by David Weber
He was terrified his two-leg was about to be rendered unconscious exactly as Twig Weaver had been. If that happened, there was nothing any of the People could do about it, for they would simply be put to sleep themselves if they came near the trap. And despite the magic device that so reduced Death Fang’s Bane’s weight, she would still fall from the tree, a triple hand and more of People-lengths above the forest floor. When she hit, especially if she was unconscious, what had happened to her when her flying thing crashed would probably seem minor compared to the hurts she would suffer.
Yet with the terror, and brighter by far, was his fierce, fresh pride in his youngling. She knew as well as he did what might happen—no, she knew better than he did. Yet it never even occurred to her to hesitate, and in the blazing corona of her mind-glow he tasted her unyielding determination to protect Twig Weaver and every member of Bright Water Clan, whatever the cost.
Yes, there are evildoers among the two-legs, he thought. But there is also my two-leg, and her friends, and there is no evil in them!
* * *
Stephanie flung herself to her knees beside the caged treecat.
The trap’s motion sensor detected her and swivelled the gas dispenser in her direction. She heard it hiss, but whatever gas it had been loaded with had no effect on her. Not immediately, at least, and she looped the first treecat cargo net through the camouflaged bars.
It was long enough to go around two of the bars, then loop around a side branch of the main crown oak limb, and she knotted it tight. Then she flipped the second net through a bar on the other side of the cage, wrapped it around another side branch and tied it just as tightly. The third net went around a bar at one end, and it was just long enough to reach around the main limb and still leave her ten or twelve centimeters of slack. She knotted that one, as well, and then went running back along the limb toward Lionheart and his friends.
Part of her wanted to stay right there, hanging onto the trap with her own body weight as an added precaution. But if she’d been trapping treecats, she’d have brought along whatever sensors she could—thermal sensors for sure, if she could get a reading through the canopy—and if the trap failed to rise on its counter-grav the way it was supposed to, she’d take a really close look at it to see why.
She didn’t know what the trapper would do if she realized there was another human being present, but she had a strong suspicion that whoever it was might be tempted to go ahead and remove the evidence anyway, especially if she had gone ahead and installed an explosive charge of some kind. And if an interfering human got in the way, too bad for the human in question.
Her main concern, though, was to keep whoever it was from making off with his captive. She was confident the three cargo nets between them were enough to overcome the maximum lift capacity of a counter-grav unit small enough to fit into that trap. So unless the trapper wanted to come down after it, it wasn’t going anywhere. And if the trapper did come down after it . . .
* * *
Climbs Quickly’s ears flattened as Death Fang’s Bane dropped from the golden-leaf tree to the upper branches of the net-wood and drew the thunder-barker from its holder on her belt. He’d enjoyed her training sessions as much as she had, watching (from an ear-saving distance) as she mastered the weapon and tasting her delight as she felled target after target. And he’d been glad she had it when they flew back and forth to Bright Water. He wasn’t certain if it would slay a death fang with a single bark the way the longer, more powerful weapons did, but its bite would certainly make any death fang back off. He was in favor of that. He was in favor of anything that didn’t require him to face another death fang or the rest of his clan to come swarming to their rescue!
But now, as he tasted Death Fang’s Bane’s mind-glow, watched her moving cautiously along the net-wood branch until she had a clear line of sight to both Twig Weaver’s cage and the forest floor below, delight was the last thing he felt. There was a cold lump at his person’s center—a knot of fear and dread. Not fear of whoever might be hovering overhead in the flying thing but of what she might be about to do in the next few moments. There was no hesitation in her. If it came to it, if it was the only way to protect herself or the People with her, she would use the weapon; Climbs Quickly knew that just as surely as he knew the sun would rise in the morning. But she didn’t want to. She wanted to do anything else . . . except allow an evildoer to harm the People.
* * *
Stephanie threw herself prone on the broad picketwood limb and spread her elbows in the solid isosceles triangle Frank Lethbridge and Karl Zivonik had taught her, holding the heavy pistol in both hands. She figured she was far enough from the trap to be beyond the reach of most thermal scanners, especially in such dense leaf cover, but she could see it quite clearly. In fact, she was almost perfectly positioned, not that realizing that made her feel any calmer. Her heart thundered—harder, she suspected, than it had when she and Lionheart had faced the hexapuma—and her mouth felt dry.
* * *
Tennessee Bolgeo opened the air car window as he hovered thirty meters above the tallest portion of the leaf canopy. He’d have liked to get a little lower, but he should be close enough, and staying out of the trees struck him as a very good idea.
He glanced at the trap’s position transponder one more time, fixing its location relative to the air car firmly, so he could be ready when it broke free of the branches, then pressed the recall button.
