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

to you, but you’re nearly sixteen and entrance exams will be on you before you realize it.”
    There was a lot more of this. Anders let it flow over him. He knew it was just his mom making sure he knew he was important to her. He’d let her pack him extra socks and underwear without protest. On some atavistic maternal level Mom seemed convinced that a relatively newly settled planet like Sphinx would lack such basic items.
    Unspoken was her concern that Dr. Whittaker would forget such things as clean underwear and regular meals once he was within reach of his new test subjects. He’d always been a bit obsessive. Now, with his entire professional reputation resting on this trip (as he repeatedly stated), Dr. Whittaker had taken to addressing his son as if he was simply an unusually young graduate assistant.
    In many ways, this suited Anders just fine. It beat being “the kid.” Since the field season was going to be a long one, several members of the crew had brought family members. However, Anders was the only one who wasn’t another adult.
    Doctor Calida Emberly (xenobiology and xenobotany) had brought her elderly mother, a painter, who was on partial retainer to the expedition as a scientific illustrator. Both Kesia Guyen (linguistics) and Virgil Iwamoto (lithics and field methods) had brought their spouses. In Iwamoto’s case, his was a very recent marriage, brought about in part by the impending departure of the expedition. Only Dr. Langston Nez, a newly minted Ph.D. in cultural anthropology who had been Dr. Whittaker’s senior assistant for many years, had traveled alone.
    Anders had overhead Peony Rose Iwamoto gossiping to Dacey Emberly, saying that Dr. Nez’s long-standing relationship had broken up in large part because Nez preferred to continue working with Dr. Whittaker rather than seeking some prestigious position of his own. Apparently, Nez’s partner had said some really nasty things about Dr. Whittaker being grasping, ambitious, and self-absorbed.
    Anders only wished he disagreed. He loved his dad, but if it hadn’t been for their shared fascination with treecats, these days he wasn’t sure they’d have much in common.
    Sphinx! Anders savored the thought as the passengers shuffled from the shuttle into the spaceport. I’m really here! I wonder how long until I get to see a treecat in person? I wonder if it will be a “wild” or one of one of those who have adopted a human?
    Unarticulated, even to himself, was the question, “Will I get to meet Stephanie Harrington and Lionheart?”
    Anders’ fascination with Stephanie was almost as acute as his interest in treecats. It wasn’t because she was a girl nearly his own age—he was about eight T-months older—although his mother had teased him about that when she saw he had a special file for articles on Stephanie. It was because Stephanie Harrington had been the first person to make contact with treecats. Until Stephanie had figured out a way to trap an image, no one had even known treecats existed.
    Then she’d nearly been killed saving a treecat from a hexapuma—or the treecat had been nearly killed saving her—that part of the story was always a bit unclear. Basically, as Anders had told his mother, Stephanie Harrington could have been a century-old double-butted near-baboon and if she’d done what she’d done, he’d still have been interested in meeting her.
    And Lionheart.
    Therefore, Anders was shocked and horrified when, after welcoming them to Sphinx, Dr. Hobbard told them that Stephanie had nearly been killed that day while going into the heart of a raging forest fire to rescue a pair a stranded treecats.

Chapter Three
    Stephanie and Karl would have probably come in for a lot more grief over the risks they’d taken rescuing the two treecats if it hadn’t been for three things.
    First, the imagery Karl had so thoughtfully taken had demonstrated how very careful they had been. Stephanie had been in full gear, not rushing in with