Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “Ethan?” Someone hollered from the shore. It was Nuko, or Ammo. He couldn’t tell. He rolled off the raft and slipped into the water, dropping toward the bottom.

  Yet another thing that was different. He’d learned to swim.

  Why would anyone who lived in space need to know how to swim? he wondered as he luxuriated in the warm water slipping over his naked skin. It was a sensual experience, and almost enough to distract him. If only he could breathe in the depths and never have to come up into the real world again. But his lungs required air.

  He pulled hard against the water and breached the surface with a powerful lunge. He felt alive despite the strangeness of life.

  Below him, the snakefish turned back in his direction and he reached out as it slid against him, brushing his hand… no, his Urah Un… against it.

  For a brief instant he knew the sensation of its heart beating, and what it was to fly through a thick, liquid sky. To breathe water, and to share life with a million other species, including the feeble creature that just now reached out to it. Then it darted away, breaking the connection and heading back toward the bottom and the deeper world farther from shore.

  He longed to follow it.

  He smiled wistfully, bringing his head above water and gulping in a lungful of human air before he kicked off toward the opalescent beach.

  Different isn’t all that bad, he decided.

  Walking up onto the sand, he took the towel Nuko held out to him. “You’ve taken to the water like a natural,” she said, watching as he dried his body. His first officer had no clue what had changed in him, but she didn’t seem to mind.

  “It feels so alive,” he said, shrugging. She was staring at him and he winked. It didn’t bother him for her to be so openly scanning his body. He’d become accustomed to the feel of the air across his skin. Even parts of it that seldom saw light. Especially sunlight.

  “You might want to put on some UV-block.” She glanced down below his waist and grinned. “I doubt you want to sunburn that.”

  “I’m done out here anyway,” he said, sitting down to dry his legs and feet.

  “You really are much more relaxed,” she said.

  He laughed. If only she knew. He was anything but relaxed. It was just simpler to keep the little self-doubts from getting in the way than it used to be. The trivial things were easy to let go of, since he saw the world much more clearly now.

  He turned his mind away from the darkness inside and leaned back for a minute. Closing his eyes, he focused on the sand under his feet. The individual grains were sharp, but he knew the small edges were trivial too. He could walk across it and stay on top of it. He chose to not let the microscopic cuts tear him down and hold him rooted in place.

  “What did you need?” he asked, opening his eyes. She was still staring at him.

  “You are different,” she said.

  “Kaycee and Ammo have said that to me every day since we got here.” He shrugged. “I’m sure you didn’t come all the way out here to reinforce their opinions.”

  She shook her head. “I came to let you know that Charleigh and I want to take an underwater safari to the Altean Caverns. I invited Kaycee to come along and chaperone.”

  “Another safari? I figured after the last one you’d have had your fill of adventure in the wild.”

  “Light gravity and no exosuits,” she said.

  He laughed. “You and Charleigh seem to be becoming quite the item,” he said, raising an eyebrow. Charleigh Shepard had been Nuko’s first officer on the Elysium Sun and when they lost that ship, it was just easier to bring her into his crew. At least until insurance paid off the Elysium Sun and they bought a replacement.

  “It’s purely recreational,” she said.

  “If it makes you happy then that’s fuzzy for me,” he said. “I think it will do the doctor some good to get away too, even if it means the three of you might need to get a bigger bedroom.”

  Nuko blushed. He knew it was bad enough that he was right about her and their new pilot, but the thought of adding Kaycee into the mix obviously set her off in a visible way. “Stop it. You’re so bad,” she said. “But I’m worried about Kaycee. She’s been moping around and pretending to enjoy herself. But I know she’s not.”

  “She’s worried about me I think,” he said. “I keep telling her I’ll be fine. I just need to adjust.”

  “She hasn’t told me, what happened to you?”

