~58Y BV (approximately late April, 1958)
Mrs. Eufegenia Nesbitt of Hare St Rd, Buntingford, was in every imaginable way, a very nice lady, if a bit cracked, as some might say; she nevertheless made an excellent pot of tea and was well-known in town for her intricate crotcheted cat sweaters. None would be so rude as to call her a crazy cat lady, but the thought was often there nevertheless, as she did live by herself a short distance outside of town with an aging barn, a horse, two cows, and eighty-seven cats, some of whom wore sweaters, and all of whom had proper Christian names. Mr. Nesbitt had passed away shortly after the war, leaving her the small farm and enough money to comfortably accommodate a growing feline population. George Foster, the milkman, was kept in business, he often said, by supplementing Mrs. Nesbitt’s two cows with extra on his weekly run.
The farm itself had been slowly customized over the prior decade into a cat heaven. Elevated, covered walkways ran between house and barn, with stopovers in various trees (some of which were fruit trees, and others assorted hardwoods). Here and there, perches protruded from trees, power poles, the side of the barn, the house on every side, and, occasionally, hanging from the walkways themselves. Most had a cat in somnolent residence during the day, at least until morning and evening milking, or when it was raining. Covered carpeted platforms stood here and there around the property, and nearly every ten feet was a scratching post in various stages of feline-assisted entropy. It was a peculiarity of the area that there were no songbirds anywhere to be seen, of course, and the rats, mice, and other small creatures normally to be found on a farm of any size were conspicuously absent.
It was this scene, on an unseasonally fine April evening, that found a small research group of Corti overhead discussing options. Several miles away, radar operators hunched over their screens and tried to make sense of the chaotic static, and a third of the town’s television reception was interrupted, to general annoyance and much tut-tutting about the BBC.
Corti deep-range science vessel Inquisitive Terminus
“…telling you, these are gricka. I do not care if this is an uncontacted species, and I do not know how gricka got from this world to the rest of the known galaxy, but the preliminary tests I ran are conclusive,” insisted one of the junior researchers. “They are gricka, and this is their home world. And that woman,” he said, pointing at the screen, where an overhead view of the Nesbitt place took up the bulk of the display, “has a bio-equilibrium with 87 of the creatures. Look at the place – everywhere, there are signs of customization. The habitat has undergone a great deal of alteration to that end.”
There were several long moments of silence, which was broken by a senior member sitting at the far end of the long oval table from the screen. “I propose that we collect both the…” he consulted his data implant for a moment, “human and the gricka she evidently has tamed, and put them in Cargo Bay 3, which is currently empty. A bio-isolation field for the room will be easy enough to enable, and it is already set up with a nutrient and water dispenser.” There was a murmur of general agreement around the table.
“Perhaps we should add some furnishings prior to collecting the human and the gricka. If they are gricka, they will undoubtedly be just as…intrusive…as the ones we are familiar with, and giving them somewhere to sit, play, and sleep that is not the floor may assist the human keeping control of them. Also – a side note – we need to procure a sample of that bovine lactation fluid that they seem to consume, as it may prove useful elsewhere there are gricka infestations.”
Mrs. Nesbitt, despite her fondness for cats, was not the most imaginative woman. It really was a very fine April evening, and she sat outside on her porch, watching the sun go down, with a proper cup of tea, working idly on a multicolored cat sweater that had somehow inexplicably grown legs and a tail cover. It had become much more like kitty footie pajamas, she thought to herself, wondering how on earth she was going to get Chester into it (he was the intended recipient, and a tomcat of no small mettle vs. stoats, dogs, other cats, and children – Mrs. Nesbitt, in fact, was one of the only humans he would deign to allow petting privileges, which may have been due in equal parts to the treats she gave him, and the “cootchie cootchie” noises she made when doing so).
At any rate, despite recent events in the London area with the anti-nuclear march, Mrs. Nesbitt prided herself on being a strictly rational person, not given to flights of fancy or imagination. She rarely watched anything on the Beeb that smacked of fantasy, and was generally much more interested in the news reports on the royal family or dreadful events elsewhere in the world. It was, therefore, her instinctive response to her entire farm suddenly being bathed in brilliant white light, to mutter something disapproving about “more shenanigans from that bloody Ogilvie lad,” and continue drinking her tea as though whatever that light was, wasn’t. Pretending things she didn’t approve of would simply go away had always worked before, and there was no reason to think it wouldn’t this time. Whatever sort of trick this was, anyway. On the off chance that this was some kind of foolish hooliganism, she hefted her Irish blackthorn walking stick with one hand, and continued with her tea, when white engulfed her vision and all faded to black.
