by M. D. Cooper
“Tanis,” Peter called out and extended his hand. “It’s good to see you. Meet our little Thomas.”
Sarah pulled back the blanket and Tanis got a look at the face of the youngest Victorian, for at least another day. The colonists were having children at an alarming rate. Thomas was the fourth child born in the past week.
“May I touch him?” She asked, looking up at Sarah.
“Of course,” Sarah said with a smile.
Tanis was surprised to see Sarah so cordial. Usually the woman was prickly at best with non-Victorians. Apparently motherhood agreed with her.
The child’s skin was soft and smooth under Tanis’s finger. At her touch the baby’s eyes opened and Tanis got a big toothless yawn. She found herself thinking of the future and what holding her own child would be like.
The baby stirred further and his eyes opened for a brief moment.
“I better quit that, don’t want to fully wake him,” she said, removing her hand.
“He just ate, so he’ll fall right back to sleep,” Sarah said as she tucked the blanket back around Tom.
“It looks to be quite the shindig,” Peter said. “I can’t believe they let this many people up the beanstalk.”
Tanis nodded. “I bet somewhere there’s an engineer going over structural specs to make sure the load is distributed well enough.”
“You’re alone,” Sarah observed. “Surely more of your people are present.”
Tanis nodded. “They are, I was late and had to catch the last shuttle in. I was out at the beta site going over construction plans there with the onsite team.”
“I still don’t quite understand why we need a beta site,” Peter said. “We have the platforms and now the station for fallback should any terraforming problems arise. Our people are more than capable of living in space.”
“You’ve certainly proven that,” Tanis agreed. “But as your population grows you’ll find yourselves needing the additional breathing room that a second world will provide. At the very least heavy manufacturing can take place there, making the chances of polluting the atmosphere on Victoria smaller.”
“A lot of people think you’re doing it to hide things from us,” Sarah said with narrowed eyes.
“Trust me, we have nothing to hide at the beta site. One of the things I was checking in on is the new team of engineers from the Hyperion who are helping out with some of the base’s construction.”
Peter placed a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Let’s not get into this tonight. We’re here to celebrate a big milestone for both our peoples,”
Sarah sighed. “Right, sorry Tanis. I’m going to show Tom around—see you later.”
The pair moved off and Tanis let out a long sigh.
Angela let out a silvery laugh in Tanis’s mind.
Tanis sighed. She did at that. Nearly the entire Victorian leadership was on the station, as well as much of the Intrepid’s. In addition, many of the colony leaders were out of stasis—their teams and expertise in high demand as the Intrepid built this unplanned colony.
As she moved through the debarkation foyer toward the corridor that connected to the station’s atrium she saw one of the more self-important colony leaders moving toward her.
“Sergey, how are you this evening?” she asked and extended her hand.
Sergey took it and gave just one firm shake before letting go. “Well enough, I suppose, though I don’t really see the need for extravaganzas like this.”
“I think it’s going to be a lovely evening,” Tanis replied. “Especially since its the first celebration of this sort the Victorians are hosting.”
It wasn’t exactly true, she had been present at several cultural celebrations on the Hyperion, but that information wouldn’t make Sergey any easier to converse with.
“I’m already building a shipyard I had never planned to build with a shoestring budget and now I have to come here and hobnob with all these people. For me this is just a distraction.
She had cautioned him about his attitudes more than once, though never so forthrightly.
Verbally she was much more cordial.
“You’ll find that many of the folks here tonight will be of great help in the coming years—or may end up being your customers. I suspect those relationships may be very useful to you.”
As if by magic, Trist appeared at Sergey’s side and gave him a winning smile.
“Come Sergey, I’ll show you around. I know all the right people you’ll want to talk with.”
Sergey’s startled expression was priceless, but Trist slipped her arm into his and guided him away.
Tanis stifled an audible laugh.
It was Trist’s turn to laugh.
Tanis walked through the corridor, stopping to shake hands or speak to groups of people here and there, eventually making it to the station’s atrium.
The domed park was larger than normal for a station of this sort, but the Victorians were adamant about the size. They had never experienced large, open, recreational spaces. When they saw the parks and the cylinders on the Intrepid they made it clear that their stations and platforms would have them as well.
Not that Tanis blamed them. She couldn’t imagine an existence where there were no trees, living and dying without ever feeling grass or dirt beneath your feet.
The station was currently in its night-cycle and the large plas dome overhead filtered out the Kap’s dim red glow, allowing only starlight to shine through. Tanis could clearly make out Sirius, almost directly above them, staring down as though it were angry over their success.
During the day, the dome filtered and amplified the ruddy light of the Kap, shifting it to the yellow end of the spectrum like Sol.
