Thbbft!

by BrianMullin0

The USS Boule Des Poils was cruising at half lightspeed (lightspeed lite, as its beer- obsessed engineer Jazz called it) when it received a most unusual energy signature while scanning a new asteroid belt they'd stumbled upon. Felines don't stumble, Cat'n Frizz Kibblebit reminded himself – not unless they were missing two out of four legs. Eight, if you were the bionically-enhanced Cat'Pilar. She was 'handy' when fixing machinery or carefully removing dangerously delicate minerals, alien artifacts, or racking up the kills in a laser pistol shootout.

It looked as if there were structural ruins on the second-to-largest asteroid – jackpot! The Feckin' Space Surfin' Scavengin' Tomcats (FSSST) were in a bit of a liquid asset shortage. Bare bones broke, to be precise. Or as his Sire was fond of saying, "Full o' shit an' no public litter box in sight." Any minerals or ore in this virgin belt would be welcome income, but space ruins of any kind was a guaranteed ticket to fortune, and very possibly fame.

The scan had picked up some high-priced possibilities: Nipsium, Tunacite and Salmonelline, and one large deposit of something radioactive but unknown. "Whizz, Taz, Buzz, and Floof – suit up. Take Carrier Two to begin extractions. I'm sending coordinates now. Pilar, Felix, Bill and Buffy come with me on Carrier One. Equip yourselves with body-cams. Pilar, bring sterile bags and your dig equipment – scans show there are ruins."

"Cat'n? Buffy's doing The Nap. She really ran herself into the ground when she did the Zoomies in zero-grav."

"That's insane!" Frizz yowled, "What was she thinking?"

"She thinks she's pregnant, Cat'n. Last planetary stop, she met this really sexy..." "I don't want to hear it. Let her sleep. She'll answer to all of us later."

"Ruins, huh? Way out here – that's gotta be one for the books," said Pilar, "That means we've either stumbled onto a chunk of what's left of a planet, or we had a space-faring race way out here."

"Maybe schools of starfish came this way, yeah, starfish..." mused Bill, licking his lips.

The four boarded the Carrier, landing on AB2346780-GHQ9 some ten minutes later. Frizz looked at his scanner, and led the way to a hole that led into what must have been an impressive mountain range in its day. Now it was the main feature of a desolate, cratered asteroid almost big enough to be a moon, if there'd ever been one near enough to snag it into its gravitational pull.

"Suit lights on half, guys. There's a hotspot coming up...holy queen of cats!" Team 2 stopped dead in their tracks. The tunnel had been about 7 feet high for the past 5 minutes, and suddenly opened up to a grand ceiling of 50 feet high. But it was the archway that caught their attention. Two huge statues flanked a pit that was at least as deep as the ceiling was high, and filled with what could best be described as teeth.

The statues were carved from lunar crystal; cat-headed, with the bodies of sheep and the legs and tails of dogs. Any feline would recognize them as the legendary Catsheepmut, a queen whose experiments in cross-species genetic engineering was said to have produced the first quadrupeds who walked alongside the bipedal humans, now long extinct. And should anyone from Team 2 manage to leap across, there was a city beyond the pit.

"You can breathe now," laughed Frizz. "I think our money problems are going to be a thing of the past.

"Cat'n, you should see this..." reported Pilar, shining her light on the ground in front of her. Frizz walked over to her, and looked down.

"Rat tracks!" he spat.

"Lots of them. They go to the edge, and there are many skewered rats down below, and from what I can make out, they continue on the other side. They were here, and recently too. Those dead bodies look fresh."

Frizz caught Bill licking his lips. "No, Bill, we are *not* dining on rat meat tonight. We have a treaty, and we will not be the ones to go down in infamy as the cats who broke it." He turned to Pilar, who was already making rubbings of the inscriptions on the statue's pedestals. "Any sign of rats making a claim on this place?"

"No, and they're notorious for ignoring paperwork in general," she snorted.

"How soon can we make an official claim?"

Felix answered, while taking close-up photos of the archway, "Microseconds to send it; but it's only when Intergalactic Customs gets a piece from here to verify the claim that it becomes 100% official."

The Cat'n scratched his chin, then his ear, and licked his paw. "Isn't that a bit..."

"Slippery? Easy to circumvent the true finders? Yes. Yes, it is." Pilar chuckled.

"Send the paperwork, now. Bill, take a chip from the pedestal. Go wake up Buffy, have her and Jazz take it to IC and verify that they have received the claim. Push the ship at maximum light speed, and ride a wormhole if you can. This is BIG, so let's not cough it up! Return to us when they leave."

Frizz changed channels on his comm. "Team 1, how's it going?"

"Floof here, Cat'n. We got all the tunacite, and are drilling for the salmonelline now. Couldn't find the nipsium."

Frizz shook his head. "Flooooof. C'mon, puss. Fess up. What happened to the nipsium? Just between you 'n me, okay? I won't breath a word to General Fuzzbutt."

"Whizz spent 20 minutes licking the first vein into oblivion, and he miscalculated the drill on his next set. The whole vein just crumbled and floated into space."

