A pulp-flavored anthology of alien encounters, featuring Thea Hutcheson's "Adding Up Cat Numbers": when salvage captain Arnist Delboray hauls a comatose survivor out of a derelict escape pod, she doesn't expect to end up negotiating with an alien intelligence that has a very strange idea of how to make introductions, and has a disastrous meeting with her ship's cat. Grief, first contact, and a very insistent set of whiskers collide as Arnist strikes the strangest bargain of her career.