”Begin log. Chief Researcher Ghoti, biome sample from class-12 temperate; one possible sapient classified as non-sentient fauna and 87 non-sapient felines closely resembling gricka.”
”Non-sapients display animal-level intelligence, as anticipated. Although we have not yet roused them from the anesthesia field, the preliminary analysis from their natural environment finds that they are, locally, a minor predator adaptable as pets, in small family groups, and solitary life. Native diet appears to be primarily meat, with frequent additions of bovine lactation fluid. Side note – unconfirmed report of one consuming groundcover leaves and vomiting.”
”Anesthesia field being lowered in 3…2…1…mark. Subjects appear to be regaining consciousness – translator matrix activated, and video feeds are live.”
Mrs. Nesbitt’s coming-to was perhaps the most perplexing event in her lifetime. She found herself lying down, flat on her back, on a somewhat squishy grey surface, with a teacup in one hand, her walking stick and a mostly-finished cat sweater in the other, a ball of yarn in one apron pocket, her good scissors in the other, and her reading glasses lying across her face in a most disconcerting way. This was an unacceptable state of affairs, although as she sat up she realized that all of her babies appeared to be present and accounted for. She looked around, doing a mental tally and getting her first good look at the large, square-ish room she was in. Several sections of one wall appeared to be mirrored glass, and the roof was five meters overhead. The walls were a utilitarian grey color that she instinctively associated with some sort of bland bureaucracy, and she wondered in a wild and uncharacteristic moment of whimsy if this was the Cat Licensing Organization for the Breeding, Bathing, and Evaluation of Recipients (or CLOBBER), which her friend Hazel had told her about at length just last week. Mrs. Nesbitt, being a sensible woman without any foolishness in her character, naturally had discounted the existence of such a governmental bureau as CLOBBER, but one could never quite tell with Downing Street just what sort of rubbish they would come up with.
Slowly, she stood up, attending to her babies crowding around with piteous meowing (and, in Felix’s case, a long-overdue hairball), gathering her walking stick up in one hand. She stumped over to the mirrored section of wall closest and gave it a gimlet eye usually reserved for town boys that were up to no good.
”Continuing Chief Researcher log, initial observations. The human subject has approached the observation window. Analysis of human optic capability indicates it is unlikely that it can see through the mirrored glass, although it is evident that the subject understands that this is for observation.”
”The subject is speaking – evidently the translator is having difficulty, as the human is speaking a local dialect…”
“…in blazes is going on ‘ere? Brandon James Horatius Ogilvie, if this is another of your foolish pranks, I swear on the soul of my departed ‘usband and by sweet Baby Jesus, this time I will whip your behind before I drag you back to your mother!” Mrs. Nesbitt was in full rant mode, and as the likelihood of having been bodily cat-napped along with all of her babies into a mysterious and anonymous government facility by a fourteen-year-old boy who ate his own boogers was the only thing she could think of, it was obviously the only correct solution. “Let. Me. Out. Of. ‘Ere. At. Once!” she yelled, punctuating each word with an increasingly firm thunk of the knob on top of her walking stick against the glass. Alarmingly, it visibly cracked on the last word, eliciting a startled squeak.
“Human, calm yourself, or I shall have to render you unconscious again,” said a light tenor voice totally devoid of regional accent. Mrs. Nesbitt squeaked again and retreated a step. The mirror suddenly cleared into transparency, with a short, gray figure on the other side looking back at her with unmistakeable annoyance.
“…I thought Martians were green,” was the only thing Mrs. Nesbitt could say, thinking to herself that this tea she had poured for herself had certainly never had this sort of effect on her before. “Are…are you with CLOBBER?” The figure looking back at her looked even more nonplussed than before, if that were possible.
“…No. No, human, I am certainly not from…whatever that is. Now…please stop hitting things with your stick, or I will have to take additional measures.”
Mrs. Nesbitt’s experience with bureaucrats was extensive, having navigated the mazes of widow-hood mostly solo. This, she was quite sure, would be no different…although she had to admit, she hadn’t ever seen a setup like this one. Sasha, an enormous female Maine Coon who was the undisputed queen of the upper floor of the barn, insistently rubbed against her knee with an aggressive purring demand for attention. Bolstered by the thought of her babies, who obviously needed her to get them out of this fine mess (abducted by Martians wasn’t typically something cat owners had to deal with, she told herself stoutly, but if anyone were going to get through it, it would be one Mrs. Eufeginia Nesbitt, and that was all there was to that), she decided that taking no nonsense from this Martian was the way to go.
