A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (36 page)

The question, he thought as he strolled across to the largish commercial-body air car, was how many more he could capture before the little creatures figured out what was happening. He wanted a minimum of, say, fifty or sixty before leaving Sphinx. In fact, he’d like more than that, since he figured the odds were against his being able to return for another haul, although he could be wrong about that. If he handled it right and no one actually bothered to check his credentials from Liberty University, he might very well be able to come back after all. If that proved possible, the fact that he’d been here before would actually work in his favor. He’d be a known quantity as far as the Sphinxians were concerned.

Best not to count on that happening, though. And that meant he needed as many as he could catch this time around. Besides, so far he’d managed to capture only males. In fact, he wasn’t certain any human had ever actually met a
female
treecat, which led him to wonder why that was. It seemed unlikely there could be that huge a disparity between males and females in a clearly mammalian species. It wasn’t like there could be a single egg-layer, like the queen bee in a hive. No, there had to be sufficient females to bear enough young for the species to sustain itself, yet apparently no one had ever encountered one.

He’d studied the available long-range imagery the Sphinx Forestry Service had recorded of the clan it had assisted after the BioNeering disaster, and he’d noticed that while all the males who’d been observed—and all the males he’d captured, for that matter—had the same gray coats and cream-colored belly fur, with dark bands around their tails, there were other treecats who had a different coloration. Whose coats were dappled brown and white—rather like an Old Terran fawn—and who seemed smaller, on average, than their gray-coated fellows. Obviously, he had to be cautious about making judgments about size, since all he had was the Forestry Service footage and it was always risky to draw hasty conclusions about size or body mass from something like that.

Despite that, he’d come to the conclusion that the treecats’ coloration was as much linked to their genders as feather colors and patterns were among many species of Old Terran birds. The Cardinal came to mind, for example. If he was correct, then the brown and white treecats were the females, and he really,
really
wanted at least a few of them. They would undoubtedly fetch a premium price from the pet fanciers, especially if they were available in only limited numbers. More to the point, it would be impossible for Ustinov’s Exotics (or any of the genetic labs Bolgeo could think of) to maintain a useful population without females to bear additional young or at least provide ova for artificial breeding.

The problem was that they didn’t seem to venture far from home. Or, if they did, it would appear the males took on the riskier tasks. Which would make sense. By and large, Nature seemed to assume males were more expendable than females, no matter the planet. Childbearers were always more important, ultimately, to the survival of the species, when all was said. Which was all very understandable but left Bolgeo frustrated and more than a little irritated.

His smile faded as he climbed into the air car and closed the hatch. The environmental systems came on, keeping the interior pleasantly cool, but he sat for several minutes, fingers drumming on the controls, while he pondered.

The traps he’d prepared had worked well, so far. In fact, he’d actually had to make fairly few modifications to a design he’d used several times in the past. He’d had to reprogram their chameleonlike “smart paint,” but it hadn’t been difficult to create an almost perfect camouflage, well suited to Sphinx’s vegetation. Until they actually pounced, they were only small, compactly folded shapes, virtually impossible to see at any distance above a meter even if someone knew exactly what to look for.

On top of the camouflage, he’d chosen his sites very carefully. He’d used small remote platforms—the kind routinely used by surveyors and prospectors—to get a good look at the terrain within several kilometers of the GPS coordinates his transponder had given him. Getting them in under that kind of tree cover had been tricky, and he’d lost two of them, apparently to collisions with picketwood branches. He’d been afraid the treecats might hear them and be panicked into fleeing the area, but there’d been no sign of any such response. Just in case, though, he’d waited a full local week and a half after sending in the platforms before going anywhere near the treecats again.

The time hadn’t been wasted. With the imagery from the agile platforms—especially the thermal imagery—he’d been able to identify the picketwood pathways the treecats used most heavily, then search for specific side branches, hollow trunks, and other natural hiding places near those pathways. He’d had exacting criteria for the spots he’d wanted, and only after he was satisfied he’d found them had he taken his traps out one night and put them into place.

His low-light vision contacts had made it daylight-bright, even under the enormously deep leaf canopy of the picketwood and crown oaks, and he’d worn a hostile environment suit. It had been heavy and clumsy, but it was a very special suit which had been treated to kill all external scent, and its sealed environment prevented him from leaving any scent of his own. The traps had been treated with the same scent-killing compound, and he’d baited each of them with celery juice.

He’d been careful not to use too much. The idea was to use just enough to send the tempting scent wafting out to where a treecat who passed within no more than a meter or two, possibly three, might detect it. Bolgeo wanted them close enough to smell it and go to investigate—make sure of what they were actually smelling—and walk into the trap before it occurred to them to call any of their friends to join them.

The Forestry Service footage of the BioNeering incident’s survivors suggested that treecats normally went about their routine tasks as individuals, not in pairs or groups. Perhaps because a race of telepaths had no need to remain in close physical proximity to communicate with one another? He didn’t know about that, but it had meant it was unlikely another treecat would be within visual range at the instant one of them walked into one of his traps. He’d placed those traps far enough from the treecats’ nests that (hopefully, at least) they would have had to do the telepathic equivalent of shouting loudly to be heard by anyone beyond visual range, as well. Unfortunately, he couldn’t be positive of the distance at which they could make another of their own kind “hear” them, so he couldn’t be positive he’d succeeded in that. But he could at least try to keep the traps far enough out that no one would simply “overhear” their thoughts when they detected the delectable scent of celery.

