Building Harlequin's Moon by Larry Niven & Brenda Cooper

Author:Larry Niven & Brenda Cooper [Niven, Larry]
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Science fiction, Fiction, Fiction - Science Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Adventure, Science Fiction - High Tech
ISBN: 9780765351296
Publisher: Tor Science Fiction
Published: 2010-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 36: Fire

The bones of a cieba Hashed eerily, a silhouette, black inside fire. Rachel crouched at the edge of a clearing, watching the tree burn. It was brighter in dying than in life. Then little remained for the flames to eat, and what crashed to the ground was white-hot, still shaped like a tree, still wreathed in bits of fire, until it was only white ash in the outline of a tree. Wind pulled at what remained, scattering once-solid trunk and branch.

Fire advanced slowly toward Rachel, licking the low grass. Farther away, it rushed through the fuel-rich jungle on either side of the clearing. She kept looking back to watch. Run, pause, run. If she wasn't careful, it would circle closed behind her.

She ran.

Heat was a physical force pushing Rachel from both sides, herding her. The smell of death and flame and smoky danger thickened the air. The fire was noisy: pops and flashes and keening chaotic winds.

The sounds of fire fell behind her, obscured by straining engine noises and snapping tree trunks, and Rachel finally knew she had outrun immediate death. She stopped, panting, breathing sweet cool air deeply into her seared lungs. In front of her, a pair of fifty-foot-long planting machines crushed young trees, pushing them aside to make wide cleared spaces. Smoke curled everywhere.

Justin, one of her half brothers, darted in and handed her water. Rachel drank deeply, watching the fire approach. Here, a hundred meters away, the heat was still palpable. Sweat ran down her bare skin. She shook a fist at the fire and turned, jogging to catch up with the trailing planter and join her crew returning to base.

She'd never seen uncontained fire. There was no place for it on Selene nor aboard John Glenn. It tore her breath from her, filled her with adrenaline and fear, made her want to run, and run, and run. It was fast, hot enough to suck the moisture from trees as it approached, turning damp rain forest to tinder in the time it took to breathe.

They had been too slow. The fire funneled through gaps, leaped over the second set of hard-won firebreaks. Rachel wiped sweat and tears away from her eyes as she jumped onto a maintenance shelf on one of the planters, holding on to a makeshift safety rope as the planter rumbled away from the fire line. Sweat poured down her face. Every vein and membrane was an internal desert. Her stomach hurt.

It was the end of the second full day of firefighting. Order slowly rose out of chaos. Training happened in stolen moments of shift briefings. Firefighters rose and slashed and hacked and fled and started over. After each shift, they fell onto thin cots at base camp, asleep while their livelihoods burned around them.

Rachel was responsible for a full crew. Nick was with Rachel; Harry and Gloria supported logistics at base camp. Star ran a team on the other shift. Shane commanded, using data feeds from John Glenn to visualize locations of fire and crew.

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