She looked back at her niece. “He may be useful. Saving him might end up being the beginnings of friendly relations with his people but we won’t know for a while.
“But that doesn’t mean you can just ignore orders and do what you feel like. I’ve put Hotdog in an impossible position. I realize that now. He shouldn’t have to be responsible for your safety if you have no intention of listening to him.”
She sighed. “I think we need to leave you on the ground for a while, give you time to think things through.”
Gabriella felt as though she’d been slapped. She looked down, nodding but saying nothing.
“We’ll take our new guest back with the squadron,” Luna said. “I suggest you do some serious thinking about all of this, Rascal.”
She shook her head when her sister caught her eye. Luna nodded Adelina toward her fighter with a look of warning. She set the example by walking off to her own fighter.
Adelina hesitated for a moment, then moved off with a glance at HotDog, who was clearly waiting for a moment alone with his protégé. She moved to her fighter, thirty feet down the road, but waited by the sponson, watching warily as the Texan approached her daughter.
“Sorry, HotDog,” she said, meaning it more than she wished.
He chewed that over for a second, then gave her a curt nod. “I know, kid.” He looked down the road, frowning at nothing for a short while, then looked her in the eye. “I’m still pissed,” he said evenly, “but that was a pretty ballsy move, Rascal! You’ll do alright.”
He turned and walked off before she could absorb what he’d said, let alone respond.
Adelina must have liked what she saw in her daughter’s face because the tension drained from her expression and she mounted the steps of her fighter for the flight back to headquarters.
Engines all around Gabriella started humming to life and she looked down, hopping back to get out of the projected warning zone from Luna’s fighter.
The squadron flew off, her own fighter following on automatic. She scuffed an armored toe in the loose surface of the road. “I suppose Rascal is the right name for me after all.”
Saplings
Northern Highlands, Ragnarok
Frank had to admit it. The EVA armor was less cumbersome than he’d expected. They were wearing the suits completely closed up today, hoping it might filter out whatever effect they’d been subjected to before.
He already knew how they could reduce fatigue during manual labor. The suits provided as much or as little muscle assist as the wearer wanted but that was a little like SCUBA diving. After a long session in the Pacific, Frank always felt the accumulated fatigue when he climbed out of the water and returned to normal gravity.
A big advantage with the suit, however, was you could keep that assist going until you were home and ready to recuperate from a long day’s work. The helmets were a little harder to acclimate to.
They’d been working without the helmets on previously but the strange events were unsettling enough for them to try using them. They weren’t half bad.
Not bad at all,” Frank thought. Now that he was getting used to the interface, it was almost better than working without it.
The cooling, for one thing, was a gods-send. His body had been cool enough previously, thanks to the suit, but he’d been borderline sun-stroked after that weird time-loss that had stranded him in the sun. Now he was barely sweating at all and the under-armor suit he wore was more than capable of dealing with it.
He’d expected to have blind-spots and limited range of motion, purely because of the standard Human idea of space-suits. This was no NASA suit with a fixed helmet.
It moved with his body, flexing and twisting like a living thing and his field of vision hadn’t been compromised at all. In fact, he now had access to new data, like thermal and infrared imaging. He could even create close up views of distant objects and set the onboard computer to track them.
At the moment, though, his family was using the suits’ muscle assist to plant coffee saplings.
The nanite-based equipment probably could have been programmed to do the job but neither Frank, Trisha nor Terry trusted the machines to handle the delicate saplings they’d brought all the way from Earth.
Vikram had been an enthusiastic supporter of the automated equipment. He’d felt that they ought to make use of the things, since they’d been shipped all the way to Ragnarok from Lady Bau’s dominions.
They owed it to her kind generosity, he’d argued. He’d also insisted, despite nobody else bringing it up, that it had nothing at all to do with a reluctance to spend days slogging through the haunted hills north of Unity doing heavy labor.
He’d been overruled, of course, and they’d been working since first light, planting by hand. To his credit, Vikram had done more than his part. Frank suspected the youngster was feeling proud of the results.
Every now and then, Frank would see him looking back at the long row of planted saplings he’d put in the ground. Kid’s gonna make a great farmer. He reached into the sapling bag.
He looked down at the empty bag that hung over his shoulder. It wasn’t the empty bag that surprised him so much as the fact that his armored fingers were still sensitive enough for him to notice without having to look.
He stepped over to the runabout to reload the bag from the cargo bed at the back. Terry had rigged a panel of nanites over the top to keep the sun off and a quick-and-dirty misting system to keep them healthy.
It was little more than a container above the shade-panel and a gravity-feed line that filled a compression chamber. Every ten minutes, the chamber would compress itself and force the water through the mist nozzles.
Frank smiled inside his helmet as he reached in for more saplings. Terry was really coming into his own out here.
He’d known nothing about PLC programming before Frank had bought a system for the greenhouses in California. Within a month, Terry had figured out how to work with the interface and improve on the basic setup done by the original vendor.
Apparently, these nanites were even easier to work with. It was all Greek to Frank, which made Terry’s achievements all the more impressive to him.
