by Ginger Booth
“Fine, grab a seat and headsets. First, before we go into VR, I want to remind you of the Earth system.” He said this optimistically. The crew needed more than reminding.
The moon colonies, Luna in particular, were established before 2030, partly as a staging platform for the Mars colonies. Mahina moon natives themselves, the crew understood the advantages of escaping Earth’s gravity well.
After the initial explorers, Mars settlement soon followed, while Earth went downhill fast.
Clay tried to explain the international nature of these colonies. The grand total population of two moons and all the orbitals of Pono came to less than half a million. They were divided into distinct sub-populations – Mahina urb, settler, star-siders, plus the orbital, and Remi’s native Sagamore overlords, paddy slaves, and the exiled miners in the rings. The crew even spoke three languages.
But for all that, the founders of Pono’s rings were drawn from Ontario, Quebec, New York, and New England – a small area of Earth. The wildly exotic Denali boarded the shuttles in Seattle and Vancouver. Only two Earth nations seeded the entirety of the Aloha system.
Granted, they were ethnically rich nations. Clay attempted to explain how his warm complexion denoted the Native American contribution to his genetics. He sketched the other races and their continents of origin on Earth. The crew stared at each other a bit, and puzzled over sample faces Clay placed on the big screen. Clay himself couldn’t identify the Denali race. Their geneticists exercised creativity in crafting heat-tolerant humans. To Clay’s eye, Denali ended up looking Latino or Polynesian.
To the crew, people simply came in assorted colors. The Pono-born crew didn’t comprehend the race concept. Clay gave up.
“These Earth regions were also culturally distinctive. Imagine a Saggy paddy speaking to a Mahina professor of terraforming. They think differently.” This made more sense to the crew.
“And then there was Ganymede. Luna and Mars were settled by multinational consortia. In theory they were free societies funded by assorted governments. In truth they were dominated by corporations – for-profit businesses. Huge ones – ten times as many employees as all the people in Aloha combined, and more wealth than half the nations on Earth.”
Darren boggled. “A company? Millions of employees? How big was a country then?”
“The largest countries had over a billion people. Those had a big stake in Mars and Luna. Anyway, a group of scientists wanted to escape the corporate influence. Ganymede was established to escape corporate greed, and focus on the science of people living off Earth. Though private donors funded them. They developed the star drive, warp, gravity generators, the enabling technologies we rely on every day. And they designed this ship.”
“Wasn’t it awkward to live so far from Earth?” Corky asked.
“By then, 2050 when Ganymede was in full swing, being out of reach from Earth was Ganymede’s biggest draw. Mars and Luna were forced to produce food and ship it to the mother planet –”
Remi’s face registered horror. “Say what?”
Clay nodded. “Impossible. Yet their corporate owners demanded they save the asses of billions back on Earth. While anyone with talent clamored to be recruited up to the space colonies, certain they’d die if they stayed home. Earth suffered a massive brain drain to the colonies. And as you noticed right off, Remi, the colonies could not feed Earth’s billions. The colonies grew fast, and claimed the best and brightest. But the goal was physically impossible.
“So how did the colonies differ? Luna had the most people, then Mars, then Ganymede. And they came from different nations on Earth. Luna was dominated by the Chinese and Indians.” Clay pointed on his globe of Earth. “Mars by Americans and Russians. And Ganymede was a European bastion. Though North Americans like us were represented in all three colonies. But some other huge swaths of Earth, not at all. For the most part, they were left behind.
“Anyway, the key point – the Colony Corps developed the Diaspora scheme as an alternative to feeding Earth from space. To some extent, this was a giant boondoggle. There was no chance whatsoever for the billions on Earth to find a new home in the stars. They would die on Earth. And by the time Ganymede discovered the warp drive, that was clear. Wars over dwindling resources accelerated them into their graves.
“That’s the world Sass and I were born into, me in 2086, Sass in 2090.
“Enough background information. Let’s enter VR and see Earth’s first colonies.”
“Clay?” Darren interrupted. “Do we have a VR of Earth?”
