Fairchild

by Blaze Ward

  “No, Rain,” he yelled. “Just thinking far–too–serious thoughts down here.”

  “Understand, Dr. O,” the pilot called back. “Gavin wants us to land so he can start a mechanical inspection on the other shuttle. Wanna walk around and stretch your legs?”

  “That would be marvelous, Rain,” Chike decided.

  He was not an adventurer, but here he was, having an adventure. Geologists set up their gear with precision and then went back and watched the readings from a safe place. Or rather, they sent grad students off to supervise undergrads, into the cold, wet, and miserable, and let them do the work while the professors, like Chike, got most of the credit.

  It wasn’t fair, but that was the way of things.

  If something bad happened, it tended to happen to other people.

  Chike knew part of the reason he was here was a layer of smothering guilt over what had happened to Fairchild. Flying the storm had been his call, a chance for some really solid science right at the beginning of the ground mission.

  Nobody could have predicted that outcome. But he should have known.

  Chike was going to have another hard night sleeping, unless they managed to find her today.

  Or recover her body.

  Chike didn’t want to think about that.

  He had already freaked out a little when Fahmida had first reported liquid seeping from the downed shuttle this morning. Being bright blue had only partially restarted his heart from that place where he had been expecting to have to take charge of transporting a body home.

  That would have been another first, and one he would be happy never having to deal with.

  Ever.

  The engines changed camber around him, vibrating at a higher pitch as the shuttle slowed and began to hover downward on thrusters. The landing gear deploying sounded like a bank robber trying to pry open a safe with the world’s biggest crowbar. Touching down was like being in a car having to stop suddenly, as Chike was thrown against the seatbelts holding him in place.

  He truly appreciated how easy Fairchild made it look, when he had to fly with other pilots who lacked her deft touch.

  At least the engines were powering down. They were on solid ground.

  He could go look inside the place he had been originally thinking of as Fairchild’s tomb.

  He could do this.

  Outside, the sun was getting hot. Or he had spent too much time in air conditioned huts and ships, and not enough in the open air.

  One of the perks of being in charge was sending other people out in the nasty stuff to do things. That brought a smile to his face.

  The mid–day sun was bright in an empty sky. The grit was dry and itchy.

  Calypso–1 was not scattered all over the landscape as his mind kept expecting. It was, in fact, still in one piece, even. Broken and dented and absolutely not flying again, any time soon, but intact.

  Part of that was the soil around here. Instead of striking a solid rock surface, the shuttle had fallen into a large notch, almost a little valley, which appeared to be filled with sand and a soft layer of goldish soil.

  A number of plants had been crushed underneath the weight of the craft, sticking out in all directions or broken off and scattered. But still, that had provided something of a mattress to jump on.

  Chike followed Gavin across the open space, leaving Lacumaces and Rain to rest in the shade of one wing and drink some soda pop from aluminum cans.

  Calypso–1 wouldn’t hold air, getting into orbit. That much was obvious from the way the back ramp was ajar in its cradle. While the flight deck could be sealed off, Chike doubted that any pilot would trust that, relying on a flight suit. He wouldn’t have.

  The sand and dirt here was almost white in places, fading to only barely golden–brown at the darkest. Except where a thick drip of bright blue sludge was slowly oozing its way down from the shuttle and puddling in a low spot.

  He would have worried, but Ann–Marta had explained to him this morning that the hydraulic fluid was derived largely from a gelatinized ethyl alcohol that was only slightly more intoxicating than water, and which would bio–degrade with barely any trace if left exposed to the elements for a month. So he wasn’t going to poison the soil around here, and probably not the local animals either.

  Getting gophers drunk didn’t count.

  Chike followed Gavin in through a side hatch and onto the cargo bed floor. Other than being slightly torqued out of shape, the door had even opened under power with a little prying from a bar Gavin had brought along. Upstairs, the now–open skylight let in dust and grit, with the pilot’s station empty and both side chairs still in place.

  So, she had ejected. Hopefully safely. And was out there somewhere, needing the rest of them to come to the rescue.

  It was one thing to hear those words. It was something else to actually stand here and understand what they meant. To touch this place with his own hands.

  Chike had needed to see this, to know this.

  He could do this.

  Downstairs, he found Gavin waist–deep in a side panel, presumably inspecting the engines. Or maybe the hydraulics system, since that had appeared to have been the original failure.

  “Gavin?” he called, waiting for the man to pop a head out of the panel and turn to face him. “You’ll be safe here alone?”

  “I’ll be fine, Dr. Odille,” the man replied. “You won’t be more than ten minutes away if I need something.”

  “Okay,” Chike didn’t know what to say.

  He wouldn’t find it that easy to just rough camp somewhere at the drop of a hat, but that was part of what made Ann–Marta’s team so good. And why he hired them for his Expeditions.

  Chike wandered outside and looked around. Once Gavin completed his inspection, it might be worth moving a small portion of Beta’s crew and staff up here, if Calypso–1 could be made to fly again.

  Then he remembered where he was, and why the shuttle had crashed in the first place. There was no way in hell he would put any more of his people at risk than he absolutely had to.

