Fire Season-eARC (2 page)

“My family does live pretty far from Twin Forks,” Stephanie was beginning, when an overwhelming sensation of alarm surged into her from Lionheart. The strong wave of emotion was far stronger than the normally faint, elusive sensations she received, yet its very strength made it hard to define: apprehension, anxiety, yet somewhat removed.

“Bleek!” Lionheart spilled the meter and a half of his furry length over into the front seat, landing in Karl’s lap, rather than Stephanie’s as would have been his more usual choice. “Bleek!”

Showing Lionheart understands more about operating machinery than most would grant a treecat,
Stephanie thought, but the thought was fleeting. Lionheart was pointing off to the southwest. Every line of his body was tight with urgency.

Stephanie immediately shifted course. Karl didn’t protest.

“What’s bothering Lionheart?” he said, stroking the thick gray fur along the treecat’s spine in a effort to soothe him.

“I don’t know,” Stephanie admitted, “but whatever it is is over that way. Let’s go find out!”

*
 
*
 
*

Pleased when the clear side panel was opened, Climbs Quickly immediately poked his head out the opening. Again, he was reminded that the air car moved more quickly than did the folding flying thing. His fur flattened against his face and his inner eyelids dropped into place. Even so, this was an infinitely better experience.

During the seasons he had lived with Death Fang’s Bane and her parents, he had come to the conclusion that two-legs and the People did not use their senses in the same fashion. Two-legs were so sight-oriented that, as in this wonderful fast-traveling vehicle, they would actually eliminate signals from scent or sound. Taste—except when eating—did not enter into their experience of the world. The importance of touch was harder for him to judge.

By contrast, the People relied on the triad of sight, scent, and hearing about equivalently. As hunters—especially when moving through the treetops—they were very aware of the usefulness of touch, including signals carried by vibration. He had
no
idea how two-legs managed without whiskers! Taste was also important, especially in how it could add dimension to the sense of smell. And in the pleasure it brought to food…

At this speed, Climbs Quickly found himself relying primarily on scent for his assessment. He caught a variety of tantalizing odors: bark-chewer mingled with the sap of the golden-leaf it had been sampling; the tangy scent of purple thorn; the musky perfume of tongue-leaf in summer flower. At one point his fur bristled when an upward eddy brought him the rank odor of death fang, liberally associated with the blood of some unlucky ground runner.

Climbs Quickly wondered how the two-legs could think they knew anything of a world most of them merely saw as they passed over faster than a winter wind, glimpsing what lay below only as a blur of green and brown. Perhaps the two-legs had senses he couldn’t guess at, just as most of them had no idea how the People used mind-speech.

In any case, today, Death Fang’s Bane and Shadowed Sunlight were traveling below the canopy—and not at too great a speed. Climbs Quickly, for one, was going to make the most of it.

Drawing in a luxuriously deep breath of the warm late-summer air, Climbs Quickly caught a new scent, one that shocked and appalled him as even that of the death fang had not…The scent of smoke and, behind it, the hot, brain-snapping odor of freshly burning fire.

Arboreal as they were, the People were all too aware of the danger brought by forest fire. It offered a danger to them greater than any death fang or snow hunter. Those could be escaped by flight into the upper branches or even—with cooperation—fought and killed, although rarely without injury, as his own scars attested. However, even the greatest cooperation could not fight a forest fire. The best the united strength of an entire clan could hope to achieve was to forestall the fire’s spread while the weak and young got away.

Climbs Quickly shivered inside his skin and breathed in the scent again. It was hard to pinpoint where it was coming from with so many conflicting winds, but he was a trained scout.

The course on which Death Fang’s Bane was taking the vehicle was erratic, but it did not seem to be going in the direction of the smoke and fire. For a moment, Climbs Quickly almost gave in to the impulse to ignore what he had smelled. After all, he was far away and this was nowhere near the range of his own Bright Water Clan.

However, his own natural curiosity had not been dulled by his seasons with the two-legs. Moreover, the songs of the memory singers—of whom his own sister was one—provided a connection to clans that would never meet, even if that connection was attenuated by distance.

