****
Frank Lambert lived only a short distance away, in a small house that was built of stone, of all things. The windows were made of steel bars. He didn’t answer Weltman’s knocking or shouting, but the sturdy metal door was unlocked, and the sheriff led Kate inside.
“Kate, this is Dr. Frank Lambert,” announced John. “Frank, wake the hell up; this is Dr.Kate Deborg, the Directorate scientist they sent to help us." Kate stood at John’s side, taking in everything with growing dismay; the strange, filthy, trash filled cabin, the empty liquor bottles, the sewer smell, and above all the hairy, filthy little man that sat slumped before them in a disgusting recliner. He seemed to be in ten times worse shape than Weltman had been in, when she first met him. On Mars, with its enclosed and controlled environments, this man would have been decontaminated and arrested, then shipped back to Earth for major therapy.
The man’s eyes opened halfway, but couldn’t seem to focus. “Leave me the fuck alone.” he mumbled tersely, before he closed his eyes again, and lifted to his lips a whisky bottle that he picked up in shaking hands.
John let him take one big swallow, and then snatched the bottle away.
Lambert’s eyes popped wide open, blazing with anger, as he launched himself awkwardly out of his chair and stumbled towards the bottle, not paying attention to anything else. “Give it back to me, you thieving bastard!”
John held the bottle behind him with one hand, and easily restrained Lambert with the other. “After we talk, Frank. Now pull yourself together, this is important. Try to be a scientist for a few minutes, OK? Tell us what you know about Aves.”
His strength spent, the man fell backward into his chair. “I don’t know any more, why can’t you bastards just leave me alone? Why won’t you let me leave this fucking death trap of a planet? You can’t keep me here, I’m a goddamn citizen and a goddamn Space Directorate employee! I don't gave a shit about your fucking Corporation one way or another.”
“Frank, it’s not the Corporation, it’s me, Johnny.”
His eyes seemed to focus for the first time on the sheriff. “Johnny? Where the hell you been? I’m almost out of squeeze.”
“Later Frank, this is Kate Deborg, the biologist the Space Directorate sent to me. She wants to talk to you.”
He seemed to notice Kate for the first time, his eyes wandering up and down her body openly before finding her face. “Damn. That’s just a little girl, though a pretty damn good looking one, and she’s no damn senior scientist, that’s for sure. They can say they sent you someone Johnny, but you needed a whole damn independent team of scientists of all types, top people, not just a young sprig of a girl. Young lady, you’re being used, same as me. The Directorate sent you so they can say they responded to John’s request, but we’re just their political cover. The Corporation has the Directive bought off, and we’re both the proof of it. Not that it matters much, but what is your specialty?”
“I am an exoplanetary biologist,” retorted Kate.
“Shit, a biologist. And a bird expert too, I bet. I told you Johnny, birds ain’t the key. Interesting as hell, sure, but you have got to look at the bigger picture. It’s bigger than birds.”
“And I told you before, Frank, I just want to solve the murders, I don’t want to figure out the whole damn planet!”
“The murders are tied to the whole damn planet, you idiot! The whole damn thing is going to hell, I tell you! Where it’s all headed is clear from the fucking geology! Here, look at this.” He pointed to the thermometer on the wall. “Almost forty degrees Celsius. Did it ever get that hot when this was forest? No damn way! The ground temperature is way-up, out there in the summer sun, in the open fields, away from the trees. We’ve boosted the damn C-O-2 already, and cleared too much forest. There’ll be a price to pay, for undoing their work.”
“Whose work?” asked Kate. “What do you mean?”
Fear suddenly filled his eyes. “I don’t know, I tell you. I really don’t. Anything I say is just the fucking booze talking. Get me out of here, Johnny, anywhere off Aves. Just get me the hell away from here. Please Johnny? I just want to forget this place."
"There are no flights off-planet until after harvest, Frank, you know that. Just relax until then. After the Corporation pulls the harvest off, they won't care where you go or what you say to anybody. I’ll put you on the first flight out myself, I promise."
Frank started laughing hysterically, as if Weltman had just told a big joke. "Aves will harvest US first Johnny, we’re the fucking harvest! And it's too damn late to fix it."
John grabbed him by the shoulders. "What is too late to fix, Frank? What is?"
