by Holly Schofield
Poig pushed his snout in my face. “Cap’n Janny, ma’am, you can’t sell the cats into slavery! You can’t!”
I shoved him to one side. As a member of the Nancy species, he’s only half my petite sixty-kilogram mass. “Stand down, Ensign. I can and I will.” I stuck the guidestick against the collar of the nearest cat as if I was wielding an épée, and the electronic tip secured itself with a satisfying click. The cat twisted around on the floor, then stared balefully at me in defeat.
Yesterday evening, the reek of a malfunctioning litter bot in the cargo hold had permeated through the ship right up to the bridge. Cleanup had fallen to Ensign Poig, the sole crew member on my ship’s inaugural voyage. I’d felt sorry for him at the time. Nancies have a stronger sense of smell than us humans.
I didn’t feel sorry for him now.
I’d woken up this morning with a furry cat butt on my face and another cat playing with the 2D photo of my Ontario apartment back on Terra. I snatched the photo away before the scratches could turn it to shreds. In ten steps, I was at Poig’s sleeping compartment. I pounded a fist on the door controls and waited impatiently for it to slide open.
“Why?” I asked. “Why would you let all one hundred units of my shipment loose!”
Poig had sat up in his bunk, rubbing his eyes. “Units? They’re intelligent creatures!” He twitched a hind leg. “I felt sorry for them. Caged below decks, shortly to be enslaved to Yoogles.”
Cats, small pointy-eared quadrupeds of the genus Felis, had scattered to every room on my ship. For the past hour, Poig and I had been trying to round them up. For some reason, herding them hadn’t worked too well. I rubbed a bloody scratch on my hand. By now, I really needed coffee. Coffee and some bandages.
I used the guidestick to drag the snarling tabby down the ramp to the cargo hold and into the nearest cage. Never mind that the beast’s collar said a different crate number. The Yoogles weren’t known for checking details—just for slaughtering couriers who failed to deliver on time. A close-up of the devil-horned Yoogle I’d made the deal with flashed before my mind, but I firmly dismissed the image. Real captains didn’t quake in their boots.
I slammed the cage door on the spitting cat. This was going to take hours, especially when it almost seemed like the cats were working together. I turned to get another one.
Poig was right behind me, standing erect, hopping from one hind foot to the other, pink tongue poking out between his canines. His bristly fur rasped against his jumpsuit, the shushushu sound grating on my nerves as much as the hissing that came from the creature he clutched to his chest.
“Cap’n!” He sucked in a breath.
“Ensign.” I cut him off. “If you don’t want to be left behind when we get to Crogan, you will quit pretending to capture these units when you are really standing around rubbing their fur. And I mean ASAP, as in right now!”
Poig stopped polishing the cat with his fuzzy, four-fingered hand. I thought he was going to whimper but he only muttered, “ASAP, a-sap, who’s a sap?” before holding the hissing animal out to me.
Now I was the one hesitating. Just how sharp were those unit’s claws? And how had I gotten into this mess in such a short time? Only a month ago, I’d had a quiet life with a quiet Terran desk job.
The cat hissed at me again. There was no choice but to forge ahead; too much was riding on this shipment. My firm grip wasn’t appreciated but with much spitting and screeching, along with a few growls from me, one more cat was re-caged a few minutes later.
Only ninety-eight more to go.
As I peeled cats from the galley cupboards, from under the sickbay stretcher, and from my captain’s chair on the bridge, I practised my deep breathing exercises. What had Poig been thinking, releasing them all?
The augmentation chip insertion process that had raised Poig from a Level Three intelligence—about as smart as a monkey, say—to a Level Four, well, it wasn’t a perfect science. Poig’s implant as a teenager might bring him on par with an unaugmented human from the last century, and make him a decent mechanic, but it was well-documented that each of the Common Worlds’ sentient species reacted differently to chip implants. Raised Nancies, in particular, had some really odd quirks. With Poig, it seemed to manifest as being both a scatterbrain and a logophile—a lover of words and wordplay. His choice of name said it all, although I never quite understood why he felt being raised was imbued with poignancy.
But as a new captain operating on a budget so small it should have the prefix “nano” attached, I couldn’t be choosy about my only crew member. Poig would work for room, board, and occasional cookies from the special container in my quarters. And he was pretty good at overhauling the worn-out engine. So far, a week into our voyage, the arrangement had worked out well. Other than him letting loose half of our cargo, that is. Fortunately, he hadn’t touched the other half: a load of augmentation chips, the pricey plug-and-play kind. If I could deliver both shipments intact and on time, my burgeoning career would be launched.
