by Ginger Booth
Ben frowned. “You made that difference for a lot of geisha on MO. Hell, I gave Kaol pointers on his pressure suit skills one time when you worked for me on the Prosper refit.”
“Thank you.” The slender man swallowed and sighed. “I’m here until I convince them to abandon the Sylvan money-pit. Because I care.”
Ben nodded respect. Then he claimed a third of the display to check on the Hopeful bio-locks. “That’s never going to latch on right.”
Sass pointedly offered, “And Darren and Nico and the Denali technicians will figure that out. Eventually. They’re staying. You two are leaving.”
Ben conceded the point and joined Cope to lean against the bulkhead for a low-voiced consultation, until they nodded agreement. “Headed out to play, Sass. See you at dinner!”
“Where you will not poach,” Sass growled.
“He’s testing their resolve,” Clay murmured to her. “Let it go.”
Ben chuckled and waved farewell.
The pair of them didn’t make it in by dinner, or even by nightfall. But they did accomplish the first boards out of the sawmill, once Darren and Nico quit for the night on the bio-locks. No question, more hands could really turn this colony around.
Sass, Clay, and Tikki’s first round of deer meat experiments rated zero for ten treatments – every single dish would make the eater sick as a dog. Half the people who tried the bacon later developed severe gut distress as well, and were iffy on the taste or smell. Though Clay improved that substantially with some maple and smoke flavorings.
Everyone hailed the bacon drippings as delicious for frying potatoes and printed eggs.
Floki’s smurf surveillance revealed a half dozen plant foods worth testing.
And Sass happily had her playmate back at bedtime. A banner day for Sylvan.
18
Late at night, when all was quiet on Thrive, four Denali whispered through the comms network, on a channel seldom used. They went by their code names.
Beta opened the meeting. “I say we lay off the sabotage until Ben Acosta is gone.”
“What?” Delta retorted. “Once he leaves, we could be stuck here a year! We need to pick up the pace, persuade Tarana to abandon Sylvan this week. Before our ride home is gone.”
“No. He has to leave,” Beta insisted. “Think. A quick knee-jerk reaction, exiting Sylvan in under a month, that’s not good enough. Bad enough. Whatever.”
“Beta’s right,” Gamma urged. “If we leave too fast, Tarana might bail for the wrong reasons. Decide we need even more people, more equipment. This damned planet is already bleeding us dry. We need a resounding, convincing, utter failure. So Denali forswears this damned plan. And stops taxing the indentures to death.”
Thrive Spaceways garnished 10% of worker wages, for however long it took them to pay off their passage from Denali to Mahina space, usually a couple years. That was fair enough. But then Denali taxed the remainder to fund the Sylvan expedition. The beleaguered indentures barely managed to cover room and board.
Alpha listened to the arguments. “OK, no more sabotage. But Beta, this planet throws enough pterodactyls at us without help.”
Beta sighed. “If we need to make it worse, we will.”
Gamma concurred. “Nothing less than catastrophe will ax this folly. Permanently. We’re saving Denali. Our people and culture anyway. Mahina is our best hope.”
“I’d rather live,” Delta differed softly. “But alright. I agree.”
“Unanimous,” Alpha ruled. “All sabotage on hold. Make sure your cells comply.”
Four days later, Sass straightened with a sigh. She and Eli stood outdoors by a line of thigh-high tree shoots. Or rather, they attempted to figure out how many lines of shoots were caused by how many root systems.
She gazed around the settlement again. Yesterday was their warmest day yet here, a balmy 80 degrees. Surrounded by Denali, the captain regressed to thinking in the Fahrenheit of her youth. Little nubbins to ankle height saplings sprouted everywhere. At least, she assumed they were saplings. They clearly needed the moat and raised platforms, plus frequent mowing.
By now, those platforms were starting to rise, two and a half meters off the ground for ease of access to weed below. Four more days of wood production had only provided a single bank yet, good to sleep fifty people laid like sardines. Which was an improvement over sleeping in Sardine.
