by Ginger Booth
“Of course.” Sass wondered if she was dismissed.
Ingersoll referred to his notes, and swiped away one item. “Sagamore. God. Why?”
“I know very little about Sagamore colony,” Sass explained. “Some gifted criminals went thataway. Michael Yang and Genevieve Carruthers. About 20 to 27 years ago, they gene-edited settler babies –”
“They what?”
Sass nodded. “Two of the altered embryos now serve on my crew. Both unusually successful. Bright, healthy, talented. Four settlers now attend Mahina University who bear this genetic insert. They thrive.
“Obviously this was a crime. We’re not interested in prosecution. What we need to know is the failure rate that accompanied these successes. How many others are out there. What exactly this genetic material does. We hope to mine your archives, see if they left any clues behind. But we tried that in MA. Yang and Carruthers covered their tracks.”
“They should have been executed, not sentenced to MO!”
Sass shrugged. “The crime was heinous. The potential benefit huge. This gene insert could be a breakthrough for Mahina. But we need more information before MA can ethically use it.”
“Indeed. Well, Sagamore… Is hell. As you know, its diurnal cycle is less conducive to Earth plant life than Mahina – 2 weeks of night, 2 weeks sun. Open-air agriculture is impossible. Sagamore Colony is purely underground. Like Mahina, the terraformers had a 40-odd year head start to dig in. And like Mahina, the early arrival of a quarter million Earth refugees was unwelcome.
“Based on your role in the rebellion twenty years ago, I assume you are unsatisfied with the urb-settler detente on Mahina. But on Sagamore, the latecomers and their descendants are essentially slaves. Naturally, they like it even less than you did. They are perhaps healthier than their counterparts on Mahina. At first.”
“Why?”
Ingersoll indicated his own face and wispy hair. “Less radiation underground.”
“But they don’t remain healthier?”
“On hard labor, starvation rations, their behavior controlled by drugs. No. They’re caught in a more-or-less perpetual pattern of revolution and reprisals. I understand the rich live well. Bleeding hearts among them sometimes choose exile to the rings.” He erased another note, then tapped the next.
“SO, the orbital,” Ingersoll continued, “and the ring skyship Gossamer, and the mining platform Hell’s Bells, tend to be crewed by those people. A very different society than here at MO. Libertarian. Pirate. Matter of opinion. Of course you could visit Sagamore without dealing with them.”
“Do they ever come here?”
Ingersoll sighed.
Alohan offered, “They’re overdue. We trade with them sometimes.”
“We haven’t had anything to trade lately,” Ingersoll admitted.
Sass glanced to Abel, who took his cue. “If I might use your communications to contact them, sar? Follow up. See what they might want?”
“You’d have to,” Ingersoll agreed, “if you want to upgrade your star drives. My understanding is that we don’t have the parts.”
“Oh,” Sass said.
Ingersoll steepled his fingers and considered her. “You don’t need navigation data or another star drive to reach Sagamore.”
“I don’t?”
“No. Merely a death wish. It’s dangerous as hell. But you simply exit the rings, accelerate a while. Pray nothing hits you at that speed, because you have zero reaction time. Then decelerate at the other end and dodge rocks again. Take you about a week at closest approach. But that isn’t all of the death wish.”
“No?”
“No. The expected result of visiting Sagamore is that they confiscate your skyship and toss you into the slave pits.”
“Ah. Yes, that is awkward.”
“Awkward,” Ingersoll echoed. “Welcome to the rings of Pono, Captain Collier. We all have a great deal of thinking and due diligence to perform. Enjoy your stay at MO.”
As they took their leave, Sass attempted to smile confidently, and felt like a fraud. Her misgivings on first seeing the worn-out orbital again had crystallized into nagging worry.
What have I gotten us into?
5
Travel between any two star systems took 3 years subjective time. Their ships accelerated upward from the ecliptic for 1.5 years, then warped to the next system instantaneously, followed by 1.5 years travel down to the new ecliptic. Objective elapsed time was the number of light years between systems, plus about 2 years.
