Twenty minutes later an older man, Dr. Saul Abraham, entered the ward dressed in scrubs and a white lab coat. He dressed like most of the practicing medical professionals on Olympus, although his position required less patient interaction and more managerial duties. He believed i the patients felt more comfortable when he dressed like the rest of the doctors.
“Nathan, what do you have?” he beamed, patting the younger man on the back. Even with this upbeat greeting, a slump in his posture betrayed the fatigue he felt from being in the procedure clinic for ten solid hours overnight.
Nathan’s expression was grave. Lowering his voice, he pulled Dr. Abraham into an empty examination room, careful not to draw attention from the staff and nearby patients.
“Saul,” he whispered, desperation carved into his face. “We have another one.”
TWELVE
On a routine patrol run, Evangeline and her trainee, Daryl Simmonds, soared above the streets of the LTZ that surrounded Olympus. The Low Technology Zone ringed the Olympic Citadel, and consisted of vast agricultural areas, rural townships, as well as a few industrial developments. For the most part people in the LTZ, sometimes known as Zoners, did not want to have anything to do with life in Olympus. The feeling was mutual for the Olympus residents, who looked upon those who dwelled in the LTZ as inferior to themselves. There were the occasional misfit transplants like Jack who found happiness after crossing the barrier between the two differing regions.
Once in a while, young men and women from the LTZ yearned to experience life away from the farms, ranches, factories, and warehouses, to try and make their way into Olympus and experience all the technological advancements it had to offer. Unless their aptitude tests demonstrated some remarkable talent or ability toward an extraordinary and useful skill, they often wound up in jobs as laborers and servers. Most often, however, these LTZ transplants found themselves joining the ranks of the military.
Between the influx of youth from the LTZ seeking a higher standard of living and the Angel population. Olympus had an abundant labor force, unlike the scarcity of available labor that plagued the continent in the early years after The Collapse.
So abundant was the population of Angels living on Olympus, that there was never a shortage of laborers to perform the menial tasks most Olympians felt were beneath them. If an LTZ transplant was fortunate enough to join the military, they received specialized training and an opportunity to go off-world, an experience even most born and raised in Olympus could not say they had enjoyed.
Daryl Simmonds was an Olympian youth raised in a multi-generation military family. His lineage on his father’s side of the family had made lifelong careers in the military as far back as the Great Recovery. His family expected him to join military service as well, but it was his choice as to how he served.
His father and older brother were serving in the TRTV corps as Heavy Assault TRTV pilots. As Evangeline understood it, they were both currently assigned together on a carrier patrolling the southern borders of Olympic airspace. Daryl hoped to make his family proud with his advancement into the TRTV pilot program.
He had spent the last few months of his life training for a career as pilot in the TRTV simulators learning to master a TRTV through his reflexes and to respond to a crisis in an instant. Learning how to feel the vehicle’s systems without looking at the HUD took time and patience. The TRTV had to become more than just a suit of armor; he had to control it as an extension of his own body.
Colonel Jacobs had an uncanny talent for determining who had an innate ability to pilot a TRTV. It was simple really. There were two categories of initiates: those who would be trainable and who would flunk out the first day. Fear of getting kicked out of the program caused apprehension among all the new trainees, even those that passed the intensive neural scan. Daryl was fortunate to fall into Jacobs’ first category. After the procedure and simulated training, Jacobs decided to team Daryl up with Evangeline. She was a natural. Her TRTV was more than a second skin to her; she could pilot her machine like a gardener wearing gloves. Her talents as a pilot made her a successful trainer. Jacobs would even wager that she was better than the late Kevin ‘B.B.’ Turner had been.
The morning patrol had gone by as expected. There was never any real need for their patrols in the LTZ, but Olympus liked to display their presence and muscle at all times. The TRTV pilots only interacted with Zoner’s in times of emergencies such as a vehicular accident, broken power lines, or something else that might require moving heavy equipment.
Evangeline and Daryl had been passing over the cityscape and farmlands for six uneventful hours. Evangeline was not one for small talk, but Daryl on the other hand was an incessant chatterbox. For most of his first patrol, he barraged her with questions about power systems, flight and evasion techniques, and anything he could think of to make him a better pilot. After several hours, he had exhausted all of his intelligent sounding technical questions. Evangeline did not volunteer any further information. Answering his non-stop stream of inquiries had sapped her of her social energy within the first two hours of patrol duty.
“Do you ever get bored out here?” Daryl asked over the headset. “I mean, after off-world missions, doesn’t this just make you go brain dead?”
Evangeline chuckled to herself. His was a typical rookie assumption. She remembered wondering the same thing during her first training days before going off-world. “Not really,” she replied with a smile. “Off-world is actually less interesting than you’d think.”
“How’s that?” Daryl pressed. He was dying for some gritty stories of missions out on the fringes of space.
Evangeline indulged him. “Well, for the most part we escorted cargo shipments between carriers and mining operations, or we protected the cargo from theft by pirates. Most of the time it was quite peaceful out there;, with the exception of the rare skirmish. To be honest, I went my entire tour without firing a single shot outside of the range.”
Daryl blew out his breath. “Well, that sounds boring.”
