Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “Actually, he’s a little paranoid,” she said once it had departed. “We’ll run to Transfer Four and pick up the outbound load and an associate of his with instructions on where we’re going.”

  “This is why indies end up going crazy,” he said.

  “The cost of doing business in the real world,” she said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  Chapter Four

  The ship felt different. Utterly and completely different. Under his command, the Olympus Dawn had seen personnel changes before, although this was the first time he’d added three new bodies at the same time.

  On their first day out, Captain Walker realized that it wasn’t just his imagination.

  Of the new crewmembers, to his surprise, it wasn’t Kaycee that was the most disturbing to routine. Other than the fact that every time he left his quarters, she always seemed to be standing around in the corridor on the crew deck. The fifty days she’d been aboard as a passenger on their last run, had at least made her a familiar face. Perhaps an always present and hormonally distracting face, but not disruptive to the ship’s life.

  Ammo was not too bad either, even though she wasn’t kidding when she said she would have preferred to work naked. Fortunately, she had a miniscule amount of modesty and decided that it might be best to wear at least something when she left her quarters. The first morning out, her choice of a flesh-colored thinskin as appropriate attire was unfortunate since it resulted in Kaycee having her first injury to treat.

  Angel, who had just emerged from her own room after having been asleep when Ammo arrived the previous night, ran head-on into a bulkhead and knocked herself senseless.

  Quintan Primm, their new handler, was by far the most interesting new addition. He was literally a giant. Angel was almost two meters tall herself, but he bested her by at least a full head. He had to duck to walk through the doors on the ship, and if he didn’t turn sidewise, it felt like it was impossible to get past him in the corridor. Every inch of him was solid and he gave off an aura that said he could alter a person’s life expectancy with no effort at all.

  When Ethan stepped out onto the mid-deck looking for a quick firstmeal and maybe another cup of real coffee if it was available, it surprised him to see three of the tables pushed together in the center of the room. Someone had draped a pink and white checkered cloth over the top of the tables, and place settings were ready all the way around. Off to the side, covered dishes and several pitchers sat on another pair of tables.

  The entire crew stood around the table staring at the display in confusion.

  “What’s this?” Ethan asked as he slowed to a stop and looked around like he wasn’t sure he was awake yet.

  “Breakfast,” Nuko said.

  “What?”

  “Breakfast. It’s another word for firstmeal,” Kaycee said.

  “I know that,” he said, rolling his eyes, “but what’s going on with… breakfast.”

  “I think it’s supposed to be real food,” Rene said.

  “It smells like it,” Angel said.

  As far as the captain knew, the only person on the ship who knew how to cook was Nuko. “Aren’t you supposed to be flying the ship?” he asked, looking in her direction.

  “I am capable of piloting the Olympus Dawn without human supervision,” Marti said.

  “I know that, too,” he said. “All I’m trying to figure out is who cooked real food?”

  “Morning, Cap’n,” Quintan said, appearing from the galley carrying a full urn of coffee and a platter covered with strips of puckered… something. It almost resembled meat protein. Maybe?

  Ethan blinked several times, not just because the smell that came from whatever it was he was carrying was overwhelming, but also because the mountain of human flesh was wearing a pink-checkered apron. It matched the tablecloth, complete with ruffles.

  He would have sworn that Rene gasped.

  “Everybody, please sit. Before the food gets cold,” the handler said with a big toothy grin.

  Nobody moved.

  “Sit down,” he insisted. “Momma always said breakfast’s too important a meal to let it go to waste.”

  The captain grabbed the back of the nearest chair and crashed down into it as much to keep from falling over as that he felt a strong need to preserve his life expectancy.

  “You cooked this?” he finally managed as everyone else dropped into seats in various states of disbelief.

  “Sure did,” he said. “Breakfast’s a tradition where I grew up, so I figured it’d be something I could do here.” He set the coffee pot on the table and landed the platter of shriveled meat slices beside it. “I’m always up before the cows, so it’s no skin off my fanny to cook some grits and gravy.”

