Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [63]
But her fingers touched no fur, just a bend in the corridor. Then something prickly crawled over them, and another thing and another. Hard nubby little things. She withdrew her arm as if she’d been burned and found the suit sleeve coated with the iridescent shiny beetles like the one Chester had caught in Jared’s office.
She shook her arm, but as she did so, she heard something snap and looked back at the hole. She didn’t see it. The wall looked completely solid again. Only the beetles scrambling up and around her testified that there had been a door, or a cat.
She had a small laser saw in her kit but her classes had not covered this sort of situation. “Molly Daise, Chester and the victim have disappeared inside the cat hole and somehow it has closed solid. Chester did not respond to my calls and I cannot reach him where he is. Request a team to demolish the bulkhead and retrieve him.”
“Request denied, CP. Return to base at once.” Indu’s voice was one of impersonal command that Janina had seldom heard before, and never directed at her.
“But Chester—”
“Abandon feline per-personnel,” Indu continued, her voice faltering.
“Janina,” Captain Vesey’s voice answered. “Leave him.”
“Then I’m staying too!” she said. Abandoning her charge was unthinkable to her.
“Consider this, Jannie,” the captain said, using the name Janina had sometimes been called when much, much smaller, and before she had gone to CP school. “You say there is plenty of oxygen, the stranded cat is in no distress that you can see. Leave them the food and water on board the shuttle and come away. We have the derelict’s identity code and position. Until the government’s order is lifted, both cats may be better off there than here. Now do as you’re told. Every second you are breathing the oxygen in that ship may deprive the cats of it later on.”
That finally convinced her. Janina replaced her helmet and used the suit’s oxygen, her tears steaming up the faceplate of her helmet as she returned to the shuttle, leaving the hatch open while she unloaded the emergency bags of cat food, which floated like lumpy clouds, rising to the ceiling. The packaging, though airtight, could be easily ruptured by a cat’s standard equipment. The water situation was a bit trickier, but long ago someone had devised a large bottle with a nipple that cats could use in free-fall to quench their thirst.
There were also the beetles, which she saw everywhere now, it seemed. There were even some inside the shuttle. The cats seemed to like those, so they would be additional food for Chester and the other ship’s cat. She looked back one last time to where she thought the hole had been, then reboarded the shuttle and returned to the Molly Daise, leaving the cats, at least temporarily, to their fate.
Chessie ran to Janina, looking for Chester. When she realized he was gone, she cried and cried for him, making Janina cry again too.
But the import of Jared’s message was even worse than she’d thought.
Jared had not been specific in the brief transmission she’d received on board the seeming derelict, but Captain Vesey had since received further orders from the GG and the GHA elaborating on the state of the perceived emergency.
The glittering matter in the mucosal secretions of the wild pintos shipped off planet had been deemed to be a harbinger of a possible galaxywide epidemic that threatened all livestock and pets aboard ships. All animals exhibiting the symptoms and any they had come in contact with were to be impounded for quarantine and possibly destroyed, depending on further findings.
“But the glittery spit is just a by-product of them eating those shiny beetles!” Janina protested after reading the full edict.
Captain Vesey shrugged. “They apparently think the beetles carry some disease.”
“They can’t kill Chessie