A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (41 page)

He managed to flop over and go scooting backwards on the seat of his environmental suit while the hexapuma coughed and sucked in fresh air. His movement only served to attract the monster’s attention afresh, however, and it cocked its head, looking at him much the way a hungry robin might have regarded the first worm of spring.

It opened its mouth again, snarling.

Bolgeo’s right hand scrabbled frantically at his belt, trying to find his bush knife in hopes of at least selling his life dearly. But the bush knife wasn’t there. It had gone flying when he slammed into the tree trunk, and his hand found only the empty spot where it was supposed to be.

The hexapuma crouched to spring, and Bolgeo squeezed his eyes shut. It was going to—

CRRRAAAAAACCCCCK!

His eyes flew open again as the thunderclap echoed through the forest. The hexapuma yowled in agony, rising up on its rearmost limbs, twisting its body, forelimbs and mid-limbs flailing as it tried to reach the source of its sudden pain.

CRRRAAAAAACCCCCK!

A second shot ripped out, slamming into the hexapuma’s back two centimeters from the first. It screamed even more loudly, but it
still
didn’t go down.

CRRRAAAAAACCCCCK!

The third shot finally found the target it had sought, and the beleaguered monster collapsed with a final bubbling moan as a 17.8-gram, 11-millimeter jacketed hollow point slug travelling at 490 meters per second shattered its spine just below its shoulders.

Bolgeo stared incredulously at the monster as it slammed to the ground and lay twitching. He was still trying to grasp the fact that he was alive when something else smacked into him.

He looked down to find a much smaller, one-armed version of the hexapuma apparently glued to his chest and snarling up at him through his transparent face plate. He reached automatically to pull the treecat loose, then yelled in pain as twenty needle-sharp claws dug into his chest.

His mind registered the observation that he’d been wrong about the environmental suit’s ability to resist treecat claws. A point which was drawn even more forcibly to his attention as two more treecats bounded out of the trees above him. One of them pounced on each of his arms, wrapping their own limbs around them, and he yelled again—even louder—as their claws ripped at the environmental suit and the far more fragile human skin underneath it.

Then there were dozens of the little demons, falling out of the branches like a furry waterfall, bearing him down under their combined weight, and he flailed desperately—uselessly—suddenly wondering if he’d just discovered an even worse fate than being killed by a hexapuma.

29

Scott MacDallan’s air car came hurtling out of the sky at an insanely reckless velocity. He knew he was flying far faster than was safe, but he didn’t really care, and neither did the young man in the passenger seat. In fact, Karl Zivonik had spent most of the flight trying to make the air car move even more rapidly by sheer force of will.

MacDallan’s radar had picked up the transponder of Frank Lethbridge and Ainsley Jedrusinski’s official Forestry Service air car coming up fast from astern, but they were at least fifteen minutes behind him, and he had no intention of waiting for them. As a matter of fact, at the moment an official presence was the last thing he wanted getting between him and whoever had been trapping treecats and threatening Stephanie Harrington. Lethbridge and Jedrusinski could have whatever was left when
he
was done.

The air car grounded in a marginally clear space on the bank of a small river, considerably less boisterous than Thunder River. It wasn’t his best landing, not that he cared under the circumstances, and a corner of his mind noticed the commercial-style air car sixty or seventy meters farther down the river.

“Where is she? Where
is
she?” Karl demanded, already flinging open the passenger side hatch and pulling his 10-millimeter Gerain Express from the rifle rack.

“That way!” MacDallan replied, pointing in the direction of the emergency beacon from Stephanie’s uni-link. “About three hundred meters!”

Karl didn’t bother to answer. He was already almost as tall as his father, with legs which were not only longer but younger than MacDallan’s, and he went bounding into the bush like a treecat with its tail on fire. MacDallan paused just long enough to grab his own rifle, then went thrashing off after the younger man.

He was running hard when he heard a sudden shout from Karl. For a moment, his heart leapt into his throat, but then he exhaled explosively as he realized Karl wasn’t yelling in despair or even anger. He was . . .
laughing?

