Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “The village down there is the home of the Ter’can tribe,” Tash said once everyone had settled into place. “They’re a typical example of one of the non-migratory social groups. There are about twelve hundred residents in this village, but it will be hard to pick them out of the jungle without help. All of their construction is from indigenous materials and blends in well.”

  She leaned close to Ethan and pointed out through the window in front of him. “If you look right there, you’ll see the roof of one of the buildings in the village center.”

  He followed her finger and could just make out the edge of something round. It had what looked like a smooth slab of dirt over it. “I see it I think,” he said.

  “Your PSE has optical enhancements if you want to use them.” She turned his hand over and opened a small panel on his forearm. She tapped a button and the arm that had provided the infrared lens the night before popped up behind his head with a small display that swung around in front of his forehead. “The only one that auto-selects is night vision. To pick what kind of enhancement you want, look at the display and blink your right eye. Blinking your left eye makes it reset.”

  Teleoptic was the first on the list. He blinked and a thin visor dropped in front of his face. This time when he looked back, he realized how big the building he’d seen truly was. There were several natives standing around in front of it and it dwarfed them to insignificance. At least he assumed those were the natives he was seeing. They looked like naked humans.

  “Either those are little people or that’s a huge building,” he said.

  “It’s a teaching center and a meeting hall. At first, we thought it might have been a religious temple, but we don’t have a lot of indication that they have any form of organized religion,” Sandi said.

  “I want to see,” Nuko said, pushing toward the window.

  “You can link your heads-up displays together,” Tash said. “It’s useful for making team observations. Each window looks out on a different area of the village so everyone can observe something else and still share what you’re seeing if something catches your eye.”

  “I’m surprised they look so human,” she said as she connected her own display to Ethan’s.

  “Me too,” he said. “I almost feel like I’m invading their privacy.”

  “You are,” Angel said. She linked into his visor’s feed and smiled in a not entirely wholesome way. “It’s just that we’re doing it in the name of science.”

  “I guess that’s probably true.” Tash shrugged. “Outwardly the Ut’arans are almost indistinguishable from us. They’re shorter with almost no examples we’ve seen over 1.75 meters tall. Of course, they’ve adapted to have much more dense muscles and bones. Their lack of clothing also tells us they have a good tolerance for heat and cold. We’ve observed villages in sub-freezing temperatures and in the equatorial summer where the daytime heat can reach over sixty, and we’ve never seen any of them wear more than those belt pouches or shoulder packs.

  “Must be nice,” Rene said. “It’s almost too warm for me now.”

  “You’re PSE has environmental controls,” Sandi said.

  “I know they do. It’s not that bad, but they don’t seem to be keeping up,” he said.

  “When we get back, we can check them out,” she said.

  He nodded. “So, go on. Naked superhumans?”

  “We think they have better vision than we do too,” Tash said. “Unfortunately, we’ve never had any way to confirm that because we’ve only had one body to examine, and it belonged to an elderly female who died of blunt force trauma to the head. Her eyes weren’t in any shape to examine.”

  “Then why do you think their vision is better than ours?” Angel asked.

  “We’ve never seen them use any form of light at night,” Sandi said. “Not even a fire.”

  “Do they use fire to prepare food?” Marti asked.

  “No, they cook using chemical reactions,” she said. “One of the other buildings down there is a food storage and preparation center. It’s like a communal galley, but they protect it like a fortress. We think they do it to keep the wakat out.”

  “Wakat?” Nuko asked.

  “Do you see any small humanoid creatures down there with them? They are like a hairless monkey with a pronounced brow ridge and large pointed ears.” Tash leaned forward and gazed out the window for several seconds. “There. Next to the dark haired female by the door to the school.”

  Ethan focused on his visor display and picked out the creature she was talking about. At first, he thought it was a child since it was about a third the size of an adult and was holding the female’s hand. Only after he stared at it did he notice it had feet that looked more like hands and that it moved oddly. It had a strangely elongated head and ears like a dog. Once he knew what he was looking for, he realized that there were at least a dozen of them running around and playing in the edges of the trees. “I thought those were children,” he said.

  “As near as we can tell, they’re a domesticated species that share their society,” she said. “They treat them like pets, but it seems to be much more symbiotic than that in some ways. The wakat also seem to be at least as intelligent as a terrestrial chimpanzee.”

  “The wakat have their own verbal language and most Ut’arans can converse with them,” Sandi said. “Early in our work here, we tried to study the wakat, but they’re extraordinarily quick and can get aggressive when threatened. They don’t appear to be specifically carnivorous, but they would be the alpha predator in the food chain because they’re remarkably cunning and they work well in large groups.”

  Tash nodded. “We wanted to examine them, but they killed several of our people before we realized it was best to leave them alone. We also discovered they could talk to the natives, and we didn’t want to risk them revealing that we were here and affecting the Ut’arans’ social development.”

  “If they’ve domesticated the wakat, why do they have to protect their food supplies?” Marti asked.

