by David Weber
For a moment, Climbs Quickly thought someone had constructed a prison out of tree branches. That was what it looked like, at any rate. But then he realized it wasn’t the case. The bars of the cage which had enclosed Twig Weaver looked like branches, yet they weren’t. And as his nostrils flared, he caught the scent of cluster stalk . . . and something else.
Short Tail started forward, but Climbs Quickly reached out and stopped him.
Short Tail said.
* * *
Stephanie leaned against the crown oak’s mighty trunk. As tall as an Old Earth sequoia (and even more massive, due to Sphinx’s higher gravity), it towered over the lower growing picketwood like a titan, and she peered up at the massive branch a good fifty meters above her—five meters higher than the tallest branch of the surrounding picketwood but little more than halfway to the top of the crown oak—at Lionheart and the others. It was hard to make out details at such a distance, but they were obviously conferring with one another about something, and she wondered—again—what this was all about.
After a few minutes, Lionheart came swarming down the tree towards her. She held up her arms when he was within a couple of meters of the ground, and he launched himself into them, pressing close against her as she hugged him.
“Okay,” she told him. “I’m here. Now what’s this all about?”
“Bleek,” Lionheart said, then raised his remaining true-hand and pointed up at the high perch from which he had descended.
“You know,” she said, “this belt unit doesn’t have anywhere near the power pack our glider does.” She studied the branch in question, then shrugged. “Still, the charge looks pretty good so far. Okay, I’m coming.”
* * *
Climbs Quickly moved around to the pads on his person’s shoulder and back, clinging close as she adjusted the device on her belt and their weight seemed to magically disappear. When they weighed as little as one of the rotating gold-leaf seedpods that filled the air of leaf-turning season with flashing golden light, Death Fang’s Bane reached out to the tree trunk and sent them bobbing up it at a speed few of the People could have matched.
They reached the limb where Broken Tooth and Short Tail waited, and she crouched on one knee beside the other two People while she adjusted a knob on her belt device. Their weight crept back up again, although not to anything approaching what it should have been, and Climbs Quickly pressed his nose against her ear, then pointed.
* * *
Stephanie Harrington followed Lionheart’s pointing finger. For a moment, she didn’t realize what she was seeing. Then she did, and said a word her parents would not have approved of.
The cream and gray shape of the treecat lay crumpled on its side in a small cage of some sort. She had no idea how it had gotten here, but she could tell it was a fairly sophisticated piece of engineering. It looked like it had articulated legs, ending in sharp, spurlike claws which were sunk into the limb’s surface. It was a bit hard to make out the details, since whoever had left it here had very carefully camouflaged it, but it looked to her as if it might have its own much smaller built-in counter-grav unit, as well.
She looked up at the canopy above and instantly realized how the trapper, whoever she was, intended to retrieve his captive. The problem was what she did about it.
She started to hurry forward to rescue the treecat, then made herself stop. She didn’t know enough about that trap. How had the treecat been rendered unconscious? Could the trap do the same thing to her if she got too close? What kind of security devices might be built into it? Could the person who had put it here be ruthless enough to include a self-destruct device, something that would blow up a trap and any treecat in it if someone tampered with it? And was there an alarm of some sort on it? Something which would tell the trapper her trap had been discovered if Stephanie tried to open it?
“Okay,” she said, keeping her voice as confident as possible and speaking to herself as much as to the waiting treecats. “Okay. I see the problem Now I think we probably need to get a little advice on how to deal with it.”
The treecats looked up at her and she sensed their deep worry . . . and their confidence in her. She wondered if she was picking it up directly from the other treecats, or sensing it through her link to Lionheart. Or, for that matter, if she was simply reading their body language and the intensity of their huge green eyes.
She didn’t know about that, but she reached for her uni-link.
* * *
“—so then Dad said I should com you, Scott. What do I do now?”
“Don’t do anything for a minute, Steph,” Scott MacDallan said firmly. “You may have a point about possible booby traps, and I don’t want anything happening to you!”