Without that adjustment, the red light of Kapteyn’s Star would require plants leaves to be brown in order to effect photosynthesis—the Victorians had worked hard to ensure they would have green plant-life, at least on the station. On the planet below it was not feasible to globally alter the star’s light and brown vegetation would be the norm.
Tanis was impressed with the atrium’s arrangement. It was quite beautifully done for a people who had never encountered anything like it until ten years ago.
She felt a hand on her shoulder and a voice asked, “how is the Lieutenant Governor this evening?”
Tanis turned with a smile and gave Joe a short embrace. “I’m fantastic. Looking forward to tonight.”
“Stars know you’ve worked hard enough for i
t. Who would have thought that my shoot-first-don’t-bother-with-questions lady would end up being the one to bridge the gap between two disparate peoples.” He stepped beside her and surveyed the room as he spoke.
“I’m just one person on a team, Andrews and Earnest deserve much of the credit.”
“Like hell we do,” Andrew’s bass rumbled from behind them. “I’ve been doing my damnedest to shuffle every responsibility I can come up with off to you and you’re taking them all with aplomb.”
While he would never admit it, she could tell that Andrews was ready for the journey to be over. She knew he had planned to make this one last run and then retire somewhere quiet, maybe take a colony ride himself. He certainly had not signed up to be the governor of an interim colony that was sharing a system with another people.
He was an amazing shipmaster, sometimes she thought he might know more about the Intrepid than Earnest and Abby did. But that is where his passion lay—with the ship.
For all intents and purposes, Tanis was in charge of everything outside its airlocks and, when Andrews was in stasis, everything within as well. A far cry from the pariah she had been when she signed on.
“It’s not like I do it all myself,” Tanis said. “I have my own people to shuffle things off to. Markus and Katrina have had some small part in pulling this off as well.”
Joe elbowed her and whispered loudly. “For once just take the compliment.”
Tanis blushed and turned away.
“She never used to do that, right?” Andrews asked Joe.
“No, she did not. I’m not really sure when it started. I think it was some time during our sabbatical in Old Sam.”
Tanis and Joe’s many decades out of stasis had become something of legend on the Intrepid. The crew and colonists alike were in awe of the couple that stayed up through the long dark to watch over the ship.
In reality there was more watching the waves on the lakeshore than watching the ship, but Joe had convinced Tanis not to disillusion anyone.
“So what’s the plan tonight?” Andrews asked.
“The usual, food, speeches, drinking,” Tanis replied. I have a short bit. Mostly it’s Markus who will be running the show.”
“Speak of the devil,” Joe said.
Markus and Katrina were moving through the crowd, smiling and shaking hands with everyone they met.
Tanis was amazed at how much better Markus looked than when she first met him. Ten years ago he looked to be within a decade of death, but now he appeared to be no older than fifty. Katrina had eschewed rejuvenation treatments while Markus took several, they almost looked the same age.
“Ready for your big speech?” Joe asked Markus as the couple approached.
“As I’ll ever be. I had no idea how much rigmarole I was signing up for when I agreed to this job,” Markus replied.
“You make it sound like there was some other option,” Katrina chided him.
Conversation turned to business for several minutes as Tanis and the Victorians discussed several logistic issues with the shipyard, terraforming, and the additions to the space station which would begin the next day.
“Okay, okay!” Joe finally broke in. “You guys need to know when to stop working. Com’on, let’s get a drink to loosen you up before your long, boring speeches.
“You say that now, but next week when the supplies for the dome expansion down on Landfall aren’t ready for you to pick up, you’ll sing a different tune,” Tanis replied.
“I may, but it’ll be a slightly better tune for having had fun tonight.”
Arm in arm, the two couples made their way through the crowd to the impromptu bar on a low grassy hill.
Katrina selected a red wine from one of the Intrepid’s vineyards and swirled it appreciatively before breathing in the aroma.
“Nothing would have stopped me from leaving Sirius with you, dear,” she said to Markus. “But the thought of never having a good red again was no small thing. If for no other reason, I would have welcomed the Intrepid.”
Markus laughed. “I don’t know how you can drink that… you realize it’s made from berries that grow on trees, right?”
“Yes, dear, I do know what grapes are. I’m not sure how you can speak poorly of wine, especially given that your rot-gut is made from hydroponics waste.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the idea of eating food that grew in worm poop. Sure it tastes good, but it can’t be healthy,” Markus scowled.
“Humanity made it a long time eating plants that grew in dirt, somehow we made it,” Joe added after taking a sip of his beer.
“And we moved past it,” Xenia, one of the Victorian leaders said as she arrived with Dmitry on her arm.
