CHAPTER 12

Jubal didn’t think much about it when his father didn’t return. He’d probably poked around so long he had to go straight back to work when he got back to the ship instead of coming to find his only son. Jubal was busy in the crew quarters, making up cots, returning safety harnesses to their proper positions, cleaning lockers and mopping floors, all part of his own new duties. It was the kind of stuff he hated doing at home, but somehow it was more interesting doing it aboard ship.

He was, in addition to his other duties, designated assistant Cat Person, meaning he helped the captain’s daughter and cleaned the litter pan, because she didn’t want to. The girl’s name was Sosi, a quick, black-haired, dark-eyed little thing who seemed to be in a big hurry when he met her. She called herself the ship’s Cat Person but she wasn’t a professional one like Janina Mauer. She was just the captain’s kid who had a big fluffy black garden variety cat, and she’d given herself a jumped-up title to make herself sound important.

The Ranzo’s ship’s cat, Hadley, was what the old man might have called “easygoin’.” He was not an old cat but seemed very lazy. Every time Jubal saw him, the cat was sprawled in a furry puddle, fast asleep. Jubal scrunched the soft dense fur of the cat’s exposed side and received a placid purr in return, and a languid opening of beautiful green eyes. His black fluffiness reminded Jubal of Chester, but unlike Chester, Hadley seemed totally disinterested in most of the people and events around him. His hunting mostly consisted of walking to his food dish and grazing.

The second mate, Felicia Daily, gave Jubal a fast tour and introduced him as “Ponty’s boy” to as many of the crew as they encountered. He learned that his pop used a different name when he shipped out—he was Carlton Pontius. Most of the people Jubal met seemed friendly, if busy, but a few acted suspicious and he really couldn’t say he blamed them. He wondered what they knew about his old man from previous journeys and supposed they might be worried about what other trouble he’d cause.

It wasn’t until he heard the station intercom saying, “Mr. Pontius, Mr. Carlton Pontius, please report to your duty station aboard the Reuben Ranzo immediately,” that he realized the old man was still gone. A few minutes later the ship’s intercom advised the crew to prepare for disembarkation, and Dad totally failed to stride down the corridor at the last minute. He wasn’t coming.

Another kid, hearing the same messages, might run to the captain, ask where the old man was and if he wasn’t aboard, try to leave the ship to go find him. But Jubal simply sighed and strapped himself in the way Felicia had showed him. Although his original plan had been to stay on the station and wait for the Molly Daise to return with Chester, he realized now that the scheme was flawed. Mom had probably sent the Guard after him, thinking he’d been kidnapped. It would be just like her to have had Pop arrested.

Nope, Jubal decided, he was better off staying put. And if the old man wasn’t around pulling what Mom called his shenanigans and making everybody mad at him—and his son by association—he knew he stood a chance to show his new shipmates what he could do being his own man. He had another plan for finding Chester, one that would be easier without worrying about what his dad would do next.

The person he most needed to make friends with was the communications officer, he’d decided. He’d find out what she liked to eat, maybe, and filch extra tidbits from the galley, as he might for the cats. Give her something, tell her she looked nice, carry messages, anything to make her like him. Then he’d tell her his story and see if she could help him keep track of the Molly Daise’s location, and somehow or other set up a circumstance where they could rendezvous. He wasn’t like his dad. He wasn’t trying to trick anybody or take anything away from them. He just wanted some help getting Chester back.

Jared’s last patient surprised him, since she lacked fur, feathers or fins and only had two legs.

Although she was by herself and dressed in expensive-looking new clothes, he recognized her as the woman who had come with her son to the Locksley clinic to return Chessie and the kitten. She was the wife of the arsonist who had torched his clinic and kidnapped Chessie in the first place, he was pretty sure.

“More cats, missus?” he asked the woman.

“No, but that’s why I came,” she said. “I wanted to ask you to get in touch with that cat girl and her crew. I need to buy that kitten back.”