  “Some wakat are integrated into the Ut’aran community, but there is a larger wild population. They can be a nuisance,” she said.

  “You can tell domesticated ones because they always wear a carrying pouch,” Sandi said. “The Ut’arans often use them to carry messages or other small things since they can cover more than a kilometer a minute in the treetops.”

  Angel whistled. “Speed seems to be a survival skill in the jungle.”

  “Don’t whistle. Ever,” Tash said. “That is a mating call of a specific wakat clan that lives in this area. Unless you want to find out if you can outrun one, you might want to be careful.”

  “Nojo?” Angel asked.

  Tash and Sandi both wore expressions that said she wasn’t kidding.

  “Except during mating season, the feral wakat are shy and tend to pull back when they see our Windwalkers. We seldom run into them and we’re careful never to corner one,” Tash said. “If they scream for help, there are always dozens within a kilometer, and the results get ugly fast.”

  “Won’t stunner rounds take them down?” Angel asked. Ethan could tell from her face she was feeling more than a little exposed.

  “It takes two or three rounds to stop one,” Sandi said. “You’re looking at an animal with four fists, that also understands basic tools, and has natural strength based on this planet’s gravity. You might stop one of them. Unfortunately, the ten reinforcements that come out of the trees within seconds make a mess of you and your stunner gun in short order.”

  “We’ve lost a few of our escorts to that over the years so we just don’t risk it,” Tash said.

  “With that kind of guard dog living down there, how do you do more than study them from a distance?” Ethan asked.

  “We use microdrones that resemble some of the local insects. We’ve managed to get them inside many of the buildings in the village and have installed permanent recording devices in some locations. Including the learning center,” she said. �
��That’s how we’ve learned their language.”

  “It is unusual for a primitive culture to have school facilities, is it not?” Marti asked.

  “By our thinking it is,” she said. “On Earth, tribal societies have little or no written form of communication until they’ve started building advanced city-states. Yet everyone here seems to read and write a common language.”

  “This tribe has a written language?” Nuko asked.

  “Actually, all the tribes we’ve studied anywhere on Ut’ar have the exact same language.”

  “We’re assuming that this might be because the three distinct types of tribes are all linked through trade,” Sandi said.

  “Three types?” Rene asked. He’d leaned far forward and was staring out a window of his own while paying attention to the conversation.

  “There are two geographically fixed types of tribe like the Ter’can,” she said. “One type hunts for wild game, while the other farms and harvests edible vegetables and grains from the local flora. The third type is a nomadic trader-herder social group that inhabits the grasslands. The written common language may be the result of the nomads providing a transport mechanism for learning and knowledge.”

  “Although we don’t understand the nuances of the process, we’ve seen it work on a global scale,” Tash said. “One tribe, a few dozen klick to the east of here, is domesticating several plant forms for food stock. We’ve seen their hybridized seeds show up all over the continent with other farmer tribes, so the nomads are transporting the seed to various locations. In the process, they seem to be imparting knowledge of how to use the seeds they carry, and not just trading commodities.”

  “Another example of this global network transporting technology is one we think started here in the Ter’can village,” Sandi said. “The hunter type tribes focus on building things. They’re much more skilled at construction, and one development that started here was a specific type of arched roof support. In the last decade we’ve seen that design show up in buildings over a thousand klicks away.”

  “They travel that far?” Ethan asked.

  “Some of the tribes migrate much farther over the course of many seasons,” she said. “Since nomads live in tents, they have no use for that kind of rigid structural technology, but they carried the knowledge of how to build these arch designs to the other geo-fixed tribes strictly for its potential,” she said. “This tells us they appear to consider information on a par with tangible goods.”

  “That’s a very civilized concept,” Nuko said

  “The free exchange of information seems, according to some of our scientists, to keep them from fighting for either territory or accumulation of resources,” Tash said. “When a nomadic tribe moves into an area close to one of the other tribes, they have a ritualistic festival where they spend as much as several months learning and sharing ideas, as well as food supplies and other goods.”

  “Because of this they’ve lived in a non-competitive balance with each other since well before we arrived and started documenting their society,” Sandi said. “We’ve found no evidence of them ever having fought a war at least as far as we can see.”

  “Too bad humanity didn’t develop this way,” Ethan said. “We’ve wasted so much of our time on competition and are only now learning to cooperate.”

  “That’s another thing that gets a lot of debate,” she said. “What caused humanity to evolve its aggressive nature? Was it because of the advent of some kind of technology that knocked us out of balance, or because we didn’t have a cohesive language and culture to keep us locked together?”

  “Now that we’re spreading further and further apart, I wonder if the fact that communication is getting harder might make it worse again,” he said.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kaycee angled across the dining hall like she was on a mission. Dr. Forrester sat at a table staring at a thinpad as he poked at his food. It was only after she landed in the seat across from him that he even noticed her.

