"I'll be fine," she said firmly. "You just get busy with that comparison, all right?"
He seemed to sigh. "I obey, Searcher," he said again, and turned reluctantly back to the recorder.
Klnn-dawan-a stepped to the shelter door and began unfastening the catches, mentally shaking her head and wondering yet again what exactly she was going to do about Bkar-otpo. Fresh out of school, studious and earnest as all get out, he was the totally stereotypical searcher assistant.
With, unfortunately, what looked like the beginnings of a strong crush on her.
She was holding on to the grips tightly as the door came open, but even so, the wind nearly ripped it out of her hands. Maneuvering out into the blast, she sealed the door behind her. Gree's sun was long gone below the horizon, and for a beat she stayed where she was beside the shelter as her lowlight pupils widened to compensate for the darkness. A few beats later, with the rocky ground now adequately visible, she headed off between the cluster of wind-buffeted shelters toward the edge of the shallow hollow the group had set up in.
The simplest thing to do, of course, would be to arrange for Bkar-otpo to be transferred to one of the other three Dhaa'rr study groups on Gree. It would give him time to forget her and maybe latch on to someone who wasn't ten cyclics older than he was and already bond-engaged. If she did it properly, chances were good that he'd never even guess that she'd been behind the transfer.
The problem was, he might. And if her own experiences when she was nineteen were anything to go by, that would be devastating to him. Klnn-dawan-a had always considered herself a rather plain sort of person when she was growing up: average in appearance and personality, considerably less than average in conversational ability and family status. Her intellect had been sharp enough, certainly, but she'd never found that to have much in the way of appeal to the people around her. It wasn't until she'd discovered her love of alien studies and the close-knit group of people who felt likewise that she'd really begun to feel at home. By the time her friendship with Thrr-gilag had begun to grow into something stronger, she'd been strong enough herself to take the chance of getting hurt.
Bkar-otpo, unfortunately, wasn't anywhere near that stage yet. Nevertheless, it was clear that she was going to have to do something, and soon. The bond-engagement threads she always wore weren't deterring him in the slightest; neither were her attempts to work Thrr-gilag's name into the conversation every chance she got. Apparently, she was just going to have to come out point-blank with it.
And then, maybe, she'd get him transferred.
She'd reached the edge of the hollow now and the predator fence that protected the encampment. The wind was stronger here, with a tangle of eddies and crosscurrents that seemed determined to knock her off her feet. Bracing herself against a shoulder-high rock, she put her hands up to protect her eyes and peered out across the sky.
Good luck was with them. The cloud formations that indicated the edge of the windstorm were clearly visible between the rolling foothills directly ahead and the taller mountains rising beyond them. Ten hunbeats—twenty at the most—and the winds should begin settling down. Should be no problem for her and Bkar-otpo to get out to the Za Mingchma farm and take their tissue samples on schedule.
She shifted her position against the rock, letting her gaze drop to the foothills themselves. The lights of perhaps fifty Chigin houses were visible through the tight mesh of the predator fence, the homes scattered unevenly up and down the slopes of the hills and even part of the way up the sheer face of the mountain behind. Farm families, most of them, working hard to coerce a living from the thin soil and thin air up here. Aloof to the Zhirrzh study group for the most part, but at least not openly hostile the way the valley and city residents always seemed to be.
Klnn-dawan-a frowned, her gaze pausing on one of the plots of land. The fence surrounding the whelp enclosure looked wrong, somehow. She stared hard at it, feeling her lowlight pupils widening to full enlargement. The landscape brightened slightly....
There it was: a thick tree branch, apparently blown there by the wind, leaning against the middle of the enclosure fence on one side and holding it partially pinned to the ground.
She fumbled out her caller from the survival pack fastened around her waist, her view of the landscape ahead changing again as her darklight pupils expanded to pull in the heat radiance that surrounded all homoiothermal creatures. The tips of the houses' chimneys and the smoke pouring from them took on a gentle glow; larger, more diffuse images appeared inside the enclosures of the nearest yards: whelps, huddled together against the wind or else prowling their circuits in mindless defiance of the elements.
In the enclosure with the downed fence there was nothing.
"Terrific," Klnn-dawan-a muttered under her breath, half turning to aim the caller at the top of the white cutting pyramid in the center of the Zhirrzh encampment. The brilliant darklight beam lanced out, and over the wind she faintly heard the clang as the alarm mounted to the pyramid's top went off in response. She turned back around again, peering out into the darkness—
An Elder appeared in front of her. "Yes, Searcher?"
"The fence at the Ca Chagba farm has been breached," she shouted over the wind. "The whelps have gotten out. I'm going to go look for them. Tell Director Prr-eddsi, and ask him to send someone to help me."
"Not a good idea, Searcher," the Elder shouted back. "Especially not in a storm like this. They could get vicious."
"I'll be all right," Klnn-dawan-a assured him. "I've been to the Ca Chagba farm several times—the whelps know me as well as they know any Zhirrzh. I don't think they'll bother me."
"They're not going to be able to smell you in this wind," the Elder objected. "It's too big a risk."
"It's not that big a risk," Klnn-dawan-a said firmly. "Regardless, I'm taking it. Oh, and tell Prr-eddsi he should send someone to alert the Ca Chagba family, too. There's a good chance they don't even know their whelps are missing. Go on, get going."
"I obey, Searcher," the Elder said reluctantly. "Don't go far; I'll have an escort for you in a beat."
He vanished. Moving out of the limited shelter of the hollow, Klnn-dawan-a slid the caller back into its survival-pack pouch and pulled out her stinger. The whelps might or might not bother her, but there were other dangers roaming the mountains out there. Keying the weapon on, feeling the reassuring vibration against her palm as its energy capacitor filled, she opened the gate in the predator fence and stepped outside.
"Searcher?" an Elder's voice called faintly in her ear. "We were told to come help you."
"All right," Klnn-dawan-a said, glancing around at the pale shapes. Good; Prr-eddsi had assigned three of them to her. That would help. "We're searching for missing Chigin whelps," she told them. "I want two of you to start quartering the area. Pay particular attention to gullies, the lee sides of rock formations, and other wind-protected areas. You"—she gestured to the third, a fairly recently raised Elder named Rka't-msotsi-a—"stay with me. Keep an eye out for predators."
The other two Elders acknowledged and vanished. "Where are we going?" Rka't-msotsi-a asked.
"We'll start at the creek," Klnn-dawan-a told her, taking a bearing on one of the houses and pointing ahead and to the left. "That section where the cut's particularly deep. Stay close."
She headed off, struggling to keep her balance in the wind, hoping that Prr-eddsi would be willing to send some of the other Zhirrzh to help in the search. Elders were fine as communicators, but as hunters or trackers—particularly at latearc—they left a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, chances were good that Prr-eddsi would do nothing but stay where he was. For all his genius with alien languages, the director was about as timid a Zhirrzh as Klnn-dawan-a had ever seen.