Claws That Catch votsb-4

by John Ringo

  The ship had left the unnamed F type star as soon as the fabber was secured below and was back on the way to the target area. But with the destination less than a week away, and starting to enter potential Dreen territory, the CO wanted to make sure his guns were going to work.

  “Oh, they’re already up, sir,” Weaver said, yawning. “The fabber finished spitting out the last of the critical molycirc about an hour ago. We’re continuing the run to make sure we have spares in the event of another emergency. And of course we’ll need it if we take combat damage; that’s not the only place that requires molycirc.”

  “Wait,” the CO said, blinking. “What about the rest of the guns?”

  “They were fixed before we even started mining, sir,” Bill said. “And you haven’t lived until you’ve seen Miriam in a coverall and four-inch heels, bent over a hatch running molycirc…”

  “Miss Moon…”

  “Participated in the reconstruction, sir?” Bill asked. “I think that would be a yes. I had Chief Gestner log her hours and I ended up forcing her to work no more than eighteen hours at a time. I’d say that she probably did about twenty-five percent of the work herself, sir. Chief Gestner and the Eng agree on that estimate, by the way.”

  “What, do I have to make an all hands announcement?” Prael asked, throwing his arms up. “Okay, I get it. She’s amazing.”

  “And cute,” Bill said, grinning. “Don’t forget cute.”

  “Fine, I want to have her love child,” the CO said, shaking his head. “I’ll add that to the announcement.”

  “ALL HANDS, ALL HANDS…”

  “What the grapp?” Chief Gestner said, his eyes wide.

  “Hey, Chief,” Sub Dude said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Welcome to the Space Navy. Things are different here.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “I simply have to get some sleep,” Miriam said. “And Tiny won’t leave me alone.”

  “You’ve been so busy, lately,” Red said, sympathetically. “He misses his mommy.”

  “I know, but he won’t go to sleep,” Miriam said, her eyes red. “I need to finally get these contacts out. I need to sleep.”

  “We’ll take care of him,” Red said.

  “No, he’ll just come scratching at my door,” Miriam said, desperately. “Here,” she added, handing the machinist a package with Japanese kanji characters on it. “Give him some of this and he won’t leave you.”

  “What is it?” Red asked, looking at it dubiously.

  “Japanese catnip,” Miriam said, yawning. “He likes it.”

  “Shiny,” Red said, patting her on the shoulder. “Get some sleep.”

  Miriam finally lay down and closed her eyes, glad to have the dreaded contacts out as well. Unfortunately, she was blind as a bat without either glasses or contacts and she hated doing mechanical work with her glasses on. She needed to get some safety glasses in her prescription, but they looked so dorky and she’d spent too many years being considered an ugly geek…

  “…uncertainty levels within the vacuum fluctuation will interact at causal nodes whereas metric control becomes distorted via…”

  “Shhh! Not now, I’m tired.” Miriam told the voice. It obediently subsided as her head hit her pillow.

  It occurred to her just as sleep enveloped her that she probably should have pointed out to Red that he shouldn’t give Tiny too much of the Katty-Man, which was to catnip what super-concentrated hash was to marijuana. Even with his size, even one of the little silver packages could make him…

  But by then it was too late.

  “Wow, he really likes this stuff,” Red said, chuckling.

  “He looks really stoned.” Sub Dude laughed as the cat flopped over on his side. “How much did you give him?”

  “I figured he was big,” Red said, shrugging, “so I gave him all four packages.”

  “He should be out like a — ” Gants started to say just as the cat leapt to its feet and let out a howl like a fire-engine. “Holy grapp!”

  “Catch him!” Red shouted as the cat screamed his way out of the compartment.

  “Good luck,” Gants replied. “I was not here. I have never heard of a giant, stoned, hyperactive catzilla…”

  Space, the final and all that…

  Four of the main screens in Conn could be set to external view and Captain Prael had to admit that the view was spectacular. But there were still times he pined for the view of the inside of a sub, nothing to see but steel walls and…

  AND A HOWLING STREAK OF WHITE AT SHOULDER HEIGHT!

