Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [49]
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.