Wings

by Fearadhach MecRaudri

  “As for why I haven’t told you all about this before, it is because it wasn’t relevant to anything we were doing. At any given time, we all have dozens of things going on which we don’t bring here, because they are not ready or not relevant to these discussions. This is relevant now, so I bring it up now.

  “That out of the way, we have a bit of work to divide up. Who wants to take on…”

  Gabern quit paying any particular attention as the assignments were dolled out, and new topics, which didn’t really concern him, were brought up. Some hours later, after everyone else had gone home and the servants were collecting the drinks, Gabern finally got to ask the question which had been on his mind for most of the evening, “I have to admire what you did with the food companies and planning the shortage. Tell me though, Sir, do you always expect to kill that many birds with one stone?”

  Sar grinned, then chuckled wickedly, his wings bouncing slightly with the motion, “It hardly seems worth picking up the stone otherwise.”

  ***

  The monitors showed a bag of grain about twice the size of a fist landing in the dead center of the rock clearing. Yolanda’s mouth twisted to a half smile in the darkness. Show off. She’d been getting nervous when he spent so much time circling the drop zone, but, apparently, he had just been trying to aim really well. She shrugged, figuring it had to be a male pride thing. No doubt he’d also hang around for a long time expecting her to come right out and grab it.

  Well, she had no intention of doing any such thing. Instead she checked the long-range ground-wave radio antenna and sent a message requesting a video conference. It only took a couple of minutes before a face appeared on the screen. She silently thanked The Chair that she knew the face.

  The girl on the other end spoke quickly, “You aren’t due to report in for at least three more days, Yolanda, are you in trouble already?”

  Yolanda felt a little less thankful about who she had on the other end of the call. It had been long enough since dealing with this comm. officer to forget how abrasive she could be. “I am not in trouble, quite the opposite in fact. I am calling to request extraction at the earliest opportunity. I have the grain sample secured, there is nothing further for me to learn here, and it is probably best to get this stuff under a microscope as soon as possible.”

  The girl on the other end of the vid blinked rapidly a few times, then checked another screen. The officious nit had probably decided to review the particulars of this assignment. Yolanda made a bet with herself that the girl wouldn’t read subsequent reports.

  She won the bet, “Your assignment doesn’t have an end date on it, Yolanda, but it does suggest an observation period of at least four more weeks before extraction. Are you sure that you wish to call for extraction? I know that you weren’t happy with this particular assignment, but that is no reason to…”

  Yolanda leaned in to the monitor and let her irritation show through, “Shut it, Agatha. Try reading my reports instead of just the mission summary.” HA! That got her: caught the pencil-pusher neglecting her homework. If not for the annoyance this girl was causing Yolanda would have laughed. Probably would laugh about it later.

  She allowed frustration to drip from her tone, “There is nothing else for me to do here, nothing else to learn, and I have a potential winged recruit who also happens to know I’m here. The only thing that remaining on this island does is increase the security risk. I am aware that you probably can’t get an extraction scheduled tonight, but if it isn’t scheduled by tomorrow then I will, by The Captain’s Chair, find out why when I get back!”

  Agatha leaned back a bit in her chair. Yolanda knew she’d handled it wrong, getting upset with this sort generally only made them more obstinate. She saw Agatha making a note on her end. Most likely something about how ‘the agent is unprofessional and difficult to handle’. Well, fine. She intended to have a few words with her own superiors about a certain pencil-pushing twit upon returning home.

  Yolanda sat impatiently while said pencil-pusher looked up various things on other monitors. She knew a girl extracting her petty revenge by drawing a process out when she saw one. She had almost lost her patience when some text appeared on her screen, detailing the craft for pickup, location, time, and everything else she’d need to know.

  She checked the details, mostly to make sure they were sending a small amphibious two-seater like she’d requested. The girl on the other end glared a challenge through the text, and then signed off without a word at her nod of approval.

  A check of the monitors showed that Terrance had returned to town. Now for the next piece of the ruse. She hit a button on her comm gear, sending out short bursts of static across a few frequencies. That should do for making Terrance think she’d sent her ‘retrieval signal’. The secret of the ground-wave radio remained far too important for sloppy handling.

  With that done, she looked to retrieve the grain. As she started to head out, a whisper from her own lips stopped her, “The proper question is: am I paranoid enough”.

  A soft laugh followed the quote, sometimes called ‘the spy’s motto’. There could easily be another flyer up there somewhere, waiting for her to come after the grain. She busied herself in packing up the little hide-out and removing all traces of her presence. There would be plenty of time to go after that bag at dawn, when it would be much easier to spot a flyer lurking in the sky. Dawn tended to light them up so well.

  Twenty-four hours later she stood at the entrance to what had been ‘home’ for the last few weeks, packed and ready to go. The disintegrate code had been sent to the cameras, and they all had stopped transmitting. That had been a great relief: crawling around retrieving any which failed to self-destruct would have been an unpleasant chore.

