Wings

by Fearadhach MecRaudri

  A certain fear for these people had begun to creep up within him, in spite of himself. He had decided to learn all they would allow about The Column, and laughed to himself at their foolishness by allowing a POW, which is how he still viewed himself, access to so much data. His plan had been to gather as much Intel as possible for the day of his eventual escape, but that information now fueled his internal conflict. He had studied every inch of this base, gone to see the food preparation, even gone down to the submarine bays below the water line to watch the food coming in from other Sanctuaries being unloaded.

  That had been the most unsettling trip, and not because of the two security men with blasters who showed up to escort him from the sub bay. No, the unsettling thing had been that the labels on the food boxes were from common Outside food companies.

  The trip had prompted another round of research, for it wasn’t as if the food brought in from Outside was better than what The Column made for themselves: quite the contrary, in fact. So, he sat down to figure out why they went to the risk and expense of bringing in outside food, and it hadn’t taken much to realize that they were already at risk of a food crisis, and would be in trouble soon if they kept taking on new people.

  A hand in the air interrupted his train of thought. He considered taking a question, but the young man's baffled expression changed his mind. He could have had fun putting a snarky one in his place, but found himself wanting to get this thing done, not answer a question he had probably answered a dozen times in this lecture already. He waved the kid down and continued speaking, but his mind wandered back to the submarine bays.

  The revelation of the subs themselves had, of course, been disconcerting for him. He had spent some weeks trying to figure out how The Column leaders had kept such a huge operation functioning beneath the nose of CentGov, and those were the answer. Outside, the grav-lev technology meant that most traffic between islands took to the air air. Most of the time the only thing one saw on the ocean were pleasure ships of one sort or another, or the short-range subs used for kelp farming. No one would even think to look for the sort of huge subs these people used for shipping.

  The food problem, though… questions to the civilians brought little more than a shake of the head and a shrug, often with some fatalistic phrase or other, or –far more annoying to him- that stupid comment about how ‘Where there is a Wing there is a Way’. Questions put to flyers were met with stony silence, or a look that seemed to ask ‘what do you care?’ The problem was that he found himself caring.

  It created a great conflict within him. The Column had murdered his father, denied him his father’s love, yet this group of people seemed to be everything they told him they were and possibly more. He could not resolve these issues, and finally his wings had begun to twitch with disuse. He had asked for the chance to go outside and fly. The ease with which they agreed had been surprising, but the allowance had come with a catch. They wanted him to contribute. There had been a great deal of discussion about the matter with the girl he considered as his ‘handler’, and when she found out about his teaching abilities the matter was immediately settled.

  So, here he stood in front of a room full of men and women of varying ages, teaching them how to maintain weapons in order to kill his old friends and comrades… and dealing with annoying questions: the kid had his up again.

  A grudging acknowledgment of his hand brought forth the sort of question which would have earned him demerits for answering at the Academy, where proper procedure had been to gruffly tell the student to run laps until he had figured it out, but he answered it with grudging patience.

  He wished, again, that he could have taught something else, but his best attempts to find something else to teach had come to naught. They didn’t exactly need anyone to teach flying lessons, and he’d never been very good as a medic. An offer to teach survival classes, how to live off the land, had been made, but they already had someone far better than him.

  He couldn’t decide which he found more disturbing: that the only thing he seemed to know how to teach was the skills of death, or that he was teaching those skills to the ones he’d intended to kill when learning them.

  He felt relief when that he reached the end of the lecture with no further interruptions, gave his class their assignments, and sent them on their way. Several stopped and attempted to chat with him, but gave up when he seemed distant. He managed to avoid offending anyone, he thought, but they all seemed to sense his mood and let him be.

  A short walk took him from the classroom to a Nest, and the clean air to help him clear his head. Things had become so confused. He had no choice to admit that neither the civilians of The Column nor the flyers he’d met were the monsters they were supposed to be. He actually felt sorry for them, for the food shortage which would obviously be coming. He got to the edge of the nest, and felt relief that a security guard had learned his schedule enough to be waiting at the door. He really needed to learn the guy's name. They would not let him go out without being scanned for transmitters, but would allow him all the time Outside he wanted. After all, where could he go? The nearest island was over a week’s wing-flight from where they were, and was uninhabited besides.

  As he launched into the air he reveled in the feel of the wind coursing over his wings, stirring his feathers. The wings, at least, had fully recovered. He pumped them harder, clawing for altitude. His wings bit into the air, the thin membrane of his wings cupped and pushed the air while currents teased his feathers. He flew higher and higher, up to the edge of the cloud that permanently blanketed the island and finally steadied his wings into a glide. He could reach up and touch the edge of the cloud, but he looked down at the mountain rising from the sea.

  The protective feelings which welled up in him were tantamount to treason, but they couldn’t be helped. Still, he could not bring himself to betray his government or his oaths. He would remain true to the Legion, as his father had done and as his brother, somewhere out there, had to be doing now. He would, however, do what he could to protect these people. He would not fight the Legion, for that would be true treason, but he would testify on behalf of these civilians before the Senate when the time came, as he was sure it one day would. He could at least do that.

