Fire Season-eARC by David Weber, Jane Lindskold Read Free Book Online

measure—that always seems to work with Lionheart.”
    From past experience, Stephanie knew that most treecats reacted to celery like a Terran cat did to catnip. This was really weird, since, although technically omnivores, the ’cats seemed to lean to the carnivorous side. It also meant that their teeth weren’t really well equipped for eating the stuff and they tended to make a horrible mess.
    “I’ve commed your mother,” Dad went on as he scooped up first Left-Striped, then Right-Striped, “and she knows we have guests. She’s bringing her car in on the side furthest from the gazebo so she doesn’t startle them. Ask Karl if he wants to stay for dinner.”
    Karl did and was easily convinced to stay overnight as well, since he and Stephanie both had been asked by the SFS if they’d help with fire clean-up, and the Harrington freehold was a great deal closer than his own family home.
    That evening, Karl showed Stephanie some images he’d taken of her going into the fire. By necessity, the pictures were wobbly and choppy, since he’d had to leave his uni-link balanced on the dashboard while he concentrated on keeping the vehicle steady. Even so, it was impressive. Stephanie hadn’t realized just how close the flames had been or how badly burnt she would have been without her fire-suit. A couple of times, even knowing that everything had worked out in the end, she found herself distinctly scared.
    Still, she knew that if circumstances demanded, she’d do it again.
    *   *   *
    Sphinx! Anders Whittaker felt delight shiver through him as the shuttle touched down, followed some moments later by a not unexpected heaviness as the planet’s higher gravity took effect. He switched on his belt-mounted counter-grav unit, already adjusted to compensate, and felt his weight return to normal.
    It shouldn’t be so easy, Anders thought, to adapt to an alien planet.
    Of course, it really hadn’t been easy. The counter-grav unit could compensate for weight, but lightening a person didn’t do anything to help the lungs deal with the denser atmosphere’s concentrations of gases. For that he’d needed nano-tech treatments. Then there had been all the immunizations, not just against the plague, which had wiped out so many of the original settlers, but against anything else his parents could think of.
    I bet I could swim in raw sewage and come out without the least trace of infection.
    He grinned at the image, thinking how horrified his mother would be. She’d been worried about him accompanying his father to Sphinx on this research expedition. However, she hadn’t been able to deny that it made more sense for Anders to spend the time in his father’s company. She’d just been named to a post as a cabinet minister of the newly elected president of Urako. She’d been busy before, as Counselor Whittaker, senior representative for one of the highest population zones on the planet. As Cabinet Minister Whittaker, she was going to be nearly unreachable for the next six T-months.
    In light of his wife’s appointment, the timing for Dr. Whittaker’s trip to Sphinx hadn’t exactly been the best. However, although Bradford A. Whittaker could be called many things, “professionally uninvolved” would never be one. A rising light in the field of xenoanthropology, he’d long griped that his career had been held back by the lack of a new intelligent alien species to study.
    When the earliest reports of the Sphinxian treecats had come to his attention, Dr. Whittaker had seen the opening for which he had longed. He had all but memorized every word of every press release, every report. He’d begun immediate correspondence with Dr. Sanura Hobbard, Chairwoman of the Anthropology Department, Landing University, on Manticore, the official head of official Crown inquiry into treecat intelligence. He’d fumed that his own responsibilities as a faculty member of Urako University on the planet Urako in the Kenichi System didn’t let him