by Ginger Booth
The banks still featured a logjam of downed trees, this time backed by dead standing trees. “We could clear all that out and have a beach to park ships on,” Sass suggested.
Ben shook his head and pointed to a shore where healthy trees grew within inches of the water. “That side.”
He had a point, Sass conceded. Clay shifted the shuttle over thataway. The deep headland and soaring trees cut into the pretty view, but mountains and glacier were still quite visible above them. And nothing knocked trees over here, a definite plus.
Clay brought the shuttle down to hover a meter above the water. “Mind if I jump out for a swim?” He flashed a grin back at Sass. “I promise to collect Eli’s sample.”
Sass beamed back at him. She was right. Clay had instantly fallen in love with Sylvan too. “Aw, I wanted to help Eli.”
“Three can fit in the lock.” Ben rose to swap into Clay’s pilot seat, as the two in front rose, Eli clutching his instrument bag. “Though I’d love to chat with Sass.”
She planned to stay a year, maybe a long lifetime. She nodded for the pair to go ahead, and she’d stay here.
Ben waited until they sealed the lock. “I want you to pull out of here, Sass. This is doomed. This planet will swallow everything Denali can give, and ruin them.”
“Did you feel this way before we came?”
He tilted his head, then gazed out at the far vista. “I heard both sides. And chose to remain neutral. I wanted to see it. I mean, a planet good as Earth, fresh and new and clean. How tempting is that? But Sylvan isn’t that. If they won’t terraform, this place is a death trap. Mahina was a lifeless rock, but at least we could turn it into whatever we wanted. Think of what Mahina could be with the Denali, too. We were underpopulated, too much to do. Sass, three hundred, with our best people and equipment, couldn’t pitch a safe tent in a week. What does that tell you?”
“Twelve thousand dead to found Denali Prime,” Sass reminded him. “Ben, you’re not giving it a chance. Yeah, there are dangers.”
“I don’t want to leave you here. I don’t want to leave them here. My neutrality bubble burst. This is wrong, Sass. You, Clay, Eli, Zan, our son. Three hundred crazy Denali idealists, well, maybe it’s none of my business if they want to squander their lives and fortunes. But I care about you.”
“Back off, buddy,” Cope murmured. “Coming on a little strong.”
Ben sighed, and slumped against the bulkhead, sideways in his seat. “OK. Why do you want to stay?”
Sass breathed deep, and let it out, trying to think how to explain. “It’s so beautiful, Ben. It’s a dream come true. On the practical side, I don’t agree that we’ve done so badly. Cope has been a huge help –”
“My husband does speak to me.”
“Ben,” Cope growled again. Ben conceded the point with an open-handed wave.
Sass tried to explain this more business-like, but her truth was all feelings. “Our first few days were disastrous, true. But we didn’t realize the hunters were under-trained.”
Ben nodded. “You were right on that. Tedious as hell, training all of them in my hold. But it needed to be done. And they learned.”
“Of course they did. These are Denali’s best and brightest. They were mistreated in the rings and grew surly. As settlers, we know what it’s like to be second-class citizens. Smart and talented and treated like garbage. That’s what I was given. But they weren’t that way when they left Denali. We gave them a little respect and they blossomed. These are superb people they sent, Ben, their world’s hope.”
The lead captain nodded slowly.
“But it’s a big problem. It’s hard. It’ll take all we’ve got. Like you say.”
Cope murmured, “We have to let Nico go, buddy.”
Sass’s eyes flew wide. This wasn’t about Ben disapproving of the job she’d done.
“Cope, I won’t be in a position to drop everything and come back at the drop of a hat. If I’m loading Hopeful for a run from Sanctuary to Mahina, I have to deliver those people to Mahina. Same for Denali. Then get the fuel together. Their lifeline could be a week long, or more.”
“Lot can happen in a week,” Cope allowed.
Sass murmured, “I’ll protect Nico with my life. All of these people. You know that.”
“I do know that.” He shook his head at the cold mountains and ice. “I’m not OK with it.”
“A month –”
“No more extensions. I agreed to one more week. Then I leave. With the strongest possible recommendation that all of you leave with me, and give up on this benighted world.” Ben’s mouth set in bitter lines. “We have so little margin for error. And to waste it on what, a pretty view? This planet will eat children and give nothing back. How long did it take for humans to get ahead on Earth? A hundred million years? At least there we could breathe the air!”
