A Beautiful Friendship-ARC (24 page)

“All right, I agree that exposing a fourteen-year-old to that kind of intrusiveness wouldn’t exactly be a good thing,” she said finally. “At the same time, the way she talked makes me think she’s probably the only person on the planet who’s already being pestered more by people like Hobbard—or the rest of them—than
you
are! You may be the one who kept that lunatic Ubel from getting away with murder—
more
murders, anyway—and worse, but she’s the one who discovered the treecats in the first place. And don’t forget just
how
she discovered them! I doubt that your going to have a talk with her is likely to make things any worse in that regard.”

“Maybe not, but how much
good
would it do? I don’t want to sound like I’m putting her down because she’s a kid, but she
is
only fourteen, Irina. It’s not just a question of how mature she is. It’s a question of how much she understands about what’s going on. For that matter, it’s a question of how much someone her age
can
do to keep things from sliding entirely out of control.”

“Granted.” Irina nodded. “On the other hand,
I
think this is something you need to do, if only to find out if she knows something you ought to find out about. And if you have any qualms about her . . . capabilities, let’s say, why don’t you discuss them with Frank? He’s probably in a position to give you a better feel about that than I possibly could.”

* * *

“Scott! Fisher!” Frank Lethbridge waved an enthusiastic greeting as MacDallan walked into his office with Fisher on his shoulder. “I didn’t know you two were coming clear out here today.”

“Well, we were in the neighborhood,” MacDallan replied.

“Just in the neighborhood, huh?” Lethbridge raised a skeptical eyebrow, then looked out the office window. His isolated Sphinx Forestry Service ranger station was over six hundred kilometers from MacDallan’s Thunder River medical office. Even for a counter-grav air car, that was a fair trip.

“As it happens, we were in the neighborhood because I wanted to talk to you . . . privately,” MacDallan admitted, and Lethbridge’s expression sobered as the doctor’s tone registered.

“Talk to me about what?” the ranger asked a bit cautiously. “And why in person instead of by com?”

“Partly because I wanted a chance to get a feel—a personal feel—for what you might have to say,” MacDallan told him levelly. “But also, to be honest, because I don’t want to take a chance on anybody overhearing us.”

“You’re starting to make me a little nervous here, Scott.”

“Sorry.” MacDallan grimaced. “It’s not really anything sinister, Frank. It’s just . . .” He paused. “It’s just that I’m worried. About the treecats.”

He reached up, stroking Fisher’s head, and the treecat butted his palm gently.

“What about the treecats?” Lethbridge asked, eyes narrowing intently.

“First, let me be up front about this,” MacDallan said. “I’m talking to you as my
friend
, not as a Forestry Service ranger. I’m not going to ask you to violate any professional codes, and I’m not going to ask you to do anything you shouldn’t be doing. But if what I’m about to say to you gets to the wrong set of ears, it could have some pretty unfortunate repercussions.”

Something like a hint of anger sparked in Lethbridge’s gray eyes, and MacDallan shook his head quickly.

“I’m not saying I think you’d betray any confidences, Frank! I just want to be sure you understand how serious my worries are. And, to be honest, I’m a lot more concerned with protecting Fisher and the other treecats than I am with helping those busybodies poking and prying around them.”

Lethbridge’s expression cleared, and he snorted harshly.

“Don’t think I don’t agree with you about
that
!” He shook his head in disgust. “Hobbard and her crowd aren’t too bad, but I wouldn’t trust some of these other . . . scientists as far as I could spit upwind in a hurricane! And most of them would make some hungry hexapuma really happy if we let them go wandering around all by themselves in the bush like a herd of Old Terran elephants! For that matter, I’m scheduled to take a half dozen of them out to ‘observe the treecats in the wild’ next week. The only thing I can think of right off hand that I’d enjoy more would be regrowing a broken tooth without quick-heal.”

MacDallan chuckled.

“Somehow I’m not too surprised to hear you say that,” he said. “Anyway, are you okay with talking to me?”

“Sit down and we’ll see,” Lethbridge said, pointing at the chair on the far side of his desk. “If you start saying anything that makes me uncomfortable, I can always tell you to stop, can’t I?”

