Wings of Earth- Season One

by Eric Michael Craig

  “Dr. Forrester and Operations Director Parker are entering the far airlock on the cargo module,” Marti said.

  “Parker’s with him?” Kaycee asked. “I don’t trust him a short millimeter.”

  “Affirmative. They are cycling through the outer lock now.” Marti brought up an optic from the cargo container so they could watch the two men approach. “Mr. Parker is carrying a stun pistol in a back pouch. They left four extra security officers outside the container.”

  “Frak, let’s go see if we can get the doctor inside on his own,” Ammo said, biting on her lip.

  “If Parker pushes to come along, then what?” Kaycee asked.

  “Then I pound him for ruining my night out.” Quinn grinned. “I can make sure he gets no farther than the inside door if I have to.”

  “Let me see if I can sweet talk him first,” Ammo jumped up and headed out the door with Quinn close on her heels.

  “I’ll keep an eye on things from here,” Kaycee hollered after them, spinning the screen around where she could see it as she set up her scanner equipment. This would be their only chance to get the info they needed, and if they missed something important, it might be bad.

  Maybe not as bad as it would be if Quinn had to get physical with Parker, but still, this had the potential to go foobed quick.

  Marti split the viewscreen to show an internal optic from the ship’s airlock along with the one that showed Dr. Forrester and Parker outside the hatch.

  “You stay here and try to look worried,” Ammo said.

  He laughed. “That’s easy enough. We’re about to do some top tier stupid shit you know.”

  “I know, but not worried like that,” she said. “Worried like the doctor is injured and we’re in a rush to get back to her.”

  “I never thought I’d need acting classes to be a security handler.”

  She winked at him and palmed the door open. She stepped out onto the catwalk and they both took a step back as she intentionally crowded them to put them off balance. “Nothing personal, but just the doctor.”

  Parker shook his head and swung his arm toward where he had the stunner concealed.

  Quinn widened his stance in the airlock and also reached behind his back. In the optic, Kaycee could see him lock his hand around his own pistol.

  “Why?” Dr. Forrester asked.

  She shrugged never looking away from the OpsSec Chief. She was talking only to Parker. “Seems to me you had your security people pointing guns at us to keep us from breathing recycler stink. That’s more like the question you need to answer first.”

  “I’d told you to stay in your ship—”

  “Let’s go back and re-emphasize the guns part of what I just said.” She shook her head. “You’re welcome to keep your guards and guns outside our cargo container until the captain gets back, but in the meantime the doctor needs to follow me.”

  Parker shook his head. “Then we’re done.” He turned to leave.

  Dr. Forrester didn’t move. “If their doctor is critically injured, I need to help.”

  “No doctor. I can’t let you go in there alone.” He reached out to grab the doctor by the arm.

  “Bradley, if I may have a word with you,” he said, backing up along the catwalk far enough to not be heard.

  “Can we still pick them up?” Kaycee asked, as the optic tracked them. Marti turned up the gain on the audio.

  “I don’t want you in there alone,” Parker whispered.

  Forrester shrugged. “I’m not big with it either, but you’re worried about what they were doing when they tried to get past your guards. Maybe I can find out. If there was someone else in the airlock and it wasn’t your people getting over excited, then we need to figure out what they were up to.”

  He shook his head again. “There are at least three of them in there, and you’d be alone.”

  “Dr. Caldwell is down. There are only two others on the crew that aren’t planetside,” he said.

  “But have you seen the size of their handler? He’s a freak of nature.” Parker glanced back at Quinn. “He counts for three by himself.”

  Kaycee grinned despite the tension of the situation.

  “I’ll be alright. They won’t give me trouble while I’m working on her,” he said. “If she needs more than what I can do in their MedBay, I’ll have to bring her out.”

  “That would put her in a position where we’d have more control over the situation,” Parker said. “You can make sure that happens. Can’t you?”

  “Probably so,” Forrester said. “I’ll have to do an assessment of her condition, and I’m sure if she’s convulsing, she’ll need a standard of care that they can’t provide on a freighter.”

  Parker sighed, nodding. “I don’t like it but maybe it’s worth the risk.”

  “I’ll maintain constant communication through my link anyway,” Forrester said, reaching up and rubbing the side of his neck.

  Finally, Parker turned back toward where Ammo stood waiting.

  “I’ve agreed to let the doctor assess the situation,” he said. “He can get your doctor stabilized, and if he determines that she needs treatment, he’ll make arrangements to transport her to our medical center.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You need to understand that I know you tried to pull something when you flashed your boobs at my men,” he said.

  “Disappointed you missed the show?” Quinn asked.

  “Hardly,” he said, waving his hand dismissively. “I also know that Dr. Caldwell has been sticking her nose into things she should be leaving alone. I don’t trust any of you, so if we don’t see him back here in thirty minutes, we will board your ship. Even if we have to cut through the hull to do it.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “I don’t feel safe talking about this in the open, but there’s a problem and we need to be ready for a stink,” Ethan said as he sat on the edge of his bunk and leaned forward. The rest of his crew, with the exception of Marti sat in a close circle on the floor in front of him.

