by Ginger Booth
“Jules wrote the speech for me,” Abel admitted. “You’re holding up the salad, Collier.”
She laughed and dug into the enormous punch bowl full of brilliant fresh-picked goodness. “Eli, do I spy new varieties in here?”
Eli returned her grin triumphantly. “New Japanese cucumbers, yellow squash, and some greens you probably haven’t eaten in, oh, 70 years or so. The other fruits aren’t ready yet.”
“There hasn’t been time yet,” Sass realized with a start. “I haven’t known you long enough for those first jalapeños and vintage tomatoes. Wow.” Only a few short months ago, she sat alone imprisoned on her farm, trying to imagine whether she’d have friends to celebrate her birthday with. Just to go to a bar with her – her imagination didn’t extend to telling anyone her age.
The last person she expected to celebrate with was Clay Rocha.
Over the fantastic fresh salad and the several courses that followed, the gang admitted who contributed what. Sass was astonished to learn that Griffith was the ice sculpture artist, with an assist from Copeland on the tray. Kassidy made the ribbons and walked the ceiling to attach them. Eli grew and picked the vegetables, of course. Wilder helped Clay with the chopping. Benjy and Seitz hauled all the flower pots in. Cortez set the table. Abel mixed the music soundtrack during his watch on the bridge. And of course everyone gave Jules a hand as the young housekeeper cooked the feast.
“There’s a dessert, isn’t there?” Sass asked her, as Griffith leaned in between Sass and Abel to clear their used plates and utensils.
“Aw, captain,” Jules crooned. “Would I throw a birthday party without a cake?”
“But I’m stuffed!” Sass protested. “I couldn’t eat another bite! Let’s wait an hour on the cake.”
“That’s my cue.” Abel rose plonked a kiss on the crown of Sass’s head. “I’m off to spell Benjy. Have a great evening, partner!”
And the drinking, fairly steady, took over in earnest, while they chatted around the table. Benjy drifted in and ate. He didn’t bother with the 3-course feasting, opting instead for a normal supper plate. He stood to eat at the galley work counter chatting with Cortez and Griffith, who got stuck with dinner clean-up. Her pet crewman sure seemed to spend a lot of time with the MO loaners these days.
Sparkling dinner party conversation went great. Then Wilder said it was a blessing that Sass and Clay still had each other from the lost world they came from.
Sass snorted. “We’re not from the same world!”
OK, maybe bitterness made her voice a little louder than it should have been. Conversation stumbled into a lull, as all eyes turned to her. Benjy suddenly plonked into Abel’s seat.
Clay raised his wine glass in salute. “Perhaps you’ve had enough to drink, Sass.”
She shrugged and downed the rest of a goblet, nearly full. “My kind drink hard.”
Her nanites defended her against the worst physical effects of getting drunk. They didn’t protect her judgment much.
Clay downed the rest of his glass as well. He placed it, and his napkin, precisely on the table. And he rose and left.
“Wait! Mr. Rocha!” Jules called, abandoning her chair in concern. “There are 105 candles on the cake! We need both of you to blow them out…” Her voice dwindled off.
Clay hadn’t bothered with a single backward glance. He was gone.
Kassidy squeezed Jules’ shoulder. “Relax, sweetie. I’ll go get him.”
Benjy at Sass’s elbow asked softly. “Captain?”
“We’re not,” she said sharply. “From the same world. Earth is a big place.”
Clay hadn’t gone far. Kassidy caught up to him dangling his feet from the catwalk outside Eli’s twin cabins.
She hopped to the outside of the catwalk and hung from the railing beside him. “I need exercise after such a big feed.”
“A walk would be good,” Clay allowed. “Is that railing strong enough?”
“Strong enough for me, Griffith, Copeland, and Wilder all at once,” Kassidy confirmed. She pulled up and leaned closer to add, “There’s plenty of room for a nice walk in this ship. You just need to use the bulkheads and overheads, too.”
He snorted a sad laugh at that. But with a sigh, he got up and clambered to the outside of the catwalk as she had. “Lead on.”
