Treecat Wars by David Weber Page A

dealing with the consequences of their destroyed air van, Dr. Nez’ near death, the forest fire, and the swamp siren which would have killed them all without the treecats’ intervention. He’d retreated into a sort of obsessive behavior in which his decisions had been…suspect, to say the very least, and it was his subordinates—and his son—who’d managed somehow to keep all of them alive until rescue came.
    There hadn’t been much time to talk about what had happened before Dr. Whitaker had been jammed aboard the courier boat and sent home to Urako. Frankly, Anders doubted his father had been in any great hurry to talk about it, anyway. He’d probably seen the tiny starship’s cramped isolation as an escape from the way he’d humiliated himself. But Anders knew now that he’d never be able to forget that he’d been right and his father had been wrong. That he, Anders, truly had stepped up and contributed to the expedition’s survival while Dr. Whitaker occupied himself excavating treecat waste dumps and cataloging potsherds.
    And yet, as he looked at his father—at the receding brown hair, the complexion which had regained its library pallor since his departure from Sphinx—he realized something else, as well.
    He wasn’t angry anymore. He’d been so mad at his father—and, he finally admitted, ashamed of him. Embarrassed by him. His father had failed him, and he’d failed in his academic responsibilities…and in his responsibility for the lives of his team. Kesia had told him even while it was happening that Dr. Whitaker had been suffering from “displacement.” That he’d been so overwhelmed by his own awareness of his ruinous decisions and their consequences that he’d withdrawn into that obsessive concentration on something he understood, something he could convince himself he was actually capable of dealing with. But Anders was his son, and Anders had been failed not simply by the leader of their expedition, but by his father . And that had been the true source of his anger—that sense of betrayal .
    But somehow, during Dr. Whitaker’s absence, he’d gotten past it. Not completely, of course. Their relationship would never be the same again, but perhaps it didn’t have to be ruined after all.
    “Maybe I have grown…a little,” he conceded after a moment.
    “I think you have. But, you know, I think most parents really have a memory of their kids as children, no matter how old they get,” Dr. Whitaker said. “Silly, I know, but here you are, almost seventeen standard, and somehow the mental picture of you I carry around is maybe twelve.” He smiled. It was an odd, almost tentative smile, and he shook his head.
    “I brought you a stack of messages from your mom,” he went on in a lighter tone. “I won’t say she’s delighted by the prospect of having you here in the Star Kingdom for at least another eight to ten months, but I told her it was being good for you. In fact, I told her something that she told me it was time I told you, too.”
    His voice had turned serious once more and Anders cocked his head, wondering why.
    “Told me what, Dad?” he asked.
    “How proud of you I am,” Dr. Whitaker said softly.
    Anders blinked. He couldn’t help it, and he felt himself staring at his father. He couldn’t help that, either, and to his astonishment, his father met his eyes levelly, his expression as serious as Anders had ever seen it.
    “I screwed up, son,” he said. “I made mistakes, I almost got people—including you—killed, and it was all my own stupid fault. And after I’d made the mistakes, I didn’t how to fix them, so I didn’t even try. I let you and Kesia and Calida and Virgil and Dacey deal with them, because…because I didn’t know how to.”
    Anders couldn’t have been more surprised if a hexapuma had walked in the door and begun singing “Auld Lang Syne.” He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard that steady, serious tone from his father. It was