  “Some what?” Kaycee asked.

  “What are cows?” Rene whispered. Ethan shrugged.

  Pulling a long pinching tool out of a pocket in the front of his apron, he handed it to the captain. “Get yourself some bacon and pass it along.”

  “Bacon?” Angel asked, her eyes going wide. “I’ve heard legends about bacon.”

  “Well yah, sort of,” he said, turning and grabbing another of the platters of food from the second table. “It’s as close as I could get with the synthesizer. Real bacon’s made of pig meat.”

  Ethan stopped in mid grab and would have changed his mind except the smell was impossible to resist. Gingerly he picked up one slice and held the tongs out to Rene.

  “No, no, get you some,” Quintan said, snagging the tongs and dropping at least a half dozen slices on the captain’s plate. “I know it’s not real, but it’s not bad.”

  Uncovering the second platter, he revealed a stack of golden yeastcake disks. He tossed one to each of them around the table. “If you want gravy with your biscuits help yourself to an extra. I made plenty.”

  “Biscuits?”

  “Yah, it’s just dry bread yeastcakes, but it’s close to Momma’s recipe, so passable too.”

  “And you eat this with… gravy?”

  “You can, or you can eat it with butter and honey,” he said, pulling a slab of pale yellow slimy stuff and a small knife off the other table and setting it in front of the captain. “Me personally I like my grits with butter and pepper, and my biscuits with gravy, but each to his own.”

  “What exactly is, grits?” Rene asked. He still hadn’t put any of the food on his plate and was clearly questioning Quintan’s sanity. “Other than an abrasive that is. I assume you don’t mean that kind of grit, right?”

  “Well grits is… uhm, well grits just is,” he reached over and grabbed a big bowl and set it in front of the engineer. “It’s this white bumpy stuff that you boil or fry and then you eat it.”

  Rene looked down into the mass of lumpy goop and shook his head.

  “Trust me, you’ll love it,” Quintan said, spooning a blob out onto the engineer’s plate. It landed with a disturbing splat. “You’ll want that with butter, or gravy. It’s pretty dull otherwise.” Reaching back over to the side table, he picked up a wide-mouth pitcher and proceeded to pour a beige, lumpy glop all over the small mountain of grits. “You look like a gravy sort of guy.”

  “Is that a lubricant?” the captain asked.

  Quintan laughed. “Close enough. It’ll help them grits go down smooth.”

  “What else have you got?” Rene asked, leaning back and trying not to examine the inelegant mound of stuff in front of him.

  “Oh yah, now the good part.” Quintan said, grabbing the last two platters off the table and uncovering them with a flourish. “Hash browns and eggs.”

  Ethan looked at both platters, neither had anything he could identify as food.

  “Hash browns?” he asked, pointing at the yellow plastic looking stuff that looked like the residue from a protein extruder failure.

  “Eggs?” Rene asked, nodding toward the stringy brown dirt-colored stuff on the other plate.

  “No.” Quintan rolled his eyes. “You people never eat real food, do
you?”

  “Not if they can help it,” Nuko said, covering her face and trying not to laugh.

  “What are hash browns?” Rene asked, picking the platter up to sniff it cautiously.

  “Plant food, sort of,” he said. “Potatoes are nodules of starchy stuff that help make plants grow. You dig them up out of the ground and then cook and eat them.”

  “Do they look like this when you dig them up?” the engineer asked. Ethan could tell from his face he probably didn’t want the answer.

  “No, you shred them to look like that. They look like… uhm… testicles sort of,” he said.

  The platter hit the table so fast that everyone jumped.

  “You’ve never seen a potato before?”

  Rene shook his head.

  “I don’t think they grow efficiently in bulk food processors,” Kaycee said, winking. “I’m sure you shouldn’t tell him what eggs really are.”

  “Probably not,” Quintan agreed, managing to look truly heartbroken.

