by Blaze Ward
Eleanor was silent for too long.
“Probably ranging from forty to seventy–five kilos, depending,” Eleanor finally said. “I’m sorry.”
At fifty–two kilos, most days, Dani was, too. Then she reset the Tomya to use the short–range cutting setting.
If that bitch grabbed Dani from behind and swept her into the sky, there would be two surprises.
One, Dani would cut her heart out with the laser first. Two, Dani would circle her falling corpse as it hit the ground. Laughing, and probably using the other setting on the Tomya to set her feathers on fire as they went.
Chike
It was Ann–Marta’s show. Chike was just along for the ride at this point.
Everyone else had been chased out of this part of the Convention Center, the primary conference room, except him and Ann–Marta. Only Hadley and her team of undergrads were even still in the building at this point.
The big screen on the short, gray wall had been split into four views to project the maximum amount of information. Top left was a view from Fahmida’s helmet camera. Top right was the same thing from Juan–Marco. Bottom left was a zoomable satellite map with topographical overlay being updated in almost real time by the smart systems in the radio hut. Bottom right was a real–time view from orbit after Calypso had deployed a stationary weather satellite and zeroed it in on the area, so they could track for more storms, smoke, or dust, before something snuck up on them.
They had nothing.
Well, absolutely stupid amounts of useful data about weather conditions transmitted from the two wingsuits, as well as much finer detail than had previously been available on the terrain and topography.
But no Fairchild.
You did not kill her. You just haven’t found her yet.
The Survey Shuttle seemed to have landed more like a leaf than an arrow, possibly buoyed by its lifting surfaces, even without power. Fahmida had even landed briefly and climbed into the wreckage first thing this morning. All she had found was some kind of bright blue fluid, hydraulic or insulating, leaking into the landscape, and a hole in the upper deck, right where the ejection seat would blow Fairchild clear of the dead craft to the safety of an electromagnetic dust storm.
Looking at the wreckage from up close cameras, Chike had been amazed that the hull was still largely intact. He had assumed that a shuttle falling out of the sky without power would have been crushed like a beer can being driven over by a tractor trailer. This one even looked salvageable, one of these days, if they could fly a dry–dock lifter out there to pick it up.
Or maybe hire in some rednecks from one of the crazier towns back home to come in and fix enough systems that the thing could manage orbit on its own, where it could be flown to a repair yard.
“So now what?” Chike asked quietly.
Ann–Marta had been hunched over a standing microphone, speaking quietly to both wingsuit pilots, who appear to be enjoying themselves soaring over the desert and mountains.
“Now? Patience,” she replied with a tight smile. “Small needle. Big haystack. We know roughly where she bailed out, but a free–glider can go a long ways in the right wind. Lord only knows where she might have ended up. I’m guessing we’ll need to fly a search pattern about sixty kilometers across, elliptical on account of the winds, and then track down everything that looks interesting. It would have been nice to fly some unmanned craft, but there is already such a tremendous amount of static charge in the atmosphere from the storm. I’m not sure any of them would make it home.”
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked in frustration, staring down into his empty coffee mug, as if the grounds would tell the future.
Ann–Marta smiled serenely at him.
“Organize the undergrads to clean everything up?” she offered with a sly smile. “Help cook lunch? Go commit science so this planet doesn’t sneak up on us again? This is just going to take time. You’ll know five seconds after we find something. I promise.”
Chike rose from the bench with a grumble under his breath and headed towards the front door. Waiting was driving him to distraction, but he couldn’t help himself.
Planetologists didn’t do emergencies, or fast. Even earthquakes and volcanoes gave warning, if you were listening.
“Dr. Odille,” someone yelled from outside as he emerged into late morning sunlight. “Shuttle coming in.”
Okay, that he could help with.
Chike pulled out the comm from his other back pocket and listened as the incoming pilot talked to someone on Ann–Marta’s Ground Services team, plotting wind, elevation, etc. All the mundane things that got a big, burly Survey Shuttle from orbit to ground without damaging anything.
Three minutes later, the ungainly bird was settled on a pad well away from camp.
Chike found himself vibrating with nervous energy that had no useful outlet.
Rather than wait, he hitched a ride out with members of Ann–Marta’s team to service and inspect the gray bird before themselves joining in the survey. Those folks rode everywhere in the camp in a little open–framed, four–seat, four wheeled jitney with a pickup bed on the back.
Right now, he was in the front seat, with the two men from this morning’s breakfast, Gavin and Lacumaces, sitting behind him, with their own oversized backpacks tied down in the bed.
The driver was a tiny woman who drove the little cart like a pack of hungry wolves was chasing her across the desert. Chike hadn’t gotten her name, but he was very glad he had listened to her quiet advice to strap himself in before she powered it up.
She might have stopped to pick him up if one of those lurching bumps had tossed him out the doorway and onto the side of the road. Or she might not have and then come back for him when she was done.
He wasn’t willing to put odds out and test theories. There were limits to his scientific bent.
Calypso’s secondary, backup Survey Shuttle was still going to be warm to the touch, but not hot enough to burn, as long as you were smart enough not to lean against one of the leading edges that tended to get red hot during reentry.
