Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  She had made the only choice she could, given the options, and although she had talked it over with Marti, she still chewed herself up with doubt. The AA’s measured logic gave her no reassurance in a human sense. Stopping at one end of the hallway, she leaned her head against the bulkhead beside the ConDeck door. “Marti can you get a message to Ammo and Quinn without the station picking it up?”

  “You can speak to them directly if you wish,” it said.

  “That would be better.” She palmed the door open and took Ethan’s normal seat on the ConDeck. “This might be a stupid question but, don’t the PSE have comms? Why can you talk to them, but not the crew if they are still in their exosuits?”

  “The PSE use low power transmitters and have a much shorter range than our space-rated systems,” Marti explained. “I use encrypted pulse signals to my body on the surface and I can convert these signals to audio RF through the shuttlecraft transceiver. With that, they can receive that transmission via their comm earpieces. They are almost ten kilometers from the basecamp, but I can keep the broadcast power level low enough not to be detected above the planet’s ionosphere.”

  “Good, I don’t care how you do it, but I need to talk to them.”

  “Stand by,” it said. “They are currently moving quickly in a dense jungle understory and I want to make sure your voice doesn’t distract them. The environment is hazardous enough without an unexpected voice in their ears.”

  “Good thinking,” she said as the sound came up on the comm speakers. She could hear both of them breathing hard and grunting with occasional snapping sounds as punctuation.

  “Go ahead, Kaycee,” Ammo said. “I think Quinn needs a breather, anyway. He’s been running point for the last couple hours.”

  “Sounds intense. How are you holding up?”

  “We’re both swinging in spec,” the handler said. “Blood’s still making it to the brain so far.”

  “We’re tracking them,” Ammo said. “We’re hoping to find them before dark, so we’re pushing hard and fast.”

  “Just watch each other close. You could stroke out if the drugs burn through your system too quickly,” she said. “The harder you work, the more likely that is to happen.”

  “We’re not quite jogging, but we figure if the Ut’arans maintain the pace they’ve set so far, we can catch them,” he said.

  “Marti’s kept me posted. So, you’re on foot?”

  “And naked as the day I hatched,” Ammo added.

  “Nojo?”

  “All-our-bits-swinging-in-the-wind, style of naked,” she said.

  “That’s insane.” Kaycee shook her head. “I’m not even going to ask why you made that decision, but you need to be careful.”

  “More careful than walking naked in a jungle full of wild animals and angry natives?” she asked.

  “Yah, probably. We’ve got an exit strategy,” she said. “Once they get the cargo loaded, Parker said he can get them back.”

  “Cargo?” Quinn asked.

  “Yah, it’s what I had to agree to, in order for him let us leave,” she said.

  “Should we stop and let him get them?” Ammo asked.

  “I don’t trust him to keep his word. He says he’s got people with eyes on them now.”

  “Then why the frak hasn’t he gotten them out already?” he snarled.

  “He’s using them as leverage,” she explained. “Problem is, once he’s bent us the rest of the way over, he’s got no reason to hold up his end of the deal.”

  “You think he’ll go sidewise?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Considering what he’s doing up here, if they catch you there’s no doubt in my mind, he’ll twist it.”

  “How’s he putting the pegs to us?” Quinn asked.

  Kaycee thought about if for several seconds. “If I tell you this, I don’t want you to explain it to Ethan before I have a chance to talk to him. Understood?”

  “Stand by,” Ammo said.

  Almost a minute passed with no answer. “What’s going on down there? Did we lose them?”

  Negative,” Marti said. “They are discussing the propriety of withholding information from the captain.”

  “Where do you stand on it?” she asked.

  “I accept the necessity of the situation, and the desirability of having more than one path to rescuing the crew. I am uncertain if the risk level is commensurate with the potential return, because of the uncertainty of either option producing the desired results. However, not revealing details about the payload until we have secured the captain and the crew does not seem unreasonable.”

  “I just don’t want Ethan flying off before we get away from those guns.” She shivered as her mind once again showed her in vivid detail what that might mean.

  “In my observation, the captain does tend to react before being aware of all the facts,” Marti said. “Such an action could have detrimental consequences regarding our collective survival.”

  “That was what I thought, too.” She drummed her fingers on the edge of the console while she waited.

  “They have concluded their discussion.”

  The sounds of the jungle came back up on the speakers. “Alright, we agree,” Ammo said. “But you need to understand you’re asking Quinn to swallow his sense of loyalty and it’s not going down easy.”

  “I understand that. It’s not going down easy up here either,” she said. “I’m having to do something dangerously far over the line, but I’ve got no choice.”

  “Doc, just toss it out on the table so we can get on with business.” The handler’s tone was dead flat.

  “They’re not just using Ut’arans on the station, they’re harvesting slaves to sell off world,” she said. “They’re loading 300 sleeper cabinets in the cargo container now.”

  Ammo gasped. “You are joking, aren’t you? Not about the slaves, but about loading them.”

  Kaycee cleared her throat. “Parker made it clear that he would let the crew die if I refused.”

  “We’re down here to get them. You could have told him to go fuck himself,” Quinn hissed.