Frank's laughter stopped, and he seemed to sober up again, but his eyes were wild. "Head for the mountains, if you can, Johnny. Get yourself a good woman and some supplies and head for the mountains right now, before it gets any hotter."
"Why Frank, why should I head for the hills?"
“Don’t know, exactly.” Frank suddenly grabbed the whisky bottle out of John's hands and ran with it to the corner of the room, laughing as he guzzled it down. “Don’t know, don’t know, don’t know,” he babbled. "But it's happening anyway!"
John tried to talk with him further, but it was no use, the interview was over. It took half an hour to calm Frank down and get him to take a nap. Then John and Kate left the sleeping scientist and walked back towards the Roc.
“What happened to Lambert, John?”
Weltman shrugged. “Aves happened to him. He used to be a top-notch geologist, him and his wife.”
“His wife is here on Aves too?” She regretted asking when she saw the hurt showing in Weltman’s face. He had to be thinking of his own wife, and losing her, she realized.
He turned away from her as he answered; perhaps not wanting to expose what he has feeling, but it was useless, his pain was too obvious. “His wife only lasted a month, before the birds got her. That was in the first year. It was a bird war then; the damn birds were everywhere. No mysterious disappearances yet, but the birds simply attacked day and night. He saw her ripped to pieces by them. And now he drinks to forget.”
“He’s an alcoholic; so why do you give him alcohol?”
“Because I’d rather he got it from me. I spike it with medicines that counter the worst effects of the alcohol. Besides that, I’ve been cutting way back on how much real alcohol that I give him; what he gets from me is less than ten percent real. If he got real liquor from somebody else that would be a big problem. Believe it or not, he’s in better shape now than he used to be. At this rate he’ll be totally off alcohol in maybe three more months and still have a healthy liver.”
“I see.”
“I have to hide what I’m doing from the Corporation. They want to keep Frank a drunk alcoholic.”
“Lambert seemed more worried about the heat than the birds. What was that all about?”
The sheriff shook his head. “Don't know. That’s as much as he ever says. More than usual, even. We could never figure out anything from it. Just crazy talk, we figure. The heat talk started when the disappearances picked up steam last summer. The disappearances relate to the hot weather somehow, he’s probably right about that much.”
“So, he freaked out when his wife was killed?”
“No. True, he generally went to shit after she was killed, but never anything this bad. When the disappearances started up again last summer he suddenly got much, much worse. He advised all his friends to leave the planet. Then he tried to transfer off of Aves himself, but even the Federation wanted him to stay here, him being their only representative on the planet. The Corporation wanted him to stay also, for political cover. Almost anyone that would replace him would be more competent and hence more of a problem to the Corporation. Now he won’t even leave his damned house. You noticed the floor and walls?”
“Looks like some sort of stone and cement, under all the trash.”
“Right. He built this stone cabin, and he keeps reinforc
ing it, one bag of cement and a couple steel rods at a time. What passes for cement on Aves isn’t cheap either, since we don’t have limestone and or much gravel either. Every few days he gets sober enough to call me up and have Tiny drop off a bag of the stuff along with his food supplies and just enough booze to keep him going. We figure he’s building some kind of earthquake proof shelter.”
“Earthquake? What has he told you about Aves geology?”
“He is mystified by it; we all have been from the beginning. I guess because Aves outwardly seems so much like Earth, we expected the geology to be similar, but it isn’t. The pieces just don’t fit.”
“In what ways?”
“There are surface stone deposits scattered all about that the birds use. The geologists have no explanation for them. The biologists seem to think that the birds created the deposits somehow, but it’s an unsolved mystery in my book.”
“Aside from that, sedimentary rocks are just about impossible to find. Stones are mostly igneous, those few that can be found.”
“That doesn’t make any sense. There’s soil and life all over the place. There should be millions of years of sediment and sedimentary rock. Hundreds of millions actually, like on Earth, if any sort of life actually evolved here.”
“There is sediment, plenty of it, but it hasn’t congealed into rock, at least not on the continent. There are impossible depths of top-soil, many hundreds of meters deep in places, all alive with microbes and mysteriously churned up except for the top ten meters or so. Much of the soil bacteria and other life in the first few meters looks like it is from Earth, by the way, but the deeper life forms are mostly native.”
“I found a big many-legged worm that appears to be native.”