“You interrupted my evening tea, young man,” she said, for all the world as though he were the Ogilvie boy who had just tracked cat feces into her drawing room. “I shall need another cup, and a biscuit, since you appear to have spilled the cup I’d made myself. With milk and sugar, if you please.” A nod, a satisfied sniff, and she turned around to get another look at the cats that were busily investigating everything. “Oh dear.”
Unbeknownst to Mrs. Nesbitt, two of the cats she had adopted were not the more usual housecat stock. They were brothers, and they were a breed known as Bengals – rare, large, more actively curious than most, and with a gift for mayhem rivalling ferrets on crack. It had taken them less than thirty seconds to decide to ignore everything at floor level, and with an uncanny instinct they had zeroed in on an open maintenance access port nearly five meters overhead. In Earth’s normal gravity, it would have been an impossible jump; in galactic standard gravity, though, it represented little trouble at all beyond proper aim, which both cats demonstrated a mastery of. As though they had been raised in low-gravity, both launched themselves at the opening, landed neatly inside, and streaked out of sight before either Mrs. Nesbitt or the suddenly alarmed researcher could object.
“Human! Human, you must call them back – the sanitary bio-field only covers the inside of the room you are in, and those creatures have not yet been sterilized!!” Ghoti’s distress was palpable. “You must get them back into the room you are in, immediately!” Mrs. Nesbitt turned back around.
“You haven’t even had the courtesy to get me a cup of tea, young man,” she said. “And what do you expect me to get them to come back with? I have no milk or treats in here. Whatever they’ve found in there is certainly more interesting than in here. They certainly won’t come back just because I tell them to. They’re cats,” she explained patiently, obviously expecting the Martian to understand. Even if he wasn’t the proper color, there was no excuse for being impolite…and if you left a door open, cats would go see what was there just because they could. Everyone knew that.
Ghoti was hurriedly pulling on an encounter suit, as the bio-hazard lights suddenly flashed on in a sudden bath of violet light. It was unlikely that he had already been exposed to anything, of course, but he had had to learn the lessons of biological contagion from deathworlds many years before, watching one of his coworkers being gelatinized by a persistent and aggressive fungal infection. The ship’s bio-alarms immediately enacted their own protocol of isolating and compartmentalizing air spaces. Unfortunately, however, the designers of the ship had never had something as tenacious, persistent, and, to the normal range of galactic life, lethal, as a housecat from Earth in mind. There was a sudden tap on the window.
“That’s not making my tea. Don’t Martians drink tea?” she said testily. “And here all of the movies said you were more evolved.”
“Madam,” Ghoti said, not pausing at all as he zipped up the back, put the head-piece on, and then fumbled on the gloves. “I assure you, what I am doing is infinitely more important, both to my long-term survival and yours.” Mrs. Nesbitt sniffed disdainfully.
“No tea, and rude. Are you sure you’re a Martian and not a Colonial? It figures. I get kidnapped by Martians, and they turn out to be Americans. If Teddy and Tinker cough up hairballs on your floor, or claw your couch, don’t blame me.” With that, she meandered over to a nearby crate and sat with a grunt.
Elsewhere in the ship, one section after another developed cascading biohazard alarms; as soon as the alarms were silenced for one thing, something else would set them off again. Cat dander, the ever-pernicious culprit in human asthma and allergies, had a far more profound and messy effect on Corti; those unlucky enough not to have reached the relative safety of an encounter suit went from a catch in their breath, to wheezing, to anaphylaxis, and then suffocation in the space of minutes. Behind them, the cats left a trail, a lethal cocktail of Earth bacteria that settled onto available surfaces, drifted through the air, and utterly overwhelmed the bio-filters that, in the absence of an activated quarantine field, had never been intended to deal with pathogens this virulent. Choking, wheezing, and dying sounds filled the various comm channels as the hapless xenos died in ugly and often spectacular ways. Perhaps a fifth of the crew had made it to some modicum of safety, and as the dying became the dead, the comm channels cleared enough for Ghoti to begin to restore some semblance of order.