“OK,” Sass agreed. “Understood. But please don’t hold it against us that we won’t give up without trying.”
“Sass, I am not angry at you! You’ve done brilliantly! So has Cope, all of you. I don’t want to lose you. When you have so much to give on the living worlds. I care about you!”
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Cope reached forward with his long arm and squeezed Ben’s shoulder. “I should stay on Thrive. For now. Until you’ve got a bio-lock on Merchant. I got work to do. Give them the best shot I can.”
“You’re welcome to stay on Thrive, too, Ben,” Sass invited.
“Can’t sit on the fence, buddy,” Cope suggested. “Just earns you a stake up the ass.”
“Fine.” But Ben’s gritted concession lacked agreement. He’d already written off Sylvan, Sass could tell. But at least he isn’t blaming me. His mind was firmly on how to ensure them a lifeline. She felt better for having talked.
She saw droplets spray past the viewscreen. She craned her neck. Did he –?
“Man overboard,” Eli reported calmly from the lock. “Intentional.”
Sass brought another camera onto the screen. The rat! Clay was taking his first backstroke in the gorgeous lake without her. Then he flipped forward to gaze into the depths. “Mind if I…?”
Ben flashed a grin. “I’ll join you!”
“Me, three!” Cope chimed in.
Soon the four of them were bobbing in the icy water, the nervous botanist minding the shuttle as their lifeline. Sass only wished she could dive. But her helmet rode higher than her limbs, as though they swam in the Dead Sea salt grotto back on Denali at Waterfalls. Next time, she promised the depths. There was life down there, too, some waving plants and rare flashes of fish-shaped creatures. With water so clean and clear and cold, it was hard to tell how deep they were.
She drank up beauty and never wanted their splashing fun to end. She and Ben were OK with each other again.
17
“Sorry, Nico’s working outside,” Sass excused to the visiting Ben on their return from the lake. “Probably all day. But Floki’s here, I bet. Yeah, in here.”
“We like the boyfriend,” Cope muttered. “More all the time.”
Ben chuckled at him soundlessly before he turned the corner into the galley. “Hey, Floki! Whatcha watching?” Ben greeted the emu-AI. Eli took one look, then swerved to practically glue his eyeballs onto the huge crew display at the foot of the dining table.
The emu whirled and recoiled his sinuous neck in an S-shape. “Um.”
Sass stepped up behind him and laid her check along that neck, stroking it. “Spill it, crewman.”
“One of the hunters got a dot-camera on a smurf,” Floki stuttered out.
“He what?” Sass growled.
“She!” Tikki called from behind the kitchen island. “Nut job.”
Eli considered other people’s motives their own problem. “How did she attach it to the smurf?”
“There was a harness…” Floki lidded his eyes and averted his beak.
Cope suggested, “And a crew emu who made the harness for her.”
&
nbsp; In a rush, Floki blurted, “I didn’t think it through. Should I have dissuaded her?”
“Yes!” Everyone present chorused emphatically.
“Um, it’s so nice to see you again, Captain Acosta,” the emu attempted. “Did you have a pleasant trip down from orbit?”
Ben smiled crookedly. “A bit bumpy. So I hear you and my son are taking good care of – Rego hell, what is that?”
“We call it a deer,” Eli breathed, in rapture. “This is brilliant. So who’s dominant? Smurf. I thought so!”
Sass opined, “Foolhardy, is the word you were looking for, Eli. Also misaligned with our current priorities.”
“Aye, sar!” Floki attempted. “I should go –”
She hung onto his back. “You’ll stay right here, crewman. Eli, why brilliant?”
He stepped back to regard the full view, his attention only half on her, or less. “I suspect the smurfs are omnivores like us. From this, we see what they eat.”
Ben helped himself to a seat on the table. “We care why?”
“Because we found Earth-compatible amino acids in their muscle tissue, and lipids.”
From the galley, Tikki translated, “We can eat their meat and blubber. If I can figure out how to cook it.”
Eli nodded emphatically. “It’s very exciting.”