  “Holy maulk!” he shouted, damned near peeing himself in surprise. For just a moment he caught a flash of feline shape at the far end of the Conn and then the thing was out the hatch headed for CIC. “COB, what did I just see?”

  “That would be a Savannah, sir.”

  “Not a white streak that sounds remarkably like the ship breaking up?”

  “No, sir!”

  “And just what is a Savannah, COB?”

  “A cross between a Bengal housecat and a Cervil wildcat, sir. Males are generally docile and have doglike personalities if neutered young. In this case, it would be a Savannah named Titanus. My guess is that somebody gave him too much catnip. I will investigate the phenomenon.”

  “Are you telling me that someone brought a genetic freak of a housecat onto my ship?”

  “No, sir!” the Chief of Boat replied. “I would be telling you that someone brought a massively-hyper, sixty-pound genetic freak of a housecat, nicknamed Tiny, onto your ship, sir. He’s for hunting down the chee-hamsters, sir.”

  “Oh,” the CO said then paused. “Chee-hamsters?”

  “They’re pests, sir. Picked them up the first time we were on Cheerick when the ship got torn up and we had to set down for repairs. Leave droppings all over, get into the food…”

  “I’ve got the picture, COB. Well… keep him off the Conn.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  “COB, I have another question.”

  “Sir?”

  “What else do I need to know about?” the CO asked carefully. “People covertly visiting Miss Moon to have her read tea leaves and butcher chickens so that this Hexosehr technology will work. And now a monster cat that hunts some rodent I’ve never heard of. Anything else?”

  “Nothing any CO needs to know, sir,” the COB replied.

  “That was not a No, COB.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sigh…

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Weaver hit save and closed the form, then opened the next. But it was the usage estimate on food consumption… and he’d already done that one. Copy sent to the CO.

  Weekly compilation of maintenance and repairs… No, that’s done. Sent.

  Payroll… checked and sent to the CO.

  He3 usage estimate…

  He looked through his to-do list, knowing that there had to be something to do. He’d been running around the ship checking on repairs, fixing personnel problems, shouting at cooks and generally killing himself for the last three weeks. There was no way that he was…

  “Christ,” Weaver muttered, running through the list. There wasn’t anything to do. He couldn’t ask the Eng for the spare parts inventory for at least another two days, there wasn’t a single department issue to “mediate” or otherwise deal with… “I don’t have anything to do.”

  So what did an XO do when he was actually caught up on paperwork? Weaver thought back and decided that what his previous XOs had done was go out and find out what was wrong that wasn’t getting reported.

  Which meant inspecting the entire ship until he found someone’s ass to chew.

  He might actually find the door to his quarters.

  “This is why you’ve been restricting the cereal ration?” Bill asked, holding up the box of generic breakfast cereal. A hole had been nibbled in the side and the cereal dribbled on the floor of the galley. “I thought you said that it was pilfering?”

  “I run a clean galley,” Chief D
uppstadt said mulishly.

  Over two weeks, by daily abuse, Weaver had gotten Duppstadt to raise the quality of food to the level of “edible” if not “pleasant.” The reality of Naval regulations was that even the CO could not relieve a chief for simple incompetence unless it was mission threatening. And after looking at Duppstadt’s record, Bill figured out why Duppstadt was in the galley; it was on the one part of a ship that was not life-threatening. How he had made chief in the first place was the real question. How anyone had let him cook in the sub service, which was normally renowned for the quality of its food, was totally mind-boggling.

  But now he had him dead to rights. Bill had asked him in a previous shouting session why he couldn’t at least provide cereal to the sailors, spacers, whatever, and the chief had told him, point-blank, that someone was pilfering. Bill had even assigned the Master-At-Arms to investigate.

  What he had found, though, going through one of the supply lockers and not-at-all looking for his door, was that rats had been at the food. Rats. In his ship. This was what he got for spending so much time doing paperwork. Rats. In his ship.

  “Chief, rats in the supplies are not a reflection on your galley,” Bill said, for once kindly. “If anything, they’re a reflection on me. But we need to get them tracked down. Have you set traps?”

