Migrant Thrive: Thrive Space Colony Adventures Box Set Books 7-9

by Ginger Booth

  Ben frowned. “And this antisocial behavior. Not liking children. It all began with a gene mod? You have this gene mod, too?”

  Adamos waved this away. “It was just another passing theory. I have the bunny gene mod. But young Milo would not. That experiment was abandoned. So many theories. Even before we left Earth, European birth rates declined. Few wanted children. Here, few can tolerate them. Few make friends.”

  Adamos paused in thought. “I think I’m happy. I can’t explain why. But very few say they are happy. Probably more in Hellada than anywhere else.”

  “Happiness is hard to gauge,” Clay mused. “Sadness is part of life. Do you have any objective statistics? Suicide rates?”

  “Yes, suicide is our leading cause of death. Less here in Hellada, but that’s difficult to interpret. We have no army. In other cities, youths often suicide within a year of leaving uniform. City service is the women’s equivalent. Parks and paperwork. In Hellada, both genders serve four years in the food gardens and tourist grotto, like Lukas. The transition to civilian life is not difficult. But here as elsewhere, people often suicide over disappointments. Serious illness. Points of honor. Suicide by duel.”

  “Regimented,” Remi suggested. “No freedom.”

  Elise shook her head. She rose and crossed to Adamos, and folded his head to her breast.

  Adamos flailed at her, trying to push her away. “What are you doing?”

  “You will accept a hug! And a kiss on your head! And I’ll hold you until you relax. So relax and accept it!”

  Ben judged the man as relaxed as one of their pikes. He gently pulled Elise off. “No, Elise. Take Milo, please, and catch me a female bunny. Or any five bunnies. Clay can figure out which is a girl later. We’ll be along soon.”

  “They need love, Ben,” Elise argued, fists on hips. “No one teaches them how. How can they be happy?”

  Ben batted his eyelashes in false innocence. She relented and decamped. He shot a pointed glance at Remi, but the engineer wouldn’t budge. He wasn’t leaving. Fair.

  “Guys,” the captain said firmly. “The Cantons people, hundreds of thousands, have tried to solve their problem. We won’t figure it out in a few hours, or months. And it isn’t our place. If they ask for our help, we can study their biology, environment. Try some of our medications on them. But so far no one is asking.”

  He turned to Adamos. “Or would Hellada like five thousand new settlers, complete with children?”

  Adamos recoiled. “Our entire city is two thousand! We want more people. Not that many. The children… If they take care of them.”

  Clay asked, “What other cities might want them? The settlers speak English.”

  Adamos considered. “Britain. Deutschland. Benelux. Scandia possibly. The others, no. The question is how they will fit in, what guilds they can join, what benefits they bring.”

  “One moment,” Clay requested. “Are any of these cities big enough to accept five thousand migrants?”

  “Deutschland certainly, and Britain. The other three, perhaps a third each, or half. But I do not speak for them. Nor even Hellada. The village council would decide. If the wizards allowed it. I am not the ranking wizard here.”

  “Oh.” Ben and Clay traded glances. Ben asked, “Is the ranking wizard the one you planned to contact?”

  “No. You say Schauble wants you.”

  Ben judged his face, his eyes. “It’s time for us to go. Isn’t it.”

  “I’m sorry.” Adamos stretched a hand and a sheet of flame blocked the roof staircase.

  But Ben was already in motion. He plucked up his backpack and bunny basket, and hopped off the roof, Remi and Clay close on his heels.

  37

  The trolleys stopped after all, Sass noted. Their guards did something she missed, and kicked a couple angry passengers off to await the next one. No doubt the entire trolley system lagged because of them.

  She clambered into the middle of the car, to sit facing Kassidy. Cope, too tall for the car’s interior, stooped to sit next to her, thighs touching. The six soldiers in bell-hop attire arrayed themselves on the running boards. The car squeaked and lurched back into motion, at the pace of a slow jog. At this rate, Sass guessed they were about an hour from the Deutschland train station

  “Cope, can you stop the car again?” Sass whispered.

  He shook his head. “Kassidy, can you reclaim your drones?”

  “They’re broadcasting,” she replied. “Pacing us.”

