by Ginger Booth
“Looks like,” Ben agreed. “We’re too sexy to die.” Walker rapped him upside the head because Zan couldn’t reach.
Tikki timidly asked, “Will Zan really stay with the fleet?”
Ben glanced around at him, and sighed. “Ain’t no perfect people in this shuttle. Or Spaceways. Coming up on our left is the broad and lovely river… Did y’all ever name the river?”
“Not here long enough,” Tikki replied.
45
Sass stretched luxuriantly, then slid into her seat on the bridge of Sardine. Judge sat to her right in the gunner’s seat. She smiled, remembering the image on the screen in their modest galley. Just as the last ship departed Sylvan One – that honor was Clay’s piloting Thrive One – a half dozen smurfs took ownership of the central platform where the cafeteria and workshops once stood.
Whoever caught those images did a fantastic job. She’d have to remember to praise them. As for the smurfs, she hoped they enjoyed the clearing until the deep snows fell. No doubt by spring the forest would reclaim it. Sylvan never evolved another biome that could compete with those root-propagating forests.
And she blessed Ben for insisting on an hour’s rest break before they warped for the Sanctuary system. He’d surely rather get a good night’s sleep between legs. But Sass had a couple hundred woulda-been colonists on board with few bathrooms to speak of. Though Jules and Tikki ardently worked the problem.
“Merchant Thrive, this is Sar– Hopeful Actual, ready at the starting gate,” she reported to Ben, taking formation behind Clay to await the ignition of the warp gateway. Formation verified, she flicked part of her screen back for a last view of Sylvan.
Such a pretty planet. She hoped Zelda and Teke’s plan worked. Maybe someday she’d return. Though somehow she doubted it.
“– double jump,” Ben said.
“Merchant, say again,” she requested, belatedly paying attention. Ben hadn’t followed the expected script.
“Hopeful, you jump second after Thrive One. You are followed by Merchant,” Ben repeated, “in a double jump to Sanctuary belt. Same jump order for the second leg. You have 8 minutes to cross through the gate again. Confirm.”
“Confirmed, Merchant, but where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise,” Ben teased. “Thrive One, stand by, lighting the gate now.”
“Thrive Actual ready,” Clay agreed.
“A…surprise?” She asked Judge, muting her comms. “Do you know what he’s on about?”
“I do,” Judge confessed, hand to heart. “But I’m sworn to secrecy. You’ll see yourself in about…?” He pointed suggestively at the screen.
“Five minutes,” Sass supplied, belatedly pressing the button sequence. She flicked the countdown clock into center ‘windshield’ view where he’d requested. It read 04:13 by now, as the breathtaking fractal beauty of the warp gateway unfolded. “C’mon, Judge, tell me!”
“Nope. But you’ll like it.”
She was stuck stewing. Clay would be just as annoyed as Ben if she grilled them at this juncture. She just had to wait.
“You think there’s a human platform in the asteroid belt?” Judge asked. “Maybe a nice bar? Showers for the passengers?”
“I think the only inhabitant of the belt is an AI,” Sass returned with a sigh. Her passengers would hate her for this side trip. But what difference would a half hour make? She was confident they’d spend long days on Sar– Hopeful while Ben led his captains to shake down the new ships. No way would Ben summon brand-new ships straight to the warp gateway. Lighting up the flower cost too dearly in fuel. And they needed to transit right on top of each other with so many ships returning to Aloha.
Yet oddly, it cost nothing to double-jump. The fractal flower didn’t travel with them so much as it opened access to its alternate dimension at both locations. And once lit, it stayed open 30 minutes. Ben had played this game before, though he claimed he never tried a triple jump. It should work, but why?
Why indeed.
Clay vanished, and it was her turn down the ‘runway.’ Ben caught her ship exactly when promised, and she suddenly saw a new star system. And a heart-stopping planet swaddled in cobalt blue and fluffy white, a pale grey moon beyond. Her breath caught. Her heart beat faster, as though suddenly meeting a lover too long parted. She never thought to see this again.