It was true. It was not always exciting off world, but Evangeline did not like thinking about the bits that had been exciting. Sudden meteor showers, forcing the entire crew to be isolated in the deepest parts of the ship for days, waiting for repair teams to seal the holes in the outer hull; finding their supply shuttle adrift and emptied of its cargo, which required them to live on minimal rations for over a month until another supply ship could reach them. But, worst of all, was the shipment of spoiled rations that poisoned half of her team, leaving only six pilots able to execute the level Red Three classified mission that ended up tearing her heart out all over again.
“Yeah,” she said, unwilling to linger in those haunting memories. “Those missions were pretty boring.” Evangeline needed to distract Daryl from asking more questions about her time away from Earth. His chattiness was wearing her thin.
“Okay, greenie,” she called into her headset. “I want you to take point and perform a standard grid search pattern cycling through your scanning frequencies.”
“What am I searching for, Captain?” Daryl asked. His face was twisted in concentration and beads of sweat dotted his lip.
“This is a training flight, Simmonds.,” Evangeline responded in her most authoritative voice. “Learning to multi-task while in flight is essential to your success in this program. If you’re not ready for it, we’ll just head back to base and you can practice it again in the simulator.”
She knew that last jab was not fair. To have a training mission cut short and be sent back to the simulators would be a huge slap in the face for Simmonds. If a trainee was sent back more than once, they were cut from the program. “Tell me what you want to do, Simmonds. Perform your mission or return to base: your choice.”
There was a short pause, and then he pushed forward ahead of Evangeline. As he answered he heard the voice of his father echoing in his head.
“Negative Alpha one. Commencing grid search, beginning with simultaneous In
frared and Ultrasonic scans. Over.”
Evangeline smiled. She knew she was going to like her trainee.
A few minutes later, they were buzzing over the southwest industrial complex. Evangeline was analyzing her trainee’s flight path when Daryl’s voice blared into her earpiece.
“Captain, it looks like there’s some kind of accident at the intersection in the industrial block below us. I’m seeing two large overturned freight vehicles. A rescue service vehicle is on site, and they appear to be trying to remove one of the drivers.” Evangeline’s reflexes turned on her own scanning equipment to assess the situation. She waited for Daryl’s next action, wondering when his training would kick in.
She started cycling through her frequencies as their TRTVs drifted to a hover over the scene. Daryl began speaking into his headset, his voice resonating through the external speakers.
“Citizens, this is Alpha Two Patrol. Can we offer our assistance?” The rescuers and bystanders all looked up at the two military vehicles hovering above. People in the LTZ were wary of hovering TRTVs; they resembled desert vultures circling over carrion, eager to pick the carcass clean.
One of the ground rescue team members, a short man with a thick ginger mustache, grabbed the handset from his vest and responded through his vehicle’s PA system.
“No, thank you, Alpha Two Patrol. We’ve got this well in hand.” He waved off the twin vehicles floating over his head.
Evangeline’s exterior camera zoomed in on the man’s face. Etched on his face was the usual contempt she and her fellow patrols received whenever they tried assisting in the LTZ. It was clear from his expression that his team did not need help handling a simple collision.
“Captain?” Daryl’s voice was laced with confusion. “Why don’t we just land and take over the rescue operation? Don’t we have jurisdiction?”
Evangeline let out a half-smile. “You must not have been paying attention in history class, Greenie!”
An image of Daryl’s cockpit appeared above her HUD. Daryl rotated the faceplate of his helmet out of the way and cocked his head to one side. “What do you mean?”
Evangeline let out a short puff of air trying to remember how her parents had explained the tension between Olympus and the LTZ to her when she was around eleven years old. “The relationship between Olympus and the LTZ is symbiotic. In the early decades after The Collapse, the Citadel was no more than a neighborhood of those who pursued high-tech solutions to The Great Recovery. The rest of the region was comprised of farmers, ranchers, and small industrial operations who believed that the solution was low-tech and hard work.”
Daryl’s impassive face gave Evangeline the impression that he had tuned out to her answer. Her irritation flared as she thought about the many teachers who must have had a similar reaction to his disengagement from their lessons. “Uh, huh,” he muttered. “So, how does that explain how we can’t take over a rescue operation when we clearly have the superior equipment and training.”
Evangeline understood his line of reasoning. She wondered the same thing until she spent years around pilots who had grown up in the LTZ. “It’s because Olympus has no actual authority over the LTZ. It’s really just a trade agreement that’s existed as long as the Citadel has been around. Olympus needs the food, clothing, and construction materials that are produced in the Zone.”
“And what does the LTZ need from Olympus?” Daryl asked shaking the dust out of his head.
Evangeline sighed and pursed her lips. “Nothing.”
Daryl looked like a fuse blew in his brain. “Nothing?” he echoed, “nothing at all?”
Evangeline shrugged her shoulders and tilted her head to one side. “I guess there’s nothing Olympus has to offer that they want any part of. They figure they’ve been doing just fine for hundreds of years, and nothing is going to change that. And on top of all that, if it came down to a war for control, there’s no one on Olympus that would be willing to do what the Zoners seem to love… working with their hands and getting dirty in the process.”
