CHAPTER 3

Carlton Pontius—Ponty to his shipmates, Carl Poindexter more familiarly to his local Sherwood associates—had not forgotten his son Jubal’s birthday cat at all. Or rather, he had momentarily forgotten his promise but remembered it immediately when he saw the Molly Daise’s Cat Person and her prize queen.

Ponty was a man whose capacity for inspiration had often come to the assistance of his aspirations. Like the cat in the little lady’s arms, he usually landed on his feet and got the cream while he was at it.

He had been a soldier until he saw the light and started working as an arms dealer and a sales rep for pharmaceuticals of both legal and illegal status. He had served in every conceivable rank and capacity aboard ships, chiefly those that smuggled prohibited technology from world to world for a price. His sales experience had made him a valuable asset to such crews. His was a competent medic and a mostly self-taught geneticist, having reared several clones from test tube to maturity en route to their most lucrative destinations. Among his other less legitimate talents, he was a consummate con man.

But even he had never in his wildest dreams imagined that he would someday include cat rustling in his résumé.

Oddly enough, it was his child’s innocent wish for a pet that alerted him to the opportunities awaiting the imaginative man in the feline relocation industry.

Raising the groceries for his family’s sustenance had put his knowledge of the shadier branches of selective breeding to good use. Since horses were big money business on Sherwood, when he first arrived he’d experimented with equine embryos and tended them faithfully. Then he’d been called away before he could return to care for the resulting foals. The best he could do was to borrow a couple of maternal mares from a neighboring herd to look after the little shavers near the line shack where he’d stashed them. Due to the financial demands of his household and the shaky state of his marriage, he’d only been back for brief intervals in the meantime and had no idea what became of the foals. If they survived, they should be full grown by now, with a couple of generations of descendants unless they were sterile, and he had no reason to think they would be.

Cats were smaller, easier to smuggle, and according to the cat girl, some of them were even more valuable than horses. Every ship he served on had a ship’s cat, of course, though none were of the hoity-toity lineage of the furball the girl had been toting. If one of those ships had gone down, the cat would have perished with the crew. The last thing his ships’ masters wanted was to draw attention to their vessels with a big fancy sign, whether or not they were derelict. Cargo could always be retrieved later, but not if some interfering busybody boarded a dead ship to save a cat.

He had known about the Barque Cats and seen them occasionally when he did business with ships whose missions were less shady than his own. They were pretty enough beasts and good hunters and all that, but in spite of what the cat girl said, he didn’t see any difference between them and the standard Maine coon moggie that patrolled the barns, yards, and houses of his feline-inclined neighbors. No matted fur on the pampered highborn beauties, of course. No fleas, ticks, ear mites, or parasites either.

When Ponty saw the girl toting the pregnant cat, it hadn’t taken much mental arithmetic to figure she was on her way to Vlast so he could tend the furball. He had promised his boy a kitten, and that was, he told himself, the reason he had approached the girl. A man could ask about a kitten for his kid, couldn’t he?

It had been a revelation to him that ships would actually pay so much to have a kitten with the right pedigree on board. Crews apparently gave more for a fancy-bred Barque Cat than he had ever been paid for a year on any of his voyages. Well, they might be too good for him, but nothing was too good for his boy. Jubal wanted a kitten, and his son was going to get the best kitten his old man could get for him. If he happened to make enough money off the sale of the cat and all of the other kittens to support his family and future enterprises for some time to come, it was no more than his reward for being such a great father. He could have always settled for one of those poor little Sherwood kittens that were lucky to find a berth as a barn cat, luckier still to be a pampered pet, but if that cat girl said her cat was better, and worth more money, he figured she ought to know.

Personally, he didn’t see—unless these cats had their kittens through their noses or in some other special way—how anyone would ever be able to tell the difference between a kitten born to Thomas’s Duchess and sired by Space Jockey from a kitten born to Haystack Puss and sired by Back Fence Tom. There was ID hardware, of course, with the DNA code on it, but that could be counterfeited easily enough.

