Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [65]
“Hey, hotshot,” Beulah said to Jubal. “Hi, Sosi.”
“We need to talk to you about something,” Jubal told her.
“Yeah, I thought you would. Dr. Mbele here and I have just been discussing Hadley and Chester. He said he’d try to look out for them.”
Sosi glowered but Jubal gave him a tremulous smile and said, “Gosh, thanks, Dr. Mbele, sir. Hadley is a wonderful cat and Sosi’s had him since he was a kitten. I helped Chester get born and took him back to his ship. Please don’t let anything happen to them, please.”
“I cannot promise,” Mbele said. “But this lady has given me her personal link, and I will do all I can to make sure that your Hadley is given every chance.” He gave Beulah a little salute and left.
“I have some news about Chester’s ship, Jubal,” his friend said. “I guess you could say it’s good news and bad news. The good news is that Chester didn’t get impounded when the ship docked, although they did take his mother the Duchess. The crew is up in arms over that.”
“So he wasn’t infected?” Jubal asked. Odd, since this supposed contagious disease thing seemed to be all about the beetles, and he knew Chester loved to eat the shiny bugs.
“Chester, uh, left the ship, voluntarily.”
“He spaced himself?” Jubal had a momentary vision of his poor kitten in despair over their separation stepping out the airlock. No, that was nuts. Cats didn’t do that kind of thing. Chester might have gone looking for him and made a mistake, of course …
“No, he and the CP went on a rescue mission, and both Chester and the cat stranded aboard the derelict evidently decided to stay there. Apparently the cats had lots of food, water, and air, and they got locked in a special cat hatch that kept the Cat Person away from the animals. Since Chester likes to eat the beetles, and the derelict was full of them, he’s not likely to go hungry.
“The GHA is blaming the beetles for this so-called epidemic. Chester’s captain figured the little guy probably had a better chance of surviving staying where he was. As long as GHA doesn’t pick up the derelict, the cats can take their chances with the bugs. And even though the Molly Daise had the derelict in its tractor beam and marked its coordinates and registration code, once they released it, they couldn’t locate it again.”
Jubal didn’t know what to think. Chester hadn’t been impounded. Good. Chessie had. Bad. Chester was on a mysterious ship with some stray cat. Bad. The ship had some life support for the cats. Good. Nobody could find the ship. Bad and good, depending on how the plague thing turned out.
“You think you could patch me through to my cousin?” he asked Beulah more calmly than he meant to. “I’d like to hear about it myself.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Beulah said, and hailed the Molly Daise.
It was a simple fact that you couldn’t say anything the GG might consider “subversive” on the com channels, and Jubal had a feeling that the GG wouldn’t like what he had in mind.
He would tell Janina he wanted to meet with her to hear more about how she’d lost Chester. That was the main reason, of course, but he actually hoped to convince her to give him the coordinates and registration number of the ship Chester was on. Then if he could contrive somehow for the Ranzo to come anywhere near that ship, Chester would know it and they’d get back together again. If that happened, he wasn’t going to let the GG or anybody else take Chester away again.
The whole deal with the beetles sounded as phony as something his dad would dream up. Jubal didn’t see how the bugs could do any more harm than beetles usually did. All the cats and kittens ate them, and except for the glittery residue, seemed unaffected.
When Janina came on the com screen, her eyes were red and her face a little puffy. She blinked a lot when she looked at him.