  “Kaycee calls it Traumatic Stress Deformation. She says it’s from losing the Elysium Sun, and then almost losing you, too,” he said, taking the official line rather than telling her the truth. The less she knew…

  “I’ve heard of that,” Nuko said. “Is it serious?”

  He shook his head. “It’s nothing I can’t live with. It just means my brain is rewiring itself around an area of emotional burn out. I honestly feel better now than I have in years,” he said, holding his arms out and grinning.

  She looked down at him pointedly and laughed. “I can tell. You look better too.”

  He would have blushed, but he recognized that she was probably picking up on his pheromones. He didn’t know if he’d started kicking them out with his new circuitry, but he felt more alive in that way too.

  “When will you be back?” he asked, putting the conversation back on track with intent.

  “Three days,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to spec it out with you first. I don’t know when you’re thinking about jumping back in the seat and getting some black under us again.”

  “Not before then,” he said, standing up and flinging the towel over his shoulder. He turned toward the cabanas up along the tree line. “Nothing could convince me we need to leave before then.”

  But nothing could make him want to stay either.

  Chapter Three

  Tiamorra Rayce considered herself sane, for the most part. She tagged along with the two handlers from the Olympus Dawn to keep them out of trouble. Or more to the point, to keep them from dying as they both tried to prove to the other that they had less fear of leaving the mortal coil.

  “Quintan Primm, are you really going to do this?” She tried to put on her best ‘mother’s voice’ but she had trouble even imagining what it must have been like as a parent raising him.

  “Yah, why not?” he shrugged and sat down on the observation deck of the space elevator landing. He looked out of place, not just because he was a handler rubbing elbows with the financially elite, but because his elbows would have hit most of the other patrons somewhere near their earlobes.

  “Flaming reentry in a space suit. That’s even a bit much for Angel,” she said. “Where is she by the way?”

  “She’ll be here,” he said. “It’s safe. They give you a heat shield and most of the plasma stays far enough away that you barely feel it.”

  She raised both eyebrows and shook her head for good measure.

  “I did it in a shuttle with you,” he reminded her. “This is just a little more… intimate.”

  “If I remember right, you nearly vented acid over that. Hurling in a space suit is a lot worse than in the shuttle. You were green for hours. I know because you were naked after that… and still green.”

  He laughed and several of the other people in the lounge glanced at him. It was strange to hear a mountain make that particular sound. “That was more those hairy monkey-spider things and you know it. And my green was better than your red.”

  Ammo made an obscene gesture. She hadn’t been embarrassed. She’d just resisted the idea of tracking the crew through a hostile jungle… naked. “I’m beginning to see a pattern here. You like dragging people along on your insanity. It’s like a twisted crusade isn’t it?”

  “Mostly it was because you were driving,” he said.

  She dropped one eyebrow and launched her best hairy eyeball in his direction.

  “Not because it was your driving. But because I wasn’t driving. You know, if I could have controlled it, I’d have kept lunch down wi
thout a problem.”

  “You don’t have a pilot’s license,” she said. “If you were driving, we’d have been dead.”

  “But I wouldn’t have nearly puked.”

  She smacked herself in the head with her palm several times. When she opened her eyes, Angel was standing over her watching her like she’d lost her mind. “Angel would you tell this dimflatch he’s crazy?”

  “Did you get the tickets?” he asked, looking at the other handler and grinning as she nodded.

  “We need to be boots-up on the launch deck in about eight minutes. We’re on the list to board already,” she said, smiling at Ammo’s obvious distress. Angelique Wolfe was a two-meter Amazon warrior herself, which made her feigned innocence ridiculous, except when she was sitting somewhere close to Quinn.

  “You’re really going to do this? With no special training? Both of you?”

  “It’s safe,” Angel said with a shrug as she sat down.

  Ammo looked at Marti and shook her head. “Would you please explain it to them? Gravity always wins.”

  “Gravity only wins sometimes,” Marti said as its Humanform automech smiled and shrugged. “In fact, the survival rate for this activity is over ninety-nine percent.”

