reported being affected the same way until they could loop back over to the shadowy side of the snake chain.

  So I didn’t actually see when some of the larger ones that had not been joined with others broke out of the serpentine cylinder to attack the control shuttles. I only heard Jubal cry my name once, and what I saw was with his eyes as he stared out the shuttle’s viewscreen at five serpents each at least the size of the one that had attacked Buttercup, their tails propelling their bodies forward through space, swimming toward him.

  Jubal had watched with pride and excitement as Chester and the other barque pilots bound the snakes together and wove them into a loose sausage that contracted in mass as they fused it together. Though it hardly seemed possible, within a few short hours they had opened diamond-shaped holes in the lacy writhing mass through which the sun blazed. He cut the transparency of the screen until it was almost opaque, but the brilliance was scary and painful to his eyes and he looked down, back, from side to side, anywhere but directly into the action, which was how he missed seeing the snakes until it was too late to evade them.

  Unlike Chester, Jubal experienced no arousal of his hunting instinct as he watched them close on him, pass him, and then whip a coil directly over the screen, then another and another. A face dipped into view, and once more fiery eyes glared hungrily at him as a fanged mouth opened in a silent hiss—but this time he could not see anything within the mouth but more fire—the snake seemed filled with it. Light leaked around its scales, barely contained by them.

  Back on Mau, the snake, despite its supernatural reputation, had seemed like an overgrown anaconda or something—mortal if monstrous, a flesh and blood reptile. And as a cloud the creatures had an amorphous look to them—he couldn’t really see Apep in that mass of what seemed to be earthworm-sized particles of the snake that had killed Chione. But the creatures that had him in their grip now were just wrong, nightmare serpents filled up with solar energy until they were about to fly apart. And yet they had the single-mindedness, even at this stage, to break away from their main body and evade the cat ships by coming after the control vessels—or at least his.

  The hull creaked and groaned and, he thought, buckled as the coils tightened. The backlit scales rippled and surged, and the head reared back as if to strike through the viewscreen. He was sure the heat from the core of the beasts was penetrating the shuttle’s shields. He would have checked the gauge but was paralyzed by the hypnotic, horrible gaze of the serpent head that filled his mind as much as his field of vision.

  His heart boomed in his ears and it seemed to him that the booming spoke his own name, “Ju-bal, Ju-bal,” but it was nothing but background noise compared to the compelling will of the snake, which told him he was about to become one with the cosmos. It made it seem like a good thing, and yet …

  “Jubal? Son?” His father’s voice sounded panicky.

  “Jubal Alan, are you still in there? Answer me!” His mother’s voice was an annoying buzz.

  He tried to answer them, but his mouth was dry and his tongue felt thick and heavy. The snake’s forked tongue, on the other hand, flickered like a flame as it hungrily licked at the viewscreen.

  What will happen to me if you let yourself get eaten, boy? Chester demanded directly inside his head, cutting through the serpent’s spell. I am almost out of fuel and snacks and I’m very tired. You’re supposed to take me back to the ship.

  Jubal looked down at the control panel, snapping the snake’s hold on him. Not that it did any good. Buddy, I’m sorry but I seem to be tied up right now. He thought he was making a joke, but it came out anguished and despairing. When the serpent killed him, unless one of the other shuttles could pull Chester in, he would be doomed to death from exposure, once the fuel cell in the little barque was exhausted. He might have oxygen, but the temperature controls would fail, and other life-support functions too. Any shuttle that took him aboard would be dooming its own cat pilot to that fate instead of Chester.

  I’m sorry! he told Chester. He’d never felt more helpless.

  In the background he heard his mother complaining. “I told them these damned things should have weapons.”

  Stay alive, boy, Chester said.

  He didn’t dare look back out the viewscreen again but felt as much as saw Chester approach, and experienced his relief when Ishmael, Buttercup, and Doc joined him.

  The light shifted, and when he looked up, the snake’s coils were falling away and the head was gone, fused to the head of another serpent. He could watch then as the three cats harried the snakes together until they could wrap them all into a big fused knot like one of those designs he’d seen in old books about ancient Ireland, slowly being drawn back into the orbit described by the larger fused serpent.

  Two barques peeled away from the snake knot then and disappeared, but he heard a noise against the hull.

  Does this hatch still work? Let me in! Chester said. Jubal got the mental picture of his friend scratching at a door.

  CHAPTER 27

  CHESTER RETURNS TO THE MOTHER SHIP

  I lay inside my barque limp with exhaustion, both my body and my mind frazzled with my exertions. Then the hatch opened and my barque nestled into its slip. The barque lid sighed and slid back. Jubal lifted me out and cradled me on his lap as he flew the shuttle, which fortunately was sturdier than it had felt to him, back to the mother ship. After a few minutes I sat up and washed my paws, but his hands trembled on the controls.

  Two of the kittens had been lost. Despite what Pshaw-Ra said, their barques did not return to the shuttles when called. I hadn’t known Trixie or Greyling well, hardly at all, and they never found their own humans, so their shuttles were controlled by a couple of soldiers.

  We found that out when we returned and popped out of our shuttles. Some of us, including me, were carried. I’d had enough exercise for the moment and felt I deserved a lot of carrying and cuddling. Most of the others were strutting proudly. Mugger said, “I wish I’d been able to bring back one of those snakes to carry around a little, show these humans what a real hunter can do.”

  “I guess we showed them, didn’t we?” other kittens called to each other.

  “You bet we did. They never saw us coming.”

  “That was fun! Do you think they’ll let us do
it again?”

  They did, of course.

  But not right then. We were all pretty tired, but the humans were exhausted. Jubal lay down on his bunk to sleep but stared at the wall and quivered. I snuggled close to him, butting under his chin, inserting my head into his palm. I walked on him, increasing my gravity until he had to pay attention to me. His mind was still crawling with snakes.

  Come on, boy, forget about them. They’re gone.

  But they came after me, Chester. They act like they’re some sort of natural disaster—like a tornado or a hurricane—but then they came after me, because they knew you and I were together. I could see it in the way that snake looked at me. And—he’s got eyes again.

  Pshaw-Ra said Apep’s injuries wouldn’t last. And of course he knows we’re together—we’ve defeated him twice, you and me. He’s scared of us and trying to think how to get around me by going after you. It won’t work, though. Don’t worry, Jubal. I’ll always protect you.

  Yeah, sure, buddy, but you’re a ten-pound cat and I’m a human. I’m supposed to protect you.

  So we watch each other. Are you hungry yet?

  We stayed on the Guard ship long enough for them to repair and service the barques and shuttles. Since Jubal wasn’t up to it, I suggested through Doc and Ponty that some kind of charge be rigged in the hulls of both shuttles and barques to dislodge clingy coils.

  Meanwhile, once the humans had eaten and slept, the noisy man who stood at the front of the room prattled on about the birth of something called quasars and how they never knew what caused it, but now that they’d seen the snakes in action, they thought that must have happened before and that the snakes were responsible for other such holes in space.

  Pshaw-Ra looked up at the man with total disdain. “What does he think we have been telling him all this time? Has he no ears? No eyes?”

  Before we flew again, I had a chance to talk to each of the other cats about tactics and warn them that some of the loose snakes might attack their control shuttles and to let the rest of us know if they did so we could help. But the next mission went far more smoothly, and the one after that, though Jubal was still unnerved and his hands shook harder and his eyes stared farther—I had more trouble getting his attention to let me back inside on the third trip.