A Cat Among Dragons

by Alma Boykin

  Book One in the Cat Among Dragons Series

  Kindle edition 2013

  Alma T C Boykin

  Cover Design by Saul Bottcher,

  Editing by Nassau Hedron, and

  Kindle file preparation by Saul Bottcher,

  all on behalf of IndieBookLauncher.com

  Published by

  IndieBookLauncher.com

  (Wanderer's Cove Entertainment, Inc.)

  EPUB edition ISBN: 978-0-9916877-0-1

  Kindle edition ISBN: 978-0-9916877-1-8

  Copyright 2012 Alma T C Boykin, all rights reserved.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  1: New Starts

  2: 1811 and After

  3: Fear and Promises

  4: Strictly Business

  5: A Modest Proposal?

  6: The Final Test?

  7: Predators and Prey

  8: Turning of the Year

  9: High Waters

  10: Imperial Passage

  11: Trial by Ice

  About The Author

  New Starts

  The woman hated the heat and the humidity, but the Traders’ Elders Council hunters would never, ever think to look for her in the laundry room of an inter-species brothel. She pulled kilos of wet fabric out of the washer and piled them into a battered but very clean carrier. She pushed back her sweat- and steam-damp brown hair, heaved the container of wet sheets and bedding over to the row of primitive driers, and began loading the first available machine. She ran a chip scanner over the fabric’s hem, double-checked the embedded data to make certain of the drying time, then started the big machine. A timer chimed down the row and she went over, opened the door and began unloading that batch of dried linen.

  “Hey, Brownie! Give me a hand,” a voice called, and the woman carried the container of very hot cloth over to the folding area. Toby had already dumped his load onto the folding table and the woman caught the loose ends on her side and quickly evened them up so he could turn on the folding and secondary sterilization machine. The specialized equipment had cost a lot, Toby had explained when she started, but the secondary process let the house use the old-fashioned bedding longer. “Some stains are harder to get out than others, but if we do a secondary we can still use the sheets. Besides,” he grinned knowingly, “the customers who are into those sorts of games don’t tend to worry too much about the odd spot here and there on the sheets. They’ve got other spots on their minds.”

  The woman hadn’t wanted to know, but she’d gotten a fast education anyway. Toby had left “the trade,” as he called it, because a customer got possessive and had his bullies cut off the man’s privates. Rather than work as a passive only, Toby started taking odd jobs around a different house, eventually becoming a sort of general factotum, running errands, doing maintenance, and helping out in the laundry and kitchen. He’d told the new employee his story the first time they met, over a pile of sheets and clothes. She’d blinked, nodded, and learned. Brownie hadn’t met many of the current prostitutes, since she worked opposite from their hours. The amount of labor that she performed and her exhaustion at the end of her workday also contributed to her lack of friends or acquaintances.

  But Brownie was safe, for the moment. The Traders current dispute with the Prostitutes’ Guild over something, probably the tarqina’s willingness to carry, buy, and sell sex slaves, protected her. Guild prostitutes and courtesans in this part of the galaxy abhorred the slave traders and their ire spilled over to the groups who transported the chattel. For their part, the Trader tarqina disliked the sex workers because the prostitutes took all paying clients who abided by house rules, whatever those rules might be. As a result, the Trader Clans’ disapproval of casual intimacy and notorious abhorrence of cross-species relations made them the butt of a number of jokes. Brownie sided with the prostitutes and she’d found refuge in the brothel, especially after admitting that she really didn’t want to learn “the trade.”

  However, she thought as she folded and put her second load of sheets into the delivery system, she didn’t want to work here forever. Because sooner or later, someone would see her and want her to service them, or the house manager would try and force her into that sort of work, and she couldn’t bring herself to do it. If she lost control of herself again and it became apparent that she was “an exotic,” well, her days of freedom would be over. Brownie knew that males, females, and others collected creatures like her for their own pleasure or to sell to higher bidders. She’d heard stories, and even if they were not completely true, still... she didn’t have a protector and wouldn’t ever, given who and what she was. So what could she do with the rest of her life, besides fold light-years of laundry?

  That night she sat in her stuffy little curtained sleeping cubby and made a list. She knew how to buy, sell, transport, and contract for merchandise of all sorts, especially exotic luxuries. But that avenue remained closed, at least for the moment. She could sell her body in the sex trade, but that was the last resort. She had considered offering her services and her ship to do strictly transport work, but again her enemies would find her very quickly. And given her possible lifespan, taking up a manufacturing job or something equally mundane was emphatically not what she wanted to do for the next few centuries. And she’d have to have legal identification. Of her computer systems knowledge and document forging skills, well, the less said the better, making it nearly impossible for her to produce identification and associated records that would stand up well. One thing she could do was fight and defend herself. All members of the tarqina learned various forms of self-defense and weapons skills and even some bodyguard work for use while they were assigned to the different Trademasters during the apprentice years. And she thought she could Heal, a little. But that required training, which cost money she didn’t have that at the moment.