  “I really couldn’t. He’s holding the Olympus Dawn too.”

  “Director Parker has a set of railguns locked on the ship and threatened to use them if we failed to accept this arrangement,” Marti added.

  “He left no doubt that he’d shred us and dump the remains into the atmosphere,” she said.

  Silence hung long enough that Kaycee thought they’d disconnected from the comm again. Finally, Ammo said, “If we get caught, that’s the end of all of us. They still execute slavers.”

  “That’s not the kind of exit strategy I’m thinking makes sense,” Quinn said.

  “I know that,” she said. “Marti and I are still working on the next part of the plan, but we have to get everybody home safe first.”

  “I’d like to know what you’re thinking,” Ammo said. “If we’re all going to hang together, I think we’ve got a right to know what we’re trying to do.”

  “Forrester gave me something that he says will help us get out on the back end,” Kaycee said. “I don’t know what it is yet, but I’ve got it locked down for now and once we clear out, we’ll figure out how to use it.”

  “Doc, you’re not helping to make me feel fuzzy about this,” the handler said.

  “I get that,” she agreed. “Right now, you stay after tracking them down and I’ll focus on the long game.”

  “Fine,” Ammo said, her tone sounding more than a little icy. “You said that Parker has eyes on them. What should we expect?”

  “He said he knew where they were and that they were safe. For now,” she said. “I assume that means he’s got people on the ground already, but it might not.”

  “If he does, they don’t give a frak about people dying,” she said. “We found a place where it looks like they stopped and the remains of a body. Mostly eaten by animals.”

  Kaycee’s heart turned to granite in her chest. “Is it one of ours?�
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  “There wasn’t enough left to identify, but Nuko left us a note in the dirt that confirmed it was one of the basecamp staff.” She drew in a noisy breath and let it out. “All we had to go on were the remnants of a jumpsuit and some leftover scraps of meat.”

  “The big animals come out at night,” he added. “It probably happened last night and we’re making the best time we can. Problem is if we haven’t caught them by sundown we’ll have to shelter in the shuttle.”

  “Parker said once they get the cargo loaded, they’ll send down a rescue party to get them out of there. Hopefully you’ll find them before then,” Kaycee said. “Have you gotten any readings of them yet?”

  “Technology tends to freak out the animal life. If we don’t want to give their captors a warning that we’re following them, we need to travel close to nature,” Quinn said.

  “Which is how he talked me out of my clothes in the first place,” Ammo said. “We’re hoping to blend in with the natives.”

  “It might not convince the Ut’arans, but if he has eyes on them it might get us past the ones watching,” he said. “There’s no way they’d expect naked humans out here in the jungle.”

  “There is that,” Ammo said. “I just wish I knew how close we are to catching up.”

  “You can’t use even the handheld scanners?” Kaycee asked.

  “Every time we pull them out it sounds like someone is lighting monkeys on fire,” he said. “And at any kind of range I don’t think a handheld scanner will differentiate a human from the locals.”

  “We were hoping to track their exosuit’s EM signatures, but with another set of eyes around them, we’ll have to walk in blind,” Ammo said.

  “Which brings us back to the point. We need to keep moving,” the handler said. “Especially if there is another layer of crap to cut through.”

  “Just be safe.”

  “I think we’re well past that point now.” Ammo said.

  That was undeniably true.

  Chapter Thirty

  Quinn trudged along the trail in front of her, looking down at the ground but still aware of his surroundings. It was clear that the change in their situation had upset his sense of propriety with the universe.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.” He shrugged. “We’re hammered no matter how this plays out.”

  “We need to figure how it changes things.” She’d reached the same conclusion he had and was struggling not to give up.

  “I’m trying to wrap my head around that,” he said. “What bothers me most is that we should have seen this.”

  “Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest—”

  “Until you’re beating your head against the branches.” He took a swing at a convenient limb that hung over the trail. “Frak, we really got our eggs handed to us.”

  He hauled himself up onto a tree that had fallen beside the trail and sat. They needed to take breaks more often as muscle fatigue started to take its toll on their legs. That meant they were slowing down, but hopefully not enough that they wouldn’t find their crewmembers in time. It was a physical wall that neither of them could push through.

  Knowing that when they finished here, their troubles would only get worse once they got back to the ship, didn’t help their motivation.

  “We should have seen it coming,” he said, pulling out a waterbag and handing it to her.

  “Kaycee did,” she said. She settled onto a rock and took a small sip before she handed it back. “The rest of us were just slow on the pickup.”

  He shook his head. “This isn’t slow. The minute we tied off to the station, Parker had us. If he’s got guns ready to rip the ship apart, you know he did that while we were all sitting on our asses.”

  “We expected them to be a science station full of science types.”

  “I get that, so we’re out here trying to rescue our captain and most of our crew because we were stuck to the deck.” He pounded the side of his fist against the log he sat on. “He’s at least a step ahead of us every time we try to get a handle on what’s going on.”

  “I can’t argue that,” she said.