  “What kind of stink?” Angel asked. She sat forward, and her eyes narrowed as she switched back into her security handler personality.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know, but it turns out that Kaycee was right and there was something more than personality deficit disorder wrong with Marcus Elarah. She says she thinks he’s Ut’aran and that there are others working on the station.”

  “Working on the station?” Nuko asked, shaking her head but more in bewilderment than disbelief. “They’re all freaked out over making sure nothing gets left outside, and they’ve taken natives up there?”

  “That makes sense though, if you think about how they look,” Angel said. “Short. Wide. And over-muscled. Just like him.”

  Ethan nodded. “His last name is also the same as the Ut’aran word for the grasslands.”

  “I wonder if he was from the Ar’ah tribe?”

  “No telling,” Rene said. He sat back against the side of Ethan’s bunk and shook his head too. “But where he came from is less important than how he ended up on Proxima.”

  “And why,” the captain added. “I think we—”

  The air pressure changed, and Ethan’s ears popped. It was subtle, but years of working in space tuned them all into the early warnings of an atmosphere fluctuation. They didn’t have a pumping airlock in the Rockpile, but double doors kept things stabilized. The air pressure inside wasn’t much different from outside, but moving winds made the effect enough that there was no doubt.

  “We’ve got a breach,” Angel whispered as she leapt to her feet. The sound of a slamming door thumped in the distance. Nuko and Ethan bounced up almost as fast as the handler, but Rene was exhausted from his outing and rolled over to push himself up using the bed.

  The captain slipped over to the door and pulled it open a crack. The corridor was empty but there were strange sounds in the distance. He listened for several seconds before he leaned back and shook his head. It sounded like peo
ple fighting. “We need to get to the locker room and suit up.”

  “What’s going on?”

  It sounds like there’s a war in the main gallery right now.

  “You think they gave up on talking it out?” Rene asked.

  “No, I think they’re killing each other,” he said. “It sounds like screaming and crashing things.”

  “If the Ut’arans got inside, we don’t have time to talk it over,” Angel said, stepping past him to check the hall.

  She waved the rest of them out and Ethan took off at a dead run down the corridor to the back entrance to the locker room. He pulled the door open slowly to make sure the room was empty, then shot across to the exit on the opposite side. He could hear voices on the other side. Undeniably not human voices.

  Kicking a bench loose from the floor he jerked on it several times before it came apart enough that he could get it wedged under the manual door handle. It wouldn’t hold much, but if it slowed them down enough that they could get into their PSE then at least they could give the natives a fair fight. Once it was as secure as he could make it, he turned around and helped Angel wedge the opposite door.

  Nuko and Rene were backed into the autovalet and suiting up. “What if the others want to get suited,” Nuko asked while the arms swung pieces of her exoshell into place.

  “Staff all keep their suits in their rooms and not here,” Angel reminded her.

  “If they can get there,” Ethan whispered. “There are extra suits here in case any of them run in this direction.”

  “If they run in this direction, they’re being chased,” she said. “Opening the door to an Ut’aran would be nogo.”

  He nodded, looking at Rene who stumbled forward out of his alcove and was looking decidedly unhappy to be back in his suit. “See if you can connect to Marti,” he said. “Nuko, come listen at the door while Angel and I get our kit on.”

  He jumped over to his locker as she slid into his place at the door. Slamming his back against the sensor, he triggered the polymorphic liner to unfurl and watched as Rene shook his head and took up a position at the other door.

  “I can’t reach Marti,” the engineer said.

  “Did they take out the automech?” Ethan asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how tough that body is, but I think it’s more likely that the power locker got shut, and the body’s AA hasn’t figured out what to do to reestablish a link.”

  “Will our suit comm reach the ship?” he asked. The actuator arms on the autovalet started assembling the exoshell around him and he struggled to ignore it while he tried to work their situation over in his mind.

  There have to be options.

  “I don’t think so,” Rene said. “The PSE comm are pretty low power. Ordinarily they’d link with repeaters to a major transmitter, but I don’t know if they’d risk deploying something like that outside. The Windwalkers carry special comm gear but we’re probably limited to a thousand meters.”

  “What are our options?” Angel asked, stepping forward and swinging her arms around to settle the exosuit onto her shoulders. “We can’t fight them in here. The PSE limiters are overriding us and so we’re lightly armored but nowhere near as strong as the Ut’arans.”

  “Good point,” he said as his autovalet turned loose and he stumbled out of the unit.

  “I am sure there’s an override,” Rene said, waving Ethan over so he could try to figure it out. Leaning his back against the door, he spun the captain around and opened a side panel on his power pack. He poked around for several seconds and then Ethan shot up off the floor nearly smashing his head into the ceiling.

  “Be careful. It’ll burn power and heat up quick if you push it too hard,” the engineer said.

  “Angel, trade me places,” Ethan said. Bouncing across the room in a single step and crashing into the wall beside the door. “Holy shit, it’s like being back on Mars, but fast.”

  “It’ll give us an edge in strength, if we can keep from killing ourselves,” she said, nodding as he set his shoulder against the door.