By lunchtime, with phenomenal effort on my part and phenomenal reluctance on Poig’s part, we’d captured ninety units. One had been hiding in the spacesuit rack, behind the helmet I hoped I would never have to use. Such odd creatures, these cats, as alien to me as the Dendrite Colony on Varga III.
I found the ninety-first unit, glaring at me behind some equipment in an engine room storage locker, but, as I turned my back to get my guidestick, the white short-haired monster vanished.
I’d been lucky to get this order, my first from the Yoogle planet, and I didn’t want to mess it up. Rumor among us captains is that one successful delivery to the Yoogles sets you up for life: more orders follow on a regular basis. On the other hand, if you piss them off—well, some rumors it’s better not to listen to.
I stepped through the cargo bay door into an audio onslaught of wailing and moaning from the ninety captured units. A brown tail swished past me and disappeared around the back of a crate, the special crate that held the oh-so-important augmentation chips. Poig and I had loaded it oh-so-gently last week, putting it in the middle of the cargo bay floor. I circled it, warily.
No cat, just some brown fluff swirling in the breeze created by the air vents. The crate, however, looked different than yesterday morning when I’d last admired it.
I beeped Poig through my collar stud. He was at the far end of the cargo hold, but he couldn’t hear me over the cacophony. He quickly put down the striped cat he’d been rubbing—what was the appeal of that?—and trotted over.
“The crate’s tipped over. And it looks like it’s been opened a bit. I’ll pry the side open a bit more and you grab the cat that must be inside, okay?” I didn’t wait for an answer. The side, or rather, the lid, came off with a screech of plastic fasteners. Two cats, one beige and one of an orangey color I think is called marmite, jumped out and sped away.
“Poig! I said to grab them!” I glanced up at him, irritated. He stood with the guidestick still upright, his ears drooping.
“There’s something I have to tell you, Cap’n.”
“I don’t have time for this, Poig.” I rubbed my bald head, which I’d shaved smooth last week, like real captains did. “I’m at the end of my rope. We need to find the ten missing cats! And we can’t be late delivering the chips on Crogan.”
“End of your rope? Is that the idiom about the goat and the tether?” He screwed up his mouth. “Or is it the one about dangling from a cliff, awaiting rescue?”
“It’s the one about frustration. If I had a rope right now, I’d use it to hang you from the cargo hooks,” I said with enough menace he took a step back.
“Cap’n Janny—”
“Let me spell it out for you,” I said. Then I held up a hand at his expression. “No, no, there’s no real spelling involved. Just some simple steps. First, we need to get to Crogan Base and hand over this chip delivery before refueling and heading to Yoogle. The Yoogles are important for future dealings, and you know we don’t want to irritate them…” I paused so we both could shudder. “These five hundred chips are our livelihood for the next few months. I haven’t told you, but I managed to buy the chips outright at a really good discount. I own them. We’re not just going to be a courier… we’re going to be in the merchandising business.” I paused again so I could replay the beauty of that sentence in my head. “Every chip means we get to keep eating and have fuel for Calamity Jane.”
“About the chips, Cap’n.” If he’d been wearing a hat, he would have taken it off and twisted it in his hands just about now.
“What? What about the chips? They’re right…” I looked closer. Fifty rows of ten chips, stored in plastic formfitting slots. Except… one row was empty. There were only four hundred and ninety chips. “Huh? The cats wouldn’t eat them, would they? Where would they have gone?”
I looked around as if the chips would be piled on the deck in plain sight. The white cat must have been sitting beside me for the past few minutes. He lashed his tail and cocked his head. It occurred to me he wasn’t wearing a collar. He canted his neck again, stretching it away from me. A raw and barely sealed red slit sat at the base of his skull, about five centimeters long.
Just the length someone would slice if they were inserting an augmentation chip. The plug-and-play kind of chip that anyone with at least four fingers could insert.
Poig looked at his feet, guilt all over his fuzzy face.
“Oh,” I said.
There was nothing more to say.
∞
Later, I found plenty more to say.