  So what did she want? To begin with, she wanted a way out of the laundry business, a career that would provide a living and possibly a life, and revenge. Not necessarily in that order. She’d be willing to do a lot in exchange for revenge. She shut down her notepad and curled up, thinking hard. Was there a way to combine all three? Maybe. It would take hard work, but she was used to working hard. And she’d have to take orders again for a while, but not forever. And no one in that career field would believe anyone who claimed that she was a Trader-born. So, how to go about investigating that option? She dozed off, still thinking.

  A week later she had a free day and took the pedestrian shuttle to a public data access center. She gave the false name that she currently worked under, logged in, and began looking at history files. She skimmed two or three before hitting on a promising data set. As the information scrolled past on the holoscreen, she made careful notes on her personal data pad, transmitting the dates, locations, and most important names to her ship’s computer system. After more investigation in the publicly available records, the woman decided on her first, second and third choices for her next career move. She logged off of the public network, bought some real animal protein to celebrate, and then hurried back to the brothel.

  Brownie settled back onto her sleeping mat and re-read what she’d found. Her first choice looked promising until she considered what the articles failed to mention. The lack of species’ identifications revealed that her first choice had been a mammals-only company. Which fact in itself wouldn’t stand in the way since she was a mammal, but organizations that employed only members of one species without good cause tended to have a blinkered view of the universe, in her experience. That was the sort of thing that might eventually cause her trouble, because while she’d never shifted form during self-defense training, she could not be so certain about controlling herself in a r
eal fight. Things might not go well if she revealed her true nature by accident while in combat. She didn’t know much about formal military behaviors, but she understood a fair bit of multi-species psychology. She assumed that armed people in a high-stress environment reacted poorly to surprises, especially if those people already carried a prejudice. OK, scratch that, she decided.

  Company number two would be her new first choice, then. She nibbled a piece of dried meat. Here she faced a different problem: could she meet their standards? Although this group provided basic training they would not hire just anyone who strolled, rolled, flopped, or swam up to the front door, unlike some other companies she’d looked at. Potential employees needed to have some kind of useful skill, or so the news and history bits claimed. Brownie counted off silently, I can defend myself, I’m time-sensitive, I’m good at bargaining and fixing, er, I’ll call it adjusting prices, and am good at spotting things that have been adjusted. Two of the three should help her sell her case with this particular potential employer. And this company hired reptiles, mammals, and insects as well. No Trader Council hunter or tracker-for-hire would ever look for a Trader-born in that sort of an environment. Unless they get clever enough to start searching where they’d hate to go. Not likely, given the combination there, she snorted, nibbling more dried meat.

  So, when to go apply, and where? The organization didn’t exactly have a main office, but it did seem to have a frequent presence on Quildar. At that time, the Traders had shifted away from working in the sector and—she sat bolt upright, grinning. At that time the Traders wouldn’t even know of her existence in order to know to look for her! Oh, the current Tarqina Elders Council could certainly search back and would, eventually, but not for a while. And that gave her a safe space to build her new identity and learn new skills that might just make her valuable enough to earn a very decent living, provided that she survived, of course.

  That was the rub, she snorted, savoring the next bite of dried meat. Her first choice of professions was not especially conducive to a long career. First, she had to learn the skills that she needed and then she had to avoid the very high risks associated with this company’s work. That was why she only looked at the best of the best: she’d have better odds serving with them, even though her work wouldn’t be safe in any sense of the term. But then neither was running forever or hiding in the basement of a brothel. She lay down and closed her eyes, turning off the touch-pad by feel and sliding it out of sight. Decisions made, she allowed herself a moment to bemoan her parents’ love life and her own fate.

  Mrrti, father, why didn’t you use protection?!, Brownie asked for the thousandth time. She heard an instructional program droning in her memory, “Although members of unrelated species occasionally form long-term partnerships and even mate, the partners remain unable to produce offspring. Species differences can only be negated by anathema genetic blending processes including chimerization,” and so on. Except, apparently, in this one case. She wondered again why her sire had to have been Trader-born and not just a Wanderer. “Same species, completely different cultures,” her teachers had sneered, meaning to insult the non-Trader Wanderers. To Brownie it sounded more like a compliment, especially now. Well, neither Traders nor Wanderers ever followed the track she contemplated, giving her more protection.

  And there was something else in favor of going to that particular company. She would be traveling back. Even the Traders hesitated before doing something that might affect the warp and weft of the time-threads or possibly violate the Laws. That gave her the faint hope that somehow she could embed herself in something so tightly that the tarqina would back off their hunt. After all, she was one nano-speck in the streams of Time. But suppose she did live long enough to establish herself somehow? If the Traders caught her then, they could kill her but they couldn’t unmake her. Not that they could prevent her having existed, the rational part of her brain reminded her. Brownie rolled her eyes at the thought. Rationality never bothered the tarqina when it came to matters of breeding and clan order.

  A chittering voice interrupted her tangled skein of thought. “Hey, Brownie, you in there?” She got up onto all fours and slid back the curtain a little. The voice belonged to the brothel’s booking manager and she wondered if the very large bipedal beetle wanted an errand run.

  “Yes, Mistress Tolpo. What do you need?” She poked her head out of her cubby. Tolpo didn’t own or really run the House, but it paid to stay on her good side anyway, so she kept her reply mannerly.