“Earth! Ben, how could you? As a surprise!” Her voice squeaked upward on the end of that, as her fingers flew across her dashboard. She desperately tried to get her cameras and sensors all up at once.
Where to look first? The Lunar colonies, Mars, Ganymede? The breaks in the cloud cover on Earth? What crescent hemisphere was that, anyway? They weren’t terribly close, and about 30 degrees off the Earth-moon plane. Signals – was anyone broadcasting? Threats – were any ships in evidence?
But of course Ben lagged her through the gate. She repeated herself when he appeared. Minus the squeak.
“Calm down,” he soothed. “Surprise for you and Clay. But Eli and Floki knew all about it, and the Denali science team.”
Floki’s new body wasn’t ready yet, but he ran cozied among Thrive’s processors with the ship AI. Ben brought an adult-sized ride-on emu by mistake. The young bird would grow up, once Nico refitted the robot chassis in his spare time.
Ben continued, “The geek squads are recording out the wazoo. Kind of a competition, which group can get the best data. The Denali at Mahina University pitched a new protocol to me, that every jump should be a double. They wanted to automate a standard system survey to execute in the few minutes we have here. Eli prefers a customized approach based on prior knowledge of the system.”
“You’ve been here before?” she breathed.
“Never. And I told them to stuff it. I’m not double-jumping every run. That’s just asking for a death sentence from Murphy’s Law. But this time, Earth is here, Sass. For you and Clay. It’ll wait for you. No need to search for it. Stick with me until Denali is safe. Then I’ll bring you back, if you want. But don’t grieve for Sylvan. That wasn’t Earth. This is.”
“Is this safe?” Clay wondered. The three of them were on the same command channel. “I mean, couldn’t someone shoot at us, or…”
Sass laughed softly, but let Ben reply. “The chances of someone being in range are infinitesimal. Space is big. Really big. Hey, you two. Sit back and drink it in. And don’t miss your warp window. We got a world to save, right?” He sighed.
She knew Ben agonized over the decision to come to Sylvan and Sanctuary first. He tortured himself over whether he’d choose the same if not for Nico. “You made the right call, Ben. As for your surprise, thank you! What a gorgeous planet. It looks so healthy and clean from here.”
“My instruments say the atmosphere isn’t much better than when we left.” Clay reached here first, with Ben dragging along the rear. “It always did look so pure from space.”
“But it is better? The atmosphere?” Sass pressed.
“Some,” Clay allowed.
All too soon, he vanished again into the warp. Sass fancied she could feel the gravity of the homeworld reaching out for her, its magnetosphere, its soul.
“Sass, confirm countdown,” Ben prompted, knocking her from the reverie.
“Jump in 10, 9, 8,” she said dutifully, hand hesitating over the console. But there was nothing to choose, after all. Her life, Clay, and tens of thousands more who needed her, lay beyond that warp flower.
“I’ll be back,” she whispered, as Earth vanished.
Sentient Thrive
Book 9
Prologue
The Colony Corps brought humanity
out from a failing Earth
to spread among the stars.
Then they vanished.
Eighty years later,
the Corps is about
to be reborn.
Diagrams
Merchant Thrive floorplan.
Aloha system.
1
The crying baby was driv
ing Ben Acosta nuts. The lead captain flew the final transport out of Waterfalls yet again, the one carrying a full thousand refugee souls. Hopeful Thrive – aka Sardine – was unbearable at this level of crowding. It took hours to load the ship, hours more to reach orbit, then jostle into correct formation for warp, and further hours to traverse the rings and land safely on Mahina. Then they began hours of unloading, for a full 20 hours in hell for the passengers.
So they filled only one transport per run to the brim, last out, first to land.
The transport could barely lift from Denali’s deep gravity well at this weight. In theory it could attain orbital velocity. But this was Ben’s sixth trip – no, was it the eighth? He was the only pilot in the fleet good enough to fly this load. And even he couldn’t achieve orbital velocity straight from liftoff. Too many damned storms to dodge, with a ship too loggy to answer to the helm.