Mrs. Nesbitt, meanwhile, had of course heard none of this. As her tea was apparently not forthcoming, she busied herself in seeing to her cats, some of the more athletic of whom had followed in Teddy and Tinker’s footsteps and gone into the bowels of the ship. Predictably, they found places that were warm and places that had things that were food, such as the stable of Dizi Rats in the kitchen. Some of the warm places, of course, were places that had power running to and from, such as the relays around the reactor to the FTL drive.
Ghoti was horrified to see that the FTL drive had not been disengaged when the biohazard alarm had sounded, as was the standard protocol. It appeared that the bridge crew had, actually, gone insane prior to expiring, or at least that was the only explanation he could come up with for why they were no longer headed in the direction of Wayfarer Station where they’d intended to go. When he was able to get a monitor feed from the bridge to see what was going on, what he found fascinated and repulsed him in equal measure. The ship’s master was still seated in his chair, with his head liberally distributed over at least a meter in every direction. Most of the others were simply slumped at their workstations, although the helm appeared to have sustained damage since most of the displays were dark, and at least two others had apparently killed each other with eating utensils.
“Human,” he said, turning away from the wall screen, and addressing Mrs. Nesbitt inside the cargo bay. “We have a problem.”
“Yes, we certainly do. I still don’t have my tea,” Mrs. Nesbitt replied.
“No, I mean an actual problem. As in, ‘we will most likely all die horribly if things are not fixed quickly’,” the Corti said evenly. “Your gric…cats… are now running amok around my ship, and they carry with them microorganisms that are fatal to my kind. They have killed most of the crew, and we are careening out of control at an ever-increasing multiple of the speed of light.” Mrs. Nesbitt blinked in disbelief.
“You….are you trying to tell me that my poor, defenseless darlings have somehow managed to commandeer a Martian spaceship and kill Martians? And you can’t even make me a cup of tea??? What kind of Martians are you, anyway?”
“We are not these Mar…okay, you know what? Never mind. Yes. That is exactly what your creatures have done. And if I get even a puncture in this suit, I am likely to join the rest of my now extremely dead coworkers.” The prospect of an extended stay in an encounter suit was seeming much more likely with every passing moment. Although Ghoti had never been an emotional sort, he had a sinking feeling somewhere in his midsection that was most certainly not indigestion; he had had training for extended use of excursion suits, but he’d never actually expected to have to use it. “It is imperative that you contain the rest of the creatures, and do not allow any more to leave.”
“You should have thought of that before you left a door open where they could get to it, Mister Martian Man. Haven’t you ever had a cat before?” Ghoti shuddered at the thought. “I can’t promise anything. They’re cats, not sheep.” She paused. “I suppose this means the tea will have to wait. Fine. But don’t think I’ve forgotten about it. Fine…fine….I’ll help you catch them and get them back in here. Do you have any treats?”
Ghoti most certainly did not have any kitty treats, and the likelihood of being able to get any in the near future was looking less and less likely. All he had, in fact, was the stable of Dizi Rats kept in a sealed pen just off the kitchen for use when the Inquisitive Terminus took on subjects that were carnivorous…such as 87 gricka and one elderly human, apparently. He placed a quick call to the dining area, hoping without much faith that someone was left alive to answer. Thankfully, his hopes were rewarded almost immediately as a face behind a suit hood came into view.
“Oh, Chief Researcher, good. We haven’t been able to reach anyone else…and there are gricka everywhere in this compartment; we don’t dare leave the refrigerator we’re in,” the somewhat-panicked worker said.
“Most of the rest of the crew is already dead,” Ghoti said bluntly. “The gricka have not been sanitized; this is the reason for the bio-hazard alarms, which I assure you you should continue to take seriously. At the moment, getting the creatures back into Cargo Bay 3 is the only priority, as we will not be able to get or keep control of the ship until that is done. The ship will need to undergo a complete bio-purge before any of us can feel safe taking off the encounter suits.”
“We could be in these suits for days,” was the reply.
“Correct. It is essential, therefore, that we contain the gricka quickly,” Ghoti said. “And they must not be allowed to devour the entire stable of Dizi Rats, as that is the only food source we currently have for them. Can you secure the rats, and your compartment?”
“We would have to leave the refrigerator, sir,” the kitchen worker responded. Behind him, several helmets could be seen, trying vainly to see the screen and jostling for position.
