by Kacey Ezell
“Just make a plan, Ozendi. I’ll be back later to check on you.” She turned toward the door.
“I shall await your return with great eagerness,” he called after her.
She ignored him and headed out into the hallway, shaking her head at his audacity.
But she couldn’t stop her lips from curving upward in a smile.
* * *
Murphy approved the plan and had further information for her, besides. It seemed the SpinDog leadership was happy with their progress and was looking to accelerate the program. Mara had gained a lot of respect for Murphy since he’d been awakened, but he increased in her esteem when he explained how he’d leveraged this desire into building a more robust support team for their surface-based operations.
“So yes, Bruce, by tomorrow afternoon, you will have your fuel at the settlement your student indicated,” Murphy had said. Though his face remained composed and blank, Mara thought she could detect a gleam of triumph in his eyes, even through the transmission’s induced distortion. “In addition, we’re sending you a larger maintenance response team and a few other SpinDog support personnel. Medical, for one. She’s also fluent in English, so she can help with any translation problems that may arise with your incoming student body.”
“Incoming when?” she’d asked.
“Twenty days. You’ll have to finish Ozendi’s training, have the training syllabus validated, and the logistics worked out by then.”
“It will be tight, but I should be able to manage, sir. Especially with the additional assets you’re sending my way.”
Because, of course, the training support wasn’t all that Murphy was sending to meet her in the mountains. Her sleepy, tiny little training base was about to get a lot busier as the majority of the Lawless’ rotary-wing assets unveiled their capabilities. What had been simply her, Elroy, and a part-time maintenance team would shortly become a full-blown task force.
All under the guise of training the SpinDogs.
Strategically, it was a brilliant move on Murphy’s part, for it allowed them to demonstrate their commitment to these new allies, as well as increase their own lethality and planetside capabilities. And, as Mara and Ozendi continued to develop SpinDog helicopter operations, that increase would apply to their capabilities as well. Win, win, win.
If Mara could get Ozendi trained up to the appropriate level quickly enough.
So, the cross-country training that they’d planned had gone from “highly desirable” to “mission critical” in a very short period of time. To that end, Mara dispatched Elroy in one of the local ground vehicles to make his way to the settlement Ozendi swore was there. The SpinDog pilot had given Elroy a flat metal disk he’d taken from around his neck to use as a bona fide when he arrived. Apparently presenting the disk, which was stamped with a design Mara didn’t recognize, was the only way to not be executed upon arrival.
The settlement was quite protective of its privacy, it seemed.
Mara pushed down her worry and waved goodbye as Elroy drove away, jouncing and bouncing over the unimproved terrain. The man had been MACV-SOG. He could take care of himself. And anyway, Murphy’s maintenance response team and support staff should be there by the time he arrived. It shouldn’t be an issue.
As Elroy’s vehicle disappeared through the trees, Mara turned to look at Ozendi, who had raised his hand in farewell to Elroy.
“Well,” she said. “Looks like it’s just you and me.”
“How fortunate,” he replied with a flash of his grin. Mara snorted softly and rolled her eyes, eliciting a laugh from the man.
“Let’s go look at your plan,” she said. “Show me what you think we can get accomplished.”
Ozendi nodded and gestured for her to precede him back to the operations building. Mara started walking in that direction, but slowed so that she paced beside him, rather than ahead of him.
“So, it seems like you and Sergeant Frazier have mended your fences,” she said, her voice softening. This wasn’t really her business, and she’d talked to Elroy about it, but she was desperately curious about Ozendi’s perspective on the relationship. “Or, at least, the two of you aren’t growling and bristling at one another anymore.”
“Oh!” Ozendi looked over at her and smiled. “I was wondering what ‘fences’ you were talking about. Yes, Sergeant Frazier and I have come to an understanding. He is very protective of you.”
“Sorry about the fences; it’s an expression from home,” she said, shrugging. “But yes. We’re a crew and good friends as well. Part of his mission here is to be my backup. I’m actually surprised he was willing to leave me, even if only for two days.”
“That is part of what we talked about before he left. Part of what you call the ‘fence mending.’ He explained his obligation to keep you safe and asked me to assume that obligation temporarily during his absence.”
Mara’s eyebrows shot up.
“Oh?” she asked. “How interesting.”
“I was willing,” Ozendi said. “Such requests are not unknown among my people. When our missions take us from our home stations, it is common to find a trusted friend to assume responsibility for those in one’s care. It is a matter of great honor to be so chosen. I was happy to agree to his request.”
“Don’t be offended,” she said, squaring her shoulders as she prepared to speak bluntly. “But I’m honestly surprised he would ask you, since he’s been suspicious of your demeanor toward me from the beginning.”
To her surprise, Ozendi threw back his head and laughed.
“Yes,” he said. “He mentioned that. I reassured him that in my culture to try to sexually take an unwilling woman was to court death, if not from her retaliation, then from the retribution of the station as a whole.” He glanced over at her and gave a little shrug. “We are a tightly bound community, and most of us are related to each other, however distantly. Such behaviors are incompatible with our existence, and the punishment for them is to be ejected from the station.”