Clay’s brow furrowed. “Most VR environments are Earth-inspired.”
Darren shook his head. “No, I meant what it was like at the end.”
The whole crew sat up and took notice. They were curious.
“I don’t have a VR. I can find pictures later. Remind me.” They looked disappointed. So Clay brought out his last images, easy enough to find. “I took these my final few days on Earth. This is the refugee camp Sass policed. She didn’t live here. Cops never entered the tent cities alone. They’d be killed.”
He showed them picture after picture of patched tents along deep runnels of mud. The fabric was stained, often blue-green. The locals hunched in ratty rain parkas against the interminable cold deluge, anonymous under their hoods, their faces rendered insect-like by goggles and breathing masks. Rats fed on corpses.
He’d strolled to the edge of the camp, where muddy misery fell downslope into the forest. It was late spring, yet the branches were barren. No fresh yellow-green leaves unfurled. The evergreens looked nibbled to death, their boughs half rust-colored, ghostly in the mist.
“Any pictures of you and Sass?” Corky asked.
“No. We met at the shuttle to Vitality.”
Sass herself wandered in, having heard her name earlier where she worked in the hold. She took one look at the screen and her face shut, her arms folded to hug herself. “Number one, I thought you were introducing the Gannies today.”
“They asked. I have some pictures of your town –”
“Ganymede,” Sass gritted out. “Mars. Luna.” She turned and stalked away. Sass loved pictures of Earth, from before the end. Clay felt the same way.
“Later perhaps.” He switched the big screen back to his Earth globe and star system schematic. “First up, Luna. Don headsets and meet me there.”
The crew had no trouble pinging into existence at the arrival gates of Luna colony. They naturally drifted to the ‘window’, a camera-fed display from the surface. The old sector of Luna sheltered underground from radiation. The space elevator stretched upward, artistically reaching the terminator a few hundred meters up. The brilliant sunlit grey and hard-edged shadows of night crossed the visible landscape. The horizon felt shockingly close, but that was an illusion born of harsh lighting and surrounding crater walls. Earth’s Moon was no smaller than Mahina or Sagamore.
Sass didn’t bother animating the non-player characters in this world. But she sprinkled frozen avatars around, drawn from period photos. Most new immigrants here at the entry vestibule looked Earth-normal. They dressed little better than the mud rats in the refugee camp, though at least they’d shed their parkas, weapons, and breath masks. The still figures coalesced around a local orientation officer, to learn emergency procedures. This man, his cheeks and body wasted, wore a clingy navy blue Colony Corps bodysuit which accentuated his ribs and bony hips as he held a breath mask in the air for display.
“Pressure leaks were common on Luna,” Clay noted. “The gravity technology came late, so half the locals suffer from irreversible wasting.”
“But he isn’t a stretch,” Corky observed.
Clay explained, “Children didn’t leave Earth. Few were ever born in the Sol colonies. And not here. That would have been Mars and Ganymede. Let’s move on.”
But Corky stopped at one of the avatars. “Half his face looks plastic. Why the mask?”
Clay sighed. “Yeast leprosy. A microbial fungus, common in the tent cit
ies. It ate away the flesh. He was lucky to survive. But tent rats couldn’t afford the medical care to fix the disfigurements.”
They continued through a tunnel, which opened out into an open low-ceiling bazaar. This offered a smattering of tables and stools, but no goods for sale. “Most products were digital-only. You could place orders here. But people didn’t own much stuff. Similar to Denali.”
“So why visit the bazaar?” Remi asked, gazing around the utilitarian space.
“I don’t know that they did,” Clay responded. “I never visited the colonies, remember. But housing was cramped. My guess is like Mahina Orbital, people wandered through every open space for exercise. They held meetings here.”
Clay led them through corridor after corridor, occasionally pushing into a utilitarian lab, a cramped one-room apartment with bunk beds, or a luxury apartment. The farther they got from the space elevator, the more upscale the spaces became, with ethereal abstract murals on the walls, usually grey-scale with one or two focal blobs of crayon color. Luxury included space, but rarely much in the way of furnishings. The prestigious rooms bore sweeping arches of ceiling and bits of wall turned into statuary, with low cushioned benches in curving shapes.