“I thought that was settled. The ship’s five days out from port now,” he said. “Janina, Chessie, and the kitten are on it.”

The woman tightened her lips. She looked no less anxious than she had on the previous occasion. “Five days, you say? Not four?”

Jared found he knew to the hour when the Molly Daise and Janina had left the station. “Five days, seven hours, and thirty minutes actually.”

She looked puzzled. “No, he’s only been gone four.”

“The kitten?”

“Jubal, my son. I think he got his good-for-nothing father to bring him back here so he could go after that cat. I thought he’d got over it but then I got up the next day and he was gone, as was my transport.”

“He couldn’t have just taken it himself? Because if he did, station security would have detained him. It’s against regulations for an unregistered, underage youngster to enter the station without an adult.”

“I’m pretty sure Carlton brought him,” she said, her eyes shifting to the side, indicating she was hiding something.

“Why?”

“There was—a note,” she said. “And Carlton—Jubal’s father—is an old spacehand. This is where he would come. It took me awhile to catch a ride with one of the neighbors who was coming here. I need them to search the station and find my boy. If he didn’t get on board the ship with the cat, he could still be here.”

“You should be talking to station security, missus, not to me,” Jared said.

“I intend to. I came here first because I figured if that girl and the cats were here, I could take the other deal—less money for the mother but keep the kitten for Jubal. I don’t know why, but the kid was really attached to that little cat. He didn’t speak to me till the next morning, but then he seemed to be all right for a couple of weeks, didn’t mention the cat again. He’s a good boy and a big help to me with his old—his dad gone, but he’s stubborn. Gets that from me, I guess. I should have known he had something up his sleeve when he was so quiet and cooperative. He was just biding his time, I guess. Carlton’s more slippery than stubborn, but once that boy sets his mind on something … well, the thing is, Doctor, if I get my boy back and not the cat, he’s not going to stay and I know that now for a fact.”

“Still, I think you’d be better off finding your son first, ma’am. The kitten is on board the Molly Daise, and he’ll be safe with Janina until you can work something out. But I don’t know about your son. He’s probably here at the station, if what you say is true, waiting for the Molly Daise to return, but if not, ships come and go all the time and he could have boarded one of them.”

“I’ll do that, but meantime you contact that girl, okay? Tell her I can pay what they wanted for that kitten and to be sure to bring him back with them.”

“I’ll relay your message,” he promised as she turned on one shiny new boot heel and stomp-clicked her way from the clinic. He wondered why—when she and her son brought Chessie back—the reward money seemed to matter to her so desperately, and now she was willing to return a large portion of it in exchange for the kitten. He didn’t think she was willing to relinquish the funds solely because of her son’s disappearance.

Then his assistant Bill called from the waiting room that they had an emergency. The passenger liner Tesoro had brought in their cat, Tess—short for Galactic Treasure—a purebred like Chessie, injured in an accident.

By the time he finished operating on Tess, Jared had forgotten all about the woman.

When Chessie jumped as gracefully as ever onto Janina’s chest to alert her that it was time for their next watch, Janina smelled the cat feces right away. She thought she might have forgotten to clean the box so she rose and sleepily pulled on her shipsuit and then her boots, which had fallen over sometime while she slept. The kitten, probably. Chessie was always as neat about Janina’s things as she was about her own fur.

Her toe was only partway in when she discovered the source of the stink. She pulled her foot out quickly. “Chester? Did you do this, you naughty kitten?”

But to her surprise he wasn’t there. She looked down at Chessie, who was standing with her tail to the boot and industriously scraping her paws back toward it, trying to bury it. Janina retrieved her boots, slipped on clean socks, and said, “Madame Chessie, I’d like a word with your son,” and set off down the hall, stopping to throw her soiled socks down the laundry chute outside the female crew’s loo. There, she scraped the contents of her boot into the commode, scrubbed it clean, and spritzed the inside with odor neu-tralizer. She took off her sock and washed her foot for good measure, then put the sock back on, dried the inside of her fortuitously waterproof boot, checked the other one carefully, and slipped them on.

