by Ginger Booth
Nose grimaced as Flipper clicked off, webbed hand reaching between his knees. As she likewise closed the channel, Nose’s hand also sported six fingers, the pair’s only resemblance. And the snippet ended, leaving Sass to gaze again at the enigmatic Earth.
Over Eli’s channel, Zelda giggled, their atmospheric specialist. “I bet they use video filters. I wear cat whiskers and ears when I comm my friend Anya.”
Each time Sass thought Zelda was maturing, the woman proved her wrong. At 29 she might be the youngest on the ship. Still.
Eli said it before Sass got the chance. “I don’t think so, Zelda. Sass, most are like that. Altered humans.”
“Hundreds of thousands, you say? Conversations?”
“Mostly data transfers. Comm calls, entertainment, email, you name it.”
Earth was alive after all. And its population was safe enough for trivial conversation long-distance. Some of them, Sass cautioned herself, lest she get too far ahead of her data. “Can we estimate how many people? From the data volume.”
“A lot,” Eli responded. “More than Aloha.” Aloha was Mahina’s star system, with a trio of colony worlds and sundry space platforms, total population maybe three quarters of a million. “Maybe by three orders of magnitude. Or four. You’d have to ask them. North America coming up soon. Congratulations, Sass. I know you’re dying to see home.”
He was sweet. “Yeah, save the best views for me. And let me know when you spot a live city.”
“You’re not watching?” he asked in surprise.
No, she’d better focus on her satellite problem. The ESD light started to flicker again. “Sass out.”
At least this time she knew at which altitude the space lasers lurked. And two locations gave her their rough spacing. Her defensive driving improved. She sped up, slowed down, and generally sought to be difficult to predict. Equidistant between guns, their power was at a minimum, too.
But she doubted Thrive could withstand this barrage for a single lap around the planet, let alone the planned 24 hours. Clay could spell her, but this was exhausting. Yet the plan called for her to observe the whole planet before opening a conversation.
I do not want to shoot first. And she passed into range of attack satellites three and four, which delivered an immediate one-two punch.
“Darren, Sass. Any options for me?”
“Just about to test one. Quit dodging.”
With grave trepidation, Sass instructed the programmed orbit to resume. She held onto her override controls just in case. But the next round of energy bursts she expected, due in 10 seconds, never materialized. She waited another 20 seconds. No more hits. “What did you do?”
“We’re broadcasting the lambda whoop,” Darren replied. “That’s what Teke calls it.”
Teke was the physicist behind the BECT gateway, currently on Ben’s ship. The acronym BECT stood for Ben-Elise-Cope-Teke, naming the primary co-inventors.
“A lambda whoop makes us invisible?” she asked.
“Hardly. Just very confusing. The frequencies – You don’t want me to explain it.”
“I really don’t,” Sass concurred with feeling. “Thank you, Darren, you’re a genius!”
“Of course. Uh, cap? The noise uses less power than laser hits. But.”
She sighed. “How bad?”
“If we stay in orbit a couple days like this, we’ll eat up half our travel reserves.”
They earmarked several piles in the fuel budget. One to land, and one for takeoff from the powerful gravity well. The remainder was small in comparison, but allowed them to fly between continents several times, and once they left Earth, power them to their cry-uncle spot at the L5 Lagrange point. If they expended the travel reserves and ate into the takeoff budget, there was no way out of here unless Ben landed to refuel them. Or until Thrive manufactured replacement fuel on Earth – hard to do.
“Understood, chief,” she murmured. “See if you can optimize usage. Take some hits, befuddle the rest.” Damn.
“Upstate,” Clay prompted beside her as she keyed off the comm.
She lunged out of her seat to look on his side, draping herself on his shoulders cheek to cheek. Her lover was born here, too. There were clouds, yes. And from what she saw of the coastline, the Northeast continued its slow sink beneath the waves. But she saw breaks in the cloud cover. Sunlight reached the ground below!
“It’s healing, Clay,” she breathed.
“Says you? Or the geek squad? Sass, please, no assumptions today.”
She kissed his temple rather than argue with him. Then a glint of that sunlight struck something to reflect into her cameras. Eli called to confirm, but she’d already caught the gist.
The Upstate Earthlings lived in domes. She’d come all this way, starved to step outdoors into a full rich biome again, feel the rain on her face while she breathed deeply of fresh air and fecund vegetation. Yet Earth wasn’t that anymore. Maybe the only open-air world they knew of was the one they’d left – the terraformed desert moon of Mahina.
Darren’s lambda whoop held good as they crawled across the American Northeast, Sass drinking it in. Then parting clouds gradually revealed an enormous new lobe on the southwest of Lake Michigan, perfectly round, about where Chicago used to be.
“Zelda, any increase in radiation near Chicago?” Sass slipped into her own seat to supply coordinates.
“Nope,” Zelda replied. “Probably a kinetic strike. Impact crater. Filled with water.”
Clay mused, “That might explain the space defense lasers.” He opened a notepad on the screen. He titled it ‘To Discuss with Ben.’ He added bullet points for laser attack satellites and impact crater.
Sass pursed her lips. Yeah, Ben wouldn’t like this. She didn’t much care for it either. “Luna?”
Clay grimaced exasperation at her. “We know nothing. So we find out. Right?”
She raised hands in irritated surrender.