“Then you must do so. Quickly,” Ghoti said. “I am sending a camera drone to assist you – you must capture the creatures and bring them to Cargo Bay 3.”
The drone whisked through the suddenly quiet hallways of the Inquisitive Terminus, its sensors capturing scenes in every direction of sudden, violently sick death. Even a veteran dispassionate researcher like Ghoti was affected, as nearly every corner the drone rounded found additional dead former colleagues. By the time the drone was nearly to its destination, each additional pitiful pile was like a gut punch to him. He engaged other cleaning and maintenance drones to begin to gather the bodies up and place them in an airlock for jettisoning later.
Describing the resulting scene in the kitchen as chaos was utterly insufficient, Ghoti decided upon seeing the initial images. The workers that had taken refuge in the refrigerator had exited and were milling about in the middle of the room, obviously petrified of the, to them, waist-high predators that padded about. It was evident that they had no idea how to go about restraining creatures with needle-sharp claws and teeth, disproportionate strength, preternatural reflexes, and trailing behind them aerosolized death.
“What on earth are they doing? Don’t tell me. Martians don’t know how to herd cats, either, do they?” The voice from the other side of the glass made Ghoti jump. He had quite forgotten Mrs. Nesbitt, preoccupied with his efforts to get the rampaging cats corralled and the bodies of the dead removed. Mrs. Nesbitt stood, gazing down at him over the top of her glasses, and even though he was aware that for her species she was elderly, Ghoti suddenly felt affixed in place by what was, after all, an apex predator staring at him. She had already demonstrated that she could crack, if not actually break the glass that separated them, elderly or not. Her eyes flicked back to the screen.
“Oh, for the love of Martha. Just let me go get them.” Mrs. Nesbitt’s annoyance took a quantum leap upwards at seeing the hapless group standing in the middle of a room somewhere on the ship, obviously convinced that her babies were going to eat them. “They won’t hurt you. Any of you.” Her conviction was palpable, despite one of the poor staff standing, utterly petrified, with Tinker’s front feet on either shoulder, looking into the window in his helmet curiously and sniffing.
Ghoti sighed. “At this point, it hardly matters whether you spread your own version of death all over my ship or not, since what’s out there is already enough to kill the rest of us several times over. Very well, I will unlock the door, and use a camera drone to guide you. Be aware, there are many of my kind dead in the hallways, and your …creatures… have gotten into crawlspaces that will be difficult to extract them from.” He punctuated his words with attention to several controls, ensuring that the quarantine field for the storage bay would remain up and intact, and that there was a security field set up to prevent additional escapees from both the floor-level door and the opening above where the mass exodus had occurred earlier.
The door hissed open, and Mrs. Nesbitt tentatively took a step out into the hallway, which was well lit in both directions, violet biohazard lights still flickering on and off in a steady “you’re all so screwed now” rhythm. A moment later, another door a few feet away opened, and the short grey alien in the suit came out holding some kind of vaguely gun-shaped device in his hand.
“I have not given you a bio-suppressive injection yet. This will make our cleanup much easier, if I give it to you now, human,” he said tersely. He pressed it against her forearm, there was a pfft and a brief prickling sensation, and that was that. “There. We are safe from you for the time being. Now. Please gather up your creatures and get them back into the storage bay. I will be attempting to get to the bridge and regain control of the ship before it strands us in Hunter space or something equally unfortunate.” He motioned at the hovering camera drone that had followed him out. “Follow this drone. It will take you to the area you need to begin in.” Without further conversation, he scuttled past her on short legs and disappeared down the corridor in the opposite direction of the one he had indicated to her.
I’d better be able to get my tea in this kitchen of theirs she thought, stumping down the corridor after the drone, which clearly had no idea how fast a human using a cane should go, and which kept zipping ahead and stopping. The flashing violet light was giving her a headache, which, combined with the lack of tea and the extremely rude treatment from the Martians, was not particularly conducive to a good mood. As if my babies had anything to do with the problems. We just got here…why, I wouldn’t be surprised if this ship wasn’t even built by union workers and was some kind of Japanese Martian knock-off, she mused to herself, remembering how easily that window had cracked. Somehow, knowing that even Martians had Brand X cheered her up, even as her level of grumpy reached a new low with every corner she went around. Martians, apparently, did not go for interior decorating at all; everything was a bland gray, beige, or other neutral color that, while easy on the eyes, was a sort of torture all on its own. The drone finally came to a stop after they had walked for some time in front of a door that looked like any other. There was no obvious way to open the door, so she reached out with her walking stick and simply knocked.
