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.