The Lion in Paradise

by Brindle, Nathan C.

  Don and Devorah looked at each other. Then nodded, together. Don unhooked the rope he'd brought from his belt and passed the shackle to Elise, who hooked it to her own belt and gave a thumbs-up.

  "Be careful, Elise," said Devorah, solemnly.

  Elise winked. "Okay, Mom," she replied, and looked down. "What is it, five feet to the far wall?"

  "We'll let you down with the rope," said Don. "That wall is probably drywall on flimsy-ass steel studs, and if you jumped down on it, you'd go right through it, don't care how light you say you are."

  "Oh. Good point."

  And just about ten minutes later, Elise had splinted the first lady's leg with an inflatable splint, and dragged her back to the doorway to be pulled back up, and had also found the second lady, unconscious but breathing, and apparently just bruised with no broken bones. She dragged that lady back, too, by which time Don and Devorah had pulled the first lady up to the office. They then pulled the second lady up, followed by Elise, who was dusty, sweaty, filthy, and grinning like she'd been given a lollipop and a pony.

  "That was badass," she said, eyes gleaming.

  "Let's get them out of here and into the ambulance," laughed Devorah . . .

  . . . as the building section creaked, ominously.

  "Shit."

  "Don, get up, now!" cried Devorah. Don didn't need any prodding; he went up the rope like he was climbing to the gym ceiling in grade school. "Elise, go!" The girl, completely forgetting her earlier argument, also went shinnying up the rope. The two of them looked down at Devorah.

  "Don, the rope we sent Elise down with. Plus a rescue seat."

  Don disappeared, was gone for about ten seconds, and returned with an aluminum and rope seat, which he hooked to the descent rope. He and Elise carefully let the seat down to Devorah.

  "Okay, ma'am," she said to the first lady, "this is how we have to get you out of here."

  "I'm good with that," said the rescuee. "I have zero interest in staying here."

  "Okay, let me help you into the seat." Which was a little difficult, since the woman's leg was splinted, but they managed it. "Take her up . . . wait, where's Don?"

  "Getting the ambulance, we're going to pull her straight up," said Elise. She looked up as the ambulance came into view, settling down to where Elise could reach it with the other end of the rope and tie it off to a ring bolt in the bottom of the vehicle. "Ready?"

  "Go!" said Devorah.

  "Go!" yelled Elise. The ambulance started to rise, and with it, the rescue seat and the woman strapped into it.

  "Thank you, miss," said the lady, as she rose up.

  "All part of what you pay taxes for, but I get you," smiled Devorah. "And you're welcome."

  They got her clear, then came back and dropped the chair for the unconscious woman. Devorah rolled her into the seat, strapped her in, yelled, "Take her up!" and the process repeated.

  Finally it was Devorah's turn. The chair came down, but she didn't bother to sit in it; she stood in the seat and grabbed the rope. "Go!"

  And she rose up out of the wrecked office, just as the interior of the section collapsed.

  "Whew," she sighed.

  "That was close!" exclaimed Elise, wide-eyed.

  "Yeah, luckily the interiors aren't part of the building structure, or we'd both be down there with the rubble." Devorah stepped off of the rescue chair and yanked the rope a couple of times; Don, in response, dropped the ambulance back down to its original parking spot.

  As they loaded the women into the ambulance, Devorah again thinking they were lucky they didn't have the gurney this time, Delaney and Yehudit showed up.

  "Can we bum a ride, or do we need to wait for Mom?" asked Yehudit.

  "I think we have room," said Devorah. "Did you find any more survivors?"

  "Yes, about fifteen," said Yehudit. "They were lucky." She looked sad.

  "Yes," said Delaney, quietly. "They were."

  Devorah looked at her older sister. "That bad?"

  "Yes. That bad."

  "Oh honey. Is this going to—"

  "Yeah. It's going to make me dream bad dreams for about a week. It's okay, Dev," said Delaney, with a bit of a crooked grin, "it's what I do . . . and what I did. But I have Harb now, so it's not so bad as it was."

  "Where is Harb?"

  "Oh, Grumpaw came back and yelled that he needed Harb, so Harb's on the Bandersnatch, now. I have no idea what they're doing, but they may still be at Mars."

