Mary hesitated. Ben had said something almost the same a little earlier. "That must be pretty rare."
"Not so much as you'd think. There are several microscopic examples and at least one large one from Earth." Ben paused. "I thought there were others but I can't access the data right now."
"Don't worry about it. It's not important."
"Jump to Haven in… Five. Four. Three. Two. One."
****
It took even longer to get to Haven than anticipated. Ben's Jump left them a long way from the station and it took another low-speed cruise until Mary could finally see the lattice-work of the geodesic domes through the optical pickups.
When traffic control found out about the damage, they forced Ben to shut down his engines at the outer perimeter and suffer the indignity of being pulled in by a tug. That didn't help his mood and Mary fought to stay neutral against his petulance, discounting it because of the damage he'd suffered and his sense of helplessness.
They'd seen so much together, it was hard to remember when it had been different. Mary still thought of Ben as he was when they were first married. He'd always been easy going, with an almost endless joy of life in general. But after they became CySaps he'd become more intolerant and obsessed with the latest technology. Sometimes Mary wondered if the gain of extended lifespans was worth the sacrifice.
The tug brought them into one of the cavernous service bays, the walls lined with various repair gantries and heavy-duty lifting booms. It was much easier than executing a routine dock and then moving later, but Ben still complained.
"I could have brought us in here. I only lost one thruster unit. Geez, I'm not a cripple or something."
Several gantries craned out to Ben's hull and locked in position, allowing the Tech team access. They'd already wired up a dozen multi-line conduits to the external service ports and were now connecting a number of internal lines too. Mary understood that they had to do it, but it made her uncomfortable. Over seventy years previously she'd seen her father in hospital for the last time. He'd been wired up to a frightening array of bioregulators, pumps, and monitors that in the end couldn't save him. Now Ben was looking the same way.
"I'm going to visit the Controller and get the full picture," she said. "He's only honest when I'm there to intimidate him."
"That snake Tartoa would cheat his own mother, if he'd ever had one. You go and roust him, Munchkin. I hope the bastard is asleep and you wake him up."
Tartoa had been created by the Company in an artificial womb from several dozen DNA sources. The project goal was to massively increase brain capacity and in that sense the experiment was successful. Typically a station the size of Haven would need a staff of over thirty to run it, but Tartoa handled it all with just a couple of general assistants.
Unfortunately the Company hadn't anticipated that the project would also magnify the negative human traits and Tartoa was caught embezzling from them. Then he used the proceeds to manipulate the Company's stocks and multiply his larceny. After some additional Cynetic reprogramming had taken care of the behavioral issues, Tartoa was dedicated to screwing people only at the company's behest.
Mary picked her way through the disordered crowds of the vaulted main avenue towards Tartoa's offices. High above, the artificial "sun" was bright, but did little to improve the appearance of the buildings she passed. The composite walls and support beams stained brown from decades of exposure to the trapped respiration by-products of thousands of transient settlers.
Main deck was even busier than normal. With two new colony departures scheduled over the next week, it buzzed as every settler squabbled over the chance to get their last taste of civilization. Moving to a new world was akin to virtual imprisonment for most of them; few made enough to leave the planet they settled.
A gaggle of young children launched out of a side-corridor and skidded to a halt. Their faces a bewildered mixture of fear and curiosity at the sight of Mary's polished body. She let them stare at her for exactly ten seconds. "Boo!"
The children squealed and vanished back in to the mob, their exultant cries audible long after they were lost from sight. Mary felt a tug on her hand and glanced down. A dark-haired girl of four or possibly five was pulling on her fingers.
"Are you a people?"
Mary lifted the girl by the collar until she was dangling level with Mary's head. The girl's eyes were big and her face solemn.
A man scurried up, his head bobbing up and down comically. "The kids, Ma'am. The children that is. They's only playing. They don't mean no harm. No reason to get upset or anything. She's my daughter, Daina."
Mary wished she could smile. Just briefly. "Hello Daina. Yes, I'm a people." She handed Daina over to her father who wrapped her up in his arms defensively. "I mean no harm either."
"Thank you, Ma'am. Thank you."
There was an antagonism between colonists and CySaps that defied logic. Colonies routinely refused citizenship to anyone less than eighty-five percent organic. And yet they depended almost one hundred percent on CySaps to find the worlds they could settle with at least a fighting chance of survival.
Mary scythed through the pack that was gathering. They made her uncomfortable crowding in like that. Marching down the corridor, she finally slipped inside Tartoa's cavernous offices and leaned against the door for a moment to gather her thoughts. She and Ben hadn't had any children. Something just hadn't worked out and neither of them had wanted to go through the medical prodding and poking necessary to investigate why.
Mary tried to imagine herself getting fat with another life growing inside her and found it impossible. Could she have had a girl like Daina? It seemed ridiculous to even think about such things after all this time. The recent brush with near-disaster had put her more on edge than she'd thought; now she was thinking all sorts of crazy things.
"Mary. How delightful. You're always away far too long for my liking. You look as delicious as ever."
