by Ginger Booth
Clay pressed, “Why do we still have full gravity? Computer, prioritize life support over the grav plating.”
“Unable to comply,” the computer replied primly.
Sass already knew that one – the grav capacitors couldn’t feed any other system in the ship. With her brain moving like congealed engine grease on a cold dark Mahina Monday, she puzzled out how to express this.
Mercifully, Dot interrupted. “Clay, help me get Darren to med-bay.”
“Stay here and rest, Sass.” Her partner dumped her flat on the cold deck again.
She gazed at her crew arrayed along the catwalk above, gawking down at her, not a one of them jumping to help. Her original first mate Axel would have hollered at them for being useless clods. Though Clay had this under control. He probably didn’t want them in the hold until he was sure the electrocution segment of today’s show was over.
Was it? Sass had an assistant engineer upstairs. But she judged it safer to wait for Darren’s brain to come back online.
She closed her eyes to let her nanites perform their magic.
The following afternoon in her cramped office, Sass finally found time for what she intended to do immediately upon entering the Sanctuary system – assess the place and hail the locals. She was tempted to record the greeting first and send it off, since the round trip lag time would take over an hour.
But ex-cops remained paranoid forever. And if her own instincts for self-preservation didn’t suffice, Clay served as a reliable bucket of ice water. “We’re not calling anyone until we check for defenses.”
Spoilsport. “Fine.” Sass brought up the external camera feeds which observed the system ecliptic, and laid them on her desk.
The strange physics of this warp drive decreed that one exited a system ‘above’ or ‘north’ of the planetary ecliptic, and arrived from ‘below,’ carrying the same velocity inward to the new star system as outward before the warp jump. Location and direction were pre-programmed into the jump.
The warp drive and news of Sanctuary’s existence came to them courtesy of the abandoned courier starship Nanomage, found on Denali. Its database provided the details to program their jump, to 18 months travel below where the colonized Sanctuary planet would be by the time they reached it. That was 2.12 local orbits of the sun from now, so the planet should be about 1/8th of its orbit behind them. Less than half of its disk was visible.
Sass zoomed in on the expected neighborhood and ordered the computer to find Sanctuary. Orbital mechanics being predictable, the computer took less than a minute to identify their prey and zoom in the desktop view, at truly lousy resolution. Clay and Darren joined her in leaning over the image to scrutinize it.
This scrap of real estate appeared far from gorgeous. The colors reminded Sass of a yellow-gray pile carpet stippled by mixed yarns. Lighter bands hinted at a thin cloud cover. Mostly ugly desert, but with more water than Mahina, and no biosphere.
“What latitude is the colony?” Sass inquired.
Clay opened a window on his end of the table to query the database. “The colony is 32 degrees North. Axial tilt 11 degrees.” The first mate was a wizard with data. Visualizing celestial geometry, not so much.
Darren Markley suffered no such limitations. “Should be visible, barely, a few hours of the day.”
“Nice,” Sass acknowledged. “How big is this sea?” The planet offered a single brackish sea for water, and the Colony Corps settled by its shores.
Clay retrieved a schematic of the planet, north pole up, to display next to the real article as viewed from its south pole. “Similar to Lake Superior, 500 by 250 kilometers, max 350 meters deep.”
Darren winced. “That’ll be hard to see.”
Sass frowned. “What is our…pixel size?”
“That’s not the issue,” Darren explained. “Computer, draw the 32 North parallel on the planet.” A green arc appeared to trace the top of the fuzzy carpet ball. “And draw a 500 by 250 kilometer rectangle on that line.”
The edges of the box curved to match the latitude arc, marking more of a crescent than a rectangle. At this zoom level, it was a couple centimeters across – visible. But the resolution was terrible at the top of the half-disk, colors simply blurred to light grey instead of the mottling visible to the south.
“Explain?” Sass invited.
Darren cast his eyes around the office and wriggled his fingers. He found the hard copy reboot manual for the computer system. He opened this to a page of text, and held it up, edge-on to Sass’s eyes. “Try reading it at this angle.”
