Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [94]
It would be faster and easier if you’d just let us out to run down the steps, I told Jubal.
But by then we had bounced to our destination and he was helping Sosi push through the heavy door from the stairs to the fourth-floor corridor.
Sosi raced through ahead of us and pounded her fist on the double doors opposite the stairwell. There was a little box with a flickering red light to the right of the door.
Beulah pushed through the stairway door behind us and pointed to the box. “Stop! Kids, we can’t get in there without proper codes either.”
Leave this to me, Pshaw-Ra said, ignoring her. It would be most useful to have our two-legged assistants lurking nearby to aid us. I will send forth the kefer-ka to smooth our pathway …
I felt my skin crawl again and pounced toward the line of movement departing the cage, but I was too slow. A string of something extremely tiny in a line half the width of one of my whiskers zipped across the pristine surface of the floor and up the wall to the electronic latch.
Before I had a chance to see what marvelous thing they were going to do, Sosi banged on the door with her skinny fists and in her shrill little-girl voice hollered, “Cat delivery!”
The door slid back far enough to allow us to see a harried-looking man in a white suit.
“You again?” he asked, and said to Beulah in a rather angry voice, “I told you to leave them with the guard in the lobby. How did you get past him?”
“We didn’t. We’re not there yet. We docked our shuttle on the roof. We figured it would be faster to just drop them off.”
“Can I see the other kitties?” Sosi asked, trying to push around the man. “I want to see the kitties!” She was doing okay until one of the cats began yowling especially loud. “Hadley!” she cried, and nearly knocked the man over trying to push past him.
“Easy, kiddo,” he said.
“Hadley is in good hands with this gentleman, Sosi,” Beulah said, pulling on the girl and patting her shoulder.
A mother cat would have boxed her ears for endangering the whole litter. But I could hardly blame her. I could hear her friend crying out to her, “Girl! Come and get me! I want to come home! Get me owwwt!” In a few more minutes that would be me, probably.
From behind the man a woman’s strident voice called, “How am I supposed to work with all this racket? That damn cat is waking up already. She scratched me!”
Her footsteps clicked up behind the man and she peered over his shoulder. Her left hand clutched a tissue to her right forearm. In spite of her own disinfectant stench and the scents of all of the other cats, I smelled my mother on her. Had I been out of the cage, I’d have scratched her up one side and down the other myself.
“Steady, catling,” Pshaw-Ra cautioned. Easy enough for him to say. It wasn’t his mother that woman was doing terrible things to—or trying to. Reading me, he replied, “Already the diversion created by our entrance has delayed this creature from harming your mother the queen. How do you like my plan so far?”
“Terrific,” I replied. “I hope you’ve worked out the part where someone diverts the woman from harming us.”
“All will be revealed in due time,” he said sagely. Of course “all” would be revealed in due time. “All” inevitably was, sooner or later. It didn’t take a sage to tell anybody that. I only had to worry about what “all” would consist of, vis-à-vis my own personal tail.
“You again!” the woman was saying, as if my boy and his shipmates were some troublesome spot that would not fade from her upholstery. “Weeks, call security and have these people removed—preferably to a holding facility.”
“Doctor, please,” Beulah said in a reasonable tone. “We docked on the roof and were on our way down when it occurred to us it would be faster—and involve less chance of infection—if we simply brought the cats to the lab ourselves. Besides, they know us and it comforts them to have us near longer.”
“I can’t tell you how moved I am by that,