  “Would you like a little extra money? I’ve got a customer who’s looking for someone new and doesn’t care if they’re experienced or not.” The larger female gave the washer girl an appraising look as the mammal eased out of the small cubby and stood up. The woman wasn’t especially pretty by current human standards but she had a decent face and a good body (if a touch lean) with average breasts. And her combination of pale skin, almost black hair, and grey eyes, along with a widow’s peak, gave her a touch of novelty. Tolpo’s experienced eyes and what she’d heard from the gossip network suggested that the brunette was a virgin or very close to it, and the procuress could make a lot more off her than just the usual. Plus the mammal wasn’t Guild, so if the client roughed her up, well, who would say anything for her?

  Brownie’s heart started pounding the instant Tolpo made her offer. Oh no, no, this was bad, she knew into her bones. Ellery’s was a Guild brothel and didn’t accept non-Guild ladies. Tolpo shouldn’t even be asking her because everyone knew that the washers did not belong to the Guild. And Ellery’s didn’t allow certain things, especially not with inexperienced workers. It didn’t take the woman’s knack for sensing emotion to read the booking-manager’s intentions and she cringed inside. “Ah, no thank you, Mistress Tolpo. I don’t want to break House rules, and I’m not really, um,” she gestured to her worn, modest clothes. “And it’s my day off,” she added lamely, turning to climb back into her cubby.

  “Too bad. Because he’ll pay more if you’re not already bruised,” and Tolpo lunged forward and grabbed the astonished woman. Tolpo’s strong midlimbs pinioned Brownie’s arms before she could blink and pulled the mammal against the insect’s thorax, while one forelimb went around her throat and started squeezing. Brownie didn’t think; she just reacted. She pitched forward, kicking out as she did. Her response caught Tolpo off guard and the pair flipped onto the permacrete floor, the woman already rolling free as Tolpo relaxed her hold. Brownie didn’t stop moving until she’d put the folder-sterilizer between them.

  “Stupid bint! The first time we get a Legislator in here, especially one who’s willing to pay top-credit for an untrained piece of meat, and you try to make me look bad!” Brownie tried to get to the door but froze as she realized that she’d cornered herself. Tolpo’s palps opened into an approximation of a smile as she blocked her in. Like most House workers Tolpo carried a small stunner, and she pointed it at the desperate woman. “Not too bruised, and he won’t have to wait long for you to wake up,” she said and fired.

  The mammal never understood the next few seconds. She should have been stunned, or at least stung by bits of the wall and metal plating behind her as she ducked the shot. Instead, Tolpo’s forelimbs waved wildly, her antennae crossed, and the insect fell over onto her back, stunned unconscious. Much later, when she had time to think, the mammal decided that Tolpo’s stunner had malfunctioned, shorting out through the improvised handle. It was the only explanation that made sense. But now, Brownie stared at the fallen insect.

  “Blessed Bookkeeper, what happened?” Brownie breathed. Her elation vanished in a heartbeat as she realized that she’d be blamed for whatever had just happened to the brothel’s booking manager. “Oh gnardbites!” Brownie stopped just long enough to make sure that the insect wasn’t dead, then bolted. She grabbed her gear and clothes and fled, not stopping until she reached the park where she’d left her ship.

  Most of the time, landing and parking a time-ship in the open without the local au
thorities’ prior permission invited discovery and very large fines. However, this park belonged to one of the city’s gangs, and no one, even Traders and law enforcers, went into the place after dark. Respectable people shunned it by daylight as well. When Brownie first arrived, she had paid the last of her regional credit chips as a “donation” to the local boss, who had no use for her services or ship but who always found a use for off-planet money. The mammal slipped from rock to tree to bench, then darted into the weird vehicle, shutting the door behind her. She dropped her few things on the floor, settled into the command seat and plugged her portable data-pad into the Dark Hart’s main computer system. Soon a series of symbols and numbers appeared and she felt the psycho-symbiotic navigation assistant reaching for her mind. Brownie lay back in the chair and connected with the strange creature as the lights inside the little craft dimmed and an image in four and six dimensions appeared inside her mind. The woman selected a thread-like path from the nearly infinite series of time lines, and with the symbiote’s cooperation, drew temporal energy into and through the Dark Hart, activating the propulsion system and guiding the ship onto the chosen thread and into that particular current of the time streams.

  After an unknown stretch of personal time, Dark Hart reached the planet called Quildar, fifteen hundred years, more or less, before the time of Brownie’s departure. Only another Trader time pilot could gain access to her ship and so the woman relaxed, napping and “talking” with the creature running the vehicle. The symbiotic animal couldn’t think, exactly, and it wasn’t sapient as Brownie understood the term, but she sensed that it “liked” her, if that was the right word. It found her mind comfortable and “flavorful.” The mammal had no idea what that meant, but she was happy that the two of them could work together, as mentally crippled as she was compared to purebred Trader-born Wanderers. Her father’s old associate, the one who’d shoved her into the ship with a set of coordinates and a letter, said that it had worked well with her sire, whoever he had been. The letter omitted his name, for safety’s sake.