Sweat dripped stinging into his eyes, as he begged Hopeful to veer faster. He approached the tropics again, girdled with hurricanes. He’d found just enough quiet air between two massive systems to slip between, if only the damned helm would respond.
That baby’s pitiful keening had every muscle in his neck seized up like steel.
And he’d fail the turn. Dammit! He’d catch the storm at the worst point, too, where its 50 kph speed of travel added to 250 kph winds to cost him 300 kph headway toward escaping atmo.
The passengers weren’t going to enjoy it, either.
“All hands, this is the captain. Buckle in immediately!” Because this is going to suck. His fleet used to have a gunner, a copilot to handle the comms for the pilot. But there was no other qualified pilot for this run, no backup. They all waited upstairs in misery for him to get up there with this last load, and warp them onward to Pono’s rings.
Hopeful hit the first outer bands of thunderheads, and he felt them fall. He buckled his own harness. How did I forget to do that? Worse, how did that falling sensation sneak past the inertial dampeners? Maxed out, dammit! He’d lost 2 km altitude in one fell swoop. And the true hurricane wall waited ahead of him like the gates to hell, towering far higher and meaner than a moment ago.
Air pressure’s higher, damn-damn-damn! His lost altitude would hurt. The wind speed might be the same, but with dense air, the dark grey inferno could punch harder. His fingers flew over his navigation calculator. But a new yo-yo sensation, jerks up and down, frustrated his dexterity. Does it –? No, it doesn’t matter, just get the hell out of here!
But that was easier said than done. He could turn and ride the air – no. At this speed and sluggish helm response, he’d need hundreds of klicks to turn the ship around. There was nothing for it except to ride the bucking bronco of these insane air currents, rapid-fire updrafts and downdrafts and side buffets. Forget the original course and just go through.
“Captain?” Tarana’s voice over his earpiece. The one-time leader of the Sylvan expedition now served as his administrative assistant, a gift from Ben’s concerned husband a couple round trips ago.
Because he thought I was losing it. Fair enough. I am losing it.
“Captain, these gyrations are very hard on the passengers. How much longer?”
“Hell if I know.”
“But Ben –”
He clicked her off. Was that blue sky ahead? No reprieve from the churning gray maelstrom showed on his instruments. But he could swear that was a spot of clear sky, just five degrees starboard. He could turn five degrees, couldn’t he? The shudder in the ship began to clack his teeth together like castanets.
He clicked his comms back on. “Tarana! Shut that baby up!” He shut the comms off again without waiting for a response. The blue sky had disappeared, and he sobbed for its loss. Instead lightning forked out in every direction. He flipped the ESD shields up to max. Those attracted the damned bolts like a lightning rod. But as the only metal in the sky, that couldn’t be avoided anyway. At least the ESD would dissipate the –
Two bolts hit the ship in rapid succession, overlapping in time, starboard and port, and arced to meet above and below, briefly encasing him in a cage of forking actinic light. He felt that one, hair standing on end. His heart misfired a couple beats. Then his console painfully zapped his fingers.
NO! His instruments flashed bright and died. One of them was the ‘windshield’ display, now a cipher of blank graphite grey.
Ben blinked. Am I dead meat?
No, the instruments rebooted. They’d take a few minutes restarting. Do I hit the ocean before I can see it? He was pretty sure he was over ocean. Yes, there is only ocean at this latitude. Couple isthmus, um – whatever the damned plural of isthmus is. Isthmussi? Dammit, think, Ben!
But his brief electrocution had knocked his brain offline as well. The wind buffeting was side-to-side now, plus jarring smacks to the diagonal, wobbling his head all over the place. A pattern-breaking up-down clacked his teeth together again, this time with his tongue between them. Ow. He ducked his head to spit blood onto the lower half of his space helmet, then clamped it to the seat back. Not that being clamped to the seat made the ride any smoother when the whole ship was shaking. But at least it cut down on the whiplash to his neck.
It’s alive! His altimeter came back first. He’d lost another 5 klicks vertical. He pulled back on the stick, praying for the thrusters to obey. Up, up, please God up! Which direction didn’t matter worth a damn at this point. He’d need a bonus trip around the entire planet to make up for this one storm.
