Anders bent to pick up the top of the stretcher, flexing from the knees as he raised it. His words, when he spoke, were gasped out around the effort.
“Maybe, but I’d like him a whole lot better if he’d just admitted he f…” He hesitated out of respect for Kesia, not that he hadn’t heard her use worse.
“That this is mostly his fault?” Kesia grunted as she picked up the other edge of the stretcher. “That he has behaved unconscionably? Believe me. He’s not going to be allowed to forget it.”
Anders wondered if this was a prediction or a threat—maybe a bit of both. For a moment gladness coursed through him. Then he realized what it would mean. If Dr. Whittaker was disgraced, then he’d lose the project. Anders hated the idea of Dr. Whittaker losing the project. That would mean leaving Sphinx and the treecats—and Stephanie, who was becoming a friend, and Karl and Jessica…
Worse, this would be the second time off-planet scientists—not that Tennessee Bolgeo had really been a scientist, but Anders had heard more than one person refer to him as “Dr. Bolgeo”—would have fallen short of the Star Kingdom’s high expectations. What would that mean for the treecats? At the very least, a delay in having their status as sentient creatures verified.
Anders and Kesia were alone now—except for the unconscious Langston Nez—and as they picked their way slowly along the trail he and Dr. Calida had marked, Anders spoke softly.
“Kesia, I know my dad has been a blackhole, but…You do realize that if this all blows up, the project is doomed. Dr. Calida is a xenobiologist with an interest in anthropology, but she couldn’t take over. You and Virgil are depending on the research you’ll do on this expedition to finish your degree work…And Langston…”
There was a long pause from where Kesia carried the back end of the stretcher, then she said, “You’re not saying we should defend Dr. Whittaker?”
“I’m saying,” Anders said, “that he’s behaved like a self-centered jerk—but like you said, that’s this ‘displacement’ thing. Not for one minute has he forgotten the treecats.”
“No. Just the humans.”
“Still, think about it?”
“I will.”
If hauling all the gear from where the van had sunk to land had been bad, hauling it back was three times worse. Yes, there was less—they’d given their last power pack to Dacey and they were pretty much out of their own food—but they were much more weary.
The odor of smoke hadn’t become stronger, or maybe their noses had just accepted it as part of the background. Maybe, the fire was even being gotten under control. Anders didn’t think he had the energy to climb above the canopy again, at least not until he’d had something to eat and maybe a nap.
He picked up a pair of high-powered binoculars and scanned the tree line, trying to see if he could glimpse his flag. Motion lower down in the tree caught his eye.
He saw them only for a moment, clearly defined against the leafy background: two treecats, gray-and-cream males. It seemed to Anders that their gazes met his own across the distance—although that was impossible. Then they were gone.
For a moment, Anders thought about mentioning what he had seen to the others, then he stopped. What good would that do? His dad might call him a liar or, worse, insist they go back and see if the treecats were still there.
Anders’ legs ached; so did his neck and shoulders and back. In the end, lying back on a blanket and resting, even with the extra gravity pressing down on him, was all he wanted.
Closing his eyes, Anders didn’t so much drift off to sleep as plunge off a cliff into purest exhaustion.
* * *
Relieved and delighted as she was when Chet, Christine, and Toby arrived, Stephanie knew they were fighting a losing battle. Sensations of uncertainly and guilt surged through her. If they hadn’t meddled, would the treecats have managed matters on their own? Had the presence of humans disrupted their usual behavior patterns?
She remembered how many years ago on Meyerdahl she’d brought home what she thought was an abandoned baby squirellette, how her father had taken it from her, concern drawing lines on his face.
“Steph, never move a baby animal. Likely its parents are close by, ready to help. This little one…”
He didn’t say more, but Stephanie could tell from his expression that he was concerned that her actions had doomed the little creature. It would have been doomed, too, except that her father was a vet and had happened to be home. The experience had cured her from “adopting” wild pets forever. When they’d left Meyerdahl, she’d found homes for those pets she did have, knowing it would be cruel to transport them to an alien planet just because she loved them.
Was this the incident of the squirrelette all over again? Had she condemned these treecats through her arrogance?
Stephanie hacked violently through the base of a shrub, not even bothering to turn on the vibroblade edge. Realizing she was wasting energy she could spend more productively, that she was letting her temper—that wild and dancing flame that ate into her as the fire now consumed the shrubs on the other side of the stream—rule her, Stephanie wished for Lionheart’s soothing presence.
Glancing over at him, she remembered that he was the one who had guided them here, so clearly he had thought they could do some good. She was turning back to the next section of her patch, when she saw a windblown branch come sailing across the stream and land in the midst of the farther edge of the grass-filled meadow.
“Karl!” she yelled. “Fire line’s been broken. I’m going in.”
Grasping her Pulaski firmly in one fist, Stephanie galloped beneath the picketwood trees, in the direction of the burning segment of the meadow. Her bladder bag had long emptied its original load, but she’d had the siphon in the stream, so she had some water with her. Even so, playful tongues of wind were spreading the fire through the dry meadow grass faster than she could reach it.
