Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “Yah we know,” Nuko said. “Apparently it attracted some attention, too. The Magellan just dropped several attack shuttles.”

  “They’re aiming for your location. ETA seventy-five seconds,” Charleigh said.

  “Frak! Can you get back to the drop-off before they get here?”

  “We’re already inbound,” Nuko said.

  “Grab Marti and move out,” he said, jumping up to run to the rendezvous point. Far behind them the thunder of the Jack Sparrow’s engines split the sky.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Rounding the corner of the seating risers and sprinting toward the safety of the ship Ethan glanced up. Only a hundred meters away but he picked out six fiery streaks arcing low into the atmosphere to the north. Doubling his effort, he watched as Angel threw the dead automech onto the ramp and turned around to help Kaycee up the two meters to where the ship hung in the air.

  It’s going to be close, he thought.

  Two armored doors swung open on the hull. Gun ports. Massive beam weapons swiveled out and took aim at the approaching ships. The first volley crackled loudly, and he felt the air around the ship heat up like someone had opened a furnace door.

  The shots missed by a wide margin but just before he lost sight of the incoming shuttles, he realized that they hadn’t intended to hit anything, only to scatter them so they couldn’t come straight in. It was a warning shot. And it worked.

  Angel had pulled herself up into the ship behind Kaycee and only Quinn remained on the ground. As Ethan slowed to make a leap for the bottom of the ramp, the handler grabbed him and threw him well into the ship. Fortunately for him, Angel slowed his trajectory as he hurtled far into the interior of the cargo hold. He crashed into her and they both bounced and rolled across the floor in a heap.

  Shaking off the impact he glanced back and watched Quinn leap onto the end of the ramp and dive through the inner door as it slammed shut behind him.

  “Everybody’s home!” Angel said. An instant later the deck shuddered and the wind outside screamed through the plating.

  Ethan jumped up and dashed toward engineering. “Status?”

  “Soon as the gun ports close, we can lean on it,” Carson said.

  “They’re twenty klicks behind and coming around to pursue,” Nuko said.

  “We’ve got the Magellan squaring, dead ahead at eight thousand klick and the Argos to port at eleven-k and closing,” Ammo said.

  “We can’t fight. Can we run?” Ethan asked as he grabbed the edge of the engineering main console and watched the screen. A tactical display filled the corner and the main forward view took up the rest. Several specific system reports scrolled along the edges.

  “If we can stay out of weapons range on the cruisers until we get above the atmosphere, they can’t catch us,” Carson said.

  “Argos is 8,500 klicks, and angling forward to intercept,” Ammo said, sounding calm. “The Magellan is arming weapons. Ten seconds.

  “The shuttles are driving us toward the Argos,” Nuko said.

  “Not yet they aren’t,” Charleigh snarled. “Everybody grab on to something.”

  The screaming of the atmosphere changed as the entire ship lurched. The sky on the viewscreen spun, and they nosed down toward the ground abruptly. The inertial field readings spiked into the red and the gravity seemed to flutter as the ship jinked left and then right and then came out upside down and rolling back toward the pursuing shuttles.

  They shot through between them and arced back up away from the planet surface and over the snow-covered ridge west of where they’d landed. With another twist that spiked the inertial field again they nosed straight up toward space.

  “Stand by to jump to cruise,” Charleigh grunted as the orange sky began to deepen toward black.

  “The Magellan still has firing arc,” Nuko said. “Six seconds.”

  “Coils are hot but we’re still low,” Carson said.

  “Do it anyway,” Carleigh said. “We’ll drag some plasma with us, and it will make us harder to hit.”

  “As you wish,” he said, closing his eyes and hitting the control to activate the cruise.

  The blinding flash as they brought a bubble of relatively dense gas over the threshold to light-speed probably looked like they had exploded, but they shot out of the flash at an impossible speed. There was no chance the shuttles would be able to catch them and if the pilots weren’t lucky, they’d be swimming in the fireball that washed out in a wave behind them.

