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  Su’s box factory belonged to the Bristler Union, which was a collection of factories located around Bristleback Range and Bunk Port. Her uncle Hoff ran Hazer Union, for hazardous waste, and if you weren’t careful, the big man would corner you and lecture you about the ethical cleansing of toxic sludge for hours, making you late to your shift and your boss pretty annoyed with both of you.

  Mighty flicked an ear toward Lincoln as if waiting for him to respond, but he didn’t, so the cat answered. “Boson Higgs accessed that. This is the only appropriate generation ship anywhere in your Planet Trash databases or your cyberspace network.”

  “Trash Planet,” Su corrected the cat.

  “What’s Catamaran listed as?” Lincoln had used stellarship scrap databases for jobs in the past, and he didn’t like the idea of the Catamaran being in the scraproll—or the gen ship they needed the part from. It was one thing when it was floating in the sky pile, a hunk of anonymous metal. It was another when the parts got itemized.

  “Heavy cruiser, stripped down to the framework,” Su said, which did not describe the Catamaran at all. “The other one’s listed as a zheng model gen ship, which I take it is accurate?”

  “Yeah,” Lincoln said. Both ships were zhengs, and zhengs were few and far between. Once whoever had towed the ship to the surface did the physical inventory, they’d transmit those records beyond Trash Planet. Then other people would come sniffing around for parts.

  And if anyone wanted to buy components specifically for cryopod systems, some might come sniff around for sleepers. A need for antique cryopod parts often indicated a pre-War gen ship—and a captive population. Which was exactly what he’d warned Mighty and Boson Higgs about earlier today.

  Either way, the zheng ship’s existence—and somebody uploading its actual inventory—could attract exactly the wrong people to their little icy corner of Paradise.

  “Is there a way to buy things anonymously?” Lincoln asked. If they could buy the ship, take the part they needed, and return the carcass to the sky pile as if it never left, that could sidetrack anyone interested in cryopods and who else was using them. Stop the inventory before it started.

  “Not really,” Su said. “Unions will raid each other sometimes, but we know who’s who and we keep track of things. The right parts can make a profit or save a life, and that’s just on the planet itself.”

  “Can we raid the people who took it?” Lincoln asked. The idea didn’t suit him—he wasn’t the raiding type—but when on Trash Planet…

  Su gave him a look. “We don’t raid.”

  He thought, but didn’t say, Good. Instead he said, “Then you’re going to have to offer for the whole ship.”

  “Did I not just get through saying I’m not going to negotiate with Tank Union?” Su leaned back in her seat, shaking her head.

  It was probably time to tell Su the bad part. “Can I talk to you alone for a minute?”

  “Without ME?” Mighty asked, eyes wide with shock. “Lincoln. Whatever do you have to say that you can’t share with me?”

  Lincoln, three months ago, had not known sentient cats existed. The entire Obsidian Rim didn’t know sentient cats existed, but he thanked the stars every day that the cats couldn’t read his mind as easily as the other humans. “That’s kind of the point, catto. I don’t want to share it with you.”

  “There is nothing you can’t say to me,” Mighty objected.

  Su spread her hands. “It’s not like you can make them leave. He’ll just pop back in here uninvited.”

  “I would not,” Mighty said, but his gaze slid to the side.

  “It doesn’t matter if I wanted the whole ship,” Su said. “We don’t have the funds.”

  “We do in the casino account,” Mighty argued.

  “Not if you’re buying from Tank Union, you don’t. They’re greedy scammers.” Su leaned her head against the back of the chair and stared at the ceiling. “Are you positive the one part you need is in that gen ship and is functional?”

  “As positive as we were able to be without entering the ship itself,” Lincoln said. They’d been on the verge of sneaking into the ship using some cobbled together technology from the Catamaran’s camouflage system, but it wasn’t working yet. Ships in the sky pile were not fair game. “The chances of finding another zheng with that part are…not good.”