Once they came close enough, the proximity sensors built into the traps released a powerful, targeted spurt of gas. Bolgeo had tested the gas (carefully and very privately) on several types of Sphinxian wildlife first and lost quite a few test subjects in the process. In the end, though, he’d found one which knocked a treecat out almost instantly with no observable ill effects. And once the little creature had been rendered unconscious, the trap disconnected itself from the tree branch or the trunk or the interior of the hollow space to which it had been attached. It extruded mechanical legs, walked across to the sleeping treecat, and unfolded itself until it could very carefully and gently reconfigure into a cage around its captive. Then it sent out a coded radio pulse to announce it had fulfilled its mission and waited—monitoring the treecat and administering more of the gas whenever it showed signs of awakening—until it could be collected.

So far, the system seemed to be working fine. The unconscious treecats obviously weren’t managing to call out for rescue, and Bolgeo or one of his assistants could collect the occupied traps with a simple air car trip. All they had to do was fly over the area where the trap lay waiting and trigger its counter-grav unit. The unit’s endurance was no more than five minutes, but that was ample for it to rise above the canopy and for an air car pilot to put his vehicle into a hover, open a window, and collect the trap (and its contents) with a simple hand-held tractor beam like the ones used in any warehouse. Getting a trap back into place and reset was more complicated, requiring another nocturnal visit in the environmental suit, but even that was hardly an onerous task.

Except for the fact that he had yet to capture a single female, Bolgeo thought. There ought to be a way he could—

His thoughts broke off as his uni-link gave a soft, musical chime. Most people would have assumed it indicated someone had left him a voicemail, or possibly a text message. Most people, however, would have been wrong, and Bolgeo smiled at the confirmation that another of his traps had just collected its own treecat for him.

He entered a code, checking the tally, and frowned thoughtfully. That made three since the last collection flight the night before. Given the traps’ locations and the weather, it was unlikely any of the captives were going to suffer from dehydration or starvation before they were collected. But the greater the number of traps sitting around with slumbering treecats, the greater the chance that an
un
-trapped treecat might happen along and spot one of them. And while he didn’t like collecting them in daylight, he wouldn’t have to land, anyway.

He thought about it for another several seconds, then shrugged. He didn’t have anyplace he was scheduled to be, so he might as well fly over and collect them now. If he needed to land for any reason the environmental suit was ready and waiting in his air car’s outsized cargo compartment, and so was the trank rifle. He didn’t want to use it if he could avoid it, but the rifle’s darts had an effective range of almost three hundred meters. They were guaranteed to knock out any treecat, and Tennessee Bolgeo was an excellent shot. Besides, who knew? He wasn’t
planning
on using the trank rifle, but if it should happen he had to land and he happened to see one of those dappled brown-and-white coats, he wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to finally collect a female treecat.

* * *

“I don’t understand what’s wrong,” Stephanie said, sitting on the picketwood branch fourteen meters above the ground, feet dangling in empty air. The slender, dappled treecat standing in her lap and staring intently into her eyes gave an audible “whuffle” of obvious frustration, and Stephanie stroked the delicate creature’s silken pelt.

“I’m sorry, Morgana,” she said humbly, projecting her regret as strongly as she could, “and I’m really trying. But I just don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

<
I see why you find this so frustrating, Climbs Quickly
,> Sings Truly said, turning to look at her brother. <
Death Fang’s Bane is trying so
hard
to grasp what we are telling her, yet we cannot make her understand!
>

<
I know
,> Climbs Quickly replied, <
but the fault, if there is one, lies with us, not with her. She is very clever, Death Fang’s Bane, yet she cannot hear our mind-voices, just as we cannot hear hers . . . if the two-legs truly have one, that is. I sometimes think from experience with Darkness Foe that they do, almost, but if so it is too different from that of the People for us to hear one another
.>

<
If only there were some way for us to make those moving images of the two-legs which you have described
,> Sings Truly grumbled.

<
Even that would not help in this case
,> Climbs Quickly pointed out. <
To make the moving images, the two-legs require the thing Death Fang’s Bane used the night we first met, and I believe they can only make moving images of something the picture-making thing has actually seen. And that is the problem here, is it not? No one has seen what happened to our missing People
.>

<
You can be very irritating at times, my brother
,> Sings Truly replied tartly, and Climbs Quickly bleeked a laugh.

<
Perhaps, but better to be irritating and accurate than comforting and wrong. Besides
—>

<
Broken Tooth! Sings Truly! Climbs Quickly!
>

The mental shout was actually all a single thought, but Sings Truly and Climbs Quickly snapped upright, heads swiveling automatically in the direction from which it had come.

<
Come!
> the distant mind-shout called. <
Come now! Something has happened to Twig Weaver!
>

It was obvious to Climbs Quickly that only a memory singer or a mated female could have projected her shout across the distance this one had clearly covered. And even as he thought that, he recognized the taste of Water Dancer, Twig Weaver’s mate. But what was she doing that far from the central nest place? And what could have happened to Twig Weaver?

<
I do not know what takes her so far from her nest and kittens, either,
> Sings Truly said, clearly sensing his inner thoughts. <
Yet it would seem Water Dancer may have stumbled across whatever has been happening to the People
.>

<
Indeed. And perhaps we do not need one of the two-legs’ picture-makers after all!
> Climbs Quickly flicked his head in his person’s direction. <
Death Fang’s Bane is here, Sings Truly. We must get her to come with us to rescue Twig Weaver and discover what has happened to him
.>

<
Are you certain of that, Climbs Quickly? We do not know—yet—what has befallen Twig Weaver, and for all her courage, Death Fang’s Bane is still but a youngling. For all we know, those of the clan who respond to Water Dancer may be rushing into danger. Would you expose Death Fang’s Bane to such?
>

<
She may be a youngling,
> Climbs Quickly returned proudly, <
but she is full of courage and she loves us. If we do not take her, and she later learns we did not, she will be angry. And if something terrible befalls Twig Weaver and we did not give her the chance to help us save him, her heart will be broken. I will not do that to her
.>

* * *

Stephanie had no idea what was going on.