by Blaze Ward
That bitch that had climbed in the bathroom window hadn’t left. She was sitting in the kitchen now, with a bottle of whiskey and two shot glasses full on the counter. Taunting Dani. Laughing at her.
Daring her.
One drink. That’s it. Drink this and let go. You’ll be free. I’ll take care of everything, little girl. Don’t you worry your pretty, little head about a thing.
Dani growled. Maybe just in her head. It was hard to tell.
No.
That would be too easy. That would be the coward’s way out.
That would be what Father always expected of her.
That would be letting them win.
“I don’t want to be crazy,” Dani whispered.
“Nobody does, Fairchild,” Eleanor replied. “How can I help?”
If Eleanor had slapped her right then, an open–palm cross to the cheek that got the attention of everyone else in the entire room, Dani wouldn’t have been as surprised.
Nobody had ever asked her that. Never. And it might have been the first time Eleanor had ever called her Fairchild to her face.
“Can I be not crazy?” she finally asked.
In her mind, she was twelve years old again. Or maybe eight. Hearing her teachers talk to her about her tendencies and how to control them. How to live with them and not embarrass herself.
Embarrass her parents.
And that was what it was really about, at the end of the day. Do nothing to bring disrepute on her Father’s name. Her own, she could do anything she wanted, but not him.
Never him.
“Fairchild, you can be anything you set your mind to,” Eleanor whispered back. “I’ve been waiting for twenty years for you to want something badly enough.”
Flying had been a want. A willingness to submit to all the grinding work, all the training, all the certifications, so that she could fly. So that she could be free.
But that paled beside wanting to be sane.
After all, they could teach you to fly.
Nobody had ever taught Dani how to be mentally sound. All they had ever given her were coping mechanisms designed to obscure the fact that she was crazy. To hold it at bay with empty relationships and mind–altering substances.
She wondered how many of her nominal peers fell into the same category. Crazy, but managing to hide it beneath simple misbehavior, abstracted from consequences by enough money and the right lawyers, folks walking along behind them like the men who picked up horse poop from parades in the old cartoons she watched as a little girl.
It explained a lot. A staggering, frightening amount of things.
And yet, she had never gone over that dark edge when it beckoned, like it did right now. Never simply curled up and died, like Esmeralda had. Never taken the whole bottle at once and locked herself in a bathroom to wait for the end. Never located a weapon capable of doing the deed in one, fast pass. Never cut herself in an attempt to let the angry, crazy blood drain out.
Never given in.
Maybe that was the secret? Never giving in?
She had inherited stubborn from Alphonse. From Sìleas as well, as near as she could tell, not having spent that much time around her mother in the decades after the divorce.
Eleanor could testify to it, if legally compelled.
Hell, Eleanor might volunteer stories of how hard–headed her charge could be. Most of them would be God’s Honest Truth™ as well.
Could she do this? Was it that easy?
Put one foot in front of the other, time and again, until you climbed down off the mountain, or at least the damned high horse you had managed to get yourself atop?
Dani looked at her hands.
They weren’t shaking now, for the first time in at least an hour.
Okay, not much. Just a quiver.
The dry river bed kept going. The banks were fairly wide, pretty straight, and almost predictable.
Safe.
She could do this.
And if she couldn’t there was always the Tomya to free her.
Chike
The comm chirping surprised the hell out of Chike.
He had been face–down on the scanner logs, studying every false positive the system had thrown up at him, after he had relaxed the definition of a possible target.
“Chike here,” he said, pushing the button and leaning back to stretch.
It had been another hour of flying orbits. High enough to see a lot of ground, low enough to get good resolution videography of things. The terrain here made it extra hard. Right now, they were flying over an area of gorges and draws so tight that it was necessary to almost fly down and back like a loom weaving cloth, in order to see the bottoms of some of these little valleys.
Fairchild could be hidden in any of them.
Geologists did do patience.
“Chike, this is Ann–Marta,” she said confidently. “We may have found Fairchild.”
And just like that, all the weight of the world was gone. Vanished. Never had been.
God, if he could bottle this feeling, he’d be richer than Alphonse Cooper.
“Talk to me, lady,” he growled back. “Need some good news.”
“We’ve spotted what might be a man–made shape on the ground, a little beyond the north edge of our original search area,” she replied. “Computer found it, cycled it up to one of the students.”
“What do we know?” Chike asked.
His console beeped at him and displayed a fuzzy, flat–angle shot of the ground, probably taken from a wing–suit helmet cam that had glanced almost far enough in the right direction.
Clear over at one edge was something someone might call an arrowhead shape. Darker than the surrounding soil, and reasonably straight. Straighter than anything else he had seen.
“I’m vectoring you and Rain in,” Ann–Marta said. “You can get there fastest and see if it is what I think. If so, we’ll go from there.”
“What if she’s hurt?” Chike asked.
Up until now, he had been focused on finding her. How she was doing hadn’t even crossed his mind.
“That’s why you have Lacumaces, Chike,” Ann–Marta’s voice sounded all smirk. “He used to be a trauma surgeon, but gave it up to come work for me because the old job was too boring.”
