Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “Though it might make you wish you were dead,” she added.

  “The river water is mostly safe, but here again there are several species of carnivorous fish too,” Toby said. “The ones in the local waters are smaller, so they can’t bite through your PSE. As long as you keep your hands and face out of the water, you’ll be fine.”

  “The PSE are waterproof?” Rene asked.

  “Completely,” he said.

  “But no swimming?” Angel looked like she’d just had her favorite toy taken away.

  Leela shook her head.

  “And the one last thing we have to enforce is that anytime you’re outside, even between here and the landing zone you will have an escort or a guide with you,” Toby said. “There will be absolutely no exceptions to that rule. If you forget and even open a door to the outside world accidentally, we’ll lock you down until your ride gets here.”

  “Understood,” Ethan said.

  “When we take you out on a day trip, you are only to watch the natives, but you will never get close enough for the natives to see you,” he said. “Your guide and the escort team will do whatever has to be done to make sure it never happens, and that shouldn’t be a problem because of the tech gear we use.”

  “What if a situation becomes unavoidable?” Nuko asked.

  “That hasn’t happened ever. And it won’t happen on my watch.”

  His expression left no doubt he meant it.

  Chapter Nine

  Sixty-three thousand cubic meters was a lot of space for cargo.

  Normally Kaycee would have had Marti sort the manifest down to a usable list, but with its ability to be in two places at once, she didn’t want to risk Ethan finding out she was still digging into her hunch. So, she sat in her room where the AA’s presence would only manifest by invitation and instead of doing it the easy way, she was drilling through the manifest on a thinpad, storage bay by storage bay. She read each item, trying to spot anything that might jump out as odd.

  She couldn’t tell Ammo with any degree of certainty what to look for, so she worked alone. Kaycee had to consider each piece of cargo for its implication against the bigger backdrop of her suspicions. The process was brain numbing, and more than once she reconsidered whether it was worth the effort at all.

  “Still shooting blind?” Ammo asked, startling her as she sat a gojuice down on the end table in her room. She had her feet up on the sofa and was reclining on a big pillow with the door open to the corridor.

  She set her thinpad down, stretching her neck back and forth luxuriating in the pain of moving the muscles at all.

  “Quinn said they’re done for the shift in the box, and he’s doing some galley work if you’re hungry.”

  “Sure, that would be good,” she said. “Make sure he locks the hatches down. I’m not comfortable with all the workers that have been back and forth out there.”

  “I already did, but you know Ethan’s right. You do sound a bit paranoid.”

  “I know,” she said. “That doesn’t mean I’m giving up on this, but it makes me question everything I’m doing with a little more intensity.”

  “What do you expect to find in that?” She pointed at the thinpad.

  “Something unusual.”

  “Expand on that a bit? Give me something else to suck me into your paranoid delusion.”

  “Something medical and unusual,” she said.

  Ammo pulled the corner of her mouth up in a sarcastic sneer.

  “It would help if I knew for sure,” she said.

  “Fine, so give me your best guess.”

  “Something bio-neural. Maybe.” Kaycee picked the thinpad up and looked at it again.

  “You can organize the manifest to sort,” Ammo suggested.

  “Not without bringing attention to the problem,” she said. “Marti is Ethan’s friend, and I don’t want to put her in the position of having to keep a secret from him.”

  Ammo looked at her hands for several seconds and nodded. “If you find something, we should bring both of them in on it.”

  “I know,” she said. “The one thing I know about Ethan is that he will do the right thing once he sees it. Unfortunately, he also has a bad habit of resisting that path until he exhausts all the wrong choices first.”

  “Excuse me ladies, but dinner is served,” Quinn said, rapping on the door jamb. He was carrying a tray in one hand and a large dark bottle in the other. “We can either eat here or downstairs.”

  “Here is good,” Kaycee said, getting up and pulling her larger table out of the wall cabinet. It slid out and unfolded into the center of the room.