“I guess you can.”

MacDallan took the indicated chair, urged Fisher down into his lap, and tipped back comfortably.

“The thing is, Frank,” he said quietly after a moment, “more went on with that BioNeering business than I ever officially admitted. I don’t want to go into the details even with you, for a lot of reasons—some of them purely personal. But what it comes down to is that I’ve got what I think is pretty darned convincing personal evidence the treecats are a lot smarter than most people are guessing even now. Not only that, but I’m pretty sure I’ve got proof they really are telepaths.”

Lethbridge pursed his lips in a silent whistle and leaned back in his own chair, folding his arms across his chest. He looked at his friend—both his friends—for several seconds, then nodded to himself.

“I wondered about that,” he said simply. “You went awfully straight to the heart of things, and I never did buy all that business about your ‘playing a hunch.’ So it was Fisher here who spilled the beans to you?”

“No, not really. Oh, he helped—he was part of it. But it was the Stray. Erhardt’s treecat.”

Lethbridge’s expression hardened into something like cold, hammered iron, and Fisher made a soft sound of distress. MacDallan scooped him up, hugging him, pressing his face against the soft fur in apology for taking all three of them back to that horrible day when the half-starved, emaciated treecat MacDallan had known only as “the Stray”—Erhardt had never shared
his
name for his friend, if he’d ever given him one—had led MacDallan and Aleksandr Zivonik to the crashed air car and the three dead bodies.

One of those bodies had been Arvin Erhardt’s. Erhardt had been a cargo pilot, hired by the BioNeering research group and assigned to their research facility here on Sphinx . . . and he and the other two men aboard his air car had been murdered by Dr. Mariel Ubel, the facility’s lead scientist. She’d sabotaged the air car’s flight computers to ensure that it would crash on its way back to civilization in an effort to keep them from revealing the fact that she’d released a deadly pathogen into the planetary environment, poisoning and destroying the very heart of a treecat clan’s home range. It had apparently been an accident, but it was the sort of accident
competent
scientists didn’t have, and her career would have been over if the news had gotten out. For someone like Ubel, that had been more than sufficient reason to casually murder three human beings.

She’d darned near murdered MacDallan, too, when he turned up at the research facility following up on the “hunch” he’d offered to the authorities as his official reason for being there. In fact, she
would
have killed him . . . if the Stray hadn’t flung himself directly onto the muzzle of her rifle just as she fired and deflected her shot at the cost of his own life.

“The Stray, huh?” Lethbridge said after a moment. “Poor little guy. Bad enough to lose Erhardt, but then . . .”

The ranger sat silent for several more seconds, then shook himself and drew a deep breath.

“Okay,” he said more briskly, “I’m not going to ask you about what kind of ‘proof’ of treecat telepathy you’ve got. Mind you, I
would
, but it seems pretty obvious you
really
don’t want to talk about it. All right, I can accept that. But in that case, what is it you
do
want to talk about?”

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot, Frank. And I’ve been discussing it with Irina; she’s the only other person—two-footed person, anyway—who really knows about all of it. And it’s occurred to me that I need to find out everything I
can
find out about treecats as quickly as I can. I’ve got sort of an inside track here, and whether I like it or not, I think I’ve got a responsibility to look out for Fisher and his relatives. I don’t know that it’ll do any good in the end, but I’d rather stay at least a couple of steps in front of those ‘scientists’ of yours. Not Hobbard—although, to be honest, I’d just as soon not tell
her
anything I don’t have to—but the others.”

“And?” Lethbridge prompted when he paused again.

“And I’m thinking that probably the only person who knows as much or more about them than I do right this minute is Stephanie Harrington,” MacDallan admitted. “There’s a part of me that really wants to know what she may have turned up on her own. And from everything I’ve heard, she’s a pretty remarkable kid. But I may have heard
wrong
about that, and even if I haven’t, I don’t see how I can go and start asking her about what
she
knows without being willing to tell her about what
I
know. Which brings up the question of just how much I can trust her discretion. I think it’s pretty likely she’s already keeping her mouth shut about quite a few things—that’s why I want to talk to her in the first place—but will she keep her mouth shut about what
I’ve
found out?”