“Poig, you know you’ve violated several laws on several planets as well as interplanetary statutes up the ying-yang? You know you’ve ruined our income? If we can’t sell the chips and buy fuel at Crogan, we won’t make our run to Yoogle on time. And what are we going to deliver? The one hundred cats they requested to serve as lap companions to their princesses? Or ninety cats and ten Level Three intelligences who need much more stimulation and education? Now that’s slavery.” I paused to take a breath and a gulp of coffee. My troubles were piling up. I paced the length of the bridge—which took all of four steps.
When would I adjust to the lack of space on the ship? I’d hung herbs in the galley and put pictures on the walls last week when we’d launched. I hadn’t felt homesick then but now I wanted to hang my head out a window and scream for a while. Trouble was, the nearest window was light-years away.
On my third round, I skidded forward, banging a hip on the edge of the console. The puddle of cat urine hadn’t been there a moment ago. I grabbed a tissue and slapped it onto the floor, letting Poig whimper as I forbade him to move. His instinct to help was so strong that, hopefully, watching me would be more punishment than doing the actual cleaning. On hands and knees, scrubbing madly, I despaired that the tissue’s built-in nanos wouldn’t be powerful enough to get the acrid stink out. When I’d switched careers, this had not been how I had imagined a ship’s captain spent her days.
Poig was still clutching his stomach. “Am I sorry? No, I’m not sorry. In fact,” Poig said, his voice rising as he stumbled his way through a little speech he’d obviously prepared. “What I’m sorry for is that you don’t seem to understand what raising does to a person. The cats deserve to be as intelligent as they can be. And free.”
“Free? In deep space on our little ship? In what sense are they free?”
“They’re free-er, or is it free-ish? More free-ish?” Poig was distracting himself yet again. “Maybe if you had been augmented later in life, like me, rather than as a baby, you would understand the concept a bit more.”
I ground my teeth, loud enough to drown out the caterwauling from the lower level. “No one is free, Poig. No one. Anyhow, now that you’ve raised the ten cats to a Level Three, what are you expecting?” I’d never heard of a cat getting augmented; I’d never even seen one until last week. Cats were rare, having fallen out of favor in the Common Worlds decades ago. I’d try to research why that had happened, to no avail. Now, as I swiped the floor with the disgusting tissue, I could make a decent guess.
Species that started with higher intelligence didn’t get quite such an advantage from the chips. The HighMind—the aliens that gave the chips to the Common Worlds—had hinted in their cryptic way that it was some kind of law of diminishing returns. A human usually went from a Five to a Five-point-two; slightly more if the augmentation was done at birth as mine thankfully had been. There were exceptions: some humans became geniuses, others became vid-fanatics and fun-junkies. I tossed the sodden tissue in the recycler. For less intelligent creatures, like the cats, the chips usually shifted them up just one level, so the cats presumably had gone from a Two to only a Three—but, like with humans, there was no real way to know.
Poig was talking. “Um, I guess I didn’t think it through.” He hung his head. “That is one of my weaknesses, postaugmentation.”
I’d never seen him so downcast. Maybe I should have chosen a more logical crew member, an Ursinian, for instance, or a Hellmuncher; neither one would make such bad decisions. Kill me in my sleep, maybe, but bad decisions, no. I sighed. Maybe I should have stayed an accountant on Terra; this whole courier-merchant business was perhaps too risky for my blood. Better to be earthbound and dying a slow death. A fast death via Yoogle-anger was holding less and less appeal.
“Well,” I said, “I’ll think about what to do. Meanwhile, we continue to gather up the remaining cats.” I drained my cup.
“At least,” Poig said with a small and crafty smile, “there’s no unaugmenting them.”
I slapped the console, narrowly avoiding an accidental course change. “Good idea! That’s exactly what we’re going to do. Unaugment them.”
“Cap’n!” Poig’s ears quivered. “It’s against interplanetary, interspecies law! You said so yourself!”
“There’s only you and me to know differently. I’m going to start right now, by yanking the chip out of that great big white one.”
I stamped off to the galley to make another pot of coffee. Several cats were brazenly slapping the food cupboard doors, trying to crack the passcodes. I knew that, without hands, a Level Three couldn’t carry out a lot of the plans they were capable of conceiving. Paws, as shown by several missteps in the development of the Augmentation Laws, didn’t do the trick, any more than talons or Dendrite twigs did. A Hellmuncher’s tentacles, on the other hand, didn’t bear thinking about.