But Darren had several saws going now, and teams out cutting trees. And the Denali cosmos proved far more capable at building than the hunters. They might make the deadline in time, to get everyone off the high-capacity shuttle and safely above ground. And the containers.
No, there wasn’t a snowball’s chance on Denali they’d even manage to unpack before Ben’s deadline.
“Three species,” Eli decided. “Help me pull this one up. Temperatures above 20 seem to cause a growth spurt.” Sass mentally switched units back to metric. “Or possibly 25. That might be a way to distinguish species. How much they react to the same temperature rise.”
These sprouts looked a lot alike until they unfurled some true leaves. They hadn’t been on this planet long enough to see those, though Eli kept a few specimens in his taped-off science plot for observation.
“Or this side of the hill gets more sun,” Sass suggested gently. “Check the soil temperature. It won’t match.”
He looked up ruefully. This side of the hill did in fact get more perpendicular sunlight. “Oh. Stupid of me.”
“No,” Sass replied. “Some things are only obvious if you live them.” Despite a lifetime studying botany, Eli’s experience with real forests could be measured in weeks. And his tree research was mostly geared toward creating useful food and air-scrubbing variants, able to thrive in Mahina’s weird sun cycle, rather than studying the wild types. Forest trees didn’t behave like orchard species, coddled and bred over millennia.
Her comms interrupted. She raised a hand to cut off conversation with Eli. “Sass. Hey, Ben, what’s up?”
“Absolutely nothing. I’m bored.”
Sass rolled her eyes in silence. Ben could get off his ship and help the settlers build. He could construct a bio-lock for his ship Merchant Thrive – he’d done it before. He chose to do neither.
“I’m bored and I’m going to fly away to scout. Come with me. Bring the science team, if you can. Then we’ll take Merchant. If they’re staying here, we can just take the shuttle.”
Sass sighed loudly this time. “Ben, there is so much to –”
“It’s not yours to do, Sass,” he interrupted her. “Actually, Tarana’s bending my ear. And Benek. And Hadron.” That was three Selectmen out of four. “I’ll summarize. They want you to back off. This is their show. They make decisions, they issue orders. Tarana even suggested perhaps I should take you with me when I leave.”
“She’s insane!”
“No, merely insisting that if you stay, you work for her. They’re trying to bring you to heel. But screw them. I want to look around the pretty-pretty world. Scout for resources. Go fishing. Check out the mountains and the glacier close up. Come with me. Take a break. If you stay, you’re on duty for a year. Play hooky with me first.”
“Huh. I don’t know if Clay –”
“I asked Clay and Cope. They choose to stay here. Just you and me, girlfriend. And whoever Eli wants to send. Zelda and Porter, maybe?”
In the event, Eli chose to send himself plus Zelda. Their agronomist Porter hoped to transplant wild ‘berries’ and other smurf edibles to his test plot. Tikka Gena also begged off, feeling duty bound to stay and render first aid to her people’s amateur construction crews. Sass noted Kassidy felt no such compunction. She and Teke had already transferred onto Merchant, ready to go as soon as possible.
She arranged all this while Eli finished figuring out the case of the overlarge sprouts.
“These aren’t root sprouts,” he said sadly. “Well, the moat helps. Partially.”
“Great. Shall I dig it deeper?”
He shook his head. “We’ll still need to cut saplings all summer. However long that lasts.”
In fact, it was unclear whether today qualified as spring or summer. They were still a few days shy of the closest approach of the planet to its star. But whether that counted as the beginning of the hot season as the solstice presaged on Earth, or the peak as on Denali, remained to be seen. Either way, Sass felt the urge to get food planted, that time was running out. But safe housing and storage came first, and progressed as fast as they could. Only on sound foundations would they erect the hydroponic gardens.
Suddenly she decided Ben was right. “Leave it, Eli. The Denali can figure this out as well as we can. It’s their world. Let’s fly.”
By late morning, Ben brought Merchant Thrive to hover a dozen meters above the stunningly white expanse of the ice cap, 30 km in from the calving glaciers as they flowed down into the mountains, and frozen to the north pole and beyond.