“That depends,” Lethbridge said, regarding him very steadily across the desk.

“Depends on what?”

“Depends on whether or not she thinks she can trust
you
to keep
your
mouth shut,” Lethbridge said flatly. “I think you’re absolutely right that she’s not beginning to tell everything she knows or suspects at this point. But I’ll tell you this—if she doesn’t think you’re every bit as determined to protect the treecats as she is, she’s not going to tell you a single solitary thing.”

“No?” MacDallan was more than a little surprised by Lethbridge’s certitude. He knew it showed in his tone and his expression, and Lethbridge chuckled. It was not a sound of amusement.

“Did Karl tell you about the two of us running into her, in a manner of speaking, on that Twin Forks trip?”

“Not me, no, but he has discussed it with Irina,” MacDallan said. “To be honest, what he said to her is one of the things inclining me towards going ahead and getting in contact with her.”

“Really? I’m not surprised,” Lethbridge said. “And I’ve always sort of trusted Karl’s judgment, too. He does see more than a lot of ‘adults’ do, doesn’t he? For example, I’ve talked to Shelton about her, and to be honest I think the Boss is underestimating her quite a bit. He doesn’t think she’s your typical fourteen-year-old, mind you, but I don’t think he’s even begun to guess just
how
atypical she is. And I know absolutely that there’s nothing—nothing in this world—that girl won’t do to protect her treecat. Lionheart, she calls him.”

“You sound pretty positive,” MacDallan said slowly, and his friend nodded.

“That’s because I am. You know the story—her hang glider crashed, a hexapuma came after her, and Lionheart fought it off until the rest of his tribe or clan or whatever we end up calling them got there. Right?”

MacDallan nodded.

“Well, that’s the official story. The only one she’s ever told, as a matter of fact. But Ainsley was the first ranger on the spot, you know.”

MacDallan nodded again. Ainsley Jedrusinski was Lethbridge’s partner. There were so few rangers, especially since the Plague, that even official “partners” often operated solo, but the doctor had become well acquainted with Jedrusinski since his arrival on Sphinx. He had considerable respect for her competence and judgment.

“Her parents had already lifted the girl and Lionheart out by air car,” Lethbridge continued, “so there was no rush, but Ainsley got the coordinates from the father and went out to take a look. By the time she got there, there wasn’t a lot left of the hexapuma. You know what the scavengers are like out there. But she found something very interesting when she examined the skeleton.”

“What?” MacDallan asked.

“The treecats may’ve pulled that hexapuma down, Scott,” Lethbridge said quietly, “but Stephanie Harrington had already killed it.”

“
What?
” MacDallan repeated in a very different tone, his eyes wide.

“Ainsley’s sure of it. She found the girl’s vibro blade where she’d dropped it. And examining the hexapuma’s skeleton, she also found where she’d
used
it before she dropped it. She got it into that hexapuma, Scott. Must’ve buried it all the way to the hilt, and she cut right through the left mid-limb pelvis. From the angle of the cut, she had to have gone straight through the major artery there. I don’t doubt that critter was still on its feet. I don’t doubt it could still have killed her and Lionheart without the
other
treecats, but it was already dead—it just didn’t know it yet. And Ainsley said it was pretty clear from the angle and the way the ground laid out that she hit it from
behind
—probably when it was ready to finish off Lionheart. How many twelve-year-olds do you know who’re going to go after a flipping
hexapuma
with nothing but an eighteen-centimeter vibro blade? You think somebody willing to do that, with an arm broken in two places and a leg she could barely stand on, to protect a treecat who might already have been dead for all she knew, won’t do
whatever it takes
to protect that treecat now?”

18

<
You look well, Climbs Quickly
,> Sings Truly said quietly, lying stretched out beside her brother on the net-wood limb fifteen meters below her nest place.

<
I
feel
well
,> he replied, never taking his eyes from his person as she lay laughing in a deep patch of moss, covered in a pile of joyous kittens. The clan’s younglings found the two-leg’s mind-glow—and the welcoming delight which filled it—irresistible. <
I will not pretend I do not sometimes miss my true-hand
,> he continued, <
but compared to what would have happened without my two-leg’s sire’s healing place
. . .>