Several other cats sat along the wall with their collars perched on their heads like jaunty little crowns. I held my frown, not letting the cuteness get to me. A large short-haired one flicked his head and tossed his collar towards a powered-down guidestick wedged into one of my hanging braids of garlic. The collar missed and clattered to the floor. The other cats gave soft cries and the next in line, a gorgeous golden brown female, moved forward for her turn at the ring-toss game.
“Close only counts in horseshoes,” Poig said, on my heels.
“Horses run around fields, they don’t wear shoes.” I glared at him but he wasn’t even listening.
He was pointing at the countertops behind me. “There’s the big white one. He’s, heh heh, the ring leader.”
The white cat’s eyes narrowed as the sleek golden-brown one chucked a collar and watched it bounce off the edge of the stick. The other cats murmured some sort of commentary among themselves before two stepped forward at once, jostling for a turn. The white cat gave a sharp cry, raised a paw. One of the two stepped back, ducking his head towards the white one. Ringleader, indeed. The white one had organized the game and had control of the whole bunch. Was that typical cat behavior?
I watched, fascinated, as the game continued in an orderly fashion. Why did they play like that? I scratched my scalp stubble. It brought them no further ahead in life. What did such effort really achieve? That was the kind of thing I had pondered, as I had sat at my accountant’s desk making judgement calls on tax returns, treading miles in the gym, washing dishes in my apartment kitchen, until I couldn’t stand another minute of it. The sales notice for a fixer-upper, Calamity Jane, had caught my eye on a ships-for-sale site and I’d spent my accountant’s earnings, my entire carefully tax-sheltered nest egg, on it.
Even if the cats were deserving of augmentation, I’d still have to cut them open and retrieve the chips. I couldn’t fail: I had no life to go back to.
I sniffed and stepped forward to pull the guidestick from between the crushed cloves of garlic. My foot went squish. The cats scattered. Waving the guidestick and shouting stuff that sounded like nonsense even to me, I wiped kibble vomit off my foot onto the doorjamb and chased the nearest cat down the hall.
Protocols be damned! Cats be damned! If I couldn’t have the life I wanted, neither could they!
∞
“Cap’n? Are you sure you want to do this to Arle?” Poig held the wheeled stretcher steady while I lifted the white cat—all puffed up to double size and hissing like a leaky boiler—onto it. My welding gloves protected me from the worst of its scratching.
I raised an eyebrow. “Arle?”
Poig continued. “This cat. He’s almost like a person. I named him Arle. A phonetic abbreviation of R.L.? The initials of ring leader? Get it?”
Poig couldn’t help the wordplay. It was a result of his raising. But I didn’t need to let his tendencies get in the way of our awful task ahead. Our Arle-ful task? Damn. Now I was doing it.
I gritted my teeth and stared at Poig through my visor until he mumbled something apologetic and busied himself at the sickbay cupboards.
It had taken all afternoon to corner all the cats including the big white ringleader. Arle. It snarled its own name as I fastened the last of the Velcro straps over its legs. I took off my spacesuit helmet, pulled out my earplugs, put down my welding gloves, and rubbed my face. Then I ran a finger under the collars of my two jumpsuits. Would this day never end?
After capturing the ten raised cats, I’d comm’d ahead and arranged for some accounting work on Crogan. If we moored there for a week, I would earn enough to recalibrate the ten used chips, assuming I retrieved them now. Then we could sell the full five hundred as arranged, refuel, and be on the way to deliver the cats to the Yoogle royal family. The Yoogle I’d left the message with, some flunky, had not been happy about the week’s delay. Seems they needed them ASAP. Which is what I felt like. A sap, I mean. Damn. I was doing it again.
Arle squirmed in his restraints.
“Hand me some anesthetic, a scalpel, and a tray to put the chip on,” I said, rather more brusquely than I intended.
Poig’s eyes got shiny and his ears drooped even further, but he opened a drawer just as Calamity Jane shook, then shook again. Poig yelped and the anesthetic sprayer clattered to the floor. Alarms, unfamiliar alarms, sounded from all speakers.
“What the hell!” I rushed to the miniscreen by the door and thumbed it on. “Report!”
Calamity’s computer started scrolling all kinds of worrying data. I stopped reading when I figured out that nothing could cause such damage to our outer hull except a targeted laser.
“Someone’s shooting at us! Get to the bridge! Evasive manoeuvres!” I shouted at Poig as I charged out the sickbay door, feeling like I was in an action vid.
