Embrace the Passion: Pets in Space 3

by Smith, S. E.

  She paid for her mealpack, then took it out to the long, curving patio that overlooked the weedy indenturee courtyard. The landscaping looked half-finished to her, but what did she know? In space stations, plants grew in planned and orderly hydroponic gardens, and massive walls of moss supplemented the oxygen exchangers. She’d decided that when she got the chance to live on a planet again, she wasn’t ever going back to lving in space.

  Luckily, none of Lambru’s crew had followed her outside. Twilight brought chilly spring breezes. She put her mealpack on the farthest table, then set her backpack behind her on the ground, with the opening facing the grass. She put her tablet on the table, so she’d look busy, and dawdled over her meal of mixed meat and vegetable bits in a spicy sauce, covered in a layered pastry. She’d had worse growing up, but she’d since grown to love real food at real restaurants with happy people around her.

  Through the windows, she kept an eye on the dining hall. The short-handed serving staff worked hard during meal service, because Argint d’Apa policy banned indenturees from kitchen-related jobs. She gathered it stemmed from an incident years before, when an indenturee got caught trading premium fresh food for sex. Indenturees were free to have as much consensual sex with each other as they wanted, but apparently, the woman’s preferred location for hot connects had been every available horizontal surface and wall in the pantry and prep area.

  Ferra didn’t miss sex as much as companionship and friends who cared about her, and she wasn’t likely get those in prison. All right, not prison, according to the CRIO system representatives, who assertively rejected any use of the word, but it sure felt like it to the indenturees. No other workplace she knew used plasma-powered fences, guards, and hellhounds to make the workers stay.

  Her vest wasn’t good protection from the chilly evening breeze. She used her tablet to check Oran Mòr’s progress and found the bot was a good thirty meters from her.

  She stood, shouldered the now empty backpack, and resisted the urge to turn and look behind her. She took her trash to the recycler, then slipped out the side door into the hallway for indenturee quarters. She walked past mostly closed doors to her own at the far north end, where she stopped long enough to put her warmest shirt on under her indenturee uniform tunic and utility vest. Back in the repair lab, she killed time by working on a solution for Tauceti to monitor his deskcomp.

  The flaws in her plan became apparent after it took the bot a full hour to signal that it had reached the southeast corner. One, night had fallen, so she was going to need handlights and a shoulder torch to find her way, much less see if the frelling trees matched the persistent image in her head. Two, it was raining.

  Now she couldn’t leave Oran Mòr outside overnight, because of its vulnerability to water. She knew she shouldn’t have named the little bot, because now she felt responsible for it. She took a red rain slicker out of the office closet and slipped into it, then pulled on the big backpack.

  She tapped into her ever-simmering resentment at how Lambru got away with shit in the CRIO system as she tromped down the main hall. The guards were more suspicious of happy indenturees.

  The guard at the indenturee wing’s south door made her walk through the metals detector and asked where she was going.

  “Repair bot wandered off. Rain will ruin it.” She brandished the inventory scanner. “This says it’s outside by the container gardens, and I’m on call tonight.”

  “Better you than me.” The guard waved her on through, then pointed to the hours-of-operation notice on the door. “If it’s longer than fifteen minutes, you’ll have to go around to the north entrance.”

  “Okay.” She nodded her thanks as she pulled on her hood and switched on the high-lumen torch.

  Every bench and shrub looked scarier in the dark. She walked carefully, wishing she had high-tech boots like Tauceti’s. Her shoes had gripper bottoms for safety in the water-logged filtration plant environment, but the uppers let in every drop of rain. Military people got all the best toys.

  The standing white-legged boxes for the container gardens looked bigger than she remembered them from her first-day tour. She skirted around to the left, under the hanging tree branches. Slower, fatter raindrops drummed on her hood.

  The closer she got to the corner of the fence, the more she became convinced she had visitors in her mind. Not telepaths, because they used words, and not empaths, because they were all about feelings. The two thought patterns were lost, and cold, and hurt. They’d called and called, and finally found someone to hear them.

