Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “And we weren’t too fuzzy with having her off the ship where we couldn’t visit her,” Ammo added, glaring at the OpsSec Director.

  “There’s been an incident on the surface,” Ansari said, pulling a thinpad out of his pocket and handing it to her.

  “What kind of incident?” Quinn asked as Ammo opened a file on the screen.

  “We’ve had a major contamination incident,” he said.

  “What he means to say is that the Rockpile was attacked by a native hunting party, and it looks like either everyone was killed or captured,” Parker said.

  “What?” Ammo gasped and leaned against the doorjamb with one hand while she watched the file play out. Marti had linked into the thinpad and was displaying the image as it ran.

  “We think your crewmates are among the ones taken prisoner,” he said. “Unfortunately, until we go down there and look around, we don’t know anything.”

  “You’re putting together a rescue mission,” Quinn said. “I’ll get my gear and—”

  “You will not be going with us,” Parker said.

  “There’s already been enough contamination without having another inexperienced person on the ground,” Dr. Ansari said. “We will be leaving as soon as it’s safe to do so. In the meantime, you tend to your injured crewmember and let us do our jobs.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Ethan sat and watched their captors doing things he didn’t understand. Even a little. When they stopped for what he assumed was a mid-day meal, it was the first time he’d seen all of them at once. As they traveled, they remained scattered out along the trail and he’d guessed there were twenty-five, but when they all gathered together, there was double that number. There were at least twice that many wakats.

  This was the first break they’d taken since they left the basecamp. They’d been walking since just after sunrise and he guessed it was around noon.

  While they were walking, they kept the humans tied together with a rope loop that wound around their necks and then back around their ankles. Once they settled into a clearing to rest, the Ut’arans untied their prisoners and forced them to sit on the grass with the rope that had bound them, laid in a ring around them like a border. Obviously, their captors expected the prisoners to remain inside the ring, because otherwise they seemed to pay them little attention.

  The wakats reclining just on the other side of the boundary line like guard dogs, made sure trying to escape was not something they’d care to risk. Up close, a wakat had more than enough teeth and speed to terrify anyone.

  Several of the natives stood at a distance staring off into the trees like sentinels, but most sat and talked while they ate. The warrior princess perched on a rock and stared at the prisoners, never smiling, and barely moving. She listened while several members of the party took turns talking to her. Each time they repeated the greeting ritual, always with a left hand, and often with the fingers down.

  As close as Ethan could tell, her name was Tuula Mir’ah since that was always the first phrase any of them said when they approached her. “Do you understand what she’s saying?” he asked, looking at Sandi and Tash.

  They both shook their heads.

  “I know some words, but not enough to follow the conversations,” Tash said.

  “Some,” Toby said. He rolled his eyes open. He lay flat on the ground almost unconscious and gasping as he struggled to gulp down enough air to think. The mission commander wasn’t going to make it much further. He was the only prisoner that wore no part of a PSE. For the last several klick, Ethan and Angel had literally carried him along. Even though it meant he didn’t have to support his own weight, his blood was clearly not moving in the right direction.

  “She’s the one in charge,” the captain said.

  He nodded. “Tuula means leader or queen.”

  “She’s too young to be ascended,” Sandi said. She’d been staggering for the last kilometer but at least she was wearing a suit liner that kept her blood from pooling in her legs. For her, it was the fatigue of trying to walk upright and carry a body that weighed over twice her normal weight. Nuko had been propping her up since they first went outside the Rockpile.

  “It sounds like they’re all asking forgiveness for not being with truth,” he said. “Whatever that means? I’m having trouble concentrating, so I’m not sure…” He gasped again and his eyes glazed over for several seconds.

  “One of them is unhappy we move too slowly,” he said. “I think.”

  “Might be prudent to move as slow as we can then,” Angel said. She was working on Toby’s legs trying to help his heart push the blood back to the top of his body. She looked like she knew it was a lost cause, but she wasn’t giving up on him.

  Mir’ah looked at Angel and stood up, pushing the Ut’aran in front of her to the side. Lowering her eyes, she walked across the clearing and stopped just outside the edge of the rope ring. “Echa et’ah marat akUt’ar. We’ir sharrah kan’doh nee.”

  She’s asking your permission to leave me behind,” Toby said. “I think.”

  “I look to know your mind,” she said, looking only at Ethan. “He is to we’ir Sharrah Ut’ar. We give him to… all trees and korah.”

  “You speak our language?” Sandi gasped.

  The captain glanced at Nuko and she nodded. If there are natives on the station, why would she be surprised?

  “A small amount I know. Yes,” she said, still refusing to look away from him. “You are Marat akUt’ar, but words of your brother lead Mir’ah.”

  She looked down at Toby and touched her forehead with the back of her right hand. “Slow is not good. Mor’et pra’ korah,” she looked off to the side. “Weak one is slow. Will kill all Cha’nee to be slow. Must we’ir Sharrah. We live and make nature good. Yes?”

  “She is saying it’s time to leave me to the jungle,” Toby said. “The we’ir sharrah is the ritual of giving the weak or old ones to the korah.”