“Those are found at all depths that we have explored. Maybe there are enough of such beasts to churn the soil, but what do the soil creatures eat ultimately?”
“Microorganisms, probably, but the ecosystem must derive energy from the suns, ultimately, via trees and other plants that in turn feed the soil.”
“That much is understood, but that only explains a few tens of meters of soil, not hundreds of meters. For hundreds of meters Aves soil hasn’t formed into rock. It’s as if it hasn’t been allowed to form into rock layers.
Kate’s mind was still spinning. Many hundreds of meters of top soil? There has been life here for many millions of years after all! On earth it would take hundreds of years to form a few centimeters of top-soil. Here on Aves it might happen faster, but it still must have taken countless millions of years to build hundreds of meters of it. But that didn’t fit. The birds had to have been brought here within the last million years or so, or they wouldn’t so closely match Earth birds from a genetic standpoint. So the current bird-dominated ecosystem hadn’t formed most of the sediment. “What of fossils and evolution?”
“Fossils are very rare. The planetary astronomy folks were surprised to find highly evolved life forms in a two-star system at all. Usually planet orbits in multi-star systems are unstable and don’t last for the billions of years needed to evolve complex life-forms. Here there is no evidence of billions of years of evolution, or of even the last few million years. For example, I’ve heard that no fossils of birds have been found.”
“No fossils of birds at all? But this is the bird planet! What fossils have been found?”
“There are some really old worm type fossils, maybe a hundred million years or so old, plus some primitive plant life. Huge mushroom type things, mostly, and algae on land and in the water. But no birds or bird ancestors. And of course you’re right, that’s impossible. After all this is Aves, the bird planet.” He looked at Kate. “Hey, you don’t even seem surprised.”
Grinning, Kate told him about her gene matching results.
“No shit!” he exclaimed. “So it’s true then. I thought so since my first day on Aves. That the fucking Corporation has managed to keep it secret this long is amazing enough, but how the hell did Earth life get here in the first place?”
“You tell me; you’re the spaceship pilot.”
"In the Space Directorate and among commercial pilots there rumors of UFO sightings. Alien spaceships so advanced that for centuries they have evaded our study."
Weltman’s communicator buzzed and he put it to his ear and listened for several seconds before responding. “I’ll be there pronto. Get our gear ready, and we’ll fly.” He doubled his walking pace after signing off, his face stern. “That was Tiny. Two more people are missing from a field north of here; both of them old friends of mine.”
They walked rapidly without speaking, John thinking of his missing friends, Kate struggling to keep pace while trying unsuccessfully to put together in her mind a scientific overview of Aves that made any sense. Meanwhile the twin suns pounded heat down on them relentlessly, and walking through the thick, moist air was almost like pushing through water. On Aves humans have to pace themselves, and they were pushing it to the limit. The walkers were both sweating profusely from the extra effort by the time they reached the Sheriff’s office. They walked to the back of the building where Tiny waited for John with armfuls of guns and what looked like camping gear.
Kate was surprised to see parked next to the gear what appeared to be an impossibly tiny, primitive looking aircraft that faced towards a short stretch of open field. It looked more like an oversized homemade toy than something that was designed to carry people; it had a ceramic composite tubular frame over which was stretched heavy fabric that covered delta-shaped, overhead wings and a rudder control surface. The material also completed small enclosed areas at the front and back of the fuselage, apparently designed to provide storage. Some of the fabric was yellow or orange, but the fabric covering most of the wings and the cockpit area was transparent. Transparency would be an advantage when flying in a world with giant birds that can attack from any direction, Kate reasoned.
Aft of the rear storage compartment a small fuel burning combustion engine sat in front of a rear facing, four bladed propeller less than a meter across which was housed inside a flimsy looking protective housing. What looked like two bicycle seats with safety straps, control-laden handlebars and foot rests occupied the middle part of the fuselage behind a clear windshield. The front seat, obviously that of the pilot, had the most control switches and displays, and controlled a bicycle-like front wheel in true bicycle fashion. Two widely spaced fixed rear bicycle wheels supported most of the scooter’s weight.
Generally only a layer of fabric separated a passenger from the outside of the vehicle. A helmet was sitting on each of the small seats.
After a few moments, Kate to regained speech. "I thought that airplanes weren't used on Aves. Of course, this looks more like a kite or bicycle than an airplane."
