Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “I’ll personally guarantee that we won’t miss a mealtime,” Rene said. He’d become a champion of the handler’s massive breakfast feasts.

  “Do it,” he said, pivoting away from the impending engineering cataclysm and heading toward the lift. It was only a half hour from Alpha Five to Earth L1 and he wanted to be on the ConDeck when they got there. Just to be safe. As he crossed the lounge, Kaycee angled to intercept, and he nodded at her as she closed the distance.

  “We’re almost ready to load up,” he said. “Have you gone over the manifest?”

  “Yah. In fact, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Walk with me,” he said, swinging the lift gate open and waiting for her to step onto the platform. “What do we know?”

  “It’s a clean load of top tier pharma. Termazadrine Tetrachlorate and Quadrapaxin Sulfate.”

  “I’m really impressed you know how to pronounce all those fancy words, but I assume it’s important for me to load that data into my brain?”

  “Probably not,” she said as the lift stopped on the Command Deck. “Those drugs are used to treat a range of extremely rare neuromuscular degenerative conditions known collectively as the Trappist Syndrome Spectrum.”

  “More brain congestion for me?”

  She rolled her eyes but grinned. “What does matter is that these medications are of a peculiar variety that only a select handful of labs can produce. They’d be exceedingly rare to find on the underground market.”

  “That explains why he’d need to buy it direct.”

  She nodded. “They’re produced exclusively in Zone One and only in facilities owned by Smythe Biomedical Technologies.”

  He glanced at her sidewise as they walked along the corridor toward the ConDeck. “Is there a connection?”

  “I don’t think so, but my name is on one of the product warrants. I was on a team fifteen years ago that certified the trials, so I received a miniscule patent royalty from the sale Smythe made to Pierce’s company.”

  “Would he want this drug for anything other than resale into the Underground Market?”

  “I don’t think that makes sense as a motivation. The market would be incredibly small since TSS has limited transmission potential. There’s no contagion risk, because the only way to acquire Trappist Syndrome is through direct exposure to the Transuranic-142. It’s a byproduct of a process used in heavy-element ore refining.”

  “Tamilis was a mining colony,” he said. “Could that tie in?”

  “I don’t know what they mined there, but Coalition law only allows extracting the specific minerals required with fully automated equipment. Because of that law, there haven’t been a total of five hundred cases of TSS in the last fifty years.”

  “How much of this medication did he buy?”

  “Two-hundred and forty thousand treatment cycle doses. Virtually every gram available in the entire Coalition supply chain.”

  He let out a slow whistle. “Why would there be that much of a stockpile of a drug that isn’t needed?”

  “That’s a good question, too,” she said. “But what I’m wondering, is why would Jetaar buy it all up?”

  “Cornering the market before the crisis?” Ethan stopped at the door to the ConDeck and leaned back against the bulkhead. “He implied that it was something that one of his crews stumbled across in the wild somewhere while they were doing freelance exploration.”

  “Not likely,” she said. “As far as anyone knows, the synthetic element that causes Trappist Syndrome does not exist in a natural form.”

  “How’s it created in mining?”

  “I had to look it up because mining and ore processing are parsecs outside my educational home field. Apparently, TU-142 is created as either a fusion waste product of anti-matter smelter separation of far-transuranic isotopes, or it comes from scattered deflection of an incorrectly aligned particle beam in a singularity core generator.”

  “Those only exist in Shan Takhu ships,” he said.

  “And the Tacra Un,” she added. “Nothing short of a supernova could create it in the natural universe, and scientists doubt there’s enough energy there to form it naturally.”

  “Then what does Jetaar need the medications for?”

  She shook her head. “I looked at the rest of the load hoping it might drain some light onto that, but everything else is standard medical diagnostic gear. Isotopic scanning hardware. Particle tissue imaging. Things like that.”

  “Would those be used to diagnose people with TSS?”

  “It would be.” She shrugged. “The problem is that the medication itself is benign. The Standard of Practice when there’s a potential symptomatic presentation of any TSS variant, is to administer Quadrapaxin Sulfate prophylactically. It’s easier to treat the assumption of the disease than to bring in the gear to pre-determine an accurate diagnosis.”

  He frowned. “I wonder if the medical gear might have other non-medical applications?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that, but I could bounce it around with Marti and Rene,” she said.

  “Do that, but don’t take them off their task. I don’t want to be without a remounted AA when we get to Tortuga.”

  “Understood,” she said, pulling out a thinpad and handing it to him. “That’s what I dug up on the drugs and gear if you want to pollute your brain space with it. I think it’s always good to know what you’re working with.”

  He watched her walk back down the corridor and shook his head. That might have been one of the least problematic conversations he’d had with Kaycee since she’d come aboard.

  She hadn’t even asked to go into Cochrane Station, and that was as close to a home as she had.

  He would have had to tell her no, since they needed to be in and out with the minimum of complication, but she’d not even shown an interest.

  Something was broken in the universe.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It surprised Kaycee to realize how much noise a spaceship made, even when she didn’t consciously hear it. When all they had was minimum life support and the gravity operating, the silence around her made even her own thoughts echo strangely.

