What Pet Should A Big Tough Spacer Own? Pets In Space

We're about ten days away from the release of the Pets In Space anthology, which also contains a new Sectors story from yours truly, entitled "Star Cruise: Stowaway." I thought it’d be fun to put my hero through a quiz on pets and see which one he ought to have, versus the two in the story. Results at the end!

Here's the blurb for Star Cruise: Stowaway: Cargo Master Owen Embersson is shocked when the Nebula Zephyr’s ship’s cat and her alien sidekick, Midorri, alert him to the presence of a stowaway. He has no idea of the dangerous complications to come – nor does he anticipate falling hard for the woman whose life he now holds in his hands. Life aboard the Nebula Zephyr has just become more interesting – and deadly.

I went online and found a variety of quizzes that claim to help a person determine which kind of pet he should own, so I asked my character Owen an amalgamation  of the typical questions:

Why do you want a pet? I don’t but I couldn’t leave a helpless kitten being tormented by a crowd of bullies at a backwater spaceport, so I waded in, handed those idiots their asses and took her back to the ship with me. She was a cute little thing when she got cleaned up! Not hurt bad, just scared. We’re just talking about the cat here, right? We’re not discussing the Ship’s alien pet? Although she kind of became mine too, somehow.

How much time do you intend to spend with your pet? I work fulltime on the Nebula Zephyr as the cargo master, making sure we take on freight, get it to its destination and offload it safely. I arrange contracts for shipping, inspect the containers – well, you get the picture. I work long hours. So I need an independent pet, which cats are. She keeps me company in my office sometimes and in my quarters after my shift ends.

Do you want your pet to ‘talk’ to you? Tell me how to get her to shut up?! She has a loud yowl when she wants something and feels ignored. Of course her purr is nice.

Do you care what gender your pet is? No. My cat is a lady, through and through.

What kind of a name did you give your pet? She’s pure white, so I named her Moby, after Moby Dick the whale in that old book from Earth. Not that I’ve read it, too long and antiquated. I figured she’d enjoy eating a whale and she was going into the ocean of space. I don’t know, seemed good at the time.

Where do you live? In the Cargo Master’s assigned quarters on the Nebula Zephyr. But Moby has the run of the ship. Maeve, the ship’s Artificial Intelligence, keeps a ganglion or two on her activities.

So no big yard? (Owen laughs.) Don’t worry, she’s happy, chasing space rats in the hold. And the Hydroponics crew grows grass for her to roll in, and catnip for her leisure time.

Do you have a lot of knickknacks in your quarters? I travel light. I do build scale models in my spare time – of spacecraft, famous buildings, things like that. Moby knows to leave them alone. She’s dainty.

Veronica sez: OK, so I took the BuzzFeed website’s quiz on what animal a person should own, answering all the questions the way a big, tough, ex-military guy like Owen would and the recommendation was  -----drum roll------a ferret! Actually that’s pretty darn close to how Midorri, the alien pet in the story, acts at times during the adventure so I thought the result was amazingly accurate.

You can download a free sampler at Instafreebie:  https://www.instafreebie.com/free/dNtPD

Buy Links:

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10% of the first month’s royalties from the book will be donated to the Hero Dogs Charity (service animals for veterans). http://www.hero-dogs.org/

What kind of a pet would you take into space?