To her surprise, the door whooshed open. Inside, three Martians in suits stood helplessly arguing with each other about what to do while the fourth of their number sat wheezing for breath under Tinker, who had obviously needed a comfy spot in which to clean himself. Apparently, Martians understood that much at least; when one was host to a cat, moving and disturbing the cat was Simply Not Done. Tinker, at the sight of his favorite human, yawned and let out a plaintive meeeyowwwl, then got up and came over to her, rubbing on her leg, purring loudly.
“All right, all right. I see you,” she said affectionately. “Now where’s your brother?” She looked around at the other three or four sitting on various surfaces or investigating various smells. “Okay. You all need to come with me now. Come on! Kittykittykitty!” She coaxed them towards the door. All but one got up and scampered towards the door – Angelo, the lone holdout, sat indifferently awaiting personalized attention, but finally got up when she walked over to him and picked him up. “Come on, you. Okay….come on. Kittykittykitty!” she said again in a high voice to the accompaniment of much feline conviction that treats awaited and various yowls of moderate enthusiasm and/or demands. The Martians looked positively terrified, she thought to herself. Good thing for them I don’t like dogs.
Along the hallway they backtracked, led by the camera drone towards the storage bay. Mrs. Nesbitt had to stop several times to re-herd the cats together, and grumbling out loud that this would have been so much easier if the Martians had thought to bring kitty treats along. She continued calling for the cats the entire way, with the result that at least two or three more had joined the feline parade by the time they reached their destination.
Ghoti, meanwhile, was having a very bad time of it. The control bridge was still a carnage scene by the time he got there, having been at the far range of where the drone cleanup was proceeding apace. He was hot, and itchy, and had had multiple contacts from surviving crew members asking what was going on, and what the anticipated time frame was that they would be remaining in their encounter suits. In every contact, he had impressed on the other party that removing their suit would be almost immediately fatal, to say nothing of the hordes of Deathworld predators stalking around their ship. Once inside the bridge, his first goal was to attempt to shut the FTL down and then figure out where they had ended up, with little success. The damage to the helm and several nearby control systems was fairly extensive, and although he could jury-rig a replacement at another station with some effort, restoring the primary control station seemed to be the best option initially.
He was able, after fumbling around a little, to route around some of the damage and at least get a good look at how fast they were now going; Ghoti was fairly certain that they had strayed out of the main space lanes, and was concerned about the need to degauss the hull soon. He was mid-task when his comm implant registered an update from the cargo bay that the human and its creatures had returned. A quick check on the camera drone’s feed, and he patched through to the sound system on the hovering device, asking the human to please attempt to continue the process and remove the gricka from the engineering compartment.
After much fumbling and several promising starts that ended up in failure, his patience had exhausted itself, and he became aware that he was muttering imprecations of dire intent upon the heads of the research team, the human, the gricka, and the universe in general. The frustrating thing was that the ship’s precautionary bio-hazard purge protocol could not be done compartment by compartment in the event of a ship-wide situation such as this. While this had been intentionally done, and partially at his design, it was most inconvenient. The fingers on his gloves were not sufficiently thin to allow fine motor skill manipulation or easy access to tight spaces, and he was acutely aware every time he tinkered with something that required either soldering, digging around inside a panel, or movement near sharp-edged objects that a single tear in his suit would be highly unpleasant in the short term, and worse in the long-term. Presently, he made a connection, there was a sudden boop and wummmm noise, and the helm displays lit back up. Pulling himself out from underneath the console gingerly, he levered himself up and looked at the data displayed on speed, route, and current location. All that came to mind was a human word he’d heard often recently in his sociological research.
“…..Fuck.”
Mrs. Eufegenia Nesbitt was not amused in the least. The terse order from that head Martian to go somewhere else in the ship and gather up more of her babies hadn’t really annoyed her all that much – his manners were atrocious to begin with, but one couldn’t really expect much better. The charnel house around seemingly every corner was swiftly being cleaned up, which was good since apparently Martians didn’t have the decency to die either quietly and in private, or gloriously in battle with the Huns (were there Huns in outer space? She decided she’d ask, the next time that whatever-his-name-was poked his head out of wherever it was he’d gone.). No, what really twisted her knickers, as Mr. Nesbitt had used to say when something had displeased him, was the fact that the Martians had abducted her without the decency to tell her first. Not that she minded going on an Adventure, of course, it was sort of thrilling knowing that she was whizzing through outer space, and just wait till she told her friend Hazel….but although she’d had the foresight to grab her walking stick, she was still wearing her fuzzy robe and a pair of rubber galoshes she usually used for mucking about in the barn. One would think that they could have allowed her to pack a bag. And tea. What did one wear to meet Martians, anyway?