  The forward view cleared, and the collar of stars appeared. It was wide and thick, so Ethan knew they were barely over light-speed, but it meant that they were well out of range and unlikely to be brought down by any weapon.

  Except that the Tahrat is still out there, he reminded himself.

  “Are we done flying sidewise?”

  “Yah. Straight and fast,” Charleigh said.

  “I’m on my way to the ConDeck,” he said. “Keep an eye on the Tahrat.”

  “Nogo,” Ammo said, “She’s already cloaked.”

  “Frak,” he said, spinning to face Angel and Quinn. “Assume we’re going to have boarding parties. Tool up heavy.”

  “At light-speed?” Carson snorted.

  Rene nodded. “It’s been known to happen.”

  “Angel grab extra hardware and meet me on the ConDeck. Marti, tell them how to rig to detect gravity plating spikes, and the rest of you hold engineering. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they won’t chase us down, but that’s not a wager I’m willing to cover.”

  By the time he got upstairs, they’d already reached the Oort cloud. “The Argos is pursuing,” Nuko said. “Captain Coldwater has ordered us to stand down and prepare to be boarded.”

  “I assume you didn’t acknowledge?”

  Ammo winked. “She wanted to send him an obscene gesture, but we didn’t figure you’d want him to know it was us.”

  “Yah, no.” He grinned. “Can we tell what the Tahrat is doing? Is it pursuing?”

  “With these sensors it’s hard to tell,” Ammo said, shrugging. “I think I might have been detecting some T-wave interference with the planet’s ionosphere after it cloaked, but it was very faint and at this range we’re way too far out to tell if it’s still happening.”

  “I’d assume they sent the Argos because they don’t think we got legs to run,” Charleigh said. “It is a fast multicruiser so they’re expecting they can drive us to ground. Why go full-Armageddon when you only need a popgun?”

  “Can we outrun it?”

  She nodded. “Once we’re past the stellar garbage field, I’ll lean on it, but I think we’ve got plenty of headroom.”

  “Let’s not smoke them too fast,” he said. “Just stay a little hotter than they push.”

  “You don’t want to blow them off quick?”

  “Nope. Based on your assumption that they don’t want to waste the super-ship chasing a gnat like us, if we leave them sucking vacuum too fast, they’ll bring in the Tahrat to finish the job. We know we can’t get away from that, so let’s not invite them to play.”

  “If that’s the plan, I’m assuming you don’t want us taking a straight course back to Tortuga?” Nuko asked.

  He shook his head. “Point us out of Coalition Space until we’re sure we’ve gotten outside of their sensor range, then we’ll double around.”

  “How far ahead of them do we need to get before we make our turn?”

  Ethan tapped into his collarcomm. “Carson, how far ahead of a multicruiser do we need to get to drop off their sensors?”

  “If we clip the field tight, just under a parsec,” the engineer said.

  “Does that limit our maximum theoretical speed?”

  “Not at all, but it causes the secondary coils to heat. I wouldn’t recommend running in that configuration above 90% power.”

  “Then this is what I want to do,” he said, walking up and leaning over the back of Charleigh’s chair. “Assuming we’ve got the legs for it, maintain five percent abov
e their velocity until we get a 1.5 parsec lead. Once we’re at their sensor limit, we’ll clip the field and make a hard turn toward home. It will look like we disappeared and then if they bring in the Tahrat to run us down, they’ll be looking in the wrong direction.”

  “And until then we’ll stand high guard?” Angel said, as she walked onto the ConDeck and started passing out hand artillery.

  “We’ll do a full shift on alert after we’ve made our turn,” he said. “If they haven’t come to get us by then, we should be out of the stink.”

  “You’d think by now we’d just be used to the recycler smell,” Nuko said, shaking her head and picking up the gun that Angel set on her console. She looked at it for a second and chambered a round before she tucked it into her belt and settled back into her seat.

