by Scott Rhine
“Understood. May I speak to Mercy?”
“Briefly. She carries our child. Be careful.”
“Your safety is my sacred duty.”
He slid out. The others had only heard his half of the discussion, so Lou filled them in. “You don’t have to do this, Mercy.”
She patted his hand. “You’re sweet. If I had to worry about you, you get to spend an equal amount of time fretting about my safety. Snowflake won’t allow me to come to harm.”
Once Mercy positioned herself under the hood, Lou held her hand. She didn’t need words with Snowflake anymore. Still, the exchange took ten minutes. When his wife emerged, Lou found her forehead damp.
“I did some fast talking,” Mercy said. “Since Yvette is Catholic, I was able to use an obscure corner of Canon Law—under Catholic law, a woman cannot be forced into marriage by a kidnapper; however, if after being back with her family for a short time, she chooses to marry that man, she may.”
“You’re shitting me,” Lou said.
“Nope. According to church law, rape and kidnapping can be retroactively legitimized.”
“There’s no way she’ll agree to that.”
“She did love him. She only held herself back to protect him, but all that’s her decision to make. All I did was buy us some wiggle room.”
“When did you study Catholic laws?” Lou asked.
“When I considered taking vows as a nun,” she explained.
“But my raw appeal was too much for you?”
“Actually, the idea that the pope couldn’t be a woman turned me off the idea.”
“Right.” Lou started humming the Rod Stewart song again.
Red cleared her throat. “Will we have to write this into the charter?”
“No. I argued that Yvette was the only remaining single Catholic woman, and the aliens we meet won’t be,” Mercy said.
“Gravitic tidal swirls are less convoluted,” Lou complained.
“You’re telling me,” Mercy agreed. “Um . . . Snowflake wants to talk to the Index next.”
By comparison, Red’s time in the interface was brief. When she came out, the room smelled of burned toast. She wasn’t happy. “Gather everyone at camp, Mercy. We have a decision to make, and I’d rather only explain this once. Conrad, sweetie, I need you to look at a star system for me.”
****
Red addressed the entire camp outside at the new picnic tables. “We have officially broken the charter, and Sensei won’t allow us to travel to our original colony choice. They call it an interdiction, but it’s more like a quarantine. They’re afraid to let us mingle with mainstream spacefarers.” She paused to give this disappointing news time to sink in. They’d failed their test before they reached the halfway mark. Do not pass Go; do not collect 200 dollars. “But—and this is the important part—because we gave our favorite rapist a second chance to make restitution through service, we have the same option.”
The crowd buzzed. “What does that mean?” asked Herk.
Zeiss held out the star-projecting globe. “See this binary system with a high degree of declination? It’s pretty far off the beaten path. The system contains a gas giant in the habitable zone with several moons. One Earth-sized moon with an atmosphere is capable of sustaining life. Because of the math involved and the incredibly long jump, reaching there is almost impossible with our ship. Escaping there is even harder because the window only opens for a short time every several years. I’ve code-named this planet Oblivion.”
“We get to colonize there instead?” guessed Herk.
Red answered, “No. It has stone-age inhabitants already. Sensei wants us to advise them the way he did us. Through service to other races, we’ll earn our way back into the club.”
“So the aliens will give us some prefab information package to drop off?”
Grimly, Red shook her head. “No. It’ll take years. We’ll have to study this race without them seeing us and write pages for them from our own limited experiences. Sensei will give us the specifics if we agree.”
“If we say no?”
“We stay here,” Zeiss replied. “Eventually Earth might rescue our descendants. It’s just as likely that we could accidentally break the biosphere and die. In every Midway scenario, we never see home again. Sanctuary becomes a quarantine cell. This is important enough that we should all vote, and it’s not a decision to make lightly. Whatever we do, we’ll need to harvest everything we can in a few months. I’m willing to schedule the vote then.”
“We’ll cut the water reserves too fine. If we don’t gain access to vast reserves soon after we arrive in the Oblivion system, we’re doomed,” Rachael announced. “I’m for staying at Midway. We could have a good life here.”
Yuki stood up. “There has to be a third option—getting home without subspace. We could accelerate to 99 percent of the speed of light, and we wouldn’t age then. The fifteen-year return would be a blink of an eye.”
Red announced, “344 days at maximum-g thrust to reach 99 percent c. That’s if none of the engines blow. Tell her what happens if one of the grav fields fails, Mercy.”
“Our subspace balloon implodes or leaks out slowly, which will look the same to us. If one of the inertia-filtering fields stop working, we turn into pancakes and die.”
“You’re exaggerating. The aliens won’t let us do anything that isn’t safe,” Yuki insisted.