Weltman smiled. "We tried using lots of unmanned drones, early on, but the birds made short work of most of those. There are only a few automated high-altitude unmanned scout craft still in use, which fly above raptor capabilities. Flying manned aircraft is suicidal. Still, certain idiots use manned planes like this one in an emergency. We call this a two-man air scooter. Tiny and I need to get to New Saint Louis immediately; that's near the northern extreme of the settlements, two hundred kilos by air or four hundred by poor roads. Besides, I want to do some searching for possible survivors and murderers from the air. Given our truce with the birds, it’s a chance I’m willing to take."
"What about me?"
"You can drive up in our ground tram, if you want to. In fact, if you could haul equipment for us, it will save us the trouble of hiring someone. Assuming you don’t get too lost, you should get there by nightfall. The roads are lousy, by Earth or Mars standards."
She shook her head. "Tiny can drive the ground tram. I need to get to the crime scene and help you. I can't drive a big tram over strange roads, but I can fly as a passenger just fine."
"No way. It's too damn dangerous, Kate! The smallest bird could knock us out of the sky. Hell, maybe even a butterfly could, on th
is planet. Besides, you aren't ready to go and Tiny is."
"I can pack and be ready in twenty minutes. We'll more than make that time up due to our reduced flight weight."
"She's right about that, boss," said Tiny. "The scooter will be faster and more maneuverable without me in it. Plus, I could start to coordinate a ground search from the tram as I drive, and bring most of the heavy gear, which isn’t even packed yet. If she drives she’ll get herself lost for sure, and she don’t know what to bring, even if she were strong enough to pack it and drive the tram."
Weltman apprised Tiny's massive frame thoughtfully. He didn’t like the idea but they were right. The tiny plane would be heavily burdened carrying the big man. “Alright, you drive the heavy gear up, Tiny, but we'll carry full survival gear and weapons on the scooter. I ain't flying this thing into the outback without that. I'll take the zoom and infrared scope extensions too; Kate can attach them to her COM. I want to start the search before I land. We should have at least two hours of light left when we get there. Fit Dr. Deborg here with a glide suit pronto, Tiny. We leave in ten minutes."
"But I have to pack," objected Kate, as Tiny, grinning, sized up Kate visually for a few moments before rushing off towards the Sheriff's Office.
Weltman was busy going through the gear, setting items aside that Tiny could tram to New Saint. "No time for you to pack, Kate. This isn't a vacation. We already have survival gear packed including provisions; we can pick up more supplies tonight in New Saint, if we need too. I assume that fancy COM unit you always carry has about all that you need, science equipment wise?"
"I could use some more empty data cubes and some type-three power packs."
"We have those on the scooter already." He resumed rummaging through the equipment that was piled next to the plane and putting selected items into the storage bin behind the passenger seat. "Anything else?"
“Got motion sickness pills?”
Grinning, Weltman pulled a small pillbox from his shirt pocket and opened it. Kate glimpsed a couple of dozen tiny pills of various colors. He picked out two blue ones, popped one into his own mouth, and handed the second one to Kate. As he did so, he looked past her with a frown at a large, noisy land-vehicle that was rapidly approaching the station. Kate followed his gaze and observed Governor George Keto emerge from the big, black, ancient but opulent auto. He was smiling, his face the impenetrable mask of a politician.
"Weltman, it's a good thing I caught up with you," he said after a nod of greeting to Kate and the application of a handkerchief to his sweating forehead. "I've just heard from Zeke Thomas. He doesn't want you tramping around New Saint and destroying evidence that he needs to track down Conners and Smith with, and I agree."
Weltman returned to the task of packing equipment onto the scooter. "Me mess up evidence? Me? I could say the same of him and his Corporation cops. What's your point?"
"Just this John. I'm ordering you to stay out of this. Let the Corporation police do their jobs. Zeke is already on-site."
"Shit. Then they've probably already fucked things up, if it’s being handled personally by Zeke. I'll have to try to pick up the pieces again."
"Did you hear me John? You aren't going. And you’re surely not flying in this death-trap of an invention, even if by some miracle you are sober."
Weltman stared up at Keto, cold-eyed. "Just how you expect to stop me from doing my job George?"
"I'm declaring emergency powers. It's in our constitution."
