Fairchild

by Blaze Ward

  “I have no interest in conducting the sorts of rigorous, scientific field studies of the native fauna that might burrow inside and flourish under such a flora,” Dani said. “Let alone positing and testing theories of symbiotic relationships between the disparate life forms, to say nothing of writing up academic articles for journals back home.”

  “I see,” Eleanor replied carefully. “And what made you giggle?”

  “Trying to figure out which one of the biologists I would have to seduce to get to come down here and do it for me.”

  “Oh, honey,” Eleanor’s voice suddenly got all sultry and stuff. “All you have to do with a xeno–biologist is whisper the words new animal species in their ear and then make sure they don’t run you over in their mad rush to get there first. Any seductions at that point are merely a cover on your part, as we already knew.”

  Dani raised a finger and started to argue the point, and realized that Eleanor was right. She almost shifted fingers.

  Boffins just weren’t like her other friends: the pilots, the daredevils, or the trust–fund–dilettantes. The kind who were beginning to get a little stale and possibly predictable, now that she thought about it.

  Probably just too White Picket Fence as they got older.

  Not that academics were exciting, but they were certainly excitable. Inspired. Mad for the possible discoveries and wholly concentrated on it. Perchance infectious in their enthusiasm to learn new things and truly understand how the world worked.

  As opposed to people from her other life, where lately it had been one round of rather dreary dissipations and parties after another. Profound disappointment, as the body slowly burned out the right receptors and the old standbys just weren’t enough anymore. Then it became necessary to up the voltage, running harder just to stay in place.

  Dreary. Tedious.

  Mundane.

  Crap, I’m growing up. And nobody stopped me, you bastards.

  “However,” Eleanor continued. “Perhaps Milo would be a good candidate. He’s a smart one, and rather nice. And he has a nice butt.”

  “Rawr,” Dani agreed. It was a very cute butt, attached to a lanky, ex–basketball player from someplace boring in Europe. Switzerland, maybe? Sweden? S–word of some sort, she was sure.

  And it would probably take a lot of effort to convince him. Dani was looking forward to all the time and attention it would require, climbing him like a squirrel with a particularly–tasty tree, just to bring him around to her way of thinking.

  After all, what good was science without a really good romp along the way? And he would owe her, big time, for such an opportunity.

  Dani grinned and licked her lips.

  She turned slowly in place, memorizing the landmarks she could see from here so she could guide her intrepid, and hopefully appreciative, boffin back here later.

  And to make sure that damned Golden Eagle hadn’t snuck up on her.

  Nothing. Good.

  Dani decided that this was as good a spot as any to take a break. It was almost local noon, from the elevation of Escudra VI’s sun, although the definition of an hour was different here.

  This planet rotated slightly slower than Earth, but everyone had long–ago agreed to maintain a standard, twenty–four hour clock, based on sixty minute hours and sixty second minutes. And then slicing the planet into roughly–equal time zones so people could localize.

  You ended up adjusting the definition of a local second up or down to match the reality of local noon and local midnight, with Zulu, your Prime Meridian, generally being derived from the point of First Landing.

  Since Ground Station Alpha was a quarter of a planet away, everything was calculated from there.

  And without electronics in her Heads–Up–Display, Dani could only guess at the actual time, but she was within thirty minutes of noon, one way or the other, which was close enough. She really needed to add some old–school non–electronics to her kit bag when she got home. Maybe a mechanical wristwatch like however many–times–great–grandmothers might have worn.

  Her brother Rudy, with his fascination for antiques, would be the perfect person to ask when she got back.

  The water bottle had been slowly inflating all morning. Dani decided to pop her face–plate up, at least long enough to smell the area, and so she could take water straight from the nipple, instead of having to kind of turn her head sideways in her helmet and stretch her lips out to dock.

  Escudra VI was fully habitable. She could have probably stripped down to her flight boots, and the emergency pants and shirt from her pack, maybe chopping those pants into capris or shorts. But then she would have had to carry the suit with her everywhere. Awkward, if not all that heavy.