  Terrance flew up there, somewhere, she felt sure of that. Retrieving the bag of grain had gone without incident, but the bag itself had yielded one small surprise. Attached to it had been a note, ‘Promise made, promise kept. Remember your end of the bargain’. He would be out there watching, making sure she made it away safe.

  She made the short hike to the labyrinth of caves. This time she came to an exit with a nice, straight drop to the water. The drop had to be a good forty feet, but she had been unable to find better. A blinking light moved against the starry sky: apparently Terrance wanted her to know he was out there. She looked at the waves crashing against the rock below, trying to figure out if there would be any sort of currents which could cause a problem.

  The waves were coming in regularly, and quite straight, which indicated… She realized her stalling and shook her head to clear it. A memory of the arduous climb out of the water weeks ago flickered across her mind as she prepared to jump. Too bad it hadn't been as easy to get out of that water as getting in was about to be. The stray thought allowed a moment of humor before she bunched her legs and leapt into the air.

  Freedom. Free from the bonds of land, free from gravity, suspended in the air. Alas, only an illusion. The dark water rushed up to meet her, engulfed her in blackness and bubbles. At least this time she didn't have all that equipment to weigh her down. Nothing on her now but her re-breather and the bag of grain, safely sealed in a water-proof bag.

  She looked up, oriented herself from her point of exit above, and took off swimming in a steady, even rhythm. Not too fast, making sure to conserve energy. She’d be at this for a while.

  Four hours later the first hint of dawn caressed the horizon with the barest hint of light. The spire a distant, but distinct, shape well to her south. She had swum far, and the currents had carried her farther still. Time to signal her ride, lest they risk being seen in the dawn’s light. At least the gear had stayed in place throughout the swim. She flicked the button on and off a few times, then turned it on, gave a command for a low-power homing beacon, and lay back in the water to make sure the signal went beneath the waves as well as above.

  It only took five minutes for the small two-seater aircraft to come rushing to meet her, the crests o
f the waves practically licking its hull. The pilot tossed down a rope and she hauled herself in with limbs already shaking from the long swim.

  She did not recognize the pilot, which suited her fine. It meant he would probably be a lot less chatty and willing to let her rest. She sat back to relax, then saw him hitting the buttons to take the craft below the waves. Fatigue got the better of her, the words came with more force than intended, “What are you doing?! Get us out of here above the waves. There is a flyer back there who knows that this is a Column pickup, and has probably been following my entire swim. Even beyond that, you might just be on that place’s radar: they are set up with top-notch equipment. You need to be at least a hundred miles from that place before you go sub-surface man!”

  The pilot’s hands froze, then he hit the throttle without a word. The craft’s acceleration shoved her back into the seat’s padding, and the pilot did a barrel roll without increasing altitude first. They were low enough that a droplet of water ended up on the canopy above her.

  Well, she’d made him mad and would now get the silent treatment. Fine, that's what she really wanted anyway. She’d apologize to him when they got back to the Sanctuary.

  Yolanda woke briefly when they made the transition from aerial to aquatic flight. She noticed that the pilot had waited an hour, and went back to sleep. It had been a rough day, and a rough mission. She just hoped her little prize would be of some value to The Column.

  Chapter 15

  Lucas sat in his living room with Sharon, enjoying some chilled wine as they went through the routine reports which sometimes seemed to run their daily lives. They made it a point for her to deliver her reports in person. It gave them an opportunity to discuss things privately before they were placed in front of the war room, and a chance to visit in general. For a few hours here and there, they could just be a pair of normal people, holding a straight-forward one-to-one conversation without half a dozen people trying to decide if their joking comments were supposed to be direct orders.

  They wound through reports on the effectiveness of various PR campaigns, internal and external, as well as reports on the mood and moral of The Column's military, the Legion, and the civilian population both of the outside world and of The Column. They talked about what each report really meant, and sifted through some of the intelligence reports he had already gone over privately with Aaron. They made various notes of what to bring up in the war room, and what didn’t need to be bothered with, wrote a couple of campaigns off as failures, and marked several others to be brought before the War Room council and taken to the next level.

  As usual the reports concerning civilian moral within The Column caused Lucas some discomfort, but she assured him it was under control. The Column had grown terribly large even before he had taken over those years ago, but the stability and safety his leadership had provided had swelled their ranks immensely. Most of the major sanctuaries could easily be classed as mid-sized cities now, with tens of thousands of residents each, and then there were still the small refugee camps which once defined Column existence.

  This was a blessing and a curse, of course. In a small refugee atmosphere maintaining security was not too hard, one simply had to point at the darkness and remind everyone what awaited them if caught. When you were managing what amounted to an entire underground civilization trying to stay out of sight of the civilization above it, things grew harder. One single defector making his or her way to the surface and spilling their knowledge to the Legion would be disaster.

  This meant that the exits to each Sanctuary had to be carefully watched, and approval to go ‘Outside’ limited to a minimal number of people. They did bring in media from the outside, even brought in the internet, though it had to be a one-way channel limited to what they could passively grab from back-doored routers.

