Werehunter (anthology)

“Well—why don’t we settle down to a little serious negotiation, hmm?” the Captain said, nobly refraining from rubbing his hands together with glee. “I think that all our problems for the future are about to be solved in one fell swoop! Get over here, spacer. You and that cat have just received a promotion to Junior Negotiator.”

:Okay?: SKitty asked anxiously.

Yes, love, Dick replied, taking Erica’s place on a negotiator’s stool. Very okay! 

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 it’s all right, SKitty, he thought at the black form that lay over his shoulders like a living fur collar. Tell her I’ll have her out in a minute. I don’t 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 he’d 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 imagi­ nation.

The world of the Lacu’un, 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 Dick’s ship described them as “six-legged crosses between cockroaches and mice.” SKitty described them only as “nasty,” but she hunted them gleefully anyway. The Lacu’un 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 Lacu’un valued totemic animals highly.

And that was what had led to Captain Singh of the Brightwing conducting the entire trade negotiations with the Lacu’un—and had kept Brightwing ground-bound for the past year. SKitty had done the—to the Lacu’un—impossible. She had killed kreshta. She had already been assumed to be Brightwing’s 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 SKitty’s four kittens. BioTech cats released for leases were generally sterile, SKitty being a rare exception. If these twenty worked out, the Lacu’un 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 well—and 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 Lacu’un lawyer, Lan Ventris, was much better suited to such a job than Vena. She had hinted that as soon as the Lacu’un 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 SKitty’s four half-grown kittens, the Lacu’un 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 Lacu’un made her happy. And if Dick was the cause of that happiness. . . .