  Better to find a spot near a lake or river or something, and then strip naked and let the sun worship her. Like all men should.

  Escudra VI had a dry smell. Dusty and rich, almost like freshly–baked cinnamon bread mixed with a tangy something that reminded her of the time she had stuck her tongue to a battery to test the charge.

  Almost citrusy, for lack of a better term, at the back of her tongue.

  Happily, she hadn’t crash–landed in a swamp. Not that she was aware of any within a thousand kilometers of here, but those places stunk, no question about it.

  No, she could handle this. If it hadn’t been so dry, she would leave her face–plate up all the time, but she needed to retain as much moisture as she could for now, and breath and sweat were fantastically bad ways to dehydrate yourself in a hurry.

  Nope, clamshelled up for now. I smell pretty good, all by myself, at least for now. Probably get funky in about five more days, so we need to get rescued before then.

  And preferably before the harpoon gun became necessary in another seventy–two to ninety–six hours.

  Ugh.

  Dani had been still and quiet for so long that a furry, little head popped out of a burrow and looked around. Short fur, somewhere between salmon pink and burnished gold. Two enormous eyes. Cute, pointy, bunny ears up and ratcheting around like radar dishes.

  It dropped from sight as soon as she moved.

  Dani circled the Aunt Trudy tree carefully and found a dead version of the tree a few decameters beyond it where the main trunk had fallen over and provided a something like a bench, upon which she could plant her butt for a little while and let her feet rest.

  The local equivalent of ants had something like ten legs, instead of six, and moved slower, at least right now. Dani pulled out the Tomya and dialed it to fire–starter mode, just in case any of them decided to get frisky. They might not smell her, but many creatures reacted to vibration instead. And they might bite.

  Dani stayed at her end of the dead trunk and put Eleanor between her and bug–land like a chaperone at a teenage party.

  Four hours of walking so far, mostly downhill or flat, across rough terrain that frequently alternated between giant slabs of exposed stone and puddles of gravel. But she was starting to get to places with soil.

  Everything around here reminded her of the northern Sahel, on Earth, arid plains slowly giving way to grass and shrubs.

  At least everything growing was some variant of green and brown. Dani decided she probably couldn’t have handled anything verging over into the cotton candy, kids’ cartoon worlds, or some of the better places she had experienced on man–made pharmaceuticals.

  This was just Utah. She could do Utah. Hell, millions of people did every year.

  Piece of cake.

  Dani let Eleanor watch the bugs while she examined the slope above her.

  She figured she had covered around six kilometers by now, possibly eight, since she hadn’t been pushing herself to get anywhere except to a lower elevation. She was pretty sure that her starting point this morning had vanished from sight, up over a ridgeline somewhere.

  It hadn’t been obvious from above, but she could see ripples in the rock now where she had come down, like waves on a beach. Probably, she had dropped at least t
hree hundred meters in elevation as she had walked, as well.

  Need to cut another direction arrow.

  In a few minutes. Resting, thank you. Feet hurt.

  Patches of greenish grass blades were starting to emerge as the ground got softer, competing with nasty, littler versions of the Trudywood trees.

  Yup. Sahel. Right at that point where the Sahara starts to fade into the savannahs of Central Africa, but hasn’t made up its mind yet.

  Suck down some more water. Contemplate really, freaking big raptors and little bunny rabbits.

  Dani wondered if the rabbits here could be eaten. Not that she was desperate enough to find out, yet, but she was in the middle of nowhere, had no radio, and could only guess when, or even if the boffins back home would find her.

  Plus, emergency food bars.

  Escudra VI was a really, freaking big planet, to go with really, freaking big Golden Eagles.

  Dani muttered a prayer to the patron saint of shuttle pilots, liberally mixed with profanities derived from six languages, and threw herself to her feet. For the briefest moment, she considered setting fire to some of the trees around her as a way of signaling the rescue teams where she was, but managed to contain her inner pyromaniac.

