by David Weber
But despite all the Navy efforts to accommodate her needs, Samantha had proven persistently unconventional. Perhaps that was to have been expected. Virtually all of the very few female 'cats who'd ever adopted had bonded to Forestry Commission rangers and never left Sphinx. Honor had run a check. No law or regulation required the registry of treecat adoptions, so the records she'd been able to consult had to have been incomplete, but as nearly as she could determine, in well over five T-centuries, only eight female 'cats had ever adopted anyone except a ranger... and that number included Samantha. That probably should have warned her that Samantha was unlikely to feel bound by whatever parenting conventions were "normal" for 'cats, but she'd still been surprised when Nimitz made it clear that Samantha wanted and intended to return to Grayson, with her kittens, when he and Honor did.
That had seemed like a very bad idea to Honor. She and Nimitz were scheduled to resume shipboard duty soon after her return, which would leave Samantha all alone with four rambunctious young on an alien planet whose environment included invisible and insidious risk factors which could kill even an adult 'cat, much less a kitten. Worse, she and her children would be the only treecats on the planet, leaving her as a first-time mother with no older and more experienced mothers of her own land to whom to turn for advice or assistance.
Honor had tried to make those points to Nimitz and Samantha, and she'd been confident Nimitz grasped them. But she hadn't been certain Samantha understood even with Nimitz to explain them to her. Telepathy was all very well, but Samantha had seemed so blithely unconcerned by Honor's arguments that she'd doubted the message was getting through.
Until the week before their departure for Grayson, that was. It had never occurred to Honor to wonder about just how much seniority Samantha had among her own kind.
She was quite a bit younger than Nimitz, and Honor had simply assumed that the wishes of a 'cat of her relative youth couldn't carry a great deal of weight with a clan to which she belonged only "by marriage." But she'd been forced to reconsider that assumption rather radically when no less than eight members of Nimitz's clan, three of them female, all older than Samantha, arrived on her doorstep. She'd been staying in her parents rambling, five-hundred-year-old house on the flanks of the Copperwall Mountains when they turned up, and she'd hardly been able to believe her own eyes.
She'd been certain at first that there was some mistake when MacGuiness answered the front doorbell and the newcomers had walked calmly inside, but Nimitz and Samantha had greeted them with purrs of pleasure and the unmistakable air of hosts welcoming expected guests. The thought of trying to chase them back outside had never even occurred to Honor, one simply didn't do things like that with treecats, and the eight of them had hopped up onto her parents' dining room table and regarded her expectantly. Her sense of shock had made her a bit slow, but a sharp nudge over her link to Nimitz had reminded her of her manners, and she'd introduced herself to her surprise guests while MacGuiness disappeared into the kitchen in search of the celery all 'cats loved.
Each 'cat had acknowledged her self-introduction gravely, and though it was considered bad form to assign names to 'cats unless the 'cat in question had adopted the namer, there were so many of them that Honor had to call them something just to keep them all straight. Given her taste for naval history, the five males had ended up dubbed Nelson, Togo, Hood, Farragut, and Hipper, but naming the females had been harder. Since so few of them adopted, it had seemed particularly important to come up with names which reflected their personalities, and Honor had needed several days to get to know them well enough to feel comfortable naming them.
In the end, the apparent social dynamics of the group had done it for her. The eldest of the three had become Hera, for it was obvious that every one of the males, except, perhaps, Nimitz, deferred utterly to her authority. If she was the head of this small slice of a clan, however, the 'cat Honor had dubbed Athena was obviously her exec and general advisor. The third female, Artemis, was barely older than Samantha, but she was also the feistiest of the ladies and the one who'd taken on the task of teaching the kittens the rudiments of hunting and stalking.
Honor still felt uncomfortable over having assigned names at all, but the newcomers had accepted their new appellations with cheerful approval. They'd also proceeded to settle down as if they'd always been members of her household... and given every sign that they intended to remain as such.
Yet if they'd been calm about it, the humans of Sphinx had not.
