She rushed to the cockpit, where Chatee arrived moments later too.

"Cyclone, play the reply."

"It's just a short text. Hello, cat freighter Cyclone with clanmother Fiyul. Please continue your flight path to orbit, we will synchronise with you in 6800.' No further identification."

"Cyclone, can you locate them?"

"Not with any accuracy, as the antenna was in broad reception mode. But it came from the general direction of the central neutron star."

"And the neutron star is tiny, we wouldn't even see a reflection if they were less than 100 klicks away." Chatee shook her head and dropped her tail. "Cyclone, set our transponder to maximum signal strength. Perhaps they will be kind enough to raise theirs as well."

"Well, that gives us time for lunch and dinner."

"Rerra, please go down and talk to the clanmother. I need a break."

She nodded. "You have the cockpit." Then she took a deep breath and went down and down to the passenger deck.

The clanmother was eating her breakfast, ignoring her as usual. She bowed to her anyway. "Clanmother Fiyul, we have received a message. They will meet with us at 7200."

The clanmother stopped chewing and finally looked at her, smiling. Or so she hoped, with her showing so many teeth, the smile was close to aggressive.

"Thank you, second pilot. Please refrain from any further unauthorised communication."

She swallowed any comment, just bowed briskly and went up to the crew deck again. She wondered how Chatee was able to talk to the clanmother for any length of time.

* * *

They did not have dinner. The clanmother had a very long brunch. It was after 5000 when it was finally the staff's turn. While the staff enjoyed a very good, long lunch, she ate faster to relieve Chatee. Although nothing happened, they both had decided that the cockpit should be manned, this close to the rendezvous with their mysterious counterpart.

So she hurried back to the cockpit and lay down in the pilot's hammock. Another 1200 to go.

Suddenly there was a jolt. Small, but there are no potholes in space! "Cyclone, status!"

"Rerra, a big ship has just jumped alongside us."

"Cyclone, can you estimate the mass of their ship from the gravity jitter?"

"Rerra, not so fast. And we are being hailed with visuals, standard protocol."

"Cyclone, on screen."

She sat up in the hammock. A face appeared on the centre screen, not unlike a cat's, but with silvery scales. "Hello, cat freighter Cyclone. I am an avatar of the Kolani."

"Hello, Avatar, this is the second pilot Rerra from Petra."

"We thought this mission would be exclusively Ketcher clan." The voice did not match the movement of the lips. But maybe these people did not speak with their lips. Or maybe it was translated and the avatar was mouthing very different sounds. Or maybe the image was just artificial. Anyway, it did not matter.

"Well, there are not many Ketcher pilots. But I am not versed in the political details."

"We would like to extend the invitation to you too."

"Thank you. How will we meet?"

"We have prepared a standard docking port. We transmit a suggested approach path." The face was replaced by a schematic of a slowly rotating station with a trajectory winding into it. It took her a few moments to locate the scale bar. Their ship was the size of a small moon!

"Uh, hello, Avatar, I need a few moments to secure the ship for such a vector change."

"We will be ready as soon as you dock. See you later."

"See you."

"Cyclone, announcement to all."

"Attention, a large ship has jumped alongside us and is requesting us to dock them for a rendevous. Please secure everything immediately as if we were going to jump. We will reduce the gravity to 0.15 g for 0025 and then begin our approach. There will be periods of weightlessness. Again, please secure everything and buckle up. This is for your safety." She nodded. "Cyclone, play the jump warning for 0025."

The announcement with the driving music began.

She checked the course she had received from the Kolani again. "Cyclone, do you have an estimate of the mass of their ship now?"

"Rerra, no need to estimate, they sent us their mass and size with the approach path." Screen 1 showed the line in 3D, their ship just a 3D crosshair in front of the alien spherical moon-sized ship, with the mass and dimensions printed in tiny letters. It was indeed like a small moon.

"Cyclone, go down to 0.15 g now." Quite a close approach, considering they were still going on the wrong vector at 0.15 g acceleration right now.

She secured the hammock to the floor with the three ropes and then strapped herself in. Finally, Chatee came up panting. "Worst moment, I was just on the loo."

"Cyclone, replay the communication."

Chatee listened to the brief exchange. "Call me paranoid. But I would not leave the Cyclone for anything in the world. "

She shrugged. "Well, I'm curious to know who these people are we've come all this way for," she turned her head to the screens. "Cyclone, zero g countdown from 10, please."