  “No frakking way,” Angel said, launching herself up and almost a meter into the air. Their suits were still running at full boost. “I didn’t carry his ass all this way only to leave him here to be eaten.”

  Before she hit the ground, every wakat was on its feet and most of the hunting party had their arrow slings ready to let fly. “Stand down,” Ethan growled, grabbing her arm to force her back to a seated position. “This is not the time for it.”

  “We can’t let her—”

  “Korah feed at night,” he said. “Watchtower has to know what happened. There will be a shuttle before then.”

  “But what else—”

  “The captain is right,” Toby said. “Predators only feed in the dark. I can lay here and rest until help finds me.”

  “I’ll stay with you,” Sandi said. “We’ir sharrah… me too.” She slapped her hand against the breast plate of her partial PSE.

  “You will not,” he said, swinging his eyes toward her and then to Tash. “Let them leave me here and you two stay with Walker. He is the shiny man, and they will not cross him lightly.”

  Ethan had no clue why Mir’ah had reached that conclusion. All of them in PSE would be shining to them.

  Tash looked down at her hands in her lap and nodded. After several seconds, she stood up and grabbed Sandi by the hand, leading her to the far side of the ring, away from Tuula Mir’ah.

  “You all need to step away from me,” Toby whispered. “Don’t cross the rope but give them room to do this.”

  The captain started to stand but leaned down over him first. “You’re sure you want to do this? We can keep carrying you.”

  “No. I don’t want to do this, but I really cannot go on,” he whispered. “I don’t need you to burn your power trying to postpone the inevitable. Parker’s probably already sent a rescue party, and I’ve only got to hang out until they find me.”

  Something in his eyes told Ethan that he’d lost something important enough that he didn’t care if they found him or not.

  He thought about refusin
g but couldn’t find a reason other than it felt like he was abandoning a piece of hope if they left him behind. He stood up and stepped over to join the others.

  With a grunt, Toby forced his body over, face down and dragged his arms straight out to the side. Sucking in a face full of dirt and grass he coughed once and then closed his eyes. “We’ir sharrah,” he whispered.

  One of the other Ut’arans stepped forward and Mir’ah and the other one bent low, picking the rope loop up. They moved it over his body to enclose a smaller circle around the prisoners and leave Toby on the outside.

  Two others joined them, and they all dropped to their knees. They said something between them so quietly that Ethan couldn’t hear it, and then each grabbed one of Toby’s limbs. Standing up, they carried him to the edge of the clearing and placed him face down at the base of a tree.

  Tuula Mir’ah pulled out a thin edged blade from her pouch and with the skill of a surgeon, slit his jumpsuit up the back side of both his legs and the center of his back to his collar. Carefully she split only the fabric and the thinskin beneath it and peeled it back. She rolled him out of his clothes and returned him to his face down position entirely naked.

  “I’ve never seen it done for someone in clothes,” Tash whispered, her fascination at the anthropological aspects of what she was seeing outweighing everything else in her mind.

  If she can cling to that, it will probably keep her alive, Ethan thought. For him it was hard enough, but when he looked at Sandi, she was sobbing into Angel’s chest. He already knew that she wasn’t going to make it if she couldn’t pull it back together.

  Turning back to watch, Mir’ah was standing with a leg on each side of Toby and had balanced her knife on the back of his head. She was facing away from them and she was saying something again. She bent down suddenly and snagged her knife, raising it high above her head she shouted, “We’ir sharrah. Mor’et wakat ak al’mor korah. Toh’bee ak Marat akU’tar. Ut’ar sharrah. We’ir.”

  “We’ir sharrah!” the others said in unison.

  She plunged the knife into the ground beside his head and turned to walk back to the prisoners.

  “He will… Ut’ar Sharrah al’mor under sister Tarah,” she said. She studied each of their faces, lingering for several seconds on each. When she got to Ethan, she lowered her eyes.

  “Travel now more fast?”

  He nodded. Now we’ll travel faster.

  She looked at him sidewise and then her eyes lit up as she understood what he was doing. Imitating his nod, she jerked her head up and down.

  But not so fast that they won’t find us, he thought. I hope.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Kaycee, Ammo, and Quinn spent hours re-watching the security file and trying not to think about the idea that they still hadn’t heard anything from the Watchtower bosses. Instead, they focused on sucking any detail out of the optic records in an effort to find any hope to hold on to. They’d pulled the table up in front of the wallscreen in the mid-deck and stared at the images.

  When the surveillance feed cut out, the captain and the others had managed to get into their exosuits. There wasn’t much else to give them a reason to be optimistic.

  “I am uncertain how the Ut’arans managed to get the entire power grid of the basecamp to fail,” Marti said. “This record shows their only access to the electrical system occurred when they contacted the wiring in the controls for the door to the locker room facility. It is unlikely that the door circuit would not have a breaker and would have sufficient short potential to draw down the entire facility. Therefore, we can assume this is an incomplete security file.”

  “I don’t know as it matters,” Quinn said. He was drumming his fingers on the table where the meal he’d thrown together for them sat uneaten. “The power went down, and that’s the last thing we see. Based on this Parker has to be making an assumption that they were taken prisoner.”

