Wings of Earth- Season One Read online

  Wings

  of

  Earth

  Season One

  ERIC MICHAEL CRAIG

  Copyright Wings of Earth: Season One © 2020 Eric Michael Craig

  Copyright Echoes of Starlight © 2019 Eric Michael Craig

  Copyright Dust of the Deep © 2019 Eric Michael Craig

  Copyright Chains of Dawn © 2019 Eric Michael Craig

  Copyright Beyond the Edge © 2019 Eric Michael Craig

  Copyright Stranger Bedfellows © 2019 Eric Michael Craig

  All rights reserved. This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author and publisher.

  Cover Designs: Ducky Smith

  PUBLISHED BY

  Rivenstone Press

  FOREWORD

  by Geoff Habiger

  When Eric asked me if I was willing to write the foreword for this box set, showcasing the first five episodes of the Wings of Earth series, I had to look around to make sure he was talking to me. Since nobody else was there jumping up and down with their hand in the air, I guess he really was talking to me. Naturally, I was excited to help Eric out, but at the same time I was a bit flabbergasted. I only met Eric a couple of years ago, introduced through another person I’d also only just barely met, at a local comic convention where Eric was peddling titles for members of the SciFi Roundtable. We chatted briefly, but I don’t think either of us gave too much thought to that first encounter. We met again at a few other events in the area, chatting during the slow times at cons. Then we were both asked to be involved in a science fiction/fantasy writing conference here in Albuquerque. We were on opposite sides of the great “Self-Publishing vs Traditional Publishing” debate panel at the conference. That was probably the first of many times that we got together, either just the two of us, or with other writers, to drink beers and pontificate about writing, publishing, science fiction, and pretty much anything else under the stars.

  Naturally, I started reading Eric’s novels and I quickly became a fan of his work. So, when he told me he was working on a new series of books that would be more space opera in tone than his previous novels, I was excited to see the new universe that Eric would create. He had set a high bar for scientific accuracy, character development, and storytelling in his previous stories and I looked forward to seeing what was to come next.

  I’m going to back up here for a moment to talk a bit about myself, just so you can get a frame of reference. I’m a child of the 1970’s and 1980’s. I grew up reading science fiction from the greats –Asimov, Bear, Bova, Clarke, Niven, Saberhagan, etc. And I loved science fiction television and movies. I could get lost in reruns of Star Trek and waited excitedly every week for new episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers to come on TV. When Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987 I was so disappointed because I had to work a shift at McDonald’s the night of the very first episode!

  I want to give you that bit of context about me as a reader and follower of sci-fi so the following will make sense. Eric has captured the same excitement, feel, thrill, awe, and amazement (and maybe a few other adjectives too) in the Wings of Earth series that I got watching sci-fi television when I was growing up. Eric’s stories evoke in me the same feeling that I got watching sci-fi on TV. (And are way better than a lot of those episodes of Buck Rogers or Battlestar Galactica ever were, but as a 10-year-old kid they were awesome!). Every week I was excited to sit down in front of the television to see what would happen to Buck, or Apollo and Starbuck, or to Captain Picard and the crew of the Enterprise. And with Eric’s Wings of Earth books it is the same thing. I’m invested in what happens to the characters. I want to know what happens next. The storytelling keeps me turning the pages and picking up the next book. It’s no wonder that Eric refers to each book as an “Episode”, and that this box set comprises the first “Season”, because in the same way that many of us now binge watch sci-fi on television, I want to binge read all of these stories to get to the end.

  So, if you love science fiction, especially the great episodic adventures you grew up with on television (no matter what era you grew up in), then prepare yourself. The crew of the Olympus Dawn are going to take you on a wild adventure. You will root for Captain Walker (who even though he’s just the master of a freighter, I’d stand up as being the equal to any Adama, Kirk, or Picard) as he threads his way through dangers and mysteries. You will be wowed by the special effects, and cringe as the Olympus Dawn faces ever more dangerous situations. And in the end, you may find it hard to put down this series until you get to the very end.

  Geoff Habiger ~ Author and Publisher

  Contents

  Foreword by Geoff Habiger

  Echoes of Starlight

  Dust of the Deep

  Chains of Dawn

  Beyond the Edge

  Stranger Bedfellows

  Get the Shan Takhu Legacy

  Leave a Review

  Other Works by Eric Michael Craig

  About the Author and Links

  Echoes

  of

  Starlight

  Wings of Earth: Book One

  ERIC MICHAEL CRAIG

  Chapter One:

  The Olympus Dawn dropped out of cruise as it passed the outer threshold marker, ten light-hours from Starlight Colony. It was a picture-perfect sub-light transition as the residual photons snapped clear of the ship’s hull with the usual flash of infrared that swept up to ultraviolet across the forward screen. From outside, it would have looked like the typical hellish white-light flash of a photon boom, but from the inside, it was a wonderful phototechnic cascade of unimaginable colors.

