Catacombs (29 page)

Can you make yourself heavy like Pshaw-Ra showed us?
I asked Buttercup. Would his gravity-increasing trick work in space where there was only freefall?

I can’t I can’t I can’t—

Do it!
I said, slapping the inner surface of my barque and fusing two passing heads together as I did so because the weapons followed the swipe of my paw. I used one of them to pluck the things up, and fused them to the inside of the hinge of the big snake’s jaw. Junior flipped over, fused two snakes, and brought them back to do the same thing on the other side.

The fused lower jaw sagged as Buttercup stomped as hard as her mittened paws could stomp inside their enclosure. The jaw snapped downward and the barque floated free. Buttercup zoomed off and I thought she would be returning to her control shuttle, but she returned in a moment with a collection of snakes fused together into bundles in each barque extension, and fused these to the larger snake’s mouth, partially filling it. We worked together, trip after trip, to fill the gaping maw of this dangerous specimen.

When it was done, we kept working together, our backs to each other as we rolled and spun, fusing any snakes that came near any of us. When my front paws were limp with exhaustion I flipped onto my back and kicked with my back paws, also bearing dextrous extra toes, fusing more serpents that way.

I called to the others to work in teams with the barques nearest them, wrapping the fused snakes like a bandage around the smaller ones within, confining them. We looped around and around the snake, fanning out and joining up our links of fused serpents, weaving diamond-shaped patterns around the mass. It took a lot of flying. The thing had spread to circle the sun, so we too had to circle it in our pattern.

I don’t know how long we fought before I became way too warm and the searing light blinded me to more snakes.

Most of the other cat pilots reported being affected the same way until they could loop back over to the shadowy side of the snake chain.

So I didn’t actually see when some of the larger ones that had
not been joined with others broke out of the serpentine cylinder to attack the control shuttles. I only heard Jubal cry my name once, and what I saw was with his eyes as he stared out the shuttle’s viewscreen at five serpents each at least the size of the one that had attacked Buttercup, their tails propelling their bodies forward through space, swimming toward him.

Jubal had watched with pride and excitement as Chester and the other barque pilots bound the snakes together and wove them into a loose sausage that contracted in mass as they fused it together. Though it hardly seemed possible, within a few short hours they had opened diamond-shaped holes in the lacy writhing mass through which the sun blazed. He cut the transparency of the screen until it was almost opaque, but the brilliance was scary and painful to his eyes and he looked down, back, from side to side, anywhere but directly into the action, which was how he missed seeing the snakes until it was too late to evade them.

Unlike Chester, Jubal experienced no arousal of his hunting instinct as he watched them close on him, pass him, and then whip a coil directly over the screen, then another and another. A face dipped into view, and once more fiery eyes glared hungrily at him as a fanged mouth opened in a silent hiss—but this time he could not see anything within the mouth but more fire—the snake seemed filled with it. Light leaked around its scales, barely contained by them.

Back on Mau, the snake, despite its supernatural reputation, had seemed like an overgrown anaconda or something—mortal if monstrous, a flesh and blood reptile. And as a cloud the creatures had an amorphous look to them—he couldn’t really see Apep in that mass of what seemed to be earthworm-sized particles of the snake that had killed Chione. But the creatures that had him in their grip now were just
wrong
, nightmare serpents filled up with solar energy until they were about to fly apart. And yet they had the
single-mindedness, even at this stage, to break away from their main body and evade the cat ships by coming after the control vessels—or at least his.

The hull creaked and groaned and, he thought, buckled as the coils tightened. The backlit scales rippled and surged, and the head reared back as if to strike through the viewscreen. He was sure the heat from the core of the beasts was penetrating the shuttle’s shields. He would have checked the gauge but was paralyzed by the hypnotic, horrible gaze of the serpent head that filled his mind as much as his field of vision.

His heart boomed in his ears and it seemed to him that the booming spoke his own name, “Ju-bal, Ju-bal,” but it was nothing but background noise compared to the compelling will of the snake, which told him he was about to become one with the cosmos. It made it seem like a good thing, and yet …

“Jubal? Son?” His father’s voice sounded panicky.

