Leaping Lizards Read online

Leaping Lizards

  by Elizabeth McCoy

  Copyright 1994, 2011 by Elizabeth McCoy

  First published in Pawprints, 1994.

  Cover art by Conrad "Lynx" Wong. Coloring by Elizabeth McCoy.

  The name "Kintara" is derived from a planet in GURPS Space Atlas 3. Sparriels are from GURPS Aliens. Wing-wyrms are from GURPS Space Bestiary. Aspects and terminology for the tech (especially biosuits and implant comms) are often drawn from GURPS Ultra-Tech. Selene Holmes created by Walter Milliken. All are used by permission of Steve Jackson Games.

  Table of Contents

  Glossary and Names

  Leaping Lizards

  About the Author, Artist, and GURPS

  Glossary

  Cor-daz – brown and black tabby.

  Halloth – a mammalian, bipedal alien species, superficially resembling humans; their blood uses haemocyanin, and their coloration spans from indigo to aqua. Not a Kintaran word.

  Khih – yes or yeah.

  Lomerf – a falcon- to eagle-sized, warm-blooded, scaled, egg-laying marsupial with four legs and wings, native to Kintara.

  Merfah – a rabbit-sized, warm-blooded, scaled, six-legged marsupial, native to Kintara. Yummy to Kintarans. (There's one hiding on the cover.)

  Mmsar – a warm-blooded, bipedal reptilian race. Not a Kintaran word.

  Mmsarsan – the name for the Mmsar's planet. Not a Kintaran word.

  Nih – No, or nope.

  Sparriel – a short, vaguely squirrel-like alien race with a penchant for fast-talk and kleptomania (a dominance behavior). Not a Kintaran word.

  Wahn – captain, or leader.

  Names

  Kinahran – Moonfur, Our Protagonist

  Choosaraf – First-Star, the clanship Moonfur lives on.

  Coli-nfaran – Ferncloud. Her name could also be translated as Feathercloud. Moonfur's mother.

  Detchal – Fat-Toe, Moonfur's cousin.

  Dettsleet – Big-Eyes, a former comm officer of the Choosaraf.

  Farafinleet – Embereyes, Moonfur's little sister.

  Klarin-yal – no translation; Captain of the Choosaraf.

  Klr-lin – He's Here, one of the Choosaraf's crew.

  K'rava – Like-a-Purr, the Choosaraf's Negotiator.

  N'balplar – Without-a-Tail, the Choosaraf's main sensor officer

  P'prr-thaht N'cheh – We-People Roam Far, or "our clan is far roaming." A clanship.

  Teecoli – Tortoiseshell Feather, Moonfur's cousin.

  Teritul – Ambiguous translation of Sibling-spots, a pilot for the Choosaraf.

  Leaping Lizards

  Kinahran M'Choosaraf tucked the communication station's ear-set into her left ear and tried to look professional. It was not every day that a pre-adult Kintaran was allowed anywhere near ship's equipment for real, unsupervised, and if Kinahran didn't start seeming competent, she wouldn't be allowed to take her little sister with her when she left the clanship in a few months. She washed her right ear for a moment and straightened the barrettes that kept a tuft of her white fur in front of each ear. Her quarter-cousin, Teecoli, walked by to the shuttle's pilot pad, and Kinahran pulled her tail in, wrapping it over her forepaws.

  "Anything?" Teecoli inquired from over her mostly orange shoulder. Like her white companion, the tortoiseshell pilot was making spurious checks of her equipment, touching levers and buttons with her fingers, and putting nervous holes in the floor-padding with her foreclaws. "Has the Captain called in yet?"

  Kinahran shook her head. "Nih. Is that good or bad?"

  "I don't know." Teecoli flicked her ears in a shrug. "I don't ferry people around any more than you sit comm, normally, and nobody bothered to tell me what your aunt's like when she's hiring humans – especially ones we don't know the protocols for, yet! If we were going to be waiting all night, she might have remembered to tell me, but . . ." She twitched her ears backwards again.

  Kinahran put one forefoot on the tip of her tail, discreetly concealing her amusement and relief that the older girl was as nervous as the young comm officer. "Maybe she's trying to take a long time, so that the rest of the clan will have more time to clean up the accident before the human sees it." Both Kintarans curled their hind-claws into the floor-padding at the thought of the awful mess that the Choosaraf's sensors were in. "I'll call my little sister, and see how the clean-up's going, I think."