Janina was wondering where to start looking for Chester when the intercom exploded with a long string of oaths followed by a shout of, “Kibble!” that could easily be heard from the forward corridor without the benefit of the intercom.

As she ran up the corridor, Chessie trotted behind her and the intercom ordered, “CP Janina Mauer report to Captain Vesey’s quarters on the double.”

She opened the door to the captain’s cabin, and Chester’s furry form flashed out the door past her, heading toward the bridge. Chessie took off after him.

“I found this when I came back from my watch,” the captain told her, pointing to his bunk, where a damp spot on the pillow reeked of cat urine. “It looks to me as if this falls into the scope of your duties. The little devil went for the one part of my bed that isn’t waterproof.”

“He was missing when Chessie woke me for our watch. I wonder how he got in here?”

“Probably snuck in when I went on watch myself,” the captain replied. “I must have shut him in.” The normally mild-mannered Vesey was cooling off, calming down. “You checked him for UTIs?”

“No, sir, but I will as soon as I find him,” Janina promised.

“You go do that, then, and I’ll have someone else clean this up.”

She clicked Chessie’s locator. She was on the bridge, two doors down from the captain’s quarters.

For the second time in as many minutes someone bellowed, “Kibble!” and she ran for the bridge, where chaos reigned.

Crew members leaped and lunged, those who were trying to cajole the kitten rampaging across the control panels shouted down by those demanding that he stop. Chester hopped from one console to the next, landing squarely on control buttons while Chessie chased him across the same panels trying to corral her offspring.

Janina calmly planted herself in Chester’s path, preparing to grab him before he could climb up one side of her and down the other. The scratches on the faces and hands of others in the crew testified that their attempts at similar maneuvers had been futile. She was very glad she had trimmed his claws earlier or someone could have been injured far worse.

Chester pounced again on another bank of keys, and Janina thrust her hands forward to catch him. She knew she was going to miss when suddenly Chester and his mother levitated toward the ceiling while crew members began floating, then swimming in free-fall.

Chester gave a startled mew. His legs and tail flailed in every direction until his mother caught him with a precision free-fall pounce and grabbed his ruff in her teeth. Someone keyed the buttons the kitten had activated, slowly reintroducing gravity so that cat, kitten, and crew gently sank to the deck.

Captain Vesey walked onto the bridge, carrying a stack of bedding he shifted under one arm before he bent and picked up a printout from the floor, saying, “That kitten is a menace.” His voice was mild, even amused, as he looked down at Chessie, who was growling through a mouthful of fur. “Keep him on a leash, Janina, until he learns some manners. If he doesn’t learn to use his box properly, we may have to give up on him as a breeder and have him fixed. He’ll not fetch such a good price that way but we can’t allow cats like this to taint Chessie’s line.”

“Yes, sir,” Janina said, and bent to retrieve Chester from his mother. The kitten laid his ears back and hissed, but Janina kept hold of his ruff while he grrred ferociously and lashed his tiny fuzzy black tail.

Captain Vesey pulled a pillowcase from his stack of bedding and tossed it so it landed on her shoulder. “Put him in that until he calms down,” he told her. Janina was shamed. She was the Cat Person. No one else, not even the captain, should have to tell her how to manage her charges.

She expertly swaddled Chester in the folds of the pillowcase and carried him off the bridge. Behind her the crew began returning things to normal, but there was a lot of muttering.

“Is that really Chessie’s kid? She’s always been such a sweetie.”

“I told you we should have looked for a better sire than the Jockey,” Charlotte’s voice answered.

“Dr. Vlast checked him for rabies and distemper, didn’t he?”

“I think he’s got mad cat disease.”

“What’s that? Is it serious?”

“Sounds like they’d have to euthanize the animal for that,” was the last comment Janina heard.