  Su swiveled her chair back and forth as she voiced her thoughts. “You can’t buy just the part you need or the wrong people will want to know why you need it. You can’t afford to buy the whole thing because we don’t have the funds. And I don’t want to work with Tank Union anyway. They suck. I don’t trust them.”

  “I will read their minds and ensure they can be trusted. And I can nudge the deal,” Mighty reminded them. Barbara had often posed as a rich eccentric from the planet Raaea who owned a cat, so the cat was able to give her some mindreading backup. “Deals are never a problem when you have my help.”

  “And the minute someone from Tank Union realizes we have cats plural instead of just Pumpkin, who everyone on the planet knows about by this point, they’ll tear the place down trying to find you and sell you,” Su said. “That would put all of you at risk, not to mention my factory. It’s one thing for you to appear here or Hoff’s visitor’s center, but Tank Union is absolutely not trustworthy and clean.”

  Mighty stewed on that while Lincoln tried to decide if he should tell the cat—or anyone whose mind the cat could read—about the cryopod deadline. Before the job he’d had with Pish where he’d met Frank, he’d mostly worked on gen ships. Cryopod systems were not permanent or fail-proof, and if they couldn’t wake the humans and remaining cats soon, they’d never be able to wake them at all.

  He knew the signs. Not many people did, because people and animals rarely remained in cryopods as long as these had.

  But telling the cats? Who knew what kind of panic that would cause? Their determination to do whatever they thought best was rivaled only by their devotion to their friends in the pods. He’d never seen anything like it, except parent to child. The reason some of the cats had woken before the humans was because they’d been on a separate power grid, and it was possible that their waking of Barbara was what had fritzed the rest of the pods in the first place.

  He didn’t want them to know that, either. That if they’d left well enough alone, the cryopods would have released their occupants as the system entered the end of its functional period—like it had with the Original cats.

  “I have a suggestion,” Mighty offered at last. Some cats never quit talking. Lincoln appreciated that Mighty was able to maintain silence on occasion. “If you cannot afford the ship and aren’t willing to stand as our agent, we can go to Hoff.”

  “I’m not getting help from my uncle.” Su crossed her arms, looking even angrier about that than the suggestion she negotiate with Tank Union. The woman was a successful business owner and treated her employees well, but her mountainous grudges made Bristleback Range look like gentle, rolling hills. “It’s one thing that Hoff helped Wil and now practically lives here. It’s another to be completely indebted to him.”

  “That’s all right. You don’t have to be involved, cat friend,” Mighty assured her. The humans had asked the cats not to call them foccers—friend of cat—though some still did it with a whiskery smirk. “We’ll ask Hoff ourselves.”

  “Stop.” Su pressed her fingers to her eyelids as if she couldn’t bear to look at them. Lincoln shifted uncomfortably in this chair. Had he made a mistake coming here with Mighty? Riling his boss up? But he wanted to help the cats. He didn’t want the folks in the pods to die.

  “Before you make up your mind…” Lincoln began.

  “My mind is made up,” Su interrupted without looking at him.

  “There’s something you need to know,” Lincoln finished.

  That got both Su and Mighty to stare at him. Lincoln didn’t talk much. He didn’t have that much to say, and before he could figure out the best words, the topic of c
onversation had bypassed him anyway. But Su and the cat waited patiently for him to finish, and there was no putting this off any longer.

  “The people in the pods are in cryo decline,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Mighty said. “Is it because the part is broken? Our system is so old. Didn’t you tell me you’d never worked on an older gen ship, Lincoln? We have got to get that part.”

  Su held up a hand. “Let him finish, Mighty.”

  Mighty’s long white whiskers twitched with impatience. Lincoln had been introduced to the truth about the cats after signing an employment contract at Su’s factory, and he still struggled to comprehend how the cats had come to exist. Not that there was a definite answer. Javier and Tama, the closest thing they had to cat medics, believed their evolution was related to the qubition bombs that ended the Obsidian War.

  But one thing Lincoln did know? The cats were a bona fide miracle, and it upset him to think of them suffering or abused.