Sass was somewhat mollified. The hunters were under orders to apply nose to grindstone until they accomplished housing. The naturalist studies dangled before them like a promised treat after hard labor. But the science team was no part of the housing agenda. The colonists needed every little bit they could learn about this world ASAP.
On the other hand, edible flesh was news to her, and it shouldn’t have been. “Deer meat? Or smurf?” She wandered to the galley to see the slabs Tikki dolefully contemplated.
She sniffed it, first meat, then fat. The fat smelled mostly like clean water. She wrinkled her nose at the meat, a gamy stench with coppery rusty overtones of blood. The geisha-turned-housekeeper handed her a couple thin strips of crisp fried pink on a plate.
“Just a nibble,” he warned, at the same instant she bit into half of it. “I meant that for everyone to try. That’s fried, slivered deer blubber.”
Sass nodded. “Bacon. Tastes a little off.”
“Really?” Clay hastened to her side to claim the second strip. “Mm! Like fresh bacon, no nitrates or smoking.”
“Leave it to you to know that,” Sass muttered. “Got any more?”
“Ah, that was the sample I hoped you’d… I’ll make more.” Tikki sighed and got busy with a razor-sharp knife, paring off thin slices. “I don’t have a stomachache yet. And Tikka Gena said it passed analysis. She didn’t eat any, of course.”
The physiologist was a vegan – as were many of the indoor-type Denali. Tikki himself seemed to prefer printed soy equivalents rather than real meat, though he appeared vegetarian, not vegan. Neither mentioned any religious convictions, simply passed on the meat.
“The point, Sass,” Eli continued, “is that if we can eat their flesh – potentially anyway – we might be able to eat the plants they eat, too. A hunter’s suggestion for decoding the food web most efficiently. Nora was it?”
Floki averted his beak. Tikki supplied the, “Yeah.”
“Though not deer,” Eli mused. “Because they eat trees. We don’t. Tracking a smurf was clever. Is that…” He peered closer. “These red swollen parts of those twigs. He’s eating them, maybe like berries. I need a sample of that.”
Sass begged, “Eli, please let the hunters focus on their tent platforms. They’re about to spend the night on Sardine, with no shower before bed.”
“Hopeful,” Ben corrected her on automatic. “So is this what you do these days, Floki? Smurf surveillance?”
“Ah…no. I’m taking a break from spacesuit cleaning and repair. And a broken power generator. They take gear outside. It comes back broken. I fix it. But I’m helping Kassidy chronicle the founding of Sylvan!”
“He’s doing an excellent job on the filming, Ben,” Sass encouraged. “Kassidy is jealous because he’s so much quicker at editing.”
“Especially adjusting soundtracks,” Floki confided. “She splices the video and soundtracks together. That’s just silly. I splice and smooth the visual, then clean and apply voiceover. Um, after she decides which of my favorite footage is any good.”
Cope encouraged, “She says your eye is getting better too, Floki. Don’t psych yourself out. Kassidy’s been doing this for decades. Can’t expect to catch up to her in weeks. But you’ll be lead film-maker once she’s gone.”
The cook supplied, “Actually, there’s a cosmo who does that. Just arrived on Hopeful.”
Sass noted the suck-up didn’t call the ship Sardine in front of Ben. She also noted the frying blubber gave off an acrid smoke. “Maybe turn the heat down, and turn on the vent.” She pointed, then gave up and came around the island to demonstrate. The vegetarian cook rarely used the stovetop, and never for frying bacon. But there was a skunky component to this fat, similar to the meat. Burning fat seemed to release its aroma.
“Tikki,” she murmured, “some reason you’re discouraging Floki? Because don’t.”
“Aye, sar.”
“He’s our most junior crewman, and he’s trying ever so hard.”
“Understood, sar.”
“Thank you, housekeeper, carry on. At lower heat.” She flashed him a smile. “Now what have you tried with this meat?”
“Um, not to vomit on it?”
She laughed. “Good start!”
“It’s supposed to be part edible, part not. Tikka Gena thinks there’s some way to prepare it that will neutralize the toxins and the smell, and make the proteins digestible. She asked me to just ‘cook it every different way’ and she’d test the results.”