  “We can’t let that technology fall into their hands,” Sass warned.

  “No biggie,” Cope decreed. “Our drones are different from their drones. The comms are similar to theirs.”

  Sass slowly broke into a smile, and Kassidy grinned likewise. “You broke into their comms, didn’t you.”

  “No time,” Cope replied. “But I sent enough data to Eli. Nico can figure it out. It’s nothing special. We just play for time.”

  “Or we accept the trip to visit Schauble,” Sass mused, playing devil’s advocate. “We wanted to find the right person to talk to.”

  “Yeah, no,” Cope judged. “Prefer to chat from my own ship. Pikes. Look heavy. No range.”

  “I’d rather not get stabbed,” Kassidy differed. She studied the guards from her vantage. “They might have pistols. But I don’t see any.”

  Cope nodded. Then he pointed a single finger up.

  Sass nodded slowly. “Pretty with the sun setting. Gets in your eyes, though. All at once. First chance.”

  Plan established, they sat back to enjoy the vast greenhouses rolling by. After a while, Sass judged the guards sufficiently lulled by boredom. Under pretense of shifting her weight, she slipped out her comm tab and turned more toward Cope. He deployed his pink ball of lizards to shield her hands while she sent a quick note to Zan on Prosper, advising their status, and that Kassidy’s drones were broadcasting.

  They trundled to a stop at last. A guard yelled at them, possibly in French, and pointed toward the city walls. Sass obediently rose, letting first Cope, then Kassidy head off before her. She hadn’t bargained on the audience. About twenty cranky citizens peered around and over each other to steal a good look at the captives. A waft of beer overlaid the ever-present rotten egg reek of sulfur. Anywhere else, Sass would smile and wave.

  “Get ready,” she murmured. The guard phalanx stepped around the car to circle them as they stepped off. She would have preferred them more spaced out, but with the streets crowded by the dinner hour, they’d probably assume a tight formation all the way to the train depot.

  Cope stepped off and straightened, stretching to get the kinks out. Then Kassidy. Sass stepped out from under the trolley roof and said, “Now,” at the same moment.

  This was anything but stealthy. The three captives rose at speed, and quickly flipped upside-down relative to the gaping onlookers below. Psychologically, it was intensely uncomfortable to fall head-first, and that’s what they were doing, falling to the dome roof. The guards yelled. One even tried to hurl his pike straight up, then hastily backed away as the pike fell back down on him. A small sea of arms pointed at them.

  Sass reluctantly switched her attention to where she was going. The dome roof appeared to be some kind of transparent panels, clouded by the years, supported by girders. It likely wasn’t designed for the weight of three adults from below, but she quickly adjusted her gravity to only 0.1 g for landing. Kassidy made a show of it, with a final flip. Cope and Sass simply landed lightly. And all three immediately bounded for the closest girder.

  “Pit stop,” Cope urged. He paused and cut a slit in his pink ball to mostly deflate it. Kassidy laughed at him. “Don’t want them to die,” he defended. He slipped in a half sandwich he had left over from lunch. Then he reinflated the ball with fresh air from a canister.

  Meanwhile Kassidy belatedly recalled her drones and stashed them in her pack. “Ready. What’s our play?”

  Sass thought that through while they worked. “Exit the city and call for p
ickup. We’re too conspicuous now. I hope Ben learned more.”

  “Caught that part, Sass,” Cope noted mildly. “But which way? We could probably break through and patch the hole with bubble stuff. Double-paned glass. But we can breathe on this side. You realize they can run on girders, too, right? They have repair access.”

  “There.” Kassidy pointed to a group of soldiers massing on a platform just below the top of the nearest wall.

  “West into the sun,” Sass said. “We run, 0.15 g. Go!”

  They set themselves to matching lope height. They weren’t on an east-west girder, so they broke north, then out along the first girder headed their way.

  Sass found the footing only mildly treacherous. The charcoal-colored ribbon was a comfortable meter wide. But giant bolts stuck out at alternating intervals, and seven of them at intersections. While sailing through the air – each bound was meters long at this gravity setting – she regularly checked back on their pursuit. The soldiers passed through the dome and ran on the top, without gravity assist. Encumbered as her team was, against fresh young soldiers, they couldn’t outrun the pursuers forever.