“Steph,” Karl called, his voice reaching her through her fire-suit’s radio, “we’re not going to be able to put that out. Do you have your drip-torch?”
“Yes.”
“I think we have enough room to start a counter-fire. It’s risky, we’ve got to try. If that fire takes the meadow, it’s going to reach the trees and then…”
He trailed off, perhaps remembering that his words were audible to anyone on their channel. She knew what he had been about to say. If those flirtatious winds pushed the fire in the direction of the tree line, there would be no saving the treecats. There might be no saving themselves, either.
Within a few steps, Stephanie reached the edge of the meadow. One corner of her mind noticed that a few meters of the tall grass had already been cut down to a few millimeters’ height. That might slow the fire if the wind was not driving it, but not enough to count on—especially since the grass had only been clipped, not raked down to bare earth.
When she dashed out into the taller grass, she cursed her lack of height. The grass came up to her neck in places, making progress difficult, but she could hear the whoosh of the fire as it licked at the dry stalks, and knew the direction in which she must go.
Karl’s voice again. “Steph, we’re deep enough in. If we go much closer, we’re going to just join up with this fire. Ready?”
She glanced over, saw Karl standing about three meters to her right.
“Ready. I’m starting now!”
Essentially, the drip torch was nothing more than a tube holding very flammable liquid with a quick-lighter set at the tip. Stephanie pressed the tab that caused the tube to elongate outwards so that she wouldn’t be starting the fire at her own feet. Carefully, pretending this was nothing more than a training exercise, she drew a neat line with the liquid, then set it alight.
Fuel, heat, oxygen, she thought, fanning the flames so they’d burn away from her, back toward the already existing fire, not toward the trees. When her backfire was burning well, she traded the drip torch for her Pulaski. Turning it hoe side down, she started raking back the grass o
n her side of the new blaze so that even if the wind decided to take part, the flames would only find bare earth.
Over to her right, Karl had also started drawing a new fire line. Then, to her left, Stephanie became aware someone else—shorter even than her—was tearing away at the grass.
“To—” she started to say, but this person was smaller even than Toby. In fact, this person wasn’t even human. It was a treecat, a very large treecat. The same treecat, she somehow felt certain, who had confronted Lionheart upon their arrival. To his left another cat was digging away at the grass, exposing the bare, unburnable earth.
Wow! Stephanie thought. I wish Dr. Whittaker and Dr. Hobbard were here. They’d love this.
She swallowed a laugh. She supposed the opponents of treecat intelligence could still claim that constructive firefighting wasn’t an indication of constructive thought. They’d say that what treecats were doing was a matter of instinct or imitation or that anyone who thought running towards a fire, rather than in the opposite direction, was an indication of intelligence needed their heads checked.
Time vanished into motion as Stephanie concentrated on building a barrier against the fire. Occasionally, one of the human members of her team would ask a question, but common sense and initiative were the order of the day.
Over across the stream to the east, the fire was spreading.
We’re not going to be able to stay here much longer, Stephanie thought. I hope Lionheart convinces the treecats to let us get them out of here.
She glanced over to where Jessica, Toby, Christine, and Chad, assisted by a few treecats, had done a good job clearing their side of the stream. Stephanie knew all too well that all it would take was another stray branch or windblown bundle of leaves and that hard-won fire line would be broken.
Already the drought-dry leaves in some trees were catching fire. One dead near-pine went up in a blaze of isolated glory.
Candling, Stephanie remembered. That’s what they called that effect in class. Weirdly pretty…
She was turning back to her work when the flames coursing up the near-pine flared, burning scorchingly hot, probably as they consumed a pocket of resinous material. With a loud cracking noise, the tree trunk exploded, showering sparks. Then the entire burning mass tumbled down, directly toward Jessica.
A shrill scream cut through Stephanie’s earphones, followed by a mass of confused chatter, chatter in which Jessica’s voice was conspicuously absent.
Chapter Thirteen
Climbs Quickly was pleased when Nose Biter and his clanmates had the good sense to join the effort to stop the grass fire. After all, if the fire spread, the question of whether the People accepted the two-legs’ aid or ran for what safety they could find on a burning island would be moot. Fire that had grown fat on dried grass and fragile shrubbery would be well-prepared to gorge upon the leaves beneath the spreading branches of the net-wood grove.
As much as he longed to be close to Death Fang’s Bane, Climbs Quickly did not join those fighting the fire, but turned his attention to those of the Damp Ground Clan who trembled between a desire to flee on their own six legs and to accept the offered help. Among those who now balanced on the brink of decision were several mothers with kittens of various sizes huddling near them. These would be the most vulnerable in a traditional flight, and he turned his attention to them.
he said,
Here he shared an image of his two-leg, her arms extended in a wide loop as she used one of her devices—the one that seemed at times to almost let her fly—to give a hooting and squeaking armload of very small kittens a ride from branches to duff, the entire giggling mass landing as lightly as did a flower-wing on a leaf.
The Damp Ground Clan kittens were captivated, for a moment forgetting their fear of both fire and strange creatures. Climbs Quickly felt fringes of “Me, too! Me, too!” from their mind-voices. He wished he had time to pull Death Fang’s Bane from her labors so she could enchant them with the warmth of her mind-glow, but there was no time.