MacDallan couldn’t imagine what could have produced
that
reaction, and he redoubled his pace, only to slither to a halt, feet sliding in the thick leaves and mouth falling open in astonishment.

Dr. Tennessee Bolgeo sat very, very still in the shredded remains of what looked like some sort of environmental suit. It was going to take a forensic reconstruction to be positive about that, given the smallness of the pieces to which it had been reduced. Bolgeo’s epidermis seemed to have suffered quite a bit of surface damage of its own in the process, which might explain why he was sitting so carefully motionless, given the dozens of obviously unhappy treecats clustered in the branches above him.

Or the explanation might be even simpler than that, MacDallan reflected, taking in the dead hexapuma sprawled untidily ten or twelve meters short of Bolgeo . . . and the fourteen-year-old girl sitting on a limb all her own, ten meters up, with a handgun that looked as big as she was resting ready on her knee.

“
Stephanie!
”

“Oh hi, Scott! And you too, Karl!” Stephanie replied, taking her eyes off Bolgeo at last and waving cheerfully with her free hand. “Glad you got here. Say, could you kind of take charge of Dr. Bolgeo? It’s been all I could manage to keep Lionheart’s family from eating him.”

* * *

“Well, that was certainly exciting,” Dr. Sanura Hobbard said, looking around the table.

She and Chief Ranger Shelton had joined MacDallan, Irina, Karl, Lethbridge, and Jedrusinski as the Harringtons’ dinner guests. Fortunately, the Harrington freehold boasted a very large dining room, with a table sized to match. The wreckage of a delicious supper lay strewn across that table, and everyone seemed to be settling back into a comfortable post-dinner sort of mood.

“Yes, it was,” Marjorie Harrington agreed. There was the very slightest edge of frost in her voice, and she gave her daughter a very direct look across the table. “As a matter of fact, your father and I would appreciate it if you could manage to find something just a little
less
exciting to do with your time, Steph.”

“It wasn’t
my
fault, Mom. Besides,” Stephanie added virtuously, “Lionheart and I told anybody who’d listen from the beginning that Bolgeo was a bas—” She paused and looked demurely at her mother. “I mean a
stinker
, of course!”

“You’d
better
, young lady!” her mother said sternly, but her lips twitched, and Stephanie grinned.

“While I might quibble with your choice of nouns,” MacDallan said with a smile of his own, “you
did
make the point fairly strongly, at that. We should’ve listened harder.” His expression turned more sober. “I’m just glad things worked out as well as they did and nobody else got seriously hurt.”

There was a general murmur of agreement, and Richard Harrington raised his wine glass in Shelton’s direction.

Despite the chief ranger’s conversation with Hobbard, he’d shared the xeno-anthropologist’s suspicion about Bolgeo’s official credentials to the full. And despite how terribly shorthanded he was, he’d arranged to keep tabs on the Chattanoogan. He hadn’t had the manpower to do it himself, but he’d discussed the situation with the Twin Forks chief of police, and the cops had kept an eye on Bolgeo for him. They hadn’t managed to actually spot any of the treecats being transported into the warehouse holding facility, but they’d been watching one of Bolgeo’s assistants when he leased the warehouse in the first place. So the instant Shelton got Frank Lethbridge’s com message about Bolgeo’s apprehension, he and the police had moved on the warehouse.

As a result, all of the missing treecats had been found, rescued, and restored to their clan. It was unlikely Bolgeo and his cronies were going to serve a lot of time, given the treecats’ unresolved legal status, but they’d probably get at least half a local year or so for poaching, if nothing else, during which Shelton would be sending out their biometric data to see if there happened to be any outstanding warrants floating about the galaxy. Everyone would have preferred something a bit more forceful, yet the important thing was that the treecats were safe.

Richard Harrington had monitored their condition until they were fully recovered from the tranquilizers Bolgeo and his partners had been feeding them, and a couple of them had seemed a little slower to snap back than the others. Those two had become semi-permanent fixtures at the Harrington freehold, and one of them was currently perched on the back of Karl’s chair, next to Stephanie and Lionheart. The two treecats looked like matching bookends, both clutching celery stalks extorted—without any particular difficulty—from the two young people. Fisher sat on the back of MacDallan’s chair, facing them across the table, and now Hobbard let her eyes circle the three treecats before they came back to Stephanie.