  “Cope, how do they plan to get through to us?”

  “Beats me.”

  She’d just bounded again when suddenly a beam shot up from the surface, surrounding them with a net of blue-green, like a cage of lightning. She looked to the ground below, not the net she was soaring into. Cope sank hard to the girder, cursing. Kassidy landed safely.

  Sass turned and realized she was about to hit the wall of light. Illusion!

  Cope yelled, “Force field!”

  Oh. Yes, she recognized it from those electric fences around the atmo towers on Mahina. But she reacted too late to use gravity to avoid it. She touched back on the girder a half step back from it, but her momentum carried her into the net. Her cropped hair lifted straight out. Searing pain scampered along her nerves for an instant, as she smelled the familiar ozone sizzle. Electrocuted, her heart and lungs stopped. And she began to fall.

  “Dammit!” Cope yelled. Opting to fall with her, he still had the problem that she was touching the electric fence, a broad column reaching up from the ground. He hooked a toe-kick to her hip. Then he reached the bubble to knock her again. Shadowy lizard toes within splayed in terror, but the Saggy bubble stuff made a phenomenal insulator. That finally got her unplugged electrically. He secured her around the chest and was able to slow their fall.

  But he couldn’t cancel it. The planet’s gravity was too high, a personal generator too weak, to carry them both to the dome roof. “Kassidy!” he yelled. But by now, of course, they’d left her far above.

  Or not. “Coming!” Kassidy cried.

  Momentarily arrested, Cope stared at the sight. The acrobat was still adjusting her gravity as she sailed toward him slightly sideways. Oh, yeah. She’d been twenty meters away when Sass fell. Cope marveled at her skill to figure out the gravity vectors on the fly like that.

  But the ground was coming up awfully fast. “Hurry?”

  The starlet barreled into him a mere two meters from the ground, awfully close for comfort. But between the two of them, they managed to stumble to a soft landing on a grassy field. Greenhouses ended a few hundred meters away. They stood in the grazing interior of Benelux.

  They were surrounded by the electric fence, now contracting into a dome above them, only a few meters across. Nice touch, but unnecessary, Cope thought. He lay Sass on the ground. No heart beat. He pounded the center of her chest, then blew some air into her lungs, and repeated. He didn’t sweat the technique, just credible enough for onlookers to believe he saved her with ordinary CPR.

  She obligingly gasped and coughed, while he checked her generator. The gizmo was well and truly fried, and probably her comms, too. Dumbass. “You need anything?”

  Not waiting for an answer, he stood, dusting off his pants, then picked up his ball of geckos again. He wondered if it wouldn’t be kinder to just free them here. Perhaps when they crossed back into the city. Sass rolled onto her stomach, trying to get hands and knees under herself. He added a boot toe to help lift her stomach up, and reached down a hand to haul on her arm. Kassidy was slightly more supportive on the other side.

  A young wizard stood outside their circle, arms crossed. Four beefy young bell-hop soldiers bore the heavy force field projectors for him, but the wizard clearly controlled it. He waited while the prisoners regained their composure. Then he closed the electric fence even tighter around them, only an arm’s length away. He snapped for their attention, then pointed toward the city wall. Deutschland lay thataway.

  And the electric cage began creeping toward it. Perforce, Cope stepped along with it. Once they demonstrated cooperation, their captor relaxed the fence outward again. He increased the pace but granted them more margin for error. Cope appreciated that. He was getting tired. And the last thing he needed was to fry any more of their comms and gadgets.

  To Schauble it would be. Cope sorely doubted the big boss wizard had a sense of humor. No one else in Cantons seemed to.

  38

  “Good to see you!” Ben cried, sliding into the gunner’s seat of his shuttle beside Zan. The rest of his party settled in behind him, tired and footsore.

  Escaping Hellada wasn’t all that difficult, but they started out tired when they ran from the wizard Adamos. Ben opted for southeast, a mere three klick stroll. The small-town ‘city’ had no guards. Soon they reached a wall. The wall had a window. They had to break the window, but Saggy bubble-stuff served as an emergency airlock to limit their vandalism.

