“We’ve got him, we’ve got him,” Juanita said confidently. “Mr. Cook, it looks like you’re in need of some attention.”
Cook smiled at Seven as Libby nodded her affirmation, adjusting her hold on him more tightly. “You promised I’d be in good hands, Dr. Seven.”
Seven just smiled and winked back at Cook. “And so it seems you are, lad.”
“I hate to break this party up, folks,” Winsteed interjected, “but if we don’t get back to quarters, we may all need a dose of sunblock I don’t have.” With his remarkable planning and coordination, the group was transported to safety in just seven minutes. “Your aircraft are being refueled as we speak,” he said as they entered the deep shelter.
“We’ll only need one,” Seven replied immediately.
“Huh?” Winsteed responded, facing Seven.
“One craft, Commander,” Seven replied. “Mr. Cook is in no shape to travel anywhere. We’ve demonstrated on at least one occasion that we can’t assure safety in a landing of a pair of VTOL at Pacifica in a brief surface interval. We only have one hangar bay for a returning aircraft and the other would have to be dumped anyway, and frankly, I don’t want to risk those operations at sunrise on the open sea. So I’m ordering Cook and Leighter to remain behind and return to Pacifica when Captain Harper returns in the Leviathan to pick all of you up in a couple of weeks or so.”
“What is this? What are you saying?” Desmond asked suddenly, turning his attention away from Serea and toward them with an obvious, deep apprehension.
“Father, Aaron has offered Commander Winsteed and his crew sanctuary at Pacifica since they’re not a self sufficient colony,” Serea explained. “Aaron has committed the Leviathan to return and pick them up in a few weeks in exchange for the renovation of this facility into a secure fuel dump and stop-over for any return flights to the United States mainland.”
“How many?” Desmond asked Winsteed with a hard expression.
“How many what?” Winsteed responded with a slight hesitation.
“How many personnel?”
“Well, counting the two you are leaving behind, we’ll have a complement of 23 for evacuation.”
The room was permeated with absolute silence. Every ear was now acutely tuned in to the conversation. Everyone knew this discussion concerned their very survival and the hope of certain redemption they had all been promised.
Desmond’s eyes flashed between Winsteed and Seven, his face framed in hard thought. “Who authorized you to make this decision?” the Professor hissed at Seven.
“I’m the Director of Pacifica. I needed no authorization,” Seven responded in an even but hushed voice, mindful of the significance of what they were saying to all who could hear.
“Did you even think of consulting the Counselor, the Judge or the Sovereign before making a decision that will affect the lives of everyone?” Desmond said in a loud voice. “Do you have any idea of the impact of this on our community? Do you believe that our resources are actually unlimited? Do you know what it will mean for Pacifica to be without the protection of the Leviathan for four weeks or more? What exactly were you thinking, Aaron? If anything happens, it’s just more lives that I’m responsible for…more deaths…”
“He consulted the Sovereign, as a matter of fact,” Serea responded defiantly, her eyes sweeping the terrified faces all around them. “Father, will you please take this conversation into a private room?”
Desmond stood unmoving between the three, his eyes flashing back and forth between Serea and Seven.
Seven could clearly sense an obvious indication of an imminent, stress-induced neurotic break. This entire exchange seemed totally out of character for the Raylond Desmond Seven knew and respected. “I can not reconsider this arrangement, Dr. Desmond,” Seven responded clearly, “and I will not.”
Desmond’s eyes flashed with white-hot anger at Seven, but he said nothing.
“Father, perhaps after you’ve had some rest, some real rest, you’ll be able to…” Serea said with some compassion, tugging on his arm.
“Do not dare patronize me,” he responded sharply, turning his hard face of anger toward his daughter. “There were clearly many aspects of this venture I never counted on, and one of them was this permanent tryst between you and this man. Now see where it has led.”