“Stephanie,” she said quietly, “I know how protective of the treecats you are. I understand that, and I don’t blame you a bit. Or you, Scott. I think I even know what it is you’re worried about, and I promise you I have absolutely no desire to see what happened on Barstool repeated here on Sphinx.”

Stephanie’s smile had disappeared. She looked seriously back at Hobbard for several seconds, then nodded slowly.

“We’ve never been afraid that was what
you
wanted, Dr. Hobbard,” she said quietly.

“I’m glad to hear that. And I have to confess I was a little surprised—as well as disturbed—by what Bolgeo had to say about ‘backers’ right here in the Star Kingdom.” Hobbard shook her head. “It doesn’t sound like there are very many of them yet, and they don’t seem to have themselves well organized, but the fact that there are
any
of them this early in the process is worrisome. I’ll admit that. But in a lot of ways, it really only strengthens my belief that we have to get some sort of official protective status in place for the treecats. And for me to do that, I need . . . well, I need more cooperation than I’ve been getting.”

“Dr. Hobbard,” MacDallan said, “Stephanie and I have never disagreed with you about the need to protect the treecats. What we’re worried about is how those protections are structured. How good they are—and how solid. You’re right, we haven’t been cooperating with you as fully as we could have. And Steph is right that our lack of cooperation was never aimed at
you
in the first place. We understand your commission has to look into the question of treecat intelligence, look at the whole question of whether or not they’re really telepathic. It’s just—”

“Just that we’d rather go slow than rush ahead too quickly and make mistakes we can’t fix later,” Stephanie said.

“Exactly!” MacDallan nodded firmly.

“Would it help any,” Hobbard said slowly, “if I admitted I share some of your concerns? Or, for that matter, that I’d be prepared to . . . shave my final report, let’s say, in the treecats’ favor?”

“Is this something official representatives of the Forestry Service should be hearing?” Shelton wondered.

“I don’t see why not.” Hobbard smiled. “I’m not going to get away with any ‘shaving’ without the Forestry Service’s active connivance, you know.”

“ ‘Connivance’ is such an unpleasant word,” Shelton said, gazing down into his own wine glass. “I’d prefer to think of it as
cooperation
.”

“Excuse me,” Lethbridge said, looking back and forth between Hobbard and his superior, “but do my ears deceive me, or am I hearing something that sounds suspiciously like the birth of a pro-treecat conspiracy?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it a conspiracy,” Hobbard said, her tone considerably more serious than Lethbridge’s had been, “but that might be moving in the right direction. The main thing is that we’ve got to get some sort of support structure in place before more of those ‘backers’ of Bolgeo’s wake up to the threat the treecats represent to those land options. And we’ve got to—at least
some
of us have to—really understand what the treecats are. How we can coexist with them on this planet without doing them irreparable harm even if we have absolutely no intention of doing so. We have to figure them
out
, Stephanie.”

She looked earnestly across the table into Stephanie’s eyes.

“We have to know how to avoid hurting them, and to be honest, I think you, even more than Scott or anybody else who winds up adopted, are going to have to be our point person on that. You and Lionheart were the first to establish your bond, and in some ways I think yours is stronger even than Scott and Fisher’s. I promise you that anything I learn from you will remain confidential until and unless you and I
both
agree the time has come to go public with it, but please, let me in. Let me learn enough about the treecats to keep them safe.”

Stephanie gazed at her for two or three heartbeats, then turned and looked into Lionheart’s eyes. Those green, slit-pupilled eyes. They gazed back at her, and she felt an odd sensation, one that hovered on the very edge of clarity, like a memory she could
almost
recall. That wasn’t a good description of it—only as good a one as she could come up with—and yet she was certain that Lionheart understood at least the heart of her concerns, her worry. There was no way he could possibly have understood
all
of it, but he knew what she longed to ask him. She could never have explained to another human how she knew that, but she did, and she realized she was almost holding her breath. Then he reached out and touched her cheek very gently . . . and nodded.