Mercedes Lackey - A Tail of Two SKittys

The howls coming from inside the special animal shipping crate sounded impatient, and had been enough to seriously alarm the cargo handlers. Dick White, Spaceman First Class, Supercargo on the CatsEye Company ship Brightwing, put his hand on the outside of the plastile crate, just above the word Property. From within the crate the muffled voice continued to yowl general unhappiness with the world.

Tell her that its all right, SKitty, he thought at the black form that lay over his shoulders like a living fur collar. Tell her Ill have her out in a minute. I dont want her to come bolting out of there and hide the minute I crack the crate.

SKitty raised her head. Yellow eyes blinked once, sleepily. Abruptly, the yowling stopped.

:She fine,: SKitty said, and yawned, showing a full mouth of needle-pointed teeth. :Only young, scared. I think she make good mate for Furrball.:

Dick shook his head; the kittens were not even a year old, and already their mother was matchmaking. Then again, that was the tendency of mothers the universe over.

At least now hed be able to uncrate this would-be mate with a minimum of fuss.

The full legend imprinted on the crate read Female Shipscat Astra Stardancer of Englewood, Property of BioTech Interstellar, leased to CatsEye Company. Do not open under penalty of law. Theoretically, Astra was, like SKitty, a bio-engineered shipscat, fully capable of handling freefall, alien vermin, conditions that would poison, paralyze, or terrify her remote Terran ancestors, and all without turning a hair. In actuality, Astra, like the nineteen other shipscats Dick had uncrated, was a failure. The genetic engineering of her middle-ear and other balancing organs had failed. She could not tolerate freefall, and while most ships operated under grav-generators, there were always equipment malfunctions and accidents.

That made her and her fellows failures by BioTech standards. A shipscat that could not handle freefall was not a shipscat.

Normally, kittens that washed out in training were adopted out to carefully selected planet- or station-bound families of BioTech employees. However, this was not a normal circumstance by any stretch of the imagination.

The world of the Lacuun, graceful, bipedal humanoids with a remarkably sophisticated, if planet-bound, civilization, was infested with a pest called a kreshta. Erica Makumba, the Legal Advisor and Security Chief of Dicks ship described them as six-legged crosses between cockroaches and mice. SKitty described them only as nasty, but she hunted them gleefully anyway. The Lacuun opened their world to trade just over a year ago, and some of their artifacts and technologies made them a desirable trade-ally indeed. The Brightwing had been one of the three ships invited to negotiate, in part because of SKitty, for the Lacuun valued totemic animals highly.

And that was what had led to Captain Singh of the Brightwing conducting the entire trade negotiations with the Lacuunand had kept Brightwing ground-bound for the past year. SKitty had done theto the Lacuunimpossible. She had killed kreshta. She had already been assumed to be Brightwings totemic animal; that act elevated her to the status of god-touched miracle, and had given the captain and crew of her ship unprecedented control and access to the rulers here.

SKitty had been newly-pregnant at the time; part of the price for the power Captain Singh now wielded had been her kittens. But Dick had gotten another idea, and had used his own share of the profits Brightwing was taking in to purchase the leases of twenty more failed cats to supplement SKittys four kittens. BioTech cats released for leases were generally sterile, SKitty being a rare exception. If these twenty worked out, the Lacuun would be very grateful, and more importantly, so would Vena Ferducci, the attractive, petite Terran Consul assigned to the new embassy here. In the past few months, Dick had gotten to know Vena very welland he hoped to get to know her better. Vena had originally been a Survey Scout, and she was getting rather restless in her ground-based position as Consul. And in truth, the Lacuun lawyer, Lan Ventris, was much better suited to such a job than Vena. She had hinted that as soon as the Lacuun felt they could trust Ventris, she would like to resign and go back to space. Dick rather hoped she might be persuaded to take a position with the Brightwing. It was too soon to call this little dance a romance, but he had hopes. . . .

Hopes which could be solidified by this experiment. If the twenty young cats he had imported worked out as well as SKittys four half-grown kittens, the Lacuun would be able to import their intelligent pest-killers at a fraction of what the lease on a shipscat would be. This would make Vena happy; anything that benefited her Lacuun made her happy. And if Dick was the cause of that happiness. . . .

:Dick go courting?: SKitty asked innocently, salting her query with decidedly not-innocent images of her own courting.

Dick blushed. No courting, he thought firmly. Not yet, anyway.

:Silly,: SKitty replied scornfully. The overtones of her thoughts werewhy waste such a golden opportunity? Dick did not answer her.

Instead, he thumbed the lock on the crate, a lock keyed to his DNA only. A tiny prickle was the only indication that the lock had taken a sample of his skin for comparison, but a moment later a hairline-thin crack appeared around the front end of the crate, and Dick carefully opened the door and looked inside.

A pair of big green eyes in a pointed gray face looked out at him from the shadows. Meowrrrr? said a tentative voice.

Tell her its all right, SKitty, he thought, extending a hand for Astra to sniff. It was too bad that his telepathic connection with SKitty did not extend to these other cats, but she seemed to be able to relay everything he needed to tell them.

Astra sniffed his fingers daintily, and oozed out of the crate, belly to the floor. After a moment though, a moment during which SKitty stared at her so hard that Dick was fairly certain his little friend was communicating any number of things to the newcomer, Astra stood up and looked around, her ears coming up and her muscles relaxing. Finally she looked up at Dick and blinked.

Prrow, she said. He didnt need SKittys translation to read that. He held out his arms and the young cat leapt into them, to be carried in regal dignity out of the Quarantine area.

As he turned away from the crate, he thought he caught a hint of movement in the shadows at the back. But when he turned to look, there was nothing there, and he dismissed it as nothing more than his imagination. If there had been anything else in Astras crate, the manifest would have listed itand Astra was definitely sterile, so it could not have been an unlicensed kitten.

Erica Makumba and Vena were waiting for him in the corridor outside. Vena offered her fingers to the newcomer; much more secure now, Astra sniffed them and purred. Shes lovely, Vena said in admiration. Dick had to agree; Astra was a velvety blue-gray from head to tail, and her slim, clean lines clearly showed her descent from Russian Blue ancestors.