Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “But there’s nothing there.”

  “They have spare parts to make repairs, but they’re packed stupid deep in the boxes.”

  Angel shook her head and sighed. “Of course, they are.”

  “Once we get them deployed, it won’t be an issue to repair, but Ethan doesn’t want to do an EVA offload to get to what they need. He doesn’t want us hanging our eggs out in the open while we get the parts dug out.”

  “Can’t say that would make me fuzzy either,” she agreed. Which wasn’t a surprise since she and Quinn would be the ones who most of the loading work would fall on. They were cargo handlers first. Security was their alternate job description.

  “It just means we’re going to hot-bunk it for about a month,” Nuko said. “We’ve got twenty staterooms, so it’s only three per room.”

  “And three on the crew deck in the empty quarters there?” Angel said. “Who gets access to our deck?”

  “We’ll figure that out. We can still lock out the Command Deck access.” The upper two floors of the ship were private space for the crew and giving guests access was uncomfortable.

  The handler frowned but nodded. “If we’re only getting sixty-three, they’re keeping most of them over there aren’t they?”

  “Yah, 130 or so,” she said. “Rene says he can rig something to swing enough air for everybody left, but it was a real hard down.”

  “What caused it?”

  Nuko let out a slow hiss of air before she looked up and made sure she had Angel’s full attention. “Sabotage.”

  The handler sat forward. Her face went from standby alert to full on battle stations. “Do they know who did it?”

  “There’s only one suspect,” she said. “Elias.”

  She shook her head. “We’re at cruise. You can’t take a shuttle and jump between two ships traveling faster than light.”

  “Yah, that’s what I said, too.” Nuko shrugged.

  “The boss has blown a chip.”

  “Maybe, but he pointed out that Elias is an STI trained engineer and who knows what kind of tech voodoo he might have.”

  Angel shook her head again. Slower and more firmly. “I’m thinking one of Wentworth’s people did it.”

  “I think you’re probably right, but Ethan wants us to keep an extra close eye on Elias until we make delivery.”

  “You know he’ll know we’re watching him,” the handler said. “Pruitt’s a smart guy.”

  The alert signal that the Olympus Dawn was ready to drop out of cruise caught her eye. She held up her finger and tapped into the shipwide comm. “All hands prepare for transition to sublight.”

  “Of course, if we’re bringing a bunch of extra bodies over, we can tell him about the sabotage and use that as an excuse to post a watch in engineering,” Angel suggested. “A few carefully placed eyes might go unnoticed since we’ll need to keep things more secure.”

  “I don’t like it on general principle,” Nuko said. “We have to depend on each other out here and not being able to trust my engineer is an ugly thing to think about.”

  “But the boss might be right. Elias did it to us before,” the handler said, her eyes flashing as she thought about their history together. “It makes sense to cover our asses.”

  “Yah, well that’s not the worst of it,” she said, sliding her hands over the console and bringing them out of cruise.

  “Nojo? There’s more?”

  “Ever hear of a plusser?”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “What the hell are you doing, Ethan?” Kaycee said as she stood in the doorway to the MedBay and watched the chaos in the lounge. He’d walked up beside her before she noticed him.

  He assumed it was at least in part because of the cloud that hung thick in the air. With every breath he took he struggled with it more, and as he looked across the room, he realized that he wasn’t alone. All of his handlers seemed to be walking around in a permanent state of funk.

  “We have no choice. Their life support went down, and we can’t make repairs.”

  She nodded. “I assume this means we’re turning around?” she asked, looking like she was struggling to swallow a smile although her eyes broadcast nothing but anger. Or maybe contempt.

  “No. As soon as we get enough of them moved over to the Sun, we’re going on.”

  “Your stubbornness does get you in trouble, you know.” She shut off the light and closed the door to the MedBay. “I am assuming you have a reason for not heading home.”

  “We’re closer to the far end now. It doesn’t make sense to go back.”

  “How much longer?” She headed across the lounge toward the lift and he dropped into step with her.

  “Thirty-two days, give or take.”

  “A month,” she whispered, looking down at the deck and trying to avoid getting too close to anyone. She was not happy, but he didn’t expect she would be.

  He opened the gate and held it for her then stepped in behind her. “I do have to tell you it might be longer, if it happens again.”

  “What happens?” She looked up at him like she was trying to tear an answer out of him.

  “It was sabotage,” he said. He stared at her and waited for a response. Anything that might give him a clue about what she might know.

  “Sabotage?” Only an eyebrow lift, which left her reaction inconclusive.

  Damn it! He was going to have to be more direct. He hauled in a deep breath and let it out. The lift stopped on the crew deck, but he held the gate closed. “I have to ask you square on… was it Elias?”

  This time he got a reaction. Pure anger. “He’s on the other ship,” she said, holding her voice dead flat. Ethan could tell she was struggling not to lash out at him.

  “He’s the only one other than Rene with the skills,” he said.

  “That’s not true and you frakking well know that,” she hissed as her rage started to overwhelm her voice. “They have to have a dozen engineers on their crew. Any of them could have done it.”