The craft itself looked like a very–stubby leaf spear with a main deck that had loading ramps at both front and back, nestled between the two mammoth engines that rested atop a big delta wing that sloped down ever so slightly while it was at rest. The pilot sat in a small, glass–sided chamber at the front of the Shuttle, up a level from the cargo deck, like an old–school aerial fighter craft from an earlier century, where she could see all the way around herself while flying.
Rain was flying today. He didn’t rotate evenly with Fairchild, taking perhaps one flight to the ground to every three or four of hers, mostly because the pay was the same and Fairchild wanted the stick time more than he did.
Rain was a seriously laid–back dude from the eternally gorgeous paradise of eastern Australia, somewhere close to Sydney, originally. Laconic probably would require too much effort from the man.
Rain walked down the rear ramp and sauntered in Chike’s direction, dressed in comfy shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and combat boots. He had long brown hair, rather like a rock star than a hot–shot pilot, and stood maybe a quarter head taller than Chike, so maybe a meter–eighty–five or a meter–nine.
“Did an overflight on my way in, Dr. Odille,” Rain announced as he got close. “Just in case. Didn’t pick up any radio signal, but I was barely able to find the landing beacon here until I was almost on top of it.”
“Thank you,” Chike responded. “So what’s the next step?”
“Have you ever done one of these before?” Rain asked.
“No,” Chike left it at that. He had never lost a pilot before, or any other staff member that had gotten farther away than the radio contact necessary to guide a team in and the embarrassment on pulling them out.
“So there are two flyers out there now,” Rain said. “Chances are, they won’t see anything. But they’re not supposed to. Somebody reviewing their footage here, or one of the smart systems,
might see something. We might as well, since I can hover on thrusters way better than a wingsuit can roll tight orbits around a spot on the ground. Either way, we get close. Either I land, or drop a jumper out the back ramp who can soft drop and identify whatever it was we saw.”
“So you have done this before?” Chike asked. That actually relieved him, that he might be theonly virgin around here when it came to this kind of operation. Not that he was interested in becoming an expert.
“Usually civilians back home,” Rain smiled. “I’m also rated on all helicopters and most fixed–wing aircraft up to four engines, so I occasionally fly Search and Rescue missions for the local constabulary, wherever I’m at on Earth. I prefer to fly Survey Shuttles because the pay is so much better. Flying anything else is expensive. Gotta pay for my hobbies somehow, you know?”
Chike smiled up at the man. That would explain Fairchild. She lived to fly into space and back, far more than aircraft, preferring to let someone like Rain taxi her up to altitude in her free time, so she could jump out and free–glide in. He wondered if that made them a better team. Certainly, he had never even heard rumors of Fairchild being involved with anybody on either crew: Calypso or Expedition.
“I understand, Rain,” Chike said. “How long until you head back out?”
“Oh, five minutes,” the tall man replied. “Mostly, just letting them get organized and packed away, so nothing flies out at low altitude when we’re overhead. You going to fly with us?”
Chike was torn. He was supposed to be in charge of Ground Station Beta, but Ann–Marta exercised Executive Authority until the emergency was over. The grad students were organizing the undergrads. Ground Services was organizing everything else. He was way too frazzled to handle the delicate task of setting seismographs for a baseline.
And he couldn’t cook.
Would anybody really miss him?
You know what? There was a time to stop being the stuffy academic and let his old, juvenile delinquent tendencies come to the fore. Again.
“I hadn’t planned to, Rain,” Chike decided. “But I think I will. Not going to jump out, but I can at least ride shotgun with you and monitor the sensors. If anybody needs me, they can call on the radio anyway.”
“Sounds good, Dr. O,” Rain held out a hand that Chike shook. “Welcome aboard.”
Chike found himself trailing the big, rock star pilot up the rear ramp and into the shuttle’s cavernous hold. Fairchild’s craft had seemed so much smaller when it was packed with forty–odd people and all their gear. On this trip, the inside of a shuttle was almost a cathedral.
Chike followed Rain up a small side staircase to the flight deck and watched the man strap himself into the big chair in the middle of the room. Chike grabbed one of two matching support consoles, in this case, the one on the right, closest to the stairway.
Space was at a premium up here, even as big as the shuttle was, so he had to kind of shuffle along, but he was able to slide his station’s chair out on rails, fold himself into the seat, attach every strap, and then rail himself forward.
Fairchild had taught him, early on, to hook every strap and keep it tight, and to keep coffee in a bulb with the top closed. That she had done it the hard way just made it a lesson he was never, ever likely to forget. Kind of like the woman who had driven him out here ten minutes ago.
While the pilot faced forward from a small dais, the other two stations were down, below the level of the windshields, and tucked into the corners of the otherwise oval–shaped control room. On a clock, Rain would face twelve, while Chike was at four.
He powered up the station and logged himself in with the override code that let him do pretty much everything except fly. The autopilot on a bad day was still light years better than he was, but very few people knew their way around a database or firmware bios system better than he did. While Rain went through his pre–flight checklist, Chike established a set of search parameters that took into account a person as alive and crazy as Fairchild, and set it to poking through all the imagery from everyone looking.