Maybe Vikram’s working so hard ’cause he wants to impress Terry? He turned to look at the far row but the youngster wasn’t in sight.
He activated the prox channel. “Vikram?” He took a few steps toward the end of Vikram’s row. “Vikram, where are you at?”
“What’s going on?” Trisha asked from the other side of the planting area.
“Can’t see him,” Frank said. “When did anyone last see him?”
“Maybe ten minutes ago,” Terry guessed. “Maybe he had to, you know… pop the aft hatch?”
The suits could do almost anything but when it came to solid waste, they couldn’t do much more than provide a path. Frank cursed himself for not thinking of it before.
If the suits were able to isolate them from the effects they’d endured earlier, an opening might let that effect in while letting other things out. Or he just wandered off… How do I..
He used his right eye to control his HUD, bringing up the locator beacons for everyone inside of a one-kilometer radius.
An orange icon appeared, semi-transparent to indicate there was solid material between Frank and Vikram. “That way,” he said, pointing into the forest. “Six hundred meters… Wait!” he commanded, halting Trisha and Terry.
He bounded around to the front of the vehicle and pulled down three assault-weapons. He checked their load-outs, the action happening reflexively the instant his hand closed on the pistol grip of the first weapon.
He turned and raced over to Trish, tossing a weapon to Terry on the way. “We need to follow the training in our heads,” he said, handing a rifle to her. “If there’s something dangerous out there, we’re not going to help Vikram by blundering into it.”
She nodded grimly, her face replacing her armored face-plate in Frank’s view. “I’m taking point,” she i
nsisted, checking her weapon.
Frank thought to protest but he couldn’t put his finger on why. She’d had the same combat training modules as everyone else and, after all, it was her son in danger.
They pushed through the forest as quickly as they could, moving from cover to cover and using thermal and IR overlays to search for threats. Frank had to push hard to keep up with Trisha.
They reached a small clearing where they found Vikram lying on his back. Trisha abandoned tactics and raced over to him.
“Terry, stay sharp!” Frank said, keeping his own weapon up and aimed where he was scanning the brush.
“Vikram?” she called to him, letting his armor stay closed.
Frank called up the biometric data from Vikram’s suit, cursing himself for not doing so earlier. He saw nothing alarming, so he projected it to the rest of the group.
“Mhh… Mom?” the teenager replied.
“It’s okay,” she soothed. “We’re going home now.”
“She’s here,” he said dreamily.
“Who’s here?”
“Kusha”
“I’m OK,” Vikram protested from his bed. “This is silly.”
None of the others in the room were convinced.
“How much do you remember?” Sushil asked. “Do you remember walking away from your family?”
Vikram’s belligerence deflated, replaced by a look of alarm. Frank darted a look at his wife and he saw a storm cloud brewing in her features. “It’s OK,” he said. “What’s done is done, so just tell us everything and nobody’s going to get upset.” He added the emphasis for Trish’s consumption.
The teen hesitated for a moment, looking down at his covered feet. “I was curious about the… effect,” he told them. “It felt as if there was something tangible up there, something in the forest…”
“Ayyoh! And you thought you’d go seek it out?” Trisha demanded.
Vikram regained some of his earlier attitude. “What happened to not getting into trouble?”
She started to respond but she bit her lip, literally, and nodded. “Go ahead.” She wrapped herself in her own arms.
“I was just going to step a few paces into the treeline and see if I could pick up anything using an active IR scan. Maybe there would be a structure or something.”
“And what happened?” Sushil asked.
“It was different than before,” he said slowly. “I have no memory of a slow buildup. I just felt like I was floating and there was…” He frowned.
“Kusha,” he said quietly.
“Kusha,” Frank repeated. “Do you mean the cannabis? Our strain traces back to the Hindu Kush Mountains.”
“Maybe,” Vikram shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. It was... thinking.”
“Thinking?” Trisha asked. “Kusha was thinking? Talking to you?”
“Thinking to me more than talking,” he corrected.
“Thinking what?” she pressed gently.
“Nothing concrete,” he said slowly. “It was more of a general feeling, a good feeling. If I had to put words to it…”
He looked up at her. “At last.”
“At last,” she repeated flatly. She looked up at Frank. “We should consider moving our crops.”
“No!” Vikram insisted. “Whatever’s up there is glad we’ve arrived, not angry. I don’t think this is something to be avoided.”
“We’ll see.” She patted his shoulder. “Just get some rest, for now, and we won’t make any decisions without you, OK?”
“But I don’t need rest!”
“Dude,” Terry said earnestly, “we found you laying on your ass mumbling about Kusha. Even I know that means you’re gonna have to at least make a pretense of resting.”
That did it. Vikram wouldn’t want to do anything to diminish his stature in Terry’s eyes. He sighed and leaned back on his pillows. “I’m resting,” he told the ceiling. “Some crazy hard resting going on right here.”
Trisha smirked. She leaned over and gave him a kiss on top of his head before leading the way out of his room.
They all reconvened around the kitchen peninsula with fresh coffee. Terry set a data module in the center of the stone slab. “Here’s the sensor feed from his helmet.”
