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

by Ginger Booth

  The press of bodies receded, so she could see what they battled more clearly. Like Earth crocodiles, it masqueraded as a floating log fairly well, crossed with a slender walrus, a member of the blubber-coat animal family, like the smurfs and deer and mermaid. Also like a crocodile, the beast featured a muscular tail, and a long and toothy mouth, plus four stunted legs with claws. It wasn’t moving.

  “Med evac,” Zan requested. He stood a few meters away from the crocodile, waving his arms. A hunter sat at his feet, and another squatted to attend to her. “Nora.”

  “Mention that first, Zan!” Sass barked at him.

  “Her suit’s torn. Small gash.” But they’d gotten the suit patched to protect her from the reactive air. She limped a little stepping to the dangling rope ladder, with Zan and the other alongside for support. Zan grabbed onto the ladder, making the shuttle dip alarmingly, but Nico compensated, then again as the weight of the injured Nora piled on. Zan and the other hunter spotted her up the bottom few rungs of the ladder, Sass and Clay aiding her the rest of the way.

  “Coming with us?” Sass asked. But Zan simply hopped off the ladder.

  “You’ll be fine, Nora,” Clay assured the injured woman, after a close inspection of the gash. They had a med kit in the airlock with them, of course. He ensconced them in a Saggy bubble, then deflated it to get rid of the Sylvan air, and reinflated with Earth-normal nitrox. They were getting quick at that trick. Then he irrigated the gash, applied antibiotics, and re-sealed her suit with duct tape to cycle into the shuttle.

  While he worked, Sass debriefed Nora from outside the bubble on the helmet comms. “How’d you get cut?”

  “Crocodile claw,” Nora supplied. “I jumped on his back to stick a camera dot between his eyes. A predator like that, his turf probably extends a couple hundred yards along the shore. Good reconnaissance for the water’s edge.”

  Sass boggled, then chuckled. “Nora. You’re the one who harnessed the camera onto the smurf, aren’t you.”

  “She did what?” Clay asked, aghast.

  Nora grinned ferociously. “Aye! Got a deer here, too! Floki’s already found a huge berry thicket. So we’d rather not burn this shore for a parking space. Rocky anyway.”

  “Good to know,” Sass said in amusement. “You’re not going to harness a sturgeon, are you?”

  Nora shook her head. “I don’t think a sturgeon can tell us much. The cameras don’t have location trackers. We wouldn’t even know he was still in this bay. Better to watch land animals. But I did get a squirrel. Not that the view from a squirrel is very useful.”

  No, people didn’t want to clamber around trees hurling nuts. The nuts bombed out on the nutritional tests. Too many toxins.

  “You hunters are crazy brave,” Clay assured her.

  “Thank you! I’ll be able to help with the pole driving, right?”

  “The muscle’s torn. You need an hour or so in the auto-doc.”

  “Sadness. But this bay – it’s beautiful!”

  A few hours later, Sass had all eight poles planted. The original plan didn’t quite work out. At one of Sass’s planned positions, she just couldn’t get a pole to stick, the lake bed too gravelly to hold it. But three poles were probably enough to secure the platform. What she ended up with offered three positions with 3 anchors, and the deepest spot with 4 strongly-planted moorings. Good enough.

  The hunters had fun testing the footings, and their suits. They harnessed themselves to jump on the poles and festoon them with fenders. Nora escaped the auto-doc before the end to join the fun.

  Now for the moment of truth. Sass banked into Sylvan One to pick up the platform, and grappled it on. The entire colony cleared out of the flight path and took a break to watch, hands up to shield their eyes from the late afternoon sun, now lurking behind clouds. Sass laid on some more power out of the star drive – that platform was indeed heavy.

  “Zan, any of your team want to swap out while we’re here?”

  “No.” He didn’t pause long enough to ask anyone’s opinion. Sass shook her head at Clay, but let it pass.

  She pulled up to 150 meters to give a wide margin between treetops and hanging dock on the rugged terrain. But the wind picked up substantially at that altitude, and the platform caught it like a sail. So she adjusted downward, shooting for compromise.

  “Cold out here,” Zan commented.