  ***

  It had only taken Yolanda a few more hours of searching through video logs to find that Terrance liked to take night time solo flights during the hours of full moon, but that he tended to go to ground no later than an hour after midnight. When she figured this out the full moon was peaking at just before dawn, so she’d had to wait a few days until the ‘howling hour’ occurred earlier in the evening. A quick look at an almanac database showed moon zenith occurring at twenty-two hundred hours in four days’ time.

  The days spent waiting were used well, however. She’d snuck into town during the ‘witching hour’ of the night, when the moon was at its darkest, and stolen the supplies she’d need to lure the flyer. She spent a number of hours combing the spire side of the island, mapping out caves and finding a place to catch herself a bird.

  Luckily the rock under the spire held a labyrinthine network of caves. There were plenty of places down there one had to crawl through, which meant a flyer wouldn’t be able to give chase. She’d also found a number of dry pits of various depths, excellent places to hide. When the night finally came, she watched the monitors anxiously, and was not disappointed. Terrance came out dressed for a long flight, and took to the air with a great leap. Watching the man take off, she felt a pang of jealousy spurred by the fact that women could not go through the wing growth process. She shook it off, there was too much to do for such indulgences.

  The moon, approaching full, gave off enough light to make moving unseen difficult. Yolanda reveled in the challenge. She grabbed her lure and double-checked to make sure her comm was set to receive on all frequencies, then she was off.

  It only took a few minutes to slink from the cave she had holed up in to the entrance to the mountain passages. Fro
m there another fifteen minutes brought her to the ambush location; a nice flat section of rock on the far side of the spire, with an opening to the labyrinth hidden by the sparse foliage growing in the stone.

  She crept slowly toward the chosen exit, set her comm. gear to maximum gain, tossed the lure through the bushes, and hoped to the Captain’s Chair that her quarry didn’t happen to be looking too near that spot at the moment. The carefully prepared flashlight sailed through the air, bounced twice, then rolled to a stop.

  She allowed herself a moment of pride as it began to let out an intermittent, dim light. It had taken hours of fiddling to get the thing to behave just the way she wanted it, and another several hours to rig its second little surprise.

  The flawless operation of the device wasn’t the only source of her pride, of course. The throw had been ideal, and the plan was brilliant. A dim, blinking light on the side of the far side of the island was sure to attract the flyer-especially since the colonists were all being held under conditions just shy of house arrest.

  She could have used one of her own flashlights for this, but that would have been more dangerous. If that bird-boy decided to call in the anomaly she’d have to scram and come up with a new plan. Part of her orders were to leave no trace, and if she had to abandon her lure it wouldn’t do for a flashlight of such high quality that it could not have come from a colonist to be found here.

  Yolanda leaned against the wall inside the entrance and waited, listening intently to the static from the comm., becoming one with the rock. The wall was a particularly hard type of rock, of course, full of straight lines and sharp angles. It took all of her training to be sure that she had herself in a position to both watch the light and make sure her curves were not visible through the bush.

  Soon she found the small flaw in her brilliant plan. The unsteady flicker of the flashlight and the droning of static were having a hypnotic effect on her. The need to remain still did not help, of course. Her first instinct was to resist the trance, but then she remembered her mother’s lessons on meditation and relaxed, allowing the trance to take hold. As her mind stilled into a peaceful state, she isolated her sense of sight and sound, blocked the smell of the caves and the feel of the rock. There was a lot of background noise, from the droning of the ocean below, to the rustle of wind through the bushes, to the static in her right ear, to the movement of air through the caves behind her.

  It took only a few moments to filter out each sound so that all her mind heard was silence. In her trance of awareness only light and sound existed; her body became like a distant thing. Her eyes slowly scanned the sky, looking for the tell-tale blocking of stars which would herald, she hoped, the arrival of her little bird.

  She didn’t know how long she had been in the trance when a noise came from the left of the cave. Even time seemed to have fallen away. The noise came in soft, quiet enough that she likely would have missed it if not for the noise-filtering aspect of the trance. Someone was creeping up a path toward her cave, and doing a good job at stealth, at least for the amount of noise here.

  The sounds were moving slowly, feet gingerly and cautiously meeting the ground, bushes being carefully pushed aside. The person had obviously not trained in stealth, then. Anyone could move with reasonable quiet if they moved slowly enough. The sound came from her right, so she concentrated her hearing onto that side. This meant that the noise from the comm. had to be filtered again, but she could not risk moving to turn it off. If that noise came from her birdboy, any movement would be detected.

  It took several more noises floating through the air before she felt sure of his identity and exact position. A soft scrape on the rock came in from too far above the footfalls for it to be a person’s shoulder-it had to be Terrance’s wing. He came closer, hugging the cliff and taking every precaution. No doubt he had his own blaster drawn, expecting a trap.

  He would not be able to see her from his position, so she eased back further into the cave, silently drew her blaster, and pressed hard against the wall while bringing herself out of the trance, thankful that she’d chosen to take position on the same side of the cave he was approaching. His blaster came into view first, and she considered making a grab for it, but the bush stood between her and that gun.