  “I guessed you’d be wanting to stay close to your work,” he said, grinning and handing the tray to Ammo. She pulled a small tablecloth off and uncovered plates and an array of serving and eating utensils. Spreading the cloth on the table, she set the plates out. There were several too many plates for the arrangement to make sense, so she left the extra ones in a pile off to the side.

  He spun his hand around in a strange gesture and three oddly shaped glasses appeared from nowhere. Winking, he handed the bottle to Kaycee as she stared, and he shot out the door.

  “He does love the presentation, doesn’t he?” Ammo whispered, grinning and taking a seat.

  She nodded. “And he does sleight of hand conjuring too. He’s just full of surprises, isn’t he?”

  He returned, pushing a small serving cart.

  “What are we having?” Kaycee asked. She could smell something sharp and tangy and she raised an eyebrow suspiciously.

  He lifted the lid off one of the serving platters and pulled three small bowls out. A slice of something pale yellow floated in the top of what appeared to be water. He set one bowl down on the table beside each plate. “For your fingers,” he said.

  The next platter he uncovered had several bright yellow bumpy cylinders. They were dripping some kind of juice and covered with green flecks of something. “Herb grilled corn on the cob,” he explained.

  “I’ve never seen corn that looked like this,” Kaycee said.

  “That’s what corn looks like,” he said, looking shocked.

  “I thought it was little tough skinned pellets,” she said.

  “Oh, you can make this look like that, but it takes a knife to kill it that way. This is corn on the hoof,” he explained.

  “On the hoof?”

  “Yah the way god intended it to look,” he said. “Upright and walking.”

  “Corn doesn’t walk,” Ammo said. “It’s a plant.” She looked over at Kaycee and added, “At least on Earth it is.”

  Quinn laughed, grabbing the next set of bowls off the cart. Bumpy things suspended in red-brown gelatinous goo. “I hope those came from a plant too,” Kaycee said.

  “We’re on a starship,” he said. “It’s all synthetic, but I try to get it as close as I can. In its real form, it’s a plant. Those are molasses sweet baked beans. I promise they won’t give you the winds though. Not too bad, anyway.”

  “The winds?”

  Kaycee shook her head in a sharp snap. “Don’t ask,” she whispered. Talking about food with Quinn was always a lesson in things you didn’t want to know.

  “Methane turbulence?” he offered.

  Ammo stared at him blankly for several seconds before she realized what he meant. “Oh. People really volunteer to eat these baked bean things?”

  “Yah, it is worth the risk,” he said, setting out a basket of yellow yeastcakes. “But maybe that’s because people back home live outside. Might be a good thing to remember when we breathe recycled atmosphere. But it’s only us tonight so it won’t ruin the air recycler too much.”

  Ammo picked up one of the yeast cakes and sniffed it.

  “Sour cream cornbread muffins,” he said, landing a bowl of honey butter beside the basket. It was the first thing that Kaycee recognized and only because it was part of the usual breakfast line up.

  Turning back to the cart he grabbed the last tray and set i
t in the center of the table. It landed with a heavy thud.

  “You do know there are just three of us to feed?” Ammo asked, raising an eyebrow and glancing at Kaycee who shrugged.

  “Yah, their loss.” He sat down and dropped a stack of small heavy cloth sheets on the stack of spare plates. “I started it cooking this morning after breakfast and planned for all of us. But when they all decided to run off... well it just means we have to work harder to get to the bottom of it.”

  “What is it?” Kaycee asked.

  He picked the lid up off the tray and a wall of an indescribable aroma launched a full assault on her senses. It smelled slightly acidic combined with an undertone of something that had burned. Yesterday.

  A massive pile of something, buried the platter. It looked like square meat blocks with rounded handles sticking out of the ends. Dark red… something… oozed down over the whole thing. It was sticky, thick, and almost horrifying to look at.

  For some reason, her eyes and her mouth both started watering at the same time.