“I’m guessing Tikka Gena never cooked meat in her life.”
“Oh, I can guarantee that,” the cook agreed. “How many ways are there to cook meat?”
“Clay?” He’d wandered back to the smurf grazing its way through a lazy afternoon in the woods. She beckoned him to the kitchen, and recapped the challenge.
“Eli? Should I be concerned about parasites?” He called over. “In the meat.”
“Uh, doesn’t matter,” Eli decided. “If you eat it raw, you’ll be miserable. I assume thorough cooking will kill the microbes as well. Of course, you send it for lab testing before taste testing.”
Sass left gourmet Clay to brainstorm cooking options with Tikki. She rejoined the smurf voyeurs. Like a good captain, Ben elicited Floki’s latest technical challenges and how he’d solved them, quick to praise and loath to find fault. Unlike Sass, Ben had an engineering degree, and understood more of the emu problems.
“– Regardless, you’d want to test the generator core first,” he suggested. “Because the rest is easy to replace if you can’t rebuild it. If the core is toast, the rest is irrelevant.”
“True,” Cope conceded. “But we let him start on the easier stuff.”
“Ah! Gotcha. So how is shipboard life?” Ben invited. “Oh! I should mention. You are welcome to bail on this expedition and return to Mahina with me. Whether Nico comes home or not. Just wanted to take this opportunity to mention that when he’s not around.”
Sass shook her head in wonder at how expressive that artificial emu face was. Floki’s eyes went round, and his eyebrows rose in dismay. “No poaching, Ben. Besides, where would he go?” The AI-cum-emu was technically only present in the Aloha system in custody of Nico or Hugo Silva, an AI specialist from Sanctuary.
Ben shrugged. “Good crewman. Welcome to stay on my ship, if the other options aren’t tenable. You’ve never even met your…grandfather? How do you see Loki?” The AI Loki, ‘Sanctuary Control,’ ran the colony plus the asteroid belt mining and shipyard facilities. Floki was brilliant compared to a human, but compared to the powerful immensity of Loki, he was a college student’s thesis project in a small ambulatory chassis.
; “I’m not like Loki,” Floki confirmed her thoughts. “I mean, I could talk to him over a video call.” His sideways eyes suggested the prospect scared him.
Ben assured him, “Even if you went to Sanctuary with us, you don’t need to speak with Loki if you don’t want to. Or try it asynchronously. Record a message, edit, send. Slow and easy, less confrontational. But you’re right, Merchant and Hopeful are headed for Sanctuary next. That’ll be the last load of the Ganymede contingent.”
He aimed the final comment toward Sass, who’d flown the first 800 from Sanctuary, on the voyage that proved 500 was the maximum for Hopeful planet to planet. The full 800 was only feasible from planet to orbital ship for immediate offload. And they had a ship big enough, the one that brought the Martians to Sanctuary. But their warp gate was too small for it. And absolutely no one volunteered to warp travel the distance the bad old way Sass used to reach Sanctuary – 3 years out of one system and into the next, losing 8 years objective in the middle in a flash to the warp jump. That old warp was a potent disincentive to interstellar exploration.
Or rather, it might have been lovely, if only humanity could afford to pursue the joy of discovery well-funded, instead of fleeing for their lives on a shoestring. When Earth failed, the collapse snowballed quick. Too many people, and few wanted to die.
“Thank you, Captain Acosta,” Floki said quietly. “But I could never leave Nico. I love your son. And I’m excited to be here! I wish I worked outside more. But I’m a little fragile compared to the hunters.”
Ben laughed out loud. “You and me both. Those bruisers intimidate me. How about you, Tikki? You and Kaol still sold on this venture?”
“Poaching!” Sass objected, and shoved him.
The fleet captain batted his eyelashes at her. “Personnel development.” They all worked for him, after all. Some days he chose to make a point of it. Today was clearly that kind of day.
Tikki cheerfully returned, “I think this expedition is the worst idea Denali ever had. And this planet will destroy my people. I say this as a patriot. We’re better off in the rings.” He paused thoughtfully, then shook his head. “Though I’m glad Sass happened to our hunters. I didn’t know they worked in space without proper training. Four of them who died worked the same mining skiffs as Kaol. Could have been him, you know?”