Seven then laughed lightly with such conviction that everyone’s eyes turned toward him. He clearly winked at Winsteed. “Look, folks, I need some rest here, as it’s clear that everyone does. We’ve all been stressed beyond reasonable capacity, and you know what that does to anyone with a heart and a brain. So why don’t we just retire and get a good nights sleep? In fact, Commander Winsteed, why don’t we lay over for a full 36 hours so we can all get to know one another, get some real rest, some good Dutch Harbor cooking, and take a leisurely flight home the next day?”
Winsteed smiled a nervous smile and just nodded uncertainly.
“Well, that does it then. How about it Dr. Desmond?”
“Where are my quarters?” he asked sharply to Winsteed without even a trace of civility.
“Lieutenant Juarez, please escort Dr. Desmond to his quarters.”
As she led him away, Winsteed looked to Seven and said under his breath, “You may want to reconsider that layover. We have a developing weather issue along your flight path that you need to know about. In 36 hours, departure may not be a viable option.”
“What’s more important, a developing weather issue or a withdrawn invitation?”
Winsteed sighed deeply. “I hope you know what you’re doing, Doc.”
“Nobody really knows what they’re doing these days,” Seven admitted. “After all, the nearest star is having an attitude and we all just deal with it the best we can. Besides, how bad can it be? We can fly over or around almost anything.”
“Like I said, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
gh
Seven and Serea retired to the comfort of their private room along with Luci who slept between them, clinging tightly every moment to Seven. She did not speak at all except that she occasionally murmured the word ‘Flower’ tenderly, almost wistfully. Otherwise, she remained in what appeared to be a healthy condition. She ate her first meal, sitting atop Seven’s lap, with energy, and her eyes were actively darting about, apparently taking in every detail around her.
Damian Cook slept hooked to a pair of dripping IV’s in the facility’s well equipped sick-bay attended to by the Dutch Harbor medical corpsman, Libby Donovan, Lieutenant Juarez and Leighter, who seemed to be paying more attention to the lively lieutenant than the needy patient. Cook’s overall health was fragile, but if his spirit and eyes for Libby held any promise, all indications pointed to a full recovery.
The plan to remain at Dutch Harbor for an additional day of r-and-r actually turned out well for everyone concerned. Seven’s immediate scheme was that Desmond would get some desperately needed rest and awake in a better mood. Seven hoped he would get to know Winsteed and his crew and change his attitude about the pick-up. He also reasoned that if the Dutch Harbor contingent saw them for another day, they would lose some of the apprehension generated by Desmond’s unfortunate opening comments in their presence.
Serea was deeply apprehensive about her father. He remained isolated in his room for a full 18 hours while Seven did his best to reassure everyone repeatedly that his own promise for sanctuary at Pacifica was still good.
At the breakfast meal, one of the Dutch Harbor enlisted personnel, a striking, young, very attractive Inuit woman whose name was Laki, asked to sit beside Luci and Seven. She attempted to talk to her in whispers, compelling Luci to make eye contact as she spoke. Eventually, there appeared to develop a whispered conversation between them. After awhile, Laki left the table and returned with a cloth bag which she handed to Luci.
Luci held the bag gently and looked back and forth between the woman and the bag.
“It’s okay to open it, Luci,” Laki said tenderly. “You can
have it,” she said with tears streaming down her face.
Luci opened the bag with trembling fingers as the cafeteria become silent, watching the tiny drama unfold. She reached into the bag and pulled out a small stuffed skunk. “Flower!” she whispered adoringly, hugging the skunk tenderly. Placing her thumb in her mouth, she laid her head back against Seven who held her tightly. “Thank-you,” she mouthed silently and closed her eyes.
Laki looked at Seven and Serea. “He’s been my only baby since I was about her age. But now I think she needs him more than I do.”
“Oh my God, you beautiful woman… you dear, beautiful woman,” Serea responded emotionally, moving beside her and embracing her as they both openly wept together.