  “Yes, sir,” the chief admitted. “But they don’t go for them.”

  Bill almost made the comment that if the chief was putting his food down as bait he could understand that but refrained.

  “How are you baiting them?” Bill asked, biting his lip.

  “Leftovers, sir,” the chief said. “But they don’t seem to be going for them.”

  Must… keep… straight… face…

  “Try something different, Chief,” Bill said. “I hear oatmeal and peanut butter works. Maybe some cereal. Cheese is, of course, traditional. Perhaps they’re not…” Connoisseurs? No that would be ARE connoisseurs… “meat eaters. And what’s the point of having a cat if he’s not catching the rats?”

  “Won’t have that filthy beast in my galley, sir,” the Chief said, stoutly. “Won’t have it. Filthy things, cats. Lick their own butts.”

  “Well, we need to get rid of them,” Bill said. “We only have so much food.”

  He considered the problem, then shrugged.

  “They can’t be hiding in the walls. They have to be in the compartments. I’ll get some hands down here to turn out the foodstocks and try to find them. And… where the food is stored away from the kitchen I’ll have Tiny participate. Maybe he can catch some of them.”

  “Okay, this is maulk,” Sub Dude said, picking up the case of cans. “We’re rat-catchers, now?”

  “Orders is orders,” Red said, picking up two cases with his Number Four lifting arm. “And I don’t want to be eating rat droppings.”

  “Well, I don’t think there are any…” Gants said, then jumped back as a purple blur went past his feet. “What in the grapp was that?”

  Tiny, though, had pounced at once, slipped a paw into a narrow crack between two boxes and fished out the creature. He flipped it out into the corridor and then chased after it.

  “That wasn’t no rat,” Red said, following the cat. “Tiny, bring!”

  The cat caught the little beast and ran over, dropping it at the machinist’s feet. But as soon as the thing hit the ground it took off, fast, faster than any rat the two had ever seen. Red never even got a good look. Tiny pounced again and brought it back over, holding the squirming thing out in his jaws.

  “What the grapp is that?” Gants asked, his voice hushed.

  It didn’t actually look like a rat, more like a purple crab or spider.

  “I’m not touching that thing,” Gants added, backing up.

  “I got it,” Red said, grabbing it with his number four arm and squeezing slightly. The shell of the thing cracked and it went limp. “I think we need to report this, though.”

  “What in the hell is that?” Weaver asked, holding up the plastic bag containing the body of the spider-thing.

  “Chee-hamster, isn’t it, sir?” the Eng asked.

  “Chee-hamsters are more yellowish,” Bill said. “And furry. This looks sort of like a crabpus. But not really. I’m not sure what it is.”

  “Well, it’s what’s been getting into the chow, sir,” the Eng said. “Once they got to moving boxes, Tiny caught two more.”

  “Sir, if I may,” Red interjected. “Tiny obviously recognized them; he chased them like he knew what he was doing. I think he’s been chasing them for some time.”

  “What this is, is a quarantine violation,” Bill said, sighing. “That means we’re all in quarantine when we get back unless we can determine that it’s from a nonthreatening biosphere. And since we don’t know where it came from… Hell, just when we need a biologist…”

  “Miss Moon?”

  “Forensics isn’t biology,” Miriam said, looking at the thing in the bag. “Cute, though.”

  “They’re getting in the food,” Bill said. “And we need to know where they came from; Colonel Che-chee didn’t recognize it. If they’re from an unknown biosphere, we’re all in quarantine for thirty days when we get back.”

  “That wouldn’t make me happy,” Miriam said. “Well, I’ve got the whole bio lab just sitting there. I guess I’ll use it. If Tiny catches any more that live, save them for me.”

  “Successfully adjusted to system HD 242896.”

  The Blade had stopped in deep space, done a complete weapons and sensors check and chilled. This was potential Dreen territory; if the enemy was present the CO wanted the option to either fight or run as seemed most prudent.

  “Sensor sweep,” the CO said, holding down his position in CIC. Lieutenant Fey had the Conn with Captain Weaver at the secondary Conn in Damage Control near Engineering.

