S.L. Huang is a Hugo-winning and Amazon-bestselling author who justifies an MIT degree by using it to write eccentric mathematical superhero fiction. Huang is the author of the Cas Russell novels from Tor Books, including Zero Sum Game, Null Set, and Critical Point, as well as the new fantasies Burning Roses and The Water Outlaws. In short fiction, Huang’s stories have appeared in Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, and more, including numerous best-of anthologies. Huang is also a Hollywood stunt performer and firearms expert, with credits including “Battlestar Galactica” and “Top Shot.” Find S.L. Huang online at www.slhuang.com or on Twitter as @sl_huang.
It is said that being a Ship Cat takes a very particular kind of cat. Just as a Bookshop Cat mustn’t hiss at customers nor scratch at children who reach out grubby fingers for an unwelcome pat, or a Temple Cat must be aloof and not too playful with the pilgrims who have come many lightyears for somber worship. Being a Ship Cat requires a limber agility for the gravitational changes, a tolerance for the scents of fuel burn and unwashed humanoid, and, most tragically, a forbearance for long stretches of expanse without a square of natural sunlight to stretch in. Toshi prided himself on being the most excellent of Ship Cats. An extraordinarily handsome fellow, Toshi was of pristine white with black splotches emblazoning his head and feet and back and tail. The patch over one of his eyes was black; the other, white; and one front paw was snowy while the other appeared dipped in soot. Toshi kept this glossy fur fastidiously clean, such that any time he deigned to allow a passenger to lift him and bury their face in his sleek self, the scent would put them in the mind of fresh meadows and clean laundry.
Toshi also excelled at the dual duties of a Ship Cat. The first of these duties is, of course, hunting down any vermin that might have wriggled on board at port. Small vermin are ubiquitous in every city of the Nineteen Worlds, only differing by unimportant characteristics such as color, number of mouths, the existence of a carapace, or whether they leave large clutches of eggs above the reactor core. Left to their own devices, they will nest near the warmth of the particle engine to chew its tubes through, or wriggle into the commissary to gobble the humans’ dehydrated provisions.
Some of the fancy luxury passenger yachts or shiny expensive cargo haulers brag of their robotic extermination systems, along with their self-navigating AIs and automated logistics operations. The old frontier captains, though—they all swear by cats. For a solid old merchant ship like the Suzaku Maru, a cat kept the in-between crannies far more spic-and-span than any number of robots could, and at a fraction of the cost.
Besides, the weathered human captains favor cats for their second purpose: cats on ships are good luck. That’s a longstanding fact. Since the old days of sailing the oceans of Earth, it has been known that leaving port without a cat on board is a deliberate tickling of fate.
Toshi’s good luck had kept the Suzaku Maru smooth and verminfree for nearly a hundred runs now. The ship arrowed blithely through the cosmos, ferrying freight from port to port to port, usually along with a few dozen travelers who couldn’t afford a berth on one of the high-speed passenger liners. No major disasters, no drastic repairs, just maintenance to help hum along and accounting books that consistently ran a few satisfactory fingers beyond breaking even. Good enough for Captain Jiro Akimoto and his crew, for sure. A decent business, running an independent merchant hauler. A decent business and a decent life.
Toshi was very certain—as all cats are—that the fit functioning of the ship was entirely down to his own presence on board making it run properly. Quite right that Captain Akimoto always gave scritches behind the ears when such was demanded of him.
During the last Galactic Cycle in lapse 8432—standard time—the Suzaku Maru lifted off from the port city of Ogedegbe on the world of Ember. As he always did, Toshi had the run of the ship, the better to supervise anything that needed his keen oversight. The shift to lighter gravity brought its own proper ritual of delight, as Toshi twisted and leapt to twice the height he could in port, pirouetting his lithe body at the peak of each leap.
Who wouldn’t want to be a Ship Cat, indeed!