  Chike stomped back over to the other two men, more angry at himself for even thinking it.

  Those men were relaxed and smiling as he approached, but sobered quickly under the withering snarl he felt pasted to his face, even as he tried to calm himself down. All the mistakes to this point were his fault, not theirs.

  “Anything the matter, Dr. O?” Rain asked carefully.

  “No, Rain,” Chike replied. “Mad at myself. Let’s go find Fairchild.”

  He went past the men and up the ramp of the other shuttle craft.

  Calypso–2.

  Into the belly of the beast.

  Fairchild

  “How are you doing, dear?” Eleanor asked her in a simple voice.

  Dani stopped, looked around, and took a deep breath before she answered.

  The walking had helped. It let her grind the repetitive tendencies in her mind out into something useful.

  At the same time, the enforced silence had set her to circling the outer edges of her mind, like her shuttle falling into a nice equatorial orbit while she chased down her mothership. Except that the mothership was always staying a step ahead of her, no matter how hard she ran after it.

  It was worse than the teenage dream of walking through your school naked as a jaybird for all the world to see. Nudity had never bothered her. Physical nudity.

  Emotional nudity, psychological nudity; that was something else.

  Dani didn’t do quiet. Not without starting to climb the walls.

  It didn’t matter that the only walls around were in her head.

  “Holding it together, for the most part,” Dani replied finally.

  It was an honest answer.

  “I’ve been walking backwards for an hour,” Eleanor said. “Where are we?”

  Dani turned Eleanor around and panned the area in front of them.

  The terrain Dani had been following had narrowed down considerably here as
it wound around the mountain. Peaks on three sides of her established a bowl with a big notch chopped out of the north side. Not the direction she wanted to go, eventually, but she was getting to a lower elevation, so on balance, it was good.

  On any other planet, this would be a river bed. She could still see the remains of something that running water had cut, once upon a very long time ago, over the course of several centuries, to measure the layers of ground excavated from the sides of the slopes next to her.

  The pathway, what might be equitably called a valley on another planet, had narrowed as well, until it was maybe only one hundred meters across the flat spot, at the widest, sloping away backwards. Not quite a defile, but not the open areas of the morning. It was still Utah out here, with clumps of Trudywood trees growing a little bigger now, and a lot more frequent, mixed in with things that looked more like a cactus was supposed to.

  Birds were getting to be a little more common as she got lower, but these were smaller ones. Honest–to–God hawks with a wingspan no wider than her own. Hunters that might bother her rabbits, but would leave her alone.

  At least until she became carrion.

  Dani stopped herself from following that thought. Her head was already too dark today.

  “I see,” Eleanor continued. “Do you know where we’re going?”

  Dani shrugged, confident that Eleanor’s internal gyroscope would pick it up.

  “Mountain Survival 101 says get to lower elevation, to make it easier for folks to find you,” Dani said. “Desert survival says to find a ready supply of water.”

  She pointed at the path she had been following.

  “This was supposed to be a riverbed when I looked at it from the top the mountain,” Dani continued. “Greener than everything else from the top. Presumably, water. But there’s nothing around here. Gotta be something in order to support this level of vegetation, but it’s not at the surface and I don’t have tools to dig down far enough to find it. I’m hoping it will come out somewhere, farther down.”

  “Your logic is sound, dear,” Eleanor agreed in a dry, academic voice that sounded like her sophomore physics professor. “And your findings are strange. Perhaps there is still enough of a rainy season to provide the plants enough water to make it through the dry periods. We should look into a planetary Expedition to Escudra VI to find these answers.”

  Dani laughed in spite of herself. Eleanor could still manage droll sarcasms that snuck up on you when you weren’t looking. This was a planetary Expedition. They just hadn’t planned on getting this detailed, yet.

  “I will take it under advisement, madam scholar,” Dani replied tartly.

  “Oh, no, young lady,” Eleanor fired back. “I know how your mind works. You are not going to blame me for all the technical, scientific evidence we bring home. You’ll either have to seduce the entire ground team, or take credit for it yourself. I will remind you that I am merely an artificial lifeform, and therefore incapable of owning property or writing peer–reviewed articles in scientific journals.”

  “You would do a better job at it than I would,” Dani wheedled.

  “If you really cared about the topic, Fairchild, I doubt that very much.”

  Dani fell silent.

  That one had hit a little too close to home.

  When was the last time she had been passionate about something? Besides flying?

  School? Certainly not in the last decade. Maybe longer. She had spent too much time doing other things over the last ten or fifteen years.

  No, be honest, at least with yourself. You’ve been running away from the world and all the people in it for as long as you can remember. Eleanor knows the truth, or she can guess. She’s been with you almost every step of the way.

  Dani tried to think back, to remember what it was she had wanted to be when she was grown up, from the vantage point of a child. Every girl went through her princess phase, and her pseudo–goth period. Astronaut. Veterinarian. Super–model. Pirate.

  When had she given up?

  Why?