Weltman laughed. "Emergency? So, at least you finally acknowledge that there is a problem? That's progress, of a sort. But frankly George, I don't give a shit what's in the constitution. I'm going out to find Conners and Smith. Period."
"I half expected that would be your reaction. Well, you and Tiny will be killed in that thing, that’s for damn sure."
"Tiny is driving the tram. Kate and I are flying."
Keto's jaw dropped. "You can't be serious. Frankly, I won't miss you one bit, Weltman, but the political repercussions of losing a Federation scientist at this point would be unacceptable."
"I hadn't planned on losing her."
"I insist on going," said Kate. “John is against it.”
Keto turned his attentions to Kate. "You're new here, Doctor Deborg, so maybe you don't fully appreciate the dangers. Flying airplanes on Aves is total lunacy."
"So I've been told by this other lunatic." She pointed at Weltman.
"Besides, you'd be missing a unique opportunity,” the governor said. “I've just had a long talk with Mark Helmins about giving you full access to the Corporation's scientific efforts and he has agreed that it can be done."
It was Kate's turn to be surprised. "Full access?"
"Access to more data and reports than you can imagine."
"Unlimited access?"
Keto nodded hesitantly. "Unlimited if you agree to standard Corporation terms."
Weltman laughed. "Including non-disclosure agreements?"
Keto shrugged.
"So I can see everything if I agree not to say anything to anybody about it?"
"Only until after the harvest. Then you can scoop everyone by reporting anything you find out. We'll give you the science news exclusive."
“So in other words,” said Weltman, “since you figure that Aves secrets are coming out soon anyway, you might as well make sure that Kate is under your control until then and help shape the news when it does come out.”
Keto’s smile broadened and he shrugged his shoulders, but he didn’t bother to otherwise respond.
Kate tried to imagine what that would do to her career. In two or three months she could be flying towards sol with the inside story on the greatest planetary discovery in history. So what if she essentially became a Corporation geek temporarily? It was a damned good deal, an incredible deal. Most scientists would sell their souls for such an opportunity. And that is obviously what it was, a deal to keep her from snooping around on her own and finding embarrassing dirt on the Corporation over the next two months while helping Weltman.
“I couldn’t tell anything I find out even to Weltman for those two months?” she asked.
“Correct.”
Weltman snickered. "Then what has this got to do with solving our missing people problem?"
Keto shrugged again. "I'm not at liberty to say, but I couldn't make any promises that there is any connection at all. Frankly, our scientists haven't made much direct progress in the missing person area. However, there are a lot of very important scientific findings that you would have access to, Kate. Incredible things. Things you could hardly begin to imagine."
Kate's head was spinning. "I just don't know, Governor. Why don't we discuss this after I've returned from New Saint?"
Keto shook his head. "Helmins wants it to happen now. If you go with Weltman to New Saint, the deal is off. Do you want to be working with dozens of top Corporation scientists, or do you want to go off on this wild goose chase with Weltman? You can't have it both ways. Work with Helmins or work with Weltman and Lambert. You talked with Frank Lambert today; did he tell you that the world is ending? The man is a loon."
"A drunken loon," corrected Weltman, "but he's still worth ten of you or Helmins. Well, Kate? What will it be?"
Kate sighed. "Governor, I came here to help Weltman; that’s my assignment from the Directorate. I don't see how I can do that unless I go with him now. Regrettably, I have to refuse this offer."
Weltman smiled.
Keto looked genuinely surprised; the last visages of his smile disappeared, but then he simply shrugged. Kate expected an argument, but didn’t get one. "It's your funeral," is all that the Governor said, before turning on his heal, getting into his vehicle and driving away.
As they finished packing, Weltman provided an explanation. “Keto probably didn’t push it further because he figures we won’t survive this little trip. So he ain’t very worried about either one of us making further trouble. He'll take some heat from your death, but it w
ill be said to be all due to my recklessness, and we'll both be out of the Corporation's hair."
"Great."
"Got other questions before we take off?”
"One practical one. How much flight-time have you logged with this thing?"
"Half an hour once. It seems to work. We had similar rigs before this one during the first year, but the birds quickly destroyed them all. Raptors attack them on sight."
"Super. This gets better and better. In that case, what the hell is a glide suit?"
"We use them instead of parachutes. Normal parachutes are too easy for birds to get at and foul up. These suits provide a sort of webbing that stretches between your arms and legs to sort of give you little wings. You land hard, but usually live."