Less time, indeed, than he had estimated. At that moment, the breeze became suffused with the odor of burning near-pine sap—doubtless one of those pockets that collected in a dead tree and were considered treasures by any treecat who excavated them, since, if carefully warmed, the sap could line a basket so that it would carry water.
The odor was followed by an ear-foldingly loud explosion as the heat-suffused sap caught fire all at once and exploded. The top of the tree vanished into sparks and flaming bits that eddied toward the ground like shooting stars. The trunk of the tree tottered and crashed down toward the stream.
Climbs Quickly knew his was not the only mind that shouted warning, but as swift as were sight and thought, in this case the falling tree was swifter. Slender as the dead near-pine had seemed when among the company of its fellows, the fiery mass that plummeted downwards was vast and terrible, trailing flaming branches that snagged and broke against the tangled trees on either side of the stream.
Two-legs and six-legs alike scattered away from the falling menace, but two were unable to escape—Windswept and one of the People. Even as they vanished beneath the flaming mass, Climbs Quickly knew the lost member of the Damp Ground Clan in the flashes of frantic memory spread by the panicked members of his clan.
Dirt Grubber was his name. He was a patient soul, older than Climbs Quickly by five rings on his tail, never mated, yet a valued member of his clan, first as a young scout, later shifting his attention from game animals to the plants the People valued. He had been among the few in this conservative clan who had not thought avoidance of the two-legs was the wisest course. Indeed, he had a fascination with their growing places, and had pestered the memory singers for images.
All this in a second, all this as Climbs Quickly bunched his limbs and began to run in the direction of the burning tree. He had felt Death Fang’s Bane’s first flash of shock and horror. He knew that his two-leg would not accept that her friend was lost until she held the burned body in her arms. Surging through Death Fang’s Bane’s mind-glow was determination that muted a budding grief. She was not one to wail mindlessly when something might yet be done.
Nor, he saw, were her friends. Running back from where they had made their escape, they raced in the direction of the burning tree. The older two wielded their cutting/hauling tools with grim efficiency, clearing away the outer layer of burning material. The younger boy stood waist-deep in the stream, playing water through one of the peeing bags so that it soaked the nearby area, keeping the flames from spreading.
Shadowed Sunlight, his mind-glow a turmoil within which the darkness threatened to overwhelm the sun, apparently thought this a wise move, for as soon as he was close enough, he began to do the same from the other side. Meanwhile, those of the People who had been helping build the fire line went from point to point, scraping dirt over those sparks or bits of flaming material that escaped the two-legs’ attention. Through the sharp, permeating scent of burning green-needle, Climbs Quickly could smell the scent of singed fur and blistered flesh.
His own skin burned in a few spots, but it took more than sparks to set the fur of a living Person alight. He hastened to join Death Fang’s Bane where she, with typical determination, was trusting to the extra skin she had donned to protect her from the worst of the flames as she pushed in to where she could get a hold on the burning tree itself.
Climbs Quickly had long known that Death Fang’s Bane was stronger even than two-legs much larger than herself. These wore devices that helped them to move about with ease and he had seen how without them they were slowed. Some—like Shadowed Sunlight—often managed without such aides, but when he did the extra effort was obvious. Such was not the case with Death Fang’s Bane. She was strong enough to move as gracefully as a Person under her own power. However, she was a two-leg and like all su
ch did not often go far without tools.
Now, reaching the burning trunk of the green-needle, she yelled something. All Climbs Quickly could understand was the word “Karl,” but her meaning soon became clear. The young male turned the force of his pee-bag’s flow to soak the section of the tree nearest to Death Fang’s Bane. As he did so, she took off the making-lighter thing and strapped it to the tree trunk, protecting it with a wrap made from one of the fire shelter bags she carried.
When this was in place, Death Fang’s Bane shoved with all her might to raise the tree trunk so that any trapped beneath it—living or dead—might be freed. Shadowed Sunlight, seeing her intention, moved to help her, his greater height and broad, muscular shoulders a tremendous asset in this labor, the fierce darkness in his mind-glow seeming to give him extra strength.
When Shadowed Sunlight had raised the tree trunk higher than she could reach, Death Fang’s Bane trusted her burden solely to the young male. Then, partly in the water, partly out, she thrust herself deeper in and began feeling around for those who had been trapped.
Here, at last, was a task with which Climbs Quickly could help. He had been sorting through the confused flood of mind-voices, seeking two that—if they still existed at all—would be faint and weak. Once or twice there had been traces. Following these as he might have scented after a bark-chewer when hunting, he waded into the stream and joined his two-leg in her search.
Almost as one, their hands found the slick fabric of Windswept’s suit. As one, they pulled with all their combined strength, seeking to dislodge the limp and inert burden. One hand tight on the fabric, Death Fang’s Bane hacked with her fast-biting knife to break loosen the twigs and branchlets that had caught on Windswept’s clothing. Climbs Quickly might lack a true-hand, but he still had five good limbs. With the upper three he gripped Windswept’s clothing, kicking hard with his true-feet braced against the near-pine trunk.