  People understood all these precautions, but such limits on the freedoms of people fighting for freedom still chaffed. So, they did everything they could to foster a sense of community and civic responsibility, and to keep people feeling connected. People were far less likely to turn on those they considered friends. The need for security provided by secrecy was something that they impressed on everyone a thousand times a day in a thousand ways, but that had its own problems.

  The dangers were not exaggerated, that everyone knew, but it still wore on people. Therefore, you had events on a regular basis which provided a lot of fun and a spirit of community. The problem with these events was food. People could only be expected to provide for pot-luck type events so often before it became a problem and they stopped coming. The food was an integral part of the events, but the burden they were placing on the dwindling food supply was becoming a real problem.

  Lucas felt some small surprise when Sharon suddenly sat back in the white sofa, pinching the bridge of her nose with her fingers. “Ok, Lucas, you have convinced me.

  “Don’t give me that quizzical look. You know exactly what I mean. We need to find alternative sources of food, and fast. The steady trickle of people entering the Sanctuaries has begun to cause a cultural strain, and if we ever have a situation where we have to take on a large number of people at once it will be even worse. Those events are more important than you know. It is hard to adapt people coming in to the corridor culture we have in here, and those events do an excellent job of it: if they happen often enough.

  “Most people who find themselves down here are basically just happy to be alive when they get in. This sense of relief, new-found safety, and the confusion of the new culture make them more accepting of cultural changes within themselves, and the parties do a great job of acclimating new people quickly even as they hold up moral. However, the window of opportunity for the full effect on newcomers is less than two weeks. I agree that, if –when-, we start having a food problem these parties are going to have to go, but once they go we have less than a year before people start trying to sneak out. Once that starts….”

  Lucas shared her look of frustration and ran a hand through his hair, “I know. I am glad that you finally came around on this one, but I wish this didn’t have us in such dire straits. I do want to say, though, that I’ve been very pleased with the way you have worked on finding us food, despite your disagreement with me over the issue. Don’t think that has gone unnoticed, or unappreciated.”

  His hand sought a recessed button under the lip of the knee-high table, shut off the built-in screen, and the surface suddenly looked like a normal wood-grained table. This was their way of separating the business time from the casual, and so they both relaxed. He poured them both some wine and asked her how the dinners with Torfan were going.

  She smiled and took a drink, then answered, “Quite well, actually. Especially considering that I offered to help his wife in the kitchen for the first one, and nearly burned down half the Sanctuary in the process. We didn’t have to call in the fire squad, but I’m sure we put a heck of a strain on the air filtration systems.”

  Lucas laughed at the images of her story brought to mind, “Sounds like you made a heck of an impression. I’m kind of surprised that you and Martha are both still breathing. She is awful protective of her kitchen, and I am not sure which of you would have been left standing if that had come to blows.”

  She chuckled softly, looking up and away as she dove into the memory, “It was a near thing, I think. She was furious on one hand, but nearly dissolved into giggling fits to see oh-so-perfect me at such a loss. Our second dinner went much better, though Martha didn’t come. I hosted, and had the wisdom to keep the heck out of the kitchen. I’m looking forward to our next one. His wife is cooking again, and has offered to beat me if I try to so much as come near her kitchen again before she has finished my cooking lessons.

  “Oh, yes, cooking lessons… don’t look so shocked. I don’t like looking foolish, Lucas, not at all. I would never have considered cooking if this hadn’t happened, but now I have to learn. I will not be made to look foolish that way again!” An impish grin played across h
er features for added the emphasis, but he could feel the heat in the words. It did not surprise him, for he had known for a long time that she was not the sort to suffer a failure gladly.

  He had not known that she was the sort who felt compelled to go back and complete something after a failure, though. He admired the trait, even while knowing it could be both a strength and a weakness. What an enticing quality, though! An indomitable will unwilling to accept defeat….

  His attention had to be forced from her swaying hair as she continued speaking, “Anyway, we had a lovely chat that evening, and I look forward to more. Like you and I we ended up talking a lot about the state of The Column, but that is just because, for all three of us, our work is our life, more or less. You and I have so little outside of it. Sometimes I truly envy him his wife and kids.

  “Heh. He is going to be somewhat disappointed at our next meeting that I didn’t just grab you by the collar and haul you off to bed!”

  They both laughed softly at the thought, heads shaking in unison as they traced the rims of their glasses. He felt the words begin to form in his mouth, and failed to catch them before he spoke, “Well, maybe you should!” Their eyes locked, and they saw the heat rise in the other’s cheeks as their bodies responded to the thought. A tension hovered thickly in the air between them for several moments, but then both of them were able to see the other’s eyes cloud over as another’s face intruded in the mind’s eye.

  They leaned back cautiously, just then realizing that they had leaned forward. Both of them stared sheepishly into their glasses for several long moments, afraid to even move. Neither could have said later whether minutes or hours passed, but Lucas finally broke the stillness by taking a long, hard pull from his glass.

  Sharon took a brief sip from hers, then spoke as he finished his drink. “On the one hand I wish to apologize for dropping that on you…on us… like that. I generally show far better judgment. I think I was hoping we would just laugh it all off, but it is too much for that…isn’t it?”