Treecat Wars by David Weber

now. He could smell them only faintly so far, since the flying things were stingy about letting smells in and out, but they were much more interesting. Indeed, they were very interesting, for they were obviously the smell of plants, yet he’d never smelled anything quite like them before, and he felt a burning need to be out and about to explore them.
    But that is going to have to wait , he reminded himself. You are in a new place, Climbs Quickly! Best you not rush off like a new-weaned kitten so sure of all you think you know that you come nose-to-nose with a death fang!
    He laughed silently at the thought, though he knew there was truth as well as humor to it. And even as he laughed, he wondered how much of his eagerness to explore was a way to distract himself from anxiety. He had no idea how far he and his two-leg had come from their home, but he was beginning to suspect it was even farther than he had believed it could be before they departed. The trip aboard the big flying thing from the two-legs’ nesting place hadn’t seemed to take that long, but when his person had lifted the carrying thing and let him look out the window, he had quickly realized they were traveling far faster than they had ever traveled before. They had been far higher , as well, and they’d gone on getting higher until the very sky had turned from blue to black! Yet even that had been only the beginning of their trip, for they had transferred to the biggest flying thing he had ever seen through a vast, hollow tube, and it seemed reasonable to conclude that it was probably even faster than the one which had delivered them to it. After all, it had even farther to go and there was clearly no limit to the sorts of speeds at which two-legs could travel when the mood took them! And the hollow tube had had windows, too—windows that let him look down upon the world…and know he had been right about the reason Death Fang’s Bane and Windswept had used round blue shapes of their images for this journey. They had not been islands, whatever others of the People might have believed.
    Yet Climbs Quickly had found himself almost more daunted than pleased at being proved right. The blue shapes were entirely separate worlds…and that meant he was far, far away from Bright Water’s nesting place. That was a sobering thought for even the hardiest scout, for it meant he was the only Person in an entire world, and he was surprised how small that made him feel.
    Still, he could not feel lonely , even if there were no other People to whom he might speak, for he was with Death Fang’s Bane, and he looked back up at her, holding tight to the flare of her mind-glow and treasuring its welcome.
    * * *
    “Bleek!”
    There was something especially warm, especially loving, about Lionheart’s sound, and Stephanie blinked quickly. Somehow, she knew he was trying to reassure her that he was fine…and probably to take reassurance from her, as well.
    “It’ll be fine,” she told him just a bit gruffly, reaching into the carrier’s side to stroke his ears with her forefinger while Karl popped the hatch. “It’ll be fine.”

Chapter Five
    “I think you’ve grown,” Bradford Whitaker said, standing just inside the apartment door.
    He was a big man, and he’d put back on at least a little of the weight he’d lost on Sphinx. He’d always struck Anders as being tall, and Anders supposed he was, yet he didn’t seem quite as tall as he had, and Anders realized with something of a shock that he truly had grown in the six and a half T-months his father had been away. Not all that much, perhaps, but enough. Only it wasn’t just physical height, he thought. It was that he was older…and not just by six and a half months.
    Anders had already recognized that their near-disastrous excursion into the Sphinxian bush had changed his relationship with his father, but he hadn’t really thought about just how it might have changed. Dr. Whitaker had not showed to advantage