Over the next several days, however, Tarlac was too busy to teach; he was studying instead, fourteen hours a day, which left him time for little except food and sleep. He didn't mind the hard work; it was interesting, and it would very probably keep him alive--if anything would.

Hovan did leave him time to study the first-contact tape and read the daily news summaries the Supreme had delivered as promised. Neither brought any surprises, though he paid close attention to the tape, trying to find some way the war could have been avoided. Doing so wouldn't solve this situation, but it might help prevent another first-contact disaster.

He didn't find anything. The tape simply confirmed Hovan's account of the first human/Traiti meeting, adding little to Tarlac's knowledge except a sight of the guardship crew's intense horror when they saw women aboard an armed scout, being taken into danger only males should face. The human scouts had followed first-contact procedure, Tarlac found; the problem was the mixed crew, and there was no point in changing that. Anything the Empire did there--except perhaps for crewing all scouts with Irschchans, whose s.e.x was difficult for non-felinoids to distinguish--could be just as bad, depending on the culture being contacted. And that had other practical difficulties.

No, the Ranger decided, it was what he'd originally called it: a mutual misunderstanding. What he'd called the Empire's fault, to Daria, had been unavoidable. Neither side could be blamed.

The news summaries reported that the Empire was winning as steadily as ever. It was the casualty reports that bothered Tarlac. The Imperial losses were lighter than predicted, and he knew few individuals in the Empire well enough to feel more than mild regret at their deaths; but the increasingly heavy Traiti casualties upset him with their sheer numbers.

More, some of them hit him very personally. The loss of people from Ch'kara, even people he'd never met, left a void. They were a loss to the entire clan, and it wasn't balanced by the birth of a son to one of the n'ka'ruhar on Norvis--though Tarlac did share the clan's joy at that event.

The losses couldn't intensify his need to end the war, though. Nothing could; it was already the central fact of his existence. So, aside from paying attention to the news summaries and the necessities of life, Tarlac spent all his time on the concentrated study that might keep him alive through the Ordeal.

All the same, it was a welcome break when, just before dinner the evening of his tenth day on Homeworld, Hovan informed him that school was over and invited him to join one of the fighters' discussion groups after eating.

Tarlac pushed himself away from the study unit and stood, stretching luxuriously. "That sounds good, and I could sure use the change. Have you decided when I'm supposed to go out?"

"Tomorrow, or if you prefer, the next day."

"Okay. Tomorrow, then. I still don't care to waste time."

"I thought you would not. I arranged for a null-grav car for midmorning; I will take you to the test area myself." He smiled a little. "Before we leave, you will have to make a decision. Now that you know all the dangers, you must choose whether to remain in the test area for the full two ten-days, or attempt to walk out. The Ordeal requires that you survive, nothing more."

"Mmm." Tarlac frowned. "Staying put's safer, but if I'm lucky, walking out should only take five or ten days. That's ten, maybe fifteen days saved--I'll take the chance. And I'll bet you expected that, too."

Hovan's smile widened. "I did. It means you will carry a locator beacon as well as your knife, timed to go off in twenty days. If you are not back here by then, we will come for you."

"Yeah, okay. You know me pretty well, don't you? Let's eat."

He slept that night as if he had nothing hanging over him, and when he went to first-meal, barefoot and wearing only shorts and a knife, he was greeted with enthusiasm and urged, almost forced, to eat heartily.

It was the last meal in quite a few days, he was concernedly told, that he could be sure of.

"Hey, don't worry about that!" he rea.s.sured them, chuckling. "Being small does give me some advantages--I can go for two or three days without eating and without getting really hungry."

That drew some exclamations of disbelief. A Traiti who fasted for even a single day would feel severe hunger pains, and three days would leave one seriously weakened.

"An advantage that may balance his lack of claws and his thin skin,"

Hovan pointed out. "It seems a fair exchange; otherwise he faces the same hazards we do."

"Yeah," Tarlac said. "It's a little hard to convince an overgrown bobcat to pull its punches."

"N'derybach are not known for their peaceful dispositions," Hovan agreed. "But if you are done eating, we should leave. You will want as much daylight as you can get."

"Okay, let's go. I'm as ready as I'll ever be."

Moments later, Tarlac and Hovan were climbing into one of the clan's null-grav cars. Hovan was confident that Steve was, as he'd said, truly as ready as possible; there was no point in a last-minute briefing, so they made the trip to the test area in companionable silence.

Twenty n'liu from the clanhome, slightly over fifty kilometers, Hovan set the null-grav car down in a clearing, reached into a storage compartment in the control panel, and handed Steve the locator beacon.

Tarlac clipped it to the waistband of his shorts. "Twenty days, right?" he said as he climbed out of the car.

"Five or ten," Hovan said with a smile. "May Lord Sepol guard and guide you, ruhar." Then he lifted the car and pointed it toward the clanhome. Steve was on his own now, totally out of contact, and Hovan found himself suddenly apprehensive. N'derybach weren't the only dangers in Homeworld's wilderness.

Chapter V

So this was Homeworld's wilderness. Tarlac watched Hovan's car disappear, then checked out his surroundings to see what he'd have to work with. It was almost uncomfortably warm now, at nearly mid-morning, but that wouldn't last. The weather was clear; come nightfall, he'd need a way to keep warm.

