Werehunter (anthology)

she was small and quick, and if they caught him again, she would still have a chance to hide and get away. But there was something odd about her bounding run; as if her body was a little longer than usual. And her tail seemed to be a lot longer than he remem­bered—

Never mind that, get moving! he scolded himself, trying to recall where they’d set up all the coms and if any of them were translight. SKitty whisked ahead of him, around a corner; when he caught up with her, she was already at work on the tangle-field generator in front of another door.

Practice must have made perfect; she got the field down just before he reached the doorway, and shot down the hall like a streak of black lightning. Dick stopped; inside was someone lying down on a cot, arm over her dark mahogany head. Erica!

“Erica!” he hissed at her. She sat bolt upright, wincing as she did so, and he felt a twinge of sympathy. A stun-migraine was no picnic.

She saw who was at the door, saw at the same moment that there was no tangle-field shimmer between them, and was on her feet and out in a fraction of a second. “How?” she demanded, scanning the corridor and finding it as curiously empty as Dick had.

“SKitty took the generator offline,” he said. “She got yours, too, and she headed off that way—” He pointed towards the heart of the building. “Do you remember where the translight coms are?”

“Eyeah,” she said. “In the basement, if we can get there. That’s the emergency unit and I don’t think they know we’ve got it.”

She cocked her head to one side, as if she had suddenly heard something. He strained his ears—and there was a clamor, off in the distance beyond the walls of the building. It sounded as if several people were chasing something. But it couldn’t have been SKitty; she was still in the building.

“It sounds like they’re busy,” Erica said, and grinned. “Let’s go while we have the chance!”

But before they reached the basement com room, they were joined by most of the crew of the Brightwing, some of whom had armed themselves with whatever might serve as a weapon. All of them told the same story, about how the shipscat had taken down their tangle-fields and fled. Once in the basement of the building—after scattering the multiple nests of kreshta that had moved right in—the Com Officer took over while the rest of them found whatever they could to make a barricade and Dick related what he had learned and what his surmises were. Power controls were all down here; there would be no way short of blowing the building up for the TriStar goons to cut power to the com. Now all they needed was time—time to get their message out, and wait for the Patrol to answer.

But time just might be in very short supply, Dick told himself as he grabbed a sheet of reflective insulation to use as a crude stun-shield. And as if in answer to that, just as the Com Officer got the link warmed up and began to send, Erica called out from the staircase.

“Front and center—here they come!”

Dick slumped down so that the tiny medic could reach his head to bandage it. He knew he looked like he’d been through a war, but either the feeling of elated triumph or the medic’s drugs or both prevented him from really feeling any of his injuries. In the end, it had come down to the crudest of hand-to-hand combat on the staircase, as the Com Officer resent the message as many times as he could and the rest of them held off the TriStar bullies. He could only thank the Spirits of Space that they had no weapons stronger than stunners—or at least, they hadn’t wanted to use them down in the basement where so many circuits lay bare. Eventually, of course, they had been overwhelmed, but by then it was too late. The Com Officer had gotten a reply from the Patrol. Help was on the way. Faced with the collapse of their plan, the TriStar people had done the only wise thing. They had retreated.

With them, they had taken all evidence that they were from TriStar; there was no way of proving who and what they were, unless the Patrol corvette now on the way in could intercept them and capture them. Contrary to what the Gray Man had thought, Erica had recognized none of her captors.

But right now, none of that mattered. What did matter was that they had come through this—and that SKitty had finally reappeared as soon as the TriStar ship blasted out, to take her accustomed place on Dick’s shoulders, purring for all she was worth and interfering with the medic’s work.

“Dick—” Vena called from the door to the medic’s office, “I found your—”

Dick looked up. Vena was cradling SKitty in her arms.

But SKitty was already on his shoulders.

She must have looked just as stunned as he did, but he recovered first, doing a double-take. His SKitty was the one on her usual perch—Vena’s SKitty was a little thinner, a little taller—

And most definitely had a lot longer tail!

:Is Prrreet,: SKitty said with satisfaction. :Handsome, no? Is bred for being Patrol-cat, war-cat.:

“Vena, what’s the tattoo inside that cat’s ear?” he asked, urgently. She checked.