“What the hell happened to my tree?” Sass demanded, the moment she stepped foot back into the Thrive’s cargo hold from the station. “Eli! Report to the hold!” she barked over the ship public address system.
Her prize scrubber trees, spare saplings of olive and grapefruit, looked more sketchy than ever, guileless victims of a hostile pruning. Most of her plants dwelt in the engine room, lit by the star drive. But she and Copeland had lovingly rigged fiber optic lighting and protective air tents for them to grace the large cargo space at the ship’s core, used for crew recreation and bulk storage. They even set a foamcrete extruded park bench by the trees, Jules and Abel’s favorite noodling spot.
The ‘scrubber’ part referred to cleaning toxins from the air. A function the spindly trees performed using their leaves. Half of which were now missing.
Catching the captain’s tone, the botanist took the express slide down from the catwalk above. He paused at the bottom. He took in Sass’s irate expression and crossed arms. He absorbed Abel’s glower beside her. He noticed the damage to the trees, and stepped warily to join them.
“That’s…” Eli murmured. “Dr. Bertram… He said a cutting or two.” Eli glanced nervously toward the door to the star drive chamber.
“Your guest?” Sass demanded. “He did this to my trees?”
“I – Excuse me.” Eli scurried for the engine room.
Sass followed on his heels. “You let a tree-murderer loose in my garden?”
All three paused to don protective goggles at the door. The engine’s waste light was brighter than Mahina’s Wednesday sun.
“The trees will recover,” Eli murmured guiltily. “I’ll make sure of it.” He hauled open the heavy blast-grade door. “Bertram?”
“Your red cabbage is delicious, Eli!” the other scientist’s voice came faintly through the foliage.
Sass dove through a curtain of rambunctious cucumber vines with their curling tendrils and dinner-plate-sized leaves. She marched straight for the miscreant, ready to throttle him.
“Bertram? My cabbage isn’t ready to harvest.” Eli trotted to keep up with Sass. “Ah!” He gazed in dismay at the wreckage of his leaf vegetables. “How could you do this?”
Sass picked up her harvest basket at Bertram’s feet, full of stolen produce and tree cuttings. He’d been snipping at her plum and peach and apple trees in here as well. “Give me one reason I shouldn’t throw you out an airlock. Bastard!”
“I –” The scrawny scientist stood transfixed, mouth agape and showing the whites of his eyes. “I thought I had permission?”
Eli surveyed his carefully managed shelves of agricultural experiments, cataloging the carnage. “I said you could look.” He held up a container of pea plants, cut in half. “Why –?”
“I get so hungry,” Bertram wailed.
“Get off my ship,” Sass ordered. “I will be speaking to Commander Alohan about your actions.”
“Sass, you don’t mean that…” Eli trailed off. “No, you’re right. Bertram, what possessed you? This is my research. You destroyed a month’s work! This is vandalism! How could you?”
The other scientist’s hand drifted toward the basket, which Sass yanked out of his reach. “I planned to graft them. I can give you back some of the child trees…”
“What, in five years?” Sass shoved his shoulder. “Off. My. Ship. Eli, you can debug your moron on the dock.”
“Sass, I don’t have any rootstock to graft those onto,” Eli
pointed out. The poor branches would be wasted.
“Confiscate rootstock from him. Abel, grab him.”
Between them, they frog-marched Dr. Bertram out through the umbilical and deposited him in the station cargo dock, Eli trailing them.
“I don’t want to see you on the docking level again, doctor. Eli, I want you back on the ship in one hour. With whatever your buddy there planned to graft my trees onto.”
“I could use a grav carrier…” the botanist hazarded. “Maybe station security? No. You’ll give me your trees peacefully, won’t you, Bertram?”
“I’ll go with them,” Abel offered. “Wait here.”
“Bring one of the other guys if you find them,” Sass called after him. “Benjy should be around, if Clay and Copeland aren’t back yet.”
“Benjy left with Copeland,” Eli supplied. “Haven’t seen Clay.”