  Nuko walked over and watched as he adjusted the power levels on Angel’s suit and she launched the same way. She had curled her arms over her head to keep from driving her skull through the ceiling. As a result, she bounced twice, once up and then again as her arms shot her back to the floor.

  “Shuffle,” Ethan said. “Like you were on an asteroid.”

  “It’s the accelerometers,” Rene said. “I don’t think I can adjust those without tools.”

  “We’ll learn to adapt,” Angel said. Apparently taking the captain’s advice, she shuffled over and leaned against the door.

  “Next,” he said, looking at Nuko.

  “You first,” she said.

  He shook his head. “I don’t think my suit will handle it.” He spun her around and started making the adjustments. We didn’t do any repairs to it since it didn’t look like we were going back outside. The overheating is bad enough that it would flat line and bake me alive before I could be useful.”

  “Then what the hell are you going to do?” she asked.

  “Depend on you three to keep me alive,” he said as she rocketed off the floor and curled to let the back of her suit take the hit.

  “Voices,” Ethan said, pressing his ear against the door. “Human, I think.”

  “We need to let them in,” Nuko said, hopping across the floor to stand beside him.

  The door actuator motor hummed but the bench they’d wedged under it held. The handle rattled and then someone started beating on it. Several people from the sounds of it.

  “For the love of frak open the damn door,” someone roared like distant thunder. It sounded like Toby if he had his eggs in a vice.

  Another voice screamed. “Let us in.” That one was Tash. There were others out there with them, but he couldn’t pick them out.

  Ethan nodded at Nuko and she kicked the bottom of the bench out of the way as he settled his shoulder against the door and pulled it open slightly. Hands shot through the opening and started grabbing at him and he opened the door the rest of the way. Toby, Sandi, and Tash all shot in but the two others behind them stood for a moment staring back down the hall.

  Ethan hesitated for an instant and in that moment an arrow, almost the size of a spear, whistled through the air and drove through the ribs of the mission medic, driving her out of reach, and pinning her against the wall at the end of the corridor. Leela blinked in surprise and opened her mouth like she wanted to scream but no sound came out. Instead she made small gurgling noises and spatters of red splashed out all over the other person who had turned to see what had happened.

  The captain reached out and grabbed the back of his thinskin. Remembering the power setting of his PSE, he stopped before he broke the man’s neck. It didn’t matter because a wakat was on him a second later, grabbing him by the arm, and twisting him around. The sound of breaking bones preceded his scream of agony by only an instant.

  Without thinking Ethan leapt forward, grabbing the creature by its head and with a twist, flung it away. It smashed into the opposite wall with a howl and crumpled in a heap of red and brown, its body thrashing uncontrollably. Realizing he was outside the room, he spun, stealing a glance down the hall. Three Ut’arans charged in his direction with several more wakat chasing behind them.

  “Frak, he growled, shoving off the wall and scooping the injured man off the floor as he dove back into the locker room. He hit the floor and rolled to a stop half way across to where Angel stood. Nuko slammed the door behind him and shoved the bench back into place with one hand.

  “What the fuck happened?” Ethan roared.

  “I don’t know,” Toby whispered as he crawled across the floor to the man that Ethan rescued. His arm was twisted almost all the way around behind his body and he was rocking back and forth in silent sobs.

  “I think they got in through the overhead exit,” Sandi said. She sat with her back against one wall and was gul
ping air as she stared at the one on the floor.

  “Do we have a medkit in here?” Angel asked. Tash nodded to a cabinet by the door to the entry room.

  “Angel, you tend to him,” he said. “Nuko, you watch her door. And you three get suited.”

  When Toby refused to leave the man on the floor, Ethan jerked him up by the back of his thinskin. “What the hell is your problem. Get suited,” he shouted as the door behind him started rattling.

  “That’s his boyfriend,” Tash said. She’d already backed into an autovalet and a liner was wrapping itself around her.

  Shit. He felt like an ass for almost a full second before the door handle twisted and the sound of metal stretching snapped him back into the reality of their situation. I can feel bad for him later.

  “That’s not going to hold,” he growled. “Rene, is there anything in here we can use as a weapon?”

  The engineer shook his head.

  Another sound started up outside the door, but this time it came from beside it. Wall panels being shredded. “Shit, they’re determined, aren’t they?”

  The lights flickered and then a loud shriek and a sizzling noise before total darkness fell on them. A sudden surge of gravity slammed Toby onto the ground with a heavy thud.

  “Main power is out,” Rene said, reporting the obvious.

  The night vision visor swung over Ethan’s eyes and he could see the glow from where something had grabbed one of the wires in the wall and fried itself. It hadn’t gotten hot enough to burn, but the sparks from the short circuit were visible through the wall in infrared.

  “Remember, they can see in the dark,” Sandi hissed. Ethan turned to face her.

  “So, can we,” he said.

  “I can’t” she said. “My suit didn’t power up all the way.” She was struggling to pull herself out of the now dead autovalet. Her liner glowed as its power supply heated the surface. She had both arms and her body backpanel on, but her legs pieces hung loaded into the assembly arms waiting to be attached.