“Oh.” Sass considered. “Would a better camera help?”
“Better optics,” Darren considered. “Help, yes. Let you see anything?” He demonstrated his edge-on text again to captain and first mate. “No. It would give us a better view of the southern hemisphere.”
“Any other ideas? Or do we give up until we’re closer?”
Clay mused, “Do we want to talk to them so far ahead of time? What’s the decision point?”
Sass outlined, “Three possibilities. They welcome us with open arms. Or they’re hostile. Or the colony collapsed, no one answers. But regardless, we still visit that planet. We want to look around.”
“I’m not sure that makes sense if they’re hostile,” Clay argued.
“We need fuel,” Darren pointed out. “Water too. That’s a big sea, and a small community. Unless they’ve grown faster than a human colony ought to.”
“They started with 8,000,” Sass reasoned, “fifty years ago. I think the largest population possible is 50,000.”
“But more likely 4,000, based on experience in Aloha,” Clay suggested. “They have better real estate. But not by much.”
Sass quit musing, and sat up in decision. “I’ll tell them we’re coming. It’s the cordial thing to do.”
“Tell them what, exactly?” Clay countered.
“Why we’re here, of course. We bring greetings from the Aloha system. News of Belker and his ship the Nanomage. We hope to reconnect to a greater human community. Improve our ability to thrive in artificial environments. Trade in technological advances for the betterment of Sanctuary and Aloha.”
“And to time travel,” Darren teased her. “Skip ahead and make sure Mahina stays on track.”
Sass pursed her lips repressively.
Clay wasn’t playing. “Veto. Advance notice gives them time to get nervous and rig defenses. With 18 months, they could do some real damage when we arrive. Call them two months out, max.”
Sass looked to Darren, who replied slowly. “Make it a week instead of a couple months. Defenses are fine. But I’d rather not give them time to build offense. People are funny.”
“They are that.” And not in a good way, Sass allowed. This decision was up to her as captain, but they had a point. “So damn, we’re here, and headed straight for them. But we know nothing, and go back to sleep.”
Darren held up the reboot manual again and squinted an eye at her. “We can’t talk to them yet anyway.”
“Radio waves have the same problem?”
“Radio is a non-starter. Signal strength falls off as the square of distance. But even a laser tight-beam would scatter as wide as Pono’s rings at this distance.”
“Virtue of necessity, then,” Sass concluded. “Alright. We party tonight and head back to sleep. Maybe do some chores first. I sure hope we didn’t break the warp drive.”
Markley scratched his nose. “About that. The warp no longer passes its self-test. But not to worry. Still four years before we need to warp again. We’ll figure something out.”
Sass gazed at him in horror as this bombshell sunk in. “When did you test this?”
“As soon as we got the power conduits out of range. I didn’t want to say anything in public. Cause panic among the crew.”
“May I panic?” Clay quipped.
“Feel free,” Darren invited. “But we’re headed for the right place. Sanctuary is where the warp drive came from. Maybe they
have expertise. Or a spare.”
They’d better. Otherwise Thrive was stranded in this system. With the warp drive, the trip home was a mere 12 objective years from here, or 4 years subjective with a one year stopover.
Without warp, Thrive could never reach home.
Sass dropped her forehead onto her fingertips to massage the headache forming behind her brow. “Let’s keep this to ourselves for now.”
3
“And that’s where we stand.” Sass beamed a professional smile at her assembled crew over dinner that evening. She omitted the fact their warp drive no longer showed signs of life, instead dwelling on the impossibility of learning about their destination at this juncture. Stay tuned!
“Everyone’s free to catch another sixteen months or so of beauty rest. Questions?” Sass sat back and sipped her wine. She wasn’t sure what Darren might have told Dot. So she had three pairs of eyes to avoid. Which probably made her look shifty.
She dug into her supper.