Usually, Climbs Quickly’s first impulse would have been to get Death Fang’s Bane’s attention, but he knew that not only was she responsible for the vehicle’s movement, she was not handling this chore with her usual ease. Therefore, although his alarm was growing as the scent of smoke became more intense, he leapt over the seat and into Shadowed Sunlight’s lap.

“Bleek!” he said, pointing in the direction in which the smell of smoke was strongest. “Bleek! Bleek!”

His faith in these two-legs had not been misplaced. Almost immediately, he felt the vehicle change direction. Nor was the impulse entirely that of Death Fang’s Bane. Shadowed Sunlight’s mind-glow was less easy for Climbs Quickly to read, but he could feel in it acceptance that he had some reason for his urgency—even if the reason was as of yet a mystery.

*
 
*
 
*

“What’s in that direction?” Stephanie asked, trying to increase the speed while not losing control of the air car. “Let me know if Lionheart seems to think we’re going the wrong way.”

“He’s still pointing southwest,” Karl said. “Let me call up the area map. We’re within a Forestry Service district, but I’m pretty sure it’s close to private holdings near here.”

Stephanie knew Karl wasn’t being in the least slow, but she felt an intense sense of impatience—or urgency. Not for the first time, she wondered if her feelings were always entirely her own. For example, she could always locate Lionheart, no matter how far away he was. She knew he could do the same with her. However, she felt certain Lionheart knew what she felt sometimes even better than she herself did. However, how much did the link work the other way? Might the urgency she felt now not be her own impatience, but Lionheart’s?

“Oh, Steph,” Karl said with a chuckle. “You’re going to love this. The private lands we’re heading toward belong to the Franchitti family.”

Stephanie made a rude noise. The Franchittis were not among her favorite people on Sphinx. In fact, it wasn’t stretching the point too much to say that they were among her least favorite. Certainly Trudy Franchitti, who was roughly a year older than Stephanie, was on Stephanie’s “Most To Be Avoided” list.

“Well,” Stephanie said. “Maybe we don’t need to go that far. I wonder what has Lionheart so riled. If it was something on the ground, we should have flown over it already. I mean, we’re not moving all that fast.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” Karl said. “Which means it’s something he could smell from a long way off. Take the car up, Steph. Maybe we can see what he can smell.”

Unspoken between them was that they both had guessed what this threat might be. The season was very late summer—on Sphinx the seasons lasted for approximately fifteen T-months. This summer had started out normally enough, but as it had progressed, conditions had grown increasingly dry. Drought status had been declared. Fire warnings were posted everywhere.

Very carefully, Stephanie brought the air car up above the canopy. The gigantic crown oaks and near-pines that dominated this area were so widely spaced that it was possible to steer between them. Since steering without the autopilot and radar assistance was something Stephanie had wanted to practice, they had stayed at trunk level. This choice had the added advantage of keeping Stephanie’s more erratic maneuvers away from casual observation.

“Steph!” Karl was pointing southwest, his gesture unconsciously mimicking that of the treecat who rested in his lap. “Smoke!”

Looking in the direction indicated, Stephanie saw the faintest wispy grayish-white traces threading through the thick arboreal canopy.

Karl was already on his uni-link, comming the SFS fire alert number. “This is Karl Zivonik. We’re at…” He rattled off coordinates. “We’ve spotted smoke. It’s pretty faint and might be coming from private land, but we thought we’d better report it.”

The voice of Ranger Ainsley Jedrusinski came back over the com. “We’ve got it, Karl, and one of the weather-watch birds is just clearing the horizon. Give me a sec.”

There was a brief delay while she queried the weather satellite for a downlook. Then her voice came back. “
Definitely
a hot spot over accepted limits, especially given wind direction. We’re going to send in a crew. Good work. Out!”

Stephanie had set the air car to hover and now she glanced over at Karl. “So, do we go to help?”

Karl considered. “Well, Ainsley didn’t say we shouldn’t, and it
is
our fire, sort of. But if we go, pilot.”

“No problem,” Stephanie said, setting the auto-pilot to hover and sliding so they could change places. “No problem at all.”