Once the gravity settled into its lighter intersystem weight, Toshi began his rounds. He first roamed up to the cockpit. Captain Akimoto was at the controls, gazing up into the star-filled viewport. The captain always flew takeoff and landing himself instead of delegating to one of his crew. Only twice in seven years had Toshi seen another human take the ship up or down from a planet or in or out of FTL—once when the captain had been sick with blood rot, and the other when he had crushed his hand in an engine room accident. That time he had still stood gravely at his crewmember’s shoulder to watch over his beloved ship and make sure all was done right.
Toshi leapt up onto the edge of the control boards, careful not to walk across the buttons and switches. He’d learned fast as a young kitten that such care was an important part of being a Ship Cat. Captain Akimoto had trained him with a buzzer that made Toshi’s ears flatten and his chin burrow down against the ground. He’d learned very fast, and would now never dream of stalking across the captain’s important buttons and switches.
Toshi was a very good Ship Cat.
Captain Akimoto hit some of those important switches and leaned back in his pilot’s chair, rubbing at his grayed-out beard. “Toshi-chan! Keeping my ship tip-top, are you? Here, have a scratch, ne?”
“Nyao,” Toshi agreed, butting his head against the captain’s outstretched fingers.
“You like that, don’t you, ne. Good boy,” the captain crooned. “This part is my favorite bit, did you know? When we’ve left civilization back behind, floating on up in the black. That space between ground and FTL when it’s just us, all alone. Drifting away, ne . . . ”
Toshi did not always understand human words, but the captain’s gravelly voice was as comforting as a heated blanket.
Still, Toshi had duties. He slipped his black-and-white head out from under the captain’s exquisitely hypnotic fingers and dropped down to the deck plating, trotting out of the cockpit to his next stop.
In this way did Toshi patrol the ship from nose on down—passenger berths, the commissary, the cargo decks; casting his keen senses around every corner and slipping in and out of maintenance shafts. As was his due, he accepted pats and scratches from several of the passengers, the cook, and the cabin boy along the way. (The cabin boy was not a boy at all, but a wiry teenaged girl named Siau, who was apprenticing on Captain Akimoto’s crew for a few years in return for food and board and learning a trade. She had a pocket tool with a bright laser on it that she would often shine onto the bulkheads for Toshi to chase.)
Finally Toshi had canvassed his entire home save the final enormous deck—the engine bay, which took up the whole aft end of the ship. The particle engine was a tremendous ball of hot and dangerous, with catwalks for the engineers crossing in suspended layers above the magnetically-contained reactor core. So very hot and so very dangerous and so very far down below, enough that Toshi had always instinctively known to hop lightly about the catwalks, nimble feet that were careful never to fall, lest he tumble into the core’s pulsing maw of energy and light. Toshi did not know how the particle engine worked—how it propelled them through folded space, or how it incidentally provided the light gravitational pull on the decks above it—but he could sense its strength as the beating heart of the ship.
He also liked to lie on the engine catwalks and laze in its warmth. Who needed squares of sunlight when you had an engine deck!
Toshi padded down catwalk by catwalk, past the many banks of controls and computers, paws winding between the scraps and springs and tools the Suzaku Maru’s chaotic engineers were prone to leave strewn about. The engine had an all-encompassing hum that tickled the ends of his fur to fluff out from his body. Three catwalks down he had encountered naught but a buzzing scorpion mantis, which he’d pounced upon in an easy leap—and then released and pounced upon again, and then again, six times before worrying its exoskeleton in his mouth until it buzzed its last, a sad zzzt-zzzt-zzzt like a dying mechanical toy.
Toshi liked to keep his skills sharp. And have some fun.
None of the engineers were about. They usually weren’t, this early in the trip. The engine had to be monitored round the clock while in FTL, but mundane thrusters needed no supervision, and the acceleration changes made the humans’ fingers slip on fiddly tasks until they raised their voices in mewing complaint. Humans weren’t like Ship Cats, who so agilely adjusted to every fluid instant of weight difference.
