Read A Beautiful Friendship Page 31

  As a general rule, the People preferred to herd young death fangs back out into the forest rather than attacking them in earnest. There was always the possibility—as Climbs Quickly knew better than most—that one or more People might be badly hurt or killed in a death struggle against a death fang. Besides, it made more sense to teach them when they were young to fear the People. That way when they were older they would know better, and some of them at least might teach their mates or their own young to stay clear of the People’s range, as well.

  Now Climbs Quickly and his fellows looked down on the death fang ambling steadily along as if it had not a care in the world.

  Short Tail thought dryly.

  Climbs Quickly agreed.

  Short Tail radiated silent agreement. Although young, the creature was very nearly two-thirds the size of the one Climbs Quickly and Death Fang’s Bane had faced. No wonder it seemed so unconcerned. It was big, powerful, dangerous . . . and too young to realize there might be things abroad in the world which were even more dangerous than it was.

  Broken Tooth said. Climbs Quickly and Short Tail looked at him, and the elder flipped his tail.

  Climbs Quickly and Short Tail exchanged glances. Intellectually, they could understand what Broken Tooth was asking, and the People never killed for the sheer pleasure of killing. Unnecessary deaths were to be avoided whenever possible. Yet true though that might be, it was also true that for the People, those who had chosen to make themselves enemies came in two categories: those who had been properly dealt with, and those who were still alive.

  Climbs Quickly said, tasting Short Tail’s emphatic agreement.

  He flipped his ears in a shrug, and Short Tail—and two or three other scouts and hunters—bleeked in amusement.

  Broken Tooth replied.

  * * *

  Bolgeo was more than two-thirds of the way to the crown oak when his suit’s external microphones picked up the sounds.

  He paused, turning in the direction they seemed to be coming from, trying to figure out what they might be. He’d never heard anything quite like them, and something inside him turned cold as he heard them now.

  The snarling, yowling ruckus was headed his direction, and it was coming fast. It seemed to be emanating from several distinct sources, as well, and his expression tightened as he realized they were the voices of treecats. Obviously the little beasties had spotted the trap. In fact, it was entirely possible they’d had something to do with the failure of its counter-grav, although he couldn’t imagine how they’d been able to get close enough without being gassed. At the moment, though, they were clearly headed his way, and they didn’t sound any too happy.

  Don’t panic, Ten! he told himself sharply. If they’re really as intelligent as all their champions’ve been claiming, they’re certainly smart enough to try to run a bluff to scare you off. In fact, they’re probably smart enough to realize that killing a human being wouldn’t be a very good idea, whatever the provocation!

  It was, perhaps, unfortunate that Scott MacDallan and the Forestry Service had never gotten around to publicizing the fact that a treecat named Fisher had ripped out the throat of a human murderer named Mariel Ubel. True, Ubel had already been dying from two bullets fired by MacDallan, and under the circumstances, MacDallan and the rangers had agreed there was nothing to be gained by emphasizing Fisher’s part in her demise. But Fisher hadn’t known his person had already killed her before he hit her . . . and he’d been perfectly willing to take responsibility for her death.

  Still, even if Bolgeo had known about that incident, he probably wouldn’t have panicked. He did have the protective suit, after all. And he had the trank gun. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more pleased he was by the treecats’ noisy approach. If they’d found the trap, it was possible they would manage to share their discovery with the Harringtons, and from that point, the Forestry Service would be thoroughly on guard. He’d already accepted that he probably wasn’t going to trap many more of them, anyway. But if they were prepared to come out into the open to scare him off, they’d also come out where he could get at them with the trank gun. He might be able to take as many as fifty or sixty of them under those circumstances!

  He grinned at the thought and brought the trank gun to his shoulder, gazing through the electronic sights towards the steadily growing ruckus.

  * * *

  The trapper’s sudden pause puzzled Stephanie.

  Unable to taste Bolgeo’s mind-glow, all she could see was a sealed, completely anonymous environmental suit. It could have been anyone, although she would hardly have been surprised to discover who it actually was. But she couldn’t understand why whoever it was had stopped. For that matter, she had no idea what Lionheart and the other treecats were up to. They were certainly making plenty of noise, though, and—

  Her thoughts broke off and her eyes went suddenly round in astonishment.

  * * *

  Tennessee Bolgeo was expecting treecats.

