‘We’re being flown by remote!’
The whole team was instantly in uproar, tearing up out of their seats, heading for the cockpit to look for themselves.
And then Lynn saw the flashing green light increase in speed, until it stopped.
And turned to red.
Five hundred metres away across the Drake Passage, Commander Flynn Eldridge and his team watched with detached professional interest as the black night sky lit up next to them in an immense fireball.
They saw the circular, expanding ball of fire hang in the air for seconds, struggling to stay up, before it plummeted down towards the icy sea below.
Eldridge nodded in satisfaction.
Job done.
PART TWO
1
Matt Adams poured the tepid tap water over his cold breakfast cereal, eyes bleary. Milk was expensive, and in his current state, he could barely tell the difference between milk and water anyway.
Adams had not had a good night’s sleep in more than a week. Sometimes the nightmares were like that — they would come in cycles, often two or three a night, and then there would be nothing for months.
For the past week he had managed the odd hour here and there when his body literally collapsed, but then the dreams would come, and he would be wide awake again, unwilling to close his eyes, no matter how tired he was.
He knew what caused it — there was no way in hell he would ever forget that — but the fact remained that he was a shadow of his former self, a washed-up wreck of a man. The news he’d received that morning wasn’t doing anything to raise his spirits either.
Evelyn Edwards — previously Evelyn Adams, back when they had been married — was dead. Killed in some sort of helicopter crash flying back from a NASA mission to the Antarctic.
The wreck had been strewn across the Drake Passage, and it was unlikely that any bodies were ever going to be recovered. Instead of a funeral, a state memorial service for Lynn and her team was going to be held in Washington DC in just two weeks.
It was NASA that had called to tell him the tragic news, and invite him to the memorial service. There weren’t many other people outside of her professional circle to invite. With no family to speak of, most of the people she knew were from within NASA.
Adams had told the lady on the other end of the phone that he would be attending. As he ate his cereal, his mind kept spinning back towards Lynn.
The thing was, he still loved her. A tear rolled down his cheek, and then he looked at the cereal bowl on the table in front of him, no longer even able to tell what it was.
An hour later, he was still there.
Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is located in the south-west corner of South Dakota on the border with Nebraska. Administered by the Oglala Sioux Tribe, it covers almost three and a half thousand square miles, and incorporates three of the poorest counties in the United States.
Marginalized at the best of times, the American Indian population of the United States has faced major problems with poverty, education, health and welfare, and this condition is nowhere so obvious as at Pine Ridge.
As Adams rode his bicycle unsteadily to work, he considered himself lucky to have a job at all. It wasn’t a good job — and certainly not in the same league as his previous employment, which had come to such a tragic end — but it was a job nevertheless. The wage was low but at least he didn’t have to worry about his rent.
With less than four per cent of the reservation’s land suitable for farming, and very much ignored by the federal government, the result was that poverty was endemic and conditions were ripe for alcoholism, crime, and other associated problems. And so as Adams arrived at the small tourist hut at the edge of the Badlands National Park, he considered himself one of the lucky ones.
The Oglala Sioux Tribe is a proud one, part of the seven tribes that had once made up the Great Sioux Nation.
Matt ‘Free Bear’ Adams belonged to the tribe, which was known by its members more properly as the Oglala Lakota Oyate. Its fabled ancestors had fought the US military in Red Cloud’s War and the Great Sioux War, and had been amongst those massacred at Wounded Knee.
Adams’ own ancestry was less clear, however. Found outside the tribal police headquarters in Pine Ridge at an estimated age of two days old, his parentage had never been determined. He was taken under the wing of the local police chief, brought in to live with the man’s own family. This had only lasted the first few years of Adams’ life, however. When the kindly old man was gunned down in the city one cold November night, Adams had soon found himself being passed from pillar to post. An orphanage here, a foster home there, he had lived in more than two dozen places before he entered his teens.
But the young Adams was resilient, the spirit inculcated in him by the police chief in those early years never far from the surface. He never let the situation get him down, never gave in, and always kept fighting.
It was Adams’ fighting spirit that finally brought him to the attention of Jim ‘Big Bear’ Maddison, the leader of the Strong Heart Akicita warrior society and a distant relative of the great Chief Crazy Horse, best known for leading a war party against US government forces at the Battles of the Rosebud and the Little Bighorn.
Like the police chief before him, Maddison brought Adams under his wing. When he was introduced to the tribal elders, they recognized not only his fighting spirit, but also his deeper, spiritual nature, and so took their own interest in him.
The tribe’s traditional war, hunting and tracking skills were treated as something of an anachronism by most Lakota, no longer considered relevant for contemporary needs. Such skills had not been passed down from generation to generation since the 1800s, and yet some of the Lakota holy men still retained knowledge of the old ways.
These men observed nature and formed a relationship with all aspects of the world — animals, plants, and the land itself. And so when it came to seemingly physical processes such as tracking, they would not rely on visible sign alone, but also listened to what the world was telling them about itself.
Not many people were capable of this connection to the earth, or attaining such spiritual alignment, but the young Adams had shown an incredible aptitude for the teaching of the Lakota elders. This had led in turn to trouble with other members of the tribe, who argued vocally that a child with no tribal lineage or ancestry should never be allowed to receive such instruction.
And so despite Big Bear’s protection, Adams’ life was not an easy one, never able to avoid the stigma of his orphaned status, and constantly having to fight to get what was given free to most. But his spirit shone through, until he became the most highly regarded tracker on the reservation, and had the name ‘Free Bear’ gifted to him by Maddison and the Lakota holy men, to illustrate how he had freed himself from the trappings of ancestry and made a name for himself through sheer ability and force of will.
What Maddison and the tribal elders would think of him now — ready to take out a group of tourists on the Badlands Native American Experience — was anyone’s guess. But as he led the party of twelve tourists on horseback into the wonders of the Badlands, he wasn’t thinking about disappointing Maddison.
Instead, all he could think about was Lynn.
The tour was four days long, and the group camped out overnight, gathering around the campfire to discuss the day’s experiences and listen to Adams tell tales about the land’s mythology.
Despite the low night-time temperatures, Adams spent his nights out beneath the stars. There were millions of them, brilliantly bright in the absence of manmade lighting, and as Adams sipped a cup of nettle tea, he felt his mind — his spirit — start to roam the cosmos.