  “All hands rig for space-normal operation.” Captain Ethan Walker made the announcement more as a formality than anything else. His small crew had done this hundreds of times, so they knew their jobs. With only a couple exceptions, they’d be snoring and waiting for something interesting to happen.

  “You just like the sound of your own voice, don’t you?” Nuko Takata said from the seat beside him. When he glanced over, she winked. She’d been his copilot for over two years, and she knew him well enough to understand sarcasm was his preferred language. They had the ConDeck to themselves and she had her legs up and crossed on the corner of the console as she thumbed through the latest newswave on her thinpad.

  “Marti, plot a course for the transfer beacon and set speed to half-light,” he said. As the ship’s resident Artificial Awareness, Marti did most of the real piloting and at least it wouldn’t give him any lip. Usually.

  “There is a problem with that, Captain,” the AA said in its rich contralto voice. “The beacon seems to be down.”

  “Down?” Nuko said. Dropping her feet to the deck, she tossed her screen to the side and leaned forward to look at her console. “It could be in eclipse, but the nav-time says that won’t happen for another sixteen hours.”

  Starlight and its co-orbiting sister planet Shadetree were some of the earliest exoplanets discovered by an old sky survey system that used transiting observation to find worlds orbiting distant stars. Kepler 186 was 178 parsecs from Zone One, but its stellar plane lined up with Earth, so a ship coming in on a direct line from the home system might catch the worlds lined up with each other. When that happened, they’d have no beacon to use to get a navigational fix. The colony’s beacon sat at the barycenter of the binary planet and winked out for almost an hour out of every forty-ei
ght.

  “You’re sure we’re in the right system?” he asked, poking at her. She wasn’t the navigator, but since she’d punched the buttons last, it had to be her mistake.

  “If it’s Tuesday, this has to be Starlight,” she said, shaking her head.

  “It is Kepler 186,” Marti said. “I have located the other threshold markers and they triangulate to a high degree of certainty.”

  “This is a dinky red-dwarf, so let’s point our nose down-system and make feet. I’m sure we can find a binary planet within twenty million klick of the big glowing thing down there,” he said, not wanting to waste a lot of time digging up problems that might have an easier explanation. “Maybe they’ve blown a fuse and they’re waiting for us to deliver parts.”

  “Should I try to raise someone on the long-comm?” Nuko asked.

  “Let’s give them a chance to come out of the shadow and see if the beacon reappears,” he said, standing up and shrugging. “We don’t want to sound like noobs to the locals, in case it’s nothing. Maybe we’re reading an old chart that somebody forgot to update and we’ve got our times off.”

  “We do not run interstellar navigation on charts,” Marti said. “They are inefficient and inaccurate.”

  “They did when I was in school,” he said, rolling his eyes and grinning.

  “Improbable, Captain,” Marti said.

  “Nuko, hold the deck down. I’m thinking I need a little time out of the seat.” He turned and headed for the door.

  “Sure thing, Boss,” she said. “I’ll scream when we catch the beacon, and in the middle-time we’ll set a course ... that way.” She waved a hand in the general direction of the dim red star in front of them.

  “Lock it in and make feet,” he said over his shoulder as he headed out in search of a meal and some time off the deck. It was his ship, at least on paper, so he took the majority of the time on duty, but after three years running consignment cargo to pay his license and lease, it was getting skinny around the edges.

  The door hadn’t completely closed behind him when one of the two passengers on this run ambushed him. “Are we there yet?” she said, grinning as his face dropped into a stony glare.

  Dr. Keira Caldwell was in her mid-thirties and was the type he once would have chased to ground, although for some reason he knew she was beyond his orbit. There was something about her that told him she didn’t breathe the same air he did. She was casual and friendly in an easy sort of way, yet it had a hint of a studied edge to it. He couldn’t tell for sure, but he suspected she had money somewhere in her tree. “It’s just been a while since I was home and when I heard that we were back down from cruising speed, I figured we were close enough to the end to ask,” she said.

  “Actually Doctor, we’ve still a little over twenty hours to go,” he said, trying to slip past her in the narrow corridor.

  “Twenty-three days on this ship and you still won’t call me by my name,” she said, winking and shaking her head as she dropped into position and walked with him back toward the lift.

  “Sorry… Kaycee. Force of habit,” he lied, shrugging. He knew it was safer to keep the wall of propriety firmly in place with her. “We have to drop out of cruise far enough from a star to be outside the clutter. Unfortunately, that means it’s crawling speed from here. We’re still eleven billion klick from a parking orbit.”

  “Is there any chance I can comm with the colony before we get there?”

  “Yah, you can send a message, but since we’re running at half-light, and there’s about twenty hours of comm loop time, we’ll almost be there by the time you’d get anything back.” That was a slight exaggeration but since he didn’t see a need to authorize the comm time, he let his oversimplification stand.

  “What about the deep-comm?” she asked. “I know it takes a lot of energy, but at this range it isn’t too bad is it?”

  Stopping at the rail edge, he waited for the lift and twisted to study her face. “Is there something urgent that I need to know about?” After several seconds he realized he was staring at her and his mind had gone into standby. She was a paying passenger, and he was just the hired help, so it was doubly dangerous that something about her tempted his eyes to wander, along with his thoughts.