His theme for today was to follow the water, the foundation of Earth-style life.
“I don’t dare put down,” he murmured to Sass in the gunner’s seat. “Looks like the temperature is slightly above freezing.”
As though to illustrate, to their left lay a crevice 20 meters wide, brimming with crystalline turquoise waters. Pits and fissures and gravel peppered the ice surface, and a nearby crag of rock the size of a house. Like an iceberg, they couldn’t tell whether this was the tip of a mountain or a submerged boulder being dragged along by the geologic time progress of this ice to the melted realms below. The frozen sheet stretched a good quarter kilometer above the mountain chain at its base, several kilometers above sea level.
But Eli could worry about the science stuff. “Shall we take a walk?” He grinned challenge at Sass, who gazed rapt at the alien, hostile landscape, drinking in its grandeur.
“Let’s!”
They left the bridge in the competent hands of Judge, Ben’s third officer, and exited on the shuttle for its portable bio-lock capacity. Even the shuttle he wouldn’t risk parking. They hopped down to a rise on the ice on their gravity generators. Ben tried 1g, normal Earth gravity for a few steps, but found he sunk in slush a few centimeters that way. So he settled on Mahina-normal 1/6th gravity, and walked softly where no man was meant to go.
The vault of cloudless blue-purple stretched above, pale to white around the edges, where he couldn’t tell ice from sky, then deepened high above. His helmet automatically darkened to cut the blinding glare of sun on snow.
Eli mused, “If we could darken this white albedo, we could probably extend the living latitudes.”
“Eli you Philistine,” Kassidy countered, “appreciate the beauty that’s here! I’m going to hop over that crevice for a better shot.”
“Veto,” Sass growled at her. “Kassidy, if you want a wide shot, hop back on the shuttle. This is our personal experience time.”
Ben agreed with Sass, but didn’t bother to say so. He crept carefully toward the crevice, well away from its edge, and gazed into its depths. Strange how its colors reminded him of a tropical paradise on Earth, inviting warm waters over white sand beaches. But no life could live in this, and it was likely only liquid for a day. Or perhaps it drained through some crack below, and flowed into the biome around the settlement.
For such a cruel landscape, the pure colors took his breath away.
Beside him, Sass helped Eli rig a pole to sample the glacier melt. Kassidy and her camera drones bounded away to clamber onto the boulder. But Ben stood still and drank it all in. I will not walk this way again. The boy from the boring dusty settler ville of Poldark felt it an enormous privilege to stand here even once. Kassidy would capture the pictures.
He turned his comms channels to emergency interrupt only, and instead listened to the wind outside his helmet. The breeze was stiff up here, lightly keening. He turned based on its song, and gazed downwind to the east. Yes, these were the prevailing winds today, but not normally. Long frozen waves spoke of storms blowing down from the north. He risked snapping off his gravity for a moment, to be one with Sylvan and its song. He closed his eyes and fancied he felt the world turn beneath him.
Did the world twitch?
He frowned and opened his eyes to glance at his feet. He’d sunk to his ankles already. Sighing, he tuned his gravity back to his homeworld normal and stepped away from the crevice.
“Any more to see here?” he asked his team, restoring his comms. “I’m ready to buzz a calving glacier, or set off an avalanche. Let’s check out where the ice sheet meets the living land.”
“Yes!” Kassidy exulted. She leapt first back onto the shuttle. Ben and Sass took Eli’s gear, as the scientist was far less adept at leaping into the sky than they were. But Kassidy easily caught him and laughingly stuffed him into the lock. Then Sass jumped up with the pole and tools. Last, Ben took a slow look around, and jumped up with the heavy sample jars of glacier melt, easily catching the grab bar of the shuttle without help from the women.
“I’m glad I lived to see this,” he murmured, as he closed the outer lock door.
“Tempted to stay?” his old mentor teased.
He chuckled. “No.” Ben Acosta’s heart lay in the crystalline gleaming rings of the gas giant Pono, its tiger stripes banded and swirled by perpetual storms. Sylvan is no home of mine. Pretty sightseeing, though. He could imagine this as an exotic tourist destination for the fabulously wealthy. Danger sports on scenic Sylvan! Too bad no one was that rich. Except perhaps a frustrated lonely AI on Sanctuary.