Kassidy swung out on one arm, stepped along and pulled herself back upright. She clapped her hands as she switched her grip to the next section. “Clapping is optional. I trust you’re good with grav generators?”
“Not as good as you are.” But he did manage the clap between handholds.
“Ooh,” Kassidy crooned. “Tight-rope walking?” She hopped on top of the railing, and carefully straightened, arms held out for balance.
“That’s a no,” Clay said firmly. He hopped back over to the catwalk, nearly knocking Kassidy off the railing as the steel flexed. But she caught herself. He held up a hand for hers. “Promenade, madame?”
She sighed theatrically. “Too easy. But when a dashing gentleman offers, I suppose…” She grasped his hand with a wink. And she held his riveted attention as they turned the corner, and she walked down the stair railing beside him on the steps.
That staircase was midway between what they’d call ‘stairs’ and a ‘ladder’ on a ship – steep. Kassidy’s shoe started to skid once, but Clay’s firm grip allowed her to recover. She let go his hand at the bottom and dismounted with a flip.
“Fancy a stroll over the garden next, my dear sir?”
“By all means.”
“You know, Clay, I’m confused,” Kassidy confessed. They pulled on protective dark goggles. Clay opened the heavy engine room door for her, and bowed her in. “I’m never sure whether it would be unforgivable for me to make a pass at you.”
Rather than look to him for an answer, she fidgeted with her grav generator and hopped onto the wall. Directing gravity 90 degrees from its previous direction, while canceling out the one g pulling toward the deck, was not a quick preset or turn of the dial.
While he was still figuring out how to follow, she added, “You and Sass are involved. And fighting it. None of my business of course. Though you are far and away the most attractive man on this ship. So I am offering, in case that wasn’t clear.” He was successfully standing on the wall now, about waist high off the deck. She smiled and batted her eyelashes at him. “Consider yourself propositioned. In case you want a silly young ingenue in bed for your birthday present.”
He smiled. “Nice approach. Well calibrated to your quarry. Not too pushy. Easy for both parties to laugh off. Well done.”
She laughed and strolled up the wall past the cucumber vines. “I’ll take that as a no.”
“I didn’t say that.”
24
It is possible that the Colony Corps crews simply returned first to Ganymede, and then continued to a backup location when they found their home colony destroyed.
“Tell me,” Benjy urged. “How are you and Clay from different worlds? Tell me about Earth.”
“I,” Sass said, topping up her wine goblet, “was always poor. He was rich. We’re not like from different parts of Earth or anything like that. We were probably born within a hundred miles of each other.”
“Miles?” Benjy asked.
Sass paused, surprised by her slip. She hadn’t made that mistake in ages. “Less than 200 klicks apart. We used – never mind. You get the gist. We grew up in the same rainy forest. Not just us, of course. Must have been a hundred million in that forest. Maybe. Big forest.”
She frowned. She didn’t actually know much about Clay’s life before embarkation, that fateful day they received their nanites. He was in authority over them under crisis conditions. He didn’t let his hair down much.
“Clay went to fancy schools. Got a couple college degrees. Elite training to best of breed law enforcement.” She held a hand palm down, way over her head.
“I was a beat cop.” The hand fell to breast level. The table was in the way t
o indicate any lower. “He went after high-brow criminals. Crooked politicians, terrorist plots, thieving bankers. You know, prestigious crime. Always wore his fancy suit. I policed the tent cities, the refugee camps.”
Other conversations found their stopping place and naturally tuned into her story as she went. Occasionally she rummaged for a picture and tossed it onto the big display to illustrate alien concepts like rain, snow, and forest, tent cities and real cities. She showed what the refugees looked like, cocooned in their perpetual slickers and breath masks, trying always to keep that caustic rain off their skin. The angry red sores from failing to keep dry. The dead in the ditches.
“I was poor,” she summed up. “He was rich. He was smart and successful. I was a dumb loser. Not the same world at all. Like urbs and settlers aren’t from the same world. Or more like a successful urb, versus a poor sod in the phosphate mines.”