  “It’s alright Quinn, don’t let them get you down,” Angel said. “I don’t care what it’s pretending to be, or where it might have come from, it smells good enough that I’ll eat their share,” She’d been piling some of everything on her plate and looked like she intended to do it some severe harm.

  “Me too,” Nuko said. “If that tastes half as close to bacon as it smells, I’ll fight everyone on the ship for the last piece.” She bit into one of the strips and collapsed back against her chair with an expression of bliss that made Ethan laugh. “You have to try it, Boss. Really.”

  She was right. As soon as he got his first taste, he was a believer. Bacon was indeed worthy of legend.

  “Where did you learn to make this?” Nuko asked, as they all busied themselves packing down as much of the meal as they could.

  “I grew up on a farm in New Hampshire,” Quintan said. “I was a tad domestic by nature, so while my older sisters worked outside with papa, Momma taught me to cook. Probably better, too, since I was always a sickly sort.”

  “Hampshire’s a colony in the Centaurus Sector isn’t it?” Rene asked.

  He laughed. “Might be, but the one I’m talking about is a place in the Old New England Sector of North America. Way back, my family hails from Kaintuckee, but when it got too hot down there, great-grandpa picked up a homestead up north where you could still grow crops.”

  “And you ate like this all the time?” the captain asked.

  “Every day. But we ate the real stuff,” he said, shrugging. “When I decided to join the Handlers Union, one of my uncles came up with the organic formulas for all the food I liked. He did it so Momma wouldn’t be so worried about me staying healthful when I was away from home. I brought all the elemental recipes with me.”

  “Well, I could certainly get used to this but damn, I feel like I could eat myself stupid,” Ethan said, packing in another mouthful of the plant testicles. “We’ll need to upgrade the exercise room if you plan to keep cooking breakfast like this.”

  “It’d be my honor, Cap’n,” Quintan said. “Breakfast’s always been a good way to keep the family strong.”

  “And fat,” Rene added.

  Chapter Five

  Transfer Hub Four was a sprawling complex of stations and docking facilities that sat near Epsilon Cygnus, seventy light years from Zone One. It was by far the busiest of the major hubs since most of the Coalition’s colonization wing focused in Cygnus. Huge arrays of cargo containers spread around the main stations while ships and cargo handlers loaded them in an almost continuous stream of traffic.

  X-04 was a well-run, and well-protected, operation where enforcement worked with an abrupt brutality that assured anyone who thought to break the law reconsidered quickly. Although it sat in open space, the threshold beacons sat five light hours from the main station itself, and a strict approach velocity limit of one quarter light speed assured no one would sneak up without ample time for scanning and confirming credentials.

  Over the course of his career, more than half of the runs that Ethan had handled for CSL started here.

  They were closing on the passenger loading terminal when an alert tag flashed on Nuko’s console. She blinked in surprise. “That’s odd. They’re ordering us to hold position.”

  “Why?” the captain asked. He was standing on the riser along the back of the ConDeck watching the scenery.

  “Approach Control needs an acknowledgement of use terms by the captain,” Marti said.

  “Is this a new policy?”

  “I didn’t get an announcement on the wave,” Nuko said. “It looks like it’s us only. They’re granting conditional mooring authorization for two hours to complete our business, and you specifically are not to access any of the station facilities. In particular the hospitality areas.”

  “What?” Ethan asked. “Me?”

  “The message says if you wish to discuss it with the Facility Manager you can meet with her while we take on our passengers,” Marti said. “Otherwise you are to remain on board the ship.”

  “Passengers? I thought we were picking up a scientist?” Nuko asked.

  “Terminal Control indicates we have nineteen passengers to board. Two full squads of security, plus three civilian scientists,” Marti said.

  “We’ve also got two containers waiting in array-four,” it added.

  “Security? This is turning twisty all at once.” Ethan said. “Confirm that I agree to the terms, but I will want to meet with the Manager as soon as we tie off.”

  “Message sent,” Marti said.

