A beautiful friendship

the long version

Stephanie Harrington always expected to be a forest ranger on her homeworld of Meyerdahl... until her parents relocated to the frontier planet of Sphinx in the distant Star Kingdom of Manticore. It should have been the perfect new home - a virgin wilderness full of new species of every sort, just waiting to be discovered. But Sphinx is a far more dangerous place than ultra-civilized Meyerdahl, and Stephanie's explorations come to a sudden halt when her parents lay down the law: no unsupervised trips into the wild! Yet Stephanie is a young woman determined to make discoveries, and the biggest one of all awaits her: an intelligent alien species. The forest-dwelling treecats are small, cute, smart, and have a pronounced taste for celery. And they are also very, *very* deadly when they or their friends are threatened... as Stephanie discovers when she comes face-to-face with Sphinx's most lethal predator.