Ann–Marta might have thought she was conservative in setting Fairchild’s possible flight distance within a sixty kilometer ellipse. Chike knew the woman better than that. He had the system start at the outer edges of Ann–Marta’s search grid and go out another forty kilometers, and then run a secondary sub–routine to stay very close to the exact center of the storm itself.
Not where the shuttle had crashed, but where the sky had fallen in.
Fairchild was a bird. Chike needed to think like one. Either she had ridden the wavefront until it died down, or, more likely, she had set her teeth into the wind and free–glided all that mad energy in not–much–more than her naked skin.
Seriously, once Fairchild figured out how to do it, Chike fully expected to see her free–glide in nothing more than her squirrel wings, and maybe, just maybe, enough of a bikini that none of the sensitive bits got wind–burned. She would want to feel the wind on her skin.
“Ground Station Beta, this is Calypso–2, cleared for takeoff,” Rain’s voice intruded. “Flying three.”
“Who’s your third, Calypso–2?” Ann–Marta’s voice came back instantly.
Chike heard the man laugh.
“Dr. O, you want to answer or should I?” the pilot called across the meter or so of space, rather than using the internal comm.
Around them, the shuttle rumbled at an ever louder rate as Rain put power to the thrusters and got air beneath them.
At least Rain wasn’t going to make him get off. The least Chike could do was handle one grumpy Ground Services Coordinator.
“Beta, this is Chike Odille,” he said solemnly into the radio. “I’m the extra passenger on Calypso–2.”
There was a pause, probably filled with a string of very colorful profanities at the other end of the radio.
“You couldn’t resist, could you?” Ann–Marta finally said. Her tone might not be enough to polish granite, certainly it could knap flints.
“Sorry, Beta,” Chike said with a rueful smile. “I can’t cook.”
That got a laugh.
“Fine,” Ann–Marta replied in a voice wavering between angry and teasing. “But keep your radio open, in case someone needs to find you. Otherwise, I’ll have to bring you up on insubordination charges.”
Which, in Ann–Marta’s case, would be two or three weeks of kitchen duty, cleaning pots and helping the actual cooks get their jobs done. Something to be avoided, since the cooks would all be in on the game with her.
“Acknowledged, Ann–Marta,” Chike said over the roar of the engines.
At least out there, maybe he could make a difference.
Fairchild
Okay, so maybe she would call it a tree. They looked kinda, sorta alike, anyway.
Maybe kissing cousins.
Dani didn’t do botany.
The tree thing was three times taller than she was, and kinda woody. Maybe tree–ish. There was a definite trunk that emerged from the ground and branched out into secondary and tertiary pieces as it got a meter or so off the ground. The skin looked like her Aunt Trudy, who was really, really old and wrinkled. Plus the woman had strange, brown spots that none of the other women in the family had. Trudy, not the tree. Well, the tree, too.
Dani had similar spots on the backs of her hands, so she suspected that Aunt Trudy just happened to be the only honest one in the family about what she really looked like.
Aunt Trudy truly didn’t give a shit what her brother thought, or any of the rest of them.
Some of that might have rubbed off on Dani.
Just saying.
Trudywood? That might make a nice name for strange, alien trees. The weird little branches, like Trudy’s hair, poking out everywhere with ten centimeter thorns just heightened the similarity with Aunt Trudy.
Dani could also see little burrows or something, inside the ring of thorned fingers that came down to the ground, pointed outwards, so she assumed critters
about the size of small rabbits lived there. She had paid enough attention in her biology classes to know that the tree wouldn’t put up with that unless there was some sort of symbiosis thing going on.
Probably rabbit turds as fertilizer, or something. They go out at night and eat things. Bring the nutrients back and poop them everywhere for the tree to absorb.
Crap, at this rate, I’m going to turn into a scientist. Can’t have that.
I’ll blame everything on Eleanor. After all, they’ll be her pictures, right? I’m just the pilot transporting the soon–to–be–galaxy–famous Governess/Scientist around while she conducts her fascinating explorations.
Yeah, nobody’s going to buy it. I’ll have to sweet–talk one of the boffins into coming up here and taking all the credit.
Hmmm? Which ones were cute enough to sleep with, to convince them to fall on their swords and write up these findings for her and take all the credit?
Dani giggled madly to herself before she could control it.
“Yes?” Eleanor asked drolly.
Dani lived in perpetual fear that her Governess could actually read Dani’s mind. Then they’d both end up in the looney bin. Or jail.
Take your pick.
“As long as you promise not to tell,” Dani replied slyly.
“Need I remind you, again, dear?” Eleanor seemed to be on the verge of rolling her eyes so hard she might pull something. So, business as usual. “I am generally legally prohibited from disclosing personal information about you, much like the traditional attorney/client privilege. I have to know of an actual crime before I can even offer data, and even then it must be done under a valid court order.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dani retorted. “There are reasons I occasionally stuff you in a pocket backwards, or leave you on a bathroom counter, you know.”
“Just so we’re clear,” Eleanor stated unequivocally. “And why are we giggling today?”
Dani lifted Eleanor up so she could see the thorn bush clearly.