* * *
Stephanie’s breath caught as the trap suddenly twitched. It jerked in place, snatching her tied nets suddenly taut. It rose perhaps a centimeter from the branch, then stopped, quivering, unable to break free of its anchors, and she felt herself smiling as she imagined the reaction of the person who’d left it here.
* * *
Bolgeo muttered a curse.
The trap should have cleared the tree cover by now. According to the signal from it, its counter-grav was on full force, which should have shot it into the clear like a cork from a champagne bottle. But there was no sign of it, and the transponder showed it wasn’t moving at all.
It had to be stuck on something. That was the biggest potential drawback of this technique, especially in such heavy timber. He’d been lucky none of the other traps had jammed, but now he had to figure out what to do about this one.
He was tempted to just go away and come back later that night when he could collect this one and also the other occupied traps while the treecats were hopefully huddled in their nests wondering what had happened to their friends and relations. The downside of that was that by now any treecats in the vicinity must have heard his air car. If they came scampering to investigate, they’d probably find their trapped relative. Whether they’d be able to tell anyone—like that pestiferous Harrington family—about it was problematical, but they’d know what had been happening, and the likelihood of his catching any more of them would plummet. On the other hand . . .
He pulled out his thermal scanner, trying to get a reading on the trap and its vicinity. For all he knew there were already a dozen treecats down there. From what he’d been able to learn of them, they’d certainly rally around to guard one of their own in a situation like this, and the thought of tangling with something which had managed—allegedly—to pull down a hexapuma wasn’t high on Tennessee Bolgeo’s to-do list.
The sheer vertical depth of the dense leaves defeated his scanner, however. He couldn’t make out a thing through them, which left him in an unpalatable position.
Well, he thought, the enviro suit’s made for some pretty nasty hostile environments. I kind of doubt anything the size of a treecat’s going to manage to get a claw through it! Besides, even if all the stories about them killing the hexapuma are accurate, it took dozens of them.
He hesitated for a few more moments, then shook his head with a sigh.
If you want the big bucks, you’ve got to suck it up and do what it takes to earn them, he told himself, and turned the air car towards the riverbank
where he’d landed the night he distributed his traps.
* * *
The trap stopped quivering and smacked back down on the branch as its counter-grav exhausted its power supply. Stephanie felt a cautious glow of optimism, which strengthened quickly when the air car turned and moved off.
She was actually surprised the trapper had given up so easily, but just as she was about to sit up and return her pistol to its holster, she heard the pitch of the air car’s noise shift. It was coming lower. It was landing!
She cocked her head, eyes closed, trying to follow its flightpath by hearing alone, and her jaw muscles tightened. Whoever it was, she was heading for the river which supplied Lionheart’s clan with fresh water. It also opened a break in the otherwise solid tree canopy, and a good air car pilot could get in under the picketwood that way if she was careful. Which meant—
She started to reach for her uni-link, then stopped herself, brown eyes hard. Scott and the rangers were already coming as quickly as they possibly could. Telling them what was happening wouldn’t get them here any sooner, but it would give them the opportunity to tell her little girls had no business facing unknown numbers of illegal poachers with a gun. She knew what they’d say . . . and a part of her suspected they’d be right. But knowing what they would say was very different from actually hearing them say it.
She sat up, looking around with narrow, calculating eyes. If the air car was landing near the river, the poachers would be coming from about . . . that direction, she decided. They’d probably come straight across to the base of this tree, then use their own counter-grav to reach the trap. If they did that, then they’d take off from just about . . . there.
Stephanie had never tried to fire a weapon while hovering on counter-grav, but she suspected it wouldn’t be the easiest thing in the galaxy to do. Or the most accurate. So her best move would be to let whoever it was get off the ground but not onto the crown oak limb. Catch the bad guys in midair, when she’d have all the advantages.
Of course, even if I do, she’s likely to figure a “little kid” like me wouldn’t really squeeze the trigger, she thought grimly. If she does, she may try to ignore me or even come right at me, figuring I’ll freeze.
She remembered something Ainsley Jedrusinski had said to her. The ranger’s expression had been very serious, her voice level.
“Never draw a weapon unless you intend to use it, Stephanie,” she’d said. “Never aim a weapon at another person unless you intend to shoot her. And never shoot at another person unless you intend to kill her.”
Stephanie had felt her eyes go wide, felt Lionheart sitting very still on her shoulder, and Ainsley had shaken her head slowly.
“If you aim a weapon at someone else, you raise the stakes. Whoever it is has to assume you will—or may, at least—pull the trigger. If she’s willing to back down, well and good. If she’s not, and some people won’t be, she may decide to go for broke, instead. If she’s got a weapon of her own, she’ll use it. If she doesn’t, she’ll try to take your weapon, and if that happens, she’ll probably use it against you. So never think for a moment that simply waving a gun at someone is going to magically make them do whatever it is you want them to do.