“Imagine that,” Winsteed said matter-of-factly, stuffing his face with scrambled eggs. “And all that hugging and crying over a stuffed toy.”
The Commander just nodded in unified cluelessness and, with a shrug, took a large bite out of a steaming biscuit.
“You guys really don’t get it, do you?” Seven asked them.
Both men looked back to him blankly. “Get what?” Winsteed asked defensively.
“That’s okay, boys,” Seven replied with a sigh. “Go ahead and eat your breakfast. God’s obviously still not finished cleaning out the gene pool.”
gh
Just before retiring for their second day at Dutch Harbor, Serea struggled with her father’s bizarre distance. She sat on the floor across from Seven, back against the wall, her face lined with deep concern, and remarked that she had never seen him so confrontational toward her at any time before in her life. She looked at Seven sitting up in the bed they had improvised by pushing two of the single military mattresses together on the floor. Luci slept curled in his lap clinging to her precious Flower.
“It’s the shock at seeing much of his life’s work first ruined by a deranged politician and his wacky, hopelessly ineffectual entourage,” Seven encouraged. “But then to see it literally collapse before your eyes because of a simple, overlooked chemical reaction is even worse. I’d suggest he’s actually suffering a severe form of psychotic shock from the guilt he assumed for the deaths of all those people. What he needs is rest, and encouragement from you, regardless of his seeming belligerence. Evaluate everything he says, no matter how personal it seems, as an interpretation of his relative wellness, and not his approval or lack thereof toward you. In that way you can track his recovery, find ways to help him get there from here, and not take any of it personally in the process.”
“Are you sure you didn’t get your degree as a shrink?” Serea asked sincerely with a flat smile. “Because your advice sure seems good and even workable, which is most odd coming from a card-carrying scientist.”
Seven smiled back, wanting to rejoin the discussion, but he just kissed the tip of her nose. “Don’t worry, he’ll be his old self as soon as we return to Pacifica . You’ll see.”
“Oh, Aaron, I am so worried about him,” she said laying her forehead on his chest. “And please don’t take what he said personally. I know he truly didn’t mean any of it.”
“Well, let’s file that under the long term worries. Now have a look at our short term its-ok-to-worry-right-now list,” he said, handing her a long sheet of paper.
Serea looked at the paper for five long seconds, then back at him with wide eyes. “This can’t be,” she said frankly.
“But it is and we should’ve listened to the good Commander Winsteed when we were warned.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said glancing back at the paper.
“If we’d left 18 hours ago, we could have beat it to Pacifica ,” he noted. “But now there’s going to be an encounter, and there’s no way to avoid it.”
“This is the largest storm system I’ve ever even heard of. Is it some kind of record?” Serea asked.
“Yep. As far as the local meteorologist is concerned, it sets several new records: new record for lowest low pressure, for the highest wind speed and, my God, it covers most of the entire northern Pacific basin from Palmyra Island south of Honolulu to the Aleutian Archipelago. This monster stretches from the equator to the Bearing Sea . It’s not just huge, it’s monstrously huge.
“Then we simply can’t fly now,” Serea responded matter-of-factly. “We’ll just have to wait this one out.”
“But you haven’t asked me for the good news,” Seven said.
Serea just blinked and stared back silently in response.
“The good news is that her eye is still hanging around the French Frigate Shoals. She’s changing her traverse as we speak and is projected to stall out right where she is and then hook south. With any luck, we can land at Pacifica with a 45 knot crosswind and 28 foot swells, which just happens to be the limit for the VTOL and a good pilot. If we wait for this monster to do something, we could, and probably would, be stuck here for weeks. These kinds of storms are exceptionally long lasting and they’re so physically large and massive that the Coriolis force tends to keep them in place, or at least bouncing about the hemisphere, until they naturally dissipate, which they’re generally disinclined to do. I say let’s take our chances on the reliability of the model and get the hell out of Dodge while we still have a few minutes to spare.”
“And what if you and the model are wrong?”
