Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “No more than an hour after sunrise,” she said, reaching out for the waterbag.

  “Then they can’t be that far ahead of us,” Ammo said, feeling a shot of optimism feed her in an almost physical sense.

  A screeching chorus exploded from the jungle just before the shuttle shot over the edge of the trees and dropped like a stone toward the ground. Marti was standing in the open door and jumped out before the engines had completely shut down.

  “I will get her aboard and tend to her medical needs,” it said. “As I was on approach, I detected a very weak power signature approximately four and a half kilometers to the northwest. It may be from an exosuit.”

  “I think that’s the way they headed,” Sandi said as the automech bent over and scooped her up in its arms. “There’s a river about that far down the trail. The Cha’nee village is downstream from there. Mir’ah told us that’s where we were headed.”

  “How far away is this village?” Ammo followed Marti toward the shuttle.

  “From here I don’t know for sure. Twenty-five klick maybe. Another full day at the speed we were traveling,” she said. “I don’t think any of them have the power to make it that far though.”

  Quinn reached out and grabbed Ammo’s arm. “If they get that far, there’s no way we’ll be able to get them out.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  “What the hell is that?” Kaycee growled as she walked through the airlock and sidestepped to get around a huge piece of machinery they were anchoring to the center of the catwalk. It sat a few meters inside the cargo container on the ship end of the center catwalk.

  “It’s an insurance policy,” one of them said. He was wearing an engineering service patch on his coverall but was driving a heavy steel pin into the deck plating to hold the device in place.

  “It guarantees that the cargo maintains power until you arrive at the destination,” Parker said. He was supervising the installation.

  “It appears to be a power plant,” Marti said. Its Gendyne automech had stopped outside the airlock. It could not squeeze past the hardware without trampling the workers who were installing the gear, since they’d removed several of the modular deck plates to limit access.

  “That too,” he said. “It’s a three terawatt antimatter reactor.”

  “That is substantially higher output than is necessary to support the independent operation of the sleeper containers,” the AA said.

  Parker nodded. “It is.”

  Marti extended its sensor head up and around the unit. “It also appears to have substantial modifications to the original design.”

  “That is true too,” he said, crossing his arms and leaning back against the roll-along that they used to cart the reactor into place.

  Kaycee glared at him. “Why did you bring your own power plant? We’ve got the power hooked up to the container from our end.”

  “Do you know what a deadman switch is?” he asked.

  “A failsafe device used to provide a specific response to an undesirable change in situation,” Marti said.

  “Exactly.” He grinned in a way that sent a shiver down her spine. “In this case, we’ve modified the reactor to overload if you don’t deliver the cargo or try to dump the container before it reaches its destination.”

  “A three terawatt antimatter detonation would cause an explosion of 10,800 billion joules,” it said.

  “That sounds like a big number. What is that in human terms?” She knew she didn’t want to know, but she had to ask.

  “Approximately equivalent to two-and-a-half megatons of high explosive,” it said.

  “So, you’ve just mounted a bomb in the cargo container to destroy the evidence if I try to cross you.” She shrugged.

  He laughed. “And your ship with it.”

  “What triggers the overload condition?” Marti asked.

  The engineer stood up and wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of a sleeve. “Any fluctuation in the ground plane connection between your ship and the container. As long as you keep the power connected to your ship, you’ve got no worries.”

  “Change your mind and you can’t get far enough away before it goes off,” Parker added.

  “Get that out of here now.” She took an involuntary step back. “I didn’t agree to you putting a bomb on the ship.”

  “Nope. It’s already armed.” He reached out and patted the reactor affectionately. “Truth is, that it doesn’t matter what you agreed to. In case you didn’t notice, we do things my way.”

  “Once we deliver the slaves, how do we get rid of this… thing.” Her mind ran into an emotional wall and bounced to a stop.

  “My agent on the receiving end will disconnect it after the sleeper units are unloaded. Before that, trying to cut it lose from your grid would be bad.” He stood up straight and made sure she looked at him before he added, “If you stop somewhere else along the way, and then decide to go on to your destination, a second transition to cruise will also set it off.”

  She nodded. “That means we go straight to the delivery.” He was making sure they didn’t have a chance to roll over on him. If they didn’t show up, they couldn’t get the bomb out of the ship without his help, and they were dead.

  He smiled at her again. “On the plus side, once you get the load delivered, we’ll transfer the balance of your payment to your ship’s account.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Right after you arrived, we put a deposit for your return load into your account. You’ll get the rest when you get there,” he said. “We don’t want this to look like something unusual is going on. You know, we need a financial trail and all that.”

  “That also makes it look like we are willing participants in the whole thing,” Marti added.

  “You know for a freighter brain, you’re pretty smart,” Parker said, glancing over at the automech. “Now, if you’ll let us get on about our business, we’re ready to connect the cabinets. Once we finish that, we’ll load the real cargo and we can get you on your way.”

  “Not until you get my crew out of there,” she said.