  Trees might burn. Hopefully, the forests around here contained enough lignin and other nifty things that she could burn them. However, she had no idea how hot and fast they might burn.

  That sandstorm had been amazingly normal, right up until the moment when Escudra VI decided to get weird and toss a forcefield–grade electromagnetic pulse thingee at her.

  Perhaps it would be better to gather up some smaller bits of wood and make sure they didn’t explode when exposed to heat?

  Crap, now I really am starting to sound like an adult.

  Dani nearly lit the whole damned forest on fire in frustration.

  She could see the fire in her mind. Smell it. Taste it.

  Her heart ached for it in ways that would make the White Picket Fence boffins back at camp probably faint. Her jaw ached from the way her teeth were suddenly grinding.

  She raised the Tomya and aimed it, fingers slowly squeezing enough pressure into the trigger button to make it all go away.

  “Fairchild, dear,” Eleanor’s voice intruded. “Is that wise?”

  Something broke inside Dani. Ruptured, like a spent water balloon.

  She sagged and nearly fell over as her muscles unlocked.

  Dani sucked a hard breath in, feeling the lock of sudden tension across her neck and shoulders, like an army of angry pixies stabbing her with those cute, little cocktail swords that bartenders stuck through fruit when you ordered something floofy.

  Wise? No.

  Necessary? Possibly.

  No, that was the chemical imbalance in your brain speaking. That dark bitch in your soul snuck up on you early this month. Thought you wouldn’t notice her coming in through the bathroom window and taking over the joint.

  Thought she could make you really crazy this time, instead of just a little nuts.

  Thought she could finally own you.

  Dani slid the Tomya back into the holster on her right thigh with hands that refused to stop shaking. She clenched them into fists and turned back to face Eleanor, unsure what to say in response.

  “It’s bad,” Dani finally blurted out.

  “I know, Dani,” Eleanor replied warmly. “I could tell. Let’s cut another arrow and then walk some. Exercise usually helps you focus.”

  Dani strode over on wobbly legs and scooped Eleanor up, carefully reversing the woman in her grip to watch backwards before holding on for dear life, her one, true friend in the cosmos being a computer program who was programmed to keep the tendencies at bay, under control.

  Safe.

  Dani found a spot with a nice amount of clearing and set to work shuffling her feet through the dust and growing layers of dirt. This one would be extra–large, compared to the rest.

  Dani had nothing to hide behind. No booze. No drugs. No mindless, casual flings with strangers to protect her from that dark patch that lived at the bottom of her soul.

  She would be alone out here, but for Eleanor to keep her sane. At least until the rescuers showed up.

  They had better hurry.

  Chike

  “So what do you think, Dr. O?” Rain called above the soft roar of the engines as the Calypso–2 Survey Shuttle orbited the wreckage site slowly in a clockwise pattern.

  What did he think? Why the hell was he up here, instead of back at camp being in charge?

  Because he wasn’t in charge. He was just getting in Ann–Marta’s way and probably annoying the hell out of her and her people with his pestering questions.

  At least she was used to it, hopefully, by now.

  It was the scientist in him, forever asking Why? to the world around him. Geologists were supposed to be patient creatures. He got that. He didn’t get patience when there were things to do. Dragons to slay.

  Princesses to rescue.

  Not that Fairchild qualified as a princess. Well, maybe a little, considering who her father was, but he wasn’t supposed to know that. Nobody was. She was Fairchild, not Lady Danielle Cooper of Panamuer Nuevo.

  If she wanted to make her way in the galaxy and hide the fact that her father probably could have bought Calypso outright from spare change, who was he to gainsay her?

  She was also a damned fine pilot.

  Chike just wasn’t used to yelling above engine noise while flying. Fairchild would have used the internal comm. But then, she would have been wearing that blue bodysuit that looked skintight, stretched over a frame that was all muscles instead of curves, with a helmet that had all the electronics built in.

