• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“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!”

CHAPTER 4

Traffic diverted the tracker from its customary bay near the clinic, and security contacted them as soon as they docked. “Dr. Vlast, station ops requests that you and your assistant round up the animals who escaped from the clinic and examine them for possible injuries and smoke inhalation while we are securing the area.”

They didn’t need to be convinced. Jared’s patients were his top priority, and Janina was frantic to find Chessie. She triggered the cat’s locator beacon, hoping against all odds that it would lead her to a Chessie calmly setting her whiskers in order with a dampened paw. But there was no answering signal from any part of the ship.

By the time she and Jared had rounded up the horses, dogs, exotic birds, and the boa constrictor wreaking havoc throughout the station, Janina was sick with worry for Chessie.

But when at last the animals were secured, examined, and lodged in whatever space available until their owners could collect them, and Jared and Janina returned to the clinic deck, they were still denied access.

“Toxic fumes,” a guard, barely distinguishable as a female in her hazmat suit, told them. “The fire seems to have started in the hay in the horse stalls, but it ignited a lot of other substances that give off poisonous gases when they burn. Good thing the animals got loose before that happened or they’d have all died from inhalation. As it is, some of the fire crew are in sick bay now.”

Frustrated, they turned away, and Jared went to the station master’s office to fill out paperwork.

Janina roamed the station with Chessie’s locator, calling and listening, but saw no sign of her, though two other cats stopped hunting long enough to regard her curiously from a safe distance.

Finally, after hours of fruitless searching, Jared called her on the com to tell her the area had cooled and the air supply had been cleansed enough that they would be allowed in as long as they wore masks.

Steeling her nerve, Janina followed him into what was left of the clinic. It was hard to believe that this rubble was the same neat, hygienic place where she had left Chessie. She picked her way through the clinic, the pools of melted stuff, the collapsed ceiling, the twisted metal exam tables. She had felt sure that Chessie was alive, since all of the other animals appeared to be accounted for and unharmed, but since she could not find her charge alive, she began to dread finding evidence that she was dead—charred fur, bits of bone, her locator chip … Jared set off in another direction to examine other areas of the clinic. Perhaps he too couldn’t bear to see proof that the kennel where Chessie should have been safe had become a death trap. If Chessie had died, Janina only hoped it was from smoke inhalation, quickly, while the cat still slept, dreaming of her new litter.

“Careful there, miss,” the guard called. “Some of the floors have buckled and pulled from their moorings. You could fall through in some places.”

“Thank you,” she replied without looking at the woman. Her eyes were on the twisted wire door lying halfway across some beams two doors away. She picked through the rubble toward it over upended file cabinets, their bent-open drawers filled with the blackened remains of the hardcopy