Tartoa's greeting brought Mary back to the present and she picked her way through piles of exclusive stock and trade goods housed there for security, the subdued lighting casting amber shadows around the heavily beamed walls. She entered Tartoa's inner office and raised her hand in greeting.
Tartoa slid towards her, his chair a meter above the ground suspended from a reinforced plastic beam. The support looked like it grew directly out of his spine and there was some truth to that. A nest of umbilicals wrapped around the support like high-tech serpents, feeding both nutrients and information from around Haven into his elephantine skull. In much the same way as Ben, the station was his "body."
Tartoa extended an optical pickup and surveyed Mary from close-up. She always felt the action was a little intrusive. All he could see was her artificial exo-skeleton, but she got the feeling that he got more from it than was entirely decent.
"You've been in the wars." Tartoa retracted the optic. "That's a shame, you were always so… perfect."
"We ran into some trouble on the last survey."
"Indeed?" Tartoa slid closer and sniffed loudly as if smelling Mary. "This is all superficial. We'll have you patched up in no time."
Mary edged back, trying not to make it too obvious how uncomfortable he made her feel. "Ben's the real problem. He's damaged far worse than I am. He's in bay seven at the moment, hooked up to the diagnostics."
"Ben? Oh dear. Let me check to see what they've found."
Tartoa clucked and tutted several times. "Just a moment, I need to make a call."
In the silence, Mary thought about the events on the planet and how Ben had been so eager to burn the plant-creatures. It was very different from the man she used to chide for running "highways" of bathroom tissue to help trapped spiders escape from the bathtub.
Tartoa swung back to face her. "This is serious, Mary. Very serious."
Mary felt suddenly cold and scared. "You can't fix him? The damage wasn't that bad."
"It's not quite that. It's, well… very expensive."
"Hang the cost. That doesn't matter in the least."
"Do you have any assets I don't know about?"
"Assets? You have all our records, you know our business."
"Then we definitely have a problem." Tartoa spun away momentarily. "This is embarrassing, but you can't afford the repairs."
****
Mary explained the situation when she got back and Ben reacted predictably badly. "That low-life bastard. He's been trying to screw us for years."
"We didn't make much on that last trip."
"How come? We tagged four A-Prime inhabitable worlds. They were ripe for colonization."
Mary hesitated. "Most of that went on upgrading to the class five Jump engines and enhanced comm system."
"We had to have those."
No, you had to have them, thought Mary. Ben always wanted to be able to go further and faster, justifying it by saying it made them able to search deeper into uncharted territory, but she knew it was just an obsession. "I know we did. I'm just explaining where the money went."
"What about the investments? We have a pile of colonial stock."
"None of the colonies we invested in have paid a dividend yet. They're still developing."
Ben snorted. "Or maybe they're not pushing hard enough. A bunch of deadbeats living off our money and taking it easy."
"Humans don't have the same drive CySaps have." She shouldn't need to explain that, but Ben seemed to have forgotten that people couldn't work thirty hours a day. "It takes them a while."
"So we're broke?"
"Short-term. The longer-term picture is still pretty good."
"How long?"
"A couple of years perhaps."
The silence stretched out for over ten seconds. "Mary, I can't wait that long. I need repairs now."
"Tartoa had some other suggestions."
"Yeah, I can just imagine what they were. He's been after you since we first met him."
"We could borrow some of what we need against future earnings, but not enough to cover everything." Mary flipped through a number of system displays needlessly. "He also suggested that I could team up with another CySap aero-unit temporarily."
"Mary?"
"It would only be until we can earn enough to pay for the repairs."
"I'm sure you'd jump at the chance to SLink with someone else."
Mary sat up straight. "That's uncalled for."
"Is it? You're the one who wanted this. Remember?"
It was true. Ben had been against applying for the CySap program and it was Mary who'd pushed for them to enroll. She'd started to see more than a few gray hairs and wrinkles appearing in the mirror and found it scared her far more than she'd ever thought possible. Part of her said that Ben would never leave her for someone younger. But the other part was terrified by the idea of suddenly being alone. She still felt guilty, even though Ben could have chosen not to go through with it. "There's another option. It's not as good though."
"I'm listening."
"There's always a shortage of Cynetics. If we sell some we could make enough to pay for some repairs. Not everything, but enough maybe."
"Brilliant thinking! We need more Cynetics not less. I suppose you want me to sacrifice my drive units so you can gallivant around deep space with someone else."
Mary slapped the controls, muting Ben's speaker output.
You little b-
She shut down the SLink too and silently recited Pi to a thousand decimal places.
"Are you done?" she finally said.
"I'm listening."
"My QuadFlex limbs are a high demand item. Even with the damage they'd bring in several thousand."
Ben didn't respond immediately. "How does that work? You'd be pretty useless without arms and legs."
"They can replace them with bioclone units."
"Meat?" Mary heard the disgust in Ben's voice.
"I still have most of the basic internal support systems. They wouldn't be as efficient obviously and I'd lose sensory inputs for atmospheric and soil sampling, but I could use hand-held units."
"What about environmental?"
"I'd have to wear a suit."