  Great, now she was dreaming while awake in the middle of a rainstorm.

  She aimed the torch for the dark hulk that had to be the repair bot. Sure enough, there were Oran Mòr’s orange stripes.

  It turned its head, opened its eyes, and meowed softly.

  You came.

  Ferra nearly stumbled to her knees. The torch dropped to the ground and winked out.

  A creature rose to its feet and shook water everywhere.

  Help us.

  A picture blossomed in her mind of another dark catlike creature, waiting in the dark beyond the fence, unable to fly over it because of a broken wing.

  She lit one of the small hand lights on her wrist. The creature in front of her stood knee-high at the shoulders and had the hint of an orange-striped bat-type wing folded flat along its side.

  “You’re real.” It was all she could think to say.

  The creature switched its long tail in annoyance.

  Yes. Help us. Help him.

  Once again, the image of the injured creature flashed in her mind.

  She’d never imagined sentient animals, not in her wildest dreams. It was too cold and damp to be a dream. And too cold and dangerous for an injured creature to be stuck outside.

  She eyed the midnight-black creature. “If I raise the perimeter fence, can he crawl under?” She visualized the memory of lifting the fence to push the yellow crate outside.

  Yes.

  She edged closer to the inner fence and considered her options. She needed to get her multitool to the bottom of the fence line. Any human on the walkway would make the overhead lights come on. However, the motion sensors were trained to ignore animals, or the lights would be blinking on and off all night.

  I can do it.

  She looked down to see the creature sitting at her feet, looking up. The gold eyes mesmerized her for a moment. She got the impression the creature was female and anxious, and wanted comfort. Just like Ferra.

  She gave herself a mental shake. Solve the problem. Deal with the mysteries later.

  She fumbled under the rain slicker to find the vest pocket. She wrestled out the tool, selected the correct setting, and turned it on, then offered it to the creature.

  We are not creatures. We are cats. Unmistakable pride accompanied the declaration.

  “Of course you are,” she whispered. “Everyone knows cats are telepaths and have wings.”

  The cat took the multitool in her mouth. We are superior cats.

  She oozed under the lower fence rail and streaked across the walkway, then dropped the multitool on the ground and batted it into place. The electrical fence lines warped upward in a semicircle.

  Ferra took a deep breath for focus, then pushed through the multitool. She hadn’t lied to Tauceti about how she lifted the fence, she’d just omitted the part about using telekinesis. She didn’t trust anyone with that secret.

  The cat crouched. The subtle light from the walkway’s road glass reflected off her fur, making her hard to see, even though Ferra was only three meters away. In her mind, she heard the cat tell her mate to hurry. That’s what he was, too, not just a companion.

  A moment later, another winged cat, larger than the female, crawled through the opening. When the cat was all the way through, even his long, flat tail, Ferra released the fence. She sent an image to the female cat, asking her to bring back the tool.

  The male cat limped across the walkway and slid under the
inner fence rail. The female clawed the multitool away from the perimeter fence, then picked it up and trotted to where Ferra stood with the male.

  Ferra crouched down to take the multitool. The male butted his wet head into her hand. The physical contact made the mental connection stronger. His wing and leg hurt. The breeze chilled him and his mate. The water was wet.

  She smiled a little that his biggest gripe was about being wet. She sympathized. It had taken her several years of planet-side living to get used to water-based showers.

  The cats couldn’t stay out in the rain. Neither could the repair bot. She pictured her plan to the cats.

  7

  Ferra shut her cell door, dimmed her lights, then slid the fully expanded backpack off her shoulders and set it carefully on the floor. She held it open for the remarkably patient cats to crawl out.

  The universe, or perhaps the pre-flight Egyptian god of cats, granted extraordinary luck that night. She’d missed the south door operation window, so she’d had to trudge through the rain with twenty kilos of superior cats in her pack and twenty-five kilos of rain-slick repair bot hugged to her chest. She must have looked enough like a drowned swamp rat that the guard pointed her straight to the solardry and volunteered a gravcart for the bot.