  “Dr. Smythe-Caldwell?” He blinked several times as he tried to fit her sudden appearance into his reality.

  “I understand our last meeting was awkward,” she said, turning on her charm with a shy smile. It was pure affectation, designed to knock him off guard, and she caught his expression shift in response. “I wanted to apologize for putting you in an uncomfortable position. I’ve just been trying to settle my curiosity. You understand how that works I’m sure.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Being a research associate with the Shan Takhu Institute it’s probably your nature to chase answers to ground.”

  “I used to be with STI,” she said. “Now I’m a medic on a freighter.”

  “I’m sure that’s an interesting story,” he said. “But I won’t pry.”

  “It’s no secret. I joined the crew of the Olympus Dawn because I felt like I owed it to Captain Walker,” she said. “He lost two crew members trying to rescue me from a situation and since one of them was his medic, I offered to fill the position. It seemed like a good way to settle the debt.”

  He shrugged, obviously unconvinced but willing to accept her explanation at face value. “I should also apologize. I’d just finished a rather complex surgery and was having trouble with my implant.”

  “Your implant?” she asked, her mind leaping in a direction she hadn’t expected.

  “Yes, for my augment arm,” he said. His eyes flashed to the side for an instant before he refocused on her. “I don’t know if you’ve ever used a neuro-transducer, but they are fiendishly hard to balance the buffers. Particularly with a microsurgery interface.”

  “I’ve done microsurgery but the tech we used at STI was experimental,” she said.

  “This one needs a lot of calibration yet, but when there’s work to do, you put up with the problems.” Again, his eyes lurched sidewise but this time they lingered for almost a second. “Fortunately, the controls calm down when you focus on just the manipulation interface.”

  “I’m surprised you have that kind of technology here at all,” she said, leaning back. “You have quite an impressive medical center.”

  He closed his eyes before he nodded. “The environment on Dawn is very hard on our teams. The gravity can cause all manner of injury if it takes someone by surprise. I treat a disproportionate number of spinal trauma patients since the gravity control in our basecamps down there is at least as old as the station here. In its infinite wisdom, the Science Wing of the Coalition decided that it was more cost effective to build one top tier MedBay, than to invest in new gravity hardware across the operation.”

  She nodded, smiling but not buying his explanation for an instant. Gravity hardware was cheap. His augment arm alone would cover the cost to replate the entire station’s grid. “If I may ask, what kind of surgery was it yesterday?”

  “A C-2 reconstruction with neuro-transceiver bridge,” he said.

  “Then you know about biological transducer implants?” she asked.

  “Enough to get through,” he said. His eyes narrowed and he stared at her like he saw her agenda.

  “Wasn’t that risky to do with your own implant acting up?” she asked. “Don’t you have a tech to help you adjust your interface sensitivity? If you don’t mind me saying, you looked like you were having a complete buffer cascade.”

  He put his elbows on the table, crossed his arms, and glared in a way that made Kaycee wonder if he was going to come over the table at her. “Are you questioning my competence because I did a surgery under questionable conditions?”

  “Not at all,” she said, holding her hands up and trying to look shocked that he jumped in that direction. “I know that buffer-burn is a result of endurance issues in the implant. I’m sure when you started into a long and complex procedure you didn’t have any sign of it. Once you’re in, there isn’t much you can do but get out the other end.”

  He looked down at the table and frowned, slowly bringing his eyes backup. The anger had evaporated and something else
replaced it. Almost helplessness? “I had no choice,” he mumbled. “I had to install the implant to establish control.”

  “What kind of implant did you use?”

  “Are you a specialist in neuro-implant tech?” he asked. His face again hardening.

  “No, not at all,” she said. “I know you had some implants in the payload we brought, but I didn’t think you had time to get them into your medical stock before we met. They were still barely unloading at that point.”

  “It was hardware we had here already,” he said. He sat up straight like he was preparing to leave. “I don’t believe I ordered any implant technology that would be delivered in your cargo.”

  “Actually, you did,” she said, pulling out her thinpad with the manifest. “We just delivered 300 Alphatron Inbit Transducers. They unloaded them yesterday.” She thumbed down through the list to the right cargo section and offered it to him.

  Ignoring the manifest in her hand, he shook his head. “I am certain I have no idea what you’re talking about Dr. Smythe-Caldwell.”

  He turned his head to the side again and closed his eyes for several seconds, several micro expressions flashed over his features and Kaycee got the clear impression he was having an internal conversation. Finally, he looked back at her with an expression of frustration that seemed completely out of place. “I did not order any AIT 3650’s. If these devices are on your ship, it is a mistake.”

  “Like I said, they were unloaded yesterday.”

  He stood up. “I will look into it, but I do not believe this to be true. Now if you will excuse me, I have to get back to work.” He spun and headed toward the door, leaving his half eaten meal and his thinpad sitting on the table.

  She looked down at the screen before it autolocked. He’d been reading a medical record for a patient. The first couple lines were all she caught before the screen went dark.