Several people exited the duck including Lieutenant Jennings. As they spread out with weapons drawn, John saw the duck’s cockpit. Sitting in the pilot's seat was Stephanie and bouncing up and down next to her was Jessica. John smiled at the sight of his children. He closed his eyes in exhaustion and collapsed as his peaceful memory began to replay in his sleep.
Chapter 39 One Big and a Half Happy Family
When John opened his eyes, he was secured in a net. He was thankful it was the safety netting of the navigator's chair in the duck. He rubbed his eyes to get the grime out of the corners. It felt as though he had awoken from an extremely long dream, yet he was supremely exhausted. The window of the duck was painted by the passing Martian landscape. Water from the great inlet rushed off to their south while they proceeded west down the railway.
Stephanie was munching on a strange looking banana as she piloted the duck down the rail line. She noticed John had woken and offered him a bite of her banana too.
“This banana is delish,” she commented. “Tastes like an orange and a banana mixed together.”
John shook his head, still trying to regain his faculties.
“That was a heck of a dream,” John told Stephanie. “How long was I out?”
“Just an hour or so,” she replied.
“You wouldn't believe the crazy things this planet puts in your dreams,” John added, “people flying around like birds and running around like cats. Like something out of an old science fiction movie. I'm surprised Godzilla hasn't made an appearance.”
“You watched far too many movies in your grandfather's basement,” Elizabeth said as she entered the cabin. She leaned into the cockpit and kissed Stephanie on the head. The sight of his ex jolted John halfway out of his netting. Luckily, or unluckily as he thought, the netting kept him inside the window.
“Oh you're not really here. Oh jeeze, that wasn't a dream,” he said recoiling.
“Isn't it great, Dad?” Stephanie remarked. “I can't believe you found mom out here in the jungle.”
John's eyebrows almost crossed as he bobbed his head with a smile, “Oh yeah, great. Exactly what I was thinking.” He retracted the safety netting holding him into the seat and motioned to Liz. “Can I see you for a second?” He continued to hold his fake all the way out of the cabin.
“What in Jehoshaphat are you doing here!” he shouted in a whisper as they rounded their way into an empty corner.
“You're new on Mars and clearly need a tour guide,” she tried to say without laughing too loud.
“Last I saw you, I thought you were about to be clawed to pieces,” John related. “I should have known you're harder to kill than a lungfish.”
“Au contraire, Jonathon,” she replied with a suspicious gleam in her eyes. “You chased after me when you could have left me to that animal. I think there's still a part of us inside you,” she said twirling into him as though dancing.
Ashley walked right past them and up to the cockpit. John quickly pushed Liz off of him as Ashley took a few steps backward to the corner.
“Perhaps I should introduce you to my wife,” John said waving his hand toward Ashley.
“We've already met,” Ashley said matter-of-factly.
John couldn't tell from the inflection of her voice how upset Ashley might be. In all their years together he had never heard that inflection before. He pondered trying to glean an emotion from her with his neuroband, but quickly thought better of it. Instead he did what awkward situations like this called for, he changed the subject and prayed everyone changed right along with him.
“So we're back on track,” John commented. “You were able to fix the external power?”
Ashley gave a quick “Uh huh,” and then walked toward the back of the duck.
“Not a good sign,” John thought to himself, “not the worst sign either.”
John followed behind her as did Elizabeth a few extra paces behind them.
In the main cargo room the troops had gathered, and they were excitingly talking about their latest adventure. No more than a second after John entered the room, the conversation volume dropped several decibels.
John picked up the change in tone, but he continued along as if he didn't notice. Seeing Jessica playing with Wispy in the back corner, he quietly made his way over to her. He bent down and tickled the back of her neck, predictably causing her legs to buckle and fall, from which of course he caught her.
“You're still not big enough to escape my tickling,” John told Jessica as he lifted her off the ground and set her down again.
“Daddy, you're awake,” she replied with a smile and a hug.
“Did you know that you taught me a valuable lesson back there in the jungle?” he asked her.
“I taught you something?” she replied with a questioning voice.
John put his nose on her nose as he did when she was younger. It was like two rams stubbornly butting noses to see who was ornerier.
“You taught me I need to listen better to you and your sister,” he said with a fun-loving voice.
“Of course you do silly,” Jessica replied. “We know lots of stuff.”
“You sure do,” John agreed, “and I'm going to make sure everyone here knows it. Take Lieutenant Kyle there for instance. I'm sure you know twice as much as he does, three times on a Sunday.”
Kyle sat up and gave her a small salute while agreeing. “I'm sure we'll all be taking orders from you one day Jessica. That's just the way of things.” He reached into a large leg pocket on his spare uniform and pulled out a shiny necklace. “That reminds me,” he added. “I think this belongs to you. A little boy made sure I got it back. I couldn't understand a lick he was saying, but I'm sure he wanted you to have it.”
Jessica gave a wide smile as she took the necklace from Kyle. She turned to Glennay and whispered, “He was so cute.”
John immediately dropped to a knee and grabbed at his chest saying. “What was that? Cute? I'm so old. You know you've another thirty years until you can get married, right?”
