Fire Season sk-2

by David Weber

  Fire Season

  ( Star Kingdom - 2 )

  David Weber

  Jane Lindskold

  David Weber, Jane Lindskold

  Fire Season

  Chapter One

  Climbs Quickly’s two-leg was up to something she shouldn’t be doing…again.

  The emotions surging through her mind-glow made it perfectly clear. And it was just as clear that she knew her elders would have disapproved strongly. But Death Fang’s Bane had a true gift for bending rules, and she was having a grand time.

  Her friend, Shadowed Sunlight, or possibly “Karl” (if indeed the single sound most usually applied to this two-legs was a name, not some other designation), was less delighted. Climbs Quickly couldn’t read Shadowed Sunlight’s mind-glow as easily as he could that of Death Fang’s Bane, but the basics were present. Shadowed Sunlight’s mind-glow overflowed with determination, watchfulness, alertness, and apprehension.

  Climbs Quickly leaned forward in his seat, watching intently as the “air car” (or “car”-a sound so very like “Karl” that the similarity had confused him for quite a time) sped along a complex path through the maze of tree trunks among which they traveled.

  Climbs Quickly couldn’t quite figure out what precisely was the source of Death Fang’s Bane’s excitement. True, the air car in which they were traveling was moving very quickly-and sometimes rather erratically-but that didn’t seem to be excuse enough for the surges of excitement and dread coming to him through their shared link.

  The folding flying thing in which they had more routinely traveled before this new fascination had gripped his two-leg was far more erratic. Yet, unless the weather was particularly bad, Death Fang’s Bane didn’t react this strongly to piloting her folding flying thing.

  The treecat thought a bit wistfully about the folding flying thing. He preferred it to the air car in which they were now traveling. The feeling of the wind on his fur was delightful and the winds carried such interesting scents. Also, the glider felt faster somehow. He’d figured out that the air car actually covered distances more quickly, but with the winds closed away, the sensation of speed simply wasn’t the same.

  A touch forlornly, Climbs Quickly pressed his remaining true-hand against Death Fang’s Bane’s shoulder, then used his left hand-foot to indicate the air car’s closed side. From past experience, he knew the transparent panels here could open-although he hadn’t quite figured out how to manage the opening himself.

  To emphasize his request, Climbs Quickly made a small sound of pleading protest. In the time that he’d lived with Death Fang’s Bane and her family, he’d learned how much emphasis humans placed on mouth noises. The People relied on mind-speech, using sound and gesture to provide emphasis. These alien two-legs, by contrast, seemed to have no equivalent to mind-speech, relying instead on complex mouth noises augmented by a bewildering variety of gestures-gestures that didn’t seem to mean the same thing from occasion to occasion and could be eliminated completely.

  He pitied them, for their mind-glows were brilliant and warm. It seemed sad that even two good friends like Death Fang’s Bane and Shadowed Sunlight could not share them.

  “Bleek!” Climbs Quickly repeated. Then, when Death Fang’s Bane didn’t acknowledge him, he extended his claws and struck them against the clear panel, making a noise like hail hitting rock. “Bleek! Bleek!”

  When he felt Death Fang’s Bane gust out her breath, then chuckle, Climbs Quickly tapped the transparent panel again, just in case she’d missed the point.

  “Bleek!”

  “Bleek!” Tap! Tap! “Bleek! Bleek!”

  Stephanie Harrington gingerly began to remove one hand from the air car’s stick. Immediately, the car swerved alarmingly.

  “Hands on the controls!” snapped Karl Zivonik. “Stephanie! I’m taking enough of a risk letting you fly without a permit. You want to wreck us and get my license pulled?”

  “Sorry,” Stephanie replied with uncharacteristic meekness. She knew perfectly well the risk Karl was taking. If they were found out, losing his license would be the least of the penalties. “Lionheart wants a window open. Since I’m flying low and pretty slow, I think it’s okay.”

  She couldn’t see Karl rolling his eyes, but she guessed at the expression even as he emitted a gusty sigh and turned to address the treecat directly.

  “Back window,” he said to Lionheart, pointing for emphasis. “Stephanie has enough distractions without you leaning over her shoulder and the wind blowing her hair in her face.”

  One of the things Stephanie liked about Karl Zivonik was that he was among the small handful of humans who addressed Lionheart as if the treecat was intelligent enough to understand him. Most humans either didn’t bother to talk to the treecat, or, if they did, they adopted the syrupy tones they used to address very small children-or pets. More annoying were the handful who seemed to think that if they spoke very slowly and used very simple phrases the treecat would understand.

  Stephanie supposed this last bothered her so much because it was actually probably the best approach, but those who used it didn’t employ a consistent and scientific approach.

  Karl pushed a button. As the back left side window slid down, the air car swerved slightly. Stephanie corrected, but overdid it-in part because Lionheart had just removed his weight from her shoulder-and she was off-balance.