  "Just be sure to put her on hold if your aunt-Captain calls." Teecoli busied herself with pre-flight checklists again, muttering the human words for "Cleared for takeoff" and "Please secure for lift."

  Farafinleet, holding comm (and indeed, the entire bridge for the duration of the emergency) on the Choosaraf, finally answered – voice only, no visual – in a flurry of clan dialect that even her older sister had trouble understanding.

  Kinahran cut into her sibling's apparent panic. "You're chattering worse than a Sparriel! No, we haven't got the human yet, I'm just checking to see what's happening up there."

  A breathless pause, then Farafinleet whispered, "Is anyone listening?"

  Kinahran turned down the volume on her ear-set so that Teecoli wouldn't hear whatever new horrid thing had just happened. "Only to my side."

  A gulp. "You know the merfah that Mother gave me, as a pet, last month when we stopped in at Kintara?"

  "Yes . . ."

  "It got out of its cage."

  "Oh?" Kinahran smoothed her suddenly-fluffed tail out with one hand and hoped Teecoli wouldn't scent her distress.

  "And I can't find it!" Farafinleet wailed.

  "That's not good. We'll have to do something about that."

  "I'm so worried, sister! Its babies were almost ready to come out of its pouch this morning – what if something happens to them?"

  Kinahran closed her blue eyes and shuddered. Merfahs were scaled, warm-blooded marsupials, native animals of Kintara, and they bred faster than any vertebrate that Kinahran knew of. While she could hope that both the creature's offspring were also females, she didn't think it was likely. The human Murphy had power over everyone, and even a mere three merfahs loose on the clanship could cause damage.

  "Well, try to sniff out the problem till I get there – then maybe we can both fix it. Is the mess we used to call the main sensors any neater?"

  Her little sister sniffled. "I s'pose it is. There's not so much drifting in front of the bridge window anymore, and I've only seen a couple of adults towing junk back to the cargo lock in the last five minutes. No casualties that anyone's told me about."

  A light on the comm panel flashed, and Kinahran chattered, "Aunt calling! Must go!" and switched channels. In exquisite human words, she answered, "First-star Passenger Shuttle Three, Moonfur here." In their own language, "Kinahran" sounded too much like "Kintaran" for many sapients' ears, so she used the local translation when she could. Choosaraf sounded (to humans) like a sneeze, and so its name was also changed to a local equivalent.

  "Moonfurr," her aunt replied, with a slight Kintaran accent, "We will be having one human passengerr. Please make surre everything is properly prepared." She switched to Kintaran. "That seat had better be fastened down behind Teecoli, with working safety-belt and no shed fur on it, or I'll skin you two! Kinahran, the rumor-trail was right; you're going to have to keep a comm-line open for the human – she talks to her computer via implant comm, and you're to patch her through to it when we get out of her normal range." Back to the human language, and dignified formality. "We expect to arrive in fifteen minutes."

  "Yes, Captain, understood. Shuttle out."

  Teecoli was frantically checking the chair, wiggling it to make sure it was stable, playing with the seatbelt, adjusting the lean of the seat-back, and bouncing her hand off the cushions to make sure no one had swiped the s
prings to make something else unique.

  Kinahran dived for the hand-vacuum and dashed to the chair, pulling off any fur that might have settled on it. For good measure, the white Kintaran waved it around the room, cleaning the floor-pads and control panels. Her tortie companion set the air circulation on high to keep floating fur from settling on anything.

  "Now I understand why K'rava is all but bald," Teecoli muttered as Kinahran vacuumed the pilot's short-clipped mane before doing her own, longer, white one. "And it's not just to be unique."

  "At least most of you is in a vacc-suit," Kinahran muttered. She, on the other hand, was entering her final (one hoped) growth-spurt and didn't have a suit of her own. Instead, she wore an emergency-bubble on her belt that she could crawl into if pressure was lost. Most of the fur that was being picked up by the air-filters was white, and most of that belonged to her. To be a blue-eyed white was unique, and normally a source of great pride to her, but if one wanted to be inconspicuous for a change? The stuff seemed perversely intent on clinging to anything darker than itself.