I careened down the hallway as the ship shuddered again. A hand on one wall and then the other as it rocked. I burst onto the bridge, tripped over a writhing pile of blankets that appeared to be screeching, and fell flat on my face. Poig, behind me, landed across my legs a second later. A white streak whizzed by us and leapt up onto the nav screen.
As I got to my knees, Arle slapped his tail, flicking it across the screen in a pattern almost too fast to follow. I sucked in a breath. Could it be? The ship lurched again, tremendously this time. Stars began wheeling across the front screen. We were speeding up! Calamity Jane was little and her computer simple, but Poig’s engine repairs meant she sure could go fast.
I crawled to the nav screen and hauled myself up. Sure enough, Arle’s tail had swiped the controls exactly right to make us accelerate and twist away from the Yoogle ship that had appeared from nowhere.
“Arle saved us!” Poig, on his hands and feet, craned his head up at me, grinning from ear to ear. “We got away!”
I had no time to figure out how Arle had done it, nor how ten cats had dragged blankets off my bunk all the way to the bridge, because the ship-to-ship comm was blinking madly.
“Captain Janny Splundell speaking,” I said, with a calmness I didn’t feel, as the main screen showed a face like a satanic rhino—the nightmarish scowl of a very angry Yoogle. He licked his lips. Something nasty was stuck to one fang.
The automated translator kicked in. “Since you notified us that you would be late, we have come to meet you, Captain Janny Splundell of Calamity Jane. We wish our shipment now. Since our attempt to take it by force has failed, we wish to take delivery in the normal manner. Please come alongside.” At least, he’d said “please.” At least, his voice was a baritone, not the really low pitch Yoogles used to show irritation.
“I have your shipment ready, of course. On time. I was just about to comm you again,” I lied, drawing myself up to my full height and squaring my shoulders. I jerked when a rough, wet sensation crossed my bare scalp. The white cat was settled in a spare harness hanging from the wall, licking the top of my head. The look I gave it should have fried its chip. It smiled at me and cocked one almost-adorable, fluffy ear.
I drew in a breath. What I had to say next might start the Yoogles shooting at us again. “I do need assurance that you will properly take care of the cats, as per Section 56.4a.17.977c of the Interplanetary Regs.” Being an accountant did have one advantage; I could quote chapter and verse from a lot of very dry documents. Beside me, Poig relaxed slightly. Had he really thought I would sell sentient beings into slavery?
“We have laid in gourmet foodstuffs, soft bedding, and the finest of litter bots. However…” The Yoogle deepened his voice so low the microphone shuddered. “Our princesses are increasingly eager and their,” the translator hesitated then continued, “debutante social tea party cannot be postponed.” The Yoogle’s arm lashed at something just out of camera range. A high pitched snarl followed from, presumably, one of the royal brats.
“I will have all units at our port-side lock in thirty minutes,” I said and, rather bravely, closed the link. The rumor among merchant captains was that Yoogles respected strength above all. They’d treat me better if I didn’t appear to back down.
Or, they’d kill me.
One or the other.
I drew a shaky hand over my bare scalp. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t a merchant captain. I’d never hung out with one; I didn’t even know any. There was just that one time when I’d taken a wrong turn on a Toronto street corner and ended up in a bar full of spacers. I was just a wannabe courier, a pretender, the worst kind of fake. My first delivery was going to be my last.
It took twenty-eight minutes for Poig and I to lock on to the Yoogle’s coordinates, get the cages full of the ninety cats loaded on the dolly, and push them next to the airlock.
That left two minutes to sweat.
The airlock slid aside and a giant Yoogle crowded in, followed by three smaller ones in tutus. The smallest one pirouetted on one claw, butterscotch curls fluttering across her horns. Something dark dripped from her fangs.
The Yoogle-in-charge had ducked his head to fit through the airlock door. Now he stood all the way up, brushing the ceiling. Striding over to the dolly of cages, claws screeching on the metal floor, he lashed his scaly tail. His thick lips thinned in disapproval.
“I count ten too few,” he said, in a dismayingly rumbly bass, fingering the gun belt slung across his massive chest.
“We went for quality, not quantity. These are the finest of felines, the cutest of kitties,” I said, with a grand hand wave. After this was over, if I was still alive, I was going to see if I could get my accounting job back.
“Grrrrrrh.” The Yoogle’s growl would have blistered the paint on Calamity’s hull, had there been any.