  "Mars?"

  "Didn't you get the scream from Yael?" asked Yehudit.

  "No, but . . . "

  Devorah's comm rang just then. She hit connect, and put it on speaker. "Devorah Fox."

  "It's your mother," said Ariela.

  "Hi Mom," said Devorah. "What's up?"

  "Well, we pulled a few more windows out, then helped move some of the rubble off of Lake Shore and traffic is moving again. I'm trying to run liaison for your emergency response people, and they're saying to take survivors out to the fire station at O'Hare. They have a triage set up there. Can you get that message to other crews?"

  "We'll try. No comms, unfortunately."

  "Yes, that." Ariela sounded disgusted. "We're going to unfuck that after this crisis is past."

  Devorah couldn't help it. She giggled.

  "What's funny?" asked Ariela, suspiciously.

  "It's just . . . hearing my sweet mother use the term, 'unfuck', it's kind of funny right now."

  "Oh. Well. Remember, both your Grumpaw and your Grampaw taught me how to cuss."

  Devorah laughed. "It's okay, Mom. You're a Space Force Marine. No need to blame it on your fathers."

  "Well, never mind. Have you seen your sisters?"

  "They're with us. Mom, we have two survivors here, we need to get them to triage."

  "Okay. Leave Delaney and Yehudit at O'Hare, I'll pick them up."

  "Yes, ma'am." Devorah made a shooing motion at Don, who got the message and headed for the driver's seat. "I'll call you later. Bye, Mom."

  "Bye, Devorah. Be safe."

  "You too." Devorah ended the call. "Elise, get on the PA, we'll fly down the building and let everyone know triage is out at the O'Hare fire station. Don, fly that route, then when we get to the base of the building, break off and we'll head west to O'Hare." She looked at her sisters. "Mom will pick you up out there."

  "Sounds good," said Delaney, throwing her an "OK" sign.

  "Careful where you do that in Chicago," warned Devorah.

  "Yeah, I know. Been here. Done that. All the way back in 2017, too."

  "Someday," sighed Devorah, "I want to hear all about your missions."

  "Someday, I'd like them all to be unclassified so I can tell you all about them." Delaney grinned.

  Yehudit sighed, too. "It's times like this," she said, "I wish we could have been regular sisters, all together, only a couple of years apart."

  "Maybe we'll get to spend more time together in the future," replied Devorah.

  Delaney just smiled, grimly.

  "Now, tell me about Mars," said Devorah.

  "Lifting," called Don, and the ambulance took off and headed south, as Delaney began to tell Devorah about Phobos.

  Chapter 9

  The Socialite, Redux

  "Is this comfortable?" asked Elon, anxiously.

  "Elon, it is wonderful," Yael assured him. "At this point, a soft place to lay my weary head is really all I need."

  The little apartment was nicely-appointed, she thought – it even had a viewport looking out across the red Martian landscape. There was a comfortable bed, a little desk and chair, a small washroom including a recycled-water shower, a tiny clothes closet, and a mini-kitchenette, all in about 120 square feet. It also had an independent air supply, just in case, and the usual suite of electronic gadgetry.

  Much nicer than the typical cramped compartment laughingly called a "stateroom" on most liners.

  "Good," nodded the man, relieved. "If you need anything, just call the concierge
. There's a mess hall, or you can call to get something brought to you. And of course, feel free to use our communications network if you've brought a personal comm or holotab."

  "Thank you, Elon," she said, warmly. "You didn't have to do all this."

  He shook his head. "For your grandfather and your whole family, it goes without saying. Like I said before, he'd do the same for me and mine. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a million things to do and very little time to do them in." He smiled, and left the room, the door sliding shut behind him.

  It was a very nice room.

  She kicked off her shoes, opacified the aliglass port, then carefully removed her dress and laid it over the back of the chair. She then pulled her holotab out of her small "business" case, and flopped on the bed in her underwear. "Ahhhhh," she said, gratefully.

  Yael.

  It was a very quiet, very soft whisper in the back of her mind she nearly didn't catch, as she was paging through her book collection on the 'tab. "Huh?" She looked around. Nobody was in the room, which made sense, given there hadn't been anyone else there a moment ago.

