Her words pierced through his musing and shook him back to the present. Pay him? To look the other way. He considered it for a tenth of a second—if he could set the price, he could restock the entire med bay with modern equipment. He’d be better equipped to keep the crew safe and alive. He’d been lucky so far, but it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt in a manner he wouldn’t be able to fix.
He couldn’t decide which would be worse; to lose a crew member or to have to tell Captain Barnes there was nothing he could do.
The temptation to accept her bribe burned out as swiftly as it had ignited. Allowing living things through without scan or quarantine was how you had outbreaks. He wasn’t about to see the Sentinel reduced to a plague ship.
“You’re a person on the run and desperate enough to think that we’re a good choice for you. I’m going to guess you haven’t got enough money to be able to bribe me.”
She looked indignant. Good. Her being angry meant he could get to work and stop getting distracted by her eyes.
He walked to the container and tapped his finger on its top. “Open. Please. Don’t make me get a cutter.”
She chewed her lower lip, only barely different from the color of her skin, and he was distracted again. Tension spooled out between them as she did nothing, and for a moment he wondered if he’d need to call Barr and Tyler to deal with her. He would if he had to, even if he didn’t like their methods. Security was their job, and they were brutally efficient at it.
After too long a pause, she relented, placing her thumb on the biometric pad of her omnidevice and holding it against the lock on the cargo crate. The lights on the lock shifted to green, and her shoulders slumped. “Just, don’t startle them.” There was a hiss of air releasing as she lifted the lid slightly and peeked through the gap. “I think they’re sleeping. Be quick.”
They? He’d been expecting a single child; the heartbeat he’d detected through the crate had been rapid but quiet. He lifted the lid farther with her help.
To one side, a small suitcase was packed and wrapped in plastic. Next to it, a battery-fueled atmosphere scrubber was operating noiselessly, its green lights indicating it was filtering the air in the crate and keeping carbon dioxide levels low. At least that explained why there were no holes cut in the crate. With a setup like that, anyone in the crate could easily last a couple of weeks depending on respiration rate. Then he saw them.
Three cats lay curled together in a nest of blankets. Silver and gray whorls covered them, the pattern almost hypnotic despite its randomness.
The curse that fell from Layth’s lips was practically reverent. “Those are cats.”
“Technically they’re still kittens. Not quite six weeks old.”
“You have cats.” It was unheard of. Okay, not unheard of. Everyone knew that the most ridiculously affluent people in the TriSystems could afford to keep cats. The only cats that had made the trip from Old Earth generations ago had been frozen embryos and sequenced DNA. All cats had to be created from scratch, a process that was more expensive than owning a small spaceship. Three cats had a value over a million credits.
“You’re very observant, Doctor.”
He understood why she was running. Why she’d been so nervous. “They’re stolen.”
The people who could afford even a single cat were not the sort of people you stole from and survived. They were people who bought and sold corporations and crushed opposition under their heel with no more remorse or thought than killing an insect. He let out a deep breath.
They were all going to get spaced for this.
He patched his omni into the shuttle’s comms and hailed the flight deck. “Captain Barnes?”
“What are you doing? I thought we had a deal!” Meja rushed forward and slapped the omni out of his hand. It fell into the crate, startling the three kittens.
Immediately the cats leapt out of the small container. Layth had a brief moment when one landed on his arm, where he caught a glimpse of bright eyes, tiny teeth, and irascible personality, then it jumped to the floor to join its siblings in the dash for the shuttle door.
“No!” Meja shouted, charging after the trio with panic-widened eyes. He turned to follow her when Barnes’s voice echoed from the crate, asking for an update.
He felt like a cartoon character, looking from the crate to the rapidly escaping cats and back again and seeing the entire life he’d built coming undone. He snatched his omni out of the crate and cut the connection. If Barnes wanted to know what was happening, she could come down. He had to help recapture the kittens before—
“Who doesn’t cover the ventilation shafts in a spaceship?” Meja’s voice was somewhere between anger and horror.
He stepped out of the shuttle to find her in the cargo hold, standing next to the open ventilation grate. She had one of the kittens clutched to her chest protectively. The other two were nowhere to be seen. Which meant he knew exactly where they’d gone.
“We leave them off so Darcy can get in and out. He likes to hunt for vermin.” Could Barr’s goanna eat a whole cat? Would the captain forgive any of them if Darcy consumed a king’s ransom’s worth of feline?
As though summoned, Raylan Barr jogged toward them, hand already curled around the stunner he kept at his hip. “What the hell’s the commotion over here— Holy shit that’s a cat.”
“As always, Barr, you are the master of observation.” Layth shot a look at the security chief.
“As I recall,” Meja said, “you were so surprised you repeated the phrase twice.” She added “Doctor” as an afterthought, and Layth couldn’t decide if she was teasing him or was panicked over the escape of her cats. Probably the latter.
Barr smirked and pointed at Meja as though he could frame her words. “See? Got you beat.”
“You only had to see one of them.”
“There’s more than one?” Barr’s avaricious leer was almost palpable, and Layth could almost hear him calculating values. “How many are we talking?”
“Enough that we need to tell the captain. Her ship, her rules, isn’t that what’s in the articles?” He knew it was, of course. Barr had drilled those rules into him when Layth had come aboard the Sentinel. Discipline and order were part of his job as boatswain. “She’ll know what to do next.”
Bootsteps sounded on the ladder behind him, and Captain Barnes’s voice was an icy gale that cut through the hold. “I’ll know how to handle what?”
3
“You had to let them out. You couldn’t just take my bribe.” Meja glared at Layth’s back as she followed him into the ship. Or she tried to. Staring at his back meant noticing his narrow waist, the curve of his wide shoulders. She rubbed her eyes with her free hand as if she could grind the image away.
“I wasn’t the one who tried to smuggle three cats on board a spaceship, Ms. Aquarone.” The exhaustion in his voice was palpable.
“A story I intend to hear all about,” the captain said from ahead of Layth. “But I have a feeling I’m going to need a drink first.”
The kitten Meja had tucked half-inside her shirt for the walk squirmed, wanting to change position and look around. She held it as loosely as possible without letting it get free again. Bad enough that two of them were loose in the ventilation.