by Ginger Booth
Sixteen months later, the couple played ball on Mars with Dot and Darren, Remi and Corky.
Sass nearly forgot that the VR colony mockups were her idea, so thoroughly had Clay embraced the project. Each of them had a favorite. Sass liked Ganymede best, reminding her of Pono with its views of lovely Jupiter, though it lacked Pono’s glorious ice rings. Remi agreed. Ganymede reminded him of his childhood on Sagamore.
Mahina urbs Dot and Darren preferred Luna Colony. The privileged classes there had a cerebral bent.
Clay and Corky favored Mars. Not because the colony was anything special. The landscape was orange, with no pretty planet above, and puny moons. The sky was often blotted out by storms, more frequent in VR than ever in life. Clay was proud of his roiling dust storms. Churning brown buffeted the geodesic dome above their heads.
No, what they loved about Mars was its penchant for hard-core sports, the more likely to draw blood the better. Today’s game was ga-ga, a form of dodge-ball played in a hexagonal pit. The players struck the whizzing hard rubber ball with their hands, trying to hit each other, often with bank shots off the walls. A single hit below the belt eliminated a player.
Sass leapt up a meter and half – Mars gravity was 0.4 g. She hit the ball with the side of her hand, and slammed it into Corky’s butt. “Score!” Everyone heckled the housekeeper as she flipped Sass the bird and bounded out to join Dot and Remi, already struck out of the running.
“You think you’re hot stuff, huh?” Darren dribbled basketball-fashion. He wore his Clark Kent glasses even in virtual. He claimed they were part of his self-image.
“She’s going down!” Clay vowed. He played in the nude today. Sass refused to acknowledge the misbehavior.
Just as the ball left Darren’s serve against the wall, the computer gave an articulated three-tone bleep. “Captain, we received a hail from the asteroid belt.”
The ball bounced a couple times, chest high, as the players stood stunned.
“On my way,” Sass replied. She navigated the exit menu and vanished to her galley. She pulled off the headset, snagging her hair.
Around her at the table, her team roused likewise. Corky collected the headsets to stow them. Sass waited until her butt was back in its chair.
“Computer, play message.”
A woman appeared on the screen, with smoothly tan oval face and regular features, race ambiguous. Her black hair pulled back into a severe bun. She wore a sleek rose-colored pressure suit, its style reminiscent of the grey Ganny Colony Corps uniforms. The Mandarin collar bore simple gold pips above a slanted zip front. She looked about 25, like everyone else.
The image quality was poor, static shooting throughout. The spacefarers were used to that from the signal-scattering rings of Pono.
For a moment the woman held still, staring into the camera with a pleasant expression not quite a smile. “Greetings, unknown vessel. This is Sanctuary Control. Please state your intentions.” She froze, her pose identical to the one she started with.
“End of message,” the computer noted.
6
Sass sat with mouth slightly open, staring at the woman on the big display. Then she exploded out of her seat and rushed to the galley head, to straighten her hair and adjust her shirt.
No, her T-shirt and overalls weren’t good enough for this, her first hail to the Sanctuarese. Sanctuarii? She should ask what they called themselves. She peeled out for her cabin to change and put on makeup. No, the talking head wore no makeup. Well, she wasn’t as pale as Sass, but maybe she could limit herself to lipstick –
“Stop.” Clay barred her way with an extended arm. “Talk first, then primp.”
Sass scowled at him. “You give me pointers on how to make a first impression? While you march around naked? Clothes, Mr. Rocha!”
“We need a strategy –”
“Clay, women can think while dressing. That’s why we take longer. We contemplate. We strategize.” Corky and Dot chortled at this claim. Sass shoved past Clay. He dogged her steps.
In their cabin, he finally deigned to put some clothes on. “Sass, take your time. No one expects us to be waiting at the comms. For all they know, we’re asleep. Calm down. Think it through. That’s all I ask.”
Sass freed her hair to brush it, then French-braided it. She even wove the tail up and pinned it to keep the hair off her neck. Navy types took that seriously, didn’t they? Her long-ago experience of the Gannies was no help – they shaved their skulls, men and women alike. But the commander in that video message wore a bun.
