The Hunt for Red Fluffy Read online

  He needed a place to think where he wasn't being…judged? Watched? Dissected? Heckle never did any of those things and would let him be if he needed quiet. There. Maybe Heckle was a friend, yes? They always had fun during weapons training. Helped that Heckle was an excellent student, of course, and simply accepted everyone as they were. Unlike a certain pair of summer sky-blue eyes that never gazed at him with anything but unease.

  Something about him still made Ness twitchy and prickly. It wouldn't have mattered in any other circumstances. Ness was beautiful and quite rightly unattainable to someone like Julian. But in close quarters, a less-guarded relationship would've been preferable.

  Brimstone was well underway, at least, managing to get away from the station before any attack manifested. Julian considered that a win. Tracker destroyed meant their adversaries had been overconfident and had lost their advantage.

  He'd gotten as far as the top of the ladder leading into storage when his hindbrain pricked up its ears and whiskers. Something vibrated the deck plates under his feet. He barely had time to register it as a sub-audible growl when his instincts took over and flung him down the ladder, barely evading the swipe of one huge black-tipped paw. He hung by his right hand from a rung halfway down and risked a look up into glowing red eyes.

  "Nice kitty?"

  The eyes narrowed. Powerful shoulders lowered. The barbed tail twitched. Julian let go, dropped the rest of the way to the floor, and made a leap for the nearest pile of crates. A heavy thud and scrabble of claws on the decking announced the cat's otherwise silent pursuit. At the top of the crate pyramid, Julian ran out of space to flee. He might have managed the leap to the next pile of crates, but that particular might have loomed large, accompanied by possible broken bones.

  Fluffy prowled up the crates at her leisure, her burning gaze never leaving him. She knew she'd won and had no need to hurry.

  Desperate, Julian looked up and found another route. It wasn't that he couldn't handle a hellcat, but this was his friend's cat, and shooting it would've been poor form indeed. The option of being ripped to pieces didn't appeal, either. Instead, he leaped and swarmed up into the ceiling girders, shimmying along a beam until he was out of reach.

  "Heckle?" While he didn't expect an answer—Heckle would've said something by now—it was worth a shot. Below him, the cat rose up on her hind legs and swiped at the air, her scream of frustrated rage raising the hairs along Julian's arms. "Ms. Ivaaaaana!"

  That didn't sound like yelling for Mom. Not at all. But Ivana was his best option, since he couldn't get to the comm pad by the door and couldn't patch into ship's systems without a free hand.

  "No need to yell, Agent Cutie Pie," the ship's AI purred through the speakers. "Ms. Ivana sees all. Captain Hot Stuff is on his way down."

  "Oh, good. Thank you." Julian shifted his grip, unwelcome memories surfacing of trying to hide in the boarding-school roof beams from bullies as a child. He hadn't thought about that in decades. Though Fluffy was just acting as her nature predicated and would never taunt Julian with a name and pronoun that wasn't his. "Not that I really need help."

  "Of course not, sweetie. We just don't want the pretty kitty getting hurt."

  To prepare for Shax's arrival, Julian shimmied along the girder until he hovered over the next stack of crates, with the cat snarling her disapproval. She clawed at the straps securing her pyramid of crates, shredding them one by one. As soon as the demon prince had his pet distracted, Julian could get his feet back under him on a stack she wasn't destabilizing and flee if necessary.

  Good plan. Which was why everything chose that moment to go wrong.

  A heavy thud shook the compartment, strong enough for Julian to lose his grip and fall heavily onto the top of the crate directly beneath him. A second concussion nearly made him tumble from the stack.

  We're under fire. I should—

  A piercing beep came from the comm system, followed by Verin's bellow, "Going Copernicus now to outrun these fuckers! Thirty seconds to strap in or grab a friend and hope real hard!"

  "Unholy shit," Julian muttered under his breath, his body moving before he had the chance to tell it. He half-leaped, half-plummeted down the crates to the decking—never mind what the damn cat was doing—and wedged himself into the barely adequate space between crate stacks. "Cat! If you don't want to be a smear on the wall, get down here!"

