by Scott Rhine
“That’s just it,” snapped Zeiss. “We think the Magi inflicted these limits on us to minimize the damage we could do. Any attempt to tamper could trigger another safeguard.”
That made Yvette’s theories about the aliens seem pretty substantial, but Lou had promised not to mention them in Olympus or in front of Red. “What could go wrong? What’s worse than dead?”
Red cleared her throat. “There are things not in those files. For example, Wannamaker didn’t take very good care of the women he referred to as broodmares. The prolonged fever from the experiments killed many of them. One of the women dropped to an IQ of 82, but because it didn’t affect her ability to carry the product, he didn’t care. Would you do that to Mercy? What if Toby sets a tailored virus loose on all of us, one that makes us permanently happy but stupid? That won’t violate the charter, but he could use it to take over the ship.”
They were tag-teaming him. Mercy was the one who could always take on Red; he needed her. Lou tried to maintain a reasonable tone. “We’ll use safeguards here and send Toby as fodder to the surface of Oblivion B4.”
“If you lived on that planet, wouldn’t you consider that an act of war? We should throw the book at you.”
“If you can’t reveal any of this to the crew, how the hell would you manage that?”
“Dereliction. You haven’t been pulling your weight since your accident. There’ve been a lot of complaints—mostly from the women, mostly about your keeping men from doing productive work.”
Lou looked at the ceiling, pursing his lips like a coyote about to howl. “Oh, that’s rich. Use your own enemies to crucify me. What I’ve been doing down there is stuff you people should have been doing all along—our mission. Instead, you’re hiding from your jobs in here. People with nothing to do are turning on each other, but you two sit idle. I’ll make you a deal: if your project trumps mine, I will voluntarily hand over my commission. What they hell is so secret your second in command can’t know?”
Zeiss sighed. “We’re trying to fix my mistake before anyone else finds it. I’ve delayed and subdivided the water data as much as I can, but eventually Rachael will figure out the atmospheric problem.”
“The new cloud in the sky—Sundog? Everyone knows about that. It’s not your fault.”
“Not the saucer leak, the increased amount of water absorbed by the air as the temperature increases. We’re losing water faster than we anticipated.”
“So we let it get cold enough to snow, and it falls out. No big deal.”
He could hear Zeiss pacing and picture him gesturing with his hands. “We haven’t been sitting on our thumbs up here, Lou. In case we don’t succeed at Oblivion, we tried to come up with a plan to refill Sanctuary.”
“I’m all ears.”
“To do that, we need between twenty-one and twenty-five million cubic meters of water. At 1000 liters per cubic meter, call it twenty-three billion liters. If we work ten hours a day on Ascension and extract and purify asteroid ice at the rate of 10,000 liters a day, we can refill in only two million days.”
“Ouch. I think we’ll run out of fuel in the shuttle before then.”
“Anything we try in order to increase the intake to appropriate levels will shift the gravitational inflection points in the system close enough to the sun that we might not be able to jump out.”
“Jeez. Any other doomsday scenarios?”
“With less water, it’s getting hotter inside the sphere faster than we thought. Without Mercy’s help, the system is difficult to maintain.”
“Why don’t you just do one of your famous computation trance thingies?”
“For the same reason Red proposed the stasis chamber rules before Toby’s trial,” Zeiss whispered. “Some time in the next three months, I might have a stroke. If we go quantum, I will almost certainly blow. If that happens, they need to freeze me in the first few minutes.”
“Damn,” Lou said. “What if you make some excuse to travel to the landing bay? When you come back through decontamination, the Magi devices will filter your blood and whatnot. They could make you right as rain.”
“Maybe, but what about the next emergency? The next time we have to compute in a hurry? Those are happening more often. Sooner or later, one of us is going to require the deep freeze.”
“Okay, no more kids for me. I understand your reservations, but Mercy needs this medicine. Throw Auckland or Yvette into the mix, and let Red supervise them. They could whip up a cure in a couple months. Then Mercy can help you regulate the temperatures before winter, and no one knows about the mistake.”
“Perhaps,” Zeiss allowed, “but you conveniently changed the subject away from your labor-avoiding, beer-hall sessions.”
Lou affected an Irish accent. “Well now, there are two parts to that answer. Do you happen to have a cool jar of something lying around for a sorely abused man who’s already parched from talking?”
Zeiss replied, “Mira made some sun tea for me on the patio. If you’re nice to her, maybe she’ll get you some.”
Lou stood and wrapped an arm around the short pilot. “Red, I’m sorry I doubted you. You know I’d take a bullet for you. I might even attend a meeting if I didn’t have to wear shoes.”
She sniffed. “You’re just trying to get rid of me to tell him something that would piss me off.”
“I can’t keep stopping to calm you,” Lou replied. “Z will tell you everything. Those people in Garden Hollow are going stir crazy in this heat. We need to give them something to do instead of gossip and complain.”
“All right,” Red said, kissing her husband good-bye for the brief separation.
When she was gone, Lou said, “The first thing you need to do is put Rachael Eliezer in charge of something. If you don’t, she’s going to start a mutiny. In fact, I’d put her in charge of the planetary beachhead committee.”