The clearing was about six meters across and roughly circular, with traces of another camp near the northern edge, shaded by the broad silvery-green leaves of a soh tree. Tarlac grinned at that, remembering his lessons. A soh tree, with its palm-like leaves and sticky sap, was pretty good material for a shelter--which was considerably simpler than trying to improvise clothing.

He'd be spending the night here, so he'd better get started. Taking advantage of all the shade he could, since Homeworld's sun put out more ultraviolet than Terra's, he cut sticks for a leanto framework, then climbed up the soh tree and began one-handedly hacking off the tough-stemmed leaves. It was hard work, but it shouldn't take more than a couple dozen of the big leaves to make a decent shelter.

The resultant structure of leaves laid over notched, sap-smeared sticks, he judged, might possibly last, if it didn't have to stand up to more than a gentle breeze. It would have to do; he didn't have any other fastening material, and it only had to survive for one night anyway.

His next priority was water, which was no problem. This part of Homeworld's main continent had abundant drainage, and from the air he had already spotted one of the streams that fed the capital's reservoir. It was less than a hundred meters away, and it would be his guide out of the forest, as well as his water supply.

Tarlac had no desire to disable his only means of transportation, so when he went for a drink, he watched where he put his feet. The water was good, clear and cold, and Hovan had a.s.sured him of its purity.

None of the Traiti worlds had any pollution worth mentioning; Traiti technology was roughly equivalent to the Empire's, but had been achieved far more slowly, and the by-products had never been allowed to get out of control.

Refreshed, Tarlac surveyed his problems. He had water and shelter; he still needed food, fire, and foot protection, not necessarily in that order. Food, now at mid-autumn, was as plentiful as water, and there was nothing he could do about foot protection at the moment, so that made fire his next priority. There were plenty of likely-looking rocks on the streambed; some, he remembered from a survival course he'd taken years ago, might work nearly as well as flint. He waded into the stream and selected a handful, putting them on the bank to dry while he planned.

It was just past midday, so he had plenty of time to equip himself, even with nothing but a knife to work with. He wouldn't need much gear; it wasn't as if he was Robinson Crusoe, having to live off the land indefinitely. He'd be out twenty days, at the most. He would have to have some kind of shoes, though; his feet were simply too tender for him to walk fifty kilometers barefoot, even through this open, leaf-carpeted forest. Some kind of long-distance weapon, say a spear or a crude bow, would be useful, too, and effective enough at the relatively short ranges a forest allowed. Anything else would be strictly a convenience. It would be nice if he could rig some way to carry coals so he wouldn't have to start a fire from scratch every night . . . He shrugged. That wasn't very likely, and speed was his main consideration, so it might be just as well for him to travel light.

By the time he came to that conclusion, the stones were dry enough to strike sparks if they were going to. He went through them methodically, hitting each one against the flat of his knife. Two of the first six did spark, weakly; he set them aside and kept going. The next five did nothing at all, and he was beginning to think he'd have to make do with one of the weak ones. Then the twelfth, a small rock that looked like pinkish quartz, gave a big bright spark that made him whistle in relief and admiration. Tossing the other stones back in the stream, he put the quartz in the pocket of his shorts and headed back for the clearing, picking up dry wood on the way.

He found a gratifying number of animal traces as well, both trails and pawprints, and he hoped few of them were predators. He might not be Robinson Crusoe, but he wasn't Tarzan either, and the idea of tackling a big cat with nothing more than a knife held absolutely no appeal.

Predators, he reminded himself, didn't normally attack unless provoked.

At least the trails meant he had a chance of trapping something, and it was a sure bet that animal skins would make better moccasins than soh leaves would!

His leanto was still standing in the clearing, though it looked ludicrously flimsy. He stacked the wood next to it, then began sc.r.a.ping leaves and other debris to make a safe spot for a fire in front of it. He hadn't needed Hovan to tell him that; this part was no different from his childhood camping trips. He could almost hear his father's voice, its calm but firm emphasis: "Always be super-cautious with fire in the woods, son. You don't have any margin for error, no slack at all."

His father would have liked Homeworld, Tarlac thought; he'd been as much at home in the woods as he had at the gunnery controls of the destroyer Victrix, where he'd been killed in the b.l.o.o.d.y running battle between Tanin and Cosmogard five years ago.

"Don't worry, Dad," Tarlac said softly. "I'll be careful." He'd been aboard the Lindner at the time, as he had almost since the war's beginning. He'd had a Ranger's reserve then, and the detachment he'd thought was real had shielded him from the full hurt of his father's death.

His mother had understood, too, when he called her instead of returning to Terra even for the memorial service. "He wouldn't have expected it, Steve," she'd said. "He was like you that way--duty first, always."

"If you need anything . . ."

"No, I'll be fine. You've both seen to it that I don't have any financial worries, and your Aunt Betty will be staying with me for awhile. But . . . I do miss you, son."

"I know, Mother. I'll come home next time I make it to Terra."

And he had. Tarlac was suddenly very glad of that. He'd been uncomfortable, vaguely guilty that he hadn't been able to feel more sorrow, but his mother had been happy to see him and made no effort to hide it. She'd let him leave without objecting, too, and he could guess, now, how much that had cost her. If he made it back, he'd have to let her know he did understand, and show her some of the open love he'd been unable to express before.

To make it back, though, he'd better stop reminiscing and get some work done. The fire area was down to clear soil, so he stood and brushed off his hands on the only cloth available, his shorts. Time to scout around for food, and the means to trap some animals.