  He had not radioed in that he was investigating something, which was good for her, even if the comms chatter would have given her warning. She had planned on him landing on the nice expanse of rock where he’d be a nice exposed and relatively unarmed target, though, rather than approaching from the side with a weapon drawn.

  Keeping her breathing even had become difficult since ending the trance, excitement and fear made her want to act rather than sit still. The weapon began to pivot as her quarry began to circle the cave. Her breath nearly caught as the maneuver began. She knew that the flyers had incredibly keen eyesight, and close inspection by him could reveal her position.

  Well, nothing for it then, time to do something bold. Before his eyes came around the corner she rolled suddenly and came to a squatting position in the middle of the cave entrance. She quickly flicked the safety to her blaster on and off, then spoke in a level tone, “Please don’t move Terrance. I have my weapon trained on you, and I assure you that I can pull my trigger faster than you can bring your weapon to bear or dodge. Before you do anything foolish, please note that if I wanted to kill you I could have done so already, and at much less risk to myself. Please put your weapon down.”

  The flyer froze, but made no move to relinquish his weapon, “I don’t know who you are nor what you want, but I suggest you come out where I can see you and put down that mark3 Tonnager. The safety on those things have such a distinctive sound. I radioed the garrison that I was investigating an anomaly, and someone will be sent to investigate if I don’t check back in the next five minutes. And don’t think you can let me just check in by keeping me under the gun, there is a voice-stress analyzer on the other end. I wouldn’t be able to hide the fact that I was in trouble if I wanted to.”

  Irritation at the man’s attitude and bravado crept into her adrenalin-heightened mind. So, he thought not only to lie to her, but that being able to name her weapon unseen would impress her into giving up? Well, two could play at that game. “Don’t try to impress me Terrance. Anyone who knows his weapons enough to feel comfortable carrying something as temperamental as that Westinghouse should be able to recognize an M3 by sound.

  “I’ll also ask you not to lie to me again. I have been running a broad-spectrum analysis of comm. chatter since you took off just before the moon hit full. I know you haven’t called in.” She saw that the position of his off hand had begun to change ever so slowly, and shifted her position to draw his attention back to her weapon. “My eyesight is also better than you give me credit for. If you don’t stop trying to trigger your emergency call beacon, I will stun you, then dump you in the ocean. I brought you here to talk, not be hauled before that bastard who has been keeping these people on the brink of starvation.”

  Something subtle changed in the man’s stance at her words. His wings came down a bit, and he seemed less ready to erupt into violence. She didn’t let her guard down, but did allow herself to feel a twinge of hope as he spoke in a slightly softer tone, “Ok, so now I know that you have been observing this colony for at least ten minutes. I’m not exactly impressed. So tell me, who exactly are you working for?”

  “I’ll ask the questions here, Terrance, and I’ll dictate the terms of this encounter: starting with one last request that you drop that weapon. I would rather not stun you, that would make this take far longer than I would like, and I’d probably have to kill you besides-which I’d hate to do. You know how the sound from one of these things carries.”

  Terrance stood for several moments, appearing to consider his options, “Ok, you’ve called my bluff, but you aren’t in total control here. My guess is that you don’t have an easy way off this island, or we would have spotted it. So, if you do kill me, you risk being found in the
search. Of course, if I take you in then that creates more trouble for you-and whoever hired you- than your life is probably worth.

  “I suggest a compromise. I will back off, lowering my weapon to one side, you come out where I can see you –or at least see your outline- and move your weapon offline. That way if either of us makes a sudden mo… ophff!!...”

  Yolanda’s irritation at this guy’s demeanor finally got the better of her, and she sprung from the bush without warning. She drove both fists into his gut, and then brought her foot around behind her in a near-impossible acrobatic move to kick his weapon off- line. They went down in a tumble, but she had the element of surprise, which allowed her to come up with her pistol buried in his gut and her knee on his wrist. She narrowed her eyes, digging the barrel into his gut for emphasis, “Now, Terrance, we are going to talk a little, you and I. But first, you are going to release that weapon.”

  His lips set into a hard line, and the muscles under her knee went slack. His other hand shot up to grab her gun, but she’d anticipated the move. With one lithe movement she stood, backed away, and kicked his gun well out of reach. A brief look of defiance crossed his moon-lit face, but an arched eyebrow cured that.

  Once she felt sure he had finished she spoke, “Ok, hero, are we done with the theatrics yet? I am quite capable at hand to hand, if you want to try some more. It was kind of fun, really. Care to go another round?”

  He shook his head as if trying to clear it. “Not really, but I am going to sit up. Lying on my wings in the midst of all this hard rock is not exactly comfortable. If you wish to begrudge me that small comfort then you’ll find that I put up a bit more of a fight when not caught flat-footed.”

  Her target rose to a sitting position, slowly. He took a moment to stretch ruffled wings before continuing. “I am assuming that you want something from me, so kindly get on with it. I would like to get back to the garrison in time to have a bite to eat before hitting the sack. Perhaps now you’ll tell me what it is you want, since we’ve become so close. ”