Shifter Planet (8 page)

Chapter Ten

A
manda jogged through the early morning streets of the city, the system’s sun barely a thought on the horizon. It would have been nicer to run under the trees, weaving in and out, listening to the forest come awake, but it was never a good idea to run in the Green, especially unarmed. It made you look like prey—and that was one thing you didn’t want the beasts of Harp to think of you.

Somewhere beyond the trees, the sun crested the planet’s edge and a shaft of light speared through the trees. She’d spent time on any number of planets in her twenty-five years and seen innumerable sunrises. And yet, three months after bidding good-bye to the fleet, she still wasn’t immune to the beauty of a sunrise on Harp. There was just something magical about seeing it through the filter of thousands and thousands of trees. She couldn’t see the horizon from here, the trees were too tall and too thick. She could feel the difference in the song of the Green, though. There was a rustling wakefulness to it when the sun rose, as if the giant trees were stretching their limbs after a long night’s sleep.

She laughed at her own musings. That was an unforgivable anthropomorphism—comparing the trees to a waking human. It was fairly apt, however, because while Harp’s trees were definitely not human, they
were
absolutely aware of their planet and everything that affected it. She didn’t know exactly how yet, but she intended to find out, which was why she was jogging through the streets at sunrise.

She hadn’t needed Rhodry’s warnings about the physical demands of the Guild trials to know they’d be rough. She had only to look at the shifters she encountered almost daily, especially now that she knew what to look for. They were some of the finest male specimens that she’d ever seen, every one of them taller than human norm, big and beautifully muscled. And, yes, they were all male. No one had been willing to discuss it with her, but there were definitely no female shifters. Apparently, there never had been. She’d gotten that much out of a local shopkeeper, with whom she’d become friendly. He couldn’t tell her much more than that, although it was obvious that the shifter trait was sex-linked. After all, they’d been created in a genetics lab for the sole purpose of defending the colony. A kind of super soldier. It would have made sense to make them male, given the greater potential for strength and aggression.

The Guild trials were designed to challenge even the physical perfection that was a shifter, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do it, only that she’d have to try harder. Nothing motivated her more than being told she couldn’t do something, and in this case she had an additional reason for pushing. She didn’t believe it was random that the trees had chosen her to be the first non-shifter to hear their voices. There was a reason. And she’d never find out what that reason was if she was confined to the city.

Besides, Harp was her home now. The idea of leaving was…painful. And if the trees needed her somehow in order to defend their shared home, then she would do her best to make that possible.

She reached the end of the narrow street. It dead-ended into a dirt path that ventured into the forest. She paused briefly, bent over, hands on her knees as she caught her breath. She was going to need her strength for what came next. This was the tail end of her morning jog, and she was hot and sweat-soaked. It was early fall, but here in the planet’s equatorial belt, the days were still warm. She started out every morning before sunrise, timing it so that by the time the city was really beginning to stir, she was back home and in the shower. She didn’t need or want an audience for her runs. Regular Harpers—norms as the shifters called them—had found her morning exercise routine something of a novelty when she’d first started. They seemed to find the demands of everyday life enough to maintain their physical health. They didn’t understand that Amanda wasn’t running for health, she was running for strength and stamina. Two things she was certain she’d need during the trials.

The shifters around her hadn’t said a word, for the most part, though their silence spoke volumes. She didn’t understand why they were so opposed to her candidacy. It seemed a simple matter to her. If she could survive the trials, then she was an asset to the community. And if she failed, then she was the only one hurt by it.

Of course, she wasn’t completely naive. The shifters would have resented anyone trying to encroach on their sacred turf. Though it seemed unlikely she’d be starting a trend or anything. Norms weren’t exactly breaking down the door to get into the Guild. In fact, in the nearly five hundred years that humans had lived on Harp, there hadn’t been a single non-shifter who’d even attempted the trials, much less one who succeeded. She’d checked.

Despite the shifters’ instinctive resentment, however, she still believed they would eventually come around to the idea of her candidacy—if only so they could be there to gloat when she failed. Not that she had any intention of failing. And so far, she hadn’t done anything except check into the legalities involved, and find out everything she could about the trials themselves so she’d know how to prepare. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done.

The initial step was straightforward, nothing more than formally registering to participate in the trials. Sign-ups were held one day each year, and that day was today, with the first part of the trial taking place in five days. That would be a straightforward written exam to test the candidate’s knowledge of the Green’s life forms—not only the animals, but the plants. The candidate had to show near-perfect knowledge of each animal’s characteristics and behavior, and in most cases how best to kill it, since almost everything out there would be trying to kill you first. For plants, it was identification, along with knowledge of any beneficial use, and a basic understanding of what was safe and what wasn’t. The latter being a much longer list.

Her training had begun as soon as she’d been released from the hospital. Slowly at first, as her leg healed, but she’d been in excellent physical condition already and it wasn’t long before she was training as hard as ever. It wasn’t the physical demands of the trials that worried her, though. It was the enormous amount of new data she’d had to absorb in order to be ready for whatever she’d face out there, and for the written exam, too. Even for someone accustomed to dealing with the vast amounts of information that came into the fleet’s science center almost daily, it was a lot to learn in a short amount of time.

And today was the day, the first step, and she was ready. She was also tired of waiting, which was why, instead of rushing home to shower this morning, she was going to swing by the Guild Hall and sign up first thing. If she missed today’s registration, it would be another year before she could try again, and it had occurred to her that some of the shifters might try to stop her from putting her name on the list. She didn’t expect anyone to ambush her on the pathway or anything physical. However, she wouldn’t put it past them to make her jump through some bureaucratic hoops in hopes of delaying her registration until it was too late. She figured by getting there at the crack of dawn, she’d at least have all day to play their little games.