“Okay. How much fuel will that speed take?” Zeiss demanded. Everyone who’d been with him at the Academy covered their faces. He’d already figured all the answers and wanted the students to see why.
“That’s not my specialization,” Yuki mumbled.
The Korean drive expert helped her out. “Half the original amount in the sphere—pretty much everything we have left.”
Zeiss paced around the picnic area as if it were a classroom. “How do we stop when we get to Earth?”
“We can’t. We just wave as we streak by in our desert ball,” said Park.
Growing angry, Yuki stood up and tipped her wooden bench over. “So we go half the speed of light or something so it works out.”
“There’s a square root involved, not a half, but say you’re close. With no more time compression, how are we going to keep from freezing for thirty-one years with no sun?” Zeiss asked patiently.
“The foggy lights we used in subspace. Toby said we might not have lost heat if Mercy hadn’t blocked the ultraviolet spectrum.”
The commander shrugged. “So we live underground and accept that whoever harvests our food is going to die of cancer?”
“We send them through decontamination each time!”
“Up to sixty-sixty times because we started with only eighty-one pods. Unfortunately, without subspace radiation, we have no way to make the windows glow. But say we can generate power from the grav fields. That would take half our power. We’d arrive ninety, blue, and—”
“You can put me in stasis; I’ll still be young. I was promised things!” Yuki shouted. “Nobody asked me about any of this before the trip started.”
Mercy wrapped her arms around the irrational woman. “Shh. I know.”
When her friend calmed, Mercy said, “The safest thing for my baby would be to stay here. We’ve all lost things to the dangers of space, and there’s no end in sight. Sensei is asking us to do things none of us are equipped for. I’m afraid of dozens of things that could kill my husband every day.” She looked around the group. “I still say we finish the mission we came to do because Earth won’t last much longer without us.”
The vote to continue to Oblivion passed in ten minutes—only Yuki and Rachael dissented.
Epilogue
Over eight months pregnant, Kaguya Mori sat in front of the TV screen at JPL. Except when Sanctuary was under the sheet, the football-field-sized monitor still picked up the signals from the alien space telescope and showed the world leaders on Earth whatever the lens of the stolen spaceship aimed at. She rubbed her belly as she watched the
movement of the spheres and calculated where the path would take them next. Hordes of scientists analyzed the transmission twenty-four hours a day. The heiress to the biggest conglomerate in the world paid half their salaries just to watch.
Leaning down to talk to the baby inside her, Kaguya said, “That’s your daddy up there. He’s going to be a big hero someday, despite what those mean people said at the Hague. Conrad did this for love. He’s going to come back and give us the keys to the universe.”
The child echoed affection at the sound of her voice. Pleased, Momma decided to sing for a while. Recordings of her impromptu, hypnotic serenades were climbing the charts under the title Hymns to Uzume—the Japanese goddess of dawn, the great persuader, and the heavenly alarming female. The complexity of the compositions was beyond Bach. Studies were already underway to see if it increased the intelligence of the infant in the womb, but Kaguya was indifferent. Either way, her precious, little one would hold this world in the palm of its hand.
###
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Table of Contents
Sanctuary
Amazon EditionCopyright 2013 Scott Rhine
Cast with Talents Listed
Map of Spacecraft Interior—Lensward Hemisphere
Map of Spacecraft Interior—Mountainward Hemisphere
Chapter 1 – Landing on the Artifact
Chapter 2 – Conspiracy
Chapter 3 – Guardian Angels on the Moon
Chapter 4 – Antarctica
Chapter 5 – Fear is the Mother of Violence
Chapter 6 – The Seven Seals
Chapter 7 – Behind the Looking Glass
Chapter 8 – Defining the Problem
Chapter 9 – Helix
Chapter 10 – Snowflake
Chapter 11 – Space Marines
Chapter 12 – The Devil You Know
Chapter 13 – Walking in the Garden
Chapter 14 – Bat Out of Hell
Chapter 15 – Mapping the Universe
Chapter 16 – Spontaneous Combustion
Chapter 17 – Escape from Normal Space
Chapter 18 – A Matter of Gravity
Chapter 19 – Ecological Niche
Chapter 20 – In the Hands of an Angry God
Chapter 21 – Dark Days
Chapter 22 – Let There Be Light
Chapter 23 – Vow of Chastity
Chapter 24 – Tau Ceti System
Chapter 25 – The Big Day
Chapter 26 – Smooth Criminal
Chapter 27 – Train Wreck
Chapter 28 – The Morning After
Chapter 29 – Paradise Lost
Chapter 30 – Exile Island
Chapter 31 – Blank Patches
Chapter 32 – Walking on the Sun
Chapter 33 – Odysseus and the Nymph
Chapter 34 – Answers to Random Questions
Chapter 35 – Canon Law
Epilogue