  Rain took an entirely different approach to flying. Chike could see him buzzing sea lions for fun, just to see if their eyes really had whites.

  “I think that I needed this trip,” Chike finally ventured, daring to speak the words out loud, where Ann–Marta wouldn’t hear and razz him mercilessly for months.

  He glanced over a shoulder to see Rain smiling down at him from the pilot’s seat, like a deity offering a blessing.

  Chike’s shoulders had come down. He couldn’t think of another way to describe it. The tension had bled out of his neck and back as he headed into the sky. Not that he expected to be able to do anything, but just being out here was enough.

  Helping.

  The mountains kept drawing his eyes, but that was the geologist in him. He could read the history of the world in the bones he could see, upthrust and breaking through the skin of Escudra VI.

  She was an old world. They knew that. Drier than Earth, too, but there was evidence else that she had been cooler and wetter in her youth. Or perhaps, middle age.

  Habitable was not her natural state.

  Earth had long–ago evolved creatures who respired oxygen into the early planetary atmosphere, setting the stage for larger and more advanced life–forms to appear and eventually dominate over the course of the last half billion years.

  Escudra VI had been a rock with a dead, rather boring atmosphere, for much of her life. Not as thin and empty as Mars. Not as exciting as Venus. But not a place where life had evolved that would look up at the stars in wonder.

  Something had happened. Or rather, someone had happened.

  Humans had found any number of rocky worlds in the giant sphere they had explored slowly outward from Earth. Many of them were habitable by humans. Pleasant even. The right gravity, within a few percentage points. The right atmospheric balance of oxygen, nitrogen, and trace gases. All the little lifeforms that sustained the carbon lifecycle. Some of them were even edible, which said something, given the wide availability of amino acids upon which life itself could be based.

  But here, on Escudra VI, all of that was a frosting added to the world at a later date. Almost yesterday, geologically, compared to the stack of bones in front of him.

  To everyone with half a brain, that argued for someone, the cake�
��makers who had originally made the world habitable. Yet they had left behind no evidence of having been here, except for these worlds.

  To the more religiously minded, that reminded people of the old biblical line about having many rooms in his Father’s house, and the exploration age had created a renewed interest in religion, driven by a warm, charismatic Patriarch who preached a message of divine forgiveness and the importance of second chances, after all the damage humans had done to Earth along the way.

  Some called them Archangels, showing the path. Scientists had generally agreed to the term Elder Race, working on the presumption that they had existed once, but had disappeared. Truly, it was a mystery, to find worlds with evidence of terraforming, but no terraformers.

  No monuments in orbit, all carefully placed where only space–traveling wanders would find them. No Sentinels on the Moon watching.

  Nothing at all out of the ordinary.

  Except Escudra VI, where the terraforming appeared to be failing. Where the Elders might not have been omnipotent, after all. Where maybe, just maybe, they hadn’t quite cleaned up after themselves.

  Who knew?

  Maybe they had been in a hurry to leave. Maybe something had happened.

  Chike didn’t know, but was intent on finding out.

  What would it be like to finally find someone else out there? To know we weren’t alone? To touch the face of God, as it were?

  The alternative was an even worse thought.

  To have missed them, by however little, and be left to face the darkness alone.

  Geologically, Escudra VI was an old world. But that layer of frosting over the top was only perhaps a million years old, at most. A soft, candy coating. The thin flesh of a plum over a very large, very hard stone.

  Had the Elders left so recently? Had they predicted humanity? Could they have? Or were there other children yet to be found, still lost in the darkness, awaiting their turn?

  “You’re quiet, Dr. O. Find anything?”

  The sudden interruption scattered Chike’s mind like a wind into fog.

  Rain. Flying. Rescue mission.

  Fairchild.

  Chike brought his concentration back from the wool–gathering places where he had wandered off to.