  Another strike rocked the ship. If Julian knew ordinance—and he did—they were short-range plasma, probably from a QR320 cannon or newer. Quite expensive. Though if one of those had hit straight on, there would've been considerably less Brimstone, so Ver was doing some fancy flying. A creak came from above, and Julian glanced up in time to catch Fluffy in a last, desperate attempt to stay atop her crate pile as the whole thing shifted, broken mooring straps and all.

  The crates tumbled, clattering and thudding to the decking directly outside Julian's hiding spot, creating a cave shape that effectively blocked out most of the light. The alarms began to sound. Fluffy lay on her side in the tunnel created by the loose crates. Copernicus acceleration would shift those crates hard, and Fluffy, too, and she would be an ex-hellcat in short order.

  Julian cursed himself for a softhearted fool, low-crawled out to the cat, dragged her back to the relative safety of his niche, unwound a climbing cable from his belt, secured it around her, then himself, and fastened it to the moorings on either side. Best he could do on short notice.

  Risky on several levels, not the least of which was the possibility that she would bite his head off when she woke. The thrusters kicked, slamming cat and ISE agent into the crates, then back the other way as they entered Copernicus space. Julian clung to the cat's neck, buried his face in the fur of her shoulder, and hung on for all he was worth.

  Finally, the transition ended and the familiar chirrup-thunk of the Brimstone's Copernicus drive vibrated the deck plates gently. Shax referred to the sound as a cricket with a wooden leg, but Julian had no experience of crickets to gauge the accuracy of the comparison. A different sort of vibration rumbled more directly against Julian. It took him a moment. Fluffy was purring.

  Other sounds filtered through when he lifted his head. The pounding of deck boots in the corridor above, accompanied by cursing chief among them.

  "Imp shit, imp shit, imp shit!" That would be Shax. The hatch to the storage compartment flew open. "Fluffy!"

  "Julian?" And that was Ness. Interesting.

  "We're both here," Julian called back. "Behind the pile of loose crates, not under it."

  "Oh, thank all the flaming pits!" The breathy sigh was a little overdramatic for anyone not Shax. "Get the loader arms working and, ah, dig them out."

  "I've got it, Captain!" Heckle called out from somewhere farther inside the room.

  "Why weren't these crates secured?" Shax's words whip-snapped through the air.

  "Not Heckle's fault!" Julian rushed to intervene, envisioning Heckle wilting under the unjust criticism. "They were secured. Your new kitty clawed through the straps."

  "Ah. My apologies, Heck!"

  Ness called over the whine and clank of robotics, "Are you both all right?"

  "I think so? A little bruised and banged around, but I think we're both whole." Julian pushed Fluffy's head away when she licked his face. "Stop that. I'm trying to…"

  He trailed off and turned to stare at her. She flicked her ears at him, batted at his jacket, and licked his chin.

  "So we're friends now, is that it? Since I saved your tail?"

  Fluffy butted her head against his chest, purring. The denizens of Hell didn't usually have friends, Shax had said. They made alliances. While Shax and Julian were friends despite everything, Heckle offered friendship to every being he could, and Julian's relationship with Verin ran more toward "familiarity breeds both trust and friendly contempt," he realized with an inward start that he'd forged his first actual infernal alliance.

  "All right, fuzzy butt, I officially declare us on the same side. No
w don't bite me while I get us untangled from the cable."

  She didn't interfere beyond the occasional bat at the carabiner end each time it came around, and soon enough, crates moved out of the way to reveal the worried faces waiting beyond the avalanche zone. Julian rose carefully in case he wasn't as whole as he claimed, then walked toward Shax's outstretched arms…

  Which he realized weren't for him when Shax went to one knee to hug his cat. "There's my Fluffykins. My pretty fuzzy-wuzzy. Papa Ness and I were worried."

  "Always good to know where I stand." Julian's laugh sounded hollow even in his own ears. If anyone had asked about the ache in his chest right then, he would've told them it was heartburn. Yes. Just a bit of a nutritional disagreement.

  Ness didn't even try to hide his eye roll toward the ceiling. "Ms. Ivana had just let us know where you were when the alarms sounded. Since there's nowhere to secure yourself down here, we worried."