  It hadn’t been boys. Her bad experiences as a teenager had been bitter disappointments, rather than the kinds of abusive, physical relationships some of her friends had endured, had sought out after a while.

  No, it had been something else.

  Being too smart, too driven, too lucky.

  Standing out.

  Being Lady Danielle Cooper, when she wanted to just be Dani, or later, Fairchild.

  Of having it all, when all she really wanted was a friend who wasn’t an electronic nanny.

  She knew she could do anything she set her mind to.

  Why hadn’t she?

  This was the part that really sucked, not having any booze.

  I could go for a pint of something right about now. Maybe some pink floaters to chase it down, and spend a few days in a pleasant, harmless funk where the walls occasionally changed colors and little, talking rabbits wandered by with silly jokes and pithy aphorisms.

  Like normal.

  Dani sucked a hard breath deep into her lungs and pushed it all the way down to her toes.

  “Dani?” Eleanor asked quietly.

  Dani could tell from the tone of her minder’s voice that Eleanor thought she had gone too far.

  Most of the time, she would have been right.

  But you know what? I’m standing on the surface of a strange, alien planet, alone, and frightened. And sober. I could do anything I set my mind to. That includes just letting go.

  Then it wouldn’t hurt as much.

  Dani considered the Tomya, riding proud and dangerous on her right thigh, all set to unleash mayhem.

  It wouldn’t take that much pressure on the button to make all the bad things just go away.

  So why do I keep pushing? Keep challenging? Keep going?

  Dani could see Scylla and Charybdis waiting for her in her mind. Onto the rocks or into the dragon’s maw. She went through this every month, when the chemical imbalances in her head made her even stranger than she was the other twenty–seven days.

  This time was worse. Much, much worse.

  Nobody would really miss her, at the end of the day. She could just kind of fade from perception when nobody was looking. They might not notice until they realized that they hadn’t gotten a birthday wish, or a Christmas present. That messages sent to her inbox never got answered, and eventually, returned unopened from an overload when the box got full.

  And it wasn’t like Alphonse Cooper would probably even miss his youngest daughter if she never came back from deep space. After all, that was the deal when you cut someone off, wasn’t it? That expectation that they would learn to make it on their own.

  Or fail.

  And he was all about failure, wasn’t he? Everyone else’s. Never his.

  No, never Father. Not the man who was on his sixth wife now. He could never be wrong.

  You just failed to live up to his expectations, didn’t you? Didn’t fall in love with the boy he thought would make a wonderful arranged marriage and business relationship. Failed to be a proper, little mindless, automaton bimbo in his household, like the other women, the daughters and daughters–in–law, the various wives and mistresses.

  “Danielle.” Eleanor’s voice had grown louder, apparently. “Stay with me, please?”

  “What?” Dani blinked in surprise.

  She had completely lost track of where she was, but at least her unconscious mind had navigated her successfully around the trees and such.

  “I was getting worried, Dani,” Eleanor said. “You got silent.”

  “I was thinking,” Dani replied, aware that the next words out of Eleanor’s mouth would normally be something along the lines of Never a good idea. And usually, it wasn’t.

  Today was different. The world was different. She was different.

  She could be free.

  A little pressure on a button, and she wouldn’t have to deal with the pain and emptiness any more. The loneliness. The pyromania. The
tendencies.

  “And what have you been thinking about?” Eleanor’s voice was soft and warm now. Motherly, in ways her own mother had never managed.

  But then, Sìleas had been a trophy. Nothing more. Just something pretty to be kept on a mantle and shown off at parties. She had been dutifully replaced in time by Elizabeth, wife number four. Paella, number five, had actually had some useful maternal instincts, although Alphonse had gotten himself fixed by that point, so Dani had never known if the woman would have made a good mother.

  Current wife Akiko was older, more mature. A better fit for the monomaniacal Alphonse as he still fought his personal wars of business and revenge into his ninth decade, confident that he had at least another half–century before modern medicine gave up on him.

  “Home,” Dani replied finally. “Where we come from. Where we’re going.”

  “Any useful insights you’d like to share?”

  Eleanor was starting to sound like her once–upon–a–time therapist now, but that was okay. Talking helped.

  Anything helped. Otherwise, she was as trapped on the surface of this planet as she was in the darkest depths of her mind.

  She could die here, or she could escape.

  Dani stopped cold, frozen, rooted to the spot.

  Revelations.

  She could die here.

  But she could also escape.

  She could simply become Fairchild.

  Leave Dani behind. Leave Danielle behind. Leave Lady Danielle Cooper on the ash heap of history.

  Fly away.

  Be free.

  Around her, the mountains laughed at her hubris.

  You don’t really think you’ll get out of this alive do you, little girl?

  You’ll feed the rabbits and the hawks. Fairchild’s Golden Eagles will tear your flesh, and leave your bones for the Trudywood trees to suck out all the marrow.

  You belong to us, now.

  “Dani?”

  Dani wondered how many times Eleanor had called her name this time, before the words got through.

  She could tell that it was getting worse. That her mind was playing even more interesting tricks on her than it normally did.

  It wanted her crazy. Reveled in it.