“Jubal Alan, are you still in there? Answer me!” His mother’s voice was an annoying buzz.

He tried to answer them, but his mouth was dry and his tongue felt thick and heavy. The snake’s forked tongue, on the other hand, flickered like a flame as it hungrily licked at the viewscreen.

What will happen to me if you let yourself get eaten, boy?
Chester demanded directly inside his head, cutting through the serpent’s spell.
I am almost out of fuel and snacks and I’m very tired. You’re supposed to take me back to the ship
.

Jubal looked down at the control panel, snapping the snake’s hold on him. Not that it did any good.
Buddy, I’m sorry but I seem to be tied up right now
. He thought he was making a joke, but it came out anguished and despairing. When the serpent killed him, unless one of the other shuttles could pull Chester in, he would be doomed to death from exposure, once the fuel cell in the little barque was exhausted. He might have oxygen, but the temperature controls would fail, and other life-support functions too. Any shuttle
that took him aboard would be dooming its own cat pilot to that fate instead of Chester.

I’m sorry!
he told Chester. He’d never felt more helpless.

In the background he heard his mother complaining. “I told them these damned things should have weapons.”

Stay alive, boy
, Chester said.

He didn’t dare look back out the viewscreen again but felt as much as saw Chester approach, and experienced his relief when Ishmael, Buttercup, and Doc joined him.

The light shifted, and when he looked up, the snake’s coils were falling away and the head was gone, fused to the head of another serpent. He could watch then as the three cats harried the snakes together until they could wrap them all into a big fused knot like one of those designs he’d seen in old books about ancient Ireland, slowly being drawn back into the orbit described by the larger fused serpent.

Two barques peeled away from the snake knot then and disappeared, but he heard a noise against the hull.

Does this hatch still work? Let me in!
Chester said. Jubal got the mental picture of his friend scratching at a door.

I lay inside my barque limp with exhaustion, both my body and my mind frazzled with my exertions. Then the hatch opened and my barque nestled into its slip. The barque lid sighed and slid back. Jubal lifted me out and cradled me on his lap as he flew the shuttle, which fortunately was sturdier than it had felt to him, back to the mother ship. After a few minutes I sat up and washed my paws, but his hands trembled on the controls.

Two of the kittens had been lost. Despite what Pshaw-Ra said, their barques did not return to the shuttles when called. I hadn’t known Trixie or Greyling well, hardly at all, and they never found their own humans, so their shuttles were controlled by a couple of soldiers.

We found that out when we returned and popped out of our shuttles. Some of us, including me, were carried. I’d had enough exercise for the moment and felt I deserved a lot of carrying and cuddling. Most of the others were strutting proudly. Mugger said, “I wish I’d been able to bring back one of those snakes to carry around a little, show these humans what a real hunter can do.”

“I guess we showed them, didn’t we?” other kittens called to each other.

“You bet we did. They never saw us coming.”

“That was fun! Do you think they’ll let us do it again?”

They did, of course.

But not right then. We were all pretty tired, but the humans were exhausted. Jubal lay down on his bunk to sleep but stared at the wall and quivered. I snuggled close to him, butting under his chin, inserting my head into his palm. I walked on him, increasing my gravity until he had to pay attention to me. His mind was still crawling with snakes.

Come on, boy, forget about them. They’re gone
.

But they came after me, Chester. They act like they’re some sort of natural disaster—like a tornado or a hurricane—but then they came after me, because they knew you and I were together. I could see it in the way that snake looked at me. And—he’s got eyes again
.

Pshaw-Ra said Apep’s injuries wouldn’t last. And of course he knows we’re together—we’ve defeated him twice, you and me. He’s scared of us and trying to think how to get around me by going after you. It won’t work, though. Don’t worry, Jubal. I’ll always protect you
.

Yeah, sure, buddy, but you’re a ten-pound cat and I’m a human. I’m supposed to protect you
.