Despite the fact that Honor knew more about treecats than ninety-nine percent of her fellow Sphinxians, she'd had no more idea of how to proceed than anyone else did. It was clear Samantha and Nimitz had invited the others to join them, but she'd taken a while to grasp that it wasn't just for an extended visit or to take the kittens back to Nimitz's clan. And when she finally did realize Samantha actually intended for the newcomers to accompany her and Nimitz back to Grayson, it really hit the fan.
Treecats were a protected species. More than that, the Ninth Amendment to the Star Kingdom's Constitution expressly granted them special status as the indigenous intelligent species of Sphinx. The laws which protected their corporate claim to just over a third of Sphinx's surface in perpetuity and guarded them from exploitation were, to say the least, firm, but the people who'd drafted those laws had never anticipated a situation such as this. Adoption bonds had much the same legal status as marriages, which helped explain the Admiralty regulations sending pregnant 'cats and their humans home, but the fact that Samantha hadn't adopted Honor had already put their relationship on the fringes of established precedence. It was unheard of for a single human to have two 'cats, although no one had been prepared to comment when it was obvious Samantha and Nimitz were mated. But eight more of them? No one had ever even contemplated a situation in which one human found herself the focus of no less than ten treecats (not to mention the kittens)... all of whom seemed intent on following said human off-planet!
The Forestry Commission had pitched a fit, and a dozen rangers had descended on the Harrington Homestead, grimly determined to rescue the eight "wild" 'cats from any chance of exploitation. But once there, they'd been faced by their rescuees' determination not to be rescued. Two of the rangers had been accompanied by their own 'cats, whose reactions had made it plain that they felt Samantha and Nimitz's friends had the right to go wherever they wanted to go with whomever they chose to go there with... however hot and bothered it might make humans.
But once the Forestry Commission had retreated in confusion, the Admiralty's minions had moved in. They'd wanted Honor to leave Samantha on Sphinx with Nimitz's clan, which, in fact, had been her original intention. Honor couldn't blame BuPers for being just a bit put out with her for changing her mind (although, to be fair, she wasn't precisely the one whose mind had changed), but she did think they'd overreacted when they all but commanded her to leave Samantha, the kittens, and, especially!, the eight "wild" adults on Sphinx. They hadn't quite made it a nondiscretionary order, but they had specifically denied her the right to take any 'cat other than Nimitz with her aboard the military transport whose use her orders to Grayson authorized.
Unfortunately for Their Lordships, the Articles of War didn't require naval personnel to use naval shipping to reach their assigned duty stations, and once she'd accepted that her six-limbed friends were serious, Honor had given in and provided alternate transportation. At first, she'd intended to buy passage aboard a passenger liner. Then she'd considered chartering a small private vessel. What she hadn't considered, until Willard Neufsteiler, her chief financial manager, suggested it, was buying a ship of her own.
Since even a small, unarmed, bare-bones civilian starship cost about seventy million dollars, the idea of purchasing one had seemed extravagant, to say the least. But as Willard had pointed out, she was worth over three and a half billion by now, and if she bought the ship as a corporate asset of her Grayson-headquartered Sky Domes, ltd., she would owe no licensing fees (in light o
f her steadholder's status), while the purchase would provide a substantial tax writeoff in the Star Kingdom. Not only that, he'd been able to negotiate a very attractive price with the Hauptman Cartel for an only slightly used vessel much larger and more capable than she'd thought possible. And, he'd argued persuasively, her growing financial empire required more and more trips back and forth between Yeltsin's Star and Manticore by her various managers and factors. The flexibility and independence from passenger liner schedules which a privately owned vessel would provide would grow only more useful as time passed.
And so, to her considerable bemusement, she'd returned to Grayson not aboard an RMN or GSN cruiser or destroyer and not accompanied by a single treecat. Instead, she'd returned in state aboard the fifty-k-ton, private registry Star Falcon-class yacht RMS Paul Tankersley accompanied by fourteen treecats, and somewhere in the course of the voyage, she'd realized what she was really doing.