Irritated, Sass got on the ship address system again while Abel ducked in to fetch the grav carriers. “All hands report. Where are you?”
Jules and Kassidy proved the only crew on board, impatiently awaiting their turn to tour the orbital. Sass sent them out with Abel. They grudgingly agreed to return for a ship’s meeting in one hour.
An hour and a half later, young Jules finished serving everybody a sandwich and salad lunch to enjoy along with their captain’s meeting.
Jules thought the hacked branches added a festive touch. The captain just stuck them in a water pitcher to await their return. But the housekeeper rearranged them into three glass tumblers to grace the kitchen and dining area, newly renovated as the most handsome section of the decrepit Thrive. She even fancied the scrubber leaves were freshening the air in here, despite their rude severance from roots and trunk.
A shame her husband Abel was getting crankier by the minute. She popped a kiss on his forehead and favored him with a grin before taking her seat.
“What’s taking so long?” he growled.
“On our tour,” Copeland hazarded, “Clay said they needed to talk. You know what that was about, Abel?”
“Maybe,” Abel admitted. “But I’m first mate. I’m her business partner. What is Clay? She can’t just take a lover and displace me.”
Jules tried to follow this in dismay. “Is he? Her lover? I don’t think so.”
“They have history,” Kassidy opined. Eli nodded.
“Jealous much, Abel?” Benjy quipped, earning a dark glower.
Jules gazed at Benjy, brow crumpled. He was right. Abel got so jealous sometimes. They’d only been married a couple months now. Before that, Abel visited her family a couple times a year ever since they were promised. Silly for her to think she knew him well before their wedding.
Benjy caught her dismay, if Abel didn’t. “I was just teasing, Jules. You know Abel adores you.”
Her husband missed his cue, and viciously stabbed his salad with a fork. “Hmph. Ah! About time.” Sass and Clay breezed in.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Sass announced. “Great idea, serving lunch, Jules, thank you.”
Jules preened. The captain was so nice that way! Abel might get more respect from Copeland and Benjy if he’d learn from Sass and appreciate them instead of being such a grump. She wondered if she could tell him that. He loved her, sure. But he was a grown man, 10 years older. Maybe he didn’t think she knew anything.
Sass continued, “I wanted to get us all together to make plans now that we’ve seen the orbital.”
Her eyes drifted up and left, squirrelly-like. Jules reflected that she hadn’t seen much of this place yet, just an ‘officer’s mess’ and hauling plants around in a hurry while Abel barked at people. Jules swung her chin to track Sass’s line of sight to the blank overhead, still quite rusty.
The captain brought her gaze back and grinned directly into Jules’ eyes. “Clay reminded me that we need to get honest with you. You know the two of us have been to the orbital before.”
“But not recently,” Clay completed her thought. They both stood at the foot of the table instead of taking their chairs. “Sass, shall I?”
Sass glanced around the table, then down. “Yeah.” She escaped to her chair at the head of the table.
Clay assumed a cool and businesslike briefing stance. “I first met Sassafras Collier at embarkation for the Vitality colony ship in the Adirondacks. On Earth. She was assigned to my team, to police settlers on the voyage to Mahina. That was…how long ago?”
“About 67 years, subjective,” Sass supplied faintly.
“What does ‘subjective’ mean?” Jules asked Abel, feeling dumb. He shrugged slightly, mouth open and staring at Sass.
“Sorry, Jules,” Sass replied. “Travel between the stars seems to take three years to the people inside the ship. That’s subjective – how I experienced it. But to the people on Earth and Mahina, we arrived eight years after we left. That’s objective, what it looks like to an observer outside. Doesn’t really matter. Clay became my boss 67 years ago, as we experienced it. But we met on Earth 75 years ago.”
Jules nodded. “How old are you?”
“Clay is 105? Yeah. And I turn 100 next month.”
Jules grinned, and she snapped her fingers in glee. “We’ll have to throw a birthday party!”
Abel turned to his wife incredulous. “Because that’s what’s important here?”
“What do you mean?” Jules replied innocently. “A one hundredth birthday is one hell of an occasion!”