  “We’ve got a green light to dock at stanchion-six. ETA is eight minutes,” Nuko said as the status messages appeared in front of her on the screen. “Approach says timer starts as soon as we lock down.”

  Tapping his commlink he said, “Ammo and Quinn, meet me in the lower airlock. We’ve got complications blowing in X-04 and we have to stop it before it stinks too big.”

  “Aye, Cap’n,” Quintan said, tapping back out of the link.

  “A problem, Boss?” Ammo asked.

  “We’ve got conditional access with a time limit to take on passengers. For some reason they singled me out as the issue,” he said.

  “Somebody’s sore that the Board didn’t whack your eggs harder,” she said.

  “Yah, my thinking, too,” he said. “We’ve got two hours so I’m going over to meet with the Facility Manager to find out what’s going on. I figure any undue influence you can wield with her might be helpful.”

  “I’ll put on something publicly appropriate and then I’m on my way,” she said, cutting the comm from her end.

  “Nuko the deck is yours. Let Angel know how many passengers to berth,” he said, turning toward the door but pausing. “Also, I know we weren’t expecting that many bodies to feed, so we should check over the stores. It shouldn’t be a problem, but I’d like a full load of consumables if we can get it loaded in the time they gave us.”

  “I’m on it,” she said, without turning to face him. She was watching the local traffic through the window, ready to grab manual control if the ALC mangled their approach.

  “As soon as I’m back, we’ll move to staging and you can load the containers. Hopefully, I can get it straightened out, but it wasn’t my intent to layover here anyway.”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t our intent this time, but if this is an ongoing restriction it could be problematic,” Marti said.

  “Agreed. That’s why I want to get it worked out this time through,” he said as he disappeared through the door.

  Ammo arrived at the airlock before Ethan and was leaning against the outer bulkhead as he walked up. She wore a pale pink thinskin and a tight burgundy vest that framed her assets in a shockingly distracting way. Publicly appropriate?

  “I’m sure someone’s filed a complaint and you’ll need to do an arbitration to clear it,” she said as he approached.

  “Probably,” he nodded, making sure to keep his eyes locked on hers. “I hope that’s a
ll there is to it.”

  “I can swing it for you, no matter what.” She smiled and winked. “I have history with Jonnie, so we’ll get it cleaned, and then it will be back to business as usual. Have faith.”

  “Jonnie? As in the chief administrator Jonston Grant?”

  She nodded and glanced toward the lift cage. Her eyes registered a trace of amused shock and the captain spun in time to see Quintan duck through the opening and onto the deck with a strange creaking sound. Some kind of tight black outer skin encased his entire massive frame.

  “What the hell are you wearing?” he asked, looking at the handler’s outfit like he was trying to figure out what it was meant to do.

  “Nice isn’t it?” he said. Running a hand over his own smooth chest, he smiled. “It’ll give me a bit of protection if things turn ugly.”

  “It’s armor of some kind?” Ammo said. Even her urbane cosmopolitan demeanor seemed to be wilting under the strangeness of his appearance.

  “Not really,” he said. “It’s just leather.” As he moved, it creaked again.

  “Leather?”

  “Yah. The real stuff, too,” he said.

  “Did you get it from a fetish shop?” she asked. Ethan shot her a quick side eye.

  “No,” he said, looking down at the floor and blushing. “Well, some of it. Maybe.”

  “How do you move in it?” he asked. He wanted to touch it to see if it was as thick and stiff as it looked.

  “It’s not too bad,” Quinn said, running his arms through several rotations and kicking his legs up into a high march. The creaking sound accompanied each movement.

  “It looks like it would be… challenging,” the captain said.

  “It’s all in the underwear,” he said. “Something silky helps it to not bind the important bits when you walk.”

  Ethan closed his eyes trying not to visualize what he meant by silky. “If you say so.”

  “It’s really not hard,” Quintan said.

  “I can tell,” Ammo choked as she slapped her hand over her mouth and spun away.

  “And silly me, I was worried about you being distracting,” Ethan whispered to her as he shook his head.