  The foreign thoughts and feelings in her head distracted her, but they also comforted her. She wasn’t warped, twisted, or fracturing from loneliness.

  The cats crouched and slunk around the small room, smelling everything. “I’ve got to take the bot and the backpack to the lab and return the cart.” She didn’t know how much they understood, but she projected images as best she was able.

  The small female looked at her. We will hide.

  “Good.” She opened the tiny closet and even tinier fresher. On impulse, she crouched down and held out her hands to the cats. The male ignored her hand and went straight for her knee. He rubbed his triangular-shaped face against her. She stroked his damp fur. The female cat licked her outstretched fingers.

  For no reason she could name, tears threatened, and she wanted to gather the cats in her arms. She reluctantly stood and stepped back. She dimmed the lights further, then locked the door behind her.

  In the lab, she put a drying mat on the shelf, then put Oran Mòr on top of it and left the cabinet open. “I’ll check you tomorrow,” she told it. If cats could be sentient, so could bots.

  She closed up the lab, returned the gravcart, and walked back to her cell. She closed and locked the door behind her, just like any other evening.

  The bed looked inviting, but first, she had to look after the cats. She could feel their presence in her mind, even if she couldn’t see them. She used the wallcomp to turn up the lights and darken her only window.

  The female oozed out from under the bed, followed by the male.

  Now that she saw them in better light, she didn’t know what she was looking at. Wide, cat-like heads and ears, with narrower muzzles, and nose flaps. Mottled dark fur with a faint rosette pattern, and folded, bat-style wings with fine downy fur. No orange stripe on the female’s wing, so that must have been a trick of the light. Their front paws had sharp-looking claws and opposable toes. Their tails were long and ovoid.

  We are cats. That was the female.

  We were made for war, thought the male.

  Food? asked the female.

  Ferra didn’t know what to do with cats designed for war, since the Central Galactic Concordance government had kept the peace across the galaxy for the last two centuries, but she could do something about food.

  She reached up to the top shelf of her closet to retrieve the mealpack she’d stashed there two days ago. She triggered the heater and put it on a narrow counter that served as the cell’s desk and table to warm.

  She sat on the bed and pulled off her clammy shoes and tossed them onto the drying mat by the door. “Do you have names?”

  The female’s tale twitched. Yes.

  Ferra laughed. The cat was just like some AIs Ferra had known, unhelpfully literal and disdainful of imprecise questions. Ferra tried again, this time forming the words in her mind and projecting them to the female cat. What is your name?

  My call sign is Novo Seventeen Alpha.

  I am Bozlurian Four Delta, volunteered the male.

  “I’ll just call you Novo and Boz, if you don’t mind.” She stripped off her damp socks and hung them in front of the ventilation grate in the fresher. When she came back, the mealpack signaled it was done, so she opened the lid and set it on the floor. “Sorry. No plates. You’ll have to share. I hope you like protein egg straws and vat-grown ham.”

  She felt Novo’s insistence that Boz eat his fill.

  As he bolted down bites, Ferra sensed his hunger pangs being eased, the same way she could feel the constant pain in his wing and shoulder. She made a mental note to use the net uplink to look up vet med treatment protocols for cats and bats. Boz said they’d been designed, so she decided to check out pet trade references, too.

  Chaos, but she was tired. She needed to think where to hide the cats while Boz healed, but her brain wasn’t cooperating. She’d have to deal with it in the morning.

  She stripped off her clothes and hung them in the closet. She’d have to book an appointment at the communal clothes sanitizer soon, or people would smell her coming.

  She pulled on her nightshirt, then arranged a nest of spare blankets in the closet for the cats. If someone noticed it, they’d just assume she was a slob. She filled the licked-clean mealpack package with water from the fresher, told the cats goodnight, turned the light to low, and crawled into bed.