“Well, I can’t just sit here! I’ve got to get him out of there, somehow. Besides, what if the . . . person”—she’d been about to use another, much ruder word, but she stopped herself in time—“who set this trap comes back to collect it before I get him out of it?”
“A good point,” he conceded. “But let me think for a minute first, okay?”
“Okay,” she replied more than a little grudgingly, and he shook his head. He’d come to know “sweet little” Stephanie Harrington too well to expect her to sit there passively for very long.
Why, oh why did both her parents have to choose today of all days to be out on business? he asked himself.
Richard Harrington was even farther from his daughter at the moment than MacDallan was, and he was smack in the middle of a surgical procedure to save a genetically modified Morgan horse’s leg. And Marjorie Harrington and her Forestry Service guide were half-buried (more or less literally) in the root structure the picketwood network the BioNeering release had contaminated, trying to figure out how the rest of the picketwood had separated itself from the dying portion before the contaminant spread still further. She was at leas
t as far from home as her husband was, which meant neither of them could get to Stephanie before—
“Look,” he said, “Frank and Ainsley should both be closer to you than your parents are. Can I go ahead and give them your GPS coordinates? I know how hard we’ve all been trying to keep Lionheart’s clan’s location a secret, but it sounds like someone’s figured it out, anyway. And we need an official presence on-scene as quick as we can get it there.”
“Wellllll . . . all right.” She knew he’d heard the unhappiness in her voice, but she’d already seen the suggestion coming. And little though she liked the idea, she had to admit it had to be done.
“Okay. I’ll get them on their way as soon as you and I are off the com,” he said. “ Now, what did your dad say when you asked him about why the treecat’s unconscious?”
“He says it’s probably some kind of knockout gas. I’ve been looking at the trap with my binoculars, and I see what could be a kind of swivel-mounted dispenser in the roof of the cage. At the moment, it’s pointed at the treecat. I guess it may be waiting to give him another squirt if he starts to wake up before somebody gets here to collect him.”
“Which doesn’t mean it won’t turn itself around to squirt you—or one of the other treecats—if you start fooling around with it!” he said sharply.
“I’m not a complete null wit, Scott,” she said testily. “I already figured that out. But Dad says most of the gases that would be most effective—and safe to use—against a native species with a treecat’s body mass wouldn’t be powerful enough, or effective enough against humans, to knock me out.”
“Which is all fine and good, assuming whoever set this trap is as smart as your father and equally concerned about not harming the critters he’s trying to trap,” he pointed out.
“I know that. But if you don’t want me to ‘start fooling around with it,’ what do you want me to do?”
“To be perfectly honest,” he said, “what I’d like to do is order you to climb down out of that tree and get back to a safe distance before whoever set the trap comes along and realizes you’re onto him. I don’t know what kind of person we’re dealing with here, Stephanie. I don’t know how far he’d go to . . . eliminate any witnesses. Unfortunately, I do know it won’t do me any good to tell you to back off, will it?”
“Not much,” she admitted, lips twitching in a brief half-smile, and he chuckled.
“Well, in that case, I think the best thing you could do is probably to back off at least a little ways and keep an eye on things. If somebody turns up to collect that trap, try to get a look at the air car. Maybe you can identify it later. In the meantime, find yourself a good spot to keep a lookout while I get Frank and Ainsley. I’ll be in the air, headed your direction myself by the time I get hold of them.”
27
Stephanie Harrington sat on the crown oak limb, her back braced against the trunk, with her knees drawn up under her chin and her arms wrapped around her shins.
Her expression was not a happy one.
She was willing to admit MacDallan might have a point, but that was one of her friends in that trap over there. It was almost certainly one of the treecats who had helped save her from the hexapuma. She owed him. More than that, he was part of her family, and she hated just sitting here doing nothing!
Lionheart shifted slightly on the branch beside her, and she made herself draw a deep breath, then unwrapped her arms from her shins. She stretched her legs out along the limb, making a lap, and held out her arms to him. He swarmed into them, cuddling against her, and she tucked her chin over the top of his head and hugged him.