So, in his natural fatherly solicitude for his boy, he formulated a lapse into not-so-latent larceny. Using the Duchess as his seed cat, so to speak, he could use her DNA samples to maybe elevate some otherwise undervalued kittens to her lofty and lucrative status, sort of like placebo cats, or a control group. As expensive as the real thing, of course, but all misrepresented in a spirit of scientific inquiry. If they didn’t know the difference, would his clients adopt the barn kittens and believe them to be as good as Chessie’s real kittens? It was a far far better thing he planned to do, a redemocra-tization of that most independent feline species. He would be undermining a silly human value system that falsely overinflated some animals while leaving others homeless and forsaken—when they could be going to good homes for a healthy profit to him. He was nothing, he liked to think, if not softhearted.

His own kid would get a bona fide Barque kitten, of course. His kid deserved nothing but the best.

Jared returned to the tracker swinging a large woven basket, and he and Janina took off over the ridge to the field Varley had indicated, where six more broken-colored horses watched curiously as the humans unpacked their lunch. Included in the picnic provisions was a healthy supply of apples and carrots.

A café lunch might have been more private, as it turned out. These horses were no more frightened than the others had been, and were also so nosy as to be intrusive. Janina and Jared sat together on a blanket, close enough to pass food and close enough that she could feel his body’s warmth radiating through the chill of the afternoon breeze.

“Janina, you’ve been a tremendous help,” he said, handing her a plate with some cheese and apple on it. “Did your Cat Person training include being a vet tech?”

“Not really,” she said. “Just certain things. Like birthings, treating wounds, emergency cat medicine, recognition of the usual cat maladies.”

“Not all of the cat handlers I’ve met seem nearly as well-versed in all of those areas as you are,” he said.

“What they gave us at the academy was a bit sketchy. I was lucky to be assigned such a wonderful cat to work with as soon as I’d finished the Cat Person elective in my schooling. And not all of the cabin boys and girls who care for a ship’s cat have even had the academy training I did. Some ships acquire a cat without having a properly trained Cat Person in the crew, just a youngster to feed the cat and change the commode. They don’t all know how to monitor the cat’s hunt and search activities properly, to do the most good for the ship. When I meet some of the untrained ones, I try to answer questions and make suggestions. Most of them at least do love their cat.”

“You’ve done remarkably well with the knowledge you have,” he told her.

She felt her skin growing warm from more than the sun’s heat. He had the most beautiful eyes, and they were totally focused on her.

“I study everything I can from the courses in the data banks, and take classes at our ports of call when we dock for more than a couple of days.”

“Excellent. Have you thought about later?”

“Later?”

“When Chessie—retires. She’s not a young cat, and all of these litters are taking a toll on her.”

Janina studied the grass intently for a moment or two while her eyes stopped swimming. She knew he didn’t mean actually retire. Chessie wouldn’t leave the Molly Daise until she died. Then, if the ship hadn’t retained one of her kittens for an understudy, they’d have to buy a kitten and assign a new Cat Person, someone young and small enough to follow the kitten into places where an adult couldn’t go. “I—I’d probably train my replacement,” she said. But the thought of trying to do that after Chessie passed—she didn’t know how she’d face it. She couldn’t bear the thought of being without Chessie. They’d been together since she was eight years old and Chessie fit into the palm of her hand.

“Will you return to your family on your home world?” he asked, pretending he hadn’t noticed her discomfort.

“I don’t have a family, not that I know of. My mother was killed in an accident when I was small. My father was away—no one ever told me exactly where—and has never returned. I haven’t been able to learn anything about him. I’m not really sure what I’ll do when Chessie—”

He cleared his throat, and this time he seemed a little nervous. “I actually had something I wanted to ask you about that,” he said.

She didn’t catch the rest of it. A brown and white muzzle intruded between them and lipped the apple off the plate, leaving a smear of sparkly slobber on the cheese.

Both of them bent over the plate. “Look,” she said, pointing, “that looks like what Chessie’s been coughing up.”

Jared was already fishing a specimen bag out of his inside pocket. Lifting the cheese slice with the edge of the disposable fork, he deposited it in the bag. He frowned. “This is very irregular, since a ship’s cat and a wild horse are hardly on the same diet and don’t even breathe the same air. I can’t think what they’d have in common that would produce this”—he waggled the bag at her before tucking it into his pocket—“in both species.”

Janina felt suddenly sick with apprehension. “You don’t suppose it’s some sort of alien plague, do you? Like those diseases that used to kill so many Terran animals before they developed vaccines?”