  The next thing she knew, two furry bodies snuggled on either side of her, making rumbling noises in their throats. The cats projected comfort and relief, and the feeling of coming home again. She stroked their silky soft fur and cried for how scared and lonely they’d been.

  For how lonely she’d been. Not just lately, but ever since she was thirteen and her parents abandoned her and her twin brother on the space station and never came back. Ever since realizing she’d have to cut all ties with her brother because he’d drag her down with him. Ever since learning he’d sold her to a vicious, violent crew to pay a gambling debt.

  She fell asleep in purry, furry warmth.

  8

  After the evening of unsettling revelations, as Kedron had come to think of the repair-lab meeting with Barray, he’d spent a sleepless night wrestling with his choices, past and present.

  He’d finally concluded that he’d learned the wrong lesson from his disastrous last post. He’d spent the last two years doing only his duty and nothing more, hoping HQ would call him back to his career. He’d been afraid that if he upset the sky skimmer again, his next assignment would be a fifty-year exploration expedition to the Great Void.

  What he should have learned was that if his life plans didn’t work out the way he hoped, he needed new plans. Not every Tauceti had to be a field commodore by age fifty, like his father, or have a galaxy-famous strategy named after him, like his great-great grandmother, who’d only retired three years ago at age one hundred and sixty-two. He could be the Tauceti who used his skulljack to train military hardware AIs how to work with humans, or made a quiet civilian military base run smoothly, or who had a family to come home to every night.

  Since he no longer worried about making waves, he’d spent the last three days investigating the mystery of the source of the surveillance. He used the cover story of creating a comprehensive procedure manual for his position, which had never had one.

  He’d also re-enabled his skulljack and started wearing a high-powered communications wire again. When he’d first arrived, the constant barrage of trivial communication between the various AIs in the plant had just about driven him around the bend. Almost anywhere else in the civilized galaxy, nonessential equipment used specific, reserved bands, but Argint d’Apa hadn’t bothered, not even for the government offices. The compound was small enough that he could hear every system in it.
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  He could have requisitioned a filtered comms wire, but at the time, it had felt more fitting to simply disable his skulljack. As a consequence, he was out of practice and was still learning to pick out individual systems from the constant sea of noise. The annoyance would be worth it if it helped him identify the watchers.

  He’d already begun making appointments with people he interacted with, starting with the CRIO coordinator. He’d easily convinced her to approve the after-hours tech infrastructure assessment request, once he’d told her he’d volunteer to escort the technician and contribute from the military liaison budget to help pay for upgrades. He’d also discovered that he had authority over the CPS office suite. The Citizen Protection Service only admitted to being part of the military when it suited them, but he far outranked the local CPS representative. He simply notified her of the assessment.

  Fortunately, the tech repair supervisor had obligingly assigned Barray, who would be starting that evening after her dinner.

  At the appointed time, he met her at the guard checkpoint and escorted her to the CRIO office suite, to which he’d been given full access. Mindful of possible surveillance tech, he sat in a guest chair and pretended to read on his percomp.

  Even though he’d had plenty of human interaction recently, he had to admit he still liked Barray’s company best. She wanted nothing from him, and she made him laugh. With the theft ring situation, he’d had no one on his side except his assigned military advocate. At least this time, he had someone to trust, though he worried he might be putting her in danger.

  Barray worked quickly around the office, using a scanner and her tablet. She looked more rested than she had a few days ago. He wanted to ask, but interaction might alert potential watchers to their friendly relationship. No, not relationship. There would be no relationship-having with indenturees. Temporary alliance, maybe.

  He distracted himself by asking the perimeter fence if it had detected anything unusual the night Barray had rescued the muskrats. The fence had a lot to say about all the animals and people it cataloged as proximate threats, but nothing about faults or disruptions. Unsurprisingly, the front gate’s AI refused to communicate without an access code—couldn’t have enterprising indenturees convincing the gate to let them out.