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.
Despite their name, treecats were not all that feline. For one, no Terran cat had ever possessed six limbs or a fully prehensile tail. Their build was longer and-beneath their fluffy coats-leaner. They were also larger, averaging sixty to seventy centimeters through the body, with their tails doubling their length. And, of course, no Terran cat had three-fingered hands with fully opposable thumbs.
However, quite like Terran cats, male treecats, like Lionheart, were tabby-gray above, cream below. Their gray tails were ornamented with a varying number of darker bands. There were other similarities as well: slitted pupils to the eyes (these almost always green), retractable claws (although these were far sharper than those possessed by any Terran cat), pointed ears, and long whiskers. Moreover, when tense, treecats bristled out their fur much as a Terran cat did. As Karl piloted them closer to the fire, Stephanie could feel from the tickling along her neck that Lionheart was distinctly puffed.
