Chapter 8

Chapter 8

T hey’re all going to die. All going to die…

Despite the flying cat in her room, Primula was pretty sure she was awake, not dreaming. That meant Trafford shouldn’t still be in her head, but she’d been hearing him more often since getting approval to go to Delta. Maybe because it was so quiet on the space ship, her memories conjured up his voice to fill the silence.

Unlike Eden, where everyone was always there, living, working, laughing, all on top of one another, like a small city that never slept. Like the nascent colony on Mars, the destination she’d never reached. Everyone working together to build a new world, a better one than the one they’d come from.

Could Delta be better then Earth? Or Tito, the planet the Titans had come from? She’d never thought to ask one of the Titans about their home. Maybe she should ask Daedalus. She’d heard some of the others say he was a Titan, though he looked as Human as herself or Anna. Then again, Orel had looked Human, too, until he’d used that experimental burn salve and turned himself green for a few weeks. The common room had been full of jokes about little green men for weeks, until he’d quit to go work at Forge, the club in Metropolis City that made the fizz she liked so much.

Ugh, now her mind was wandering again. She should be thinking about fish, not former colleagues. She flipped up the lid on the first tank and dialled up a diagnostic on her tablet. The dataloggers in the tank took a moment to send her the report, before she scrolled through the data. Turbidity, pH and temperature were all fine…most of the parameters were within acceptable limits. In fact, the only numbers that had changed since they came aboard were population numbers – this tank was missing four fish.

No, that couldn’t be right. The lid had been closed – the only way she could have lost fish was if they’d perished, and then they’d either be floating or down at the bottom of the tank. With water this clear, she’d have no problem spotting dead fish. But there was nothing to see except live fish, endlessly swimming.

Primula asked her tablet for a recount. That would take a few minutes, but it was better to retest than to panic prematurely. Computers were as fallible as people – just ask the Titans, who’d apparently had to flee their planet because of a rogue, genocidal AI. At least that had never happened on Earth.

A shadow moved in the corner of her eye, and Primula spun just in time to avoid being clocked by the flying cat’s wing as it zoomed past her into a fresh cloud of moths, clustered up near the heat lamp.

Not for long. The creature was a moth munching machine, making short work of the bugs before it perched on the edge of the tank to finish crunching through its second course of the morning. It was so busy eating, it didn’t even seem to notice its tail was dangling in the water. A hundred hungry fish weren’t so oblivious, though – they knew splashes at the surface meant food.

“Get out of the water!” Primula cried, trying to shoo the cat away.

The creature had to be deaf. It didn’t have any ears on top of its head, after all.

Then one of the fish took a tentative nibble of the cat’s tail.

A loud yowl erupted from the creature, before it whacked the offending fish clear across the tank. The fish lay stunned on the surface for a moment, before it regained its senses and swam away. The cat licked its injured tail, then the paw it had smacked the fish with. It considered for a moment, before turning its gaze on the tank. No, on the fish swimming in the tank. It wiggled its butt, the way cats did when they were preparing to pounce.

“No, you can’t hunt my fish!” Primula snapped, pushing the cat off the edge with one hand as she reached for the lid with the other.

Just as she managed to get the tank closed, her computer beeped to signal that it had finished its report. Five fish were missing.

The flying cat burped, retched, then yorped up a mess of moth wings and what looked suspiciously like fish scales.

“Bad cat! You’re not allowed to eat my fish!”

But the earless wretch just sat there, bathing itself like it had done nothing wrong.

Primula bundled the creature up in her arms, and marched off to find the pilot to tell him to keep his ship’s cat away from her precious cargo.