*
 
*
 
*

Actually, though she wouldn’t have admitted it aloud, Stephanie was glad to give up having to pay attention to the surprisingly demanding role of pilot—at least a pilot without autopilot. Freed up from those responsibilities, she brought up her uni-link and downloaded information on the location of the fire.

“Winds are rising,” she told Karl. “Unless there’s a miracle, the fire’s going to spread—and fast. I wonder what started this one?”

Karl shrugged. “We can rule out lightning. The usual summer T-storms are really late. This might be a ground fire that’s finally broken out to the surface, so we’re seeing the smoke. The area is so dry almost anything might start a fire.”

Stephanie nodded. She also knew what Karl wasn’t saying: on Meyerdahl, eighty to ninety percent of forest fires had a direct or indirect human cause. The percentage wasn’t as high on Sphinx, since the population was so much smaller, but that didn’t matter. When the forests were this dry, even a stray spark could find ample natural tinder.

Whatever their cause, forest fires were never comfortable events. Intellectually, Stephanie knew wildfire was actually a necessary part of a forest ecology, a means of clearing away deadwood, underbrush, and accumulated duff that contributed to disease. Moreover, many plants actually
needed
fire in order for their seeds to germinate. Browsing and grazing animals benefitted, too, since new growth was higher in nutrient value. Thus, a bit more indirectly, the predators benefitted as well.

Despite knowing all of this, Stephanie still found it hard to think of forest fires as
good
. The skeletons of burned-out trees, the carcasses of animals that failed to outrace the spreading flames, the fallen bodies of birds choked by smoke, even though they were never close to the fire, all seemed evidence of evils to be fought.

Yet what was true on any planet with forests was even more so on Sphinx. Eighty percent of Sphinx’s land surface was forested. Some of the plants—like the picketwood, on which the treecats were so dependent—might look like forests. However, picketwood groves were actually one vast plant. The parent tree sent down runners from the branches of a nodal trunk. These in turn became their own trunks and sent out more runners. Damage to one area of picketwood could have a definite—although usually short-term—effect on related groves, even if those groves were kilometers away.

The policy of the Sphinx Forestry Service was to manage rather than simply put out natural fires. This did not make SFS popular with many of the human settlers, who felt that they and their property should be protected no matter what—even if that property was located where it should not be. When the fire was of human origin and SFS started handing out reprimands and fines…Well, then the SFS found itself even less popular.

Karl had switched the com so they could listen to the Forestry Service chatter as the unit was assembled and sent out. Although the SFS had what many of the planet’s residents considered an overly large staff, they were actually stretched pretty thin. Ranger Jedrusinski’s call had alerted any and all on- or off-duty rangers in the immediate area of the fire. Some would delay long enough to fetch specially equipped firefighting vehicles.

However, at this time of year, all rangers—and that included Stephanie and Karl, who were only probationary rangers—routinely carried with them a kit that included a Pulaski, a shovel, a bladderbag, a portable fire shelter, and a fire-suit. Many of these tools would have been perfectly familiar to firefighters some thirteen hundred years before. Others, like the modified vibroblade cutting edge of the Pulaski (a combination hoe and fire axe that had been in use for centuries even before humans reached for the stars) or the fire-retardant chemicals that the bladder bag automatically mixed with water, would have surprised and delighted them.

When he’d taken over piloting, Karl had closed the back window they’d opened for Lionheart. The treecat had remained in the front seat, perched on Stephanie’s lap. Once they’d set course in the direction of the fire, Lionheart stopped pointing. Some of the tension had left the lines of his long, lean body, but through their shared link Stephanie could feel that the treecat was clearly conflicted about heading into—rather than away from—a fire.

She stroked Lionheart, even going so far as to roll him over onto his back so she could ruffle the cream-colored fur on his tummy and tickle under his chin. Usually, this relaxed him, but soon enough, Lionheart put his one remaining true-hand and his two hand-feet on her forearm and gently shoved her away.

Stephanie offered him a perch along the back of her seat. He flowed up, sinuously graceful, and settled where he could rest his true-hand on the top of her head while looking out the window.