  We were worried or you were worried? Stop it, Parallax. Not the time. "Thank you. Do we know anything yet?"

  "Not yet. Needed to account for everyone first, since that was all rather, ah, sudden. Wasn't it Fluffy-wuffy?" Shax rubbed his face against the cat's before he stood. "We got away, though, and Ver's headed us somewhere off the usual shipping lanes. So now's the time for sorting the pieces."

  "He does know where he's going, though? Doesn't he?" Ness's wings ruffled in an agitated way.

  Shax gave him a too-bright smile that didn't reassure anyone. "Ms. Ivana's helping. Don't worry. Let's convene in the galley in fifteen and we'll see where we are."

  The cat followed Shax as he climbed back up the ladder, though she gave Julian a prrru-mre on her way past. While she didn't climb the ladder, she managed it easily with a leap and a back-paw launch from a rung halfway up to reach the top.

  "I'll help you re-secure the crates, Heck," Julian offered after Ness had followed Shax out of the hold.

  Heckle bounded around the newly piled containers with replacement straps but stopped to regard Julian in his earnest way. "We're in trouble, aren't we?"

  "Odds are good." Julian shrugged, going for an outward nonchalance to avoid frightening Heckle. "But I don't recall odds ever bothering Captain Shax too much."

  Shax considered the universally worried faces surrounding him, and they were all worried, in spite of incidental ancillary expressions. Verin—pissed off and worried. Ness—impassive but with the little crinkle between his eyebrows that said worried. Heckle—twisting his tail in both hands hard enough he might break it off. Julian—that ironic curl of lips that clearly said, What now, tough guy? Worried.

  His next words could make or break morale.

  "Well, that was fun, wasn't it?"

  The solid wall of unbelieving stares wasn't the response he'd been looking for.

  "Ahem." Adopting a more serious expression, Shax turned to address the speakers in the galley. "Ms. Ivana, do we have a damage assessment?"

  "The nasty old plasma raked us, but no hull breaches, Captain Hot Buns. Engines and guidance are undamaged."

  "But? I hear a but in those statements."

  "Our itty-bitty aft gun is out of commission, Captain."

  Shax rubbed his palms over his temples. That gun—far from itty-bitty—was the Brimstone's only defensive weapon. They'd always operated under the rather prudent assumption that a ship Brimstone's size shouldn't be engaging in firefights, so he'd never added additional armaments.

  "All right. Not a disaster, all things considered. We're all alive and well away." The slot beside the galley table opened, and several mugs trundled out on the conveyor. Shax grabbed his current black-and-red one, took a sip of his bourbon and coffee, and closed his eyes on a contented sigh. "Thank you, Ms. Ivana. You always know how to make it better."

  "You're welcome, sweetie. Always such a gentleman."

  A few minutes ticked by as everyone claimed their mugs and sipped their respective drinks. Even Nicodemus the spacer rat and Max the millipede had tiny mugs of warm milk.

  "It don't make no sense, Cap, if you don't mind my sayin' so," Corny finally broke the silence.

  "I don't mind. Pray, continue, Mr. DeGroot." Say what we're all thinking.

  "Well, now, seems to me it was mighty convenient that someone leaves a present only you had a right to." Corny leaned back against the wall, arms crossed over his chest.

  "The point's been made, yes."

  "So whatever varmint left her made for damn sure they could track her. Goes to all that trouble to be sure she's marked and left for you so's they could follow us wherever we went, then waits behind some space rocks to bushwhack us when we came off station?"

  "It does seem unlikely behavior. Though Fluffy's acquisition and the attack could have been unrelated events." All eyes turned to the beautiful hellcat curled up by Shax's feet.

  "But you don't believe that, do you, Cap?" Mac rumbled.

  "I don't have enough informa—"

  Verin cut him off with a snarl. "Don't even fucking say it, Shaxy. We all feel it. Looks like we walked out of a troll shit trap, but it feels like we're walking into the real one. Deny it and I'll put you through the damn wall."

  "Er, no need for that." Shax edged away just in case. "That was some damn fine flying, Ver. You can't deny that, either. It wasn't as if we were meant to get away. Though speaking of— Do we have any ID on the firing ship?"