  “They do, but all of them were in cabinets,” he said. “And the one that wasn’t, was in Kai’s presence when it happened.”

  “That only leaves Elias and Rene and well I know it wasn’t—”

  “Why do you always come at us?” She shoved the lift gate open on the crewdeck and pushed him out of the way. “Don’t you trust us? Trust me? For frak sake, Ethan I’ve pulled your ass out of shit so deep you would be dead if it wasn’t for me. Especially last time. I cannot believe you still disrespect me this much. We’ve got a problem.”

  “You’re right, we do.” He followed her toward her quarters. Toward the end of the corridor, a door opened and then shut. Whoever it was seemed to realize it might be better to hide until the storm blew past. “You don’t talk to me, you just attack. You start out with instant attitude, and no matter what sets it off you aim it at me. If you brought things to me without a full barrage of artillery to pound me down, it would be a damned sight easier to deal with you.”

  He grabbed her arm and spun her around to face him, pinning her to the wall beside her door. He would not let this one go. Even if it meant they were cashiering her out when they got back to coalition space.

  She laughed.

  He raised an eyebrow and turned loose of her arm. It wasn’t the reaction he expected. “What’s funny?”

  “Maybe we need some marriage therapy,” she said, almost giggling.

  “Maybe,” he said, grinning despite his anger. “But damn, we have to figure out how to get through this, and not go through it at each other’s throats.”

  “I can agree with that, but it will get harder to think straight.”

  He nodded, taking a step back. He looked down and took a deep breath to try to get his boiling rage under control. It didn’t help, and he realized that it might have made it worse, so he blew it back out through clenched teeth and just swallowed all of it he could.

  “I’ve never been bottled up with a shipload of them,” she said. She opened h
er door and stepped through, gesturing for him to follow. “Unless the recyclers are a lot better than they used to be, the pheromone fog will make everybody crazy before we get there.”

  He nodded. She was probably right.

  “You know it’s a defense they engineered into them,” she said, slipping across the room and settling onto her sofa. She didn’t call for the lights and when the door closed, the room was almost totally dark.

  Ethan stood just inside her quarters. He only knew where she was by the sound of her voice. “Kai said it was an accident of the genetic augmentation process.”

  “It’s probably a product of how they do the genetic resequencing, but I don’t know that they’ve ever tried to fix it. All augments have it regardless of their enhancements, but some of them are more noticeable than others. In fact, that was how I knew Kai was one.”

  His eyes began to adjust to the blackness, and he could almost see her silhouette against the faint starlight filtering in from above her bed in the other room. “You think it’s a defensive augmentation they build for?”

  “It tends to keep everyone around them off-balance,” she said. “Although to be honest, it might serve as part of a selection process. Assuming an intelligent design behind our basic genetic code, a superior mutation might result in a stronger sex drive. That would inherently increase the chances that desirable dominant characteristics breed through. Specific pheromones could serve to push our animal nature so that they drive us to find others with similar superior traits.”

  “All I know is that my hormones get trampled to stupidity whenever Kai walks in the room,” he confessed.

  “Mine too,” she whispered. She shifted again, and he struggled to track her position.

  “What about STIFs? Do they have a similar problem?”

  She sat for several seconds and although he still felt her, he wasn’t sure she hadn’t left the room. She cleared her throat sounding nervous. “Uhm… it does show up in proxy chamber modifications, but since the process is less coarse, the effect isn’t as noticeable.”

  “That explains a lot about you, doesn’t it?”

  She let the silence hang again but didn’t deny it.

  “Unfortunately, it also means that I’m particularly tuned to their… chemistry,” she said.

  He could tell she stood up and was moving around the room. Her footfalls on the padded floor were almost impossible to track with any precision. It had the effect of making him decidedly uncomfortable. “Does it cause this kind of reaction in them too?” he asked, leaning back against the door jamb and trying to keep his mind focused.

  “That’s one reason they tend to not live in their own communities,” she said from somewhere in the middle of the room. “The registered ones are usually working for the Institute, and we learned a long time ago to keep them separated.”

  “How do they concentrate on anything at all?”

  “Other than sex? I don’t know,” she whispered. She was a lot closer to him now, and he slid his hand along the door to make sure he knew where the lock plate was. It was ridiculous to feel this uncomfortable with her. But even in the dark he knew how beautiful she was, and for some reason his mind felt the need to keep that thought in the front of his brain.

  Wait! Stop it! he thought, jerking himself back from a wave of near panic that threatened to overwhelm his mind.

  He felt her turn away. He couldn’t see her, but he knew she spun toward the far door. The air shifted in the room like a physical presence.

  “Have you thought to ask Kai if she knows who did it? She’s a telepath. It would be hard to keep a secret from her,” she said. Her voice sounded like she’d dropped a steel wall of professional detachment between them.

  “She said she didn’t,” he said, letting out a slow sigh.

  “And you believe her?”

  She was clear across the room, but he could still feel her presence like she was standing next to him. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ve been modified. Aren’t you telepathic too?”

