Sanctuary Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  Joey hoofed it to collect his own pressure gear.

  Nico leaned in to whisper. “Shouldn’t Remi be in the office with Ben?”

  “Lowest member of the crew,” Cope mused. “Critiques the acting captain. Think it’s your place to criticize someone else’s job performance?”

  Nico grinned and shook his head emphatically. “No, sar. I should learn my own job. And keep my mouth shut.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m Prosper’s owner. We’re not under way. I could fire Ben if I wanted. But I choose to take orders. Captains are his problem, not mine. Climb aboard.”

  Cope grappled on the triple-wheelers and got underway. He briefly considered giving his miscreants another lecture, but discarded the notion. For now, dad and sons alike were all eyes, drinking in a new world for the first time, and about to meet the natives.

  Joey hadn’t seen much either. But he supplied natural history tidbits he’d picked up from their academic squad. Sanctuary was head and shoulders better real estate than their native Mahina. The nanite-killing cocktail in the water was only a temporary setback in Cope’s mind. The Aloha worlds invested in chemists to solve fiddly bits like that. The tragedy of Sanctuary was that they’d lost their experts to time, and couldn’t train up replacements.

  Not that it mattered. The human race was down from over 10 billion, to maybe a few million now. They needed to consolidate, not open more worlds. Cope understood why the Colony Corps came here with so few people. They didn’t know which colonies would survive, and several failed. But John Copeland knew tech, and this few people couldn’t reach critical mass to support a tech-dependent civilization. Maybe in a few centuries, human population would rebound. Then this place would be worth another look.

  For now, Sanctuary was pretty in a barren desert sort of way. He missed the gas giant hanging in the sky.

  Soon he landed the shuttle in front of the Loonie vehicle garage. Hugo Silva, or his son Bron, had the forethought to bring out a third wheeler so all three boys could try them out before relinquishing them.

  Hugo proudly bragged how his son helped lead the overthrow of the world government. Cope shared how his young idiots stowed away to another star system. Hugo laughed and conceded Cope won the beleaguered dad contest today.

  “Hey! SOCK! Get back here!” Cope demanded. Bron was cresting the hill, too. But the engineer preferred to yell at his own children.

  “Dad, I can’t!” Sock complained. “It’s driving itself!”

  Cope scowled, inclined to assume his kid was lying.

  Hugo’s recent experience with robots was rather different. “BRON! Jump off if you have to!” But Bron was already out of earshot, with no radio.

  “Nico, can you control your wheeler?” Cope asked.

  “Not anymore,” Nico complained. “Dad, I can’t jump off until Sock does. And Bron doesn’t have air.” Unlike Cope’s boys, Bron relied on the wheeler for his airline.

  “Daddy, I’m scared!” Sock shrilled.

  Sock’s grav was set to 1g. Cope realized he was right not to jump. He’d fall hard. And Sock had no experience with an adjustable generator. Nico could cut his grav, and Bron was at native 0.4g, so the engineer was less worried about them.

  Nico volunteered, “Bron says we’re heading for the facilities garage.”

  “Get him to power off his damned wheeler!” Cope demanded.

  “Dad, none of the controls work!” Nico complained. “We’re going awful fast to jump off.”

  “Through the city!” Hugo yelled. “We’ll meet them at the facilities garage!”

  “Screw that!” Cope countered. “We’ll take the shuttle.”

  He blew out the atmo rather than wait through a lock cycle. Cope lunged to the pilot’s console. He brought the shuttle off the ground and tore off after the boys before he bothered sitting down. Joey and Hugo knocked into each other in the rear, both caught still on their feet.

  Cope didn’t care. Could he snag all three wheelers, boys aboard? But they weren’t strapped to the machines well enough. They could all jump off their machines. Any two of them had enough air while he retrieved the third. But if Sock was too scared to do it… No, Nico was right. Better they stay together.

  Hugo lurched into the gunner’s seat and pointed. The wheelers headed for a garage structure on the lake side of the city, past the spaceport. And now that he could see their speed, Cope agreed with Nico. The boys had all they could do to hold on, let alone jump into a controlled roll. Cope took a short-cut across the giant dome. He goosed the thrust beyond what was really polite so close to the structure.

  “Joey, got any blasters?” This wasn’t Prosper’s shuttle, after all.