19
Like Ben, Sass was drunk on beauty. He hovered Merchant before a glacier cliff face, rising straight up from the northern end of the same melt lake they swam in when he arrived. Unimaginable volumes of water poured out the base, the middle, waterfalls she’d never seen the like of before, cascades of rainbows vivid against the blue-white ice. Below lay a cauldron of churning white over indigo depths.
Suddenly Merchant swerved and swooped away. “Calving,” Ben reported shortly. His piloting seemed effortless, his ship an extension of his muscular arms, tan against his snowy white T-shirt. They’d slipped off the tops of their p-suits to relax. The boy she once coaxed past his fears was long gone, the man in his prime at ease and assured.
She reset her side of the ‘windscreen’ to continue displaying the glacier, the ship AI swapping cameras out for her. An immense wall of ice was indeed sloughing off the curved glacier front, scored by many more collapses like a set of gleaming shark teeth. She panned the view down to see the newborn bobbing icebergs. “Follow one?”
Having brought his ship around to face the cliff again from a more cautious distance, Ben cocked his head. “Well, trace their path, anyway.” He stared at the newly rearranged cataracts of pouring melt a moment longer. “Eli, how much water is that?”
Over the comms, Eli replied, “About 200,000 cubic meters per second. That’s more than the greatest rivers on Earth – the Amazon, the Nile. I mean, it’s about as much as the Amazon, but this is only one source flowing into the lake. The mountains drain into it, too.”
“That’s amazing,” Sass murmured. “The Amazon was greater than the Mississippi that drained my continent, wasn’t it?”
“Y-yes,” Eli confirmed, probably looking it up. “Yeah, this one lake drains more fresh water than Earth had altogether, I think.”
“Huh,” Ben breathed. “Seen enough, Eli?”
“Readings out the wazoo, yes! Very helpful.”
“We thought maybe the mountains,” Sass suggested. “If we place a colony above the tree line, we’d have less effort fighting off the forest and the wildlife.”
“Worth a shot,” Ben allowed. He crept away from the glacier, and headed for the western mountains. “Any particular mountain in mind?”
Sass sighed. “We hadn’t scouted. Under a time crunch.”
He let that go with a raised eyebrow.
“We have a mountain of interest,” Eli piped up. “Suspected iron deposits. Marked.”
> Ben lazily headed thataway, while Sass watched camera views of the vast lake below, its icebergs growing tiny as the lead captain laid on altitude. Soon Merchant slowed to a hover, and she turned her attention to the view at hand.
On an impossibly steep mountain cliff, they still couldn’t see any bare rock. “Remarkably persistent, these trees.”
“Yeah,” Ben said thoughtfully. “We could burn it. But no telling how far the fire would spread in the summer heat.”
Sass checked the external temperature – 37° F, or 3° C. Balmy. “Sorry, gonna give it a miss, Eli. Just keep marking metal deposits.”
“Understood.”
“So far your proven reserves are none whatsoever?” Ben verified.
“Yeah.” She looked up as they approached the tree line on a smaller, less steep mountain. Except there was no tree line. Ben hovered over the southern-facing slope. Dark hemlock-alikes marched straight into the snow pack, thinning into nicely spaced Christmas-tree tips before the white banks swallowed them whole. “Maybe not this far north for the tree line idea.”
Ben laughed. “Alright. Next on my agenda is fishing. Downriver, I think. We already swam in the lake.” He banked around to the southern end of the vast melt lake to pick up the huge river that flowed by the settlement.
“We originally tried the settlement there, but it was boggy. Sodden ground, no drainage.” Sass marked the location for Ben. He flew over the blackened scar on the land, already thick with sprouts taller than her. “Wow. This biome is resilient.”
Eli offered, “Several rivers drain that lake, but this is the biggest. My numbers don’t balance. More water seems to flow into the lake than out. I think half the water is flowing underground. Or through the ground.”