Today, however, two humans were down below, on the very lowest of the catwalks.
They weren’t humans Toshi recognized. That in itself was not unusual, as unfamiliar passengers came and went every voyage. These humans, though—they radiated a sense of not belonging, down here on this lowest catwalk above the reactor core. The reactor’s light played up against them in dancing blue and white, leaving them mostly in shadow.
Toshi’s fur, already fluffed from the crackly air, stood on its ends even further. His paws moved in advance and then retreat, tail swishing, his eyes on the men.
“You sure they’re not gonna come down here?” one of the men was saying. He was a tall, burly fellow, with a wide face and a floppy hat that shaded his features to darkness. His scent was acrid, of stale smoking herbs and rancid fuel.
“Not till close to the FTL point,” responded the other. “We’ve got twenty-five hours, or near enough, and by then we’ll have ’em all locked out.” The second man was weedier, with shelf-like eyebrows and long fingers. He smelled of handling piles of metal, the way the captain’s skin smelled after he met with the type of people who, instead of tapping screens, gave him lumps of yellow gold that he weighed and counted. Or the way the pads of the captain’s fingers smelled after he loaded stacks of shiny darts into magazines for the pneumatic pistol holstered at his hip.
The big man heaved at a crate behind them. It seemed the two men were coming from the maintenance door of the trash hold, which didn’t make very much sense, because no one ever came from the trash hold. Toshi had been cautioned very severely never to try to jump in when it opened, by humans whose voices went high with worry. They needn’t have been so concerned—it smelled of rot and waste, and Toshi had never been tempted to put a paw inside.
“Well, what are we waiting on, then?” grunted the big man while he dragged on their crate. “Let’s get the damn bugs out. This is guaranteed foolproof, right? I’m not going to some dagnasted penal colony if we’re caught—”
“Relax,” answered the metallic-smelling man. “These spiders are state of the art. An old bucket like this won’t have a chance. Besides, you don’t have to worry about a penal colony—hijacking is a Class Ten. Still a capital crime if you do it in a spaceway.”
He sounded much more relaxed than the big man, like oil pooling where it shouldn’t.
The big man made a bunch of sounds with his mouth that had a lot of hard consonants in them, and then said, “If they weren’t paying us enough to buy a fuckratted planet . . . What the hell is this rust heap carrying anyway that could be so—hey! What in fuck is that?”
He’d spotted Toshi. He dropped the end of the crate with a loud clang and advanced a few steps, his fists opening and closing like aggressive mouths.
Toshi arched his back and hissed, his tail flicking. His claws snicked against the catwalk’s grating.
“It’s just a damn cat,” the smaller man answered. “Leave it alone.”
“They ought to learn to buy a canister of crawlies instead,” groused the big man. “Get outta here, beast! You hear?”
He swatted with hands the size of barrel lids, not close enough to make contact, but Toshi scampered anyway, still hissing.
He did not like these men. They were humans, but they smelled wrong and acted wrong and they made Toshi’s fur prickle so far up it was as if someone had dragged their hands against him back to front, all the wrong way, everything wrong.
Toshi did not run far, however. He disappeared from the men’s view and bounded away up to the next catwalk, then to the top of one of the tall banks of machines the engineers spent their days poking at. He crouched down flat against it, eyes slitted, his ears lying back against his head. His black bits faded into the shadows, only his white bits shining out of the dimness.
He stayed focused on the men, every predatory instinct itching.
The men’s conversation floated up to him here, voices that chopped and swung with a tension that twanged against the air. Words like “only take a few hours” and “seal them out” and “full control of the jump, and then that’s done.”
They’d hauled their crate all the way out onto the catwalk. The smaller man produced an angled metal bar and began prying at a corner. The top of the box came up with a screech, first one corner then another, until together the two men dragged the lid off with a tremendous amount of grunting.