  When the air-taxi landed near the shuttle, the pair had managed to put the chair back into something resembling a normal position, clean all the fur off it, and toss the mass of fur the filter had caught in the last five minutes out the airlock and bat it under the shuttle – the human wasn't too likely to notice it there, since it was planet-night. Kinahran was putting herself back in order and re-inserting the ear-set when the outer lock opened. By the time the inner lock cycled (the air wasn't the issue, but that was the only way that lock would work), Kinahran was settled and busy with spurious adjustments to the comm panel, trying to look professional again.

  The captain of the Choosaraf, Klarin-yal, was an ancient and scruffy cor-daz – brown and black tabby – with red leather stitched through the edges of her ears. K'rava, apprentice medic and experienced diplomat-merchant, was a pale orange-cream all over, with bright amber eyes and a delightful purring accent to every language he spoke. While the Captain went to the co-pilot's floor-pad, K'rava was smoothly saying, "We have the gravity set for one G now, but if you wish something different, it is easily changed."

  "This will be fine," their human passenger said, settling into the chair. Kinahran was relieved, since if the gravity got any lighter, she was afraid that she would do something clumsy and disgraceful. She was painfully aware of what her growth-spurt was doing to her reflexes anyway.

  While Teecoli was running though the final pre-flight check and K'rava was introducing the younger Kintarans ("Teecoli is our pilot, and Moonfur our communications officer"), Moonfur was sneaking blue-eyed peeks at the human. Most, if not all, Kintarans had heard of Selene Holmes, though it had only been five months since the clanship P'prr-thaht N'cheh had discovered her existence. When it came to matters of sensors, comm, or computers, Ms. Holmes was not only brilliant by the standards of most races, she was also able to create unique designs for Kintaran clanship equipment. Even better, it was said that she was able to take the most unique design a Kintaran had made, and make it work. She was very expensive to hire – even more than most humans were when they sold properly remarkable things to Kintarans – and would not go far from the human world of New Terra, but to have her work on the Choosaraf would impress other clans no end.

  Ms. Holmes was also personally unique; her hair, in a short spacer style, was as light as Moonfur's, her skin was paler than any human Kinahran had ever seen before, she wore a strange silvery visor that rumor called a personal multiscanner, and – a sight to make all Kintarans sigh longingly – she wore a biosuit, also a pure, shining white. Biosuits were cutting edge tech. They were extraordinarily tough and comfortable to wear over fur, recycled wastes (useful if one had to deal with bipedal bathrooms for some reason), and changed color with but a little tinkering. Kintarans, especially those cursed with commonplace markings and colors, loved things that they could customize to show off their personal uniqueness.

  Unfortunately, biosuits were expensive enough for their humans inventors; for Kintarans, over twice a human's mass and with six limbs instead of four (not to mention the tufted tail), such a costly item was a luxury that usually got shoved aside in favor of refueling powerplants or repairing damage acquired from pirate attacks.

  "Re arre cleared for lift-off," Teecoli said. Only a hindfoot on her tail kept it from lashing nervously. "Pr-please securre yourselvess." She began steering the shuttle towards the runway, following the blue lights at the edges of the pavement.

  "This craft is not equipped with contragrav?" the human woman asked K'rava. Moonfur couldn't read the expression behind the silvered goggles, but she thought that Ms. Holmes sounded a bit surprised.

  K'rava gave a flat-eared duck of his head and looked away. "It is not working right now, I fear. Some of the parts were needed by the crews cleaning up in the aftermath of the accident." He indicated the lapbelt on the chair apologetically. "If you would?"

  Ms. Holmes looked at the seatbelt with the faintest of frowns before fastening it. Kinahran hoped that if any fur was wafting around, it wasn't hers.

  Wanting to get through with her duties before the take-off, Moonfur inquired, "Ms. Holmes? May I know the frequency band and net address of your communication implant so that I can ensure you do not lose contact with the planet for any length of time?" She was very pleased with that speech. It used properly complex words and showed off her lack of accent.