  She paused, and considered just how uncomfortable Zan might be before he’d admit it. “You could flatten against the cargo door, and pull the ramp up.” The cargo airlock was like standing pressed into a storm door the width of a garage.

  “We’ll fit,” Zan decided. “Give me a minute.”

  So the hunters packed in and the ramp closed. But on this haul that didn’t allow her to fly any faster, because of the wooden kite dangling below, horizontal to the ground, which was anything but horizontal, dipping and rising and spiky with forest. She debated a couple times turning back and waiting for a nicer day, or taking the long route above the river. But it was more tedious than difficult to hug the tree line and make steady forward progress.

  After an hour of white-knuckle piloting, she emerged above the lake at Sylvan Two. No, that wind wasn’t just at altitude. The placid waters gained some chop while she was gone.

  “Wave height’s barely a foot, Collier,” Clay chided her. “Get on with it.”

  Still she paused. “Safer at the deep end or the shallow?”

  “Middle,” he answered immediately. “From there they can shift either way.”

  “True.” So she painstakingly positioned the platform at the third slot from shore, a three-poler next to the terminal deep four-pole mooring. She paused just above the poles. “Zan, we’re here.”

  “Hold for one.” He opened the ramp so they could clamber out and watch directly. She watched their progress over a ship camera mounted above them. They lay on the ramp, helmets over the edge to peer down, cables at hand. “Ready.”

  She lowered the platform quickly then, lest it hammer at her poles before getting wet.

  “Zan!” Clay bellowed, in his best first mate chewing-out tones. “Warning next time!”

  Sass glanced over to the cameras on his side of the windshield. A couple hunters already dangled off down to the platform, on lines from the ramp. They didn’t even give it a couple minutes to see if it would float!

  Though it did seem to float.

  The figures scurried to lash the platform onto the two windward poles first. Two more hopped down, on grav generators judging by their slow fall. The captain held her breath a second, but they saw it when a gust of wind nearly made them miss their target. Their EVA-ball drills in the hold served them well. They added a little vector to their heading and landed safe on the surface.

  “That’s surprisingly stable,” Clay observed. “Two men on the leading edge didn’t make it dip at all, that I could see.”

  “Darren, you’re watching this?” Sass inquired. “We’re admiring how stable you made your deck. Fine work!”

  “Thank you! They’re insane, of course.” But they’d lived with these hunters for a month now. They knew that.

  “But safe?” Sass inquired.

  “Who the hell knows?” the engineer returned. “Looks good, though.”

  “Sass, request,” Zan interrupted. “We want tow lines to adjacent poles. Suggest you hover ramp above shore-ward two poles. Hunters rappel down and tie ropes around them. Then back up and to this location.”

  Hunters are insane alright. On the other hand, she wanted to see this. So she lifted and came around to hover the ramp above the requested poles, then lowered to the extent she dared. She recognized Nora as one of the crazy people who dangled down to lasso the poles. She was first back up her line onto the ramp, too. Her partner jumped down to the platform alone with the other end of those ropes. They repeated the operation to tie to the deepest poles. And then the last of Sass’s hunter outriders hopped down to the platform.

  “What do you think, Darre
n?” Sass inquired of the engineer, snug at his engineering podium in the hold.

  “Pretty pleased! Platform rides a little higher than I expected. That just means it hasn’t soaked up water yet.”

  Sass smirked. “Ready to hop down with me for a closeup? I’ll be down in a minute. Suit up! Sorry, Clay.”

  “No, I want the helm,” he assured her. “That wind is getting frisky. Temperature’s dropping too.” For him to drop to the platform with her, their only other option was autopilot, a risky idea in evolving weather conditions, or let Nico fly Thrive, which left them without a shuttle pilot to fly their mobile bio-lock. “I should start training Kaol to fly. The shuttle, not the ship,” he hastily amended to Sass’s pursed-lip displeasure. Kaol was a good security crewman. He lacked the educational grounding to sit on her bridge.

  Soon she and Darren popped open the door airlock and gazed down at the platform amid the lake’s whitecaps. In the gusting wind, the target looked a mite small even to Sass’s eyes. She coaxed her lover into dropping just a few meters closer, then caught Darren’s hand and squeezed it with a wink. “On three! One, two –”

  The second they dropped below Thrive’s hold, the wind grabbed them. They let go each other’s hand to hastily add some vector, adjusting their gravity direction like trimming sails. Sass tucked in her body and dialed her gravity stronger as well. She landed first with a solid thump, grateful that the inch-thick decking proved sound.

