Resurrection

by Jeffrey Burger

  Rikit saw an odd, contemplative expression pass over Jack’s face, “What?” he asked.

  “I was just thinking… can you make it blink?”

  Rikit arched his eyebrows, “Can I what?”

  “Make it blink. The light - can you make it blink,” Steele asked, deadpan.

  ■ ■ ■

  Coming down through the atmosphere on the dark side of Byas-Kuyol, there wasn’t a spec of light visible anywhere on that side of the planet. “Skipper, I don’t see a damn thing. If there’s even a single power source down there somewhere, it’s too small for us to pick up from this distance.”

  Butterflies fluttered in Lisa Steele’s gut. “I find it hard to believe that seventy-five percent of this planet is uninhabited…” The Reaper dropped from space on an oblique angle to minimize descent speed and visual signature, but that seemed to be an unnecessary tactic. “Back home, this is what we’d call a backwater shithole…” Her fingers dancing across her sensor command panel, she activated a magnetic scan of the planet’s surface below them. “But maybe I’m being too harsh - maybe it’s a quaint little home world to cute fuzzy animals and sweet gentle people…”

  From the REO position behind her, monitoring a wide variety of systems, Marine Sergeant, Draza Mac chuckled, “I can’t believe you actually said that with a straight face…”

  “A girl can dream, can’t she?”

  “Despite this rock having a spaceport, and I say that word jokingly, this place is pretty primitive,” commented the sergeant. “They have one lousy geosynchronous nav beacon, and it’s altitude is so low, it’s barely outside the atmosphere.”

  “Yeah, did you see the intel on that field? That spaceport is nothing more than a giant clearing surrounded on three sides by jungle. I really get the feeling they’d rather stay a backwater shithole.” One hand controlling the flight stick, Lisa’s free hand went back to her sensor command panel, switching from magnetic to infra-red, the screen coming to life with a flood of markers. “Whoa…” she breathed.

  Prompted by her response, Draza Mac switched tabs on his sensor screen to match hers, “Damn. That is a lot of activity. I don’t suppose some of those could be people…”

  “Nothing down there but jungle, Mac. My guess is, that jungle is not a friendly place…”

  “Noted,” he replied. “Adding it to my life’s list of places to avoid.”

  Lisa pursed her lips in trepidation, “Further confirming my backwater shithole theory…”

  “No chance it could be a jungle paradise, huh?”

  “I think that’s a fantasy, Mac…” Lisa’s hands were firmly on stick and throttle. “Alright, flattening our angle of approach at five-thousand. Que up to go NOE… Nine thousand… eight thousand… seven… six… pulling, pulling…” she eased back on the stick, hauling the nose up, applying braking thrust from the throttle control, simultaneously deploying speed brakes, the Reaper’s gyro working overtime to normalize gravity for its human occupants. They both grunted under the strain as the Reaper’s approach vector flattened to horizontal, its speed dropping from Mach 20, to just over Mach 3, heavy condensation trails of compressed air rippling off her leading edges and wingtips as they disappeared into heavy fog and dense cloud cover, a thundering sonic boom announcing their arrival to an otherwise quiet jungle.

  “NOE ready, Skipper.”

  Lisa eased the throttle back, retracting the speed brakes, the Reaper’s speed dropping below Mach 1. She eased the nose down, allowing the ship to sink down toward the jungle canopy. “Looks like we’ll be crossing into daylight in ten minutes…”

  “Right on time Skipper. Just keep us out of the trees and the mountains.”

  “Mmm,” she hummed, looking out around her, visibility at zero, streams of water flowing across the outside of her canopy. “Might help if I could see something… anything.”

  “Trust the NOE Skipper, you got this.”

  “Engaging NOE.” Her helmet’s visor automatically dropped down, displaying everything around outside the Reaper in greens and blacks, the nap of the earth video feed displaying the terrain on the inside of her visor wherever she looked. Her eyes twitched and she felt like she was seeing double as she fought to control the sudden wave of nausea. “Oh, geez…”

  “Skipper?”

  “I don’t feel good, Mac, I think I’m going to be sick…”

  “Adjust your oxygen to full, Skipper,” he coached, flipping one of his holo-screens to monitor her NOE feed.