  He was about to make the cats suffer.

  “Cryo decline happens to beings in pods too long, whether the system is functional or not,” Lincoln explained, choosing his words carefully. He hadn’t learned the neuro-preservation science behind it, but he understood how to identify it and how to tinker with the pods themselves. “The brain can’t sleep forever. It degrades and then the body breaks down.”

  “My human is breaking down?” Mighty stood up, hair rippling along his spine and his tail poofing out like a bottle washer. “She’s hurting? She’s dying? And all the other cats and people?”

  Lincoln held the cat’s gaze like he would a person he was giving bad news. Eye contact meant you were taking their pain seriously, like you should. Mighty Mighty had bright yellow eyes, except when he was this anxious, when they were all black pupil. “Yes.”

  Without another word, Mighty blinked out of the room in a spark of blue light. The cats called it skipping—another miracle the cats had been granted by whatever higher power or science settled such things.

  “Shit,” Su said. “They’re dying? All of them?” At last count, there were 4763 humans of all ages in cryopods, mostly women, and half that many cats. People who had wanted to travel the stars with their feline companions. The Catamaran had been headed to a partly settled planet as additions to a colony, not as groundbreakers. Or, the colony would have been partly settled by the time the ship arrived.

  Instead humanity had gone to war and nearly destroyed the universe.

  “I can’t put a timeframe on it,” Lincoln said. “But it’s soon. We need that part. And since the cat’s gone, I can tell you—when they woke Barbara up, they broke something. That’s why this is happening.”

  “That was two years ago,” Su said.

  “That’s nothing in the scope of the three thousand years they’ve been asleep,” Lincoln explained. “These ancient cryopod systems are a lot less finicky than new ones, and they have checks and balances. Best guess is it detected the onset of cryo decline and activated the wake-up protocol. But then the cats interfered.”

  Su directed a piercing stare his way. Her long, dark hair was pulled sharply away from her face today, businesslike and tidy. “Why do you know so much about cryopod systems?”

  If he shared all of his history, she might fire him. He had a way of attracting trouble—or not turning it down when it looked at him funny. Bosses didn’t like employees who attracted trouble, except he never recognized it as trouble until the damage was done. “I apprenticed on them and worked on them.”

  “The people I know who use cryopods are slavers, prison owners, and medical research facilities.” He didn’t miss the slight narrowing of her eyes. “Which was it?”

  “I was born in Oka Conglomerate.” It wasn’t the whole truth, but it was the part of the truth that answered her question. “They have a lot of generation ships. They keep the pods in working order.”

  “All right.” It was clear Su didn’t one hundred percent believe him, but she let it go. “The cryo decline puts a whole different spin on this shit, doesn’t it? What do you think we should do?”

  She was asking him, her employee of three months, how to save the lives of over 4500 innocent people and 3000 cats? People trusted him, sure—they trusted that he was a soft touch. But the people on Trash Planet didn’t realize that about him yet, and he’d been hoping to shed that weakness.

  But was it weak to help the cats?

  “We need that part,” he repeated. “I guess we should make the other union an offer.”

  “Can’t be me,” she mused, flicking on her cybbie screen and scrolling through a list. “Let’s just say I’m not welcome in their headquarters. And sending Barbara is a no-go.”

  The cats had relied on Barbara for two years. How the talkative, scatterbrained woman had managed to negotiate with pirates and mercs and other unsavory types, Lincoln had no idea. Javier feared that the constant mind invasions from the cats had harmed her mentally.

  “She’s done enough,” he agreed. She spent about half of her time in Su’s factory now, rejoicing in the presence of other humans. If there was a gathering of people, Barbara was sure to be part of it. “She deserves a break.”

  “That leaves you.” Su turned to stare at him. “Tank Union doesn’t know you. We’ll set you up as an independent operator and let you make the offer. If it’s coming from you instead of me, there’s a chance the casino funds plus mine will cover it.”

