Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  He raised an eyebrow at her revelation then frowned. “We can’t make this run without a doctor.”

  “I understand that,” she said. “Because of that, we’ve decided that none of our people should come aboard the Olympus Dawn for the remainder of the outbound leg. Perhaps, if we stay out of your air supply, it will reduce the friction.

  “And the distraction,” he said, instantly wishing he could reverse his mouth and take the words back.

  She winked at him. “No offense taken, Captain. I’ve been living with this problem for… a long time.”

  He nodded. “We’ve got a couple weeks until we pass Deep Three and we’ll see where we are at that point. I have to admit I’m tempted to turn around and take you back.” He held up his hands to stop her protest before it started. “I know I can’t do that, but the further into this run I get, the more I realize I don’t have the topography straight.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The outer edge of Coalition space came and went without notice. Territory in space was defined by arbitrary distances from known objects and wasn’t even worthy of note except that, as far as the records said, no human from Earth had ever traveled this far. Officially, they were just over halfway between home and nowhere.

  Because it was easier, Ethan decided to take the passive approach with Kaycee and leave her to her own space. She’d never asked to be put off the Dawn, so he’d never had to address the problem. Instead, he focused on the minutiae of running the ship and as many tri-vid stories as he could absorb without brain damage.

  Perhaps because, on the few occasions the doctor emerged from her quarters, she hadn’t run into any of the plussers, she seemed to be simmering down from a raging boil. She’d been doing her job with a minimal amount of interaction, and Ethan assumed that she’d also taken in a mind-numbing amount of tri-vids. Maybe it had been therapeutic for her too.

  Quinn had taken to training his handlers daily. The ship’s gym was too small for physical combat training, so it had become a bit of a spectator sport to watch them throwing each other around the lounge. On the occasions where Ammo joined them for some physical exertion, Kaycee still stayed with her post as athletic team medic. Often their training passed the point of casual chaos and sprains, bruises, and even an occasional broken bone punctuated what they apparently thought of as a general good time.

  The captain had watched them demolish the deck in pure glee for several hours, but when they asked him if he wanted to dance, he had politely declined, choosing instead to hold down the ConDeck so Ammo could go play.

  As he settled in with the local newswave from Tharsis Keep on a thinpad in his lap, Rene came in and plopped down behind him at the engineering station. “I was going to eat something, but the gladiators were tearing up the furniture in the lounge.”

  “Yah they outgrew the gym,” Ethan said, not looking up.

  “I didn’t dare cross the deck to the galley,” the engineer said. “It would have been the end of me if I’d gotten caught in the crossfire.”

  “Quinn asked me if they could use stunners to train. I didn’t know they’d done it yet.”

  “Nojo?”

  The captain looked up and winked. “The blood sport seems to be something they’re all enjoying though.”

  “Even Kaycee.”

  He grinned. “I noticed. She smiled once or twice. Even when it was Ammo kicking some handler butt.”

  “I didn’t know she was such a contender. She’s taught some of the temps a trick or two.”

  “Wedgie Jitsu.” Ethan leaned back in his chair and yawned. Or maybe there’s something else to it?

  “What?”

  He shook his head. “Long story. Just never let her get a hand on your underwear.”

  His commlink chirped. “Captain Walker?” It was Kai Wentworth. He hadn’t spoken more than a few words to her since she’d put herself and her people into exile. Her voice sounded stressed.

  “Go ahead,” he said, setting his feet back on the deck and leaning forward.

  “We’ve got a problem with a power coupling to our life-support system.”

  He glanced at Rene and nodded. “What kind of problem?”

  “It’s something that my chief engineer says he can’t fix. At least not before we start having systemic failures.”

  “I can come take a look,” Rene said, jumping in on the comm.

  “What’s the status of your system?” the captain asked, checking the shipwide system screen for clues.

  “We’re on emergency backups,” her engineer said. “Our primary power distribution node is offline, and the secondaries aren’t designed to handle full power and the sleeper cabinets at the same time.”

  “Can we shunt them back to ship power?” Ethan asked.

  Rene shook his head and then shrugged. “It’ll buy some time, but we need to get them back on their mains or it’s only a short-term fix.”

  “Define short term?”

  “Hours maybe,” Kai’s engineer said.

  “Feed them what we can, and you go see if you can help make repairs.”

  “Stand by to transfer power, and we’ll kick on the internal interconnects,” Rene said.

  “We’re up,” her engineer sounded relieved as Rene punched in the commands to put their life support back on the Dawn’s power grid.

  “That should hold you for the time being,” Ethan said.

  “Thank you, Captain. And thanks to your engineer too. Hopefully, this won’t be a major ordeal to work around.” She cut the commlink from her end.

  “I’m on it,” Rene said, bouncing up and heading for the door. Boredom was the bane of a good ship’s engineer, and he looked positively ecstatic to have a problem to deal with.

  Ethan pitched the thinpad to the side and looked out at the starfield with the sensor display superimposed over it. There were no lines visible anywhere. He drummed his fingers on the edge of his console and chewed on his lower lip while he ground through their options. “Marti, what’s our timeframe back to the nearest coalition facility? If it comes down to that.”