  Lisa reached over to the panel without turning her head, and rotated the dial to the wide-open stop, “Oxygen to full…” Cool, fresh oxygen flooded her helmet and suit.

  “Do you see that Skipper? Do you see that...?”

  “See what?” her eyes ached, the pain radiating into her forehead, flashes of light making her squint, her eyes vibrating like a full-blown case of nystagmus.

  “Trees… we have TREES!”

  “At five-hundred feet?” Lisa’s eyes refused to make sense of the video feed, “I can’t…”

  “Roll left… ROLL LEFT!”

  Lisa reflexed, leaning the stick over, rolling the Reaper left, following Mac’s instructions, massive, thousand-year-old pillars of living wood, whipping past. “Pull, pull, pull… Alright, level out, LEVEL OUT!” The Reaper righted with a wobble. “Release the controls, let me take it…” Lisa released the sticks without a word and held up her hands to indicate he had control of the ship. Hands on his own set of flight sticks, Draza Mac tested the Reaper’s response. Satisfied he relaxed, adjusting the position of the holo-screen with the NOE feed. “Ok, Skip, just breath in that oxygen. You can flip your visor open and close your eyes, I’ve got her.”

  “My eyes have been closed since you told me to roll left…” she muttered, fighting the nausea. She reached up and manually released her visor, the seal popping with a hiss, sliding it up into the recess of her helmet.

  “Good to know.” He was watching the video feed and adjusting the settings. “You ever played with these settings, did you?”

  “On what?”

  “On the NOE system.”

  “No,” she replied uncomfortably, fighting to keep her stomach from ejecting her last meal.

  “You still going to be sick?”

  She took a deep breath, the crisp oxygen clearing her head a little more with each breath. “I think I’ll be alright…”

  “Good,” he nodded, rolling the Reaper right then left. “Damn, those trees are tall,” he breathed. “As I was about to say,” he continued, “it appears the settings for the video feed were off. Way off, as a matter of fact…”

  “But it didn’t affect you,” prodded Lisa.

  “Holo-screen versus visor-feed. With the visor, it might as well be plugged right into your brain. The synch, frame rates and field depth, were all set to neutral zero.”

  ■ ■ ■

  Breaking free of the clouds, a halo of light - a rosy glow, silhouetted the treetops and mountains in front of them as they approached the light side of the planet. Heavy fog had receded, dropping to fill the low levels of the ground below them, hiding the jungle floor. Draza Mac expertly weaved the Reaper between mountains and hills of the undulating landscape. “Any signals?” asked Lisa, cautiously opening her eyes.

  “Nothing,” replied Mac. “I get the feeling these people are blind to all but a direct approach to the field.”

  “OK then. Let’s go shields off and ARC on,” she announced, flipping switches. “Shields off, engaging ARC system.” A small independent screen swung into view, a message rolling across the readout. Initiating ARC - Automatic Reflective Camouflage system. A schematic of the Reaper appeared, covered in markers. STAND BY system checking emitters... System reading and calibrating... System active... The whole process took less than thirty-seconds.

  “How are you doing up there?”

  Lisa turned slowly, looked out over the wingtip as it gradually dissolved, the emitters of the ARC system making the Reaper invisible t
o all but the most keen-eyed observer. Swiveling her head to scan the landscape, gingerly testing her vision, she breathed a sigh of relief, “I’m good, thanks. And um, thanks for bailing me out - that was rather embarrassing.”

  Mac shrugged, “No sweat, would have happened to anybody at a factory neutral setup. You ready to take her back?”

  Lisa took hold of the flight sticks, “Yep, I’ve got her.” She offhandedly wondered if it was like a car - disconnecting the battery on the engine meant you had to reset all the radio stations. Could it have been something that simple? Did it happen during maintenance?

  ■ ■ ■

  Flying against the planet’s rotation, the Reaper left the darkness behind, albeit briefly, ranches and farmland passing below them, carved out of the wilds of the jungle. Lisa could see the edges of the city, scattered lights already on, the low afternoon sun making its approach to the horizon. They had caught the sun, only to watch it set, as they slowed to a crawl to execute their security sweep of the area. With the throttle backed down to limit sound, and air disturbance, she’d be coasting with the antigravity on and the engines near idle by the time they reached the edge of the city, just the other side of the spaceport. The tower appeared to be the tallest structure in the area, few buildings challenging its height.