  “That means for every 100 people that do this, one dies,” she said.

  “That is not entirely accurate, however it is an adequate approximation.” The diminutive AA body slid into a seat between the handlers. A full-size human would never have fit in the narrow slot.

  “How many tickets have they sold today?” Ammo challenged.

  Angel looked at her confirmation code on her thinpad. “I’m number 805.”

  “And how many have died today?”

  “I am unaware of any reported fatalities today,” Marti said.

  “So that means you might each die four times today and still be within the realm of statistical probability.”

  “That’s not how it works,” Quinn said.

  “Quintan is correct.” the AA said, raising an eyebrow on its projected face. “The rules of statistical variance give them the same odds of surviving whether they are the first jumper of the day or the one thousandth.”

  She let out an exasperated sigh. “Whose side are you on?”

  “I was unaware there was a side,” Marti said. Looking back and forth among them. “However, I am sitting on the same side of the room as they are, so perhaps that is indicative of my position?”

  Angel snickered and shook her head. She knew Ammo was teasing, and she winked.

  “Well, given a one percent chance of dying would you do it?” she asked, poking a finger in Marti’s direction.

  Marti’s head tilted to the side, and it drew its mouth over into a frown. “Probably not. Unless there were a compelling reason.”

  “There is. It’s a rush,” Quinn said. “Pure adrenaline.”

  “Given that, as a machine, I am incapable of experiencing an adrenaline rush, then I doubt that I would participate in this activity purely for the sake of what for me would be a meaningless attempt at self-stimulation.”

  “Exactly!” Ammo said. “Me either.”

  “That proves it,” Angel said. “You’re a machine.”

  The finger flashed again.

  A computerized alert chime interrupted before she could load another retort. “Loading number 805 and 806 at gate four-alpha for a dual jump from LEO. Re-entry point, Larcossa Cove, Trinity Island, North Shore. Enjoy your Meteor Adventure Drop Experience.”

  “That’s us,” Angel said standing up.

  “Nice choice. We can drop in on the cap’n this way,” he said, standing up to check in.

  “Figured it would make for a grand entrance,” she said. “We can buy him a drink afterward.”

  “I’ll warn him to watch for two toasted corpses falling out of the sky,” Ammo said.

  “Four times each,” Quinn added with a wink.

  Once they disappeared through the door and up to the launch deck Marti slid off the front of the sofa and reached out to touch her arm.

  “It’s alright, we were just teasing,” she said, assuming that it was trying to comfort her concerns. “I’m actually the one that pointed Angel at this adrenaline game.”

  Marti didn’t respond. Instead it turned her hand over and placed one finger in the middle of her Urah Un. She blinked in surprise. It was the first time the AA had given any indication it knew she had one.

  The sensation was a bit jarring as the powerful computer awareness adjusted speed to match her human brain. The nerves in her hand and arm responded like they were on fire before it fell into a link.

  A word formed in her mind.

  Trouble.

  Where? She felt her heart accelerate, and it momentarily knocked them out of sync.

  Being watched. An image of a woman’s face materialized in her visual cortex and she fought the urge to twist around and look. Whoever she was, she looked familiar, like she’d been on the edge of Ammo’s awareness for the last several days.

  Must tell Captain Walker. NOW, Marti thought to her.

  She nodded, and they broke the connection.

  On the way toward the door she caught the woman out of the corner of her eye. She was putting something in her pocket.

  It looked vaguely like an Urah Un.

  Chapter Four

  “Look at those idiots.” Rene Pascalle was plain-spoken. That was why Ethan liked using him as a sounding board. He was the one member of his crew who seemed to have no spin of his own to service.

  That made him a good engineer and an even better friend. He’d been beside Ethan through insane relationships, and a string of strange jobs, and even now, as he sat around in an expensive bar, on a vacation world that held absolutely no interest for him, he was still right up front with his thoughts.

