Free Yesterday's Cat: Episode 1: Before the Storm by Naomi Kramer Page A

single watch myself and place it in the operative's hands until I do.”
    “OK. Thanks, Geek.”
    “Live long, Ange.”
    ****
    Angie took a slide to her apartment downtown, logged in at
the doorbot and entered.
    “Random, I'm home!” she yelled.
    A tortoiseshell cat leapt onto the table near the front
door and launched itself at her throat, but found itself caught to her chest and
hugged.
    “Beast,” Angie said with affection, and put her back on the
floor. “I wish I knew how you manage to get back before me.”
    She opened a packet of cat food, and poured it into a bowl.
Random approached, sniffed, and meowed querulously.
    “Yes, I know, the cat food's better in the past,” she said,
shrugging. “We'll be back soon, puss. Until then, eat the fardling food,
kapische?”
    Random glared, then ate. Slowly, so Angie knew she was
unimpressed.
    ****
    Angie’s comm jingled. She opened her eyes and sighed. Why
did the thing only go off in the middle of a sleep cycle? She shook herself
awake, jumped out of bed, and stood.
    “Answer call,” she said to the air.
    Geek appeared in the air in front of her.
    “Don’t you ever dress?” he asked, in a tone of curiosity,
rather than judgment.
    “Skin saves time in emergencies,” she said, and shrugged.
“What’s up, buster? You woke me.”
    “I need you to come into the lab right away. No excuses.
There are some tests I forgot to run,” he said, and disappeared.
    Angie frowned. Geek was the chatty type, and he was rarely
rude. Which meant he was probably worried about spilling something on a
non-secure channel. A call from the Time Department to her apartment should be
triple-encrypted and, as the tech guys put it, ‘safe as pi’.
    “I knew those
secure channels were a load of hooey,” she muttered.
    She buckled on a knife-and-tool belt, then pushed a bottle
of water, a food-bar, and her tablet into a backpack. She held it open while
calling Random, and the cat meowed and jumped in. No better security for one’s
belongings, in Angie’s opinion, than a grumpy cat. They meowed louder than your
average siren, could take the skin off someone’s face faster than you could say,
“OW ow ow get it off me I’m dying here!” and had judgment, besides. Random could
pick a dishonest person at a hundred metres.
    Doorbot locked, Angie took a slide back toward the time
department. This particular location was handy – only a single slide from her
place, no transfers. Some of the others had been way out in the burbs. Not that
transfers were difficult, mind – but it required a touch of agility, and on
three hours sleep, she was feeling just a little bit fuzzed out.
    “Bring on technology that doesn’t rely on sitting on top of
a time-stream,” she muttered.
    She reached the building, logged in to the doorbot, and
lifted up to the Time Department on the seventh floor. Then thanked the gods of
technology for silent liftwells… because she could see through the open lab
door, leaning against lab benches, four men dressed in black, wearing
balaclavas.
    “Shit,” she murmured, and ducked out of their line of
sight. “Shit, shit, shit!”
    There was a locked door behind her – the only option to get
out while staying out of their line of sight, apart from the antiquated ‘fire
exit’ door that led to stairs which wound up and down for the entire height of
the building. No one used them any more. Antigrav units were failsafe these
days. If your antigrav failed, you were about to have far more serious troubles
than getting smushed into a pile of bloody tissue at the bottom of a liftwell.
Besides, all liftwells had mandatory mesh installed, so you could always just
climb down if the unthinkable happened. But building regulations still mandated
fire stairs. Bloody bureaucracy.
    The sign on the fire exit explained that an alarm would
automatically be sounded if the door were opened. The locked door behind her
would warble a greeting