“Clay, what rank were her insignia?”
“Ah…” Clay finished fastening his pants, then reviewed the message still-life on his tablet. “That’s not a Ganny rank. And no name badge on her chest.”
“Maybe she’s a civilian.”
Sass rifled her wardrobe, and pulled out a rosy T-shirt. Its shade was a near match to the Sanctu. But faint stains had darkened in storage from suppers past.
Still holding a slinky russet sweater in his hand, Clay reached past her and selected a Mahina mushroom long-sleeved tee, high quality in a drape-y fabric. “That one. Women aren’t the only ones who think when getting dressed, you know.”
Clay was the more clothes-conscious of the couple. Her barb got to him. Score! She’d thawed the other four because she was about ready to slit his throat. All day she’d refused to rise to the bait over him going nude. “Why wear boring?”
“Pink asserts you’re a girl. A pale neutral asserts authority, and that your gender is irrelevant. More business-like. And it’s flattering on you. Don’t wear overalls.”
Sass yielded to his advice. Then she applied minimal makeup for a cool polish. She had dress-up coveralls emblazoned with the ship’s name and her own, and dithered about whether those would appear more uniform-like. But no. She was here to represent Mahina and the Aloha system, and the interests of humanity as a whole. Her Thrive overalls represented her business. He was right. She nodded assurance at herself.
“Computer,” Clay thought to ask, “did you send an acknowledgment of the hail?”
“The hail was acknowledged with the ship’s standard greeting.”
So much for Sass’s assurance. “Computer, play the ship’s standard greeting.”
Abel Greer appeared on their wall screen, a recording made a few weeks after Sass bought the ship. “Hi! I’m Abel Greer, co-owner of the skyship Thrive! Sass Collier and I are real sorry we missed your call. Please leave a message.”
Abel sure was good at those detail niceties of running a business.
“His kids are twelve now,” Sass said. Sassafras Acosta-Copeland, Cope and Ben’s daughter, would be eleven, and Cope’s baby Nico sixteen. She gulped, and resolved to re-record the message. While she was dressed up and vanilla-looking, today would be good.
She shoved her tablet into her jeans pocket and sat on the bed. Her pants wouldn’t show on the video. “Was there something you wanted to advise me privately, Clay? Aside from how to dress.”
“We chose not to hail them this far out. Remember? Maybe we should manufacture technical difficulties. Static.”
“Good idea, except that Abel already answered,” Sass pointed out. “I don’t like subterfuge, Clay. We need to be honest.”
“Yeah, you’re a poor liar.” He ignored her irritable scowl. “Then spin it out. She didn’t give you anything. Not even her name. Acknowledge the hail, and identify yourself. Play twenty questions. Please, Sass. Don’t begin by announcing your entire agenda, attaching the cargo manifest and details of Belker’s demise. Play getting-to-know-you. Talk less. Listen more. Don’t give up more information than you get.”
He was so annoying when he was right. He poked at her weak points, too. “Alright. Let’s record in front of the others. We’ll do several takes, get feedback, choose one, send it.”
Clay spread his hands. “That’s all I ask.”
Back in the galley, takes one through three went straight into the bit bucket. Meanwhile
Corky and Remi gave a white tornado treatment to the galley. They removed wayward dishes and napkins, and other slovenly bits that went unnoticed until company came calling. Nearly three years, after all.
Then Sass took a breather by re-recording Abel’s automated message. “Hello! This is Captain Sassafras Collier of the starship Thrive, home port Schuyler City, Mahina Colony, Aloha star system. Please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you soon!”
Remi thought she should add more sex appeal, but Corky hit him before Sass could reach. Aside from that, “Perfect!” was the general consensus.
Which was just as well, because a minute later Sanctuary Control called again, transmitting the exact same message as before. And they received a brand new automatic response.
Sass deflated. “Well, that was lame.”
“Perfect,” Clay reasserted.