"That doesn't sound like a good solution."
Mary sighed. She was tired of explaining things in the face of Ben's selfishness and they had limited alternatives. "It's not. Even with a suit I'd be more exposed. Bioclone limbs are as vulnerable as any human tissue. To be honest the idea scares me, especially considering the way the last mission went."
Ben vented some pneumatics unnecessarily, a clear sign that he was agitated. "I guess we have to risk it."
****
The wispy gauze of a gold and purple nebula spread across the viewscreens, splashing its glory like a medieval depiction of heaven and hell. But Mary was in no mood to appreciate the "heavenly" aspect of the scene.
"I hate these things." She scratched her legs until she felt welts rising on the pasty skin. "They're useless."
"You can't swap out four limbs and not have some issues; especially going back to meat." Ben was preoccupied analyzing the remote probe. "They said it would take time to adjust."
"Adjusting isn't the problem. It's this damn itching."
That wasn't the real issue, even though Mary wouldn't admit it. Her new arms and legs were simultaneously better and worse than the Cynetic units. There was a subtlety to the neural impulses that made them more sensitive to inputs like pressure and touch, but at the same time provided none of the atmospheric and chemical analysis she was used to with the Cynetics.
Mary pinched the skin on her thighs and it reddened in response. "They look disgusting and they're weak too."
"Weak? Let me check the diagnostics."
"Don't bother." Mary knew Ben would tell her everything was within normal parameters again. But they felt weak.
"Probe data is in," Ben announced.
A stream of planetary data appeared on the main console and Mary pored over it, hoping it would be interesting enough to take her mind away from her discomfort.
"Four looks promising." She filtered the data to provide more detail on HR4788-4. "Stable orbit inside the HZ with an ESI of 0.87."
"If you like that, wait till you see this. Atmospherics show O2 content."
Mary gripped the chair arms, her fingers digging deep into the padding. An oxygen atmosphere was the golden prize—a planet that could potentially support life with minimal terraforming. If there were no impeding lifeforms, it could be settled within a couple of years and would fetch a large bounty almost immediately. They could even borrow against it before ratification.
"This is going to turn things around, you'll see." The stars spun on the screens as Ben executed several barrel rolls. "We'll get rid of all these patches and shunts. Replace everything brand new. Hell, we'll even get those new Mark Twelve engines."
"Ben?"
"I haven't forgotten. We'll replace your QuadFlexes as well. Shit, we'll have them gold-plated."
"Any imagery?" she asked.
"Nothing of use at this range. Some low fidelity probe opticals."
Mary opened them up anyway. Ben was right. The circular blob of light was unsatisfying and showed no surface or cloud details. The planet had a strong tinge of yellowy-green to it though. They'll call it "Chartreuse," she thought.
"Orbital approach calculated. We're going in."
The thrust pressed Mary back into the acceleration couch as they boosted towards the inner planetary system. "Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a settler? Building a new world from nothing?"
Ben scoffed. "We get to see new worlds before people spoil them. What could be better than that? You know they're all screw ups."
"You're probably right. I just…" Mary thought about the settlers back in Haven with their children. "It would be nice to see something build and grow, that's all."
"How about we focus on growing our bank balance for now?"
Mary heard a "thunk" and a series of vibrations rattled
the ship.
"Deploying swarm sensors. That'll give us maximum high altitude coverage."
The swarm consisted of several dozen powered micro-sats that would collect data as quickly as possible. Some would simply orbit surveying the planet in multiple ways. Others would commit techno-suicide, plunging into the atmosphere to burn up as they collected atmospheric information. It was a good way to pick up data quickly, but had drawbacks.
"Don't you think that's a bit lavish?" Mary looked up from the console.
"No, I don't," Ben snapped. "A planet with this potential makes a more intensive study worth doing, plus I want to get back as soon as possible to finish the repairs. You're not the one patched up and held together with bubblegum and baling wire."
Mary didn't respond to his comment. "I'll check my environment suit. Make sure everything's okay for planetfall."
Ben didn't say anything else, but Mary knew he was angry. So was she. He didn't seem to understand he wasn't the only one suffering. With her new limbs she was far less effective and much more vulnerable—something only made worse by having to use a suit. The previous mission should have made her relative danger clear, but Ben seemed blind to the fact.
Mary pulled the suit on and and checked the fit for what must have been the fortieth time. It pinched her and made her waddle around like a badly programmed children's toy. The joints clicked into place as she bent, a side-effect of the armored shell that hampered her even more.
Ben let out a laugh. "I'd like to see that-"
The deck jerked from under Mary's feet, swinging back a second later and smashing her into the bucking metal floor-plates. She felt, and heard, a terrible snap as her left leg twisted underneath her. For a moment it felt as if she was suspended in time. There was no sensation or pain, but she knew it was coming.
Agony spasmed from the damaged leg like a thousand volt shock. Her new leg was broken almost before using it. Blistering spears of pain left her gasping as a loud boom tore through the ship drowning everything out. Even her amplified Cynetics couldn't compete as her brain was overwhelmed.
Three Lives Of Mary Page 2