Too boring? What in the name of God did Ground Services do that would make being an emergency room doctor look boring? Besides traveling to alien worlds and occasionally jumping out of perfectly habitable shuttles, or flying Search and Rescue missions in one–man wingsuits.
Where was the excitement in that?
Chike laughed, quietly.
“Understood, Ann–Marta,” Chike replied. “We’ll find her.”
Rain had been listening. Calypso–2 suddenly stood on one wing and howled defiance at the sky. Chike found himself facing straight down, according to his inner ear, and pushed sideways against his seat, and then down into it as Rain hit the bottom of his turn and came out of it like a race horse smelling the final stretch.
And then down was down again.
“Keep me posted,” Ann–Marta said, and then she was gone.
Chike glanced back over his shoulder.
Rain the beach bum had turned into a terrible, vengeful god from the profile Chike could see, scowling with intensity as he locked the coordinates in and flogged his steed to get there ever faster. It was a side of Rain that Chike had never encountered before. Hadn’t even realized lived beneath that laid back façade.
We all hide our secrets beneath the bonhomie. Only pressure reveals it.
And then, diamonds.
The next ten minutes were some of the longest in Chike’s life.
The two wingsuits had been up a good portion of the day, landing for breaks every few hours. They were actually closer to the target, but the shuttle moved twenty times faster, even at this atmospheric density. So Ann–Marta had left them on their patterns and called him in as the cavalry.
Rain had a refrigerator and a bathroom up o
n the flight deck, and Chike had forced himself to use both as he waited, sipping on a lemon–flavored energy drink as they got closer and his nerves wound tighter and tighter.
Even geologists had limits to their patience.
Finally, Rain snapped the big shuttle onto her left wing and rolled back hard.
Chike was prepared this time, all strapped in and comfy as the maneuvering got almost as crazy as Fairchild’s on a normal day.
One quick orbit, and the engines cycled, thrusters standing the massive deadweight on tongues of flame as the shuttle slid in to land. Even the landing gear was a welcome sound.
From his monitor, Chike agreed that it looked like an arrow worn into the ground by feet shuffling along. What he didn’t understand was why they were landing, if the arrow pointed that–away.
“Rain?” Chike finally called. “Why aren’t we following the arrow?”
“Boss wants us to touch this one and confirm its origins, Dr. O,” the pilot called back over the roar. “Might be a weird critter den, or crop circles, or something.”
Crop circles? Oh. Right. Alien planet. Strange lifeforms.
Don’t get so involved that you lose track of where you are.
The roar of the engines overwhelmed everything else for thirty seconds. And then they were down.
Silence, offset with the occasional ping as the engines cooled and the shuttle settled.
“Damn, would you look at that?” Rain exclaimed suddenly.
“What?”
Chike felt his heart wanting to stop again.
“Here.”
An image appeared on his screen. A brownish bird, gliding above them on thermals above them, orbiting slowly.
“Okay?” Chike said, confused. “I don’t get it.”
“Dr. O, that thing’s body is as big as yours,” Rain said confidently. “Each wing is a little over two meters long.”
“But that would mean…”
Chike felt his voice trailing off in spite of himself. Birds got that big on this planet?
“Yup,” Rain agreed. “Thing’s huge. Pretty, too. Wonder what she’s up to.”
“Maybe having a religious experience, Rain,” Chike fired back. “We’ve got to be the biggest flying creature she’s ever seen, too, you know.”
“True dat,” the pilot smiled.
Rain popped all his straps and stood up, stretching. Chike followed suit, following him down to the main deck in time to see Lacumaces powering the front ramp down.
Chike realized now that the big man’s sand–colored backpack was covered with Red Crescent logos. He had missed that earlier, but Lacumaces and Gavin had only intruded on his consciousness as physical obstacles to navigate around, instead of people.
Chike would have to get his head out of his ass in the future. Everyone had interesting stories, but he had been too busy in his ivory tower to pay any attention to anyone besides the other academics. And Ann–Marta, but she had been his friend for fifteen years.
Even at this elevation, it was hot out. Long pants against bugs and small creatures didn’t help, nor did steel–toed boots and sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Chike was glad Rain had made him drink something before they got out into the dry oven of Escudra VI’s uplands.
The air was gritty. It left an alkaline taste on his tongue, as well. The soil was a dusty blanket of cream and taupe over darker rocks, with only occasional plant life thrown in.
They had overflown areas where the trees and grasslands were heavier, but this was above the local tree line, for lack of a better term to describe it. Nothing but rock and scree above here for the most part.
Chike followed Lacumaces across nearly a kilometer of open space, with Rain staying behind and getting ready for the next hop.
“Why do we land so far away?” Chike asked.
Geologists had to be in pretty good shape, but this was a long hike in the heat. It better be worth it. His shirt was already sticky.
Lacumaces slowed his killing pace and let Chike come up beside him.
Up close, the man was tall and looked lanky, until you realized that he was all wires and bone. The name was North African, possibly Libyan, but Chike didn’t know his last name to be sure. Certainly, the man had that swarthy, Mediterranean look that bespoke Egyptian and Roman ancestors, if you went back far enough. The bones in his face looked Spanish, for lack of a more accurate geography.