"Do you want to take over?" she asked Chatee.

"No, I'll stay and watch." She buckled herself into an emergency wall harness. "Anyway, it's just like a station approach and even without the traffic."

The alien face appeared on Screen 2 again. "Hello, second pilot Rerra. Can we talk to clanmother Fiyul?"

"Cyclone, direct them to her cabin. No copy."

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"You don't want to listen?"

"No, I still have to return with the clanmother."

At that moment the countdown was over and they became weightless, for the first time on this voyage. She slowly turned the ship to the curved approach vector. The other ship was rotating very slowly and she did not need to go too fast. So they followed the updated dotted line, never exceeding 0.1 g for now.

A little later, the two guards came up, moving awkwardly in the low and constantly changing gravity from the weak decelleration. "Second pilot Rerra, please follow us to report to the clanmother."

For a moment, she thought about pushing 0.5 g tilt, so they would fall down the stairs and then hit the ground hard enough to knock them out. But then?

"You're violating the ship's order of command," Chatee said from her wall spot, "and anyway, she has the controls now. Does the clanmother want to postpone the rendezvous with the other ship?"

"We have no orders on that."

Chatee pointed to some hooks on the other wall. "Then this can wait. There are two more belts on the other side, please secure yourselves."

She was not sure if it was a good idea to ignore the clanmother. "Cyclone, please open a line to the clanmother's cabin. This is the second pilot, Rerra. Since we are approaching the other ship, it is very dangerous and therefore strictly forbidden to move around. Everyone must fasten their seat belts. This rule also applies to the pilots. Do you want to abort the docking?"

"No, I want you down," came the immediate reply.

"Do you want to abort the docking with the other ship?"

"No, but..."

She cut the connection with a tap on the screen.

Chatee shook her head.

* * *

The rest of the approach was uneventful, and about 0500 later the docking clamps locked with their counterpart. The slow spin was just under 0.05 g. But a few moments later there was a strong lateral acceleration, the ship's structure groaning on this strange vector: The other ship was rapidly increasing its rotation. Soon they had 0.3 g, exact to six decimal places despite being a human unit, and she doubted the alien operated in that system. She put Cyclone on hot standby, they were still on their own power, the docking was only mechanical, no fuel was exchanged, neither electrical nor data communication was established.

She unbuckled and walked over to the guards. "Ok, we have docked. We can go to the clanmother. Chatee, please take over."

Chatee nodded slowly but remained silent.

The guards were polite, they took her in the middle and walked rather leisurely in the lower gravity straight to the clanmother's cabin. Chatee had even finished announcing their docking when the door closed behind her and the guards.

The clanmother stood there. "What kind of stunt was that? I nearly fell to the floor."

She bowed. "Clanmother Fiyul, that was not my doing, but an action of our hosts. The other ship is the size of a moon, and I don't understand how they could have increased their rotation so quickly. I had no warning either."

"You know you are only here at the request of Samul, who wanted a second pilot."

"Clanmother, it is a rule for all ships to have a second pilot when there are more than five passengers."

"But you are the only cat not from Ketcher."

She waited.

"So why did you answer the call?"

"Clanmother, a giant ship jumps in less than 500,000 klicks away and hails us. Of course, I answer. Chatee was on the toilet and we were too fast to wait for her. Any pilot would have done the same."

"And now they want to meet you too."

She was silent.

The clanmother walked towards her. But being small all her life, the clanmother's size did not intimidate her. She feared her political power.

"Clanmother, what are you implying?"

"You are a spy and I do not want you in my business."

She was surprised again. First Chatee, and now the clanmother herself! "A spy? For whom? I am only adopted, Petra, true. You know I renounced Samul, I still hate them." Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Fanny's surprise. There was no dossier on her? Totally unlikely. The clanmother showed no reaction.

"But spying for Petra? We run a catering business on the station, and not even the biggest. Me, I am trying to restore an old, tiny jumpship as an independent pilot." That seemed to be news to Fanny as well. "So why should I spy? And for whom? I would never work for Samul. Those arrogant pricks, no thank you. So no reason to spy, sorry."

"But you are an outsider."

"Clanmother," Fanny interjected, "she's right. A spy would be inside Ketcher. What would Samul do with that knowledge anyway?"

"Fanny," the clanmother scolded, but Fanny had at least partly convinced her.

