Firestorm Page 0,60

don't want to run from them. They do enjoy the exercise."

I gulped. Audibly. She smiled. I wondered if she was just needling me, but then I decided she wasn't. She'd take her responsibilities more or less seriously, out here.

"What I need from you is to hang back here and do what you can to get a decent rain going. Counteract the prevailing winds. Think you can do that?"

I could do that in my sleep. I confined myself to a quick nod, gathered up my hair in one hand and tied it back with a rubber band from my pocket. The way the wind was swirling, that last thing I wanted was to obscure my vision. Too many things could sneak up on me. Fire, for one. Or bears. The bears were worrying me. Badly.

"Take two steps to your left," Emily said.

"Why?" I froze, staring at her. She nodded down at the ground.

There was a timber rattler gliding along the ground right by my foot. I jumped out of the way with a little shriek, hands held high. "Snake! Snake!"

"No shit," she said dryly. "Trust me, she's not paying attention to you. She's got plenty of problems of her own. Not so quick a traveler as the larger critters. She'll have a job of it to try to get out of here in time, poor girl."

I watched the snake wiggle its--her--way down the road. Emily was right; the reptile didn't pay me any attention. Good. On the plus side, now I wasn't nearly so worried about bears. Bears didn't sneak up on your feet like that.

When I looked up again, Emily was striding along the road, straight for the fire. "Hey!" I called after her. She didn't answer. I suppose she really didn't need to answer; I knew what I was tasked to do, she knew what she was doing, and there wasn't a lot left to discuss.

Still, when she looked back, I said, "Good luck. I'll do whatever I can."

She had a surprisingly sweet smile, when she wanted to. "I know," she said. "You're a Warden."

I sat down on the bumper of the SUV and contemplated the sky.

The fire wasn't big enough yet to truly drive the system--weather systems are massive, full of energy of their own, and it would take a real out-of-control wildfire for that synergy of elements to take on an unstoppably deadly partnership. But the weather wasn't feeling particularly cooperative, either. The heat from the fire definitely had it feeling its oats, and the evaporation of moisture was creating low-level disturbances. Lots of cumulonimbus action forming, but it was hanging out on the fringes, getting pushed along by the warmer air of the fire. I needed to pull it in and start squeezing those moisture-rich clouds for rain.

First things first: I had to pump more moisture back into the air, keep the underbrush from drying out quite so quickly so that it wouldn't just continue to explode into flame. There was a lake five miles to the east of where we stood; I went up in the aetheric and soared across the fire, which looked like a giant twisting tangle of ghosts, twisting and mating and soundlessly screaming. On the aetheric, you couldn't feel the heat, but you definitely felt the forces at work; it translated as pressure on me, a resistance that was hard to push through. I made it and touched down for a landing--still in spirit-form. I was at the edge of a glowing, whispering fog that was, back in the real world, a nice place to boat and fish.

Ever seen one of those fog fountains? They sell them in stores now, complete with transducers that create fog from water. Simple process. All you have to do is bombard the water with ultrasonic pulses, and it breaks up into fog. Not quite without cost--six hundred calories of heat per gram of water, in terms of energy--but a nice benefit. As mist evaporates, energy exchange results in temperature reductions, too. With the humidity as low as it was in the vicinity of the fire, mist evaporation would bring down the temperature by about twenty degrees.

I started shaking up the water.

Mist began rising almost immediately... thick, milky tendrils off the surface of the lake. I kept it going, piling mist in layers until it was as thick as foam on a latte and as tall as a three-story building. I'd drained the lake level by quite a bit, but if the fire reached the shore,