“They wouldn’t make a loser a cop,” Copeland argued. “You don’t pick an idiot to have power over other people.”
Sass nodded. “I was a soldier once. Like you guys. When I was your age, Jules. I joined the army at 14. They gave me a gun and taught me to kill, defend myself. As a girl in the barracks –”
Benjy squeezed her hand hard. “Is that why you left the army?” he interrupted her.
Sass smiled sadly at him. Good catch, kid. No, her stories of defending herself in the barracks would be no help to Jules. She’d avoided talking to the child about her assault in the bathroom, let Kassidy handle it. Sass’s experiences were too rough. Kassidy could tell a more helpful story.
“I got pregnant,” Sass said. “Against the army rules. I was kicked out. And I became a cop. Raised my kid. Earned just enough to keep out of the DP camps myself. Displaced persons. Refugees. The tent cities.”
“Did you ever want more children?” Eli asked. “Clay had some.”
“Clay still has the equipment,” Sass replied sourly. “No, there were rules. Earth was overpopulated. If I’d had Paul after I was 25. If I had a husband. But I didn’t. They removed my ovaries the day Paul was born. No second chances.”
Clay and Kassidy slipped back into the room quietly and took their normal seats at the table, several places apart. Sass paused to nod at them warily. Clay returned the nod, then studied the image of a DP camp.
“That was in the Catskills,” she excused herself, to only him, since no one else knew what she was talking about. She scrolled around on her pocket tablet and found another. “Adirondacks camp. My old haunts.”
He took a sip of wine and pulled out his comm. He replaced her image on the wall with a prosperous farm in the woods. A little more flipping, and he split the screen with an elegant brownstone.
Sass scowled at the display.
“They asked me how we grew up in different worlds on Earth,” she said. “But I never knew where you lived.”
“You never asked,” Clay bit out. “The names wouldn’t mean anything to them. I grew up in a city. That brownstone. We also owned the farm. I lived in a different city at the end. Traveled a lot for work.”
“He was rich,” Sass summarized. “He had everything.”
Clay’s brows lowered as they faced off down the length of the table, across the melting ice sculpture of the Thrive.
“Tell us what was it like, Clay,” Kassidy intervened. “Tell us a tale of Earth of old.”
Grudgingly at first, Clay told a story about cross-country skiing as a child through the woods. The snow was slushy that day. Winter rarely stayed frozen by then south of Canada.
The boys didn’t wear breath masks in the forest. That surprised even Sass. Only 5 years older, Clay recalled playing outdoors with no air support. Though even then, his house was pressurized in the city. Sass’s childhood tents didn’t provide environmental.
That day Clay and his friend crossed an open area, not noticing it was a pond instead of a field. His friend took off his skis to adjust his boots. The ice gave way beneath him. Clay phoned for help. Then he figured out how to pull the other boy out of the water, using his skis to spread their weight across the weak ice.
“The police arrived,” he concluded, “with emergency blankets. Said I’d make a great first responder. When I got home, I told my father I wanted to be a cop to help people. He told me that was ridiculous. I’d go to university and join the family bank. But that wasn’t up to him.”
“You did both!” Jules noted, with a clap of glee. “Police. Now you’re a banker, too, to the Thrive!”
Clay chuckled. “Yes. I guess so. My father would still not be proud. But that was him.
“Sass, yes, I was rich. Still am. All the advantages. But I did what I could. On Earth, my department was invited to send 20 people to Mahina. I was the only volunteer. I didn’t look down on you because you were poor. The more I learned of your background, the more impressed I was you ever made it out of the camps. Impressed as hell.”
“You identified with the urbs, not us.”
“Yes, I did. And the rest of you didn’t. So I tried to bridge the gap.” Clay waved his hand around the table, mixed urb and settler. “You do, too. On your terms.”
“I’m ready for cake,” Kassidy announced. “Jules, can I help serve?”
As the young ones dealt out plates and forks, Sass reconsidered her long antipathy to Clay. Was that the root of it? Resentment of his advantages? His assumed superiority, because he was in fact her boss?
