The Hunt for Red Fluffy Read online

  "They're away!" Shax crowed. "Our turn, Ver!"

  "About fucking time. Firing up the Copernicus."

  Shax had half a moment to feel inordinately pleased before he grabbed Verin's arm. "Oh no. Wait. Look."

  As the ship turned, one sad remaining glow appeared in the viewscreen—one last octopus spacer who had missed their ride and now floated in vacuum with an aimless stillness that often accompanied no longer living spacers.

  "Shaxy, no. So much fucking no."

  "We can't just leave them out there."

  "Pretty fucking sure we can."

  "But we're not." Shax hurried to unbuckle with one hand as he hit the comm with the other. "Julian, I'm coming down. I need the retrieval arms unshipped. Emergency EVA retrieval." Fluffy yowled as he half-lifted, half-shoved her onto the jump seat behind the copilot's station and webbed her in. "And you stay here with, Ver, Fluffums. No running about the corridors right now."

  "Make it fast, your ridiculous highness. I can't keep dodging these shitheads forever."

  To that end, Shax ran, skidding around corners and pounding down the corridors to the airlock. Ness had arrived ahead of him—not terribly shocking, but so had Leopold. How did he…? Never mind. I don't want to know.

  "Gentlemen, I don't think I need you all here." Shax squeezed by Ness to get to the airlock control.

  "You don't know what you're bringing on board, love." Ness said it gently, but steel glinted in his eyes.

  "Fair enough, I suppose. Julian? How are we doing?"

  Julian hadn't turned from where he'd thrust his hands into the retrieval arms' controls, eyes glued to the guidance screen. "Nearly there." Another shudder jerked through the ship. "Just need the ship steady for a few seconds more."

  "Good man." Shax realized he'd whispered the words as he kept watch over Julian's shoulder. It wasn't as if his voice would actually break Julian's concentration, never that. But pulling in an unconscious body with the padded claws was a horrifically delicate operation. One false move, one wrong twitch, and the rescuee's suit would tear. Whispering was appropriate to the occasion.

  "On my mark, Captain." Julian's soft voice was uncharacteristically strained as the glowing suit inched toward the ship. "Steady…steady…now!"

  Shax slammed his fist onto the outer airlock control, trying to will the damn iris to open faster. Then the retrieval arms maneuvered into the airlock to deposit their catch, and Shax fumbled the grab on the lock's safety harness the first time. Cranking back and trying a second time took an eternity. Finally, the octopus spacer was secure, the retrieval arms disengaged, and the outer airlock sealed again with their rescuee safely webbed in the cushioned emergency alcove inside the airlock proper.

  "Ver, we're clear! Go, go, go!"

  Julian's head jerked around. For three heartbeats, they stared at each other. "Shax…did you just tell Verin to jump to C-space with all of us standing in the airlock access?"

  "I…did."

  For one more stricken moment, Shax stood frozen. Then he surged through the lot of them, tucking Leopold under his arm like a football as he raced past, and sprinted for the nearest cross-corridor and one of the emergency alcoves. Ness arrived directly after, then Julian rounded the corner and nearly skidded into him. They glanced at Shax in the alcove, side-eyed each other, looked back at Shax…

  Panicked, Shax pulled out the royal voice. "Get in here, the pair of you! This is no time for silliness!"

  It was good to see that the voice still worked in emergencies. Both security officer and government assassin scrambled into the alcove. There was a bit of jockeying for position as Shax secured the webbing over all four of them, and he eventually ended up holding Leopold to his chest while sandwiched between Ness and Julian, who were both holding him.

  Socially awkward perhaps, but forcing certain people into close proximity could only be a good thing. Though he hadn't planned it, no one could have accused him of a lack of ulterior motives. Even if someone was growling. Shax couldn't quite tell who, since the claxons had kicked on, and any thought became something of a moot point after that as acceleration kicked in. Squashed yes, but the position between Ness and Julian was giving Shax all sorts of ideas that could only lead to trouble, so he carefully thought about the day long ago that he'd spent mucking out his mother's Nightmare stables. This became more difficult when Julian's knee became wedged between his thighs, and Ness's unmissable erection ended up poking him in the hip. Rather delicious torture that Shax had to keep to himself since no one had agreed to it.

