Are We On Mars?

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Greenface was giddy with excitement as he held up a small orange bottle, examining the contents inside. "Twenty pills... that's enough to last me for the rest of the trip!" he exclaimed, reading the label on the side.

"I heard you the first hundred times you mentioned it," groaned Shadepelt, looking like she was a pawstep away from heading to the side of the spaceship and banging her head against it. 

"Wait what?" Alderwood mewed sleepily, padding into the control room. "Catmint pills?" His eyes grew round.

Greenface ignored the brown tabby, setting down his pills on one of the tables, on top of an empty pizza box and half a set of Monopoly money. "So, Lionshine," he meowed to the golden-furred she-cat. "How close are we to the planet?" 

Lionshine is too busy staring, dumb-founded, through space, at the massive floating object in front of them. Greenface, too, notices this and rushes to her side.

"Is that like, a space station?" he breathed, looking enthralled by the mass of metal. "Wow... do you think it's more advanced than the one at Saturn? Or Jupiter?"

Lionshine gave him a shrug, typing something on one of the control panels. "I don't know... I'm trying to contact K.G.I.S. right now, but they're not responding. Something's interfering with the signal, I think." She swallowed, looking slightly nervous. This wasn't very comforting for the rest of the S.S. Catmint crew.

"Are we going to die?" Alderwood wailed dramatically. 

Lionshine kicked her brother as the ship suddenly sped up. "That wasn't me!" she yelped, surprised.

"It appears as if our ship's signal has been intercepted, as you said... and they're controlling where we go," Greenface mewed nervously, glancing over at her. "Are you ready to board that... space station?" 

"How do you know it's taking us there?" asked Lionshine.

"Simple mathmatics," responded the white tom, flicking his tail. "You see, with our current path and the current level of acceleration, I used the Theorem of Juniperpaw to calculate the approximate cou—"

Shadepelt interrupted him. "Okay, so we're going to the space station. Sweet. We're probably going to die. What if they're hostile? Yep, I signed up for this."

"You didn't sign up for anything; you snuck on the ship," pointed out Pebblepounce, who had suddenly appeared in the back of the control room.

Shadepelt shot him a harsh glare. 

Two large doors slid open on the side of the space station, and rows and rows of space-ships became visible. Still without control, the S.S. Catmint was parked in an empty spot, and a long tube expanded from the ceiling above. It connected to the ship with a hissing noise, and the top opened.

"I guess we should go through..?" Pebblepounce mewed hesitantly. 

"What if they're hostile?" repeated Shadepelt, but the other cats had already climbed into the tube above.

By Rio ⛈