Maybe 70 years was too long to resent someone for something he hadn’t done. Besides, he still had more money and influence than she did. And she was still using him for it. She snorted wryly to herself.
Then she pulled back in alarm as Wilder and Griffith removed the sculpture and full drip tray, to be replaced with a giant sheet cake. There were, in fact, one hundred tiny candles in blocks of 10, plus 5 more along the edge.
“You’re not going to –” she objected.
Copeland pulled out his gas jet, the one he used to check for pressure leaks or to solder plumbing. Tuning it up to a half meter flame-thrower mode, he lit the candles.
“Have you made a wish, captain?” Jules invited. “For your next century!”
“You have to blow all these out to get your wish,” Benjy said. “No wonder wishes come true easier when you’re a kid.”
Clay laughed out loud. “I’ll blow out my bonus 5.”
Sass slapped the table. “Everyone helps blow out the candles. That’s an order from your captain! Rocha, got a wish?”
Clay gave an exaggerated nod. “Ready! I wish for no space pirates.”
“Space pirates!” Sass scoffed. “Who would they prey on? There’s no one out here. Not economically viable.”
Before her elders could descend into squabbling again, Jules launched the singing of ‘happy birthday.’ Others leaned in to blow out the flaming cake. Copeland canceled the smoke alarms.
Maybe she considered space pirates silly, but Sass fervently wished to bring her crew home safe to Mahina. With everyone helping, she blew out her hundred candles, eyes stinging from the waxy black vapors. Copeland’s shiny new fan system soon drew the smoke away from their gorgeous new kitchen.
As the party broke up, Benjy walked Sass back to her cabin. “Captain?”
“Yes, Benjy?”
“Do you…want company?” He pointed bashfully at the bridge door, not far beyond Sass’s own cabin, then scratched his nose. “I have a little while yet before I’m on duty.”
Sass leaned on the bulkhead and beamed at him. “What a flattering offer! But no. As your captain, I’m not free to take you up on it.”
“But that’s not why?” Benjy fished.
Sass’s smile broadened to a grin. “You’re a bit young for me. Truly, Benjy, I just don’t feel that way about you. But thank you.”
“Ben,” he insisted, out of the blue. “Benjy is a kid’s name. My dad called me Benjy. In school, they call me Benjamin. I choose Ben.”
“Good choice, Ben,” she murmured. Funny how she felt proud
to see him grow up, yet mourned the rambunctious kid she met such a short time ago. This trip stole his innocence. She squeezed his shoulder in encouragement.
“Good night, captain. Happy hundredth birthday.”
As he left her, she saw Clay and Kassidy leaning on the catwalk railing. Flirting, by the looks of it.
None of my business, Sass told herself firmly. She retreated into her cabin, and called it a night. Her libidinous nanites rebelled at her lousy choices on how to celebrate a birthday. She firmly told them to take a hike. She decided who shared her bed.
Or not.
As for contemplating the panoramic sweep of her past century, she’d far rather distract herself with a good book and fall asleep.
25
In-depth studies and physical fitness regimes were among the successful strategies for coping with long inter-colony voyages.
“Whatcha doin’?” Sass asked, peering into the ventilation system compartment.
Copeland straightened abruptly and brained himself on some jutting metal. “Ow.”
“Sorry to surprise you,” Sass apologized.
Copeland clambered out of the cramped space, and re-angled his grav to sink to the floor instead of the bow. “Testing the ESD field – electrostatic discharge. Kinda woke up this morning nervous. Maybe had a dream about how the defenses were weakened by those rocks on the way out of the rings. Then got to thinking that was kinda possible. So, you know, paranoia.”
“Contagious paranoia,” Sass murmured. “What did you find?”
Copeland warily eyed the rebuilt fan system, fancy-fresh built from the printers. “It’s 25% down from spec here. But I never measured it before the accident. Some places are 100%, one spot worse than here so far.”
“You have my undivided attention,” the captain assured him. “Is there anything we can do about this?”