“You mean exiled planetside?” Mara asked, fascinated by this glimpse into SpinDog culture.
“I mean ejected naked from an airlock,” Ozendi said baldly, no trace of a smile on his lips now. “As I said, transgressive behaviors are incompatible with our existence.”
“Fair enough,” Mara said. “But I’ll be honest, I don’t think Elroy was worried you’d force yourself on me. I think he’s more concerned you’ll try to seduce me…and even more concerned I’d let you.”
“Ah,” Ozendi said. Mara waited, but he didn’t elaborate. When she glanced up at his face, that warm, beautiful smile was stretched across his mouth once again.
“‘Ah’?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, coming to a stop before their building.
“Do you have any other thoughts on the matter?” Mara asked, exasperation leaking into her tone. “Besides ‘ah’?”
“One,” he said, that smile growing, shining from his eyes.
“And?” she prompted.
“Simply this: Sergeant Frazier is not the type to be unduly concerned…about anything.” With that, he reached out and twined his fingers through Mara’s, and lifted her hand to eye level. He pressed her knuckles to his forehead and then to his mouth. He brushed his lips across the back of her fingers, and the warmth of his touch rocketed through her, igniting fires under her skin that burned like the light in his dark eyes.
She opened her lips to speak, but for once in her life, she couldn’t think of anything to say. Ozendi lowered his right eyelid in a wink, let go of her hand, and disappeared into the building before she could do anything else.
Mara dragged in a deep breath, trying to force her nerves to settle. Get yourself together, girl, she ordered. You’ve flown with beautiful men before! Never mind that none of them made you feel like you were about to combust just from a single kiss. It’s not a big deal. Handle your business!
With that demand ringing in her metaphorical ears, Mara squared her shoulders and fo
llowed Ozendi into the operations building.
* * *
The next morning, at dawn, Mara felt a fluttering in her belly that had nothing whatsoever to do with Ozendi.
The suns rose bright and clear in a cloudless, golden sky. The air was sweet with a tantalizing hint of heat to come, but a consistent light breeze promised to keep temperatures within the bearable range. It was, as one of Mara’s old flight instructors would have said, a cherry day to fly.
Mara pushed aside memories of other perfect days back home and headed out to the aircraft with an eagerness that vibrated through her entire being. Yesterday, she and Ozendi had gone over every detail of his plan—which had been rather good. In hindsight, that really wasn’t much of a surprise: life in space meant you either planned well or died fast. And, she had to admit, he was coming along nicely with his flying skills. Before too long, she’d be willing to certify him as a fully qualified aircraft commander. Then they would see if he had what it took to be a flight instructor—but those were questions and problems for another day. Today, they were going to fly and have some fun.
Their first order of business was to make their way to the settlement Ozendi had indicated on the map. From the beginning of this venture, navigation had been a tricky proposition. Back home, Mara would have used radio navigation aids like VHF omni-directional receivers and TACAN military navigation aids to augment her visual “clock/map/ground” dead reckoning navigation. Not to mention the Global Positioning System, which had been an aviation game-changer in the last decade she’d spent on Earth.
But R’Bak didn’t have any of those options available. The Dornaani microsats could certainly have served in the same role as the GPS constellations back home, but the SpinDogs’ ingrained caution about casual radio contact made that a no-go.
So, she had to rely on other methods. Like most planets, R’Bak had a magnetosphere complete with north and south poles. The Huey had a magnetic—or whiskey, for “wet”—compass mounted high above the pilot’s windscreen. She could use that for basic dead-reckoning, although that was a tricky proposition since they were based in the polar region itself. As one would expect, the closer they got to the pole, the less reliable the whiskey compass headings became. Plus, some of the aircraft systems that used electricity induced further errors in the reading, thanks to the electrical current running through the wires also mounted above the windscreen. Basically, Mara could use the whiskey compass as a rough guideline, but she wouldn’t want to rely upon it for precise navigation over long distances.
Fortunately, she had two things that did seem to be utterly reliable. The first was the incredibly detailed imagery compiled by the SpinDogs over many decades—centuries?—and recently updated by the Dornaani microsats to create excellent navigation maps. Mara had never seen such high-resolution, high-fidelity images, not even from the most highly classified satellite intel back home. With these maps, she could almost navigate tree-by-tree, and, since the indigenous population of R’Bak seemed to be both pre-industrial and—perhaps more importantly—located elsewhere, Mara had little fear of “pop-up” obstacles like towers or powerlines.
The second reliable factor was Ozendi.
“I was born in the settlement we are going to see,” he admitted. They were about thirty minutes into their navigation route, winding through the mountains and forests about one hundred meters above the trees. “It is why I was sent to be your first student. I grew up adapted to standard gravity, and it was thought that this would be helpful in learning to fly the atmospheric craft.”
“Shit,” Mara said as her mind spun from this revelation. “Yeah, it would be. I didn’t even think about that, but in order for the Huey to fly, we have to keep a one-gee load on the rotor. If that didn’t feel ‘normal’ to you, that might present difficulties. We’ll have to figure that out for the other students.”