  Passing silently over the spaceport, invisible to the naked eye, Lisa held her breath. Would they see the Reaper? Could they tell there was a ship passing over the field?

  “No traffic,” confirmed Mac. “Got a couple ships on the ground though. One looks like it’s been there a while. Maybe abandoned. All sorts of weeds growing around and under it.”

  At a little over two-hundred feet in altitude and coasting along at a snail’s pace, details on the ground were quite clear. “Couple of small ships over by the tower…”

  “Look like patrol ships of some kind - crew of maybe three or four,” confirmed Mac. “Nothing on passive scans, they must be completely shut down.” He made sure the Reaper saved a series of digital images, “We’ll have to keep an eye on those.”

  Passing out of the spaceport’s airspace and over the city which bordered it on one side, the congregation of people and vehicles on the road near the front gate did not escape their observation. “What the hell is all that about?” Lisa wondered aloud. “That looked like an angry mob…”

  ■ ■ ■

  Much of the city was rather haphazard, makeshift, run down, reminding Lisa of the poor, depressed, shanty towns in Mexico, Columbia, Brazil and South Africa.

  Main streets were easily defined, but the side streets and alleys were a confusing, twisted maze of narrow, barely passable routes and abrupt dead-ends. The main streets were lined with closely-fitted masonry buildings of all types and sizes; businesses, restaurants, bodegas, apartment buildings - with an occasional factory or warehouse dotting the sea of multi-colored shanties. There was one section they passed over, more developed than other areas, looking like a real city - of course it was long past it’s heyday, looking more like the abandoned areas of Detroit than anything livable.

  Following the sun across the city at a snail’s pace, the glowing orb would set before they reached the far side of the sprawling urban slum. “This has got to be ten or fifteen miles wide…” groaned Lisa.

  “How are we supposed to find him in this mess, Skipper? In the dark?”

  “I’m thinking he won’t be more than a mile or two from the airfield…”

  He motioned toward the tenements and shanties passing underneath them, “That’s still a lot of… whatever that mess is, to cover. It’s a maze. And it doesn’t look like there’s much in the way of a power grid down there…”

  Lisa took a long breath to calm the jitters and push aside her own sets of concerns, “I know,” she sighed. “We have to trust that Jack will have a way to contact us when we reveal our presence.”

  ■ ■ ■

  Jack checked the hallway to be sure the neighbor was truly gone, closing the door again. “Y’know, I think she’s sweet on you, Rikit…”

  Rikit shifted on the easy chair, sitting on his good side, his brow furrowed in consternation, “Whaaat?”

  “Yeah man, she took a lot longer looking at your ass than I would think is necessary to simply check your stitches - I think she was enjoying herself.”

  He waved it off dismissively, “Nah…” His expression lightened, “You think?”

  “I do,” nodded Jack, slinging a holster and slug-thrower around his waist. “She’s not bad to look at, either.”

  “I noticed that. Never thought she’d give me a second glance.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I’m poor. And I’m not exactly the brightest…”

  “Whoa,” interrupted Jack, stalling him with a wave, “hold on, let me stop you right there. You’re a good guy with a good heart. And poor has nothing to do with it - which you’re not, by the way, Mr. Glitter King. I’m not sure where you got the idea that you’re not smart, my friend - you built a functional lab out of retired equipment and used it to save my life with no medical training. That’s pretty freaking genius level stuff, if you ask me…” He swung a jacket on to cover the slug-thrower belted to his waist.

  “Think so?”

  “Yeah,” replied Jack, bobbing his head. Stuffing a couple extra mags for the gun into his jacket pockets he picked up the pen light Rikit had built. “Think this thing will really work?”

  “No reason it shouldn’t.”

  Jack pointed at him, “See? Genius stuff right there. How about the one on the roof?”

  Rikit shrugged, “It will run from dark till daybreak - providing the batteries hold up. It’ll recharge in the daylight.”