  Darren lacked the instinct to roll himself into a ball to cut his wind exposure. As a result he was blown off-course, and struggled to solve the problem with grav generator alone. But he was rapidly running out of vertical distance, and trying to solve that by making gravity lighter, which made it easier for the buffeting wind to send him off course.

  He wouldn’t make it.

  26

  Sass nervously braced her stance at the edge of the platform nearest to the engineer’s struggles. But Zan took her elbow and drew her back, taking her position himself, rope lasso in hand. He didn’t wait for splashdown. Instead he eyed the wind and tossed the rope ahead of time, a stone’s throw out into the lake. Darren came down only a man’s length from the loop, at a gravity setting so light he managed to prance on water to reach the lifeline before he began sinking. The moment he grasped on, Zan started hauling. Several other hunters fell in behind him to add muscle and mass to anchor him. And soon they pulled him onto the platform, embarrassed but perfectly safe.

  “That was exciting!” He laughed out loud. Sass hugged him and clunked helmets. “Thanks for the save! I’m better at math.”

  Sass joined him on a stroll around the roomy platform, keeping a good stride away from the edge. He built it sixty feet square, twice the size of Thrive’s hold, but without any junk on it. After one lap, he requested all the hunters stand on one side, then the next, all the way around, that being the only weight they had handy. But a group of ten adults weighed nothing compared to that much wood, braced beneath by split tree trunks. No water spit up between the boards. But of course the platform edges caught spray, and the decking grew slick.

  Once released from service as dead weight, the hunters hunkered down in the middle, hugging their knees. Sass and Darren headed for the windward corners, Zan alongside.

  To reinforce the base ropes, she and the engineer carried a couple extra cables along, carbon core. Sass worked with Zan to pass one around the pole, within his arm’s reach, though not hers. She hitched it off to another couple of the corner’s generous supply of cleats. Then she repeated the operation on the other side, this time anchoring Darren by the belt as he took a turn helping Zan pass it around the pole.

  Then they stepped back and sighed in satisfaction. “I think it’ll float, cap.” Darren beamed at her.

  “Outstanding work, chief! Zan, your lips are blue. Let’s head home.”

  That was quicker said than done, of course. While they waited for Nico to bring the shuttle around, several hunters clamored to pitch a tent and ride out the storm here, and fail faster! Sass pointedly detached a camera dot from each of them and sent Zan to attach them to poles for observation.

  The captain never had the luxury of a brilliant AI to monitor and analyze dozens of surveillance cameras for her before. Thrive’s ship AI recorded their cameras, of course, but only reacted to problems it was programmed to understand. Junior crewman Floki had rapidly made himself indispensable. And for him, to observe the smurf grazing and caring for its cub, monitor multiple Denali, watch the odd crocodile, plus this new platform, was nothing. He could run all those processes and still carry on a conversation and tend to all his equipment maintenance and repair jobs. She ought to pay the emu six times over.

  They were all freezing by that point, so Sass let Darren board first, and herself and Zan last, everyone to ride inside Thrive. Tikki Cook, bless his heart, met them all with mugs of hot chocolate at the ladder, and a crock of soup and fresh bread with fake butter laid in the galley.

  For which service the hunters snubbed him. One even shoved him as Sass stopped in for a cup of soup to go. Good reflexes. Tikki didn’t spill a drop of the scalding hot chocolate he carried.

  “Get him off my ship, Kaol,” Sass demanded, pointing at the guy who shoved Tikki. “He can ride in the cargo lock. Anyone else can’t treat my crew with respect?”

  Some eyes remained surly, but they lowered their gaze to apply themselves to the vegetable soup.

  “You did fantastic work today. All of you,” Sass boomed. “Don’t blow it by being rego asses, OK? Soon as we reach Sylvan One, you’ll all suit up again and hitch my bio-lock back where it belongs.” And she stalked out.

  By the time she landed Thrive home at Sylvan One, it began to snow.

  Sass laughed out loud at the crest of their chosen course. “This isn’t much of a hill. And that tray isn’t much of a sled!”