He had surprisingly delicate hands, even in black gloves.
“Shuttle generates a lot of wind when you land on thrusters, Doc,” the man said. “We need to retain a safe perimeter so we don’t scrub all the evidence accidentally.”
“Oh, right.”
Duh.
You see evidence of Fairchild, and then land on top of it and obliterate it. That would be dumb.
So that meant a long trudge across broken ground.
Chike could see the need to get out more and eat less, if he wanted to keep up with these people. It was probably worth the effort. Academics were frequently uninteresting company, himself probably included in that number.
Lacumaces stopped him with a sudden hand on Chike’s arm.
“What?” Chike asked, at a total loss.
“There.”
Lacumaces pointed at the ground a few meters away.
“Stay here for a moment, please, doc.”
Chike was happy to catch his breath and watch the other man move.
It was like a documentary on hunting big game. Lacumaces went down to one knee and stayed perfectly still for about ten seconds, and then reached a hand out and touched the ground. Then he stood up and carefully put a foot down.
From here, Chike could see a trail of footprints coming from the left, higher ground, and making their way to the right. Lacumaces’s feet were much larger, so Chike assumed that these were really Fairchild’s prints.
What other woman would be walking around up here?
“Hours old, but not days, doc,” Lacumaces announced. “Pretty sure we’ve found your girl.”
Chike allowed himself to know hope.
Fairchild had made it out of the shuttle safe. Had made it to ground intact, and was walking around up here somewhere, looking for help while they were looking for her.
Just a matter of time, now.
Lacumaces started walking again, gesturing Chike to come up with him. The last hundred meters were so much easier, paralleling Fairchild’s tracks in the dust.
Fairchild had walked to this point, rested for a bit, and then taken ten minutes or so to create an arrowhead shape in the dirt that was about eight meters along each axis and maybe two centimeters deep in the soft ground.
“Ground Station Beta, this is Field–Four,” Lacumaces suddenly said out loud.
It took Chike a moment to process. And then the radio pinged.
“Go ahead,” Ann–Marta replied instantly.
Was she as on pins and needles as he had been all morning?
Probably. And probably cursing him under her breath for being out in the field doing something when she had to stay home and mind the store. Not that she would ever say a word to him.
“Contact confirmed, Beta,” Lacumaces continued. “Human female tracks. Right size, right dimensions to match Fairchild. Less than a day old. No sign of our quarry, but she’s leaving us a clean trail as she moves.”
“Acknowledged, Field–Four. Vectoring all other teams your direction, but they’ll be a bit. What do you need now?”
“Nothing at present,” the man grinned at Chike as he spoke. “Got Doc and Rain to keep me company. Fairchild’s tracks show no indication of physical injury. We’ll saddle up and hop after her. Might not catch up with her in daylight. She’s moving at a pretty good clip. We’ll determine late in the day if we should return to base or camp here.”
“Understood, Field–Four,” Ann–Marta replied professionally. “Tell Chike that we’re having Beef Stroganoff with meatballs for dinner tonight and he’s missing it.”
Okay, that was
a low blow.
Chike could just imagine that this was her revenge on him for leaving her behind. There were only enough ingredients to make Stroganoff twice, and he had been planning the second batch to be the last, celebratory meal before they broke down Beta and moved on to the next major phase of the Ground Expedition. Right before they went home in six weeks.
Lacumaces grinned even broader. Probably almost as grandly as Ann–Marta was doing right now back at Beta.
He would have to spend some serious time thinking about ways to get even with that woman. Something really good, like finding her a boyfriend or something.
Chike let his scowl out and trotted it around for a bit. That just made Lacumaces laugh out loud.
“Okay, so now what?” Chike said.
Lacumaces grew serious again. Emergency room trauma surgeon serious. He turned in place and moved to the point of the arrow, pulling out a compass and a printed topographical map as he knelt. Chike watched the man draw lines on the map with his finger for a few moments before he rose and turned back.
“Fairchild’s not crazy, is she?” he asked, catching Chike off guard.
“No, why?”
“Good,” Lacumaces said with a grim, serious look. “From here, I can see two major directions that normal people would pick, given her route so far. We need to find her next arrow or two, to see which one she chose and then we should be able to fly right over her.”
Hallelujah.
And it would be worth it to miss dinner, to see Fairchild again.
Fairchild
Dani chuckled.
It was a quiet sound, nearly swallowed up by the crunching of her feet on the rocky, gravelly soil as she worked her way down the mountain and into something that might charitably be called a forest. Certainly the Trudywood trees were bigger now, butted up against one another and reaching to five and six meters in height, each holding their circle of ground with dangerous thorns.
Tiny, organic castles filled with dangerous rabbits. Living inside a dry riverbed that ran beam–straight for more than a kilometer. On a planet a hundred light years from any place she had ever been.
“What’s so amusing, dear?” Eleanor spoke up.
“Bunny rabbits as fierce knights,” Dani replied. “Holding their borders against all comers, and pooping everywhere.”