The inside was dark.
The smaller man produced a handheld computer from a pocket and tapped its screen.
Tiny lights clustered up from the crate’s darkness. Like the stars in the black that Captain Akimoto so loved. Except these lights moved.
The lights skittered up and out, pouring from the top of the box and down its sides on many tapping legs. The men whooped. The tiny creatures began to fan out, chittering across the catwalk, a slowly-expanding spill of dread. In minutes they would spread far enough to reach the banks of machines along the catwalks—the ones that controlled the particle engine and navigation systems, communications and life support, everything the Suzaku Maru needed to function.
With nary a breath of thought, Toshi gathered himself and leapt.
Humans—he couldn’t do anything about humans. But these were not humans. These were vermin.
Toshi knew exactly what to do with vermin.
He bounded into the edges of the burgeoning swarm. A claw swipe—snick— a pounce and bite down—snap. Toshi was momentarily surprised when his teeth encountered metal, when his claws scratched at their skins to find only bits of wire and no flesh that squished or crunched. Still, these moved and they were vermin, and Toshi knew what to do with vermin.
The Suzaku Maru used no automated cleaning crawlers. Toshi had never been trained not to attack mechanicals.
He skidded through the horde, his heart pitter-patting with the thrill of his expertise, as he met a challenge like none ever before. Tiny robots flew, spiraling off the catwalk with their metal legs kicking until they arced out and down, down, down to crackle into nothing when the surface of the engine core devoured them. Within the first seconds, Toshi had become a black-and-white cyclone, mechanical spiders raining in his wake along with a trail of scrap and circuitry from the ones he had mauled.
It took the two men those seconds to react.
The big man was faster. “Hey!” he yelled again, but this time he charged at Toshi. His boots crushed more of the robots, and he danced back, cursing. “Hey! Get away! Get off them!”
The smaller, metal-smelling man did not try to approach. Coolly, he drew a pneumatic pistol from his hip, one very much like what the captain wore. In the throes of predatory bloodlust, Toshi only peripherally saw the movement, and would not have recognized it in any case. Nor would he have known that this hijacker of his home had filled the pistol magazine with star-pointed shredding darts, the type that would, if a single round impacted a cat, tear straight through the poor creature’s fragile skin and lithe bones.
The man fired. The pneumatic went off with a phhhhllk that echoed off every metal surface in a dangerous whisper.
The man was a good shot. Serendipitously, Toshi made a twisting leap after one of the spiders at the very instant the gun went off, and the cruel dart skimmed over the side of the catwalk and out into nothingness.
The next one passed so close it clipped some fur from Toshi’s flying tail before it buried itself in one of the bugs.
Still Toshi did not realize the danger, glorying only in the pounce and snatch and tear, so many of these rattling creatures, all for him, all for him to clear out as meticulously as he cleaned his own black and white fur.
His rampage had taken him closer to the men. The big man lumbered forward again, reaching out with grasping hands. This was a gesture Toshi recognized. He dipped and dashed, in then out—pounce and shake, tear and swat—so the man’s fists closed only on air.
“Get out of the way!” yelled the other man. “You utter nimbo! Get out of the way so I can shoot it!”
The big man obeyed, lurching backward, and the man with the pneumatic swung it around back at Toshi, who at this point was close enough to dash between his legs.
The man spun, shouting, and tried to aim, but Toshi zigged to and fro, a quicksilver storm of black and white sleekness. Back between the man’s legs again, then leap up to dash off the side of the crate . . . Mid-leap, the man with the gun lunged for Toshi, trying to grab onto him as his partner had, and he was far closer, but that’s what claws were good for.
Whisk, slash, and the man howled something about eyes, his hands coming up to his face and the pneumatic clattering to the catwalk. Lines of red appeared on his skin as he staggered backward. Toshi left off the bugs for a quick shake and pounced again.
