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“What would you do with something like that?” he asked, genuinely puzzled. Crew members rarely dressed up or wore anything but shipsuits.

“I’d make a princess drape over my bunk,” she said. “It would be gorgeous!”

He shrugged. She wound her way through the crowd toward the coveted cloth, and he was following her, when through the babble of the crowd he heard a familiar voice haggling in the booth directly behind him.

“Pop?”

CHAPTER 16

When the Grania received the impound notice, Ponty’s stock actually went up. “Get your test tubes bubbling, boyo,” Mavis told him. “Once the government gets through with the galaxy’s livestock, there’s going to be a big market for uninfected cats with blue bloodlines.”

Doc followed her into the room and hopped up on the console, pretending to use it for a washstand as he carefully groomed his long luxurious gray-striped coat.

First his chest, then his paws, then his ears and whiskers, his shoulders.

“What’s this all about, Mavis?”

“Making us rich, mostly,” she said, stroking Doc’s head, which messed up his bathing schedule so that he had to wash that part next. “Every ship docking at Galport has to surrender its critters to be tested.”

Doc’s ears flicked forward a fraction.

“You know as well as I do they’re not going to bother following up to see which ones are sick or get sick, they’ll just put ’em all down. There will be a lot of berths open for expensive ship cats then. We’ll be able to name our own price.”

Doc sprang to Ponty’s shoulder, clinging with all claws. Save me, boss. I’m too young to die. Ponty thought he was imagining it, of course. Cats could make themselves understood without words, even ones inside your head. That kind of thing just told him he’d been working too hard. He felt the kitten trembling against his neck, though, so he wasn’t imagining that the little fellow was afraid.

“How about this guy, Mavis? You gonna let them take him?”

She looked sad and shrugged. “He’s not exactly legal to begin with. Not exactly on the manifest or anything. What the GG don’t know won’t hurt ’em.”

“Hide him?”

She gave him a pitying look back over her shoulder as she strode from the cabin. “And they’d better not find him either.”

Doc mewed into his ear again, and although the sound that came out was standard feline issue, the thought that came into Ponty’s mind in a nasal little cat voice was in GSL—Galactic Standard Language: Save me. Meanwhile, the kitten clung to his neck with sharp baby cat claws that threatened to open a jugular.

“Pipe down,” he told the cat aloud. “If I’m gonna hide you, you need to keep your mouth shut or they’ll find you. Keep still too.”

I’ll be as quiet as a—you know, the kitten promised, but Ponty wasn’t sure he could trust him. Cats had been known to lie-especially about when they were last fed. He’d learned that from Chessie’s and Git’s litters. There wasn’t anything wrong with a good fib, of course, but he liked to be the one telling it.

None of the kitten’s usual haunts would work. The crew would know about those places. They could turn the little guy in to the GG goons and Mavis would never know.

He tried the bottom of a tool bag, but the kitten popped its head back up, wrinkled his little pink nose and said, Smells bad.

The ship’s intercom blurted that the impound team had arrived to search the ship for beetles and infected animals. Mavis made sure to warn her crew that the team was armed with bioheat detectors and other more lethal weapons.

Time had run out. The only hope for Doc was that nobody would, well, rat him out.

The kitten would make an unlikely spot of bioheat in any clothing or bag where he might be hidden, so Ponty took the cat to his quarters, where he put on his civvies—the jeans and plaid shirt he’d been wearing under his shipsuit when he left home, and the black leather jacket he’d kept in the carrier. The jacket had an interior pocket that was handy for a lot of things. It fit up close under his arm