  “No unusual particle emissions,” the TACO said after a moment. “All nominal for an FV9 star.”

  “Conn, make course for the referenced Jovian,” the CO said.

  “We’ll have to find it first, sir,” Lieutenant Fey replied over the comm. “We weren’t actually given its trajectory by the Hexosehr. Doing a planetary sweep at the moment. Permission to take the ship into the edge of the warp denial zone. We can sweep better from in near the star.”

  “Move her in, Conn,” the CO said, his face blank. Item One on his report: The Navy needed a better class for COs of spaceships. “TACO, any sign of Dreen?”

  “No sign of any other ships in the system, sir,” the TACO replied. “No neutrino or quark emissions over nominal for the star.”

  “Stand down to Condition Two,” the CO said. “Captain Weaver to the CIC.”

  “The best way to find the planets is still reflectance, sir,” Bill said, looking at the information starting to come up on CIC’s monitors. “The telescopes spot them automatically. We can get some from gravitic anomalies and standard astronomical distances. But mostly we have to just look, so looking with the sun behind us works better. The first time around we had a heck of a time but we learned from it and the algorithms are better, now. But we won’t be seeing anything on the other side of the sun, obviously.”

  “CIC, Conn. We have the indicated jovian spotted as well as two more jovians, one super-jovian and two rocky planets.”

  “Head for the indicated Jovian,” the CO replied. “We’ll do a sweep of the other side of the sun after checking it out.”

  “I’m not spotting any other installations in orbit,” Lieutenant Fey said. “And the Hexosehr buried the other one.”

  “Wonder if it’s still down there,” Bill said, gesturing with his chin in the direction of the Jovian. “Be funny if it’s sitting down on the metallic hydrogen bottom.”

  “Metallic hydrogen?” Prael said. “Oh, yeah. The egghead said something about that. How do you get metal out of hydrogen?”

  “Lots of pressure, sir,” Bill replied. “You’ve had chemistry, sir. Three states of matter.”

  “Solid, liquid
, gas,” Prael said. “Four with ions.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bill said. “Ice is solid water, fog is gas and, well, water is liquid. Any material known has, potentially, all three states. But for you to get solid hydrogen requires sufficient pressure, say the pressure of the gravitational force of a gas-giant, pressing the hydrogen atoms together until they’re a solid. Nominally, due to their configuration and position on the periodic table, a metal. Metallic hydrogen.”

  “Got it,” Prael said then paused. “Let me guess. If the pressure gets higher, say more mass…”

  “Then you pass the pressure threshhold of the material, bits of hydrogen start to fuse and you have a star,” Bill finished. “Super-massive jovians, there’s one on this planet, are very close to stars. The pressure is so high that it generates some internal kinetic energy so they’re not actually as cold as they should be for their position in the system. There’s a theory that you could find some bodies that are right on the edge of both, sort of fusing but not really willing to be a star. Those are one class of white dwarf.”

  “And so much of the planetology lecture of the day,” the CO said. “Plan.”

  “We’ll approach to low ball-and-string orbit on each of the rocky planets and major moons,” Bill said. “From there we can do a ground-penetrating radar sweep as well as a computerized visual sweep. Both will be looking for straight lines. They don’t tend to form in nature but civilizations always seem to have them. If we find one, we’ll consider the imagery and try to determine if it’s an artifact or just an anomaly. If we think it’s an artifact, we land and deploy the Marines.”

  “And who is the ‘we’ who are checking on the hits?” the CO asked.

  “The intel section has an imagery specialist, sir,” the XO reminded him. “He’ll check them.”

  “Oh My God.”

  Julio Plumber hadn’t been quite sure what an “imagery analyst” was when he signed up, but he By God learned in A School. It was a guy who was going to go blind, early, from looking at satellite shots. When, rarely, satellite shots were shown to the media they were always carefully labeled and the clearest shots possible. The media didn’t get the shots that were just a blur of movement or a shadow that might be a rocket launcher and might just be, well, a shadow.