  “Yah, we might as well get comfortable,” Charleigh said. “It will be at least another thirty-five hours before we’ll rest.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Ethan shared the one suite on the middeck with Ammo and Kaycee. He slept on the sofa in the sitting area and they shared the bedroom. Although there was a small medical diagnostic chamber tucked back off the side of the galley, it was far too tiny to be useful for anything other than the simplest of medical care, so the doctor had turned the main living area of their room into a makeshift lab.

  Ethan had suggested she’d be better to set up shop in the cargo hold or engineering, but when Kaycee had pointed out that not everything they discovered might be something they wanted to share with Carson, or even the rest of the crew, he’d given in.

  She’d piled the majority of their suite with her gear and the few small sample bags she’d collected from Tamilis.

  “I didn’t know you’d brought this much equipment along. Did you leave anything on the Dawn at all?” Ethan said as he came in and sat on the arm of the sofa.

  “I didn’t bring as much as I’d have liked, but Marti’s main body could only carry so much. When we get back, I hope I’ll be able to get more out of these samples,” she said, picking up the clear nano-fiber bags that she’d spread out across the sofa where he slept. She tossed them on the cluttered table in the middle of the room and slipped into the plush seat across from him.

  “I didn’t know you’d collected so many samples,” he said.

  “I didn’t, but I’ve been reclassifying bigger ones down into smaller packages for specific tests once we’re home,” she said.

  “At least that won’t be too long now,” he said. “Another two days.”

  Their return trip had been half as long as the outbound leg because once they had left the Argos behind, they’d just kept their velocity and pushed hard for home. They were running at double the best speed the Dawn could manage. It was hard for him to imagine a ship capable of this kind of sustained cruise, and even harder to accept that pirates built it in a backwater shipyard.

  “What have you learned so far?” he asked, slipping down onto the seat and leaning back.

  She frowned. “I wish I could have done more tests of the soil while we were still on Tamilis. My guts tell me the TU-142 is a direct byproduct of whatever did this.”

  “I think we all assumed that, but what could cause it?” he asked. “Is it the result of a weapon?”

  “It has to be, but the amount of energy it would take to create TU-142 would be unbelievable.”

  “And it didn’t do any physical damage to anything,” Ethan said, massaging his temples with his fingertips. “That’s what doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “I’d like to get samples from Starlight to compare against, and if it shows up there, we’d know for sure there’s no doubt these are connected.”

  Ethan gave her one of those, you are kidding, looks. “When we get back, we’ll have to pay for this ride. I’m not about to ask if he’d let us take it for another spin.”

  “I didn’t expect we would,” she said, nodding sadly.

  “What happened to Marti shows they have to be connected, doesn’t it?” he asked. “I guess my question is, other than that, did we get enough to be worth it?”

  She shrugged. “We now know a lot more than we did.”

  “Good,” he said around a yawn. “Sorry, I’m too tired to even think square.”

  “Trouble sleeping?”

  “I’ve been sitting ConDeck for days, but I haven’t slept right since we left Tamilis,” he said. “Strange dreams. I’m sure I’ll catch up when I get back to my own bed.”

  “I can give you something,” she offered.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think I want to be trapped in dreamland.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about them?” she asked, getting up and crossing over to a table by the door to her room. She picked up something but slipped it into her pocket before she turned back to face him. “It might help to release the demons.”

  “Demons?” He raised an eyebrow at her choice of words. “Interesting that you’d mention that. I don’t know that I’d call it that, but it definitely wasn’t human.”

  She stared at him for several seconds before she sat down. “I was speaking metaphorically, but if you’re seeing something like that, I need to know.”

  “It might just be that I’m channeling the things you told me that survivor saw in his mind,” he said as he closed his eyes and leaned his head into the soft cushion behind him. “It always starts out with people falling into a lake of fire. But it’s not fire, it’s more of an ocean of dancing green waves. Like plasma.” He drew in a deep breath and tried to control the sudden terror that washed over him.