“I wouldn’t say that,” Tanis grinned as she picked a bacon-wrapped pastry from a passing server’s tray. “There’s a flavor you can only get from plants that grew in dirt, let alone from living meat that ate those plants. Vat grown stuff always tastes like you may as well just be eating the vat itself.”
Xenia grimaced. “I can’t believe we’re serving that stuff here.”
Tanis shrugged. “I’ve worked with a lot of different cultures over my years. Some eschew this, others can’t bear that. If I were just visiting it would be one thing, but our cultures are going to spend two or three generations together. We’re going to have to learn to accept and support one another—even in things that we may find foreign.”
Xenia’s expression softened. “I guess that’s true. In a manor of speaking, our peoples are married. We’re going to have to learn how to deal with that.”
“It’s not so bad,” Joe said. “There are some cultures back in Sol that you wouldn’t want to share a system with for the next week, let alone decades. Plus, if Tanis had to go that long without her BLT we’d have a serious problem on our hands.”
Tanis shrugged. “And B is for bacon. Nothing else works in a BLT.”
“Say what you want, dear,” Dmitry said to Xenia. “I’m with the Edeners on this one. The sheer variety of alcohol these folks have is worth any compromise.” He tapped glasses with Joe and they both took another drink.
The conversation drifted through topics ranging from food and religions in Sol, to music and the news of the new gravity research in Procyon, information that Bob had siphoned from signals between the stars.
“What do you think it means?” Katrina asked. “I read through some of the data streams as best I could, but it was all Greek to me.”
“Artificial gravity will be a breeze for starters,” Dmitry said. “No more shenanigans like the Intrepid, with its accelerator coils doing double-duty, or the spinning superconductors. Hell, ships won’t even need to be air tight anymore, the grav field can hold the atmosphere in.”
“Plus that whole universal point of reference thing,” Joe added. “Another point for Einstein.”
“Isn’t that supposedly the secret to FTL after all the warp drive experiments petered out?” Katrina asked.
“One and the same,” Joe nodded. “Wouldn’t it suck if we finally got to New Eden and FTL was invented?”
Tanis threw Joe a sidelong glare. “Don’t even joke about that.”
Myrrdan stood at one of the station’s broad windows, surveying the world the Victorians were building. It was impressive to say the least—to spark up a colony in such time, and have many of the trappings of an advanced civilization, was a testament to the sophistication and power of the Intrepid and her crew.
“Impressive, isn’t it,” a voice said from beside Myrrdan.
She turned and saw the Lieutenant Governor, Tanis Richards next to her.
“That’s putting it mildly, Ma’am. What we’ve built here has to be unprecedented, Myrrdan replied.”
Tanis gave a light chuckle. Her ability to switch between affability and deep seriousness had always irritated Myrrdan—or perhaps it was the fact that she had always beat her in every contest.
Ever since that day on Mars, Tanis Richards had come o
ut on top—though not every one of their encounters had been adversarial. Tanis would be amazed to know Myrrdan had helped as much as hindered the Intrepid’s progress between the stars.
It was an invigorating game, one that would be passed down through the ages. A long struggle of power and control that took centuries to come to fruition.
“You’ve certainly helped,” Tanis said. “I really value your contribution; you’ve given a lot to help us get this far.”
“You’re too kind, I’m just doing my job.”
“That’s my line,” Tanis said with a smile. “How are things looking at the academy? Joe tells me you’re doing well there.”
“It’s a fun challenge. Also getting to go down to Victoria so often is nice—especially after so long being cooped up on a starship.”
“I know what you mean, I love my little patch of land in Old Sam more than I can say, but getting back out has been nice.”
Myrrdan couldn’t help shaking her head. Referring to the eleven years they had spent on in the Kap thus far as getting back out was a sign of someone who had spent too much time alone. If it hadn’t been for her daring defense of the Hyperion with the Andromeda, Myrrdan would have thought that Tanis had lost her edge.
And that would have ruined the game.
When the tales were told in the distant future, learning of Earnest Redding’s discovery of picotech would certainly go down as the defining moment for Myrrdan. But she knew her true purpose was this game with Tanis Richards.
Even though Tanis never knew her opponent, her moves and countermoves were deft, and so often made without any direct confrontation. Myrrdan would nearly have turned an asset, then Tanis would give a stirring speech and shift that person’s alliances. Other times, Myrrdan would lay in a plan to access sensitive data, but some new procedure or measure of the Lieutenant Governor’s would foil her approach.
The nuance was so great that Myrrdan doubted even Tanis could fully appreciate it—though at least she would understand better than Jessica.
The former TBI agent had never really been a suitable match for Myrrdan. So often she’d found herself stringing that plastic doll along, it had really been frustrating.