“Well, that’s certainly true!” Daryl grinned. “I can’t think of a single person I know that would ever leave the comforts of Olympus to live down here.”
Evangeline suppressed the flare of pain in her heart. She had faced that decision and it had cost her more than she cared to contemplate. With a blink of her eye, the display of Daryl’s cockpit disappeared before the tear escaped behind her eye. She shook her head as she cleared her throat of the lump that threatened to betray the weakness she feared to show. “Let’s focus on the task at hand, Simmonds,” she said with more harshness than she intended.
“Um… yes, captain,” Daryl muttered. Evangeline heard the confusion in his voice.
Evangeline’s attention was drawn from her memory as one of the freighter operators was evacuated from the wreckage. Emergency personnel escorted him to the back of a medical vehicle for treatment. His now-ruined vehicle had been transporting a load of grain to the mills for processing. Yellow granules were scattered all over the road.
“Corn,” Evangeline mumbled to herself. “I can’t say I ever acquired a taste for it.” The piles of yellow grain reminded her of an impromptu history lessons her mother had shared while making dinner several years ago.
Six-year-old Evangeline was helping her mother in the kitchen. A pan of corn bread was hot from the oven and chili simmered on the stove. The small girl picked at the cornbread and tasted a morsel. Her expression soured as she chewed and swallowed the yellow bread.
“I don’t like cornbread!” she said, waggling her tongue. “It tastes weird!”
Elizabeth smiled, amused at her daughter’s blunt honesty. “Well, it’ll taste better with some honey-butter. We should be grateful we can even digest it.”
“What do you mean digest it? You mean eat it?” Evangeline asked puzzled, tilting her head to one side.
Her mother laughed. “No, not just eat it. Our stomachs can turn corn into energy for our bodies. Centuries ago, our bodies couldn’t process corn very well. It was mostly used to feed animals. Then some scientists figured out how to make a new kind of corn that humans can digest. Now, we can enjoy the corn’s flavor, as well as use it for energy.”
Evangeline’s parents were always explaining how life was better now than it had been before The Collapse. She could only understand how things were in her small six-year-old sphere, not how they used to be. Nor did she care.
Evangeline and Daryl continued observing the rescue effort from overhead in spite of the rescuers’ repeated assurances they could handle the situation without Olympic oversight. Pedestrians salvaged the precious corn while the emergency workers tended to the drivers and overturned vehicles. The vehicle that had been carrying the corn was going to be difficult to deal with. It sustained more damage in the collision than the one that had been hauling steel pipes. Evangeline guessed they were being transported to a construction project in Olympus.
The infrared scanner cycled from her HUD, showing a flash of red swimming among blues and greens on her display. She cycled back to it to find out what it was, locating a heat signature buried under the pile of steel pipes. It was smaller and less intense than the other heat signatures swarming below. Judging by its size she thought that it might have been an animal crushed during the accident, but the shape of the heat signature suggested the body was humanoid.
Her breath caught in her throat when she noticed the heat signature pulsating. A heartbeat! Whatever was under the pipes was still alive, but its temperature was below normal and dropping. They would need to act fast if they were going to save whoever was buried alive beneath the mass of pipes. She activated her PA, calling down to the rescue workers on the ground below.
“Attention! Attention!” The crew on the ground all raised their eyes to Evangeline’s TRTV. “There is a person trapped below the pipes. Someone is still alive under there, but their temperature is dropping rapidly. You need to move the pipes fast.”
The man with the
ginger mustache motioned toward the pile and flailed his arms over his head, beckoning the people around him. The rescuers and bystanders that had been scooping up the corn all dropped their tools and moved toward the pipes. It took a group of five or six people to remove a single pipe from the pile. Nearly twenty minutes had passed and the pedestrians had only managed to move few from the precarious stack. The pipes were much heavier than they looked; Evangeline knew whoever was trapped at the bottom would not survive if the rescue effort continued at this snail-like pace.
A second TRTV patrol hovered over the scene of the collision while Evangeline and Daryl watched the ground crews scurry around and on top of what she could only describe as a giant game of pick-up-sticks. It was Alpha Seven and Eight patrol. Evangeline and Daryl hovering around a single spot for longer than usual, which meant something interesting was going on below, drew them in. It was rare that anything interesting happened on patrol in the LTZ, which resulted in the air patrols congregating to witness whatever was breaking up the monotony.
The man with the ginger mustache spoke over his PA system. The panic in his voice betrayed the bravado he displayed when the TRTVs first arrived on the scene.
“These pipes are too heavy!” he barked into his handset. “We need your help!” Shattered pride clouded his expression. He started ordering the pedestrians to clear the scene of the accident to make room where the pilots could land. Evangeline felt a slight wave of claustrophobia as she imagined all four of the TRTVs working in the tight area between the buildings below.
Dust and debris from the street danced in a cyclone created by the four sets of powerful engines as they descended from the air. Many of the spectators ran to find shelter from the veritable sandstorm blasting them from all directions. A few pedestrians and emergency crew covered their faces, while they waited for the roaring engines to disengage and stop sandblasting the intersection.
Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) Page 7