  “There are writhing bodies trying to claw their way out of it, but the currents keep pulling them back under,” he explained. The images came clearer as he reached for them. “I can feel it while it plays out around me, but I’m also detached from it. It’s like I’m an observer, and not actually there.”

  “That’s probably a good thing,” she said quietly.

  He nodded but didn’t open his eyes. “It seems like the miniscule details stick in my mind. Things like the lake is perfectly round and whatever fills it is more like a dancing sheet of something. It’s not a flame or a liquid. It seems more like an energy field, maybe?”

  “What happens when someone falls in?”

  “It never reacts. No splash. No ripples. Nothing. It simply swallows them. There are times when I see what looks like arms or legs emerging from the surface. They’re always dragging fire behind them when that happens. Sometimes I see a head break through the surface,” he said, drawing in a sharp breath. “I can tell from their faces that they’re screaming, but they always end up sucked back under.”

  “Just breathe Ethan. You’re alright.” He felt her hand on his arm and he knew she’d moved over to sit beside him.

  “I’ve also seen one of those creatures you described.” He shook his head as the image came back to him. “It was standing on the side of one of the craters of fire, watching.”

  “What does it look like?” she whispered.

  “It has dark skin, or maybe it’s wearing some kind of tight coverall,” he said struggling to breathe as he studied it in his mind’s eye. “It’s actually beautiful in an ethereal way. It’s ectomorphic, with a rail-thin body and four long arms that move like tentacles. I can tell it has a huge head with four pale eyes spaced so they face in every direction at once. There’s a heavy brow ridge above them that looks like a visor, almost. The top of the head is smooth and covered in red luminous flesh.”

  “That’s almost exactly what I saw in Cantos Vega’s mind,” Kaycee said.

  When he opened his eyes, he could tell she was pale. “Are you alright?”

  “No. But now I’m not at all convinced Vega has melted down. You’re describing what I got from him.”

  “How did I end up with it?”

  She pulled out the thing she’d put in her pocket. It was his Urah Un.

  “Have you figured out what happened to it yet?” He tried to drive the subject away from his nightmare
s.

  “When you touched Marti’s dead minimech, I’d wager the residual charge that transferred through your glove carried the images to you. Unfortunately, it almost killed it in the process.”

  “How did that give me these… dreams?”

  “I don’t have a shred of a hypothesis yet. There used to be a theory that information itself might be carried in a poly-dimensional matrix of quantum gravity—”

  “That’s a load of mystic crap,” he said. If he weren’t fighting to concentrate, he’d have argued with her, but it just felt easier to dismiss it without working hard enough to be polite.

  He snagged the Urah Un out of her hand and dropped it into his palm. It twitched several times before it began to uncoil.

  “Be careful. It should be alright in a few days, but it’s not there yet,” she said reading his concerns.

  “You make it sound like it’s alive,” he said, frowning.

  “Not really. It has the ability to self-replicate the nano-receptors on its polydermal surface in the same way your skin is constantly repairing its outer layer. The damage was deeper than the superficial receptors though, so it’s struggled to make repairs.”

  “It’s like it wants to work,” he said, watching it spread out on his palm.

  “It might need to link with you,” she said. “A good portion of the power it consumes comes from your physiology. The more you can tolerate wearing it, the faster it will repair.”

  “Tolerate?”

  “Yah, it will give you a brainache, like it did when you were first…”

  Her words faded out of his awareness, dying away to a distant thrumming as his Urah Un attached itself to his hand and screaming agony exploded in his skull. He crushed his eyes closed and clenched his jaw against it.

  “This is worse than… the first…” he hissed. Opening his eyes, he stared at it for several seconds and shook his head.

  “You can take it off if it’s too bad to deal with.”

  “Will it get better?” he whispered.

  “Probably faster than when you initially adapted to it. What it’s doing now is pulling power from your nervous system. Once it gets enough repairs made it will re-interface with you,” she explained. “The discomfort is because your body isn’t accustomed to being used as a charger.”