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  Pshaw-Ra turned with twitching tail to regard my boy impatiently. He had heard the thought through me but was becoming adept at sorting out whose thoughts were whose. And no wonder. The kefer-ka, the shiny beetles that had caused our psychic link, were his creatures. I didn’t fully understand what they were—other than delicious—or what all that eating them could do, but Pshaw-Ra claimed they were responsible for the link between Jubal and me.

  “Ask the boy where he thinks the ship that allowed diseased cats to escape the clutches of the tyrannical Galactic Government can go.” Pshaw-Ra said. “Our other human minions have been sent for. They will assist the Ranzo‘s crew in acquainting themselves with their new homes and duties.”

  “See here, Pshaw-Ra,” I said. “It’s good of you and yours to hide us here until the Galactic Government humans come to their senses. But you can’t even make the cats stay here if they don’t like it. And you are not going to force the Ranzo‘s crew to—”

  “Calm yourself, catling,” Pshaw-Ra said. His tail had stopped twitching and he sat calmly grooming his paws. They needed it, surely. All that sand blowing around out there made us all instantly very dusty. The coats of the horde of cats milling around outside the ship had all begun to look almost as tawny as his with a coating of the surrounding environment. “I was merely pointing out that they will need refuge from their authorities until further notice, and the resident humans will be happy to offer them accommodation. Human food is less plentiful than ours however, so the duties I spoke of will involve acquiring that as well as helping their hosts tend to our needs.”

  “What are they to be then?” I demanded. “Bringers of food we can hunt for ourselves and litter box changers?”

  Pshaw-Ra snickered behind his whiskers, then planted his front paws wide and stared out into the vast tawny-ness that so closely matched his coat.

  “Behold the desert!” he said. “The largest self-changing litterbox in the galaxy!”

  The evolutionary journey of the Barque Cats continues as the refugee cats seek asylum on Pshaw-Ra’s planet, Mau, a world of ancient secrets and advanced science that Pshaw-Ra declares will bring about his goal of feline domination of the universe! Can Jubal and Chester stop the tawny cat’s master plan? Do they even want to? Wouldn’t cats running the universe actually be a good thing? Watch for CATACOMBS, the next in the Barque Cats series, coming from Del Rey.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  ANNE MCCAFFREY, the Hugo Award-winning author of the bestselling Dragonriders of Pern novels, is one of science fiction’s most popular authors. She lives in a house of her own design, Dragonhold-Underhill, in County Wicklow, Ireland. Visit the author’s website at www.annemccaffrey.net.

  ELIZABETH ANN SCARBOROUGH, winner of the Nebula Award for her novel The Healer’s War, is the author of twenty-one solo fantasy novels. She has co-authored fourteen other novels with Anne McCaffrey. She lives on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State. Visit the author’s website at

  www.eascarborough.com.

  Catalyst is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  Excerpt from Catacombs copyright © 2010 by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming title Catacombs by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  McCaffrey, Anne.

  Catalyst : a tale of the Barque cats / Anne McCaffrey, Elizabeth

  Ann Scarborough.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-51897-2

  1. Cats—Fiction. I. Scarborough, Elizabeth Ann. II. Title.

  PS3563.A255C38 2010

  813′.54—dc22 2009036820

  www.delreybooks.com

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