  “Ah yes, of course. Once we get your crew back,” he said. “We’ve got about five hours of work if you don’t interrupt me again. If it goes longer than that, we won’t be able to get down to the surface under the cover of darkness. Dr. Ansari will never let me take a shuttle down if I can’t make a night landing. I’m sure you understand why that makes it imperative that you leave me the frak alone so I can get this done, yes?”

  “Fine,” she said, spinning around and pushing her way past the engineer and back to the ship.

  As soon as they’d closed the airlock, she turned to Marti and shook her head. “We have to figure out how we can disarm that thing as soon as they’re out of the container.”

  “I will research the possibilities,” it said. “However, we may need to accept that it could be impossible.”

  “I know,” she growled as the inner door opened. “Otherwise I’m tempted to set it off right where we sit and take Parker and the fucking mess right along with us.”

  “That would be undesirable,” it said, following her inside.

  “If we don’t get Ethan and the crew back…” She stopped herself short of letting the helplessness she felt push her over a line she knew she should never cross.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  “There’s the PSE,” Quinn said as they both dropped over the dirt ledge and down toward the river.

  Ammo pulled out her hand scanner and bending over it, opened the lid and tapped the screen. The jungle went insane above her, but she watched the readout for several seconds before she nodded and closed it down again. Eventually the screaming overhead died back down to its normal level of chaos.

  It was the source of the power signal. “It’s weak enough I’m surprised the shuttle sensors picked it up at all.”

  “I wonder if it’s Rene’s suit?” he said, walking over and picking up a piece of an arm shell. He held it up to his own a
rm to compare size and shrugged. The whole arm barely went from his elbow to the tip of his fingers.

  Joining him, she picked up another piece and checked it against her own anatomy. It was only a little smaller than her arm. “It looks about his size. Or Nuko’s,” she said. “But where’s the liner?”

  “If the power was dying, maybe he tried to go on without the exoshell,” he said dropping the piece back onto the pile.

  “Why would anyone keep just the liner on? If it was dead it’d just make it harder to walk wouldn’t it?” She pitched her piece down too.

  “I’ve never worn one, so I don’t know,” he said, walking up to the edge of the river and staring across at the far bank. “They keep the circulatory system working, so maybe it was still powered enough to help?”

  “It looks like they might have stopped here for a while and then gone into the river,” she said, pointing to some scuff marks in the mud near where he stood.

  “I wonder if it’s safe to swim?” He reached down and scooped up a handful of water and sniffed it. “Smells clean.”

  “If you say so,” she said. “I didn’t think water had a stink except if you had a bad recycler.”

  He nodded, looking back at the far side. “If they crossed here, we might have trouble tracking them. Especially if they went downstream.”

  “How would they get across?”

  He shrugged. “Swim.”

  “That assumes any of them know how to swim,” she pointed out.

  He shot her a strange expression. “Of course, they know how to swim. Who doesn’t?”

  She stared at him for several seconds before he realized why she’d asked. Most of them were born in space colonies. Even Mars had little enough water that swimming was a rare skill to have.

  He lowered his head and his shoulders sagged. When he turned back around to study the far bank again, Ammo realized he looked tired. Bone weary with a load of frustration piled on for good measure.

  “Maybe we need to take a break,” she said, walking up beside him. “We’re both fighting the gravity, and we haven’t slowed down or even eaten.”

  He shook his head and glanced up in the direction of the sun. “We’ve only got a couple more hours before the sun drops on us. We’ve got to find them before then.”

  He was right, but reality might crush out that possibility. It was hard to stay motivated when everything kept pulling them down, literally and figuratively. Time was running out and the dead exosuit they’d just discovered only drove that point deeper into their awareness.

  “You look around here and I’ll try to figure out if they crossed,” he said. “If I get lucky, I might be able to see where they climbed up on the other side.”

  “You’re going to swim over and look?” she asked. Obviously, he missed the hint that she couldn’t swim.

  He shook his head and pointed to a tangle of big tree branches that stuck up a dozen meters and overhung the river. “I’ll just climb up there and see if I can see anything. Maybe they had a raft or something.”

  “Yah, whatever that is,” she said with a sigh.

  Heading back over to where the PSE was sitting, she watched him grab a branch and pull himself up toward where he could see across the river. She was barely standing at this point and he still had the energy to climb.

  She knew it was emotional fatigue starting to tear her down, too. Nine hours of hiking at two-g was enough to kill anyone’s enthusiasm, but other than the small shot of hope they got when they found Sandi, there wasn’t much else to keep them motivated.

  She nudged the pile of exoshell parts with a toe and then paused. She looked at the two pieces that they’d picked up and using the indentations in the ground put them back in place. Whoever laid them here set the pieces in a pattern.

  An arrow.

  Pointing almost at where Quinn was climbing the branches.

  “Look sharp. These things are pointing in your direction,” she said, hollering up at him.

  “What?” He leaned around the side of the tree trunk to see what she was talking about.

  “Yah, right at you there.” She pointed at the exosuit and then swung her arm along the line of the arrow.

  He looked around and down at the base of the tree before he cocked his head to the side. “Is that vine tied to the tree or does it just look like it from here?”