Even though the man was human. Sometimes humans were vermin too.
The man screamed and swiped at the flying whirlwind of angry cat, covering his face and diving away. Toshi careened back off him and down to the catwalk—just as the man’s dive took him straight up against the metal railing with a flailing, panicked force.
Yells of pain and alarm turned to a surprised screech of pure fear as his momentum took him toppling over. For one brief moment he pawed at the railing from the wrong side, and then he too was falling, falling in a hail of his own sabotage robots, down and down and down.
The surface of the reactor barely sizzled before they were gone.
The big man bellowed out something that might have been his friend’s name, and began to sob.
Toshi noticed none of it. He still had more of the rapidly crawling mechanicals to get back to. Not so many now, though . . . his sensitive ears flicked about for every final skitter of tiny metal feet on metal catwalks. Toshi chased the last few down wherever they fled, whether under banks of controls or into maintenance shafts. He smacked them off vertical plating or fat wires, dragging them out to where he could hurl and snap and dismember while their little legs flailed.
He was fierce. He was glorious. He was an excellent Ship Cat.
The big man stared about at the rapidly multiplying strew of debris that had been their state-of-the-art hijacking robots. He gazed weak-kneed and anguished after where his friend had fallen and then cast a malevolent glare after the black and white cat that was so joyfully savaging the remainder of their plan.
With his criminal enterprise in tatters and his partner ionized to nothing, the big man became seized by a senseless, raging fear. He yanked his hat down over his face and ears and, with no other option coming to mind, hurried to stuff himself away back in the large metal box of a trash hold. He would stay here and plan, he thought—figure out what to do now—he was not on the passenger manifest, nor did he have the provisions to stay hidden for the ship’s planned months-long journey between ports. If he was found—how could he not be found?—the best he could hope was that they would think he was merely a stowaway, and take pity . . .
Even if the crew here was cruel, it was the thought of landing at their destination port that made a pure inky terror fill the heart of the Suzaku Maru’s erstwhile hijacker. The employers he and his brother had been working for—the brothers had never worked for them before. Not them. It had been his brother’s idea, laugh at the risk, laugh at the stories, it’s too much money to say no. We’ll be set for life, he’d said, stop being such a damn puss . . .
The stories, the stories—you could never hide from them, everyone said. You could run, but not for long, never for long, and then they’d find you.
They wouldn’t kill you. Not yet. Not for a long time.
The big man crouched among the slimy, crusted innards of the empty trash hold and whimpered into his enormous hands.
Meanwhile, Toshi pounced upon the very last one of the scuttling spiders, his paws pinning it with perfect aim. One black paw, one white, claws extended, trapping the tiny robot so its metal legs pedaled on either side. Toshi took the unlucky creature in his jaws, tossed it once, twice, three times, allowing it to recover each time. Each time it moved a bit slower, and its legs hitched and jerked a bit more.
At last Toshi batted it to the ground. The metal wasn’t very pleasant to pull at with his teeth, but the fine wires underneath were a much better mouthfeel, enough that Toshi lay contentedly chewing at them for a few minutes.
The reactor core hummed on below, the blue and white light dancing up the sides of the engine bay, playing against the bulkheads as if they were underwater.
Toshi got up, shook himself, and resumed padding about his domain.
A shout made his ears prick.
Not quite a shout. More like a loud complaint, the way humans did sometimes when they wanted someone to overhear. A bulkhead banged up above, at the top of the catwalks.
Toshi recognized the voice, lively and taut with both youth and green inexperience. Siau, the cabin boy. Odd that she should be here now. She thumped down the catwalks, muttering under her breath.
Toshi trotted up to wind about her legs. He thought he very much deserved a pat.
Of course, Toshi was always of the opinion that he deserved a pat.
Siau obliged, reaching down to scritch between his ears. She smoothed his fur, which had become so fluffed by the crackly air down here and the rollicking fight.