  She sat in Ethan’s spot in the front of the lounge with her feet up and looking out at space. Not the distorted collar of stars that fascinated him on most days, but the eternal blackness of the deep.

  They’d dropped out of cruise above a faint Y-class Dwarf almost seventeen hours ago. The miniscule glow of the swirling protostar’s atmosphere had been visible an hour ago but now it had slipped under the ship and all she could see was nothingness. It was soul emptying in itself, but she suspected that something else had torn the hole through her.

  They’d stopped in the middle of nowhere and powered down everything so Rene could transfer Marti’s quantum core and interface systems out of their ship-based interfaces and into her new portable body. They had thirty-six hours of batteries on minimum power, and they were seventeen hours into the process so far.

  Kaycee knew it was a risky and delicate procedure that they should have done in port. Ethan didn’t want to spend any extra time being a target in Zone One, and Marti had agreed. It was also important to have the transfer completed before they got to the pirate base.

  Moving Marti’s core was like doing brain transplant surgery, while trapped inside the body of the patient. If either end of the procedure didn’t work perfectly, not only would Marti die, but the ship and everyone aboard would follow her into the cold.

  So here they sat, naked and vulnerable, hiding in a weak radiation cloud and praying nothing went wrong.

  “Holding your breath?” Ammo asked as she walked up and took the engineer’s usual chair across the table.

  “Negotiating with god,” Kaycee said. “But I’m sure we’re all doing that about now.”

  “Even Marti, I’d wager,” she said.

  “What’s the prognosis?” She changed the subject. She didn’t want to talk about her god at the moment. It had turn
ed to clay and was crumbling in front of her.

  “I think they’re starting to test the teleoperation interfaces,” Ammo said. She’d slipped in and out of engineering several times in the last few hours keeping track of how it was going. “Marti’s core is stable on the new body power supply, but they haven’t re-uploaded her data engrams yet. The hard part’s over, and once they transfer her awareness back into place, it’s purely hooking her back to the ship.”

  “Connecting the spinal column to the midbrain.”

  “The hardest part is that Marti has to reconfigure the interfaces manually. It isn’t like a human brain that can just grow itself into a new configuration spontaneously. It’s all done by choice of will.”

  She nodded. “Brains are remarkable that way. Ethan’s living proof of that.”

  “I was going to ask you about that. How is he doing?”

  She sighed and shrugged. “That’s hard to say. He seems to be adapting well to his new abilities, but he keeps saying there’s something missing. He’s reaching for a piece of a puzzle in his mind that isn’t there.”

  “I don’t think he’s got any memories that haven’t come back. At least as far as I know.”

  “I haven’t found any holes either,” Kaycee agreed. “Whatever it is he’s searching for seems to be exacerbating his trauma. Every time he lets me do another scan, his TSD is getting worse. It’s like he’s picking at the injury and it’s not healing enough before he tears it open again.”

  “He doesn’t seem to be slipping backward though.”

  “Not at all, and that’s what’s so strange about it,” she said. “Right after he and Qara linked, it looked like a very slight disruption to his synapses. Not anywhere near as advanced as what a STIF gets at investiture. But now…”

  “How extensive is it?” Ammo swung to face her and leaned on the table, propping her head up on a fist.

  “Probably a lot more than either of us at this point. It’s also not focused to the Broca Region of the frontal lobe anymore. There are entire structures of synapsis that are building between the processing centers of his brain.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “He’s built up massive synaptic redundancies that have probably already given him eidetic memory, but I don’t think he knows it,” she said. “There may be other abilities he’s developing, but since a lot of the brain is still only superficially understood, we’ve got no way to tell what they might do from a simple scan.”

  “If he’s still evolving new pathways like you said, it wouldn’t matter what you saw today because it would be different tomorrow.”

  “Exactly.” Kaycee said.

  “If he’s developed total recall, maybe what he thinks is missing are memories he has from before that don’t feel as complete to him as how he stores information now?”

  “That’s possible, but it seems to me more like he’s sensing something that hasn’t manifested in his brain yet. Perhaps there’s an ability that he can feel emerging, but hasn’t realized,” she said. “If that were the case, then he’d be reaching for it and that might force the necessary pathways to be created.”

  “I think you’re on the right track there.” Ammo nodded, turning back to the table, and facing Kaycee. “Has he explained how he discovered the listening device in the cabana on Escabosa?”

  “Just that it was an accident.”

  “I linked with him right after it happened and his memories were fresh at that point,” she said. “His coffee spilled and when he reached out to grab the table lamp, he felt the Institute’s transmitter even though he had no direct physical contact with it.”

  “Ethan’s trained his Urah Un to be sensitive to Shan Takhu based technology.”

  Ammo shook her head. “He wasn’t wearing his glove. He picked it up without one, and without touching it.”

  “Oh. That’s different.”

  “Yah, not being a proxy modified augment like you, I don’t know if that’s normal.”

  “Something with a lot of power maybe, but he said it was small. It couldn’t be that significant,” Kaycee said, frowning. She leaned back and stared out the window for several minutes. “I thought that he felt different to me when we got back on the ship. I should do another scan before we get to Tortuga.”