  She couldn’t see which one he was talking about in the tangled underbrush. He’d eased himself back down to the ground and by the time she got to him, he was pulling it out of the water. “It looks like we’ve got something here,” he said.

  “Frak! It’s Rene,” she said as she recognized the limp form he was hauling up to the river bank. She ran out into the waist deep water and grabbed him under the arms to pull him in.

  He opened his eyes and blinked several times in surprise. “I didn’t expect to see you,” he whispered. “And maybe not so much of you either.”

  “You’re alive,” she said as she heaved them both back toward the shore.

  “I think so. Otherwise I have to say this isn’t quite what I expected the afterlife to look like.” He grinned and glanced pointedly at the decidedly female parts of her anatomy that hung close over his face.

  “Obviously, you’re hallucinating, so shut up and let us rescue you.”

  He nodded and closed his eyes while they hauled him the rest of the way out of the water.

  “Bring the shuttle. We’ve got Rene,” Quinn said. He untied the vine from around the engineer’s chest and helped roll him over onto his back.

  “Stand by. ETA ninety seconds,” Marti said.

  The utter shock as he opened his eyes again and looked up at Quinn made Ammo double over in laughter.

  “Yah, this is definitely not the right afterlife at all,” he said. “Why are you both naked?”

  “It was his idea,” she said, tilting her head at the handler. “It has something to do with hunting baggers with no clothes.”

  “Badgers,” he said as he knelt to untangle a collar of small branches that wrapped around Rene’s neck.

  “This has to be a hallucination,” Rene said.

  “We have that effect on people,” she said. “Sandi reacted almost the same way.”

  “You found her?” His face wrinkled up strangely. “We had to leave her this morning and she was in a lot worse shape than I am.”

  “She’s on the shuttle now,” Quinn said. He handed Ammo a waterbag.

  Rene nodded. “So, they let you two come along.”

  “Parker doesn’t know we’re here.” She tore the top off the water and handed it to him. Rene was in much better shape than Sandi, so he took it and sipped at it slowly.

  “He and Ansari insisted they had to wait until tonight to rescue you, and he wasn’t going to let us come along,” the handler said, his tone carrying a load of contempt as he spit out their names.

  Quinn handed Ammo one of their vaso-regulator doses and she slapped it against Rene’s leg. He grunted in surprise as the medication readjusted his circulatory pressure. Letting out a slow hiss he said, “Sandi would have been dead as soon as the sun went down. Me too probably. There are some big predators in the jungle.”

  “We know,” she said. “We found some of their handiwork this morning.”

  “Toby.”

  “Probably.” She glanced up as the sounds of animals rolled out of the jungle like a wave. “That’s your ride.”

  The shuttle arced out over the river and dropped toward the water before it pushed in under the canopy of trees to settle on the muddy bank.

  “Marti should be able to get you loaded,” Ammo said, standing up. “We need to keep moving.”

  “Which way did they go?” Quinn asked as he picked Rene up and handed him to the automech. “Did they cross the river?”

  “They went downstream on this side,” he said. “But before you go, you need to know there’s something going on.”

  “Yah, we know,” she said. “They’re slaving the natives.”


  “That explains why the one running things speaks our language,” he said. “They’re probably using her to harvest them.”

  “It also means they’ll be doubly dangerous,” Quinn said. “There’s no telling what knowledge they’ve uploaded to her.”

  “Uploaded?”

  “They’re putting implants into them and uploading things directly to their brains,” he said.

  “Mir’ah’s the one in charge,” Rene said. “She’s smart and ambitious, but she seems to be in awe of us. She calls us shiny.”

  “Shiny?”

  He nodded. “They can see in infrared and our exosuits give off heat. In the dark that makes us look like we glow. The reason she didn’t kill us with the others in the Rockpile is that we were suited up and she mistook us for someone she’d seen before. She called the other one Marat akUt’ar.”

  “It means shiny man,” Marti said.

  “She calls Ethan the Marat akEarth, and she seems to like him,” he said. “He’s been leaning into that to keep us alive.”

  “Anything else we need to know?” she asked.

  “Nighttime is when it gets dangerous out here.”

  “We figured that out already,” the handler said.

  “You need to watch out for the wakats,” he said. “They’re almost as smart as the natives and they seem like they have a common language. As far as I can tell they work like guards and they can move through the trees faster than you could possibly move on the ground.”

  “Marti warned us about them too,” she said. “What I’m more worried about is the ones that Parker has watching you. They’ve been keeping an eye on you all along.”

  “Keeping an eye on us?” Rene’s eyes flashed in pure rage.

  “He told Kaycee that they knew where you were all along, and that they had someone keeping an eye on you,” Ammo said. “I don’t know if it’s true or not, but we have to assume he still has people on the ground somewhere.”

  “The Windwalkers,” he hissed. “They’re the ones who provide protective escort to expedition teams. They’re good, and almost invisible.”

  “The Windwalkers had an entrance on the roof of the Rockpile,” Marti said. “When I was restoring power to the basecamp so I could access the language database, I determined that their entrance had not been forced, but was the point of access for the Ut’arans.”