Mercedes Lackey: SKitty

:Nasty,: SKitty complained in Dick’s head. She wrapped herself a little closer around his shoulders and licked drops of oily fog from her fur with a faint mew of distaste. :Smelly.:

Dick White had to agree. The portside district of Lacu’un was pretty unsavory; the dismal, foggy weather made it look even worse. Shabby, cheap, and ill-used.

Every building here—all twenty of them!—was offworld design; shoddy prefab, mostly painted in shades of peeling grey and industrial green, with garish neon-bright holosigns that were (thank the Spirits of Space!) mostly tuned down to faintly colored ghosts in the daytime. There were six bars, two gambling-joints, one chapel run by the neo-Jesuits, one flophouse run by the Reformed Salvation Army, five government buildings, four stores, and once place better left unnamed. They had all sprung up, like diseased fungus, in the year since the planet and people of Lacu’un had been declared Open for trade. There was nothing native here; for that you had to go outside the Fence—

And to go outside the Fence, Dick reminded himself, you have to get permits signed by everybody and his dog.

:Cat,: corrected SKitty.

Okay, okay, he thought back with wry amusement. Everybody and his cat. Except they don’t have cats here, except on the ships.

SKitty sniffed disdainfully. :Fools,: she replied, smoothing down an errant bit of damp fur with her tongue, thus dismissing an entire culture that currently had most of the Companies on their collective knees begging for trading concessions.

Well, we’ve seen about everything there is to see, Dick thought back at SKitty, reaching up to scratch her ears as she purred in contentment. Are you quite satisfied?

:Hunt now?: she countered hopefully.

No, you can’t hunt. You know that very well. This is a Class Four world; you have to have permission from the local sapients to hunt, and they haven’t given us permission to even sneeze outside the Fence. And inside the Fence you are valuable merchandise subject to catnapping, as you very well know. I played shining knight for you once, furball, and I don’t want to repeat the experience.

SKitty sniffed again. :Not love me.:

Love you too much, pest. Don’t want you ending up in the hold of some tramp freighter.

SKitty turned up the volume on her purr, and rear­ranged her coil on Dick’s shoulders until she resembled a lumpy black fur collar on his gray shipsuit. When she left the ship—and often when she was in the ship—that was SKitty’s perch of choice. Dick had finally prevailed on the purser to put shoulderpads on all his shipsuits—sometimes SKitty got a little careless with her claws.

When man had gone to space, cats had followed; they were quickly proven to be a necessity. For not only did man’s old pests, rats and mice, accompany his trade—there seemed to be equivalent pests on every new world. But the shipscats were considerably different from their Earth-bound ancestors. The cold reality was that a spacer couldn’t afford a pet that had to be cared for—he needed something closer to a partner.

Hence SKitty and her kind; gene-tailored into some­thing more than animals. SKitty was BioTech Type F-021; forepaws like that of a raccoon, more like stubby little hands than paws. Smooth, short hair with no undercoat to shed and clog up airfilters. Hunter second to none. Middle-ear tuning so that she not only was not bothered by hyperspace shifts and freefall, she actually enjoyed them. And last, but by no means least, the enlarged head showing the boosting of her intelligence.

BioTech released the shipscats for adoption when they reached about six months old; when they’d not only been weaned, but trained. Training included maneuvering in freefall, use of the same sanitary facilities as the crew, and emergency procedures. SKitty had her vacuum suit, just like any other crew member; a transparent hard plex ball rather like a tiny lifeslip, with a simple panel of controls inside to seal and pressurize it. She was positively paranoid about having it with her; she’d haul it along on its tether, if need be, so that it was always in the same compartment that she was. Dick respected her paranoia; any good spacer would.

Officially she was “Lady Sundancer of Greenfields”; Greenfields being BioTech Station NA-73. In actuality, she was SKitty to the entire crew, and only Dick remembered her real name.

Dick had signed on to the CatsEye Company ship Brightwing just after they’d retired their last shipscat to spend his final days with other creaky retirees from the spacetrade in the Tau Epsilon Old Spacers Station. As junior officer Dick had been sent off to pick up the replacement. SOP was for a BioTech technician to give you two or three candidates to choose among—in actuality, Dick hadn’t had any choice. “Lady Sundancer” had taken one look at him and launched herself like a little black rocket from the arms of the tech straight for him; she’d landed on his shoulders, purring at the top of her lungs. When they couldn’t pry her off, not without injuring her, the “choice” became moot. And Dick was elevated to the position of Designated Handler.

For the first few days she was “Dick White’s Kitty”—the rest of his fellow crewmembers being vastly amused that she had so thoroughly attached herself to him. After a time that was shortened first to “Dick’s Kitty” and then to “SKitty,” which name finally stuck.

Since telepathy was not one of the traits BioTech was supposedly breeding and genesplicing for, Dick had been more than a little startled when she’d started speaking to him. And since none of the others ever mentioned hearing her, he had long ago come to the conclusion that he was the only one who could. He kept that a secret; at the least, should BioTech come to hear of it, it would mean losing her. BioTech would want to know where that particular mutation came from, for fair.

“Pretty gamy,” he told Erica Makumba, Legal and Security Officer, who was the current on-watch at the airlock. The dusky woman lounged in her jumpseat with deceptive casualness, both hands behind her curly head—but there was a stun-bracelet on one wrist, and Erica just happened to be the Brightwing ’s current karate champ.

“Eyeah,” she replied with a grimace. “Had a look out there last night. Talk about your low-class dives! I’m not real surprised the Lacu’un threw the Fence up around it. Damn if I’d want that for neighbors! Hey, we may be getting a break, though; invitation’s gone out to about three cap’ns to come make trade-talk. Seems the Lacu’un got themselves a lawyer—”

“So much for the ‘unsophisticated primitives,’ ” Dick laughed. “I thought TriStar was riding for a fall, taking that line.”

Erica grinned; a former TriStar employee, she had no great love for her previous employer. “Eyeah. So, lawyer goes and calls up the records on every Company making bids, goes over ’em with a fine-tooth. Seems only three of us came up clean; us, SolarQuest, and UVN. We got invites, rest got bye-byes. Be hearing a buncha ships clearing for space in the next few hours.”