The meal was excellent. Thrive’s fruit and vegetables, and pure water, tasted better than any she’d ever bought on Mahina. During the Denali jaunt, every crop regimen was honed to flavorful perfection. But for this special milestone, the housekeeper Corky Graham pulled out all the stops, roasting a couple frozen chickens with all the fixings. She made fresh bread from real wheat flour instead of recycled soy protein.
“Why can’t we see the planet better?” Corky boomed. Sass once asked their medic Dot if she was hard of hearing. But no, she was just loud.
“Darren?” Sass invited.
Markley busily fussed at making himself replacement eyeglasses at the supper table. The electronics of his previous pair were fried by their electrocution. He had flawless vision – their health nanites made sure of that. The glasses provided eye protection and a convenient heads-up reference display while he worked on machinery.
“It’s an ill-conditioned problem. Mathematically.” Darren followed up with a forkful of salad.
Sass swallowed, and translated. “The planet’s tilted the wrong way.”
“So you build a better telescope?” the housekeeper demanded.
“It’s the angle,” Sass attempted.
Clay rose and pointed out the colony on the planet’s image, currently gracing the wall display. “No matter what we do, it’s fuzzy because we’re looking at it sideways.”
“May I help fine-tune?” Remi Roy offered in a strong French accent. Third officer and second engineer, Remi was from Sagamore, their sole non-Mahinan.
“No, thanks.” Darren didn’t bother to raise his eyes from his meticulous craft project.
“Or I could skip cryo and keep the lovely Sass company,” Remi offered with smarmy smile and a wink.
Sass winked both eyes. “Dot has come light years – literally – on the cold sleep nanites.”
“Oh, yes! Gross tissue damage reduced by half from the drugs we used on you when we left Mahina. Zero fatalities. Prior cryo regimes carried a ten to twenty percent mortality rate. Sperm motility is still quite low upon resuscitation, along with erectile dysfunction, and drippy sinuses.”
“Perhaps my English is not…” Remi mused. “Did you say –?”
“Dot’s cryo nanites have side effects,” Sass translated, “on organs that secrete liquids. Eyes, nose, et cetera.”
“Yes, that,” Dot agreed.
Remi stared at the nurse uneasily. Sass couldn’t blame him. She too found the eager glow in Dot’s eye disconcerting.
Sass breezed on, “Who else wants to stay awake with me?”
For this momentous midpoint of their journey to Sanctuary, the celebration was lackluster. Bored as she felt while they were in cryo, Sass almost felt lonelier with the crew awake.
The captain glanced up from her desk at Remi Roy’s knock on her door, and waved him to a seat. So far the third officer had spent most of his time in cryo. Though first he had to build the cold sleep facilities.
Remi was 41, but looked closer to 60 when he joined Thrive and gained a full set of Yang-Yang nanites. He served half his life aboard the asteroid mining platforms of Hell’s Bells. His rejuvenation progress arrested by cryo, his cheeks still sagged around lines bracketing his mouth, and beneath his broad jawline. His graying hair showed rich brown roots.
“Mon capitan! Please! You have something for me?” He winked with a crooked slimy smile.
Sass pursed her lips repressively.
Remi frowned. “Why this? Every time I smile at you, I feel you wish to lock me in the fridge.”
“Let’s get back to that,” Sass deflected. “I’d like you to double-check my engine burn calculations. For course corrections and deceleration into Sanctuary.” She swiped the desk display clear, then brought up the navigation programs, blank of inputs. “From scratch.”
“From…?”
“Start over. I want to see how you calculate it. Then we’ll compare yours and mine.”
“Ah!” He stretched his neck, flipped the desk display right-side-up relative to him, and leaned on his forearms to glower at the problem. “Our original plan? Or do I calculate that again, too? Is this a test?”
“No, sorry.” She opened the original flight plan. “Ask for anything you want, when you want it. But I don’t want to prejudice you.”
Mouth slightly parted and one eyebrow cocked, Remi’s reaction to this was clearly, Screw you, too. “I need our current position, bearing, and deviation from the plan. But I retrieve them myself.”