  “Now we find out he’s got someone on the surface keeping track of the situation,” he said. “We might have been able to overwhelm a bunch of natives, but if he’s got people down here too, you can count on the fact that they’ll be a lot harder to get past. They’ve got to be better equipped than we are.”

  He was right, but unless they wanted to give up now, they had no choice but to see it through. It made her feel a lot more naked.

  “You know, being in our skin might be more effective against them,” she said, grinning as her mind reached for an idea. “They sure as hell won’t be looking for a naked rescue party. They might just dismiss two sunburned idiots walking through the jungle without a second thought.”

  He laughed. “There is that. We might be more invisible to them than to the natives. At least if they don’t look too close.”

  “And if they do, then it will take them a long second to fit it into their reality,” she said, watching the spark come back to his face.

  “The element of shock is always better than the element of surprise.”

  She grinned. “Your momma said that I’d wager.”

  He nodded, standing up and offering her a hand. “I think she got it from weird Uncle Bob. The badger hunter. This one time he came in from a hunt covered in—”

  “Quinn, honey, I don’t need to know.”

  “But it has to do with an alligator and…” He winked as she shook her head.

  They’d covered another two hundred meters when the trail opened up onto a clearing. He stopped at the edge of the trees and ducked down to scan the area with his eyes. Blinding sunlight flooded through the opening in the canopy above them. He held a hand over his brow and squinted.

  “We’ve probably got another body,” he said. “I don’t see it but there’s a pile of hardware that might be a PSE and a bunch of rags blowing in the wind.”

  Ammo had hidden on the opposite side of the trail and leaned against the base of a massive tree. She closed her eyes for a second and then nodded. “If it’s clear, let’s go see who it is,” she whispered.

  “I don’t see a body but the whole area is trampled flat,” He stood backup and stepped out into the open. “The grass is taller here, so it looks like they didn’t move out too long ago. Otherwise it would have stood backup.”

  They edged around the perimeter of the clearing toward the pile of suit pieces.

  Fortunately, there was no spectacle of blood and gore this time. Only a body, naked, and facing up. As they got closer, Ammo recognized it as Sandi. “At least it’s not one of ours.”

  Quinn stopped well back, from where she lay. “She was one of the passengers we brought in with us,” he whispered.

  She nodded. “She was the one that Nuko said would be next.”

  “I’ll check her out and you can look around to see if she left us another note?”

  “It’s alright. I’m not that squeamish about dead things. At least not ones without catastrophic disassembly issues,” she said as she stepped around him. We should start with the body then do a fast once over on the rest of the clearing together.”

  Kneeling down beside Sandi’s body, she almost missed the knife that came up out of the grass in a feeble swing. It was weak and slow, and Quinn kicked it away. Her arm fell limply back to the ground above her head.

  Ammo jumped up. She’s still alive!

  Her eyes flickered open. “Pra mor’et at’esha,” she whispered, her voice so weak as to be almost inaudible.

  “No. Kill. Help,” Marti translated.

  “We don’t want to hurt you.” Ammo looked around to make sure there weren’t any other weapons hidden in the grass.

  Her eyes opened wider and she shook her head. She obviously wasn’t firmly feeling reality. She looked like she was close enough to dead to see the afterlife from where she lay.<
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  “You know us, we’re from the Olympus Dawn,” Quinn said. “We’re looking for our crew.” He’d fished a waterbag from his pouch and was tearing the top open as he knelt on the other side of her. He tilted her head up and dribbled some on her lips.

  Rolling her eyes to the side, she struggled to fit their nakedness together with their sudden appearance. Clearly, that wasn’t happening for her yet.

  “What happened to you?” Ammo asked.

  “We’ir Sharrah,” she croaked out, licking her lips and staring at the waterbag as he dropped more onto her mouth.

  “Giving to the jungle,” Marti translated again.

  “They left me… to die,” she whispered.

  “When?” he asked. Easing her head back to the ground, he handed the water to Ammo and dug in his pouch.

  “This morning.” She took another sip. “I was weak… so they abandoned… me.”

  “What about our crew?”

  The water seemed to be infusing her with strength, but she still looked like someone had beaten her with a hose. “They were all in PSE,” she said. “But Rene’s suit was almost dead. When it quits, he’ll be next.”

  Quinn pulled out one of the injection pens and jammed it against her leg. She made a little squeak as the medication shot into her system.

  “What’s that?” she asked. Her eyes rolled back in her head but then seemed to clear up.

  “It’s a vaso-regulator,” he explained. “It’ll get your blood moving in the right direction again.”

  “I can feel it,” she said, nodding.

  Making a decision, Ammo stood up. “Marti, bring the shuttle to our location and stay here with her. We’ve got plenty of open landing zone.”

  “Can’t let them… see the shuttle,” Sandi said, strength coming back to her voice.

  “Marti, ignore that. Just do it,” she said, glaring down at her. “Get her aboard and then keep it here. I think we’re catching up with them.”

  “I am en route now, ETA forty seconds,” it said.

  “We’ve been trying to slow the Ut’arans down,” she said. “I don’t know how long I’ve been here, a few hours maybe.”

  “When did they leave you?” he asked.