  “Or they know more than they’re sharing,” Kaycee said.

  “Correct,” Marti said. “I believe that my automech body is in the main power distribution room. To shut the grid down would require them to access the breakers in that room.”

  “And you’d know if they’d done that because the door being opened would have given you access to your body,” Ammo said.

  “That is also correct,” it said. “Even making an assumption that they somehow damaged the body to the point where I cannot reestablish a link, there would have been an interval between the door opening, and it being incapacitated that would have indicated such an event was occurring.”

  “At least that means your body is probably alright,” Kaycee said.

  “That implies there’s got to be another point of attack we haven’t seen. Where else could they have accessed the whole grid?” Quinn asked. “I’m not an engineer, but wouldn’t a power plant be a distance from the facility?”

  “Such a design characteristic is to allow for thermal management,” Marti said. “However, as the Ut’arans see in infrared, typical techniques for radiation of excess heat would be visible to them.”

  “You know, that’s all fascinating as shit, but we’ve got no legs here,” Ammo said. “We’ve figured out they haven’t shared everything with us, and beyond that we’re pissing blind. Maybe it’s time for us to take this backup the stack and see what they’ll say if we push.”

  “I agree,” the handler said. “We’re no closer to knowing anything.”

  Kaycee leaned back and wrapped her fingers behind her head. She nodded and looked at Ammo. “You up to chewing some butt? If they see me up and around too fast, they’re going to look sidewise at Forrester.”

  “When have I ever passed up a fine feast of ass?” she asked, tilting her head to indicate that the doctor should get out of sight of the optic.

  As soon as she was out of view, Marti opened the channel.

  It took almost ten minutes for Ammo to shred her way to the top of the Watchtower food chain, and when she got there, she’d worked herself up to a fine edge of frustration. Dr. Ansari and Bradley Parker were sitting together in an office when the last bureaucratic wall crumbled, and she finally got the ones she wanted on the comm.

  “Gentlemen, since you’re both there, I expect I can get all the answers I’m looking for at once,” she said. “What the frak is the hold up?”

  “Mounting a rescue mission is a complex endeavor,” Dr. Ansari said.

  “No, it’s not,” she said. “You get some people with guns in a shuttle, and you go down there and get them back. That’s not quantum physics.”

  “I understand your concerns, Miss Rayce,” he said. “But—”

  “I don’t think you do, Doctor,” she snapped. “You’ve got people supposedly being held prisoner by a tribe of overexposed savages. There’s none of this ‘contamination’ shit to consider. This band of natives has been all over the inside of your very modern basecamp. They are as exposed as they’re going to get.”

  “Yes, but landing a shuttle is a very visible endeavor. There would be witnesses for hundreds of kilometers in every direction,” he said. “There may be a handful of the Ut’arans exposed thus far, but there are thousands and thousands that would be damaged by witnessing a spacecraft coming down from the sky.”

  “I’m more concerned about my crewmates than your precious non-interference rules,” she said.

  “Actually, those are laws,” Parker said his expression smug. “The Science Wing of the Coalition got the non-intervention policy codified several decades ago. Right after the first landing parties here discovered the indigenous culture.”

  “I know the laws, but they don’t apply in this case,” she said.

  “In fact, they do,” he said. “Director Ansari is vested with both ambassadorial title and governor status. As such, if he says nobody ever goes down to rescue them, that carries the weight of law.”

  “He’s not saying that’s my intent,” Ansari said, “but Brad is right. I can do that.”

  “
As it stands, we plan to launch a mission tomorrow evening local time. At that point, we’ll do what we can to extract your crewmembers,” Parker said. “We only have a landing window every four days, and unless we want our rescue team to spend four days down there, we need to make sure they can get in and out in less than the seventeen hours of darkness.”

  Ammo shook her head. “That’s a load of recycler biscuits and you know it. We have to get our people out of there.”

  “We’re developing a plan to give us the best chances,” Ansari said.

  “Care to share what you’re thinking?”

  “No,” Parker said. “To be blunt, you have no expertise of relevance in the environment, so time wasted in explaining the situational topography would only delay the process.”

  “I’m not buying that. It would take us an hour to do it ourselves.” She jerked her head at Quinn. “Maybe you should let us.”

  “I absolutely forbid it,” the Director said. “Even if I were to consider it, you don’t have the experience in the environment to try, and you cannot survive in that environment without a PSE.”

  “So, give us the gear we need,” Quinn said, shrugging.

  “No,” he said. “The contamination to the civilization down there would be profound and unrecoverable. We don’t know how far that’s gone. But I guarantee it will make it worse if we launch an ill conceived rescue mission.”

  “And even if we were to let you throw your lives into jeopardy by trying, you still cannot leave until tomorrow night local time,” Parker said. “That means we have to wait thirty-six hours. Then we will go get them.”

  “In the meantime, we have much to plan, so if you will excuse me, I have to get back to it,” Ansari said, cutting the comm without giving her a chance to reply.

  “The odds of them remaining alive after another thirty-six hours, is extremely small,” Marti said. “Their PSE power supplies are limited and likely will not last that long.”

  “How long have they got?” Kaycee asked, walking back to the table and sitting down.