  “Why would we have blasters?”

  Cope huffed a laugh. “Been some changes in the home system since you left. Check the closet.” But no, Sass proved less paranoid than Ben. She didn’t stock guns on her shuttle.

  “No one has guns in Sanctuary,” Hugo consoled him. “The robots, though –”

  His thought cut off as Cope flipped the shuttle end-over-end, then rolled it, while banking sharply around the bunker. He landed to block the wheelers from the garage doors.

  “Jump off now!” he yelled at his kids. Bron didn’t hear him, but jumped anyway. The trikes braked, but not fast enough. Two bashed into the shuttle. One broke a wheel, and spun around in circles. Another flipped into a ditch. The third managed to swerve around the shuttle’s nose and stop with dignity at the garage doors. Fortunately, the boys managed to evade being run over.

  “Sock! Nico! You alright?”

  “Yeah, Dad,” Nico assured him. “Bron’s OK, too.”

  Cope took a moment to breathe, trying to calm his thudding heart while Joey opened the doors again. “Get your asses in here!” the loving dad ordered.

  “Fetching my stuff from the wheeler, Dad,” Nico excused himself. The wheelers weren’t on the view screen, so Cope leafed through the cameras. And he found not one, but both of his boys running toward the wheeler that went for the garage door.

  “For cryin’ out – Joey, with me,” Cope ordered. They jumped out of the shuttle, and jogged after the running boys.

  And the garage doors opened. Six polebots emerged, with one arm apiece. Cope barely noticed them. Until one aimed and shot a blaster hole through Joey’s thigh.

  Cope skidded to a stop and sank to his knees. Hugo could scream at the kids. The engineer was a master of focus, but didn’t multi-task well.

  Joey’s vital signs were weak, but the suit automatically applied a tourniquet to keep him from bleeding out. Radio comms burbled past Cope’s ears, including Ben’s voice. Cope ignored him. He used duct tape and patches from his toolbelt to re-seal Joey’s suit. As soon as it reported pressure, he hit the cryo button. That was the best chance of survival Cope could give him.

  He looked up to demand why his kids hadn’t reached him yet. And saw both boys running away from polebots, Sock’s legs pumping fast and low, Nico’s stretched in low-g bounds. And another polebot was aiming for him.

  Cope ran and lunged to tackle the gunner bot flat, and yanked its blaster away. He paused to shoot it, holding fire until its bowling ball head exploded. He pivoted to aim at any other bots threatening his children.

  But all three boys were captured. Robot arms seized them around their midsections. They rolled full-tilt into the garage.

  Cope didn’t have a safe shot. He ran for the open garage lock. Hugo beat him there, and started wrestling the polebot that kept Bron pinned. Cope gave Nico a bracing grimace. He set to work freeing Sock first. Like Darren before him, he spotted right off how to dislocate the shoulder joint for the articulated arm. “I’ll work you free, Sock, don’t worry.”

  Of course, he pocketed the blaster to work on the robot. He pulled the master pin and the arm drooped helpless, releasing Sock.

  But the lock finished cycling. Three more polebots apiece grabbed Cope and Hugo. The scholar hadn’t gotten far at freeing Bron, constrained to rig him an air supply fir
st.

  Cope tried to fight the polebots off. The net result was that his elbows got clamped around his ears, with another mechanical arm hugging his hips, and a third pinning his knees. His back was twisted into a strong spinal stretch.

  The squad of polebots sped toward the elevator at the back of the garage. Free but alone on an alien planet, Sock ran after his dad and brother. Within seconds, he was recaptured.

  Cope finally thought to call home at the last second. “Ben, help! Captured by robots –” Steel elevator doors shut behind them, and the chamber descended. A tone chimed to inform him that his comms were out of range.

  “You didn’t tell him where we are,” Hugo noted sadly, suspended sideways in mid-air between two robots. His pair of captors clutched him at chest and thighs, more dignified than Cope’s contortion.

  Cope sighed. “The shuttle tells them that. And Joey.”

  A spare polebot reached into his pocket and relieved him of his blaster, then his toolbelt.

  49

  The polebots released Cope, Hugo, and the three boys into a control room, deep in the bowels of the facilities quadrant of Sanctuary Colony. The robots retreated, sealing the door behind them, with no explanation.

