Chapter 376

The Prison Planet

Morales and Lobo struggled up the steep incline below the cave as the first big drops of rain began splattering down. "Dammit! What happened to raining at night?" he groused as he tried to go faster, then to his partner, "Push hard, Lobo, or we're going to get our asses wet."

As if to hurry them along, lightning flashed, and the loud clap of thunder hit a second after.

Inside their home a couple of moments later, he turned the lantern on, his next thought to get rid of his shit-smeared pants.

With clean BDU shirt and pants on, he started a cook fire, then checked his coffee pot to gratefully find some left from earlier in the day. Even though he had many pounds of coffee, he never threw any out, no matter how long it had been in the pot. Of course, the way he drank coffee, it seldom sat for any great length of time, anyway.

"When the fire burns down a bit, I'll cook us some dinner," he told the wolf.

After washing his hands and face in fresh water and dish detergent – his shallow wounds stinging like crazy as he did so – he used his small mirror to check out the places where the chicken had pecked and scratched his face. Applying a dab of his precious antibiotic ointment to the facial wounds in an attempt to keep down infection, he decided to wait until bedtime to put any of the ointment on his hands.

When he finished, he realized that Lobo was staring at him. "Yeah, I know. You're hungry. Me too, but I'm going to check out the chicken before I put our dinner on to cook."

Walking over to the case, he asked the wolf, "What in the hell am I going to do with her?" Lobo whined back at him, but just sat watching. After thinking a minute, Morales grabbed a couple of skins and hung them over the entrance bars. "I guess she could easily work her way around the skins and on through the bars, but at least she won't be able to fly out of the cave so easily," he remarked.

When Morales went back to the case and the chicken, Lobo came nearer before sitting to grin at him. "You want to see that bitch come after me again, don't you? But she's on my turf this time." Damn, I wish I was as confident as I sound, he thought as he grabbed a length of parachute cord before picking the chicken up. "Shit, she's even heavier than I remember. This is one big fucking chicken."

With the cord close to hand, he removed the shirt from around the hen while being careful to keep his hands out of beak range. He could feel her tense, but so far, she had made only a quiet puck, puck, pucking sound. Before untying her legs, he tied a length of cord to one of them. Giving her roughly twenty feet of slack, he slipped the tie off her legs and jumped back as she came quickly to her feet.

After fluttering her wings for a few seconds, she raised the leg with the cord attached while making an angry sound and shaking the appendage. An instant later, she was in the air headed for the outside light that shone past the skins at the entrance. Morales hadn't tied his end of the cord for fear she would do what she had just done and hit the end hard enough to break her leg. He let the cord pay out, but gradually tightened his grip as it slid through his hands, bringing her to a fairly abrupt halt, but not so abrupt as to break her leg.

Hitting the ground, squawking, she pulled at the cord, still trying to get away, then attacked it with her beak. Another half dozen trips around the cave, with him pulling her down when she neared the end of the cord, finally had her sitting on the ground, her breath heaving.

Morales took one of the ears of corn out of the case, pulled the husk back and shelled off a handful of the grains. Taking up the slack, he got close enough to throw the corn at her feet. She glared at him and fluttered her wings, leaning forward as she did so, obviously threatening to charge him. He had no doubt the threat was valid.

"Well, let's see if this calms you a little more," he told her as he took her nest out of the case and put it against the wall out of the way. She watched him, but didn't move until he was a little distance away. Hurrying over, still occasionally shaking the foot that had the cord tied to it, she checked out her eggs, making a clucking sound to them.

After tying the cord to a rock too big for her to fly off with, he went back to the fire, poured a cup of coffee and began peeling potatoes, pretending to ignore the hen. When his back was turned, she took flight again, but she seemed to be a quick learner, because she fluttered to the ground when the cord tightened up, instead of being jerked out of the air.

Lobo walked over and tried to smell her, but that terrified the chicken. "Leave her alone, Boy. Hell, you scare me. I can only imagine what you seem like to a chicken." Morales realized that she probably had a very good reason to be terrified of wolves.

After a few minutes more, she settled on her nest, craning her neck, obviously checking to be certain that she was sitting on all her eggs.

From time to time over the next hours, she would jump up and try for the entrance, but she was wary of the cord jerking her down.

"You don't want out there," Morales said after her latest attempt. "It's raining like crazy. It's nice and dry in here, and nothing is going to bother your eggs."

Glaring at him, she paused to shit, then went back to her nest.

Morales didn't know enough about chickens to realize that she was exhibiting far more intelligence than was common for the chickens of Earth. Of course, like every other chicken, she shit frequently. Mumbling to himself about what he had to go through to have eggs, he cleaned the chicken shit up with a shovel, throwing it in a corner near the entrance and putting a shovel full of dirt on it.

Later, as they sat to eat, Lobo stared hard at his master. "Yeah, yeah, I know," he told the wolf. "She's not going to live with us long. I don't love eggs that much. I have a rough idea about how to build a fence for her, but first, I have to preserve two cases full of vegetables. We'll just have to put up with the chicken shit until I get time to get her secured outside."

Lobo rubbed his nose between his paws, whining at Morales, who shook his head. "It's not that bad, Boy," but he had to admit that the smell of chicken shit was hard to ignore. What I would give for a can of air freshener.