  What he got was something rather different.

  His mouth dropped open in horrified astonishment as four meters of enraged, panicky hexapuma came bounding out of the forest straight at him. A Sphinxian might have recognized the huge creature’s adolescent clumsiness. One of the Forestry Service’s rangers would certainly have realized it was as frightened as it was angry—not that that made it any less dangerous. But Bolgeo was neither a Sphinxian or an experienced ranger. What he saw was a night-black monster charging right at him. He didn’t even notice the treecats bounding from limb to limb behind it, or the dozens of deep, bleeding cuts and scratches on the hexapuma’s hindquarters.

  The trank gun was already up and ready. His thumb automatically switched it from semiauto to full automatic, and he pulled the trigger frantically.

  Panic is not a helpful thing where accuracy is concerned, and he managed to miss with his first dozen darts. The trank gun’s rate of fire at full auto was in excess of four hundred rounds per minute, however, and he emptied the entire magazine in just under six seconds. Most of the other darts didn’t miss, either.

  Unfortunately, what would have dropped an eight or nine-kilo treecat instantly only made an enraged, 650-kilo hexapuma even angrier, and this one’s priorities shifted from simply getting away from the tiny demons goading it along to the much larger threat which had just stung its tough hide so painfully. In its present mood, it would have been prepared to tear almost anything apart. The fact that the bipedal tormentor in front of it was bigger—and obviously far slower—than the treecats only moved it to the very top of the hexapuma’s “to eat” list.

  Bolgeo yelled in terror as the hexapuma headed right for him, totally unfazed by the tranquilizer darts. He threw the trank gun at it butt-first, turned to run, and slapped at the controls for his backpack-mounted counter-grav unit, all in one movement.

  The trank gun—hurled with far more force than careful aim—flew straigh
t into the hexapuma’s mouth with freakish accuracy. It drove a twenty cetimeters of its length directly into that fang-studded maw, and the hexapuma hacked painfully at the sudden obstruction blocking its airway. It shook its head and slowed, but it didn’t quite stop, and Bolgeo had risen no more than a meter into the air when a huge, taloned paw ripped into his backpack.

  The counter-grav unit kept the claws out of his flesh, but it had never been designed to stand that sort of abuse. It stopped functioning abruptly, and the power of the hexapuma’s strike hurled Bolgeo through the air. His arms windmilled wildly, fighting for balance, and then he slammed into a picketwood trunk headfirst.

  He slid down it, stunned, less than half-conscious despite the enviro suit’s protective headpiece, and the only thing that saved him was the irate hexapuma’s frantic efforts to get his trank gun out of its gullet.

  * * *

  Stephanie stared in disbelief at the scene below her.

  The hexapuma—coughing, choking, spitting—batted at the rifle stuck in its mouth with all four of its forward limbs. She didn’t think the weapon was going to be stuck there long, though, and when the creature finally got it unjammed . . .

  There was no doubt in her mind how the hexapuma came to have arrived at such an opportune moment. Well, that wasn’t quite true. She had no clue how it had come to be in the vicinity in the first place, but she knew exactly why it had come thundering right past the base of her tree. The tidal wave of treecats flowing through the picketwood behind it made that crystal clear.

  For a moment, all she was aware of was just how unnecessary to defending her treecats she’d suddenly become. They’d managed quite well for themselves, thank you, although even then the back of her brain realized it was only because the hexapuma had happened along. Still, they did seem to have found a solution to their problem.

  That was her first thought. Her second was that the hexapuma was definitely going to tear the treecat trapper limb from limb as soon as it got its mouth unclogged. And however angry she might be, the thought of watching another human being—even one willing to trap her treecats—being shredded the way she’d almost been shredded wasn’t something to be looked forward to.

  It was odd, she thought later, but it never occurred to her even once to blame the treecats for what they’d done. As far as she was concerned, they were simply defending themselves. That didn’t mean she wanted to see anyone killed, but she wasn’t going to pretend the trapper hadn’t brought whatever happened to her upon herself.

  Still . . .

  * * *

  Tennessee Bolgeo shook his head dazedly, blinking hard, trying to get his eyes to focus. They didn’t seem very interested in cooperating with him on that. Then, abruptly, they did, and he gave another fully understandable squall of terror as the hexapuma flung its head to the side one last time and the badly battered trank gun went spinning away.

  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.”