“There’s no such committee.”
“There should be. Weren’t you listening? Before I was in the space program, I would go into remote villages and find out who the leading malcontents were so our government could bribe them—either to overthrow their regime or stay loyal, whichever side we were supporting that week.”
“The Brits still do that sort of thing?”
“Please, there are only about four countries in history that the empire hasn’t invaded, and we have contingency plans for them,” Lou said, half-joking. “The difference in this situation is that we don’t have billions of pounds, just important work and titles. There need to be lots of new committees with plenty to do. We’ve already discussed the water committee and the nanomedicine monitoring committee. Those are doing our work. You need other projects like alien language translation and page selection.”
“We won’t need those for almost a year.”
“Ah, but developing the tools and software for these can easily take a five-man team even longer than the time available. The Magi should have a standard toolbox for this stuff already if they do it as often as they claim, but we couldn’t find any trace of one in Snowflake. I already put Sojiro to work on a basic interface mock-up and collecting all the similar software we have available for voice recognition. That man is like Michelangelo, wasted on all that painting. Did you know Michelangelo was an architect, too? I have Yuki working on changes to make the translator portable; she’s a whiz at signal processing. Our programmers will teach the audio pick-up to parse sounds into words. From words, we can make frequency charts and dictionaries. We can train it on every available Earth language to prepare it for cracking the alien tongue.”
“A Universal Translator?” asked Zeiss.
“No, a toolkit to crack one language. I figure we can dope out a pidgin dictionary with only 500 hours of recordings. I can handle the project requirements and testing, but Pratibha would make an ideal manager. Giving her something concrete to focus on will give everyone else room to breathe. However, to actually get these recordings, you need Yuki’s good will. She holds a vital link, but she’ll
only volunteer it if she trusts you. I asked you to work out with her for a reason.”
Zeiss shook his head. “The last Mori woman I let work out with me was straddling me naked when Red walked in. If you haven’t noticed, my wife holds a grudge.”
“Someone can stay to protect your virtue. You need what Yuki has,” Lou said, thinking of the bugs no one in the crew had been able to find. He was certain Yuki could listen in on the dining hall at will.
“Can you give me any hints?”
Lou shook his head. And have Red ripping your bedroom apart in paranoia? “No. You have to act surprised. You’ll be able to trust her more if she’s the one who spills it. If she doesn’t confess by the time we reach the goal, I’ll shame it out of her.”
“Okay. Yuki does need specialized hand-to-hand training, and I am the one most qualified to provide it.”
“So you like the language project?”
“I should have thought of it,” Zeiss admitted.
“I told the other two you had. That’s one of the things you’ve been planning in your room all this time.”
“I haven’t planned a thing.”
“People won’t believe that. You’re always planning. We have to let just a little leak out. I think we should make Risa head of the committee for the twenty-seven ideas we want to give the natives of Oblivion. She had great ideas about prerequisites and methods of selection.”
Zeiss covered his face with his hand, muffling the groan slightly. “We can’t pick the concepts the aliens need until we meet them, but what did you mean about prerequisites?”
“Sonrisa is great at telling what concepts come before others. When Yvette said law was our most important idea, the engineer broke the most primitive example of law, Hammurabi’s Code, down into a dozen components: literacy, stoneworking, an alphabet, a numeric system, currency for the fines, a whole pyramid of government concepts, basic if-then logic, and rudimentary anatomy. A lot of pages devolve into these just like physics begins with the six classical simple machines: the lever, wheel, pulley, and I forget the rest. We can put some thinkers to work building the checklists of the building blocks that we can use later. We need several because everyone I asked had a different top ten. Herk listed weapons and tactics. Red gave me a lecture on the history of pi. Toby was a freaking wellspring on every biological advance from crop rotation to hookworm. That asshole knows how civilization functions in ways I never even imagined. And every single person was absolutely right in his or her field.”
“It’s an intractable problem.”
“Exactly why we need to decide ahead of time how we’re going to choose. A committee will never agree, but a monarch will miss the diversity that Sensei took pains to recruit from our world.”
Zeiss pondered this. “So after we study the aborigines, each person gets to present one idea, subject to some majority approval? I get a veto? That’s seventeen. How do we decide the remaining ten?”
Lou leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “Who knows? That’s the beauty of the committee: you don’t have to know. Let them argue about this for the next year instead of how they should be roasting your balls.”
“That’s rather jaded,” Zeiss said.
“But you like it,” Lou sang.
Red came in with a set of glasses clinking. When she handed Lou his, he could feel the ice rattling near the top and siphoned off the coldest liquid. “Careful, Conrad,” she said. “It sounds like he has you down to your panties already. He’s a slick talker.”
“Bless you. There’s sugar in this. I never get any in the Hollow,” Lou said, changing the subject.
“I learned tea making from my Texan grandmother. It’s not tea without lethal amounts of sugar. Are they rationing supplies already down there?” Red asked.
“No. Yvette doesn’t want me to have any more sympathy weight-gain during the pregnancy,” Lou admitted, patting his belly. “Speaking of which, could you spare the medical personnel to save Mercy and the baby?”