“That will put her at forty,” Ashley joined in, her voice sounding more relaxed than before. “I don't think you want to make a spinster out of her do you?”
“Well maybe twenty-nine years then,” John corrected himself. “We wouldn't want that.”
Jessica tried to poke John in the ribs as he parried her jabs with his hand.
She stopped her play as she noticed Elizabeth standing in the doorway.
“Who's the princess?” she said pointing in Liz’s direction apparently yet to be introduced.
Tyler had apparently missed the introductions too, murmuring under his breath, “Yeah who's the chickie babe?”
John fumbled for a second on what to say. Before he could find the words, Ashley stood up and walked over to where Liz stood.
Looking straight into her daughter’s eyes Ashley said, “Jessica, this is Stephanie's mother.”
Jessica looked confused saying, “Does that make her my step-mother? All the stories say that step-mothers are old and mean, but she's pretty.”
Kyle about choked on a bagel he was eating. John turned away trying to keep his composure.
That was going to be a challenge as Glennay interjected, “Out of the mouth of babes...”
“Not every fairy tale is true,” Elizabeth elaborated before more comments could be made. She finished her sentence with a smile, a smile that only adults would recognize as falsely dressed. Elizabeth then walked toward Jessica with a glide, bending over and offering her hand to her when she arrived.
“In my kingdom you would be regarded a princess,” Elizabeth said with a soothing tone. “Your story can come true.”
Glennay leaned over to Tyler and whispered in his ear. “Please pick your jaw up from the floor before I step on it.”
Tyler looked at Glennay through the corner of his eye and began chewing again on his bagel.
“You seem like a nice person,” Jessica confirmed. “Those stories are for little
kids anyway.”
John having finally decided on a course of action jumped into the scene.
“Okay girl, we need to do some grown-up talk for our mission,” John relayed to Jessica. “Take Wispy into the next room and play for a bit.”
“Do I have to?” Jessica protested mildly. “I'm the only one who isn't a soldier around here. Well, me and Wispy that is.”
“You’re not the only one,” Elizabeth chimed in before John could reply. “We have some royal matters to attend to you and I…and your Wispy friend there too.”
Jessica's eyes lit up a bit. “Maybe we can see how Stephanie is doing. Let's see if she wants to be a princess too!" John didn't want to see the look on Ashley's face, so he turned to the group for the answer to a question.
“So my murky memory is failing me, I don't remember what happened back there,” John stated. “The duck crashed down by us, and Liz in the net with the panther man. Somebody fill in the blanks.”
Glennay came in from the sidelines to answer taking pity on John.
“Thanks to the handy repairman of Oz, we were able to salvage a compatible power converter from the outpost,” Glennay explained. “We went to find you and Kyle, but apparently you two were already playing in the trees with your new friends. So we brought the converter back to the duck. With a lot of luck and a few temper tantrums, from a person whose name starts with a T, we managed to get the duck going.”
John gave Tyler an affirmative pat on the shoulder from where he stood. “We didn't bring you along for only comic relief you know. Good show.”
Glennay continued, “By then it was late into the night. We really didn't want to land on you with the duck even if we could track your location. It turns out that we were testing out the duck's lifts when Kyle put out his all call over the Ksync. A few jumps and several stacks of firewood later we found Kyle. You should have heard him jabbering away about bird people going after some cat. We had no idea what he was talking about, but at least he helped us zero in on your location.”
“To my defense,” Kyle interrupted, “I was still feeling the effects of those toxic vines in my system, and I think it made me ramble a bit. It was either that or the fruit I ate.”
“Or maybe you were distracted by the breeze blowing up your arse with that Roman toga you had on,” Tyler joined in.
Everyone laughed at Tyler's brand of humor.
Glennay finished her account. “So the bird people let the two of them out of the net. The cat person ran off by himself. The woman, we now know as your ex, asked to come along since we were heading to New China. Kyle's account of what happened before the duck didn't make much sense. To be fair at the time he was still acting like a lab rat on sugar pills.”
“What do you mean acting?” Kyle questioned her.
“I'm sure nothing but the best things,” John sidelined the comment before it could snowball from there.
“So the winged people just let him go?” John asked rhetorically.
“Oh and I started to decode these files Glennay pulled from the outpost's consoles,” Ashley added. “So far the journal entries seem to be discussing the implementation of some sort of biological plan. It has to do with the terraforming of Mars and creating the planet's biomes.”
“And I thought we were busy on the Columbus,” John shook his head. “OK, this sounds like something really important, but I’m not sure we can take another problem into this raft without sinking. We’ve overcome so much to get here…disabled ships, space jumping, exploding space stations, and plummeting to Mars in a duck. Now what do we have? People, who used to be our people, except now with wings, flying around? We need to get focused on our objective, bringing Andreou to justice. After that we can try to wrap our brains around the rest of this crazy planet.”
John looked around the room and seemed to have general consensus on the matter. He nodded and then brought out his Ksync, drawing focus to finding Dominic.