Abel pinched the bridge of his nose in irritation. Her eyes narrowed. That husband was starting to make her mad.
“I agree,” Sass pounced. “Thank you, Jules! See, Clay? There’s a benefit to coming clean with them already. We can celebrate our birthdays like normal folk.”
“Quite,” Clay replied with a faint wince. Not the folksy type.
Jules inquired, “Did you celebrate your 105th, Mr. Rocha sir?”
“Call me Clay. No. I don’t celebrate because I can’t tell anyone how old I am.”
“But now you can,” Jules concluded in triumph.
Kassidy grinned at Jules in appreciation, as a discomfited Clay tried to wrest back control of the meeting. Halfway between Benjy and Abel in age, Kassidy treated Jules like the fun baby sister she never had.
Clay continued, “But here’s why we’re telling you this now. First, we’ve been here before, and in space. But we’re cops, not space hands. We alternated between orbit and the moon during the crash terraforming project, before the settlers could wake and move down to Mahina. We visited the orbital a few times, 50 years ago and more. We didn’t live here. We lived on the Vitality, or on one of the work crew skyships.”
“That’s where Sass learned the skyship,” Kassidy murmured. “Can’t be genetics, that you didn’t age?” Her father was the leading nanite engineer on Mahina before his exile to the orbital. Not her thing at all – Kassidy made a living as a gymnast and adventure celebrity. But she knew Sass’s age was beyond the abilities of Mahina’s nanotech.
Clay spread his hand to concede her conclusion. “Back to Earth. When we reported for duty, Sass and I – all ten of us on my team – were injected with nanites. Four of us were dead within the week. A couple more died on the trip to Mahina.”
“How did they die?” Kassidy probed.
“Violently,” Sass replied. “Hold the questions for now, Kassidy.”
The young woman nodded and settled back in her chair.
Clay sighed. “The point. We two seem effectively immortal. The others are dead. No one on the colony ship knew where that injection came from. Or they wouldn’t admit it. We assume a Ganymede tech experimented on us. But we don’t know who, or whether he came to the Alohan system with us. If we could safely give our nanites to the settlers of Mahina, our health problems could be over. Obviously the techs in Mahina Actual tried to figure this out. They couldn’t.”
“Even with a living sample?” Kassidy blurted. “Surprised they didn’t drain you dry trying.”
“There was a bad year.” C
lay grimaced. “But no. What we were injected with, was smart nanite fabricators that custom-built all our other nanites after installation. A couple orders of magnitude more complex than anything Mahina Actual can do. Our nanites are self-replicating and adaptive. One researcher even theorized the bugs leverage our brain power, running a true artificial intelligence on human wetware.”
Kassidy and the scientist Eli traded raised eyebrows and huffs of disbelief.
“The researcher hoped for a magical breakthrough, I know,” Clay placated. “The guy won his extra liter of blood for science. Doesn’t matter. I outlived him forty years ago.
“But a couple take-home points. Most people don’t remember this, but our urb nanotech arrived with the Ganymede techs on the Vitality. Not with the terraformers who founded Mahina Actual. When we arrived the city didn’t look much better off than the people here in the orbital.”
“Worse,” Sass recalled. “Except the children in the anti-radiation bunker. The adults all battled cancer.”
“Anyway,” Clay concluded, “this is one of the things we’re looking for up here. Nanites have been our most successful strategy to live on Mahina. Our nanites more so than yours,” he added apologetically to Kassidy and Eli, the Thrive’s urbs. “But then, ours had an immediate 40% fatality rate. Given a choice, I wouldn’t have agreed to those terms.”
“No,” Sass concurred. “None of us would have.”
Kassidy suggested, “So you’re not just looking into Genevieve’s genetic experiments on Benjy and Copeland. Or even my dad’s nanite work. You want to track the Ganymede techs. Where they went. What clues they left behind. And maybe even a unicorn – the guy who created your nanites.”
“He made us live young and healthy to a century,” Sass agreed. “Surely he saved the best for himself.”