  The engineer found the loss of his toolbelt especially galling.

  “Where are we?” Sock asked plaintively.

  Cope set his helmet aside and shrugged out of the top half of his p-suit. He started pacing the room, heavy sleeves slapping his thighs.

  Hugo replied instead. “The facilities wing of my town. This is where we keep mechanicals, like water pumps and –”

  “I know what mechanicals are,” Sock interrupted, fairly politely. “Why did the robots put us here?”

  Bron theorized, “Shiva’s gone nuts, the AI who runs everything here. She’s taken us hostage. She’s going to force the spaceships to leave or she’ll kill us –”

  Hugo seized Bron’s upper arm and dragged the boy to him sideways. “That’s not helpful, Bron. We don’t know any of that for sure, Sock.”

  “Water quality monitoring station,” Cope reported to the room in general. “No cutoff valve. No staff.”

  “The robots still manage the facilities,” Bron supplied uneasily. “Major Ling – the Loonie mayor – she’s trying to get all this staffed. But the top priority is the creches. And Shiva doesn’t want to hurt –” He stopped. “Until Joey, she’s never harmed a person.”

  “She murdered seven in their sleep on Thrive,” Cope corrected him. “Plus Sass and Clay. Now Joey. All it takes is to redefine personhood.” Cope resumed prowling another lap of the cramped quarters. Nico and Sock flattened themselves against the cabinets when he passed. “Define harm, Hugo. Shiva is dangerous.”

  These enameled steel boxes twinkled with status lights over rocker switches. Probably because they always had, Cope mused sourly. Status indicators in an unmanned position offended his engineer’s sense of decency. On the next pass, he used the karate-chop side of a hand to rock switches to their opposite settings.

  “I hadn’t considered that,” Hugo conceded. “Redefine personhood. Shiva did that to Sass, of course.”

  Nico shared, “On our world, the terraformers redefined settlers as a different class with less rights. Same on Sagamore, where Remi is from.” He paused as his dad pulled a side panel off a cabinet with an ear-splitting screech. “On Denali, they have three classes. But none of them are subhuman.”

  “Four,” Cope murmured. “Teke is an academic. Quire is a farmer. Zan’s a hunter, and Aurora and Reza are cosmopolitans – cosmos. But most of the academics lived in the capital. And died.”

  “Oh, right, Denali Prime, the one the volcanoes destroyed.” Nico said. “Dad will get us out. He’s been in prison on every world he’s ever been. This is his fourth.”

  Bron grinned. “Fourth prison? Or world?” Now that his breathing gear was off, he proved an attractive lad, on the brink of manhood-with-acne, with black hair like Nico’s, though his skin was a lighter brown.

  “World,” Cope growled. He’d survived more than one prison on Mahina, and Nico reminding him didn’t help.

  He tossed away the sheet steel with a clang, not having figured out anything useful to do with it yet. “Hugo. You were in a tearing hurry to visit us. Before, I thought we’d wait so you didn’t have to tell the story twice. Now,” he ripped a bank of handspan-wide ribbon wires out of the cabinet he was dissecting, “I’m curious.”

  Hugo made a show of looking around. “Walls have ears.”

  “Get creative,” Cope advised. “My kids look forward to seeing their Tante again. My second is named for her. She’s not here.”

  “He means –” Sock began. Nico shushed him before Cope could reach. Cope gave him a quick hug anyway.

  Hugo nodded, easily catching on to Cope’s example. “About that. I had an interesting call. And brought some notes.” He pulled out a data stick.

  Despite the generations that separated their two societies, most technology hadn’t advanced worth a damn in the interim. Cope pulled out his tablet and stuck in the stick. Two files, one a video, the other text. He opened neither, because at that moment, the door hissed open, and a polebot entered, unarmed. The door closed behind it.

  Cope and Bron instantly tackled it to the floor and disarmed it – literally. The bot bore no weapon except its single claw. The machine took up too much space on the floor, so Nico flipped it back to standing. He devised a sling from a couple of its springs to keep the broken arm out of the way.

  “Where was I,” Cope muttered, and retrieved his tablet.

  “Cope, it’s me,” said the bowling ball head of the polebot. “Sort of. I’m a copy of Sass.”