  When the ship's gravity had sorted itself out again, with the wooden-legged cricket sound of the Copernicus drive chirp-thumping in the background, Shax tried to move an arm.

  "Papa, I am squished." Leopold's voice came muffled from Shax's collarbone. "Could we leave the alcove now? I'm a pink pancake."

  "I'm trying, my dear, but this alcove was really designed for one person. Could one of you gentlemen manage to reach the release, please?"

  After a bit of grunting, cussing and additional squishing—and someone's hand on Shax's ass, but he wasn't going to complain about that—the webbing released to wind back into its slot in the wall. Leaving the alcove was as much of a fall as a scramble.

  Shax placed his son on the floor, ran a hand through hair that desperately needed a brush, and hit the comm. "Ver? Heading?"

  "For Ms. Ivana's not populated planet. And you're fucking welcome."

  "Amazing flying, Ver. You've saved our proverbial asses once again."

  "Pretty sure I saved our actual asses."

  Ignoring Verin's comment, Ness's eye roll, and Julian's snicker, for which he felt he deserved a blue ribbon in Competitive Ignoring, Shax strode back toward the airlock with the comm still open. "Corny, Heck, Mac, I need you in the cargo bay in five. Gentlemen, we have a visitor whom I very much hope is still alive."

  With Ness gently removing their visitor from the airlock and carrying them just as carefully, they all arrived in the hold at more or less the same time, with Fluffy following Corny down from the pilot's pod. They didn't dare touch the seals on the visitor's suit, especially since it still glowed, which possibly indicated life.

  After a cursory examination of the suit, Mac sat back on his heels with a dark frown. "Suit's leaking. It's a small one along one of the, ah, tentacle seams, but I don't think I can seal it."

  "Some kind of cement? Glue?" Shax suggested, though he knew better than to offer such stupidly simple solutions.

  Mac shook his head. "The suit's full of fluid. No way to know if any seal I'd use might contaminate it without a barrier."

  "Fluid? What sort of fluid?" Shax could feel his brain gnawing on something. He just couldn't see it yet.

  "Looks to be mainly saline." Mac stared at some meter or other he'd produced from one of his many pockets. "Ms. Ivana? A little help with composition here?"

  Ivana, with a direct link-up to all Mac's meters and gauges, crooned, "Oh, it has some fabulous calcium and magnesium accessories. Just a splash of arsenic."

  "Are we in a position to replicate it, Ms. Ivana?" I'm not going to let this happen. No. This lovely, graceful creature can't die, leaking out all over my deck.

  "Easy as apple crumb pie, Cappy-poo."

  Shax tapped his fingers on the seam of his pants, staring at the ceiling as he searched for a thought. "All right. Good."

  "Cap?" Corny pushed his hat back on his head so he could look up from where he crouched by the slow leak. "We still got any of the fishbowls from the frogs?"

  Fishbowls…ah, the tanks. "Heck, did we get rid of the old plexi tanks that used to be in storage?"

  "There…" Heckle was twisting his tail hard. Not a good sign. "A lot of them were broken, Captain. I…um… took apart the ones that weren't and…and crated the panes."

  Mac tilted his head toward Heckle. "You still have the connectors, little bit?"

  "Um…yes? In the crates?"

  One huge hand on Heckle's shoulder had him turned and propell
ed in the direction of storage, imp legs running to keep up with Mac's purposeful strides. A bit apart from the crew, but Shax couldn't help noticing a good line of sight on their visitor, Julian cocked his head in that curious raptor way he had.

  "Frogs… Frogs…" Realization dawned on Julian's face with a little smile. "Oh, yes. Those frogs."

  "Yes, those frogs." Ness nodded, his expression altogether too blank.

  Shax's nerves twitched at every repetition. "Could we please stop saying the F word? If you don't mind terribly, thanks much."

  Any other time, he would've been happy to examine the phenomenon of Julian and Ness working together to tweak his nerves. On any other subject. Again, a highly developed talent for ignoring snickers was vital to being a ship's captain. It helped, of course, that Mac and Heckle returned quickly, and all hands were needed to assemble the tank quickly and pipe in the modified water to Ms. Ivana's specifications. Shax frowned at the finished piece. Not as big as he'd hoped, though their visitor wasn't any bigger than Heckle. He just hoped the octopus spacer, if they regained consciousness, wouldn't see it as a prison cell.