  “If he’ll let you.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Ethan felt like he was standing in the back of the shuttle on his own ConDeck. Charleigh was over-qualified as a third pilot, but since she’d posted on the Elysium Sun for the last run as Nuko’s first officer, when she asked to transfer to the Dawn, they’d kept her on. She’d taken over the pilot position so Nuko had bumped herself up to the command seat.

  While that arrangement suited Ethan’s desires, it also meant that because Ammo had conscripted the engineering console as a permanent workstation for controlling their augmented sensors and comm systems, he had no place to sit except in one of the jump seats. And they were almost as comfortable as a packing crate covered in corrugated metal sheeting.

  “We’re over Tortuga’s outer control perimeter,” Charleigh reported. Tortuga orbited the M-class dwarf CG-670-III, and they’d used the beacon for Dr. Makhbar’s archaeological dig as a navigational fix, even though they were headed toward the third star in the system this time.

  Ethan would have felt relief, but the last time he’d been here, the same pirates they were now working for had threatened to kill them. “Call us in and let’s get our approach instructions,” Ethan said. An odd echo of that memory hung twisted in the back of his mind.

  “Tortuga Control, this is the Olympus Dawn requesting clearance and approach limits.” Charleigh said.

  “Olympus Dawn, you’re late,” the voice of the approach controller sounded annoyed.

  Ethan leaned in and tapped the comm panel on Ammo’s workstation. “Sorry we had a coil induction feedback problem, and had to stop to make repairs,” he lied. If the only grief they had was a surly traffic manager complaining about them being late, that wasn’t too bad.

  “I’ll pass the word,” the approach controller said. “Captain Jetaar was about to come hunting for you.”

  “That’s a lie, we’re only three hours late, but at least now he can breathe easy,” he said. They’d stood up tall on cruise to make up most of the time they’d been down.

  “I’ll tell him you called him a liar,” the controller said. “Tortuga tracking, out.”

  “We are receiving coordinates and comm specifications for their navigational transponder,” Marti said.

  “One hour and six minutes,” Charleigh confirmed as she loaded the heading into the helm. “There are five small ice balls in tight orbit close to their base.”

  “Well at least that gives us a little more eyeball time on the way in,” Ammo said. “I’m already seeing weapons platforms on all those mini-moons, but nothing is hot yet.”

  “Keep an eye on them,” he said. “I want a best exit line if things go sidewise.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t go that way,” Nuko said, twisting to look back at him. “I’m tired of sidewise anything. Straight in and out would be nice.”

  Ethan chuckled, looking down at the front of his coveralls like he expected to see someone else standing in his place. “You thought you were working for a different captain?”

  She laughed. “What can I say, you know I’m an optimist.”

  “We’re already getting a good bit of data,” Ammo said with a low hissing whistle.

  Nuko sighed as the sensor image appeared on the main screen. “I’m pretty sure we should call Kaycee to the deck.”

  “I have notified her, and she is on her way,” Marti said.

  Outwardly it was nothing more than an iceball, with a set of very ordinary domes spread out in a pit around a bigger gray dome.

  “I asked to be called too,” Rene said, appearing in the doorway behind him. “Other than Kaycee and Nuko, none of us has ever been close enough to see a Tacra Un. It’s a unique thing in my book.�
��

  Of course, it would be to him.

  The door opened again, and Kaycee stopped to stare at the screen.

  “Is that all there is to it?” Rene asked, disappointment dialing down his tone.

  “I don’t know what you were expecting, but holy frak, they’re well tooled,” Ammo said.

  “The best that money doesn’t need to buy.” Ethan grinned.

  Other than the domes, there was a tall docking stanchion dug into the ice on the edge of the pit. It extended almost a kilometer above the surface and looked as sophisticated as any facility in Zone One. There were tie off ports for several dozen ships and two enormous drydock assembly platforms. A vast array of industrial fabricators spread across the ice in rings that spread from its base.

  “That’s an intimidating support facility,” the engineer conceded. “I’d hate to think of the fleet they could support from there.”

  “There is that,” Ethan said. Looking again for a seat, he decided to pass and remain standing.

  “The big dome is part of the Tacra Un,” Nuko said. “I recognize the material.”

  “It is,” Kaycee said as she stepped up beside Ethan. “A very little part of it, but that most assuredly removes all doubt that he’s got one.”

  “Well then, we know his reputation wasn’t sucking vacuum,” he said, glancing at her.

  She looked pale. “Even though his base isn’t in the right position to get in, I can’t go down there. This might not be his only operation.”

  “I’d expect it to be more alive than that. It’s mostly inert,” Rene said, glancing over at the detailed data on Ammo’s screens. “We’re not reading any power below the surface.

  “That’s not entirely true,” Ammo said. She dialed the image back and switched to a ground penetrating scan. “We’re detecting a small gravity signal at 8.516 terahertz.”

  “That the same as the Tahrat’s signature, isn’t it?” Ethan asked.

  Rene looked at him and frowned. “Since you know what that means, I assume that’s in the dead zone of my memories.”