A Tail of Two SKittys

magnitude or two. Dick felt obscurely ashamed of his world whenever he looked at the shabby, garish space­port “facilities” that comprised most of the Terran spaceport area. At least the headquarters that Captain Singh and CatsEye had established were handsome; adaptations of the natives’ own architecture, in cast concrete with walls decorated with stylized stars, spaceships, and suggestions of slit-pupiled eyes. Solar­Quest and UVN, the other two Companies that had been given Trade permits, were following CatsEye’s lead, and had hired the same local architects and contractors to build their own headquarters. It looked from the half-finished buildings as if SolarQuest was going with a motif taken from their own logo of a stylized sunburst; UVN was going for geometrics in their wall-decor.

There were four ships here at the moment rather than the authorized three; for some reason, the inde­ pendent freighter that had brought in the twenty shipscats was still here on the landing field. Dick wondered about that for a moment, then shrugged mentally. Independents often ran on shoestring budgets; probably they had only loaded enough fuel to get them here, and refueling was taking more time than they had thought it would.

Suddenly, just as they passed through the doors of the building, SKitty howled, hissed, and leapt from Dick’s shoulders, vanishing through the rapidly-closing door.

He uttered a muffled curse and turned to run after her. What had gotten into her, anyway?

He found himself looking into the muzzle of a weapon held by a large man in the nondescript coveralls favored by the crew of that independent freighter. The man was as nondescript as his clothing, with ash-blond hair cut short and his very ordinary face—with the exception of that weapon, and the cold, calculating look in his iron- gray eyes. Dick put up his hands, slowly. He had the feeling this was a very bad time to play hero.

“Where’s the damn cat?” snapped the one Dick was coming to think of as “the Gray Man.” One of his underlings shrugged.

“Gone,” the man replied shortly. “She got away when we rounded up these three, and she just vanished somewhere. Forget the cat. How much damage could a cat do?”

The Gray Man shrugged. “The natives might get suspicious if they don’t see her with our man.”

“She probably wouldn’t have cooperated with our man,” the underling pointed out. “Not like she did with this one. It doesn’t matter—White got the new cats installed, and we don’t need an animal that was likely to be a handful anyway.”

The Gray Man nodded after a while and went back to securing the latest of his prisoners. The offices in the new CatsEye building had been turned into ­impromptu cells; Dick had gotten a glimpse of Captain Singh in one of them as he had been frog-marched past. He didn’t know what these people had done with the rest of the crew or with Vena and Erica, since Vena had been taken off somewhere separately and Erica had been stunned and dragged away without waiting for her surrender.

The Gray Man watched him with his weapon trained on him as two more underlings installed a tangle-field generator across the doorway. With no windows, these little offices made perfect holding-pens. Most of them didn’t have furniture yet, those that did didn’t really contain anything that could be used as a weapon. The desks were simple slabs of native wood on metal supports, the chairs molded plastile, and both were bolted to the floor. There was nothing in Dick’s little cubicle that could even be thrown.

Dick was still trying to figure out who and what these people were, when something finally clicked. He looked up at the Gray Man. “You’re from TriStar, aren’t you?” he asked.

If the Gray Man was startled by this, he didn’t show it. “Yes,” the man replied, gun-muzzle never wavering. “How did you figure that out?”

“BioTech never ships with anyone other than TriStar if they can help it,” Dick said flatly. “I wondered why they had hired a tramp-freighter to bring out their cats; it didn’t seem like them, but then I thought maybe that was all they could get.”

“You’re clever, White,” the Gray Man replied, expres­sionlessly. “Too clever for your own good, maybe. We might just have to make you disappear. You and the Makumba woman; she’ll probably know some of us as soon as she wakes up, and we don’t have the time or the equipment to brain-wipe you.”

Dick felt a chill going down his back, as the men at the door finished installing the field and left, quickly. “BioTech is going to wonder if one of their designated handlers just vanishes. And without me, you’re never going to get SKitty back; BioTech isn’t going to care for that, either. They might start asking questions that you can’t answer.”

The Gray Man stared at him for a long moment; his expression did not vary in the least, but at least he didn’t make any move to shoot. “I’ll think about it,” he said finally. He might have said more, but there was a shout from the corridor outside.

“The cat!” someone yelled, and the Gray Man was out of the door before Dick could blink. Unfortunately, he paused long enough to trigger the tangle-field before he ran off in pursuit of what could only have been SKitty.

Dick slumped down into the chair, and buried his face in his hands, but not in despair. He was thinking furiously.

TriStar didn’t like getting cut out of the negotiations; what they can’t get legally, they’ll get any way they can. Probably they intend to use us as hostages against Vena’s good behavior, getting her to put them up as the new negotiators. I solved the problem of getting the cats for them; now there’s no reason they couldn’t just step in. But that can’t go on forever, sooner or later Vena is going to get to a com unit or send some kind of message offworld. So what would these people do then?

TriStar had a reputation as being ruthless, and he’d heard from Erica that it was justified. So how do you get rid of an entire crew of a spaceship and the Terran Consul? And maybe the crews of the other two ships into the bargain?

Well, there was always one answer to that, especially on a newly-opened world. Plague.

The chill threaded his backbone again as he realized just what a good answer that was. These TriStar goons could use sickness as the excuse for why the CatsEye people weren’t in evidence. A rumor of plague might well drive the other two ships offworld before they came down with it. The TriStar people could even claim to be taking care of the Brightwing’s crew.

Then, after a couple of weeks, they all succumb to the disease, the Terran Consul with them. . . .

It was a story that would work, not only with the Terran authorities, but with the Lacu’un. The Fence was a very effective barrier to help from the natives; the Lacu’un would not cross it to find out the truth, even if they were