She was helping Samantha and Nimitz establish the first extra-Sphinxian colony of treecats. For whatever reason, her two friends and, obviously, the rest of Nimitz's clan had decided it was time to plant their kind on another planet, and that represented a quantum leap in their relationship with humanity. It might also prove that they were more intelligent than even Honor had suspected.
She knew Nimitz, at least, understood that the Star Kingdom was at war, and he'd had entirely too close a view, on occasion, of what humanity's weapons were capable of in ship-to-ship combat. It was entirely possible that other 'cats had seen what could happen when those weapons were used against planetary targets and shared the information with him, or perhaps he'd simply extrapolated the possible consequences from what he'd seen himself. Whatever anyone else might think, Honor had always known he was brighter than most two-footed people, and she'd asked him pointblank if an awareness of the military threat was behind this extraordinary departure in the behavior of his species. As always, there'd been a frustrating fuzziness to some of the nuances of his reply, but the gist of it had come through clearly enough.
Yes, he and Samantha did understand what nuclear or kinetic weaponry could mean for planetary targets, and they, or they and his clan, Honor wasn't entirely clear on that point, had decided it was time the 'cats stopped keeping all their eggs in one basket. She couldn't be certain, but she suspected that it wouldn't be long before other adopted humans were tapped to help move core colony groups from Sphinx to Manticore and Gryphon, the other two habitable worlds of the Manticore System, and that headed her towards other speculations. She'd become convinced over the years that 'cats in general were considerably smarter than they chose to admit, and she could see several advantages which might accrue from concealing their full capabilities. No humans who'd ever been adopted could doubt the depth, strength, and reality of the bonds between them and "their" 'cats. Honor knew, didn't think; knew, that Nimitz loved her just as fiercely as she loved him. But at any given time, only a minute percentage of the 'cats' total population ever adopted, and she'd sometimes wondered if perhaps those who did filled the role of scouts or observers for the rest of their species.
Did Nimitz report back to his clan on all that he'd seen and done with her between their visits home? Had the 'cats decided long ago that they needed to keep an eye on the humans, who had invaded their world? Given the ability of humanity's technology to destroy, as well as help, observing and studying the newcomers certainly would have made sense. Honor had never asked Nimitz outright if he reported to his clan, but she'd gradually become certain he did. Not that it bothered her. She certainly discussed the events they'd shared, including his part in them, with other humans, so how could she possibly object to his sharing them with his own family?
But his clan's decision to establish extraplanetary colonies suggested a more highly developed policy-making ability than even the most free thinking 'cat experts had been prepared to posit. Not only did it require them to carry out some pretty sophisticated threat analysis, but it presupposed an ability to formulate a generational strategy for their clan and, quite possibly, their entire species. That was a sobering thought, and once it sank in, it was going to require those "experts" to undertake some substantial reevaluation of their hypotheses. And especially, Honor had thought with a smile, the theories woven in efforts to explain why seven of Manticore's last nine monarchs had all been adopted on state visits to Sphinx. If she was right in her latest hunch, that indicated the 'cats had an awareness of human political structures whose sophistication no one had ever suspected in his or her wildest dreams.
In the meantime, however, she had to deal with the more immediate consequences of the decision to immigrate. At least it had provided Samantha and Nimitz with a generous number of baby-sitters, and given the appalling energy and inquisitiveness of their offspring, that was a not inconsequential benefit. More than that, the others had shown a far greater willingness to interact with humans than most "wild" 'cats did. Honor hadn't tried them in a large crowd yet, but neither MacGuiness nor her twelve armsmen bothered them in any way. In fact, each of the eight newcomers had been taken around the entire crowd of humans and formally and individually introduced by Nimitz or Samantha. Most of them had followed Nimitz’s example and adopted the custom of shaking hands, and the nods and ear flicks and flirted tails of the ones who hadn't had clearly been intended as formal gestures of greeting.
