There were still far more Lacu’un who urgently craved the boon of a cat than there were cats to fill the need. Thus far, none of SKitty’s female offspring had carried that rare gene for fertility—when one did, that one would go back to BioTech, to be treated like the precious object she was, pampered and amused, asked to breed only so often as she chose. There was always a trade-off in any gengineering effort; lack of fertility was a small price to pay in a species as notoriously prolific as cats.
Meanwhile, the proud parents were in the last stages of educating their current offspring. There was a pile of the dead vermin just in front of Vena’s desk; every so often, one of the half-grown kittens would bring another to add to the pile, then sit politely and wait for his parents to approve. Sometimes, when the pest was particularly large, SCat would descend from Dick’s lap with immense dignity, inspect the kill, and bestow a rough lick by way of special reward.
Dick couldn’t keep track of how many pests each of the kittens had destroyed, but from the size of the pile so far, the parents had reason to be proud of their offspring.
The kittens certainly inherited their parents’ telepathic skills as well as their hunting skills, for just as it occurred to Dick that it was about time for them to be fed, they scampered in from all available doorways. In a moment, they were neatly lined up, eight identical pairs of yellow eyes staring avidly from eight little black faces beneath sixteen enormous ears. At this age, they seemed to consist mainly of eyes, ears, paws and tails.
The Lacu’un servant whose proud duty it was to feed the weanlings arrived with a bowl heaping with their imported food. She was clothed in the simple, silky draped tunic in the deep gold of the royal household. The frilled crest running from the back of her neck to just above her eye-ridge stood totally erect and was flushed to a deep salmon-color with pleasure and pride. She started to put the bowl on the floor, and the kittens leapt to their feet and ran for the food—
But suddenly SCat sprang from Dick’s lap, every hair on end, spitting and yowling. He landed at the startled servant’s feet and did a complete flip over, so that he faced his kittens. As they skidded on the slick stone, he growled and batted at them, sending them flying.
“SCat!” Vena shouted, as she jumped to her feet, horrified and angry. “What are you doing? Bad cat!”
“No he’s not!” Dick replied, making a leap of his own for the food bowl and jerking it from the frightened servant’s hands. He had already heard SKitty’s frantic mental screech of :Bad food!: as she followed her mate off Dick’s shoulders to keep the kittens from the deadly bowl.
“The food’s poisoned,” Dick added, sniffing the puffy brown nodules suspiciously, as the servant backed away, the slits in her golden-brown eyes so wide he could scarcely see the iris. “SCat must have scented it—that’s probably one of the things Patrol cats are trained in. I can’t tell the difference, but—” as SKitty held the kittens at bay, he held the bowl down to SCat, who took a delicate sniff and backed away, growling. “See?”
Vena’s expression darkened, and she turned to the servant. “The food has been poisoned,” she said flatly. “Who had access to it?” They both knew that Shivari, the servant, was trustworthy; she would sooner have thrown herself between the kittens and a ravening monster than see any hurt come to them. She proved that now by her behavior; her crest-frill flattened, she turned bright yellow—the Lacu’un equivalent of turning pale—and replied instantly.
“I do not know—I got the bowl from the kitchen—”
She grabbed Vena’s hand and the two of them ran off, with Dick closely behind, still carrying the bowl. When they arrived at the kitchen, Vena and Shivari cornered all the staff while Dick blocked the exit. He had a fair grasp of Lacu’un by now, but Vena and Shivari were talking much too fast for him to get more than two words in four.
Soon enough, though, Vena turned away with anger and dissatisfaction on her face, while Shivari began a blistering harangue worthy of Captain Singh. “There was a new servant that no one recognized on staff this morning,” Vena said in disgust. “Obviously they were smart enough to keep him away from the food meant for people, but no one thought anything of letting him open up the cat food into a bowl.”
“Well, they know better now,” Dick replied grimly.
“I’ll put the Embassy on alert—and give me that—” Vena took the bowl from him. “I’ll have the Marines run it through an analyzer.”
Embassy guards by long tradition were called “Marines,” although they were merely another branch of the Patrol. Dick readily surrendered the poisoned food to Vena, knowing that if SCat could smell a poison, the forensic analyzer every Embassy possessed—just in case—would easily be able to find it. Relations with the Lacu’un were important enough that Vena had gone from being merely a trade advisor and titular Consul to a full-scale Ambassador, with the attendant staff and amenities. It was that promotion that had persuaded her to remain here instead of returning to her former position in the Scouts.
Dick himself went to the storage vault that held the imported cat-food, got a highly-compressed cube out, and opened it over a freshly washed bowl. The stuff puffed up to ten times its compressed size once it came into contact with air and humidity; it would be impossible to tamper with the packages without a resulting “explosion” of food. The entire feline family flowed into the kitchen as soon as his fingers touched the package; the kittens swarmed around his legs, mewling piteously, but he offered the bowl for SCat’s inspection before allowing them to engulf it.
His mind buzzed with questions, but two were uppermost—who would have tried to poison the kittens, and why?
* * *
SCat and SKitty herded their kittens along like a pair of attentive sheepdogs when they’d finished eating, following behind Dick as he left the palace, heading for the Embassy. The Marine at the entrance gave him a brisk nod of recognition, saving her grin for the moving black-furred flock behind him.
A second Marine at a desk just inside, skilled in the Lacu’un tongue, served double-duty as a receptionist. “The Ambassador is expecting you, sir,” he said. “She left orders for you to go straight in.”
Dick led his parade past the desk—a desk of cast marble reinforced with plastile, which would serve very nicely as a blast-and-projectile-proof bunker at need. The door to Vena’s office (a cleverly concealed blast-door) was slightly ajar; it sensed his approach and opened fully for him after a retinal scan.
“Have you ever wondered why our peaceful hosts happen to field a battle-ready army?” Vena asked him, without even a preliminary greeting.
“Ah, no, I hadn’t—but now that you mention it, it does seem odd.” Dick took a seat, cats pooling around his ankles, as Vena tossed her compuslate aside.
“Our hosts aren’t the sole representatives of their race on this dirtball,” Vena replied, with no expression that Dick could see. “And now they finally get around to telling me this. It seems that there is another nation entirely on this continent—we thought that it was just another fief of the Lacu’ara, and they never disabused us of that impression.”