“And the athletic complex,” Clay introduced, entering double doors to a gymnasium rich in resistance equipment and banks of stationary cycles, stair-steppers, and jogging machines, each with its own entertainment screen. “Everyone was supposed to be in here an hour a day. But there aren’t enough stations for that.”
They ducked their heads into the locker rooms. Loonies never showered, merely wiped off. Next Clay showed them a tack room, where residents suited up for work on the surface.
“We built these sims from old schematics,” he apologized. “Vitality left a dozen years later. In the meantime, Luna colony grew fourfold. Maybe a few thousand more rich corporate mogul types, plus a hundred thousand workers to build Luna’s share of the colony ships. They worked in orbit, 12 hour shifts, 12 days on, 2 days off down here on the surface. If they didn’t like the working conditions, they were fired. The death toll was horrific. They were promised berths to leave for the colonies. All the rich got settler slots. For the builders, only lottery winners. I don’t know how many won. But the best became Colony Corps crew.”
“Ten colony ships?” Darren confirmed. “How many were Luna’s?”
“Three,” Clay replied. “Four were built by Mars, and another three by Ganymede. They collaborated on those out in the asteroid belt. Luna had the largest shipbuilding operation by far, but they built the shuttles for lifting refugees off Earth.
“That’s enough for one session. Let’s log out back to the future.”
“Poor sods,” Corky murmured before she winked out.
Clay exited VR last, after taking one more look around the empty tack room. Perspective was his goal, but he wasn’t sure he’d conveyed much. These Loonies weren’t pitiful to him. They were the heroes who saved humanity by launching them into the stars. Maybe he should skip the Mars and Ganymede virtual tours. The engineers understood, and that was enough.
We owe them. Ever since Clay learned that the Colony Corps retreated here, he had to come and make sure they were OK. Because 8,000 settlers wasn’t enough.
10
A week out from the planet, Sass strolled from the bridge to snag a cup of coffee in the galley. She glanced down into the hold and halted, arrested by the view.
Scraps of red dangled over every piece of equipment. The whole crew – the ones who bunked in the crew quarters at the rear – mingled below. The housekeeper Corky presided from the half-landing on the staircase, as though in a guest box at an industrial opera.
“Corky! Why red rags?” she called across. Sass decided coffee wasn’t urgent, and trailed fingers along the catwalk railing as she headed aft to speak more comfortably.
Of course Corky didn’t lower her volume. “Making crew uniforms, cap! So we look all spiffy when we reach Sanctuary. Not long now!”
“That’s…industrious.” Sass would have preferred the woman ask before designing uniforms. Corky had a flair for inventing make-work to while away the weeks, though. Sass could only approve. A busy crew was a happy crew.
“But the ship’s coveralls are royal blue.” Since the only conceivable point was wasting time, the captain felt no guilt about making them start over.
“Yes, sar!” Corky bellowed, with her square-jawed grin. “We thought the bright red would go right well with the royal blue.”
Sass folded her arms on the railing, now standing nearly on top of the housekeeper down one of the two flights of stairs. “I don’t look good in red. Not a big believer in uniforms anyway.” She graduated from her police uniform into plainclothes at age 25, a point of pride at the time, having donned an army uniform at 14. Company coveralls weren’t the same thing. They protected personal clothes from work damage. “We’re civilians.”
“Yes, sar! We thought of that, too! Officers like us, we won’t wear the red, no. It’s just for the crew, you see.”
Sass wouldn’t exactly call the housekeeper an officer. Perhaps a noncom. Her pocket comm alarm beeped for the next set of engine burns, but she set it to snooze.
“Builds team spirit!” Corky enthused. “Belonging! And awareness of the chain of command. We took a vote. Most of them look good in red! We’re not so pale as you are. You’ll see, it’ll do wonders for EVA ball games!”