He might even meet the same cyclone again on his next lap around. Horrifying thought.
Another five seconds, and the helm answered. He began rising, still according to the instruments. Six long seconds later, the front display exploded into eye-searing bright confetti. He tried and failed to blink away the seared spots on his retinas. He finally accepted that half the bright spots were the screen’s fried pixels, not his rods and cones.
Rain, he decided, and belatedly realized his bronco ride was over. The helm responded smoothly, like congealed Monday axle grease. He couldn’t see anything through the grey clouds, but a ping off a Spaceways satellite positioned him. He was back in business. Minus half of his windscreen display set to dead white or black pixels. He could live with that.
He jumped half out of his skin when he noticed Tarana was sitting beside him in the copilot’s seat. When did she get here? He swallowed uneasily and returned his focus to his instruments. Up.
He couldn’t for the life of him remember how to do Up. Up in which direction? Where was he going?
Tarana rapped on his helmet, her face contorted as though she were screaming at him from inside her own. He clicked the comms back on.
“Ben? Answer me!”
“Sorry, comms were off,” he said absently. He had programs to reach orbit. What world was he on again? Water in the sky. Must be Denali. Or Sylvan… “What planet is this?”
“…What?”
“Tarana. Sylvan,” Ben replied.
“Ben, we are taking off from Waterfalls. On Denali,” Tarana said slowly, cautiously. “Ben?”
If only that baby would quit crying. Did he say that aloud?
Tarana hung on his shoulder now, gazing in concern at his face. “Ben, there is no crying baby.”
“There is, it’s screaming, it’s driving me nuts. It’s been crying forever.” When did the baby start crying? Takeoff. Waterfalls. Right, he was on Denali. Over Denali. Probably. No, Tarana said. He was taking off from Denali, if only he could remember how to do that. Surely he’d programmed a preset for that.
“Ben, there is no baby crying,” Tarana crooned to him. “Let’s take off your helmet, and take a nice little break. The ship will just…fly…right?” She busied herself trying to release the helmet, then switched to unclamping it from the headrest first. “Won’t the ship keep going straight and level?”
He batted her hands out of the way and unclamped his own helmet, lobbing it over his shoulder to the bridge floor. He tried to breathe deep, but found he wa
s breathing too fast. His hands shook. Would the ship fly ‘straight and level’? What a ridiculous concept. He was in an atmosphere circling a rock ball. If he flew straight and level, he’d simply escape out of the gravity well on a tangent and keep going until the engines died and the sun pulled him…
What was I trying to do?
Tarana stuck his water straw into his mouth, jutting out from the body of the pressure suit. “Just take a sip, and a little rest break.”
Her voice was weird. Ah, it was coming out of helmet speakers over her ears instead of her mouth. That was confusing.
“Mayday, mayday,” Tarana said. Without transition, suddenly she sat in the pilot seat now, and Ben in the copilot seat, with his helmet back on. “Hopeful Thrive, calling Abel or Sass. Emergency, please respond!”
“Greer here, on Bold Thrive.”
“Sass on Thrive One. Tarana? Where’s Ben?”
“Ben is seated here beside me. But he’s not tracking. Mentally.”
“He’s not… Holy hell.” Abel Greer’s voice.
“We have no copilot,” Tarana continued, voice tinged with hysteria.
“I’m right here,” Ben said crankily. “What are we…?”
But now he was back in the pilot seat. And it was his husband, not Sass or Abel, coaching him softly. “– Should be seeing the flames die back now. Ben?”
Upset by the inexplicable time lapse in his memory, Ben gazed at the display screen. Why did it look so ratty? And what was…? Oh, flames. “Yeah. Flames. Dying back.”
“Listen, buddy, Tarana installed the program I sent. Rendezvous Gamma Ternary. Can you find that program on the nav computer for me?” Cope sounded tired, and concerned.
Ben keyed up the program he mentioned. “Got it.” He swallowed. Why did his mouth taste like blood? “You want me to run this?”