“They are fully trained, um, they cuddle and purr, and they never make messes.” I had never made a sales pitch in my life but even I knew I was over the top.
I sensed Poig behind me sidling over to the cage controls. Surely, he wasn’t going to let them all free again? I flipped a hand back and forth behind my back, angrily motioning him to stop.
Poig obediently moved away.
A meowowwwwwwooooh came from behind my left shoulder. Arle was saying something to the cats. All ninety felines perked up their ears and sat at attention.
Could I trust Arle? Should I trust him?
I kept babbling at the Yoogle. “Yessir, trained for years, by skillful, um, trainers with the finest, er, training.” I wasn’t even convincing myself.
The Yoogle-in-charge growled in so low a bass that ship alarms cheeped at the subsonic vibrations.
I flipped a hand back and forth behind my back, this time frantically motioning Poig to open the cages.
The cage locks buzzed. Accompanied by a musical chorus of meows, the troupe of ninety cats daintily stepped out, tails aloft, and pranced single-file into the Yoogle ship. Arle purred with approval and Poig gave a short, sharp bark. I crossed my arms as if I’d expected their performance all along.
The three Yoogle princesses clapped their hands and squealed with delight. The smallest one jumped up and down, making the decking tremble. The Yoogle-in-charge grinned hugely, both fangs exposed, before nodding his head in my direction.
I don’t think my mouth closed until after the Yoogles had transferred payment—less ten percent—disconnected from the airlock, and raced away, leaving us far behind.
∞
Calamity Jane might be small, but its liquor cabinet was fully stocked, unlike the food cupboard. As captain, I’d set some priorities. I poured a third cucumber-soup-and-vodka cocktail and held the glass aloft.
“Poig, we are going to make this venture work. For all of us.” I patted Calamity’s hull to make sure she knew she was included.
He stroked the golden-brown cat on his lap and smiled up at me. “And we’ve raised ten intelligences. I think that counts for something.”
I frowned. Two hours helping Poig clean the cat-hair-clogged air filters after the Yoogles had left had not softened me towards our new shipmates one bit. Not at all. I fished several sleek white hairs out of my drink before taking a large sip. The cucumber flavor was growing on me.
I felt myself relax from more than just the vodka. Not only had we saved the fuel needed to go all the way to Yoogle, but we were ahead of schedule thanks to Poig’s engine tweaks, almost to Crogan where we’d cash in on the chips.
I nudged two cats out of my way and touched the galley’s miniscreen, recording a reminder to pick up kibble and kitty litter on Crogan. That made Poig’s fuzzy face light up.
“We can keep them?” he asked, as a smaller black cat settled down around his stocky neck and blinked its yellow eyes slowly at me.
“Well, we can’t sell augmented animals or even give them away, not anywhere in the Common Worlds. Not without getting arrested on the spot.” When we got to Crogan, it was going to take me a full day or two to hack the shipment documentation to show ninety cats were all I’d originally agreed to deliver. Thanks to my childhood augmentation and my accounting skills, I was pretty sure I could do it.
We’d keep them. We’d adjust to them and them to us. How different could a cat’s mind be, anyway, when its DNA was so closely related to humans? Didn’t I successfully handle both the convoluted logic of a certain raised Nancy and the nasty attitude of a nastier-than-most Yoogle on practically a daily basis?
A few cats would be no trouble at all.
“Poig, let’s go up to the bridge and watch the stars pass by.” I never tired of the view, so much more impressive than anything on my apartment’s wallscreen back home.
My former apartment in my former home. I patted Calamity’s hull again.
As I left the galley, glass in hand, various cats skittered away down the corridor, responding to the automated dinner bell I’d set up in the cargo bay. Arle chose to delay his dinner and come with me, winding around my legs as I walked, his tail proudly upright. Poig followed a step or two behind.
I bent down to give Arle a pat. Handsome fellow. I admired his jaunty walk as he scooted ahead.
Yes, indeed, this could work.
Arle did a U-turn as I entered the bridge, flicking his ears at me as he sauntered back out. What had he just done?
I approached my captain’s chair warily. The fresh hairball, glistening obscenely, lay centred on my seat.
“Cap’n? What can I do?” Poig’s voice at my elbow was hushed.
I drained my glass. “Find me a rope,” I said, crooking my head to one side while raising a fist near my other ear, as if hanging myself. “A nice long piece of rope.”