Catalyst_ A Tale of the Barque Cats - Anne McCaffrey [98]
Jared was staring at the three of them—Ponty, the kitten, and Janina—evidently trying to understand what was happening.
“Jared,” Ponty said, “I don’t want to confuse the issue after all your fine arguments and research and such, but there might be this one little teensy side effect I maybe ought to tell you about, just among us friends …”
Janina wanted to throttle the man. He’d been holding something back! She should have known it. She had gone along with Ponty’s plan simply because it was the only one anybody had proposed that showed signs of working. It didn’t mean she trusted him. Knowing that he was Jubal’s father, she realized he had to be the person who kidnapped Chessie and probably set fire to the clinic to cover his tracks.
“How could you?” she demanded, keeping her voice low so as not to disturb their passenger. “Do you mean there is a real threat, and you know about it but you’ve still let Jared stake his reputation to participate in your charade?”
“I didn’t say it was a threat, young lady,” Ponty replied smoothly, with a hint of amusement in his tone. “I said it was a side effect. And it might not be. I have to ask you something. Have any of the Duchess’s previous kittens developed psychic bonds with certain people?”
“Psychic what?” she asked. “You’re saying Chester can read someone’s thoughts? Jubal’s?”
“That’s about right,” he said. “Any of Chessie’s previous kittens done that sort of thing?”
She shook her head, then amended it. “Not that I know of. No. I’m certain somehow I’d have known.”
“You don’t have that kind of link with her?”
Janina loved Chessie very much, but she had no idea what the cat was actually thinking, aside from what she could understand from Chessie’s body language. Janina felt a little cheated. She was the Cat Person, Chessie’s Cat Person. If Chessie had psychic kittens, she should have been the first to know about them—perhaps bond with one herself. On the other hand, even she couldn’t have cared more for a feline friend than Jubal cared about Chester. It hurt to think of how the boy must be feeling now that Chester had been lost to the derelict ship and its peculiar COB.
Jared took a more scientific approach. “You’re just taking this on faith about your son and the kitten, aren’t you? Is it possible he was misleading you to reinforce his position? Besides, one connection like that wouldn’t mean that all of the exposed cats or even all of Chessie’s kittens—”
Ponty shook his head. “You can’t kid a kidder, Doc. Besides, it’s not just the two of them. There’s this little guy.” He pointed into the box. “Though, technically speaking, and just between you and me, he isn’t one of the Duchess’s line. She adopted him. But he’s adopted me, for some reason.” He tipped his head backward, toward the passenger section. “How do you think I learned how to catch a rat?”
Dr. Agneta Wren, DVM, regarded with disdain the creature who should have been cowering before her. He stared at her with huge yellow eyes, coiled and uncoiled his tawny snakelike tail and purred aggressively. The others in the cages had an injured innocence in their stares, as if they couldn’t believe what was happening to them. Of course, the ones she examined had turned into the nasty, hissing, scratching furies she knew them to be before she immobilized them, but this one was different. He was clearly behaving in a shamelessly obsequious manner because he wanted something. Loose, probably.
“Purr all you want, beast. You’re about to become dogmeat,” she told him. She had no time for evasive feline antics. She had been able to perform only one autopsy, and that was spectacularly inconclusive. Her colleague, the absent Dr. Vlast, had performed exactly zero autopsies since he arrived, and had no findings whatsoever. She wondered if he’d been sacked for slacking off. He was a troublemaker. He refused a direct order to sacrifice a few of the animals