  “That is food?” Ammo asked. “I mean I trust you, but what the hell is it?”

  “Kansas City style barbecue ribs,” he said, laughing at their reactions. “I know it looks a little like a farm machinery accident, but it’s another one of Momma’s secret recipes, so I know you’ll love it.”

  He reached over the table, grabbed the bottle, and poured their glasses full of amber liquid. “That, I recognize,” Ammo said, grinning as she watched the foam swell on the beer.

  “It’s real too,” he said. “I’ve been brewing it for a while but never had the right meal for it.”

  “Where did you put together the gear to brew beer?”

  “Rene helped me build a cold storage locker behind the galley and promised to keep it secret as long as I keep him supplied with bacon.” He grinned and handed them each a glass.

  Grabbing several hunks of the barbecue with his pinchers, which he also materialized out of nowhere visible, he filled both their plates while they sat staring at him.

  “How do you eat this?” Ammo said.

  “With your fingers.” Picking up one piece by its knobby end, he took a chomp out of the side. “It’ll be messy but that’s what the napkins and finger bowls are for,” he said around a mouthful.

  Kaycee shrugged, gingerly grabbed one piece, and brought it to her face. The acidic smell made her eyes burn even more and she wrinkled her nose.

  Ammo sat watching her, obviously not willing to take the risk until Kaycee survived the ordeal.

  Steeling herself, the doctor took a bite and gasped as every taste bud in her mouth exploded in pure screaming ecstasy. Nothing she’d ever had in her whole life was even close. All she could do was moan.

  “Tasty huh?” Quinn asked, grinning.

  She nodded, wiping the corner of her eye with the back of her hand. The intensity was almost overwhelming.

  “Are you alright?” Ammo asked, looking concerned.

  She nodded again, taking another bigger bite.

  “Is it good?”

  “Better than sex,” she said, groaning.

  “I don’t know if I’d go that far,” he said, laughing. “But Momma said never pass up a compliment when someone throws one your way.”

  “You’ve got to try it,” Kaycee said, staring at Ammo. “Really. If you don’t eat your share I will, and then I’ll probably regret it for days.”

  Taking a deep breath, Ammo closed her eyes and grabbed one of the ribs off her plate. As soon as it made it to her mouth, and she bit in her eyes shot open then rolled back as she groaned in pleasure.

  “See, I told you,” he said. “It just looks scary to you space people.”

  About halfway through the meal Quinn pulled out a second bottle of beer and they plowed on in a valiant attempt to clear the platter, talking little as they did serious damage to the pile of food. They each had filled one of the extra plates with bones before they slowed down at all.

  “Wait, I almost forgot, we’ve got dessert too,” he said. “Save room for some peach cobbler.”

  Kaycee stopped and glared at him while she licked her fingers. She’d realized that manners were impossible with food like this. “What’s peach cobbler?”

  Wiping his hands on a napkin, he twisted around and pulled a deep tray out of the lower rack. When he slid the lid off, another wave of smell filled the room.

  Ammo let out a whimper as she looked at it. “I don’t know if I can stretch that far,” she said.

  “Nojo,” Kaycee said.

  “No problem,” he said. “It’ll stay warm and we can have it later. I just wanted to make sure you both ate. It’s hard to work on an empty stomach.”

  “But it’s hard to stay awake on a full one too,” Ammo said.

  “Maybe a good night zeroed out will help,” he suggested. “New eyes in the morning are a lot sharper than red eyes at night.”

  “Where do you come up with all those sayings?” Kaycee asked, leaning back and stretching. “They can’t all be your momma.”

  He shrugged. “Momma is pretty smart, but I’ve learned to pay attention to things around me. I watch people because it always teaches me things.”

  “That’s a survival skill too,” she said.

  “It is,” he said. “I notice things that jump out at me. Then when I need it, I can pick the patterns out.”

  “Like what kind of patterns?” she asked.