* * *
Climbs Quickly pressed his nose more tightly against his two-leg’s collarbone, buzzing with a bone-deep, reassuring purr. He felt her anxiety, her frustration, but he and Broken Tooth and Short Tail had listened to her conversations with her parents and with Darkness Foe. They hadn’t understood any of the mouth-sounds, but they’d understood enough—at least in general—from Death Fang’s Bane’s mind-glow to know Darkness Foe, Swift Striker, and Darkness Foe’s friends who had helped teach Death Fang’s Bane the use of her weapon, were all on their way to Twig Weaver’s rescue. They knew that, and it filled them with hope, but they also understood Death Fang’s Bane’s worry and burning desire to do something.
He kept his mind-voice low, but it was perhaps fortunate Water Dancer was too far distant to overhear him anyway, Climbs Quickly reflected sourly. Not that Short Tail’s point wasn’t valid.
Both of his companions’ mind-glows radiated wry amusement at that. Water Dancer hadn’t wanted her mate to go off unaccompanied when so many of the People had been disappearing. But he’d been confident in his ability to look after himself, and with the clan so short of scouts and hunters, he’d refused to ask another to go with him. And when she’d threatened to follow him herself, he’d delivered a tremendous scold, pointing out that their kittens were scarcely weaned. Surely she had better things to do than follow him about! And if there actually was any danger, they had no business risking both of their kittens’ parents!
In Climbs Quickly’s opinion, any male—especially a bonded male—should have known how useless it had been to issue that sort of decree. In fact, Twig Weaver should have realized it would only make Water Dancer even more determined to keep him safe. Which was precisely why she had asked one of the older females to keep watch over her offspring while she went scuttling through the branches behind Twig Weaver.
Climbs Quickly didn’t know how she’d managed to keep him in sight without his detecting her familiar mind-glow, but it was obviously as well for Twig Weaver she’d done so. At least the clan knew where he was, and now Death Fang’s Bane and Darkness Foe knew what had been happening. Now if only they could—
His head came up suddenly, ears pricking forward, and a faint snarl sounded deep in his throat as he recognized the sound of one of the two-leg flying things.
* * *
Stephanie saw Lionheart’s head rise abruptly and sensed a sudden spike in his emotions. She didn’t know what he’d heard, but she strained her own ears, trying to catch whatever sound had alerted him.
For several seconds, she heard nothing but wind sighing
through foliage and the distant call of the Sphinxian equivalent of birds. But then she heard another sound, and her face went pale.
That can’t be Scott or either of the rangers—not this quick! she thought. But if it isn’t any of them . . .
Her eyes darted back to the trapped treecat, and her stomach twisted into a sudden knot. Of course. Whoever had set that trap would have fitted it with some sort of signal to tell her when it had something in it. She wouldn’t want to leave it sitting too long lest one of the other treecats come along, discover the victim, and realize what had been happening to the members of his clan. Which meant she was going to activate that counter-grav unit any second now and the only physical evidence of what she’d been doing would disappear . . . along with yet another member of Stephanie’s treecat family.
Her jaw clenched. No. No, that wasn’t going to happen! Not to another of her treecats, it wasn’t! But how—?
“Give me your net!” she told Lionheart, pointing at the net wrapped about his middle. “All of you—give me your nets, now!”
Lionheart looked at her, his expression perplexed. For just a moment she thought he didn’t understand. Then she realized he did . . . and that he didn’t want her risking herself.
“Give me the nets!” she repeated harshly, holding out both hands and making grabbing motions. He looked at her for a second longer, and then his true-hand and hand-feet moved, unwrapping the cargo net he continued to carry with him everywhere he went.
He held it up to her, and by the time he had it unwrapped from around his torso, the other two treecats with him had unwrapped their nets, as well. Stephanie snatched them up, twitched her own counter-grav up to reduce her weight to no more than a kilo or two, and went racing along the branch.
* * *
Climbs Quickly watched Death Fang’s Bane run along the branch towards Twig Weaver’s prison and pride warred with fear in his heart.