4242: Fundamental Laws

Held in place by enormous steel couplers, the General Esteban Navarro dwarfed every explorer, medical transport, and freight slinger on the station docks. It was big enough, Ramon Galvez figured looking up at its nose from a port bar, that oncoming traffic could see it from a thousand miles away. He puffed on a cigarette and drank overpriced beer from one of those odd hourglass pints that were so popular in these places.

It was a hell of a ship, yessir. A little less than a kilometer long, though to be fair most of that length was made up by the strange matter drive. Bristling with laser cannons and rail guns and missile launchers and mine layers that weren't a hell of a lot of use unless you had somewhere real nice to hide. Ramon stubbed out his smoke in the ashtray, with more force than he intended.

The strange character who sat across the table noted Ramon's frustration. A tall, rugged human in his forties, the man had sat watching the Navarro's captain wordlessly and with obvious amusement. He was waiting for the right time to speak, waiting for Galvez to blurt something desperate and foolish. The man's name was Oswald, and unlike Ramon his sense of humor was palpable; it beamed from the small movements of his eyes when he cocked a brow or cracked a smile.

The two had met many times before. Sometimes it had been on friendly terms, other times they had been sworn enemies, always they had met to mediate a dispute or start a fresh one. Today, however, Ramon had come in with a problem and he couldn't be sure if it was Oswald's doing or something far more mysterious. If it wasn't the older man's fault, Galvez didn't know who else to blame.

"All right." Ramon said, exasperated, "Enough of the waiting game. Did you put the fucking cats in our storage bay?"

"Storage bay?"

"Most people would ask what I meant by cats."

"That ship of yours is an old warfighter from the days when Kal'selyn was a guest of the empire. It should have more than one storage bay."

"It has ten. One of them is full of cats."

"That sounds like the exact opposite of a problem to me."

"Did you do it? Did Kal'selyn order someone else to do it?"

"If I did, or she did, why would I tell you?"

"Obviously you want something. You must want something. Otherwise you've got a sick sense of humor."

"Again, I don't see why this is such a problem for you. My crew has some issues with cats--Jyscil over there is very allergic." Oswald nodded to one of the two goons he had brought along with him, a Mustellite with red eyes that seemed to glow from beneath her hood. "But since the human hystemic system is pretty much controlled by nanopills, I don't see how you couldn't just shut that sort of reaction off."

"Don't pretend you don't get the point. You dumped forty cats in one of my storage bays while we were moored at Iakammis. Why?"

"I didn't dump forty cats on you."

"What, they just spontaneously appeared?"

"Maybe. My ship's full of the cute little fuckers."

"What?"

"It's full of them. And the number fluctuates a lot. Any time we land we're bound to lose or gain a few. I don't know how they get there, I don't know how they feed themselves. I let them roam free. Free range kitties."

"Listen to me you son of a bitch--"

"Cats are a fact of the universe. There were cats on Ori Prime before the first human colonists arrived. Cats run around under the catwalks of hermetically-sealed colonies on Titan. Cats hitch rides from one end of the galaxy to the other, sometimes aboard ships where they shouldn't even be able to breathe.

"There are a few fundamental rules of the universe, Skipper Galvez. You can't get something from nothing. You can't hit absolute zero. Every ten-thousandth ship disappears into hyperspace and nobody knows why. And cats are everywhere."

Ramon didn't know how to come back from that one. He stared across the table at Oswald, the good-humored psychopath who had once, rumor has it, killed a crew that had risen up against Kal'selyn by kidnapping their children and demanding their suicide or else. Oswald, the man who mapped stars and explored distant planets when he didn't have any banks to rob, ships to pirate, or people to kill. Oswald, the man who had probably put forty fucking cats in Ramon's storage bay and said it was just physics, quit whining.

He didn't know how to come back from it. So he paid for their drinks, got up, and walked away. He had seventy-five crewmen, thirty mercenaries, and a bunch of adorable fluffballs to feed.