  Cope folded his arms over his chest. “You’re Shiva.”

  The ball chuckled. “I don’t blame you. Shiva is the one who took you hostage. But I’m Sass.”

  “Prove it.”

  The blank-featured polebot audibly sighed. “I found you crying because the baby almost ate your solvent rag. That’s when we took Nico to the creche. When I invited you to come to Sanctuary with me, you said no, because of Nico. You said Ben would be a fool to go, because you were going to marry him, and you’d make him captain instead of third mate. And you were good as your word. You bought him Prosper. I can hardly believe you came, Cope.”

  Each sentence brought him closer to certainty. “OK, you’re Sass. Or you can access her memories, at least.”

  Hugo nodded agreement, though why the local scholar believed her, Cope wasn’t sure. Oh! She already contacted him. Hence the data stick.

  “I need your help,” Sass-as-polebot continued. “The file explains.”

  Hugo interjected, “But surely you have no way to affect…things?”

  “Clay has a plan.” Despite the tinny quality of the polebot speaker mouths, she sounded sad. “It’s alright. You can speak freely. Shiva has no ears in here.”

  “Does Clay’s plan get you killed?” Cope inquired. “Deleted.”

  “Him. I’m the backup.”

  “Sass… We could find some way to copy you,” the engineer suggested. “I don’t know how to weld you back to your bodies. But Thrive kept them in cryo. It might take a while, but I don’t give up easy. Trust me on that.”

  “I trust you with my life, Cope,” Sass agreed gently. “Always. But Clay and I don’t want to continue as AIs. It’s been a couple days real time? It feels like an eternity. No bodies. No freedom. Nothing but memories and each other. And Clay won’t stay.”

  Cope’s eyes fell on a sorely puzzled Sock. He ordered himself to grieve later. He hated to let go of a friend, but in truth, he let Sass go a decade ago. His responsibility lay in protecting his family, Prosper, Thrive, Mahina. “I understand. So this file Hugo gave me?”

  “You have Nico with you. Show it to him,” Sass the bowling ball advised.

  Cope opened the file on his pocket comm and read the first few lines, which explained the goal – to devise directives that convinced Shiva that sh
e must not manipulate humans. To protect people, she must not alter or control them in any way. The detailed case-by-case legalese struck him as more Clay than Sass in spirit. The mechanics of figuring out how to alter the code was beyond him. He scrolled through half a page of the existing directives, but the code was impenetrable.

  He showed it to Nico. “Can you work with this? Or do we need to send it to your buddy on Mahina? That’ll take days. Once we get out of here. Say, Sass. You opened the door. Do that again.”

  “I used the door open button on the outside.”

  “Awesome. So suborn another robot and do it again.”

  “Too many robots in the halls, Cope,” her tinny speakers replied. “This is their lair. You wouldn’t get far. And each time I do it, Shiva might catch on and cut me off.”

  Meanwhile Nico bent to study the file, and Hugo borrowed Nico’s comm tablet to look the code over as well. “I could use a bigger screen,” Nico complained. “And one for Sock to work.” The younger boy hung on his shoulder.

  Cope chided, “Sock, leave your brother alone.”

  “No, Dad,” Nico countered. “I want Sock’s help.”

  “That’s a first. Use mine. Don’t screw it up.” Cope handed over his deluxe engineering tablet. To his surprise, Nico added some software to it, then Sock took custody of his powerful large-screen tablet instead of his big brother.

  “Did you find any screens I might use?” Hugo requested. His son Bron slid down a cabinet onto his butt, bored.

  “There’s a dumb monitor.” The two men, soon helped by Bron, managed to scavenge wiring to give Hugo a display slaved to Nico’s pocket comm. Cope found it a very strange sensation to watch his firstborn solemnly collaborating with another grown man. They seemed to confer as equals. Sock interrupted a couple times. Nico calmly unstuck his issue so Sock could get back to playing.

  Sock explained to his dad what he was doing, and demonstrated. Cope praised him as the child desired. But his older son jerked his head to suggest his dad get out of the kid’s way.

  Cope gave up trying to scavenge equipment. If his goal wasn’t to break out of the room, there wasn’t much point. Nothing in here would let him reach Ben. Relying on his kids to save the world was a concept he didn’t care to dwell on.