He worked a full two minutes before venting. “You know, Sass, I am a capable engineer. Experienced in space, in this hull. Thrive is not my first PO-3!”
“I know you are. I appreciate your skills.”
“No, you do not. I smile at you, and you scowl, and put me on ice. No! Say nothing! I am calculating now! Bitch.”
He completed a problem sketch. He itemized the task, then filled the first screen full of inputs into the navigation problem.
Then he just had to unload again. “What is your problem with me? Why can I not be useful? Of course Darren becomes more experienced. Because I spend my days as a corpsicle while he learns remedial space handling, yes? No! We cannot talk now! I have calculations to perform!”
Sass allowed, “We should talk…”
“So you can cut me down again? I think not.”
Sass watched as he worked, finally engaged in his navigation. She was impressed. He remembered to compensate for the gravitational effects of sun and extraneous planets much sooner than she had.
And when he arrived at the answer sheet of burns, he surprised her by continuing on without pause. “What are you doing now?” she asked.
“Optimization. I run the first-pass solution through a variation generator. Equivalent ballistics. Then I ask the computer to calculate time and fuel cost for each.” He stabbed the desk a few times with his finger. “Constraints, max fuel expenditure, max speed. Priority time over fuel.” With a final flourish tap, he sat back in his chair. “She thinks about this.”
“She?”
“The computer, she speaks with a woman’s voice.” He said this so sadly that Sass was taken aback. “Now we talk. Why do you hate me?”
Because every conversation goes weird on me. “Remi, does it bother you that the ship sounds female?” Sass feared he didn’t like women.
“It is sad on Hell’s Bells, of course. We have no women. A few came just before I leave for your ship. But since I leave Sagamore, only the computer’s voice.”
Sass winced both eyes shut. “You have no experience with women!”
“I am no virgin! I was 19 when I leave home!”
Sagamore exiled him for subversion. Sass didn’t hold this against him. Any Saggy worth knowing objected to the slavers who ruled the other moon of Pono. Sass spent 20 years under farm arrest herself for the Mahina version of crimes against the urb overlords. “Did you leave a girlfriend behind on Sagamore?”
“Not really. She turned me in.”
Sass nodded
. “Wink at me like you did when you came in.” He performed as ordered. “Yeah, that expression. Never do that to a woman again. It’s…” Repulsive? Reptilian? Makes him look like a frog? “Mahina body language is different. You smile like that to a prostitute. Not a woman you respect.”
His eyebrows flew high. “Oh.” He leaned forward to touch her hand. “Anything else?”
She rapped his hand sharply. “That’s an intimate touch. For a lover, not your boss.”
He sat back aghast. “All this time, you don’t tell me this? The other girls don’t tell me this?”
“There are no ‘girls’ on this ship, Remi. The women are older than you.”
“Hah! You don’t look older!”
“I’m 104 subjective. I was born on Earth in 2090.”
This dramatic statement lost its impact to the need to translate it into Sagamore years. Bottom line, Sass was born 120 years ago on a now-legendary planet. But 16 of those years vanished instantaneously in two warp jumps.
“Huh. Oh!” The computer interrupted with a slew of solutions. Remi instructed the desk to plot them on time versus fuel axes. He zoomed in to study a few in detail, then sighed. He saved his work, then made a copy to start over. “Mistake. We don’t correct our current location first, this is foolish.”
Sass leaned forward. “Oh… You’re right. I made the same mistake.”
He nodded, set up his problem again, then restarted his optimization sequence. Apparently the ship AI learned some tricks along the way, because the second batch completed in seconds.
Sass rounded the table to study the solutions by his side. “Damn, you’re good.”
“I try,” he returned with a boyish smile. “This one has six burns per day sometimes. She saves 17 days from the original plan.”
“I love it. Your solution is way better than mine.”
“We save mine, then you recalculate to double-check.” He suited action to words and cleared the desk for her to try again.
“Right.” Sass started over based on his refinements. Their solutions didn’t diverge by much, but his optimization saved 12 days over hers – a mere 523 days on top of the 540 traveled so far.