Frizz had forgotten that some branches of the orange tabby clans still had the recessive nip addiction gene. Well, it would come out of his paycheck, and then Frizz would send him to the Boarding Planet until he'd slept or worked off his cravings. It would surprise him if there wasn't a BP cell in which Whizz had left a pawprint.

"Once you get the salmonelline, tie Whizz to the outside of the Carrier and get your fuzzy rears over here. I need all mousers on my watch, please. Cat'n out."

Frizz said a prayer to Bastet, took a long running start and leapt. It felt as if he'd triggered a burst of compressed air from below, because he sailed across. When it came Pilar's turn, he was about to mention that when he thought better of it. Purrhaps it had been activated simply by the leap of faith he'd taken that he'd made it across?

The first building they entered had a couch and a small table on which were pamphlets that had photos of some neighborhood. It was Pilar who nailed it with the wry observation: "Marvelous Mehitabel, it's a damned real estate office. And they were selling plots for here!"

"Why would anyone buy a house on a feckin' asteroid?" Felix cried.

But Cat'n Frizz had his attention focused elsewhere. Namely, a door on the far end, a rocky wall with a small window at head height and a sign that read, "Employees Only." 'Felix, Pilar, come with me," he ordered.

Each flight of stairs going down had motion-sensitive lights, and after taking ten of them, the furry trio found themselves facing a dead-end and a door that said, 'Control Room.' It opened into a very familiar sight: a command deck, with a huge panoramic screen, two pilot's chairs and a view of space, as seen from the underside.

"It's not an asteroid, it's a ship!" said Pilar.

The pilot's chairs were occupied, however, by two Catsheepmut skeletons. And both had burn holes in their sternums.

A small, squeaky voice said from behind them, as electro-nets wrapped around their feline bodies, "For such a large carnivore, it's amazing that you have such tiny brains, and such limited capacity for reasoning."

"Can we nibble their tails off, Bastardly? Huh? Huh? Please, can we nibble their tails off?"

"Quiet, Mouseling! Is that all you can think of? Where's your higher intelligence, hm?"

Frizz controlled his urge to break free from his bonds – mainly because he'd fry his fur with it, and most of his skin. And also, because it would ruin his opportunity to bag himself a bounty...or a favor, if he played his cards right. "Rat Bastardly! Last I heard, you were making toothpicks in the Balsa Penitentiary. I see you still have one friend left."

Mouseling winked at him, twice with his left eye and once with his right. "Yes, we good friends. He gets the shinies, and I get to nibble on things. Some tasty, some not. Your tails be tasty things, methinks."

"Stop your chatter!" the Rat Man growled. "I knew this was a valuable ruin, but I never dreamed it was a ship. Thank you, old sourpuss. It's so nice to pay you back for what..."

As the loudmouth droned on, Frizz began to exploit the advantage Bastardly had unknowingly left for him. The Cat'n nodded at both Pilar and Felix, and hacked three times, as if he were coughing up a hairball. Frizz had a brain-controlled motion device in the one limb that a cat couldn't normally control. Most space surfin' cats did too (good space boards are hard to come by) and, because electro- nets have wide spaces, his tail was free to move.

He edged it slowly under the pilot's chair, until it was touching the ancient hand weapon that he hoped still functioned. He wrapped the tip tightly around the barrel, and hacked again. Embarrassing, but it worked.

"Great Cheese Graters, what's that?" shouted Mouseling, pointing behind the Rat Man.

Bastardly turned, giving Frizz just enough time to flip the weapon in the air, catch it with one hand and zap the Rat Man's arm off, the one holding the net controls. As Bastardly howled in agony, Mouseling pried the control box loose and freed the crew, then whacked Bastardly in the back of his head, rendering him unconscious.

"Felix, get the med kit from Pilar and patch up our Pi-Rat here, then put him in one of these lovely nets. I'm pretty sure Agent Fievel here would like to take him in to Contraband Retrieval HQ. Pilar, you photograph and documents and any star maps you find. When Floof and the rest get here, tell them everyone except Whizz can take a souvenir back to the ship. "

Fritz shook the undercover Agent's tiny hand. "Fancy meetin' you out here on the edge of nowhere. How long have you..."

"Three years. I swear, if anyone calls me Mouseling again, I will dismember them slowly with my teeth. This would have been quite a feather in your cap, Cat'n. Too bad..."

"Never jump to conclusions, my good fellow law-abiding scoundrel. Unless you've the paperwork in your hands or your computer files, this site has been registered for a good hour. The discovery of Queen Catsheepmut's interstellar ship will always be attributable to me and my crew."

"I'm surprised that you're not claiming it as salvage, Frizz. Leaving it to the Intergalactic Historical Museum is very, very generous."

After Fievel had relayed a command for the instant molecular transportation of himself and the prisoner, Frizz turned and shouted, "Of course, I never specified when I was leaving it, did I? Bye now!"

He looked at the ancient control console. He saw a brightly flashing button, and he considered a very obscure and ancient saying his widowed mother was fond of quoting. The question is: did it or didn't it?