  Ethan twisted around in his seat and squinted against the setting sun. It took him several seconds to find what had attracted the engineer’s ire. Two blazing sparks tore a pair of thin lines across the sky, arcing downward. “Someone doing a hot entry?”

  “Orbital base jumping,” he said. “A space suit, a heat shield, and atmosphere at 23,000 klicks.”

  “It can’t be that dangerous or they wouldn’t do it for fun.” He shrugged, turning back and putting it out of his mind. He stared down at the table and frowned.

  “Not enjoying paradise, are you?” Rene asked.

  “Not so much. But you’ve got room to talk. You haven’t been down to the planet more than a handful of times since we got here.”

  The engineer shrugged. “I came along because you all needed to untwist.”

  “You too,” he said, as the waitress put their drink order down and leaned over to ask Ethan if he wanted to run a tab. She’d made sure he got a serious view of the goods as she played for a bigger tip. Smiling, he winked and waved her away with a nod.

  “Lying around in the hot sun isn’t how I relax. It makes me insane even thinking about it,” he said. “I need to be mentally creative. Something has to be stimulating my brain for my body to let go.”

  “I’m like that, too. I get bored quick,” Ethan said. “That happened for me about two weeks ago.”

  Rene nodded. “They used to call it island fever. People would move to a small island looking for paradise and end up going crazy from the boredom. Some folks could adjust to it, but a lot of them exploded.”

  “That’s me. No matter how big this planet is, I’ve run in the black and nothing here can hold my interest for long.”

  Rene sat back and stared at Ethan for a couple minutes while they sipped their drinks. “There’s something else though isn’t there?”

  Ethan nodded, but didn’t expand on it.

  “You’re going to make me guess?”

  He shrugged. “Something happened to me on our last run, and if I tell you about it, that’ll lead to a lot of questions that would be better if you didn’t ask.”

  “Does it have anything to do with why Nuko and Charleigh are spend
ing more time together than you and her?”

  “No. Well yah, maybe,” he said. “I want to tell you, but it’s best if you don’t know.”

  “That’s bullshit Ethan. You and I have been friends for a long time. There isn’t anything you can’t tell me.”

  “I know. But this time it’s different.”

  Fire flashed in the engineer’s eyes. “I don’t know what the stink is, but there are things that don’t add up square. I’ve smelled the stink since we got back from the last run. If you don’t trust me enough to tell me what’s broken here, then maybe we’re a lot further out of spec than I thought.” He shook his head and pushed away from the table like he was going to walk off. “If that’s true, then maybe I’ve got some tough decisions to make.”

  This was not coming down anywhere near where Ethan expected the conversation to land. “Are you saying you’re thinking of leaving the Dawn?”

  “No. I wasn’t, but more than anyone else, I have to be able to count on you. If I can’t…”

  “Then you might?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.” He shrugged. “It’s not what I want but sometimes things get too twisted to unbend.”

  Ethan stared at the engineer, reading the thousand expressions that danced along the edges of his eyes. Curiosity. Frustration. Doubt. All in equal measure. He saw them because of what had happened to him, but he recognized them because he’d felt them, too. “You can’t leave,” he said. “I need you now more than ever.”

  “Then just tell me what’s swinging in the background.”

  He nodded. “I’ll probably regret this but you’re right.” He leaned back and chewed his lip while he tried to figure out how to explain the truth.

  “How much of our last run do you remember?” he asked.

  Rene raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

  “Just what I asked. How much of our last run do you remember?”

  “All of it. Why?”

  He shook his head. “No. You really don’t.”

  “Of course, I do. I was there, right beside everyone else. I remember getting our asses jumped by raiders and losing the cargo. I remember rescuing Nuko and her crew from their shuttles after the Elysium Sun blew up. I remember them leaving us for dead and repairing the Dawn with my own hands. I remember that. All of it.