"Usually. Well, that’s very comforting. Sort of like bat wings?"
"Right. On Earth they use them to maneuver while sky diving. On Aves the atmosphere is so thick you don’t even need a chute. You can even maneuver in them, if you're good at it, and try to evade whatever is attacking you. Only problem is, you can't very easily shoot and glide at the same time."
"Shoot?"
He reached into the storage bin, pulled out some kind of short barreled rifle and handed it to her. She held it gingerly, afraid that the damn thing would go off in her hands and kill somebody. "In addition to being co-pilot and observer, you're going to be the tail-gunner. Ever shoot a gun?"
She shook her head. "I've never even seen one in person before coming to Aves. They're totally banned on Mars."
"Sure, with windowed habitats like they have on Mars, guns had to be banned. That gun is the easiest one to use. It's an old-fashioned scattergun that holds a ten-shot clip. It shoots a cloud of tiny pellets that at close range can take out almost any bird. But aim for the solid parts of a wing. Wound it almost anywhere else and it can still fly and come after you. If you can’t get a vulnerable part of the wing and the bird is really close, go for the eyes. Just be careful not to shoot me up or shoot apart the damn airplane." He proceeded to show her how to load, aim and shoot the scattergun, although they didn’t fire any practice shots.
In the meantime Tiny returned carrying two bright-orange colored outfits and handed them to John and Kate. Kate repacked the gun in the storage bin and turned her attention to the strange clothing. It was surprisingly light and had a slick, plastic feel to it. Unfolding it, she quickly realized that it was a single-piece, full-body outfit that zipped up the front. Similar yellow tinted translucent fabric stretched between the arms and legs. Weltman already had his shoes off and was removing his shirt. "You ever use a glide suit?" Tiny asked.
"No, of course not. On Mars you’d fall like a rock in one of these. And I'm not really anxious to wear one now."
"This suit also keeps the wind off your skin and serves as light body armor,” explained the big man. “It wicks sweat and isn’t at hot to wear as you might think. It’s pretty much bug proof and it would take a tough bird to rip through this material; it's the same stuff we used for the scooter wings. Besides, it isn't hard to glide. You spread out your arms and legs, pulling the fabric tight on each side. Sort of like swimming in air. Put your arms and legs way back so that the wings are in back of you and you glide face-down. Try to land in a clearing and on your feet though, or you'll bust your head to mush, even with a helmet."
“How do I land on my feet if I’m flying head-first?”
“OK, I guess that’s a little tricky for a non-pilot,” admitted Tiny. “On Earth there are vertical wind tunnels where people practice up for sky-diving. You sort of pull up at the last second, pointing your head and arms forward and up, and you just sort of rotate and find your feet pointing down and hitting the ground. Practice a couple times in mid-flight to get the hang of it.”
“Swell.” It sounded totally suicidal. No way could she do fancy maneuvers like that, but she started to pull on the suit anyway. Hopefully it wouldn't be needed.
"Sometimes Doc, folks are more comfortable if they take off all their other clothes first," suggested Tiny, grinning at her wide-eyed.
Kate smiled back at the big man as she pulled the suit over her jeans and t-shirt. "Too bad I'm going then, Tiny, and not you. I'd have liked seeing a big strong man like you strip down." The deputy had sized her up perfectly, her suit fit her snugly, but not too tight.
Tiny laughed while handing her a helmet. "Yeah, too bad Doc. Maybe next time. And don't you worry. There ain't been no bird attacks in two years that we know of, and you'll be flying with the best damn pilot there is, so you won’t be needing a glide suit anyway."
Weltman put on his helmet and climbed onto the front seat. "There haven't been any recent bird attacks that we've been able to prove, but that's about to change. We’ll track down the sneaky bastards from the air, and solve this thing once and for all. Climb aboard Kate, and strap in good. Could be a bit bumpy at first."
She straddled the seat and Tiny helped her strap in. “This thing doesn’t look very sturdy,” she remarked. She glanced down at her feet. Centimeters below them thin fabric stretched. If a foot slipped off the footrest it looked like it would go right through the bottom of the airplane.