  “Steph!” Karl turned the single syllable into reprimand and protest in one.

  “Sorry,” Stephanie repeated.

  She scanned the control panel: direction indicator, elevation, engine temperature, fluid levels. There was so much to keep track of. Worse, unlike with the hang glider, where an accident meant some busted struts and fabric (and if she wasn’t careful, some busted Stephanie, as she remembered all too vividly), here she might damage expensive equipment.

  Worse, Karl didn’t own this air car. At sixteen T-years, he had dreams of owning one, had even admitted that he was saving towards a used model, but this air car was “his” only because he needed to get to his job as a provisional ranger with the Sphinxian Forestry Service. His parents considered use of the car fairly compensated by the time they saved shuttling Karl back and forth from Thunder River, which was about a thousand kilometers away-an investment of a couple hours each way, even at the speeds an air car traveled.

  Since Karl and Stephanie were the only probationary rangers in the Sphinxian Forestry Service, they were regularly assigned to work as a team, allowing only one ranger’s time to be taken up with supervising them. Since Stephanie couldn’t pilot, this meant that usually they worked in the vicinity of Twin Forks, the town nearest to the Harrington freehold and where Richard Harrington had his veterinary clinic. There was plenty of room in the Harringtons’ sprawling stone house, since Stephanie’s parents definitely planned on additional children. That was one of the reasons they’d emigrated from their heavily populated homeworld of Meyerdahl, and Stephanie was looking forward (guardedly) to the novel experience of siblings. In the meantime, Karl often stayed with the Harrington family, taking advantage of all that currently unoccupied space, although sometimes he stayed with friends in Twin Forks.

  They were coming into an area where the forest giants were more widely spaced, so Stephanie hazarded talking in addition to piloting.

  “I think I’m getting better,” she said, “but I’ll admit, I never thought handling an actual air car on ‘manual’ would be so hard. I mean, I was getting perfect scores on the simulator, even in the ‘auto-pilot-off’ setting.”

  “Wonder-girl,” Karl retorted with a grin. “You always get perfect scores on everything. If you hadn’t, I would never have let you try this. Reality is different than a simulator. What I don’t und
erstand is why you can’t wait until you have a learner’s permit like everyone else. Your fifteenth birthday isn’t that far off.”

  Stephanie was glad that concentrating on piloting gave her an excuse to pause before answering. She knew she tended to “push.” Only lately had she tried to figure out why. It wasn’t as if her parents didn’t love her or expected her to win their approval. If anything, Richard and Margery Harrington were almost too approving, too fair, too balanced.

  They’d let Stephanie know-gently and in small increments-that she had advantages most people did not. For one, although they’d tried to hide this from her lest she get either lazy or smug, Stephanie knew her IQ scored nearly off the charts. Karl’s statement that she always got perfect scores on everything was only a slight exaggeration.

  For another, Stephanie was a “genie,”-her genetic mutations making her stronger and tougher than average. She paid for these advantages with a higher than usual metabolism, but given that Mom and Dad always made certain there was ample interesting stuff to eat-they shared her metabolism, after all-she never suffered for this. What she did suffer from was the flashes of hot temper that came with the package. She simply didn’t get along easily with most people-especially people her own age. They seemed dumb, fascinated with things she wasn’t in the least interested in.

  Karl Zivonik-who was over a T-year and a half older than her-was the closest Stephanie had to a friend her own age, the first she had made since her family emigrated to Sphinx from Meyerdahl a bit over four T-years ago. Even Karl was more like a big brother than a friend, watching over her, scolding her, teasing her, practicing target shooting with her, and, well, letting her fly his car, even though it was against the rules.

  However, despite the amount of time they spent together, Stephanie still felt there was a lot she didn’t know about Karl. At times he’d fall into a brooding silence or snap at something she didn’t think was all that bad. From Karl’s aunt, Irina Kisaevna, Stephanie had learned that much of Karl’s family and many of his friends had died during the Plague. Stephanie guessed that probably had something to do with his moods, but she sensed there was more. Occasionally, someone named “Sumiko” would get mentioned-usually by one of Karl’s host of younger siblings-and there would be this uncomfortable quiet.

  Anyhow, despite the amount of time she’d been spending with Karl, Stephanie’s best friend was Lionheart.

  I mean, look at him, now, she thought affectionately, glancing into the rearview mirror to do so, hanging out the window like some cross between a gray-and-cream floppy toy and a six-legged weasel. No one would ever guess how smart he is…

  At long last, Stephanie answered Karl’s question, “I don’t want just a learner’s permit. You know as well as I do that you can qualify for a provisional license at fifteen.”

  “At need,” Karl said. “You can get a provisional license ‘at need.’”

  “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.”