Lou felt shocking cold slither from his neck down his back. He had to untuck his uniform shirt to let the ice cube escape. “Good one, Red. If I did that, it would be considered sexual harassment.”
“I did that to prevent myself from smacking you again,” she said. “Don’t ask him to do an end run around my righteous indignation.”
Zeiss said, “Let me talk to her for a while. I’ll see you after your shift.”
Chapter 10 – Motivation and Meteors
When Yuki rode up the elevator to report for meteor monitoring duty that evening, Zeiss was sitting at the patio table outside the saucer’s main entrance. He held a cup of tea and a manifest. He appeared to be double-checking mesh bags of perishable food, primarily fruit and melons. As she passed, he said, “Yuki, I owe you an apology.”
The scantily dressed technician stopped mid-stride, flabbergasted. “Sir?”
“All my people must know how to fight because I can’t afford to lose any of you. You are one of my people, and I’ve neglected you. What can you do in combat?”
“Um . . . I prefer blade work, sir. I have a punching knife in my belt. I like throwing blades, but the Magi confiscated our guns and every blade over ten centimeters long.” After entering the vast ship, some items hadn’t reappeared on the other end of decontamination, including some of Johnny’s kitchen cutlery. “A punching knife is still good for holing suits, eyes, the jugular, throat, kidneys, balls, lungs, and heart.”
“At first, I pictured one of those pointy, metal key rings, but you make it sound like a small ice pick. Show me,” Zeiss ordered. He slipped inside her guard and grabbed her waistband, preventing the close-order knife from being drawn. When she reached to twist his thumb off her waist, he blocked the attempt casually with his left hand.
“I’d be screwed, sir,” she replied. “I did my hand-to-hand test with small, paired weapons. That’s out the window now.”
“Would you consider sparring with me?” he asked. “I think we could both benefit. We can work on my strength and your speed. We’ll try a police baton first, one with the handle on the side so you can spin it for blocks or attacks. We’ll concentrate on low kicks, and I’ll have Red tutor you on fancy footwork to avoid grappling. We need to rework your style. Heel sweeps and hip throws should be your first line of defense. Instead of a follow-through with your opposite fist, we’ll retrain you to use your feet.”
She knelt in front of him. He had once taught both Red and the great Kaguya Mori. Rumor said he had killed one Override talent with a bamboo pole and faced another unarmed for his team leadership badge. When Z tutored someone, they were being groomed for leadership. Bowing fully, she said, “You honor me, sir.”
He shook his head. “This isn’t about me. A black belt is just a white belt who didn’t give up.”
“When and where?”
“I prefer mornings. We’ll have to do it when Toby leaves the storage area—that’s the best workout room. Someone off duty will need to referee.” He really meant chaperone.
He didn’t want to take advantage of her like every other man who tried to get her alone. She didn’t know whether to be offended or flattered. Had Lou arranged this for her as a payoff? “Why me?” she whispered.
The commander shrugged. “We’re each weak in ways we’re afraid to expose to the others. It’s a mutually beneficial association. I’m low on training hours myself.” When she seemed unconvinced, he added, “You saved Mercy, which would’ve earned anyone else a commendation, but you’ve turned the rest of the crew against you with the water leak and the political fights over the nanofabricator. I’m hoping that with a little seasoning you’ll make an officer who solves more problems than she causes.”
Yuki colored a little, something she hadn’t done since the age of ten. “We could solve it all with another fabricator.”
He snickered at the persistence of her request. Then again, his wife was the queen of insistent. “I actually had Red brainstorm about that problem. Her idea was to have
the active fabricator print a fourth fabricator unit.”
Yuki blinked. “That’s brilliant. We could print one for Ascension to carry to the surface.”
“Whoa! There are problems. It’s sort of like wishing for more wishes; it doesn’t work. The nano units we have can only print spinnerets a micrometer across, no finer. All the dimensions would be an order of magnitude larger than the original.”
Yuki considered. “That’s okay. Over 90 percent of what we use the units for is larger scale. Microweave fabric would be fine. In fact, five meters wide instead of half a meter would work better for many of our applications.”
“You’re serious? Even if we could build this behemoth, the rare metals have been hard enough to find for your computer chips. The habitat recycles every trace metal from the stubble and even our waste, using those beetles and the shrimp. The ones with the shiniest shells carry the most metal. Nonetheless, we have to collect hundreds of those bugs for enough exotic ingredients to print one of your sensors. Every gram of mineral we bind up in solid form means less we can use as fertilizer. Plus, where are we going to find more Gallium in this ship? We’ve already scrapped everything we can, including some of our NASA locator chips.”
Rising to her feet, Yuki smiled. “What about the asteroids in this system? They have most of what we need. Some of the other elements can be substituted.”
Zeiss leaned back, folding his arms. “Sure, but that would mean months of planning and require more fuel for the shuttle.”
“The shuttle needs more fuel anyway to take off from B4.”
“We planned to have the landing team distill the fuel from native resources on the surface. I just spent time working the steps out with Risa.”
“Then we use the same steps on an asteroid and show a net profit for the venture. That way, we’ll have options and be able to leave the moon early if things get too hot.”