  “Alright,” acknowledged Jack, turning towards the door, “I’m out. I’ll be back before dawn. Need to see if I can get to the tower and send out a comm, find out how close they are.” He nodded towards the hallway, “She’ll be back about midnight to check on you…”

  “What if you don’t?” asked Rikit, sounding concerned. “Come back, I mean.”

  Steele opened the door, “It’ll mean I’m dead…”

  ■ ■ ■

  Draza Mac reviewed the data coming into the Reaper, paging through the tabs on the screen checking the ship’s specs, “The Revenge identified those two ships we saw parked by the control tower as Pathfinder patrol jumpers. Three-man crews…”

  Lisa held the Reaper in a hover below the tree line, but above the jungle floor on the far side of the field, facing the tower, “Is Pathfinder a ship type?”

  “No, Pathfinders are the closest thing they have to the Law out here.”

  Lisa reached in through her open visor and rubbed her forehead, “Interesting. I wonder if they had anything to do with that dustup we saw by the field’s front gate…” She tabbed to the screen of the Reaper’s forward cameras, but the jungle growth obscured her view of the entrance to the field. Was that the reason the Pathfinders were here? Or did it have something to do with her brother? Knowing Jack, it probably has something to do with him. Who did he piss off this time?

  “No idea,” replied Mac, interrupting her train of thought. “The Revenge also reviewed our data on the other ships out on the field - said there was nothing irregular about them, just your standard shipping and transport rigs.”

  “Did you tell them we completed our search pattern?”

  “Affirmative. They are approaching the beacon now to begin their descent. Our orders are to stay dark and continue to observe.”

  “Hmm,” she grunted, “can’t observe much from here…”

  ■ ■ ■

  Just like the night Jack and Rikit walked from the Clinic to the bar where they ate and met Targus and his men, large sections of Byas-Kuyol were dark, even along the main streets. Operable street lights along the thoroughfare were rare, an occasional corner bathed in a weak pool of light that seemed sad and lonely, rather than warm and inviting - something to avoid rather than attract.

  Businesses st
ill open - bars mostly, an eatery, a small bodega type store, were the few exceptions for light that spilled out across the sidewalk onto the street. He was not alone as he walked, voices were everywhere, hidden in the darkness, living their lives without the barest of essentials. He caught rare glimpses of faces, illuminated by a candle or the embers of a cigar, huddled together, chatting, ignoring him as he passed, anonymous in the darkness. The way he preferred it.

  A vehicle trundled slowly past and he flattened himself into a space between buildings, wanting to stay invisible from the likes of Targus and his men, only moving on when he was assured it was safe to do so.

  It was the first time he’d had to himself since waking up naked in a glass tank of amber goo with Rikit staring down at him like some weirdo checking out a child in a shopping cart. Steele’s mind was swarming with internal conversations and unanswered questions… Trying to piece together Rikit’s account of the mercenaries that came to the Clinic, Targus and his men - whether they be mercenaries or henchmen, the men that followed them to the farm - including the Clinic’s Director… and how they all fit together. Or not. How, why; were they all connected? Then there was something Rikit himself had said; about him being shot at with slug ammunition, while Jack was hit with sand rounds. Was that intentional or coincidental? It seemed odd, that while no one knew where Rikit lived, they located him easily enough to follow the two of them to the farm. And it appeared Steele was the target of their desire - so was Rikit part of the plan or was he an unwitting accomplice? And if he was involved, what were they hoping to gain by the ruse of letting him get away? Information perhaps. Jack wasn’t fond of the idea that the man who had befriended him, may somehow be part of a devious plot of some kind.

  Jack was suspect of anything that even looked like a coincidence and there were just too many things that seemed too convenient. Like the reason to go to the farm in the first place; diamonds the size of ice cubes. How would he know if they were real or not? He was no expert - he had to take it at face value. But on further examination, it sounded, and felt, like he was being played. Like he was being manipulated. With all the other equipment at the farm nothing more than rusted hulks, it was pretty lucky for them that Rikit’s grandmother’s Tempest was still in running condition so they could make a getaway just in the nick of time. It just didn’t sit well with him.