  She’d picked up a quartet of cafeteria trays from Tikki Cook in the galley. He, Kaol, and Floki were temporarily in charge of Thrive, while they rest of the crew played in the still-falling snow the following day. They didn’t mind. Tikki was cooking, and Floki supplied him three excellent dot-cam views to watch on the big display, including their shiny new lake platform. She promised they’d take a turn outside soon.

  “Use your imagination, Collier!” Clay exhorted. “You remember how to do this, right?”

  “I don’t remember snow, Clay. Not on Earth.” Upstate was too warm by then.

  That caught him up short. Darren and Eli hadn’t seen snow, either, except the glacier. He was likely the last person alive who sledded as a child.

  She nudged him. “So show us, hot shot.”

  He set down his tray, backed up, and took a running jump onto it. This got the tray moving, but his momentum overshot. He ran off, gouging boot-holes into their slope. Grinning ear-to-ear, he retrieved his sled.

  “Let’s try this a different way. Sit on your sled. No, get your boots up!”

  If he uttered one word about the size of her butt, Sass silently vowed to slip a snowball into his shorts. But no, he gave her a strong push, and she slid, for a couple meters. He jogged around to the front and took her hands, pulling her the rest of the way to the base of the slope.

  “We’re packing the snow,” he claimed. “So the others will slide better.” Sass didn’t believe him. But as they trudged back up the trodden access slope, Darren went sliding past, widening the packed runway. Next in line, Eli managed some speed, grinning like a child.

  But Clay was determined to do his run standing on the tray. His second time he made it halfway down before stepping off, still without falling. Sass plotted to run for the momentum, but then squat the rest of the way. Somehow she ended up face-planted in the snow.

  “Cad we dry?” a Denali asked, bearing a flattened carton. She assumed he meant ‘can we try’, spoken with a cold. His corrugated plastic made for a wider sled. He took a running jump and dove onto it, lifting head and shins so they wouldn’t drag.

  Show-off. His
packed route was twice as long as the engineer’s, who clearly cheated with superior math skills. And less sheer stubbornness than Clay, who insisted on trying his tray standing yet again.

  Hang on. A cold? Sure, it was called a cold. But she thought the disease was caused by a virus, which never reached the Aloha system. Quarantine on the colony ships was absolute – contagions did not follow them to the stars. She handed her tray to an envious-looking young woman. Her ‘dank yew!’ convinced Sass to follow up with her physiologist.

  “Hey, Tikka, Sass. I’m seeing people with head-colds. Why would that be?”

  “What’s a head-cold?” She sounded even froggier than the hunters on the slope. She coughed, then sneezed.

  “Nose dripping? Throat sore? Coughing.”

  “Huh.”

  “Fever sometimes.”

  “No fever,” Tikka reported. “But, what did I just sneeze out…”

  Sass quipped, “Don’t leave me in suspense!”

  “Going inside to check, sar.” She signed off. Sass saw her in the distance, trudging through shin-high snow, helmet down to reduce drag as she stalked into the driving wind. The captain stood mesmerized a moment, watching the shifting streamers of falling white in an afternoon turned dim. In a spacesuit meant for the absolute cold of space, she was perfectly toasty. But as she’d seen at the lake, the hunters wearing the new wet-suits were freezing.

  The snow did tend to clump on her helmet, though, and left wet runnels when she brushed it off.

  A snowball hit her in the arm, breaking her reverie. Her command team had relinquished their tray-sleds now. Eli jogged toward Thrive, probably alerted by Tikka Gena. Darren was the one who pelted her.

  She hunkered down to make snowballs to retaliate, then realized she didn’t know how. But a gauntlet full of the stuff, pressed together, seemed good enough. Clay got her in the helmet, but she retaliated against Darren first, who pelted both of them.

  Then he held up a hand of surrender, clearly talking on his comms. He took off jogging toward the housing platforms. What’s wrong there? But he’d let her know if he needed anything. She turned back to see that another group of Denali, farmers by the look of them, amassing piles of snowballs. Facing off against them were cosmos, some making ammo and the others patting together snow wall defenses. Oddly, a few hunters appeared more intent on sculpting a snow smurf.