  “Forty-one days, seven hours, and six minutes to Starlight Colony,” it said.

  “That’s nogo,” he said. “Unless they’ve reopened things there and didn’t tell anyone.”

  “There are abandoned facilities in Kepler 186, however the nearest operational center is Cygnus Deep Three. It is thirty-six hours further. We are nine days closer to our destination than we are to help.”

  “If we can’t get them back up, how long do they have?”

  “No more than thirteen hours.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Boss, we’ve got a problem,” Rene said as his face appeared over the internal comm. We need to talk. He looked a bit out of focus and sweaty, like he’d been working too hard, or worked over by someone, but the engineer’s tone carried a gravity that set Ethan’s teeth on edge.

  “Alright, what’s swinging?” He pushed back in his seat, locking his arms against the edge of the console.

  “In your office. I’m bringing Kai with me.”

  Kai and her pheromones in the closet-sized space of his office wasn’t a good idea. He was about to suggest another venue, but Rene added, “You might want to have Quinn join us.”

  “Quinn?”

  He nodded. “This might be a security problem.”

  “Understood. Bring her up,” he said, cutting the comm. He didn’t understand at all, but he knew if it was enough of a situation to set off his engineer, he should just go with it for now.

  “Quinn, I need you to report to my office,” he said, tapping in to his collarcomm.

  “Yah, Boss, we just finished our training session. Let me grab a shower and I’ll be right there.”

  “Skip it,” Ethan said.

  “You sure? I stink like a pig in heat.”

  “I’m not sure what that smells like, but it doesn’t matter. Make feet and I’ll turn up the ventilators.”

  “It’s your sinuses,”
the handler said, tapping out of the link from his end.

  Ethan stood up and glanced again at the sensor image. So far from nowhere.

  He got into his office just before Quinn got there. The handler was naked from the waist up and shiny with a heavy layer of perspiration. It ran in rivulets down the massive plates of muscle that covered his chest. The captain had dialed up the ventilators as a defense against Kai’s fog bank, but as he watched the handler dripping sweat, he was relieved that he’d done it preemptively.

  “Good workout?”

  “Yah.” He nodded, looking concerned about the possibility of offending. He stood as far into the corner of the room as he could get and ran a small towel over his body to try to staunch the rivers that drained from him. “So, what’s swinging?”

  Ethan shrugged. “We had a power failure in the habitat container and Rene went down to check it out. He’s on his way up with Kai, and he asked for you to be here.”

  “What happened?” He looked around self-consciously. He seemed embarrassed that the client was coming, too.

  “I don’t know yet.” The handler’s sudden shyness surprised him. Maybe there’s more to it than that, he realized. Perhaps plusser pheromones didn’t care about gender orientation.

  The door opened and Kai came through first, gasping as she took in the full magnitude of Quinn’s well displayed body. He slid back against the bulkhead and looked down, blushing.

  “Oh my, you are a large one, aren’t you?” she said, recovering her composure faster than the handler.

  “You like my wall art?” Ethan asked, enjoying the momentary upper hand he had as their hormones fought to the death. “I figured it might give me a fighting chance.”

  She laughed and took a seat across from his desk. Ripping his eyes away from her, he glanced over at Rene who had followed her in. His expression dashed any hope of keeping things light.

  “What have we got?”

  “It will take some major repairs to bring their life support back to full power. Their primary interlink is blown. The sleeper chambers are all offline and on battery backup.”

  How long will they hold?

  He shook his head. “Four hours. Maybe less.”

  “Do we have parts to make repairs?”

  “The problem is their habitat’s designed as a fixed base.” He pulled out a thinpad and opened a schematic of their system. He set it on Ethan’s desk and leaned forward to point at the diagram as he explained. “The primary power conduits that connect to the life-support are much larger than the ones we use anywhere except in our drive systems. And those are completely different in how they hook up so I can’t even modify them to make them work.”

  He glanced at Kai. “You have to have replacement parts?”

  “We do. We also have a commercial scale printer.”

  “It’s all stowed in pieces,” Rene said. “Unless we want to stop and unload in open space, we can’t get to where their spare parts are containered.”

  “It would take a day or two in EVA suits to get to them,” she said.

  “And at least that long to get it all repacked,” Quinn added. “And sitting still we’d look like the free food table at a Sunday church social.”

  Ethan pushed himself back from his desk and would have paced, except that the room was crowded and the clouds of hormones in the air were almost enough to make him dizzy. Instead he drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “So, what are our options? Do we need to turn around?”

  “Marti said we’re closer to our destination now, and once we can offload the containers, accessing the parts will be easy.” Rene said.

  “It would only take a matter of a few hours to get everything back to operational, once we have solid ground under us,” she added.

  “How do we keep everybody alive until we get there?” he asked. He’d anticipated this possibility already, but he hadn’t come up with an answer he liked. He was sure he wouldn’t like anything they had to suggest either.

