Dragon's Teeth by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey [Lackey, Mercedes]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General, historical, dark fantasy
Google: Q4-HmQEACAAJ
Amazon: 1451639430
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2013-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

A Tail of Two SKittys

Mercedes Lackey

The howls coming from inside the special animal shipping crate sounded impatient, and had been enough to seriously alarm the cargo handlers. Dick White, Spaceman First Class, Supercargo on the CatsEye Company ship Brightwing, put his hand on the outside of the plastile crate, just above the word “Property.” From within the crate the muffled voice continued to yowl general unhappiness with the world.

Tell her that it’s all right, SKitty, he thought at the black form that lay over his shoulders like a living fur collar. Tell her I’ll have her out in a minute. I don’t want her to come bolting out of there and hide the minute I crack the crate.

SKitty raised her head. Yellow eyes blinked once, sleepily. Abruptly, the yowling stopped.

:She fine,: SKitty said, and yawned, showing a full mouth of needle-pointed teeth. :Only young, scared. I think she make good mate for Furrball.:

Dick shook his head; the kittens were not even a year old, and already their mother was matchmaking. Then again, that was the tendency of mothers the universe over.

At least now he’d be able to uncrate this would-be “mate” with a minimum of fuss.

The full legend imprinted on the crate read “Female Shipscat Astra Stardancer of Englewood, Property of BioTech Interstellar, leased to CatsEye Company. Do not open under penalty of law.” Theoretically, Astra was, like SKitty, a bio-engineered shipscat, fully capable of handling freefall, alien vermin, conditions that would poison, paralyze, or terrify her remote Terran ancestors, and all without turning a hair. In actuality, Astra, like the nineteen other shipscats Dick had uncrated, was a failure. The genetic engineering of her middle-ear and other balancing organs had failed. She could not tolerate freefall, and while most ships operated under grav-generators, there were always equipment malfunctions and accidents.

That made her and her fellows failures by BioTech standards. A shipscat that could not handle freefall was not a shipscat.

Normally, kittens that washed out in training were adopted out to carefully selected planet- or stationbound families of BioTech employees. However, this was not a “normal” circumstance by any stretch of the imagination.

The world of the Lacu’un, graceful, bipedal humanoids with a remarkably sophisticated, if planetbound, civilization, was infested with a pest called a “kreshta.” Erica Makumba, the Legal Advisor and Security Chief of Dick’s ship described them as “six-legged crosses between cockroaches and mice.” SKitty described them only as “nasty,” but she hunted them gleefully anyway. The Lacu’un opened their world to trade just over a year ago, and some of their artifacts and technologies made them a desirable trade ally indeed. The Brightwing had been one of the three ships invited to negotiate, in part because of SKitty, for the Lacu’un valued totemic animals highly.

And that was what had led to Captain Singh of the Brightwing conducting the entire trade negotiations with the Lacu’un—and had kept Brightwing ground-bound for the past year. SKitty had done the—to the Lacu’un—impossible. She had killed kreshta. She had already been assumed to

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