  Gently, Ness lifted the visitor and eased them into the tank where the still-suited octopus spacer immediately looked less…dead as they floated in the green-tinted water.

  "Well done, gentlemen. All we can do for now, I'm afraid." Shax turned until he spotted Fluffy curled up asleep on a packing crate. "And now, let's figure out how those pit-reeking bastards found us."

  Chapter Four

  Julian cleared his throat, hoping he wasn't about to be skewered for withholding information. But to his everlasting shame, he hadn't thought of it until the second attack. "I…have some thoughts about that."

  "And no one's at all surprised," Ness muttered just loud enough for Julian to hear.

  Shax gave his lover a hard side-eye. "Lovely. Please share."

  "I'd rather not just yet." In case I'm wrong. It'll only worry you. "But I need a sample of your kitty cat's blood and an atomic-level magnifier."

  "That…wasn't what I was expecting." Shax stared at him, waiting for Julian to break, to explain, then he shrugged. "I'll get the blood, Mac, if you provide the instrumentation."

  Blood from a hellcat sounded like one of those items a mythological hero was tasked to retrieve by someone who never wanted him to come back. But Shax managed it by snuggling up to his sleeping cat, doing a lightning-fast retrieval from the large muscle in Fluffy's back leg, and getting away with only a minor scratch on his arm when she roared and swiped out blindly.

  "Sorry, sweetie." Shax leaned down and kissed the top of her head. "Just that once."

  "You really can steal anything." Julian took the little vial with a grin.

  In years past, he would've followed up with a kiss, but Ness watched his every move again like a starving eagle. Having a head still attached where it should be was something Julian wanted to hold onto a while longer. He didn't mind Ness watching him, not exactly. Ness had the face of, well, an angel, and the body and beautiful wings to go with it. But there was that odd shift tugging at Julian again that something had changed recently. The long stares full of suspicion and barely checked anger had turned into something else, and Julian was uncomfortable not knowing what that was.

  And now you're getting distracted. He shook himself back into full situational awareness as he trailed Mac to his workspace.

  "Magnifier's in the corner." Mac waved a hand at the far side of the room. "I have a bad feeling I know what you're looking for, Julian. I hope I'm wrong."

  "I try not to hope too much. Saves unpleasant surprises." Julian slid onto the stool by the counter and loaded the vial into the magnifier.

  It was blood of the usual sort found in oxygen-breathing Earth mammals. Was it odd that hell mammals were that similar to their terrestrial counterparts? Probably not. All the same planet, after all. Corpuscles, lymphocytes, all the…aha. What's this? Trying to be terribly coy and hiding amid the platelets, Julian spotted them as he increased the magnification. Tiny constructs that looked like scout landers for inhospitable planets.

  "As Ness likes to say, no one is surprised," Julian muttered with his eyes glued to the viewer.

  "What are we not surprised about?"

  He turned to find Shax leaning in the doorway. "Your new kitty has nanite trackers." Julian held up a finger when Shax opened his mouth. "Which Ms. Ivana didn't find because you didn't ask her to look for them."

  "Not something one thinks of in everyday situations," Shax said with his darkest frown.

  "My dear, handsome prince, there are no everyday situations around you. Your next question—I see it brewing—is how do we get rid of them?" Julian heaved a sigh. "We don't. Her immune system's already destroying them, but it's going to take a few days. Unless you get rid of the cat, we're trackable."

  In some things, demon princes were entirely predictable. "She's mine!" Shax snarled, his horns picking up an ominous glow.

  "Notice that I didn't say, 'Get rid of her.' I'm just telling you how the Duomo goons have been finding us."

  "Quite. Yes." Shax turned to his engineer. "We truly don't have a way to get rid of the little beasties?"

  Mac shrugged, the heaving of a small mountain range. "Don't think anything I could do would be any faster, Cap."

  "Ah. Well." Shax brightened. "We'll simply have to keep ahead of them, then, won't we?"

  "Of course." Julian returned the smile, since he knew Shax was doing his best to hide his anxiety. "When we get planetside, I might have some ideas about that, too."