“I was able to find some old maps of the New China area on the Admiral's Ksync,” John informed the crew. “If we can cook up some sort of projector here, I'd like us to look at it together.”
Tyler stood up as constructing devices on the fly was his specialty.
“No biggie mate, I'll have something pieced together in a couple minutes,” he said.
#
“You effortlessly pilot this machine,” Liz complemented Stephanie. “It's as though you were born to fly not be tied down. I wonder who you inherited that from?” Liz suggested with a small smile.
“I love it,” Stephanie replied. “Dad didn't want me being a pilot when I was younger, but then he saw me too. I think he was fighting the grandpa in him. By the time I turned sixteen, he knew I wasn't giving up. That's when Captain Sterling sponsored me for the MARC academy. She's amazing.”
Elizabeth absorbed her daughter's words as she toyed with the cockpit's vidcomm.
“Can you turn this on so we can listen to the cargo bay?” she asked Stephanie. “I'd like make sure I don't miss anything. Maybe you can put the mic on mute, so that we can still chat away?”
Stephanie swiped a few controls on the vidcomm and said, “There ya go.” She nervously tapped the controls as though pondering a question.
“Mother,” Stephanie summoned her best aristocratic voice, “where did you go after leaving?”
Elizabeth tilted her head and smiled, she had wondered how and when that question would come about.
“Stephanie,” she began while weaving Jessica's hair, “I'm like you though I don't fly machines. I fly ideas. And also like you, I need the freedom to fly.”
Elizabeth paused, mentally taking notes of the other conversation heard across the vidcomm.
“For a time, I thought I could keep my feet on the ground and stay in one place,” she elaborated, “but I couldn't do it. Even for something as precious as you my child, I couldn't put my flying aside.”
Stephanie forced back several tears as her mother spoke. An occasional drop slipped out regardless of her efforts.
“I don't know how I would stop flying,” Stephanie said. “But I don't know how I could leave someone either, someone who needed their mom.”
So much for sounding like an adult she thought to herself.
“She's here now, Stephanie,” Jessica said as she moved to her sister and gave her a hug.
The tears that had been held in check, now rolled freely from Stephanie. She realized how much her half-sister really meant to her even though they had always poked fun at each other. In the end they supported one another.
Elizabeth felt her own emotions swelling inside, but forced them down as she struggled to hear two conversations at once.
“I can't explain away those lost years Stephanie,” she told her daughter. “There's a city though we're about to visit. A place where you can live your dreams of flying, I'll make sure of that. And if you want to spend time with me there, I'd love to watch over you again.”
Stephanie, reeled in her emotions, agreed, “Okay.”
Jessica turned back to Elizabeth, ready for the finishing touches of her braid.
“And you princess are welcome to stay as are your parents,” Elizabeth said as she engaged Jessica in conversation. “I have a question to ask about your father. He’s learned a few tricks of his own since I knew him. What is this thing he does with sending memories to your head?”
“That's the NEUBI,” Jessica replied.
“Neuroband,” Stephanie corrected.
“Yeah the grown-ups have a better one called a Neuroband,” Jessica added. “It’s not fair.”
“What is this Neuroband?” Elizabeth asked, struggling to conceal her overwhelming interest in the device.
“It lets you send your thoughts to someone. Sometimes you can even trick them into believing things are there when they're not,” Stephanie answered.
She glanced back to make sure no one else was in the cockpit.
“I can use it to focus my thoughts when I'm flying,” she elab
orated. “I'm not sure it was meant to do that, but I found a way to make it work. That's not something dad needs to know about though.”
“Sounds like something we can keep to ourselves,” Elizabeth assured her.
“So does everyone have these then?” she followed up with another question.
“Nope,” Jessica replied, “just some of us. Dad wants mom's invention to be a secret.”
“Oh, okay,” Elizabeth said, “I'll make sure of that.”
Elizabeth heard a name on the vidcomm that peaked her interest. A discussion regarding New China was turning heated.
“If you two lovely princesses will excuse me, I need to make sure we have a chance to make it to my fair city,” Elizabeth said giving both of them a kiss on their heads. She nonchalantly turned off the vidcomm on her way out.
“Sure mom,” Stephanie replied. “Come right back.”
Jessica hopped into the Navigator's chair as Elizabeth left the room.
“Now I get the big chair!” she exclaimed gleefully.
Chapter 40 EX Marks the Spot
“It looks like there are several maintenance hatches we could reach,” Kyle commented as the group looked over the admiral's map of New China. “The only hitch will be the access codes to get in. Is it possible we could patch you in from a distance Ashley and have you open them remotely?”
“If you can find a way to interface your Ksync with those old doors, then yeah. I shouldn't have much trouble bypassing their outdated security,” Ashley confidently replied.
Elizabeth slowly walked into the bay area without being noticed.
“I have every confidence in your technical skills,” Elizabeth joined the conversation to much surprise. “Though I'm afraid you won't have a chance to use them as anyone approaching the city will be vaporized by the automated defense systems.”
Curious Sols (The Sol Principle Book 1) Page 27