  Julian cleared his throat and tapped the table's display on. "Ms. Ivana managed some vid. It's a little fuzzy, but clear enough, I think."

  The image, which was rather shoddy resolution since Brimstone's optics had been undergoing some violent shaking at the time, showed the prow of a sleek, nasty little ship, and on her hull, a mark. A symbol. It looked like the black rook from a chess set.

  "Duomo," Ness breathed out in an arctic whisper.

  "Ah. Stands to reason." Shax nodded, trying to get his brain turning.

  Mac drummed his fingers on the table. "Wanna fill us latecomers in, Cap?"

  It's not as if you didn't know it was coming. Things have been too peaceful, after all. "Federico and Achille Duomo run… ran a sophisticated fencing operation. A criminal empire all their own. I put it in the past tense, since apparently, Federico murdered Achille, who was the reasonable, sane one. I did business with them from time to time, until I did something unforgiveable to Federico."

  "Did you steal from him? Or maybe cheat him, Papa?" Leopold piped up. "And now he hates you?"

  "I did worse." Shax grimaced around a sip of coffee. "I humiliated him."

  Ness patted his hand. "It was a joint effort, love."

  "Doesn't precisely make it better, since he also hates you specifically, with rather specific malice." Shax heaved a steadying breath. "But he can't follow us into C-space. He's lost his tracking. Though I have my doubts that the ship held Federico himself. That was a sleek clipper, not the vast, ungainly lump of his flagship, Pinochet. For now, we have a bit of a respite. Can we repair the gun, Ms. Ivana?"

  "It's slagged, hon. I'd have to build a whole new one, and that kind of fabrication's too hard on a girl's nails out here. Not happening, sorry."

  No, if the housing had melted, Shax understood that Ivana didn't have that level of manufacturing ability onboard. If that had been the case, the Brimstone could've had several guns.

  When Shax looked up from the depths of his coffee again, he found everyone watching him, each with their own variation of expectancy. "They've been quiet since the Poe house. Staring at the board. Plotting. We still hold the high ground, though. Their opening hand failed."

  Mac snorted. "You really should get fined every time you mix your metaphors that badly, Cap."

  As everyone left the galley for various duties and so on, Shax caught hold of Ness's hand to prevent his exit. His angel gave him a quizzical look, waiting until everyone had cleared the room before asking, "Everything all right, love?"

  "Certainly not. I've put my crew and ship in peril. More peril than usual, at any rate."
<
br />   Ness offered a soft smile. "You're only now realizing this?"

  "Ness…" Shax gripped both his hands. "You know if I thought any of you would go that I'd send you somewhere safe, yes? Back home to my mother, where no one could get at you?"

  "I know. I do." Ness lifted their joined hands to kiss Shax's knuckles. "But Verin can't go back, so Corny wouldn't. And a demon palace is no place for Heckle. And our son is as stubborn as you are and certainly wouldn't go. And your mother wouldn't take Mac in out of old prejudices. And I'm never leaving you, no matter what you say."

  "And Julian?"

  The smile vanished, replaced by a worried frown. "Julian could go."

  "My angel, do you still hate him so much?" I know you don't, but far too many things lurk behind your eyes that you won't say whenever Julian's in the room.

  "No. No, of course not." Ness actually squirmed. "He's your friend. How could I hate him? But he's human and more destructible than the rest of us. He'd be safe at ISE headquarters, wouldn't he?"

  Shax tipped his head in acknowledgment. "Most likely. But Julian is Julian. He would never stay there. Besides, the rest of us, barring Corny, might be essentially immortal, but we're all quite destructible. Are you worried about Julian in particular for some reason?"

  "What? No. That is, not beyond the fact that he's more vulnerable here." Ness looked at every spot in the galley except Shax, and wasn't that telling?

  Oh my darling angel, my own. I hope desperately that what I think is happening is happening, but if I push too hard now… Of course he would settle for Ness and Julian being friends, but Shax was greedy by nature, and his little black heart sped at every hint that it might be developing into more. Possibly. Though he could be misreading the situation, and this was something Ness had to arrive at on his own, if that was where he was heading.