Chapter 12: Miss Piggy's Adventure

~~ May - Weeks 18 & 19 ~~

The crew were getting the transporter loaded up.

They planned to be gone a week or two and as Sean planned to get the land cleared before too many others came down. They had to pack a lot of gear into the transporter.

Kyle also insisted that the wizard’s boxes couldn’t be left on the ship. So, they had to find a spot for them and at least one box of books. They were getting ready to board when Sparky turned up ridding Miss Piggy.

Sean scolded her, “Sparky we need to leave. Why did you bring Miss Piggy? Now I’ll have to walk her back to the room.”

Sparky looked at him, indignantly, “We can’t leave my sister here. She will be very sad without us, and I want my sister with me.” She pouted like a belligerent teenager.

Lee and Kyle came up to see what the problem was as they were ready to leave. Sean turned to Lee, “Please explain to our daughter why Miss Piggy can’t come.”

Lee looked at him with raised eyebrows as if to say, ‘What me?’ Lee looked at the pleading look in Sparky’s eyes as she hugged the broadening pig. Lee looked at Sean and shrugged her shoulders, “Hey, don’t bring me into this, you’re the one who wanted kids.”

“Please daddy, please, we will be really good,” Sparky said, pushing Sean’s buttons, giving him the most pleading look.

“Bugger me!” he said in exasperation. “Where the hell, are we going to put her? The animal pen is full of equipment, and we don’t have any food for her?” he said, trying to find a way out of the dilemma.

“Piffle daddy, there is more than enough food at home for her. I can tell her what to eat and what not to,” Sparky answered as if it wasn’t an issue.

“Sparky!” he said exasperated.

Terry, DT and Gavin joined them to find out what was going on. Sparky realising, she had an audience put on the tears. “Daddy wants to leave my sister behind, and we will be really sad, and Miss Piggy needs her family cause she is expecting,” she sniffed several times.

Lee and Kyle were trying to hide their smirks at Sean’s discomfort and totally lost look. Terry shook his head. “Put her in the aisle, and you, young lady are totally responsible for her, okay?” he finished waving a finger at her.

“Yes, Captain Terry,” Sparky replied brightly, and the started shooing everyone in. “Come on, we are burning daylight,” she admonished them.

The rest of the party headed for their seats smirking at the showdown. Sean sat next to Lee and asked, “Bugger it all. Are all little girls like that?”

“That is your problem,” she answered him. “She is not fifteen, she is twenty-five. She has already had heaps of practice on her first daddy. By all indications, you are probably just as besotted as he was. She already knows all the buttons to push, and she has had plenty of practice.”

Lee patted his arm as he unhappily looked at his adopted faerie daughter who was for her part, happily sitting in the isle petting Miss Piggy. He decided Lee had a point and he had to remember she was indeed older and wasn’t a normal child.

He often forgot about her wings and the fact she was a different race. To him, she was just Sparky and his to protect and love. ‘Damn, Kyle and Lee were right. I really do have a frustrated, daddy complex,’ he thought, sighing loudly.

He had forgotten she had grown up where they were going. She had managed to keep herself safe for a year, all alone before he had appeared. If she couldn’t look after the pig, then probably no one else could either.

The trip down didn’t take long. The had shifted the Fortune’s orbit a little, so the ship sat over the hump of land they planned to settle. Terry planted the transporter exactly where he had landed it before.

He had left the compensators on in a low setting in deference to the pig, and it stopped the cargo from shifting. They used more energy, but Terry decided having them on would provide a better outcome for all. The army team didn’t always use them, on the transporters.

The bare outcrop of rock made an excellent landing zone. Lee suggested that this time, they set the tent up in its own location. So, the transporter could go back and forth if they needed more gear or people.

The trip was less than two hours return. So, it only took about three hours to load up and get back. This was considered a safe margin for the people on the surface. Plus, if things got bad, the second transporter could get to them in less than an hour.

Sean and his people thought things should be okay. Gavin and DT got the survey gear out, and one of the three-person lingers. They went for a ride with Juanita as the guard in case DT got distracted. All three made sure they had their zappers and pistols.

The linger had four lifter engines for travel with a central compartment for the passengers. The canopy was covered with solar panels. On Earth, they could rise up to ten meters in the air over people’s heads and maintain stability.

They made short work of rough terrain, as long as the incline wasn’t too steep and the linger wasn’t heavily loaded. They could travel at about 100 km/hr if kept lower to the ground like the old cars. Limiters stopped you going to high for safety reasons.

In this gravity, they soon learnt that they lost stability the higher they went, so it affected their speed, and it ran out of power more quickly. You drove them like the maintenance sleds and could sit one person in front as the driver and two behind.

Lingers were about 6m long with a rounded nose in the front. They were 3m wide at the widest due to the fans and 2m high due to the small wheels’ underneath and the curved canopy. Behind the back seat was a trunk for equipment storage. The nose compartment could also be used for storage. You could even attach a 3m long by 2m wide levitated platform behind them, which carried two 1.5m square pallets.

The team had bought three of each down with them. As well as the two mini loaders, their attachments and a larger loader they had to assemble. Every available millimetre of space in the hold was accounted for.

They planted the tent about 150m from the drop zone and closer to the forest. Sparky said it was a good spot, as it didn’t flood. As it was her land and she had lived there all her life, they took her word for it. It put them a little closer to the forest than Sean liked.

Sparky said if he set his energy fence up across the entrance to the forest, she doubted any of the critters in there would come near them. She had told them that the whippers were the most dangerous predators in this area.

The creatures had claimed many of her people in the past. They hunted in small packs and were smart and sneaky. Sparky told them they should be easy to scare off if they tapped the creatures with the energy sticks. They would get the message and stay away.

Sean got the impression they were similar to a wolf pack. However, she forgot to mention the feathers and the long beak-like jaws that were full of teeth. She had told him that when her family lived here, the whippers tended to say out of her forest, but since her father and her uncles had died, they had started to get more adventurous.

While everyone else was busy setting up the camp, they hadn’t realised that Sparky and Miss Piggy had wandered off. The next thing Sean knew, a piercing little voice screamed into his head, ‘DADDY!’ Before he even realised, he had moved Sean, Kyle and Lee were running into the forest.

The trio pulled up about 100m into the forest. They found Sparky in tears throwing rocks at four animals. Miss Piggy was backed in under a thorny bush, squealing in pain and terror.

‘Wolves, be damned. The bloody things are velociraptors if I have ever seen one in a book or they are at least their cousins,’ Sean thought. The creatures had the long snouts, sharp backward teeth, big eyes, long whipping ‘S’ shaped tails and finely feathered bodies.

The velociraptors had distinctive wing feathers alone their forearms with long clawed appendages on the end of them. The whippers as Sparky had called them stood just over 80cm high and were about 2m long to the tail tip. The four of them surrounded the bush.

Lee and Kyle suddenly had long staffs in their hands and attacked the closet two. Sean headed for the third. He went to hit it with his stun stick, but it danced out of the way and hissed at him. It cocked its head and eyed him off as its partner tried to circle behind him.

Sean stepped back, so the bush was behind him and planned his next move. The whipper lunged at him again. He struck it a glancing blow, and it jumped back. He still hadn’t managed to zap it. Sparky was still crying, but she kept throwing rocks at the fourth whipper, while Sean was dealing with the other one.

‘Bloody hell, they are fast,’ he thought as sweat beaded his brow. The creature lunged again, and Sean took another jab at it. This time he hit it on the snout. It screamed out in pain as the zapper discharged and it ran off on its hind legs. Sean spun to find the fourth whipper. This one also tried several times to get past the pole.