“But the flip side of that is that you’d better be sure—damned sure—the stakes are worth escalating a confrontation that way. If there’s any question in your mind that stopping the other person justifies killing her, then it doesn’t. Because the truth is that once you shoot someone, you can never put that bullet back into the gun. It’s going to hit them, Stephanie, and if it comes out of something as powerful as the pistol we’ve been teaching you to use, the odds are that it will kill whoever you shoot, whether that’s what you want or not. So make up your mind. If you decide to aim your weapon at someone else, then you aim—and you shoot, if it comes to that—to kill. Not to wound your opponent like some holo drama hero. To kill. Because you’ve decided it’s better they be dead than that you or someone else be dead. If you’re justified in shooting at all, then your sole object should be to neutralize the other person as quickly as possible, and the fastest way to do that is to shoot to kill. And if you deliberately shoot to kill, at least you’ll never know you killed someone by accident.”
Stephanie had thought then that at least part of it had been Ainsley making sure she’d be scared spitless at the thought of actually shooting another human being. But she’d also realized that what Ainsley was telling her was the grim truth, the consequences of picking up a weapon. That her friend and teacher was telling her that now so it wouldn’t come at her cold and unconsidered if the moment ever arrived.
I hope it hasn’t arrived now, she thought, climbing up one branch and working her way several meters further out from the main picketwood trunk to get the best angle. I hope it hasn’t. But if it has, Ainsley, I’ll remember.
28
Tennessee Bolgeo finished wiggling into the environmental suit and sealed the closures. He checked the heads-up display on the inside of the transparent plastic face shield and nodded in satisfaction. Everything in the green. He had fourteen hours worth of air, which certainly ought to be plenty, since he was no more than two or three hundred meters from his trap.
He picked up the trank rifle and checked it for readiness. It was a selective-fire weapon, capable of single shots or full automatic. Its magazine contained forty darts, each guaranteed to knock a treecat off its feet instantly, and he had two more mags on his belt. He didn’t expect to need them, but between the armor of his environmental suit and the firepower of the trank gun, he wasn’t especially worried about meeting up with a handful of treecats.
He looked at his GPS tracker, which showed the position of the trap’s transponder, and started trudging through the drifts of ancient leaves.
* * *
Climbs Quickly glanced at Broken Tooth, faintly amused that the elder who had been so adamantly against closer contact with the two-legs was asking him what to do in this situation. But the amusement faded quickly, and he looked at Death Fang’s Bane.
She was lying very still, once again in the position her weapons teachers had taught her, and he tasted the absolute intensity of her focus.
he admitted.
Climbs Quickly tasted the sincerity in Broken Tooth’s mind-glow and sent back a quick, warm wash of gratitude. But—
* * *
Bolgeo found himself breathing heavily as he forged through the thick drifts of leaves. It was like wading through mud, he thought. The upper layers were dry and crisp, but as the leaf mold got deeper, it got moister and more crumbly. There had to be a good forty or fifty centimeters of . . . mulch, for want of a better word, under those upper layers. And in Sphinx’s dratted heavy-gravity, his feet sank deeply into it with every stride.
Still, it wasn’t that much further. Every picketwood trunk looked the same to him—he imagined it was easy for even the locals to get badly disoriented in a thicket like this one—but the tracker kept him on course and he caught fairly frequent gli
mpses of his target crown oak through breaks in the foliage.
Catching these little beggars is hard work, he reflected. Next time, I’ll send one of the boys out here instead of coming myself!
* * *
The senior scout had suddenly come upright, gazing intently off into the forest. But unlike everyone else, he wasn’t looking in Speaks Falsely’s direction. Climbs Quickly looked at him, ears pricked in question, then reached out in the direction Short Tail was looking.
* * *
Stephanie caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. She glanced sideways, and her eyes widened as she saw Lionheart and half a dozen other treecats go scampering off through the picketwood. For just a moment, she thought they were running away, but she knew instantly that that couldn’t be what was happening. There was too much focus and determination in Lionheart’s body language. No, he and his friends were up to something—something they believed would help—and she found herself hoping they were right.
They might not be, though, and she settled back into her waiting position.
* * *
It was a very young death fang.
An older, wiser death fang would have realized it was drawing perilously near to the central range of a clan of the People, at which point it would have turned and gone someplace else. Quickly.
But this death fang was in no more than its first turning of adulthood, so Climbs Quickly supposed he shouldn’t be too quick to judge. In fact, it wasn’t all that unusual for a youthful death fang to blunder into even closer proximity than this. The People tended to locate near rivers and streams, and death fangs needed water as much as anyone else. So every so often a particularly incautious death fang was likely to stray into forbidden territory.