  “The life-support systems on the Dawn could support about a third of the people they’ve got in there and we could hot bunk in the staterooms to get the bodies aboard,” the engineer said.

  “If we can move another third across to the Elysium Sun—”

  “Nuko’s license won’t let her carry human livery,” Ethan said, shaking his head. He was sure he’d covered that with her in their first conversation.

  “In an emergency it wouldn’t matter,” Rene said. “Rescue operations are exempted from those limitations.”

  “This would easily qualify,” the handler pointed out. “Plus, there’s nobody out here to pull an inspection and catch her with passengers aboard. As long as we don’t have to call for help, then there’s no chance of getting smacked.”

  “Alright, but that still leaves us way short of an air supply,” the captain pointed out. “Where do we put the other third of them?”

  “We can rig one of our smaller couplings to run their life-support at minimal capacity. Their reactor is still putting out plenty of power, it just can’t feed it to their internal grid.”

  “If we do this, how long will it take?”

  “We have no choice,” Kai said. “Even if we turn around, we won’t make it back to anywhere we can get help before…”

  Ethan nodded. He knew she was right, but he had to make sure, before he signed off on it.

  “I can get it installed in a few hours with some help,” Rene said. “She’s got some slick engineers in those sleeper pods, so it should swing easy once we wake them up.”

  “You can’t leave them asleep?”

  “Once a pod goes onto backup power it autostarts the wake-up process,” she said. “At this point we need to bring them all the way up first. Then if we have to, we might be able to put some of them back under. Unfortunately, it takes almost a week to get someone cryo-prepped.”

  “Frak,” Ethan hissed. He didn’t like the idea of a whole ship full of hormone machines breathing his air. It was distracting enough with only a few of them in the ship at a time.

  “Then let’s make it happen.” When neither of them jumped up to move, he raised an eyebrow. “Something else?”

  Rene nodded, glancing at Quinn. “We also have one other thing we need to talk about. It’s the reason I thought we’d be smart to bring him in.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The damage to the conduit was sabotage,” he said. “It had to be someone who knew exactly where to hit too.”

  “One of your people?” He looked at Kai and frowned.

  She shook her head, tapping a finger on the side of her temple. “It wasn’t one of mine.”

  “How do you know that?” the handler asked.

  “She knows,” the captain said, noticing that Rene had raised a skeptical eyebrow. “I’ll explain that later.”

  Quinn looked confused but accepted Ethan’s answer without question. “If it wasn’t one of hers, then who else could it be?”

  “We’ve only got two people out here that would know enough about life support to pull it off. And one of them is sitting here in the room with us.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Nuko sat on the edge of her bed staring at the commscreen in her room. Even though she was the captain of her own ship, she still kept second watch so she could back Ethan up if they needed to make a command decision for both ships at any time.

  She’d been about to get up anyway when he commed to let her know they would have to drop out of cruise and transfer passengers over to the Sun. She’d tried to protest, but because it was an emergency, there wasn’t much she could do except nod and agree.

  She wasn’t happy, but it had to be done.

  “Sunny, is Charleigh on the ConDeck?”

  “She is not, Captain,” the ship’s AA said. “Should I summon her?”

  “Tell her to report to the shuttle bay. As soon as we drop to sublight, she’s going to make the shuttle runs to bring the passengers over. I’ll take the deck and she gets to
drive the bus.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” it said.

  Reaching over to her bedside table, she picked up her collarcomm and tapped into it. “Angel, if you’re not tied up, I need you to report to the ConDeck.”

  “I’m always on the outer side of the rope,” she said.

  “I figured you were.” She smiled despite not liking the orders she was going to have to give the handler. “I’m on my way there myself. Five minutes.”

  Calling for the lights, she checked the chrono. No chance she might slip back into the rack for a couple bonus hours, so she pulled on a thinskin and her coverall jumpsuit.

  When she got to the ConDeck, Angel sat in the copilot seat with her feet up and her hands behind her head. She looked like she’d been working out, but it was hard to tell. She always looked that way lately. Although she’d never admit to it, Nuko guessed that she was trying to match Quinn’s level of physical intensity.

  “What’s up, Boss?” The handler asked as she swung her feet out of the way so the captain could take her seat.

  “We’re dropping out of cruise.”

  “Isn’t it early?” she asked. They had a schedule for transferring consumables between the ships from the provisioning container they were towing, and Angel knew they were only supposed to be down twice all the way out. They’d made one transfer just after leaving Coalition Territory and the next one wasn’t for a couple weeks. At least according to the plan.

  Nuko leaned forward and logged in to her console. “Yah they’ve had a problem on the Dawn, and we’ll be bringing sixty-three passengers over.”

  “What the frak? That’s almost all of them.” Angel’s alert status ticked up a point or two.

  “Not anymore. The sleeper cabinets are offline so everybody’s awake.”

  “What happened?”

  “They slagged a power connect in the habitat container and they had to bring everyone out.”

  “That must be serious,” the handler said. “Does this mean we’re going back?”

  She shook her head. “We’re closer to the far end of the run already.”