  From there, Ben considered stealth a moot point. He kept the group strolling southeast, but called Zan in to pick them up within sight of the walls. No one manned Hellada’s walls, anyway. And he’d admitted to Adamos that they were from off-world. The small shuttle would tend to corroborate his story without appearing threatening.

  “Any word from Sass?” Ben inquired, as Zan lifted the shuttle and banked south, to loop around toward Prosper out of view of other cities.

  “Captured. All three.”

  Ben blinked. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  Zan shot him a sour look.

  “OK, not a lot I could have done about it. Is someone doing something about it?”

  “I anticipate your creativity, sar.”

  “Mouthy,” Ben noted.

  The Denali hunter smirked, then launched into his situation report. Cope had found a routing node of the Cantons comms network, and a passel of net addresses. These were passed upstairs to Nico on Thrive, to see what he could do with them, along with data dumps from both of Ben’s laptops. No word back about cracking into the planet’s comms net. Presumably Nico was asleep, given the hour. Hugo and the science team kept themselves amused, but Zan deferred to Eli to report on that. Abel wanted to throttle the Sanctuary envoys on Cupid, and the boy duo were hiding something on a computer. Abel suspected a porn VR game.

  By now they were clamping onto Prosper’s shuttle port. Ben detailed Elise to take charge of Milo and the bunnies. He appointed Remi acting chief engineer until they recovered Cope. First mate Clay needed to hustle their personnel and camp outbuildings and equipment on board. The captain wanted his ship ready to fly.

  Ben boiled into Prosper’s hold first. He trotted through for the bridge, and opened comms. “Abel? Ben.”

  “Ben! What time is it?” Abel replied groggily. They’d adjusted the little fleet’s operations clocks to their best guess of Cantons time. By now it was 02:00 or so.

  “Time to wake up. Any surveillance on Sass’s party?”

  “Lost them hours ago. Now I’m on the far side of the planet.” They’d dropped a few simple geosynchronous comms buoys to stay in touch regardless of where Thrive and Cupid were in orbit. But those didn’t support remote viewing, only signal forwarding.

  Abel retrieved his last footage of Sass’s party and played it for him. Zan caught up and took the gunner’s seat. He cued up some highlights of the last drone video
broadcast from Kassidy, and the messages from Sass and Cope. The captain reviewed all this in increasing dismay.

  They had no idea where in Deutschland his husband had been taken, with Sass and Kassidy. “OK, thank you. Get me crewman Nico.”

  In a few minutes, his groggy teen came on the ‘windscreen’ display of the bridge. “Hey, Dad!”

  “Captain,” Ben corrected. “Crewman, any progress cracking into the local comms?”

  “Um, let me check.” Nico blanked the screen. “Um.”

  “Um what, crewman.”

  “Um, uh-oh.”

  “Crewman, you’re about to lose your pay for the voyage.”

  “I, Dad, sar, don’t get mad, but…”

  Ben waited, tapping a finger on his thigh where the kid wouldn’t hear it. Pushing Nico was so unrewarding. Their eldest was a sweet kid, and a brilliant one. But pressure just made him stammer and get flustered.

  “I didn’t hack the comms, no,” Nico admitted slowly. “But Bloki did.”

  Ben froze. “Bloki?”

  “He’s a person, Dad! A sentient being anyway. And he’s so lonely back on Sanctuary.”

  “You smuggled Loki onto Sass’s ship?”

  “Not all of him, and he’s not Loki, really. He’s a limited instance of Loki. I call him Bloki –”

  “Grounded for life,” Ben noted. “Moving on. You have comms with the planet?”

  “But that’s the point, Dad. I don’t! You don’t either. But Bloki does. I think. Here, you talk to him.”

  Bloki’s visage appeared on the display, recognizable from Loki but modernized and cured of yeast leprosy. “Howdy, partner! No call to be mean to my pal Nico.”

  “I am working a situation,” Ben replied coldly. “My husband, Sass, and Kassidy have been taken hostage, possibly by –”

  “Schauble, in Deutschland. Yeah, I know that.”