  The human turned her head slightly, probably looking at Moonfur, though that blank, reflective visor was wholly opaque. "Comm band S-6, address nine-seven-four-one-eight-three-five-nine-six-two," she said, as Moonfur punched numbers swiftly and all but frantically. ". . . three, five, nine, six, two," the Kintaran repeated back, making the connection.. Ms. Holmes paused, head tilted as if listening to something for a moment, nodded once, and resumed facing front.

  Teecoli's terror notwithstanding, the take-off was decent and Captain Klarin-yal did not even mutter darkly, much less take over the operation as she had when they'd landed that evening. Not that the Captain had been that much better, but at least she'd had (as she'd said) the authority to smear them all over the pavement.

  Due to the accident, the Choosaraf was not allowed in New Terran orbit; instead, they were circling one of the other moons of the gas giant the humans called "Sol Two-Point-Five." Even without fractional warp-drive, the trip took less than a half-hour. That was, unfortunately, enough time for Kinahran to start feeling her racial curiosity tweaking her tail. Sitting at the comm panel, she could have easily have arranged to tap into whatever the human woman was saying to her computer. Not that the white Kintaran would have had any use for what was said, or any desire to spy, but she was curious. On the other hand, such a thing would be highly impolite, and if she lost them the prestige that a Holmes-designed sensor array would get them . . . At the least, she'd be shaved and Klarin-yal would notch her ears for her; at the worst, the Captain would have a white tail for a belt and white ears for a belt-pouch.

  Kinahran was saved from either fate by Wahn Klarin-yal herself. "Moonfurr, please tell the clean-up crews that we will be arriving soon, coming in at a seventy-degree angle from stripe-side four."

  Moonfur nodded. "Yes, Captain," she said, then switched to Trade Kintaran to make the call to her little sister. "Farafinleet, this is Kinahran on the Passenger Shuttle. Can you get me patched through to the crew leaders? It's the, urr, red and black lever, I think." Kinahran could have contacted the clean-up crew directly, but protocol and procedure demanded that she go through the Choosaraf if she could.

  A faint hiss-spit of static, and the contact was made. Trying to sound just the faintest bit professionally bored and formal, since such things came through even to aliens like their passenger, Kinahran said, "Clean-up crew leaders, this is the Passenger Shuttle. We will be arriving shortly, coming in at a seventy-degree angle from stripe-side four. We have the human with us."

  That last was acknowledged with pleased tones of voice by the other Kint
arans, and full-band orders to keep that area clear of tossed debris and free-falling workers. Kinahran cut the connection and squinted ahead, to see if there had been any improvement to the mess since they left for New Terra.

  The former main sensors looked a bit better than they had, Kinahran decided, but not much. They were all lucky the crater wasn't any deeper – it had just barely missed depressurizing part of the ship, and had taken out a lot of the Choosaraf's armor there. The culprit, a cousin of hers named Detchal, still insisted he hadn't done anything that could possibly have made something explode and there must be a saboteur running around loose. Nevertheless, he was still confined to quarters below the crater, to meditate on the wisdom of secretly re-building bits of the main sensor array when the back-up array had already shorted out from similar modifications.

  One of the Choosaraf's other shuttles lumbered by underneath the Passenger Shuttle, towing a chunk of the largest dish back from wherever it had gotten to. When it passed by, the full extent of the disaster was clearly visible. Ms. Holmes winced slightly, presumably at the magnitude of the destruction. "This looks like a full replacement will be necessary, not just repairs."

  The Captain sighed, and K'rava said, "We feared as much. At least it will be rebuilt uniquely."

  "Mm. And this is due to someone's modifications?"

  K'rava lashed his tail, thumping it against the chair's floor-support. "The miscreant is confined and there will be no repeats of his mistake. His designs will not be among any that we might offer you."

  "Was there internal damage to the ship?"

  K'rava shook his head. Kinahran wondered what else he'd downplayed in his description of the incident, in order to secure the human's services.

  Ms. Holmes leaned forward, contemplating the Choosaraf's unsightly blemish. "Mm. I'll need access to one of your computers now. It will have to understand Terran."

  Moonfur recognized her cue and was murmuring to her little sister about re-setting the ship's gravity to a mere one G before Captain Klarin-yal had even glanced over her shoulder. Kinahran also told Farafinleet to stay on the bridge – it would be very bad if her younger sister, accustomed to 1.2 Gs, went bounding around and clumsily knocked over their human visitor.