  He leaned forward and eyed another rib but apparently decided against it. “I know you’re looking for something odd in the load, so I watched for something they treated with special attention when they were packing stuff out.”

  “Did you catch anything,” Ammo asked.

  “Only thing that caught my eye was the security guy got very interested in a crate of medical gear they pulled out of G12,” he said. “He’d been standing at the back door watching them work all shift but when they got to that box he came inside and physically took charge of it. They hand carried it out rather than loading it onto a roll-along.”

  “You’re sure it was G12?” Ammo picked up Kaycee’s thinpad and tried to scroll through the screens. It refused to move, and she glared at it.

  “Wipe the screen and rinse your finger in the bowl. Then try again,” he said, grinning at her.

  Fortunately, it fixed the problem and she fast flipped down the manifest until she got to the right cargo section. She scrolled through the list for that bay. “Only one thing medical in that whole section,” she said, turning the thinpad around and setting it on the table in front of Kaycee.

  “Why the frak do they need 300 neural transducers?” she asked.

  “That would be a good question,” Ammo said.

  “Who is Alphatron Inbit?” She shook her head. “I’ve never heard of them.”

  “AIT?” Quinn asked.

  “Yah, the supplier is Alphatron Inbit Technologies of Proxima,” she said.

  “Before I applied to the Handler’s Union, I worked at a deep security rehabilitation center in upstate New York,” he said. “AIT supplied the behavioral control implants they used on the hard case prisoners. Violent ones.”

  Chapter Ten

  As the small party made its way through the jungle and up a gradually sloping ridge toward the observation point, Sandi and Tash played tour guide and kept up a continuous running commentary as they walked along. They explained everything from the geology, to the flora and fauna pressing in all around them. It was a little unnerving to know that while there was so much they did understand, by their own admission they had only learned a hundredth of a percent of all the diverse life around them.

  The six humans and Marti stuck together in a single line and followed what might have been a trail made by animals. While their guides stayed close to Ethan and his crew, somewhere ahead, they had escorts making sure they didn’t accidentally walk up on a native, or some other hungry carnivorous inhabitant of the trees. The four scouts that protected them were adept in the jungle and
moved with a stealth that seemed unnatural.

  “Where did they learn to do that?” Angel asked after trying to spot one of the escorts who had seemed to vanish as he climbed a tree silently and faded into the foliage.

  “They’re Windwalkers,” Sandi said. “Most of them come from Earth and were members of one of the indigenous nations of North America. It is a heritage thing for them.”

  “Dr. Ansari is Sioux and Apache,” Tash said. “He picked and trained the Windwalker teams.”

  “I’d love to move like that,” she said. “But I think I’d need looser underwear.”

  They hiked for almost two hours toward the rock ledge that was their destination before the canopy of the jungle opened up to reveal the sky. Emerging from the undergrowth, they climbed up onto a rock slab that stuck out above the dense tree cover and waited for a signal from their forward scout that their observation position was clear.

  Tash turned and lowered her voice as she explained, “We’re still almost three klick from the Ter’can tribe’s village but we’ll be in sight of them if they happen to look up in our direction. The Ut’arans have extremely good ears and we have to be extra careful not to make any loud noises that might carry that far. As we move forward, you have to keep low until we drop into the observation shelter. Just make sure you don’t do anything that would attract attention.”

  “I’ll go first,” Sandi said. “Do what I do, and you’ll be fine.” Crouching down she edged forward. A dozen meters from where they stood, she dropped over a ledge and disappeared.

  They each eased out into the open and followed her down into a hollow in the rocks. Tree branches and leaves covered the top of a narrow slit and formed a sheltered tunnel that snaked all the way to the cliff face. They’d built a stone wall on the edge of the precipice to provide cover, and a dozen small slit windows opened up to let in light and give them a view down into the valley beyond. It was crowded and the ceiling was low enough that no one except Marti could stand upright. Fortunately, there were rocks placed behind each of the observation windows so they could sit.