The island turned into a small holographic map of the region around the McAdams’ plantings. Terry activated an icon and the view changed to show what Vikram would have seen through his HUD.
“You might want to come over here so you can see better, Mr. Kawle,” he suggested.
“This is impressive, Terry,” Sushil said, moving around to a stool on the far side of the peninsula. “I didn’t know we could do this with data from our suits.”
Terry shrugged. “Neither did I until we needed to.”
Sushil gave him an appraising look. “You figured this out in the last hour?”
“He’s got a knack for this kind of thing,” Frank said, enjoying the blush the young man was trying to hide. Poor guy’s not used to folks noticing that he’s got potential.
“Well,” Terry cleared his throat. “We can follow along with Vikram and see for ourselves what happened.” He started the playback.
They were treated to a view of hard work, mostly. Vikram was planting the saplings at a pretty good pace for a teenager. Terry skipped forward a few times until they found themselves moving into the denser trees where no coffee would be planted.
At first, their view showed mostly forest floor, confirming his story about looking for evidence. After a few minutes, the view came up level and started moving deeper into the area of the jungle where he was eventually found.
The view abruptly rotated, making everyone in the kitchen reflexively grab onto the stone surface of the island. They watched the patches of sky between the leaves of the canopy for roughly fifteen minutes before Trisha’s helmet appeared above him.
“Nothing happened,” Terry said, sounding disappointed, as if he’d let Vikram down.
“What was that sound,” Trisha asked. “Can you go back to just before I appear?”
Terry reset the view.
Just before Trisha appeared, they could hear her calling out to him, her feet running over, Frank’s warning to Terry and then…
“Trisha’s last footsteps sounded different,” Frank agreed.
“So he did find something!” Terry exulted.
Debrief
Babilim Station
Gabriella shut down her engines, hoping it wouldn’t be the last time. She could see her aunt standing inside the main door to the less ornate space that served as their hangar at Babilim. Time for the reckoning...
The canopy flowed out of the way and she climbed down. Hotdog strolled over from his own fighter, which sat creaking and hissing next to hers.
“Got your head on straight?” he asked her.
“Yeah, I think I do now.”
He nodded. “Let’s go find out.”
They walked over to Luna, Gabriella clearing her mind of all the conversations she’d had in her head. Over the last two days at the jungle house, she’d had plenty of time to work out where she’d gone wrong.
She came to a stop in front of Luna.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” Luna asked.
Gabriella took a deep breath. “Hotdog’s job is to turn your orders into a manageable picture for his flight. Mine is to follow his orders.
“When I ignore orders, I create problems in a part of that picture that I don’t even know about. I put Hotdog in a place where he might have had to kill innocent people to protect me.”
“So, would you ever do that again?” Luna asked.
Gabriella was on the verge of saying ‘no’, but she caught herself, uncertain. “I think that, sometimes, you see something that’s too time-sensitive to pass up the chain but that’s not what happened, in my case, and…”
Dumbass! You almost had this aced, she told herself, scratching her elbow nervously. Might as well finish it now. “Anyway, I don’t have the
experience, yet, to make that kind of call.”
Luna looked down at her for a long time in silence. Just when Gabriella was on the verge of asking for a verdict, her aunt finally spoke.
“You’re back in the air but we’re gonna be watching you like a hawk from now on; got it?”
Gabriella wanted to shout but she caught herself and just nodded.
“Alright, let’s get to the briefing room. Your new boyfriend has a lot to tell us.”
They were using a large room near the hangar. Scorch-marks on the floor showed where they’d removed furniture that was too tall for Humans. A nanite-based conference table sat in the middle of the space and there were several people sitting around it.
Scylla sat at the middle on the far side, along with the young erstwhile sacrificial victim. Gabriella gave him a wave but he simply responded with a polite nod.
Of course he won’t recognize you, idiot! You had your helmet closed the whole time.
Luna sat opposite Scylla, leaving Gabriella to wonder if there was an order to where attendees should seat themselves.
Am I supposed to take a spot in the corner as a junior member of the squadron or a seat at the table as the pilot that collected this alien? She glanced at Luna, who was no help.
Screw it. I’m gonna sit next to her as second in line. It occurred to her as she sat, leaving it to the nanites stationed in the room to provide a seat, that sometimes authority was given to those who assumed it.
She resisted the urge to grimace at the expected reprimand but none came. Luna knew she was there and didn’t chase her off to stand in the corner.
Gleb came in, along with Sulak. He gave Gabriella’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze on his way past, then sat next to his wife. Sulak moved to sit next to Scylla.
Adelina arrived just ahead of Eth and they were the last of the attendees. So much for assuming authority, she thought. I’m either here as third in line or as the pilot who found this guy so, either way, I don’t have to fight for a space at the table.
“That’s everyone,” Luna said. “First, the basic details. Dentrat tells us that his people, the Trellans, engage in low-level conflict with the Mictan in order to procure sacrificial… candidates. Both sides use their prisoners to ensure a bountiful rainfall for their crops.”
Ragnarok: Colonization, intrigue and betrayal. Page 17