Seven minutes later, almost exactly the round-trip speed of light, they received a new missive from the lady in rose. “Thank you for your response, Thrive. What brings you to Sanctuary?”
“Not big on smalltalk, one feels,” Sass mused. “Sanctuary Control, we are here to connect with the only surviving colony we know outside Aloha. May I ask, how many people live in Sanctuary now?”
Her jury of peers felt this was perhaps a little too forthcoming, but not dangerous. She sent it.
Sass was snacking on a peach by the time the reply reached them. “Thrive, please redirect to our facilities in the asteroid belt. Coordinates attached.” Like the Earth system between Mars and Jupiter, the next planetary orbit out from Sanctuary was occupied by smithereens.
Darren muttered, “There’s something off about her.”
“Best poker face I’ve ever seen,” Clay agreed.
“Barely human,” Corky hollered from the galley.
Like Sass, Dot was more intrigued by the message than the messenger. “Why would they abandon a planet to colonize the asteroid belt?”
Sass ran with that question, since she hardly knew Rosie well enough to get personal. “Sanctuary Control, we are confused. Our information placed Sanctuary Colony on the Goldilocks planet, on the shores of Great Alkali Lake, at 32.4 degrees North latitude. Is this no longer the case?”
The first settlement established the prime meridian, so that part went without saying. Mahina Actual, Sagamore Landing, and Denali Prime shared the same longitude, 0 degrees West.
They were clowning around with a can-can number when the next 7 minutes, 38 seconds completed like clockwork. Unlike Sass, the pink one’s replies seemed to require no time to think or confer.
And her response came out of left field. “Thrive, be advised that for the convenience of our trading partners, we prefer you visit our shipyards in the asteroid belt. All your needs can be met there.” The video froze at a placard providing the coordinates.
Sass pointed one of the ship cameras toward those coordinates. After a day or so she could study the recordings, but she didn’t expect to learn much from fuzzy visuals. Remi added the location to their navigation database.
Of more interest were the implications. Trading partners? Our shipyards? Her heart thudded. Was that even possible? Sanctuary not only thrived, but engaged in interstellar commerce with other human systems? That alone of the human diaspora, the Aloha colonies were backward?
That would be embarrassing. If she believed it. But she really didn’t.
Meanwhile Darren checked the time lag. Sanctuary Control’s responses came like clockwork. The messages were of unequal length, yet took exactly the same time to reply. Which meant they took zero time to compose. But these were data bursts, arriving as complete videos. His eyebrows rose. “Sass, you’re talking to a computer.”
“I never see an avatar so good,” Remi remarked, peering over Darren’s shoulder at the data. The pair of engineers got along fairly well these days. Sass used that excuse to drag them out of cold sleep together the first time, only a couple months after warp, and she stood by it. They seemed to split the ship’s systems in half, neither touching the other boy’s toys without invitation. Fine by her.
“Computer, is the message computer-generated?” Remi inquired.
“Probability over 60%,” the computer allowed. “Samples are insufficient to assign more than one digit of accuracy.”
Remi had a flair for talking to AI’s. The captain suspected this had much to do with the lack of female companionship on Hell’s Bells. “Computer, what question might determine whether this is a computer avatar?”
The computer replied primly, “You could ask her. Or ask to speak to a human.”
Sass thoughtfully nodded her thanks for the assist.
But the content of the message still bugged her more. “Trade? Computer, have we seen evidence of another spaceship in this system? Drive trails? Anything?”
“We detect drive trails consistent with mining and manufacturing in the asteroid belt.”
Sass read off the coordinates still frozen on the display. “Does that location show drive trails?”
“Yes.”
Remi took over. “Do any drive trails visit the planet? Or maybe someone enters the system to visit the location in the asteroid belt?”
“No other recent drive trails are detected.”
“Recent,” Remi pounced. “Computer, describe older drive trails, most recent first.”