“Sure it’s sturdy,” said Tiny. “Me and the Boss built it ourselves.” He laughed at the face she made. Then, to Kate’s surprise, he rolled out transparent fabric from the forward compartment that pulled back over the passengers and snapped to the outside frame, forming a flimsy looking but more streamlined passenger cabin. When the big man stepped away from the scooter, its engine sputtered to life. It wasn’t nearly as loud as Kate feared it would be, but she was still thankful that the helmet muzzled most of the noise.
“Ready for take-off,” said Weltman’s voice, from inside her helmet. “You’ll find helmet voice controls above your left ear. Oh, and Tiny put some water and sandwiches in that little compartment to your left. That will be your lunch, I’m afraid.” The engine wined slightly louder and the scooter started to roll forward slowly on its three bicycle-like wheels, bumping along a dirt path that let straight towards the open fields of crops that lay behind the sheriff’s office.
"Want me to get out and push?" she shouted.
“Just keep your feet from dragging, please, and I’ll do the rest.”
The engine suddenly roared to full power, and the scooter immediately lurched down the path and accelerated, rattling and bumping so violently that Kate feared that the contrivance would tear itself apart. It took all her strength to hold on well enough to avoid being thrashed by the jolting scooter frame to each side of her. Glancing up at the delta-shaped wings overhead she could see them billowing out in the thick air, pulling up on craft ever harder. They seemed impossibly small for the task, but with the thick Aves atmosphere and lower than Earth gravity, wings didn’t need to be very large.
The scooter was suddenly not bumping around as much, but instead seemed to be yanked violently in several directions at once. Kate looked down and was astonished to see that they were already airborne, though still only a meter or two above the broad cornfield. Through the transparent skin of the plane she could see birds in the field scatter to each side from their path, squawking and staring up wide-eyed at the plane. They seemed to be as surprised as she was that it worked.
Even though they were only a few dozen meters above the field, Kate was already having second thoughts about her insistence that she fly with Weltman. What was she thinking? This was worse than being in an anti-gravity elevator, far worse! A thousand things could go wrong and cause the airplane to plunge her and Weltman to their deaths.
A flying beetle the size of her head plopped onto the rigid cockpit windshield in front of John but slid off the hard surface and onto the overhead fabric. Even with its sharp, powerful mandibles it was unable to gain purchase on the tough, fine-woven fabric, and it slid rapidly over their heads and towards the rear propellers. Kate turned quickly to see if would cause problems and was relieved to see it slide harmlessly over the porous canopy that housed the p
ropellers before disappearing behind it.
Kate’s attention was soon drawn to the vista that rapidly opened up around and below her as they gained altitude. Behind them was the town and spaceport. She picked out the science building, gigantic lumber yards, a biochemical plant and in the far distance, a rocky outcropping riddled by roads that had to be the colony’s source for rock materials. In every other direction for several kilometers green fields of human-sown crops stretched, attended by thousands of birds scattered throughout. In the far distance giant trees loomed, but as the plane climbed still higher Kate could see that this was merely a narrow strip of forest, beyond which stretched another broad green cultivated field. It was an incredible sight. Her fear of heights abated, to a degree, as time passed and she continued to focus on Aves instead of her mortality.
As they climbed still higher, she noted that what she saw within the nearest few kilometers was part of a larger pattern of fields and thin strips of forest that stretched many tens of kilometers in all directions. Of human structures only roads and additional enormous lumber-yards could be distinguished. Behind them and already fading from view through the haze of the thick Aves atmosphere was the town, and beyond that stretched the spaceport, where hundreds of gigantic spacecraft, some looming taller than even the trees, gathered in rows in preparation to carry away the bounty of Aves. She could see birds flying far below, and felt relieved that the airplane was apparently flying above their range.
“It’s magnificent,” said Kate, not sure if her intercom unit was on or not. “Are we above the bird danger now?”
Weltman's voice replied to her clearly via the helmet speakers. “It is a beautiful place, even where we humans have screwed with it,” he agreed. “As for birds, look above us and to our left." Weltman pointed with a wicked looking short-barreled shotgun that he held with one hand as he flew with the other.
Kate looked to here he pointed and was startled to see a big dark shadow flying perhaps fifty meters from the plane, apparently matching the plane’s progress with minimal effort, its wings pumping slowly.
“Grackle,” said Weltman. “That’s our old friend Blackie, or one like him. Been following us since we took off. I’ve gotten damn popular with them. They’ve been following me non-stop for a couple of days now.”
****