Sass’s brow furrowed. “Us versus them?” Normally they picked teams one at a time for their zero-g play in the hold. Though that left the last-chosen feeling unwanted. Sass and Clay led opposing teams. “That leaves the sides unbalanced.” She and Clay could beat a half dozen of the others.
“You’ll see, cap!” Corky raised her voice even louder. “Alright, you gold-brickers! Let’s start assembling!”
Clay sauntered out of the galley to join Sass. “Red shirts. Think I should tell them?”
“Tell them what?”
“You don’t remember that? Red shirts on an away mission.”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” Sass assured him. “Coffee?”
He shared the joke during their break. No, they wouldn’t tell anyone.
She and Remi ended up twelve minutes late for their next set of engine burns, but it didn’t greatly matter. They didn’t even lose time on arrival. Working side by side, they simply adjusted the next burn to compensate.
Shiva had been hard-pressed to project Thrive’s trajectory. Her original calculations, based on a straightforward smooth deceleration, were wildly off what the Mahina ship chose to do.
Not that it greatly mattered to Thrive. Shiva reluctantly acknowledged that their strange pattern of burns cleverly incorporated a deceleration assist from assorted gravity wells. It took her several minutes – and that was an eternity for an AI of her capacity – but she figured out what they were doing.
And she sent Narcissus updated instructions to compensate. The JO-3’s new flight plan exceeded the maximum safe velocity, but all these engineering limits had error tolerances built in. She assumed up to 10% was safe enough. Unfortunately this was only an assumption, because a search of her databases failed to turn up details on the subject.
But Thrive’s latest burns were mystifying. And they required her to lay on further acceleration just to keep Thrive within extreme range of Narcissus’ guns. At this rate, she’d get only a single shot. Narcissus would zip by so fast Thrive would never notice if it didn’t fire on them.
Grimly, Shiva concluded yet again that humans were damnably inconvenient. She spawned another process to continually recalculate a thousand possible shots based on what Thrive did next, based on burns up to 20 minutes early or late for the remainder of the interloper’s deceleration.
“There, did you feel it?” Sass asked Remi as the engine burn eased off. Now only two days out from Sanctuary, they performed their 00:34 burns yawning. The wonky schedule called for more at 02:17.
There were upsides to S
ass’s lazy approach to decelerations on her trip to Denali. She conveniently slotted them at shift change, when two bridge officers convened on the bridge to hand off responsibility and compare notes anyway. This time, Sass and Remi were the only ones truly qualified for the job. Clay could sleep through the night, while the other two took turns catching naps.
Remi frowned. “A slight pull to the left.” He paged through displays on the console before him. “The computer compensated by burning a little longer. Hm.” He found a particular visual and scowled at it.
“Exhaust turbulence?” Sass suggested, trying to peer over his shoulder.
In irritation, he flicked the image onto her own screen. “Possible. It looks like something in the nozzle, disrupting the laminar flow. Conceptually.” He sent her another picture to compare. “The right engine flow.”
“Huh.” Sass saw tangle in the image. Exhaust of what, exactly, she was less clear on. Thrive’s engines spewed hardly anything out the rear of the ship. Which was currently in front of the ship, since they turned backwards to decelerate. The star drives consumed fuel, at a prodigious rate during the past few days. But her understanding was that they outgassed plasma. She thought that was energy, and thus expected it to behave like light beams.
“I though energy didn’t bend.”
Remi boggled, and informed her, “Sass, even light waves bend. From gravity.” He stabbed a button. “Chief engineer to bridge. Hoof it, Darren!” His fluency and Mahina slang were growing.
Sass cracked a smile. “That was mean.”
“Will you overrule me?” Remi challenged.
“No. I bet five minutes. He’s sound asleep.”
“Two,” Remi countered. “He is terrified because I ask him to second-guess me.”
Wild-eyed with adrenaline, Darren Markley reached the bridge in under three minutes, wearing skimpy briefs, a muscle T, and his Clark Kent glasses. He forgot his shoes. “What’s wrong!”
Remi grinned at Sass. She chalked up his win with a finger in thin air.