  “Not really,” she said. “It’s just that I need to make sure they’ve got a cargo lander waiting at the transfer station. The payload is a bit delicate, and if you’re running a tight turnaround, I don’t want you to be held up, or to drop and dart leaving us free-floating while we wait on the down-leg.”

  “I don’t have a problem with giving you the comm time, but Starlight’s transponder is in eclipse at the moment so it can’t be for a while yet,” he said. “Since deep-comm runs through the same relay as the beacon, we’ve got no link to the colony until it comes back into line-of-sight.”

  “So, it could be as much as an hour before we can downlink.” She frowned.

  “We’re not tight, anyway. We came in about ten percent hot, so we’ll make station early,” he said. “If you’re worried about the environment of the transfer, why didn’t you have us contract the downside handling? Nuko’s an artist with the drop-ship loader.”

  “That’s good to know,” she said, stepping onto the lift platform once the rail opened. “Unfortunately, I didn’t arrange that side of the contract and your Cargo Compliance Controller doesn’t seem like she’d be much inclined to look the other way and let me make you a side offer.”

  He followed her into the small cage, and they started down. “Leigh is a good Triple-C, but she does tend to be somewhat …” he stopped, trying to find a diplomatic way to finish his thought without overstating his opinion.

  “The phrase you are looking for is, tight assed,” she said, winking. “I bet when she breaks wind, dogs come running.”

  Walker’s mouth fell open. He blinked several times as he looked down at the deck and struggled not to laugh. “Rigid was the word I was thinking,” he said.

  Leigh Salazar was a corporate enforcer and responsible for making sure they executed the transport contract from end-to-end on any run they accepted. It meant she was as inflexible as an iron-bar. He didn’t particularly like her, but she was the legal agent for the load, and she was excellent at her job.

  “Regardless, I didn’t even think to ask her because I know what she’d say,” Kaycee said.

  The railing opened, and they stepped out onto the mid-deck. The majority of the deck was an open space that served as the dining room and recreation area. Because the Olympus Dawn also carried passengers, the area was much larger than it needed to be for the crew alone. Captain Walker spotted his Triple-C sitting alone at a table across the room and nodded, making sure Kaycee caught the significant tilt of his head and the warning to change the trajectory of their conversation. Leigh glanced up but paid them no attention. She appeared to be busy reading her morning newswave while she munched on what looked like a brick of yeastcake.

  Lowering his voice, he asked, “Do you want me to ask her if she’d be willing to let us make the landing leg for you?”

  “Can we feel that out and keep it as a backup in case there isn’t a cargo lander available?” she asked.

  “Cando,” he said. “I’ll poke the bear and see if she might be willing to dance.”

  “Kaycee, may I have a word with you?” Elias Pruitt said as he angled across the deck in their direction from the workout room. He was the other passenger on this run. Wearing a thinskin, he looked more like a two-meter slab of bodyguard flesh than the biomedical systems engineer he was. He was traveling back to Starlight from a vacation at New Hope City and had boarded before they picked up their cargo modules and the doctor at Armstrong Station. Their boarding passes said they weren’t traveling together, but they seemed suspiciously casual.

  “I’ll go grab a meal and will let you know when Nuko says we’ve got the beacon back,” he said, nodding at Elias and ducking out of their conversation.

  “The beacon is down?” the engin
eer asked.

  “It’s probably in the shadow of—”

  “No, sir,” he said, glancing at his chrono and shaking his head. “I’ve been running on Starlight local time since we left Zone One. It’s got another fifteen hours and forty-eight minutes.”

  “Angular position of the planet in orbit relative to our position would change the time,” the captain said.

  “I know, but that should be very close to right,” he said.

  “You’re probably right,” Walker said, trying to play it off with a shrug. “Then they might have it offline for maintenance.”

  “That would be possible, but don’t they send out advisories through FleetCom?” Elias challenged, his dark eyes flashing between the captain and Kaycee.

  “They do, but sometimes those don’t make it this far down the deck-list,” he said, holding up his finger and tapping into his collar comm. “Nuko, have we received a FleetCom advisory on a maintenance cycle on the Kepler 186 beacon?”

  “Negative, Captain,” Marti answered for her. “There have been no updates to the beacon schedule.”

  “Yah, Boss can you come back to the ConDeck?” Nuko asked. He knew her well enough to recognize the stress in her voice even if it was undetectable to anyone else. He immediately regretted having used the open comm rather than the command channel. It meant that anyone in earshot was listening in on what she said.

  “What’s swinging?”

  “The beacon isn’t in eclipse, it’s hard down,” she said.

  “Down, as in for maintenance,” he offered.

  “No.”

  He turned toward the lift and realized both his passengers were following on his heels. “You’re obviously saying something else here. Connect the dots for me,” he said, trying to figure out a diplomatic way to tell them to wait here. Nothing came quickly to mind, so he tried to ignore them instead.