The clanmother still shook her head. "Rerra from Petra, I think my daughter has made a point. Did you meet any Ketcher before you left?"

"Only the staff at the beauty clinic."

"Oh!" and the clanmother gave a sign to the guards. One left and returned moments later with a doctor, or at least a cat wearing a lab coat. The doctor just nodded and she followed the clanmother, the doctor and one guard in front of her. The other trailed behind her. They went into the doctor's cabin next door.

The doctor was preparing something that looked like a robot arm with a flat lamp. Then she smiled a professional doctor's smile and looked straight at her. "Please stand on the circle for a scan."

She did as she was told, although she had no idea why.

The robot arm moved the scanning device around her several times. It took much longer than at the beauty clinic. The scanner made three more circles just around her abdomen. A 3D cross-section of her body appeared on the screen, refined with each pass. A purple mark flashed off the screen, just to the right of her navel and close to her outer skin.

"Sorry, this will hurt," the doctor said, still smiling, and pressed a tube to the spot.

"Arg!" It hurt a lot but soon eased.

The other doctor put a plaster on the circular wound, then took her hand and pressed it on the wound. "Please apply pressure for a moment."

The first doctor had removed a bloody thing and dropped it into a beaker. She added some chemicals and soon only a tiny black ball was floating in the clear liquid.

"Do we have a decent microscope?" she asked, "That looks inorganic."

"There's one in the workshop, it even has an atmospheric electron microscope stage," she replied, "So someone put that inside me? By Hopkins, I want to know what that is too."

"No need," the clanmother interjected. "The clinic would have reported it if you had it before. So you were a spy for Ketcher, but I believe you didn't know it. And that thing cannot communicate back from so far away, it is probably just a recorder. Let's meet the Kolani."

* * *

That meant the aliens. They walked to the passenger docking circle on the third deck. No one seemed concerned that there was a hard vacuum next to the seal and an unknown atmosphere on the other side.

"Second pilot, open the door."

She cringed at the clanmother's misnomer. She took a deep breath, then keyed in the sequence to cycle the atmosphere between their hatch and the alien ship. Now they had to wait for the bars to shrink to zero and rise again.

"Clanmother, perhaps you should consider wearing a space suit?"

The clanmother stood silent, only Fanny shook her head. Stubborn old lady. Well, she had been warned.

"Clanmother, I will change into a thinsuit."

She did not wait for an answer, just walked back. A guard went with her. She went down to the workshop and got her radiation thinsuit. By now it was familiar enough that it took her less than 0020 to get into it. She tucked the helmet under her arm. "Let's go back."

The clanmother did not even blink as she arrived in the yellow hazmat thinsuit. As before, she ignored her.

A quick glance confirmed that the airlock had not fully cycled. The pump was weak; a passenger docking port didn't see much use. Most of the time, passengers were extra and freight would be the main source of revenue. And then they would have docked at their freight port. And if there was no time, you could vent into space to replace the atmosphere in the docking chamber from the compressed gas cartridges for emergencies.

The screen flashed blueish white. She touched it and the hatch unlocked and swung in slowly, releasing only the ozone and burnt metal smells of the parts exposed to space. Nothing to worry about.

She put on her helmet, did the 1 to 10 leak check and was ready to go. But the clanmother had already entered into the short access tunnel and was now knocking on the other ship's hatch. That stupid old hag. "Cyclone, close the bulkhead to the passenger dock."

The yellow flashing of the rapidly closing bulkhead startled the others. As it should. They really did risk venting the whole ship, those idiots.

Fanny looked at her miserably, caught between loyalty and her understanding of basic spaceship protocols. She shrugged, then entered the docking port and closed the hatch from the inside. That caused a reaction.

"What are you doing?" the clanmother shouted.

"Safety first. We have no idea of the pressure on the other side. Even if there is a slight difference, it may be impossible for them to open their hatch if it is constructed like ours. And with our hatch open, they cannot really vent it, as the air will always flow in from our ship. Simple physics."

"And that stupid suit comes off."

"No, it stays. You don't have to tell me about safety in space. Kill yourself, but I intend to be alive afterwards."

"Wimpy kitten!" she scolded.

She did not care. Transferring to an alien spaceship in a better loincloth was stupid. No matter what.

Finally, the pressure dropped a tiny bit. She would not have noticed it without the indicator on the overhead display in her helmet. The other hatch opened like an iris, even though it was square.