  Yael. Can you hear me?

  This time, it was louder, and she was sure she heard her name.

  "Okay, this is as weird as it gets, but where are you? I can barely hear you, I think I heard you say my name. Try again."

  Oh, good. Girls, she can hear me. Yael, it's your mother. I'm on Earth with your sisters, except for Raven. Not to be cliché, but can you hear me now?

  "Right. Pull the other one. You're my mom and you're on Earth." Yael was starting to get angry. "There's no such thing as telepathy, so how are you talking to me from Earth? Whoever this is, I've had a really bad day, and this is a really, really bad joke."

  Yael. Did you hear Devorah when the Hancock Tower went over?

  "Um. Yeah. I did. I don't know how, but it was kind of like this, except fewer words, more, more, um, mind pictures?"

  Concepts, yes. Yael, this really is your mother. We're talking via something called "the Mesh", and basically what I'm doing is making the Mesh resonate in your inner ear. It's that thing I do . . . or, at least, it's related to that thing I do. Do you believe me now?

  "Talking in real time from Earth? Wow. The family really is going to be rich if we can do that. So yes, I guess I believe you, Mom, and I'm sorry I doubted at first. But I thought you and Dad were on al-Saḥra'."

  No, we came back because we all heard both you and Devorah cry out. And I think I've heard Raven, too, but very faintly if so, so I'm not sure. She's on a liner out toward Devlin's Star, and I hope she's all right. These incidents are all tied together, though, and we think they were aimed at us.

  "Why—" Yael tried to make sense of it, and failed. "Why would the incidents be related and aimed at us? I assume you mean you, me, and my sisters."

  It's a very long story and you're going to be read in as soon as we can get you back to Earth. But there's something you may be able to do right now to help the Mars colony.

  "What can I do?"

  We think you may have enough power in the Mesh to pull Phobos back together. If you don't, by yourself, we may have to rotate out there in the Tumtum and help. But we can't do it from here, none of us have fine control over that much distance. And right now we're doing something important and very delicate for – um – well, just accept for now that it's important, and we can't leave right away.

  Yael looked askance. "I don't have a clue what you're talking about."

  Sorry. The Mesh, Yael. The same thing I'm talking to you with. Do me a favor. Look at something, anything, that's solid. A chair, a desk, a window frame, anything like that.

  "Okay, I'm looking . . . at . . . a desk chair." She looked over toward the chair she'd hung her dress over.

  Now, try to look past the surface, but not farther than the other side of it.

  "Huh?"

  She could hear her mother sigh. You need to try to look inside the chair.

  Let me try, Mom. Yael, it's Delaney. How are you, sweetie?

  "I'm fine, Delaney! Are you okay? Oh, I see! Delaney! You're pregnant! Twins!"

  That's true, Yael, and you're seeing that through the Mesh, by the way. So, what you want to do is really concentrate hard on that chair. Think about what it's made of. Think about what that would look like. And then think about seeing just beyond the outer surface. This is extremely important, honey, so we have to see if you can see the Mesh itself, because if you can't, you won't be able to manipulate it.

  "Well, okay, so I'm looking at this upright on the chair, it's made of some kind of steel, I think, it's painted black, and I think I know what steel looks like on the inside when you break a piece of . . . it . . . off . . . Ohmigod!" Yael shrieked. "Delaney! What the hell am I seeing?"

  You tell me. Delaney sounded amused.

  "It's a grid! Like in a vidgame! A 3D grid . . . and I can see the metal and the paint and, wow, Elon ought to send this chair back, there's a big internal flaw in this upright . . . this is so cool!"

  That's the Mesh, honey child. So, you can see it. Rather strong sense of it, apparently. Excellent.

  "Now what?"

  Del, stand down. Yael, it's Mom. Look above you, in orbit. Where are you, by the way?

  "At SpaceX Mars. They have temporary employee quarters. Jack and I met Elon at a spacer bar and that's when all this happened, so Jack asked Elon to make sure I got to someplace safe. And here I am."