Eventually, she reached yet another anonymous door, this time at the end of a longer hallway, and a double door at that. Instead of whoosh-ing to one side, this one opened from both sides into unmitigated pandemonium. None of the inhabitants of the room registered her presence at all for a long moment, and so she (relying again on several years of experience with miscreant teenage boys from the village) took a moment to evaluate the scene.
The room had been crowded with Martians to begin with, she was sure, and apparently there hadn’t been enough of their suits to go around, because only about five of them had them on and a number of bodies were piled up in one corner, some partially covered and others not. A waist-height (to her) podium of some kind stood in the approximate center of the room, with a wall behind it bedecked with flashy lights and colorful, yet strangely ominous-looking displays. She couldn’t resist a tut-tut, as there were no buttons anywhere to be seen, which certainly didn’t seem like any Martian ship she’d ever heard of. Several raised lines led from the wall to the podium thing, and sitting squarely on top of this latter feature was a yowling ball of fur, claws, teeth, and the promise of painful demise, in the form of Chester. She found herself wishing she’d finished his sweater, because it would have looked quite handsome on him – at the moment, though, it was clear that trying to put anything on him would have little effect other than having ones’ own hands and arms slashed to bloody ribbons. The cause of his attitude was immediately apparent, as there were two Martians with what looked like ray guns pointed at him, and several more behind them huddled against a wall, being investigated by several more cats.
Without even thinking about it, Mrs. Nesbitt erupted in fury. “RAY GUNS???? You’re shooting my babies with RAY GUNS!? How DARE you!” and with that, swung the head of her hard knobbed walking stick (which was actually less of a walking stick and more of a shillelagh) into the lead Martian’s gun. It erupted into a volcano of bits and pieces, liberally distributed over the far side of the room in a shower of sparks, bits of twisted metal, and other unrecognizeable parts. His hapless companion, seeing an oncoming, armed, enraged Deathworlder, did the only reasonable thing and shrieked like a little girl, threw his gun at her, and took to his heels out the door screaming the whole way. The newly disarmed one keeled over in a dead faint.
Cats, unfortunately for the fleeing Corti, rather enjoy chasing things that run away, despite being primarily ambush hunters. None of the Corti were significantly bigger than a middle-school aged human child, and the suit he was wearing made a wssk wssk wssk sound with each step that was irresistable. All five of the cats behind him took off after him, and his wails of fright echoed through the halls with the soft patter of padded cat feet until cut off by the closing door. On the podium in the middle of the room, Chester had subsided somewhat to a fluffed-out tail and low snarling growl, his eyes never leaving the now-disarmed Corti, who was coming back to awareness and obviously convinced that he was about to be eaten.
“Oh, Chester, you hush,” Mrs. Nesbitt said affectionately, letting the riled-up tomcat sniff one hand and scratching behind one of his ears as she gave the Corti on the floor her best quelling-disobedient-children look. “Mama is here, and the bad Martian doesn’t have his nasty gun anymore.” The rumbling assurance of homicidal intent from the cat faded out, although he kept one watchful eye out for further danger. Mrs. Nesbitt picked him up with one hand and scooped him onto one shoulder. “There, dear. Isn’t that better? Yes, it is….gootchiegootchiegootchie. Let’s go find your siblings, huh? Who loves you?” The cat hissed over her shoulder at the aliens, and her voice faded out of the engine compartment as the door closed behind her, leaving the three remaining and unexpectedly rescued Corti blinking at each other in shock.
Mrs. Nesbitt stumped along the hallway, soothing a still-irate Chester over one shoulder and calling for the other fugitives as she went. Only a couple joined her; the others were still apparently either chasing a quarry that in no way was fast enough to escape them or had found other mischeif to get into. She followed the camera drone back to the storage bay, thinking the whole way that surely she should start recognizing things after the fourth trip through this part of the ship, and that it was simply uncivilized to expect an old lady to do all of this work and not even have a proper cup of tea or biscuits at all. Why, there must be some Department or other I can lodge a complaint with when I get home. This will simply not do.