“It will not be hard,” he assured her, flashing a quick grin in her direction before turning his visored face back to look out the windscreen. “We are used to encountering varying gee levels with our other craft. But perhaps it might be useful to install an accelerometer, just so the spinborn may have something concrete to tell them what is acceptable and what is dangerous.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Mara said. “I’ll talk to El and the maintenance team about it.”
“I am honored,” he said. “But yes, that is part of the reason I wanted to come this way. I know these hills. I spent the first nine years of my life exploring them from top to bottom. Long enough for my bones and musculature to be well established.” He thought a moment. “A little too long, actually.”
Mara frowned. “Why is that ‘too’ long?”
Ozendi shrugged. “I should have gone to one of the rohabs—rotational habitats—when I was four or five, but the shuttle sent to pick me up had to be diverted, and it was several additional years before the next one came to this region. So, I came late to living and moving in low- and zero-gee.” He smiled. “But as you have seen, I am a swift learner.”
“And your body didn’t regress once you got there?”
“A little,” he said. “But I was already earmarked as a planetary liaison by that time, so I trained very hard to keep my body in condition to return.”
“I didn’t think you guys had any permanent planetary settlements.”
“We do not have settlements, exactly, and those few places that we visit regularly are kept very quiet. I was only authorized to tell you because—because it was necessary for the flight program.”
He was going to say something else. Mara didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. He had corrected himself and given a different, albeit true, answer. Curiosity burned within her, but she pushed it aside. As much as she wanted to know, there wasn’t a reason for her to insist, and to do so could be damaging to the excellent working relationship they’d built.
Because building relationships was their key to survival. Just as the contemporary “Terran” officers had pointed out shortly after awakening her and as Murphy continued to emphasize in all of his communications. Forging those relationships were just as crucial a mission as getting the helicopter training spun up. She couldn’t afford to forget that.
Even if it meant that her attraction to Ozendi continued to grow.
She shoved that thought aside as well and forced her focus down to her watch and then to the map she held in her gloved hands.
“There should be a distinctive rock outcropping coming up,” she said. “A stone spire that’s been weathered away from the rest of the cliff. It’ll be at your one-o’clock for approximately half a kilometer—”
“Contact,” Ozendi said. Mara flicked her eyes up to the windscreen and, sure enough, there it was, a little more than 500 meters away.
“Perfect,” she said. “That’s our turn point, so keep it out your right door and turn around it. We’ll have to climb a little to get through the pass below it.”
“Pulling in power to seventy percent torque,” Ozendi replied as he approached the landmark. “Right turn…clear right.”
Without Elroy in the back to look out the large cabin windows, the pilots had to clear their own turns. Mara had been relentless in her instruction, ensuring that Ozendi developed the discipline to turn his head and look every time before he banked the aircraft.
Mara punched her stopwatch button, resetting the leg timer, and glanced at the map again. “Keep your climb at ninety knots if you can, please,” she said. “It should only take us a minute and change to clear the pass, and then we’ll see the next river valley beyond the ridge. The river is our boundary, so don’t cross it. We’re looking for what looks like a wide, flat turn in the stream, like the beginning of an oxbow.”
“I know the place,” Ozendi said. “Leveling off. This should keep us one hundred meters from the highest point in the pass.”
“Good,” Mara said, looking up again. The terrain really was breathtaking. On either side of their pass, craggy granite peaks rose. Vegetat
ion grew on every slope that wasn’t sheer rock, and its dark, cool green-blue colors looked black in the morning shadows. They cruised through the pass and descended down the other side, being careful to keep clear of the uneven terrain as they approached their river valley. This was the last leg of their first flight, the leg that would bring them into the settlement where Ozendi had been born, and where Elroy awaited them now.
* * *
They made it to the settlement, which Mara had already christened “FOB Ozendi” in her head. It consisted of a village with a wooden stockade, perched on the wide bank of the mountain stream they’d followed. Like their training site, there was a large, open field which bore scorch marks from the engines of orbital shuttles, not far from one of the gated entrances.
“I’m guessing our people set up near the same landing field,” Mara said, glancing down at the satellite imagery and then back out at the landscape. “Yep. That looks like Sergeant Frazier’s vehicle at the northwest corner there. Make your approach to the north end of the field.”
“Roger,” Ozendi said, easing the collective down and beginning a turn designed to bleed off his airspeed to the point where he could make a safe, controlled approach and landing.
Mara called out his altitude and airspeed as they both decreased, until they wound up in a respectable four-foot hover, about fifty meters from where Elroy waited, leaning on his vehicle, arms and legs crossed. Despite her sudden urge to jump out and hug her battle buddy, Mara made herself sit still and help Ozendi step through the After Landing and Engine Shutdown Checklists in a methodical, disciplined manner. Once the rotor slowed to a stop, Elroy came forward and opened the rear cabin door.
“Good to see you, ma’am, sir,” he said as he reached under the left alcove seat for the pelican case that held the rotor tiedown cord, among other things. “I’ve got fuel on standby, and the village put together a lunch for you guys to take with you. I told them you’d quick turn this afternoon but be back to spend the night this evening.”