“Hi, you. Ain’t you a good cat? Good Toshi.”
Toshi was in complete agreement. He was very much a good cat.
“Chief’s making me come and swab before FTL,” Siau complained to him. “She says it’s too much a mess down here. I says, ‘well who’s making the dagnasted mess, cos it sure as shit ain’t me’ and she says, ‘good thing my crew’s got ’em a cabin boy to sweep the decks for us.’ Kicks me down here quick as you please.”
“Nyao,” Toshi answered knowingly. Siau complained often.
“Can’t wait for the someday when I’m not nobody’s ’prentice no more. Don’t got to answer to no one and get a wage of my own. Maybe a ship one day, good as the Suzaku Maru. Whaddaya think of that?”
Toshi rolled over on top of her boot and rubbed his cheeks on the tight-clipped laces. She smelled of solder and burnt metal. It was a good smell. A belonging smell.
Siau laughed. “Good cat. Guess I’d better get to it, eh?”
Toshi kept her company while she stalked about the catwalks, picking up the various springs and scraps and wires and fuses the engineering crew had left and chucking them in a large bin, then sorting through for what would go in the recycler or for any reusable parts. She groused to Toshi the whole while—“You’d think after decades working an engine room they’d learn to pick up their own shitnicks, wouldn’t you” and “why leave out a whole bottle of grease-up, no wonder they can’t never find nothing ’round in here” and “the Captain keeps such ship shape up top, you’d think his Chief could keep her crew in line down below. Guess she thinks they’re so good at running a core they can do whatever kinda raz they want.”
She dumped the unusable bits in the various slots along the catwalks that dropped down into the trash hold. When the scrap metal clattered down the chutes to the hold at the bottom, Toshi’s sensitive ears picked up a few quickly-stifled yelps. Siau banged on, oblivious.
When she got to the mess left by Toshi’s stellar devastation of the mechanical vermin, Siau let out a gusty groan and set about chucking the bits into her bin with enough force to dent them further. “What in a nebular eye were they doing here—no, don’t tell me, I’ll just get more tizzed. Leave it all for the low-down intern to pick up, yeah, convenient for you all, ain’t it? None of this crap’s good no more.”
She shoveled it all into the slot in the trash hold.
“Fuck me, that’s already starting to be a load. Better space it before FTL and clear things out, eh Toshi?”
She banged some of the buttons on the trash hold’s side.
A great grinding started up, followed by the sudden sound of nothing, as everything in the trash hold dropped hard into an airlock and then was sucked out into the vacuum of space. Environmental groups hated waste management systems like these, protesting the endless dumping of litter among the common shipping lanes, but none of the older ships could afford to keep the weight. And, their captains reckoned, space was pretty damn big. Bits of litter could lose themselves forever in the black.
A trail of debris fanned out behind the Suzaku Maru, metal detritus and dead robots and exactly one human corpse, his wide face frozen in a scream the vacuum had snuffed away.
Back on the ship, Siau scooped up Toshi in her arms—he allowed it—and smushed her face into the fur of his neck. Then she carried him up with her to the passenger decks, where he leapt down and went to the commissary for some crunches of food and a very thorough bath, licking flat every prickle the engine deck had left in his fur.
He wandered back up to the cockpit, where Captain Akimoto reclined in his chair, hands laced behind his head.
He grinned when he saw Toshi, the skin crinkling all up next to his eyes.
“How’s it tripping, my good little friend?” he asked, reaching out automatic fingers for the expected ear scritch. “Did you find any vermin for us?”
Goro-goro-goro-goro-goro, purred Toshi against his hand.
“Good boy, ne. Taking care of us all.”
Toshi hopped up to the captain’s knee this time, kneading his claws against the tough canvas coveralls. Then he curled up against Captain Akimoto and let the ear scritches absently continue on, as together they watched the black drift by.
It’s true, what they say. It’s bad luck to leave port without a cat on board.