“He looks really stoned.” Sub Dude laughed as the cat flopped over on his side. “How much did you give him?”
“I figured he was big,” Red said, shrugging, “so I gave him all four packages.”
“He should be out like a — ” Gants started to say just as the cat leapt to its feet and let out a howl like a fire-engine. “Holy grapp!”
“Catch him!” Red shouted as the cat screamed his way out of the compartment.
“Good luck,” Gants replied. “I was not here. I have never heard of a giant, stoned, hyperactive catzilla…”
Space, the final and all that…
Four of the main screens in Conn could be set to external view and Captain Prael had to admit that the view was spectacular. But there were still times he pined for the view of the inside of a sub, nothing to see but steel walls and…
AND A HOWLING STREAK OF WHITE AT SHOULDER HEIGHT!
“Holy maulk!” he shouted, damned near peeing himself in surprise. For just a moment he caught a flash of feline shape at the far end of the Conn and then the thing was out the hatch headed for CIC. “COB, what did I just see?”
“That would be a Savannah, sir.”
“Not a white streak that sounds remarkably like the ship breaking up?”
“No, sir!”
“And just what is a Savannah, COB?”
“A cross between a Bengal housecat and a Cervil wildcat, sir. Males are generally docile and have doglike personalities if neutered young. In this case, it would be a Savannah named Titanus. My guess is that somebody gave him too much catnip. I will investigate the phenomenon.”
“Are you telling me that someone brought a genetic freak of a housecat onto my ship?”
“No, sir!” the Chief of Boat replied. “I would be telling you that someone brought a massively-hyper, sixty-pound genetic freak of a housecat, nicknamed Tiny, onto your ship, sir. He’s for hunting down the chee-hamsters, sir.”
“Oh,” the CO said then paused. “Chee-hamsters?”
“They’re pests, sir. Picked them up the first time we were on Cheerick when the ship got torn up and we had to set down for repairs. Leave droppings all over, get into the food…”
“I’ve got the picture, COB. Well… keep him off the Conn.”
“Will do, sir.”
“COB, I have another question.”
“Sir?”
“What else do I need to know about?” the CO asked carefully. “People covertly visiting Miss Moon to have her read tea leaves and butcher chickens so that this Hexosehr technology will work. And now a monster cat that hunts some rodent I’ve never heard of. Anything else?”
“Nothing any CO needs to know, sir,” the COB replied.
“That was not a No, COB.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sigh…
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Weaver hit save and closed the form, then opened the next. But it was the usage estimate on food consumption… and he’d already done that one. Copy sent to the CO.
Weekly compilation of maintenance and repairs… No, that’s done. Sent.
Payroll… checked and sent to the CO.
He3 usage estimate…
He looked through his to-do list, knowing that there had to be something to do. He’d been running around the ship checking on repairs, fixing personnel problems, shouting at cooks and generally killing himself for the last three weeks. There was no way that he was…
“Christ,” Weaver muttered, running through the list. There wasn’t anything to do. He couldn’t ask the Eng for the spare parts inventory for at least another two days, there wasn’t a single department issue to “mediate” or otherwise deal with… “I don’t have anything to do.”
So what did an XO do when he was actually caught up on paperwork? Weaver thought back and decided that what his previous XOs had done was go out and find out what was wrong that wasn’t getting reported.
Which meant inspecting the entire ship until he found someone’s ass to chew.
He might actually find the door to his quarters.
“This is why you’ve been restricting the cereal ration?” Bill asked, holding up the box of generic breakfast cereal. A hole had been nibbled in the side and the cereal dribbled on the floor of the galley. “I thought you said that it was pilfering?”
“I run a clean galley,” Chief Duppstadt said mulishly.
Over two weeks, by daily abuse, Weaver had gotten Duppstadt to raise the quality of food to the level of “edible” if not “pleasant.” The reality of Naval regulations was that even the CO could not relieve a chief for simple incompetence unless it was mission threatening. And after looking at Duppstadt’s record, Bill figured out why Duppstadt was in the galley; it was on the one part of a ship that was not life-threatening. How he had made chief in the first place was the real question. How anyone had let him cook in the sub service, which was normally renowned for the quality of its food, was totally mind-boggling.
But now he had him dead to rights. Bill had asked him in a previous shouting session why he couldn’t at least provide cereal to the sailors, spacers, whatever, and the chief had told him, point-blank, that someone was pilfering. Bill had even assigned the Master-At-Arms to investigate.
What he had found, though, going through one of the supply lockers and not-at-all looking for his door, was that rats had been at the food. Rats. In his ship. This was what he got for spending so much time doing paperwork. Rats. In his ship.
“Chief, rats in the supplies are not a reflection on your galley,” Bill said, for once kindly. “If anything, they’re a reflection on me. But we need to get them tracked down. Have you set traps?”
“Yes, sir,” the chief admitted. “But they don’t go for them.”
Bill almost made the comment that if the chief was putting his food down as bait he could understand that but refrained.
“How are you baiting them?” Bill asked, biting his lip.
“Leftovers, sir,” the chief said. “But they don’t seem to be going for them.”
Must… keep… straight… face…
“Try something different, Chief,” Bill said. “I hear oatmeal and peanut butter works. Maybe some cereal. Cheese is, of course, traditional. Perhaps they’re not…” Connoisseurs? No that would be ARE connoisseurs… “meat eaters. And what’s the point of having a cat if he’s not catching the rats?”
“Won’t have that filthy beast in my galley, sir,” the Chief said, stoutly. “Won’t have it. Filthy things, cats. Lick their own butts.”
“Well, we need to get rid of them,” Bill said. “We only have so much food.”
He considered the problem, then shrugged.
“They can’t be hiding in the walls. They have to be in the compartments. I’ll get some hands down here to turn out the foodstocks and try to find them. And… where the food is stored away from the kitchen I’ll have Tiny participate. Maybe he can catch some of them.”
“Okay, this is maulk,” Sub Dude said, picking up the case of cans. “We’re rat-catchers, now?”
“Orders is orders,” Red said, picking up two cases with his Number Four lifting arm. “And I don’t want to be eating rat droppings.”
“Well, I don’t think there are any…” Gants said, then jumped back as a purple blur went past his feet. “What in the grapp was that?”
Tiny, though, had pounced at once, slipped a paw into a narrow crack between two boxes and fished out the creature. He flipped it out into the corridor and then chased after it.