“I hope not. But we’ll need to tag this lot before we process this,” he said. “We’ll want to be able to identify them again, in case it’s necessary to isolate them.”

But when they rose to return to work, they found the attentive horses had all vanished. Returning to the tracker, Janina and Jared followed the beasts into the hills, down into another valley, and then into a thick birch wood, where they lost them. The tracker’s scanners showed that the horses were still there, but when they tried to follow on foot, no fruity inducements were enough to persuade the horses to show themselves.

Finally Jared shook his head and said, “We’re wasting our time here. We’ll need to have a talk with Varley. He’s going to have to round this lot up for us to tag. Not a word about the specimen, though, all right? He’s not likely to be cooperative if he thinks we may be looking for something that could endanger his herd.”

Janina nodded gravely, her former high spirits thoroughly dampened.

Jared set the tracker down in the wide drive outside of Varley’s extensive ranch home, which was bigger than the bridge and the crew quarters of the Molly Daise put together. The house was surrounded by a vast garden with an array of flowers in a rainbow of colors. The gardener, Hamish Hale, stood up as they exited the tracker.

“Hi, Doc Vlast,” he said. Hamish owned a black lab named Rollie who had a hip problem. As they drew nearer, Rollie looked up at them from his place beside Hamish’s feet and wagged his tail. Jared greeted them both, patting Rollie’s head, and asked if Mr. Varley was around.

“In the stables, Doc,” Hamish said, waving his trowel in the direction of the building that was the size of one of the Locksley malls.

Two large red dogs came bounding up to meet them. One of them leaped to put its front paws on Jared’s shoulders, and he held them and danced the dog around as if they were at a ball. The other settled for pats from Janina, when it was clear his doctor was tied up with another patient.

“Roscoe, Roary, down,” a man’s voice commanded. Varley himself strode out to meet them and shook their hands briskly.

“Get the mustangs tagged already, did you, Doc?” he asked in a jovial tone.

“One lot, but the second spooked and hid in the woods. They wouldn’t come out for love nor bribes, so you’ll have to have your hands corral them and call me back.”

“The ones you did check—they look okay to you?” Varley asked. “Healthy, no mutations or anything?”

“Other than their coloring and undocumented origins, no,” Jared said.

“Because I’m thinking I should probably sell them offworld—I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but on the other hand, I don’t want to get fined for owning a herd of them when I can’t say who the giver is.”

Jared nodded. “They look healthy enough to me, and I would say most are young and sturdy as well. But as long as we’re here, I thought we might take the annual specimens from your other stock. Save us all time later.”

Varley screwed his mouth up considering, then shrugged. “It’s up to you. They’re not due for six weeks, though.”

“I know, but I figured you’d like to get it over with.”

He shrugged again. “Your call. You know where to find them.” He signaled toward the stable area. “When you’re done, you and your helper come on up to the house for refreshments, why don’t you?”

“Thanks,” Jared said, waving as he strode toward the corral, Janina trailing behind him. Roary and Roscoe, wagging and bouncing as if they’d never before seen such a wonderful man, followed their master to the house.

It took another two hours to gather the necessary specimens. Only three of the stabled horses exhibited the sparkly saliva, which obviously puzzled Jared as much as finding it had displeased him. But neither he nor Janina said anything about it as they sat sipping iced tea and nibbling fresh baked biscuits from Mrs. Varley’s dessert plates. The biscuits were dusted with cinnamon and melted in Janina’s mouth. She thought she’d never tasted anything so delicious. She was biting into her second when one of the hands, dressed in blue work pants and a matching shirt with the tails hanging out, strode into the room.

“The station’s on the com, sir,” he told Varley. “They said they’ve been trying to raise Dr. Vlast on the tracker com but can’t.”

“Is it an emergency?” Jared asked, setting down his glass and plate as he rose.

“I think it may be, sir. They were wondering if you can explain why there are horses, dogs, and sheep running through the station.”

Janina felt her stomach clench with anxiety.

Even before entering the tracker, they heard the com unit squawking at them through the closed hatch. Janina’s dread swelled to near-panic as she made out the first words of the message. The security monitor that had last showed Chessie peacefully napping was now black.

“Fire,” the com unit was saying. “Fire in the animal clinic!”