“Six months ago, a ship visited the planet from the asteroid belt. Twenty-five months ago –”
Remi eventually extracted the facts. In the past 9 years, round-trips from the asteroid belt to the planet colony recurred every 19 months, when the two locations made their closest approach. A ship may have arrived from out-system 9 years ago. The computer was unable to discern whether that trail led to the belt or the planet. Drive trails older than a decade would be too attenuated to detect.
“OK, gang,” Sass redirected. “Do we ask to speak to a human next? Or tell them we need to visit the human colony? Though we’d be happy to visit their gift shop on the way out.”
“Both,” was the consensus.
Clay quibbled, “I wouldn’t phrase it that way.”
The next reply starred a man of similar age, wearing the same cut of bodysuit in a color matching Sass’s shirt. His collar bore tiny matching stars instead of pips. Tidy iron-gray hair failed to match his baby-smooth complexion, unlined and stubble-free.
“Hello, and welcome to Sanctuary. We prefer all guests visit our asteroid facility first.” He almost smiled, like the first avatar. However, instead of a blank wall, his background included a window onto a desolate landscape, including a lake rimed with something white, and presumably alkaline.
“It’s another avatar,” Darren advised. “No time lag to bring a human being into the conversation, or to record.”
“And the face is fake,” Dot added wryly.
“Computer,” Remi inquired, “was this message computer-generated?”
“Probability 100%.”
“Why so certain?”
“Great Alkali Lake is currently below the terminator.” Night-time at Sanctuary Colony, Sass readily translated. “Blink pattern and speech cadence identical to the first avatar. Voice lowered one octave.”
Sass didn’t ask for opinions this time. She simply began recording. “Sanctuary Control, I need to speak to a human being.” Specific requests brought better results. “I prefer a medical nanite specialist, preferably of Ganymede descent. A Colony Corps veteran of the settlement ship Vitality would be ideal. Thrive out.”
That time, 7 minutes, 38 seconds elapsed without response. Indeed Sass eventually went to bed without receiving an answer.
The answering machine AI never answered her question. Were there any people on Sanctuary?
7
Sass wasn’t surprised after breakfast when Dot, Corky, and Remi opted out of continuing a conversation with 7 minute lags. They could catch the recap at lunch. She missed Remi’s flair for coaxing intelligence out of Thrive’s computer, but Darren and Clay were probably her
best advisors for this.
No message ever arrived in response to her request to speak to a medical nanite specialist from Ganymede. “Sanctuary Control, this is Thrive. We would love to speak to the authorities on Sanctuary. Any human would do.”
Rosie was back. “Thrive, be advised that our asteroid facility is where we engage with visitors. There we extract and refine many resources of interest to space-faring cultures, and build spaceships.”
She said that already. Sass’s next gambit was to engage the AI’s agenda. With luck, that would collapse some menu tree and require a human salesman to intervene.
“Sanctuary Control, we’ve seen the ship Nanomage sent to the Aloha system from Sanctuary. Is this the sort of courier ship that you build in the asteroid belt? Do you offer other models as well?”
She bit her tongue on the temptation to ask exactly what form of payment this shipyard expected. Her credit line at the Bank of Mahina, perhaps? Sass was happy to give them a copy of every database she possessed. But she’d do the same whether the locals gave her a sandwich in return, or star drive fuel and a new warp drive. Other than that, Thrive could offer fruit, truck garden vegetables, and a few technology consultants. None of which could touch the price of spaceship, surely?
“Thrive, our shipyards offer the Nanomage-type courier vessel, plus the JO-3 model asteroid miner, and several smaller utility vessels. Nothing larger than your ship.”
Thrive was a JO-3 built in Pono orbit instead of Jupiter, thus labeled a PO-3. Sass flirted briefly with a vision of replacing her aging bolt bucket with a fresh shiny one. This was about as tempting as breaking in a new AI. These skyships were death traps until their hapless crews ironed out the kinks. The immense refugee ship Vitality featured a polished Colony Corps crew section up front. The rest was a nightmare do-it-yourself project left for the refugees to complete. After three years, one deck never did get the latrines working.
But let’s pretend.
“Sanctuary Control, do you offer spare warp drives? And third generation star drive fuel?”