She straightened, stepped off the street, and started down the narrow dirt path that would take her to the Guild Hall. If the shifters had been decent about her candidacy, she would have made a point of showering first, and shown up looking and
smelling
all nice and proper. But she was still angry about a group of teenage shifters who’d expressed their displeasure in a very aromatic way when she’d first made her intentions known. She’d already moved her living quarters into the city, renting a two-room apartment on the edge of town above a busy clothing shop. The teenage pranksters hadn’t dared pull their little stunt there, but her office was another matter.

They’d begun visiting the compound every day after dark, when no one was around to catch them, and using the ground just below her office window as their personal urinal. She’d stopped that practice short—quite literally. She’d installed a series of pressure plates along the outside of the building. The equipment was standard gear for planetary landings into unknown environments, usually part of a small perimeter set up to safeguard the human encampment against animal intrusion. The plates were designed to deliver a small, harmless, electrical shock, just enough to make the average indigenous life form decide it was too much trouble to keep going.

The sensitivity of the plate could be heightened, and the electrical jolt could be amped up, however, to accommodate larger and more dangerous animals. Put those two adjustments together and they were capable of producing a more, um…dramatic result.

She’d slept in her office the next night in order to monitor her security enhancements, and now she smiled, remembering the panicked shriek she’d heard when the first little pisser discovered his urine stream was highly conductive to electricity. The resulting arc had probably felt like his dick was being burned right off, and his yowl had given her the best laugh she’d had in a long time. Not that he suffered any permanent damage. She’d been careful about that. The asshole was probably peeing painlessly after just a few days. But not beneath her office window. Not anymore.

She left the shelter of the trees as the Guild Hall came into view, straddling the line between city and forest. Some of the trees here were far older than the building itself. Others were newly grown as if trying to reclaim the slender strip of land the Hall sat upon. It was the oldest construction in the city, dating back to the landing itself. Originally, it had served the colonists as a little of everything—hospital, school, administrative offices—and that early utilitarian history was reflected in the many smaller out-buildings huddled around the main lodge like chicks to a hen. If one knew where to look, there were even parts of the old colony ship to be seen in some of the exterior walls.

The central hall was a sprawling and disorganized two-story structure, its ancient wood stained a dark, reddish brown from centuries of weather and use. It had been patched and modified over the years to add windows and a covered porch that stretched nearly the full width of the building. The core of it was still original construction, a testament to the determination of those original colonists to remain on Harp for generations to come.

As she crossed the clearing and climbed the stairs to the old-fashioned screened door, she mopped her face with the sleeve of her tunic and caught a whiff of herself. She grinned. Nice and stinky, just like she’d planned. And shifters had such
sensitive
noses.

R
hodry came out of his room at the Guild Hall barefoot, wearing a loose-fitting pair of drawstring pants. He was leading a long-distance hunt today, and wanted an early start. One of the Green’s worst predators, a long-haired primate known as a pongo, had been attacking the lumber camps throughout the forest. Pongos were big—as much as six feet tall when standing upright, and two hundred pounds of muscle. They were like banshees on steroids, but they usually traveled alone, and their favorite food was actually banshee meat. This pongo had killed a human, however, and that made him fair game for a hunt.

With the hunt’s departure only minutes away, there was little reason for him to get dressed. He’d be going cat as soon as he reached the trees. Shifters were fairly casual about nudity—clothes were destroyed by the shift, and one could never guarantee there’d be something handy when changing back to human form. Many of the shifters living in the permanent residential areas of the Guild didn’t even bother with pants, but Rhodry had been raised among the mountain clans in a house full of female relatives. He’d been taught early on that one did not run naked among polite company. Although calling the Guild Hall polite company might be stretching it a bit. Especially when he saw what was happening below.

Shifters lined the balconies. Some were sitting along the sturdy, wide railings in cat form, their tails switching with irritation. Others stood as humans. And they were all staring at the same thing—Amanda strolling over to the sign-up table for this year’s Guild trials.

Rhodry stared along with the rest of them, not quite believing. He’d heard the same rumors everyone else had, rumors that only confirmed what she’d stubbornly insisted that day in her hospital room. She planned to try for Guild membership. He’d seen her many times out among the trees, walking along muttering to herself, taking notes on every little thing she came across, drawing pictures in that leather notebook she carried with her everywhere she went. Every shifter in the city had watched her at one time or another these last three months, always sitting high above her, hidden in the thick canopies where she couldn’t see them. And if he had watched more than most, it was only because Cristobal had put her safety in his hands all those months ago.

She never acknowledged her watchers, and seemed unaware of them. That fact alone said she wasn’t qualified for Guild membership, that they could sit up in the trees and watch her, and she didn’t even know they were there.

Of course, it was possible that she
did
know they were watching and had decided to ignore them. That’s what he would have done in her situation. Never let an enemy know you’re aware of him. The shifters weren’t her enemies. Not precisely. But if she could hear the trees as well as any shifter, and that was still a very big
if
in his mind, then she would definitely have known she was being observed from the treetops.

Rhodry had trouble wrapping his mind around that possibility. He had to admire her determination, though. Hell, he even had to admit that he’d been impressed with the way she’d handled that pair of Wyeth badgers back at the start of all this, when Tonio had made the mistake of shifting right in front of her. He’d never told her that, but it didn’t seem to matter. That one event had set off a chain reaction in her thinking that had culminated in her ridiculous belief that she could qualify to become a member of the Guild. The other Earthers who’d remained behind on Harp kept to the city and spent most of their time in the science compound, but not her.