  "Would have been shocked if you didn't." Shax gave his shoulder a pat. A kiss would've been better, of course, but at least the "unspoken several feet of space between them" rule seemed to be relaxing. "We'll all spill our ideas on the table later."

  That was that. Any other captain would've had some sharp questions, and there probably would've been some bellowing and possibly shrieking in a similar situation. Shax, though? Shax still considered himself the most dangerous thing in the room in most circumstances. The gears spun without rest. Unless frogs were involved.

  With the captain's departure, a definite sense that Mac wanted his space back permeated the room. Julian gave the giant engineer a mock salute and wandered off, meandering the ship's corridors, thinking. Not planning. That was done—the easy part.

  Mostly, he had been enjoying this assignment. He had backup, people he could trust. That in itself was a rarity. He had a place to sleep where he wasn't on constant alert for ambush. He had regular meals. The extended exposure to the same set of people got to him, though. Shax was as familiar as Julian's own hand, and if he was honest, he still loved his prince. Verin was still the same old grump—predictable, reliable. But there were so many new crew members, so many prickles and social pitfalls that being dangerously charming just wasn't enough after months in close quarters.

  Corny had been kind to him, Leopold seemed to tolerate him well enough, Heckle was always sweet, but Julian didn't think any of the others particularly liked him. And when did Agent Parallax start worrying about people liking him? Oh, yes. When he'd started worrying about the good opinion of fallen angels. One fallen angel. One prickly, possessive, fiercely loyal, dream-hauntingly beautiful… Not again. Stop. You're far past old enough to know you can't always have what you want.

  His feet had taken him back to the cargo hold where he leaned his elbows on the railing at the top of the stairs, unwilling to disturb what was happening below. The rescued spacer floated free in the cobbled-together tank, conscious now and well enough to have pulled their vacuum suit off. Free of coverings, the overall effect was astonishingly like an old Earth octopus. From what Julian recalled of pictures, perhaps the head was a bit more spheroid, but the overall shape screamed cephalopod.

  Corny had Rosa out of her stall to brush her, maybe to keep from staring at their guest, while Leopold had no such inhibitions and sat directly in front of the tank, watching without blinking. What their guest thought about all
this was difficult to say, though Julian had to admit that the octopus person had every reason to be frightened witless. Maybe the rhythmic tucking and untucking of the arms was a sign of agitation or discomfort, but then an arm would sneak out, tentatively exploring the material of the tank or testing the air above the water.

  After a few more of those testings, Leopold pulled a draw screen out of his backpack and, stylus firmly clutched in his pink paw, began to sketch. Julian wasn't at the best angle to see the drawing, but he didn't want to interrupt the tableau by clanking down the stairs. After a good deal of intense sketching, Leopold turned the screen to show the octopus, patted the deck plates, and pointed to the sketch.

  Sliding sideways and craning, twisting his head a bit, Julian made out a passable sketch of the Brimstone from the port side. The octopus person floated as close to the glass as possible to examine the sketch, then three arms shot out of the tank and over the side, reaching for the screen. The transfer from hedgehog hands to octopus arms was done gingerly, further slowed by Leopold demonstrating the screen's functions, but the octopus person had the basics within seconds and drew at dizzying speed, stylus clutched with the tip of one arm.

  When they turned the screen back to Leopold, it showed an excellent rendering of the octopus spacers' home ship. One arm tip pointed to the screen, then to the octopus person, and finally to the outer hull of the Brimstone.

  Communication begins.

  Julian wandered off again before they could catch him watching. He needed to have a word with Fluffy, whom he believed understood more human language than she let on, and Nicodemus the spacer rat, whom he knew understood, the little stinker.

  * * *

  "I have nothing but the highest respect for you." Shax's words were so taut they quivered. "But, my dear Agent Parallax, you've lost your mind."

  "Not at all. It's the only reasonable option." Julian kept his smile in place. He didn't need permission to do what had to be done, but his life might contain a bit too much of the spice of danger if he took Shax's kitty without his agreement. "We'll have a few hours at the most before that cutter catches up, if previous experience tells us anything. You need time for repairs, and Fluffy's a giant glowing beacon. Let's use that to our advantage."