“I’ve thought of that actually. If the model’s wrong, then we’ll know that by the halfway point, at which time we can turn around and head back to Dutch Harbor before it’s too late, then try again later.”
“I would argue with you,” Serea responded, “but I have to get father to some resemblance of a stable situation as quickly as possible or risk a total break.”
“I would also suggest that we get back to Pacifica and get the Leviathan underway to rescue these people as quickly as possible or there may not be anyone left to save,” Seven added grimly.
“Well, you’ve done it again,” Serea stated with a tight smile.
“What?”
“Made the airtight case for another suicide mission, or, should I say, suicide attempt. And from the looks of it, this should be a good one. We might actually succeed this time.”
“How so?” Seven asked, his voice feigning hurt.
“Well, if we actually make it on our fuel load through a thousand miles of a record setting typhoon outer rain bands… and if we make the landing attempt at all, we’ll be landing one of our finicky aircraft on a platform rising and falling a minimum of 24 feet on each cycle in a crosswind… considering, of course, we’ll be right at the design limit on an empty fuel gauge. This should be good. I’d actually love to watch it… from just about anywhere but inside the aircraft!”
“Hey,” Seven rejoined, “I didn’t do so bad coming in here with a surface to air missile hot on our tail or taking off a flatbed truck doing 90 down the runway or landing in a zero by zero fog storm in downtown Seattle, now did I?”
“If I’m not mistaken, ace, you’ve taken a lot of credit for some of my best flying there. And just what, may I ask, is a fog storm?”
“I’m actually very happy you asked that question,” Seven laughed loudly. Then he laid the sleeping Luci gently on the bed beside him, rose to his knees and pulled himself over to her position on the floor. He tenderly kissed her cheek and touched her ear with his lips.
He whispered lightly into her ear, “A fog storm is a rare meteorological event that begins with a soft and gentle breeze, something like this…” Seven then softly breathed near her ear. “Then it becomes more intense, eventually building to a gale. It begins to pull itself together and organize, something like this…” He began to lightly touch her lips with his. She sat still, allowing Seven to demonstrate. In but a half second, his kisses became more detailed, more fully intimate. She returned his passion until he joined his kisses with the requisite follow-up hand’s on demonstration, then she stopped him.
“Nice demonstration of a fog storm,” she remarked coolly. “Next time I’ll know.”
>
“What?” Seven said, fully surprised. “No full range demonstration? No end-to-end fidelity of expression allowed here? You yourself have said that the classroom experience follows us in each and every venue of life.”
“No need, I get the point.”
“Not yet…”
“Aaron, aren’t you forgetting something?” Serea said, motioning her eyes toward the sleeping Luci. “Besides, how can you even think about intimacy when we’ve got to fly through hell tomorrow? Aren’t you even the least bit distracted by everything, and I mean everything, going on around you? At what point does situational trauma or the imposition of suicidal reality actually begin to affect your hormones?”
Seven just stared back at her as though she were speaking Swahili. He did not say it, but ‘what?’ was written all over his face.
“Men…men! I swear to God I will never understand,” Serea responded with frustration. “Aaron Seven, you could make love strapped to a bomb on its way down to the bull’s-eye. It’s totally inconceivable to me.”
He just continued to stare back at her with no trace of emotion.
“Well, go ahead and say it. It’s your turn. How can you possibly defend yourself at a time like this? Go ahead, you’re a certified world class genius. Let’s hear it. I really need to understand this.”
“Ye haw!” he replied waving an invisible hat in the air.
gh
The following morning, Seven and Serea recovered Luci from Laki who had agreed to watch over her for the sleep interval. Seven walked into the dining hall with Luci propped on his left arm and shoulder and holding Serea’s hand with his right. He looked like a man who was not just simply refreshed, but one who had just conquered the Asian sub-continent single handedly and had spent the last nickel of the spoils of total victory.
Quantum Storms - Aaron Seven Page 44