Pet Noir Read Online Free PDF

let my feelings about it be known.
    â€œShh,” Devon said as he caught me with one hand and clamped me against his chest. I hooked my claws into his one-all, making sure I wouldn’t drift free again, and looked around.
    There were a few other people in the elevator, mostly in work clothes like Devin’s. One woman with freckles and short red hair made moony faces at me. I looked away and noticed the colored stripe on the elevator wall was fading from blue to green. Must be a location indicator, I thought, proud of myself for figuring it out. Investigator Leon makes another brilliant deduction.
    The freckled woman came over, her static boots making crackly sounds with each step. “What a cute kitten! Can I pet her?”
    â€œHim,” Devin said hastily. “It’s a he. Sure, I guess.”
    I couldn’t very well get away, not without drifting around in zero gee, so I submitted to having my head stroked while she cooed at me. She had big, heavy fingers and was kind of clumsy, not like Jill who knew just where to scratch. Devin fidgeted, apparently no more comfortable about it than me.
    The stripe was vivid green when the elevator stopped and Devin got off, boots making shklep, shklep sounds with every step as if the soles were coated with chewing gum. He turned right and entered a long, round corridor, bare and utilitarian, nowhere near as nice as the rotunda or even the lab halls at Astara. The only decoration was the green stripes on what were now, to our orientation, the ceiling and floor.
    Every so often we passed through a ring of large hatchways, Devin stepping over the handrails that preceded and followed them, which I saw a couple of people using to change their orientation from wall to ceiling or floor as they went in and out of the big doors. Not many people walked on the walls—it tended to disrupt traffic. Most stuck to the floor or the ceiling, walking along the green stripes.
    Gamma Station is really huge. I hadn’t understood how huge before, but I began to get an inkling as Devin carried me past ring after ring of the hatches, all marked as warehouses. No wonder security couldn’t screen every shipment that came through. It would take an army.
    We passed a lot of people in the hall, quite a few of them non-humans, especially a big, burnt-orange species with four arms and no cues for gender that I could see—maybe they only had one. They grunted in response to Devin’s greetings. Looked like efficient heavy-lifters. Here in the low-gee warehouse section weight wasn’t a factor, but muscle was still required to move mass around.
    At last Devin stopped at a doorway marked “Warehouse 217” and thumbed the access pad. The big, heavy door slid open and we stepped into a cavernous, wedge-shaped room. Shipping containers were stacked on the floor, walls, and ceiling, held in place by containment nets. I knew from the briefing that this was a short-term storage warehouse, designated for holdover shipments awaiting flights to their final destinations.
    Devin walked over to the a half-circle desk that housed a huge control console and traded lazy hellos with the dark-skinned guy who got up from the chair. Devin called him Steve. They chatted a little and Steve reached out to scratch my head.
    â€œNew pet?”
    â€œYeah, just got him. Didn’t want to leave him alone in my apartment.”
    â€œLooks kind of young,” Steve said.
    â€œI thought he could work on the mice.”
    Mice? No one said anything about mice. I perked up my ears. Mice were one of the things I’d seen only on holo.
    â€œAmazing, huh?” said Steve, laughing. “We can travel to the edges of the galaxy, but we still can’t keep mice out of our transports.”
    â€œYeah. Amazing.”
    â€œWell, have a good shift, Dev. See you later.”
    Devin settled into the chair at the console and detached my claws from his clothes. He put me down gently on the