  “It doesn’t work that way for someone who’s had synaptic pathway augmentation done in a proxy chamber.”

  “You’ve mentioned a proxy chamber twice now. What is that?”

  “It’s too complex to explain,” she said. “It’s the tool the Institute uses to make modifications to allow us to use Shan Takhu technology.”

  “To make you telepathic?”

  “My abilities only work with STI equipment,” she said. “You don’t have to worry. I can’t read your mind.”

  But that was exactly what he was thinking, so it didn’t help that she denied it.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Ethan stood in the door to Nuko’s quarters watching as Kai dropped her small bag of possessions on the sofa and looked around. Nuko was still his first officer and once they got back, if she didn’t take the captain position of the Elysium Sun permanently, these quarters would be hers again. For now, they sat empty and there was no point in leaving them that way for the rest of the trip.

  “Thank you for this Captain,” Kai said. “These are more than adequate. Luxurious in fact. Freighter accommodations have come a long way since the first time I hopped one.” Her eyes flashed as she seemed to remember a story long in her past.

  “The Clydesdale Class ships are a lot more Spartan,” he said. The Clydesdale had been the mainline freighter for over fifty years and wasn’t designed for passengers. At least not ones you wanted to impress.

  “And those were better than a Goliath,” she said, laughing.

  There hadn’t been a Goliath in service in seventy years. And they never operated outside of Zone One since they didn’t have the power to be refitted with drive coils. He’d seen one in a ship salvage yard once.

  “Where’d you see one of those?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I think it was at Tsiolkovskiy Freeport.”

  He nodded. They used to fly Goliaths on the Freeport to Lagrange Station runs in the Earth system, but not in his lifetime. She couldn’t be that old. Could she? He let it drop without asking.

  “These quarters belong to my first officer, but since she’s mastering the Sun, she doesn’t need them until we get home. She said she didn’t mind you using them for the rest of the trip.

  “I will make sure to thank her next time I see her,” she said. “That’s very generous.”

  “I explained to her that I wanted to have you on the crewdeck so I can have access to you,” he said. “The pheromones are more intense on the lower decks.”

  She nodded. “I wish it wasn’t such a problem for you.”

  He looked down. When she smiled, or they made eye contact it got hard for him. Almost literally. “We’ll make it through.”

  “I know it can be a challenge sometimes. Especially in confined spaces or close proximity.”

  “It is disconcerting,” he agreed. “Can I ask? How do you deal with it? It has to have the same effect on you doesn’t it?”

  “Even more so,” she said. She sat down in the chair in front of the console. “Honestly, we have a lot of sex and then get on with life when we’re done.”

  He blinked, several times. The image of superhumans being sex crazed maniacs was both intriguing and horrifying to him. He was by no means repressed in that regard, but the whole concept was just too intense for him to absorb. At least while he was in public.

  He stood there for several seconds and then realized that he should sit down to keep from embarrassing himself.

  “Sorry,” she said as he struggled to position himself in the chair across from her. At least the table provided him some cover. “Different people have different ways of working through it. I think your chief handler is burning through it with extra intense workouts. That’s a pretty common response too. Unfortunately, it might kick his hormones into overdrive since exercise tends to do that too.”

  “Like I said, we’ll get through it.”

  “What about your doctor? Won’t my presence on the crewdeck m
ake it tougher for her?”

  “Probably, but she and I talked and have reached an understanding. When we get back to Coalition space, we’re getting marriage counseling.”

  She raised an eyebrow and then grinned at his joke.

  “I think she plans to spend as much of her time as she can in her quarters. It’s still on the same recyclers as the rest of the ship, but she said she’ll burn incense or something to cope.”

  “I’ll do my best to make sure we don’t cross paths in the corridor too,” she offered.

  “That might help, but I need you both to do your jobs,” he said.

  “She’s part of your crew, but what do you see me doing?” She leaned back a bit.

  “I’ll want you to keep your people from turning the lower decks into an orgy pit, but I need you to work with me to get to the bottom of this. We have to figure out who did it.”

  “I thought you suspected your other ship’s engineer was the only one with the qualifications to do it?” she said, cocking her head to the side and studying his face. “But you don’t think so now, do you?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, shaking his head. “I do know that I need to be, before I can do anything.”

  She held up a finger. “You want to ask me to get you that answer, don’t you?”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Your face told me you don’t want to ask me to look, but you have to know.”

  “I’m in a difficult position here,” he said, looking down at the backs of his hands and sighing. “Kaycee suggested I approach you and ask you to do it.”

  “Which says she has nothing to hide,” she said.

  “And that she believes Elias isn’t responsible either,” he added. “So, can you do it?”

  “I can’t,” she said. Her face flashed between sadness and maybe a bit of anger. “Before I say that I have people that can do it, let me explain why we won’t… except under exceptional circumstances.”

  “I’d say this might qualify,” he said, surprised she’d not be more willing to do it.

  “That’s subject to perspective,” she said, leaning forward and putting her hands flat on the table. “Just because one person may have the physical strength to overpower another, it doesn’t give that person the right to force intimacy on someone else, does it?”