So we watch each other. Are you hungry yet?

We stayed on the Guard ship long enough for them to repair and service the barques and shuttles. Since Jubal wasn’t up to it, I suggested through Doc and Ponty that some kind of charge be rigged in the hulls of both shuttles and barques to dislodge clingy coils.

Meanwhile, once the humans had eaten and slept, the noisy man who stood at the front of the room prattled on about the birth of something called quasars and how they never knew what caused it, but now that they’d seen the snakes in action, they thought that must have happened before and that the snakes were responsible for other such holes in space.

Pshaw-Ra looked up at the man with total disdain. “What does he think we have been telling him all this time? Has he no ears? No eyes?”

Before we flew again, I had a chance to talk to each of the other cats about tactics and warn them that some of the loose snakes might attack their control shuttles and to let the rest of us know if they did so we could help. But the next mission went far more smoothly, and the one after that, though Jubal was still unnerved and his hands shook harder and his eyes stared farther—I had more trouble getting his attention to let me back inside on the third trip.

Once Apep was thoroughly fused, however, the snake was recondensed to the size it had been in the tunnels—not sun-spanning or even obscuring—and the big ships were able to tractor beam it and haul it away to the farthest, unterraformed planet from the sun, where it was buried in the frozen underground of ancient lava tubes.

There, Pshaw-Ra assured everyone through Balthazar, it would be dormant in perpetuity.

“I have heard him say that before,” Renpet told me somewhat bitterly. She still mourned Chione but had a new task. The Mauans of Mau-Maat had been displaced by the disastrous effects of Apep on their sun and needed a haven. Balthazar, speaking on behalf of the new queen and her vizier, offered them shelter once more on Mau. I think Pshaw-Ra felt that they could use a refresher course in their native culture.

Buttercup and Ishmael would remain with Jubal’s mother and Lieutenant Green, but they came to see their mother off.

“Isn’t it funny how the snakes arrived at the star here on the far side of the galaxy at the same time we did?” Buttercup asked.

“Yes, that is funny. Good thing we were ready for them,” Ishmael said.

“I hate to think what would have happened if we hadn’t been.”

But I suspected that I knew what would have happened if we hadn’t been ready to carry out Pshaw-Ra’s master plan. The snakes wouldn’t have been there either. Once our reputation as defenders of the star system spread throughout the galaxy, there were not enough kittens to go around to all of the humans with high psychic ability that were willing to pay all of the credits they had to be paired with one.

Jubal, weary and a little jumpy, but better, came down to the docking bay to say good-bye to Balthazar and give Renpet a stroke too. She nuzzled his hand hungrily and licked it. She missed a human touch. Pshaw-Ra put a paw on Jubal’s knee in farewell, though of course petting was not something he ever solicited.

Before they boarded, however, the lift descended from the upper decks, and Beulah, carrying a pack, joined us. Renpet spurted a purr and stretched up with her front paws for Beulah to lift her. The communications officer told Jubal, “I always wondered what it would be like to be a lady-in-waiting. I guess I’ll find out.”

“But the
Ranzo
…?” Jubal said.

“You are ready to take over my job. And we’ll be in touch. Count on it,” she said.

We watched silently as the pointy nose of the pyramid ship drilled its way into space, Jubal stroking my hindquarters and tail.

Funny how in spite of everything, Renpet has put on weight again
, he said.

I licked his earlobe.
Now that we’re all heroes, there’s a kitten shortage again. I decided to help Renpet out. As queen, it was her duty to set an example, you know
.

Don’t you want to go back to Mau too?

No, not really
. I washed my paw.
I’m sure Pshaw-Ra will have plans for the new litter, so I expect we’ll be seeing them when he’s ready
.

Jubal sighed.
Not that I don’t want to see your kittens, Chester
,
but I hope the universe can survive that old cat’s next scheme to dominate it
.

I hoped so too, but we’d had psychic bugs, sentient rats, solar snakes, and warrior kittens already. What could he do next? It made me tired just thinking about it. Time for a nap.