Later, he put a small pan of water as near her nest as he could manage without her getting upset, then put a few more grains of corn next to the water. When he went back near the fire, she hurried over for a drink. Having never been on a farm before, he sat staring as she drank. She would dip her beak in the liquid, then hold her head almost straight up to swallow. He didn't know if all chickens drank that way, or just her, but it surely looked odd.

As night neared and the rain continued to pour down, Morales fixed their meal before he began work on his vegetables. After a couple of hours of shelling, he took a break to play with his computer. While exploring icons on the computer's startup screen, he clicked on an icon showing a face with a caption that said, "Reader."

After spending some time reading the instructions, he started one of the articles that described the care and feeding of chickens, then copied and pasted it into the reader program. With a voice that only faintly hinted it was computer driven, the app began reading the article aloud.

"Well, I'll be damned," he muttered. "I knew vaguely there were text to speech programs, but I didn't realize I had one. Now I can kill two birds with one stone. I can work on my vegetables while expanding my knowledge of 2214." For someone who was only moderately computer literate, this was a big surprise and an even bigger boon for him.

After putting the laptop closer to his work location, he restarted the article and returned to his shelling.

Lobo came over to stare at the computer while it talked. Looking back at Morales, the wolf whined. "Sorry, Boy. I don't know how to explain it to you. The computer is just reading an article. There's nobody inside the machine, if that's what you're worried about."

Lobo snorted as if to say, "I'm not that stupid." But he hunkered down near the computer to listen.

When the article finished, Morales brought up another, this one written by one of the exploring scientists. After copying and dropping it into the app, he resumed his listening while his hands automatically shelled the peas.

He had already discovered that some of the articles were just lists containing data, so he avoided those files and concentrated on descriptions and narratives. If he had fully understood how to use the scientists' programs, much of the data would have made more sense, but there were many gigabytes of information stored in narrative form that was more easily understood by him. He fumed that there were many terms he didn't understand, but he refrained from taking the time away from the shelling to look their definitions up. For some of the terms, he was able to puzzle out their meaning from the context in which they were used; others remained a mystery to him. He had nothing else he could do while shelling the peas and beans, and decided to listen whether he understood everything or not. The more I learn about this planet, the better my chances of survival become.

Lobo, astonishing his master, continued to lie near the computer and listen, all the while staring at the human. What does he get out of listening to that program drone on and on about the various types of fish in a river that is nowhere near here – well, I don't think it is. Oh, hell, even if it's the one past the plains, he can't understand a word of what the text reader is saying.

But Lobo continued his vigilance as he stretched out on his stomach, his muzzle on his paws and his eyes barely open, the human not realizing that the wolf never took those dark eyes off him.

Time drifted onward, the monotone of the reader program accompanied by the deep rumble of distant thunder. Sometimes, there was an occasional swamping of the program's voice by the crash of mind-numbing thunder that accompanied a closer bolt of lightning.

Morales got up to put on a fresh pot of coffee, having walked within a few feet of the hen as she slept with her head under a wing. "Bet your buddies aren't sleeping so peacefully hanging onto a tree limb in that wind, not to mention being drenched by the rain."

At the sound of his nearby voice, she pulled her head from under her wing and sleepily looked at him for a second before ducking her head back out of sight.

"Better be careful, you might get used to the easy life, Gertrude, " he said with a chuckle while gathering some more wood from his woodpile.

Deep Space

The Chief Engineer met the First Officer in the hallway. As they passed each other, the Engineer quietly said, "Meet me in a half cycle."

The First Officer cleared his throat in acknowledgment, but never missed a step as he continued on his way.

He was standing with his hands clasped behind his back similar to Earth's military parade rest position as he stared out at the glowing band of light that is part of the Milky Way. The Chief Engineer walked in and, after scanning for eavesdropping devices, finally addressed the other.

"I have managed to tune three coils to ninety-nine point six five percent of optimum."

"Great," the First Officer began, only to be waved down by the engineer.

"Not great. Far from it. Even if we had all six coils tuned to that degree, it would take roughly a quarter lifespan to return to base. Perfect alignment is defined by the repair facility to be eight decimal places, and as I have emphasized before, that can only be achieved there. We simply do not have the equipment to accomplish that degree of accuracy. Even so, I have succeeded in building my own tuning equipment, and I am becoming increasingly more confident that I will be able to tune the coils sufficiently to return to base in a reasonable length of time – especially if my idea about enhancing the tuning equipment proves accurate. If it does, it will give sufficiently qualified ship Engineers an option of rough tuning misaligned coils while on mission."

"That should make you quite wealthy."

"Perhaps, if ... Command does not confiscate my idea as its own – which is a distinct possibility."

The First Officer grinned at him. "There is always the option of resigning your commission and starting a facility of your own. I suspect the tuning equipment would be an item that would sell to ship builders as well as wealthy owners, especially those who use their ships to trade at great distances."

The Chief Engineer let out a sigh. "The building of the last coil is nearing completion, but integrating coils four, five and six into the first three is a slow process, indeed. And as I add each coil, the integration process becomes more and more complex, even with the use of my invention."