  Lincoln stiffened. “Me?” He glanced down at his dirty coveralls, his nicked and scratched hands, and his dusty boots. He was a behind-the-scenes man. A mechanic. What in the hells would he say to some corporate union type to convince them to sell a ship they’d just bought? “I’m not a negotiator.”

  “This is Trash Planet, not Al’Amal,” Su said with a smile. “You don’t have to be a richie rich or act like one.”

  “It’s not a good idea.” He rubbed a hand across his chin. Most people on Trash Planet had facial hair. It was a cold, desolate place. But beards made his skin itch and then the hairs got infected. “I don’t look like the people here. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  And it would put him in the spotlight. Standing out. He didn’t like to be noticed. That was when the trouble started.

  “All you have to do is offer them a lot of money,” Su said. “If they won’t sell you the whole ship, haggle them down to a list of parts that happens to include the one you want. You can come up with a list like that, right? One you might need if you, say, lived on a gen ship in the Oka sector? Nobody here does much business with Oka, so they’ll overlook irregularities.”

  “I could do a list,” he said slowly, “but I’m not good with people.” He couldn’t look, or talk, less like a wheeler-dealer type if he tried.

  “I’ll have Wil give you a crash course,” Su said. Wil was Su’s lover. The few times Lincoln had met him, he did seem sociable. And the cats liked him, which Lincoln had come to realize was significant. “It wouldn’t hurt to butter the sales associate up. Personally, if you get my drift.”

  She raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to respond.

  “That really won’t work,” Lincoln grumbled. He’d never be able to seduce someone under false pretenses. He wasn’t even good at it when he just wanted a date.

  Su studied him a moment. “Why not? You’re not from Trash Planet which means you probably have fresh nanobots, right? And you’re young and healthy and good-looking. Got all your teeth. No scars like me. Or do you already have someone?”

  He just shook his head. “We’ll be lucky if they believe I’m a buyer.”

  “All right.” Su, to his relief, moved on. “I’ll get my cybbie hacker to set up a background for you, and we can send you over there in a hired shuttle the day after tomorrow. Make it look like you flew in through Yassa Port. The sooner we do this, the better, before the cats do anything drastic.” Her fingers were already flying across her holo keyboard, putting her plan into motion.

  “Oka doesn’t usually shop ar
ound for parts,” he warned her. “They’re tight.”

  And when you screwed up, they kicked you straight out of the tight, loyal Conglomerate. Forever.

  “I know, they don’t even recycle with us,” she said. “But this’ll work. They still need the rest of the galaxy sometimes.”

  If Lincoln insisted he wasn’t up to this, Su’s disappointment would probably lead to him getting fired. Would she be frustrated with Frank, too? She wasn’t the type to make him do anything he didn’t want to do, but she wouldn’t do anything she didn’t want to do, either. Like keep him on staff if he couldn’t commit to saving all those people and cats.

  “Guess I’ll need a change of clothes,” Lincoln said with a sigh. “If you can find out how much they paid for it and who they bought it from, that’ll help.”

  “No problem,” Su said without looking at him. “One of Estelle Gee’s boys will be in touch about the clothes.”

  Gee was a familiar name—the Bristler Union president. Why one of her kids would contact him about clothes, Lincoln had no idea, but Su seemed confident in her plan. The least he could do, after the way she’d accepted him into her factory family, was put in his best effort.

  That didn’t mean it would work. Maybe he’d be better off if one of the cats could insert the right words into his mind. Otherwise this negotiation was going to be very, very short and very, very unsatisfying for the people—and cats—who were depending on him.

  Chapter 2

  Briar Pandora deactivated the comm screen by punching the power button so hard she broke her shiny manicured nail.

  First, pain rippled through her finger and blood welled at the quick. Then, anger stirred in her stomach, her spine, her head, like a pot about to boil. She inhaled deeply, twice, tasting the sterile air of the shiny metal and glass Tank Union HQ on the back of her tongue and wishing she could wrap her hands around someone’s neck.