They'd taken the move aboard ship with equal aplomb, and they'd abided by Honor's strict injunctions not to go running about unaccompanied by a human. Like Nimitz and Samantha, they clearly understood human technology could kill by accident, as well as design, and they'd not only exhibited their own willingness to avoid such dangers but guarded the kittens against any similar risk with undeviating attentiveness.
But within thirty minutes, the GSN pinnace which had come up to collect Honor and her party from the Tankersley would deliver them all to the pad at Harrington Space Facility. And as Hera, the seat-hopping nursemaid, deposited Achilles in the seat with Samantha, Honor found herself wondering how well the Graysons would handle their planets invasion by treecats.
Graysons human settlers had always faced serious environmental limitations. In many respects, the entire planet could have been considered a vast toxic waste dump, where human-habitable enclaves could be carved out only through unremitting effort and where draconian birth control had been required for a millennium. The situation had grown steadily better over the past three T-centuries and, especially, the last decade. When Grayson first joined the Manticoran Alliance, it had been laboriously pulling itself up by its own bootstraps via space-based industry and orbital farms. That process had been hugely accelerated when a youthful engineer named Adam Gerrick came to his newly installed Steadholders office with a proposal to build entire planetary farms under domes constructed of the advanced materials the Alliance had made available. His audacious plan had been well beyond the resources of Harrington Steading... but not beyond the off-world resources of Countess Harrington, and by now Honors Grayson Sky Domes, Ltd., was busy doming entire towns and cities, as well as farms.
That was one of several reasons her personal wealth was expanding at an almost geometric rate. There were others, of course. As Willard had promised her, once her working capital passed a certain point, it became almost a self-sustaining reaction. She was even beginning to understand the inner workings of high finance, though she remained far out of the class of a wily old financier like Neufsteiler. But the impact on Grayson had been to provide an enormous expansion in safe habitats and relax many oj the traditional restrictions on birth rates.
Now she, or, more precisely, Nimitz's clan, proposed to introduce a second intelligent species into that mix. To be sure, it might be some time before most Graysons fully grasped that the 'cats were another intelligent species, but Honor expected them to make the leap at least as quickly as Manticorans would have. She and Nimitz had been entirely too visible here for the people of Grayson to be able to ignore the fact of his intelligence, whereas few non-S
phinxians came face-to-face with 'cats back in the Star Kingdom. In a sense, the fact that treecats were an accepted part of the "scenery" there actually made it easier for native Manticorans to overlook their intelligence. Where the Graysons saw Nimitz as a new, fascinating species to be carefully studied and enjoyed, Manticorans were almost blase, comfortable with what they already "knew."
It had been rather refreshing for both Honor and Nimitz to meet an entire planet of people who were willing to accept the 'cat on his own terms, but it did mean the Graysons were also more likely to grasp that Nimitz and Samantha's new friends were, in effect, the opening wedge of an invasion. A friendly one, perhaps, but still an invasion. One of Honor's traditional authorities as Steadholder Harrington was to decide how many and which emigrants would be allowed into her steading. In Graysons grim, early days, it had also been the steadholder's harsh duty to determine which of his steaders had to die if that was what was required to balance population against the maximum strain his steading could bear, and Honor was unspeakably grateful that decisions like that were no longer necessary.
Yet Grayson remained a planet with a commitment to the tradition of balancing people against resources which would have delighted the most rabid of Old Earth's pre-space Greens, and that was the environment into which Honor proposed to introduce treecats.
The good news was that 'cat populations grew far more slowly than their multiple-birth reproductive patterns might suggest. Samantha’s four-kitten litter was of about average size, but most females littered no more than once every eight to ten T-years. Given that they lived about two hundred years and remained fertile for a hundred and fifty, that still meant a single mated pair could produce a staggering number of offspring, but the process took much longer than initial impressions might suggest. And it was inevitable that human and 'cat societies were going to be much more intimately intertwined here on Grayson, which lacked the endless forests that provided Sphinx with virtually unlimited habitat for its native sentients. Here, 'cats would have to share the life-sustaining enclaves of humanity, and Honor wondered just how that would affect their adoption rate.