  Okay, good. So . . . Phobos is coming around in its orbit in about five minutes. Phobos is, was, will be again, basically just a rock shell around a pile of riprap. Scientists think it got hit really hard by something that nearly broke it to pieces, and then it fell back together, but since the gravity is so low, it never really set up properly and there were a lot of voids and suchlike. The moon is now in two pieces, basically, with all that riprap spreading out between them. Our job – your job – would be to pull all of that back together, carefully, so we don't lose the Phobos shipyard and all the ships being refitted there. The shipyard and its attached base are still sticking through one of the two halves of the shell.

  "Uh . . . what? How the hell do I do that?"

  Look up. Actually, Phobos doesn't have to be above you; you should be able to see it wherever it is in its orbit. And as far as how you do it, Ariela was obviously grinning, you simply think about what it ought to look like, put back together.

  "I don't know what it looked like before."

  Use your holotab, dear.

  "Oh!" Yael wrenched her eyes away from the gridwork that was her chair, and grabbed for the holotab, which had fallen on the mattress beside her. "Tab, I need a photo suite of Phobos, very recent, preferably a video with a slow spin put on."

  The holotab obliged by throwing a spinning Phobos up on its virtual holographic screen.

  "A little slower . . . hmm . . . that says one RPM, let's try half that. Perfect!" She watched the moon spin, noting the location of the docking facility and the unburied parts of the underlying base. "Okay, tab, give me a cross-section of Phobos, so I can see how the base went inside." Another screen popped up with that information.

  Yael, initial appearances notwithstanding, was not an airhead, not by any stretch of the imagination. She had enough general knowledge about a lot of different things to qualify for two or three degrees – at least one of them in engineering – and was, as a result, something of a polymath. After all, she was in her fifties, and she had lots of downtime to read and study anything she pleased . . . and her grandfather was John Wolff, albeit the one in her mother's home timeline, but no less an engineer than her Grumpaw, for all of that – and she'd grown up tinkering in her Grumpaw's "garage" just like her sisters had. Much of what she was doing now came completely naturally from her years of reading, asking questions, and trying things out in search of a real calling.

  While the existence of the Mesh and her ability to see it and manipulate it had surprised the hell out of her at first, her ability to grasp and understand new concep
ts quickly had set her right back on her feet, swinging.

  She looked up, then, confident she knew what Phobos should look like. She found the inner moon, in a very low orbit, lower than she thought it should be, and in two large and a bazillion little pieces.

  "I think," she said, slowly, "the best solution is to fit the two halves of the shell back together, and then fill it back up slowly with the riprap. But we need to raise the orbit, or tidal forces will likely rip it back apart. It's at something like eight thousand kilometers and its normal orbit averages nearly ninety-four hundred."

  It will hold together long enough for us to move it after the reassembly, came from her mother. We will have to be extremely careful when we do that, or it will break apart again.

  "It's amazing the shell even held together after whatever tore it in two, but it's about 100 meters thick, according to the Near-Space Encyclopaedia. So something must be sticky in there. Anyway, so all I have to do is imagine it back the way it was?"

  More or less, but you will have to exercise some control all the way back. This is the most dangerous part of the job, because the base still has people in it, and they can't readily evacuate. Minute, fine control will be required to bring the two halves together in a reasonable approximation of how they came apart. Remember the Doctor Doolittle movie? The one with Rex Harrison? When the island came back together?

  "Yes! I understand. The two halves of the tree must match up. And the rock must not fall into the volcano."

  Exactly. I knew I raised a smart girl.

  Yael blushed. She wasn't used to hearing high praise, lately.

  "I think I had better call Elon and warn him, so he can warn Aunt Mei."

  Yes. Do that, then let's get started. I understand it may take some few minutes to get him to understand what we're doing.

  Yael grabbed her comm and got through to the concierge. "Hello, I'm Yael Wolff Fox, just checked in down the hall in Apartment 3. Mr. Musk brought me in. I realize he's extremely busy at the moment, with the Phobos problem, but I must talk to him, urgently – it's about Phobos, so I hope he has a few moments free."

  She listened.

  "He said to forward my calls to him immediately? Oh, thank you so much. This is terribly important, and I know he'll want to know. Yes, I'll hold while you transfer me, thanks again."