On the far side of the Sun, and a longer planetary radius out, Ben Acosta gazed in disfavor on his own choice of planet.
He’d spent a few extra minutes on the bridge to ascertain that none of the spaceship graveyard drifting in orbit was hostile. But his sensors detected no power or heat. That settled, he left the bridge to his gunner for the moment, and joined the geek squad convened in the galley.
He needed to decide how long to learn by observation, versus opening a dialog. If anyone was left to talk to.
“They call this red?” he called out cheerfully on the way in. “It’s peach. An orange sort of pink.”
His gorgeous housekeeper Tikki returned, “It’s a pretty shade of peach.” The man hastened to supply his captain with a glass of tea and and an ice wand. Ben swizzled in a lightning zig-zag of ice and handed back the wand with a grateful smile. A generous multi-world snack buffet littered the dining table. Ben snatched a croissant. Thrive Spaceways – or the Colony Corps, as he’d rechristened the adventuring arm of the company – didn’t carry a single person from the dismal world of Cantons. Yet their French and Austrian pastries traveled the stars.
Ben claimed his seat at the head of the table. He started to put his feet up, but the housekeeper cleared his throat repressively. In his fleet, a housekeeper rated as a chief petty officer. Tikki applied the crew to cleaning chores when engineering didn’t need them.
“What’s the white stripe?” the captain asked his brain trust.
On the face of Mars, it looked as though someone drew a chalk line to the west of Arsia Mons, the massive volcano home to Mars One, the last-known sole settlement on this rock ball. The computer informed him the volcano was thirty times more massive than the biggest on Earth, Mauna Loa. But it shrank in comparison with Olympus Mons off to the left, which was about the size of Italy on Earth.
Ben’s ancestry was part Italian, and he felt some affinity for Hawaii due to being born on Mahina in the Aloha system. But he couldn’t relate to ‘Italy’ as a size. Mahina’s most impressive geographic feature was a rift a hund
red meters high. Which was fun to jump off, with or without a hang-glider. In contrast, the planet before him featured twice the gravity of his home moon. And the valley to the right stretched halfway across the planet face. The three massive volcanoes showed up clear as day, though he inserted his ships four times farther off than Sass chose, in geosynchronous orbit over the colony site.
Visibility was less problematic with a thin atmosphere.
The physicist Teke, a baldy from planet Denali like Tikki Cook, finished retrieving an answer to Ben’s question. “The white stripe is a condensation trail. Water. Snow. Apparently this time every year, that streamer forms west from Arsia Mons, up to 1500 klicks long. Neat.”
“Huh,” Ben acknowledged. “And the shiny bits are solar collectors?” The modest colony was dug into the flank of the volcano. He hadn’t spotted any domes from the bridge.
“Safe bet,” Teke agreed. “We found activity on the surface.” He leaned forward to zoom in the wall display screen with his oversized comm tablet. “Kicking up dust. I bet they’re mining.”
“Also a safe bet,” Ben returned. “Possibly for water. No convenient snowballs in the neighborhood.”
Desert Mahina orbited amid a gas giant’s convenient rings of ice. Unlike most colonies, their settlers never completely gave up space, because little ships like his and Sass’s needed to fetch water.
“Ah. Point.” Teke shifted the zoom to the area tiled with solar collectors, then increased magnification to study a handful of them. This clump proved to be mostly broken, reflective surfaces dulled and fragmented, dust drifts built up to one side. He panned along and found intact reflectors too, though.
Floki, the emu-form android on the team, said, “Sar, 60% of the solar reflectors are in good condition. We postulate they collect into light pipes for agriculture, not power.”
“Based on?”
“Prior knowledge,” Hugo Silva supplied. The AI specialist hailed from Sanctuary, the tiny colony where the original Colony Corps regrouped after depositing their settlers in the Diaspora. His own forebears were from Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons. But ex-Martians outnumbered the Gannies on Sanctuary. “Mars One had maybe fifty thousand citizens in its heyday after we left. The solar array isn’t big enough.”
Ben thought this through. “So do we estimate thirty thousand remain?”
“Don’t know,” Teke countered. “I’d guess somewhere between ten and thirty thousand.”
The captain had hoped for ‘none.’ Nothing personal, he wished the Martian people well. But his goal here was to salvage lost research. Two Martian crews, with their priceless science teams, had never reached Sanctuary. But instead of a nice antiseptic retrieval, this was looking like yet another space colony desperate for transport to somewhere the grass was greener. The grass here didn’t look so green.
He sighed. “Any obvious anti-aircraft guns?”
“Why would anyone make them obvious?” Teke retorted.
“Ours are obvious as hell. Because why hide an anti-meteor gun? That just makes it cost more. So what are we still investigating?”
The emu volunteered, “Trying to intercept off-world comms. Ways into their computing infrastructure.”
“Without success,” Hugo summed up. “They’re not talking.”
Ben glanced at Teke, who shrugged. “The discrepancies from historic records are unsurprising. It’s lousy pink real estate. Call whenever you want.”
Ben glanced around the others, but they seemed to accept Teke’s verdict. He gazed at the planet and sighed. “OK, let’s do this.” He opened separate comms windows to include their doctor and chief engineer on the call, plus himself flanked by Teke and Hugo at the table. “Everyone else out of the camera frame. Especially you, Floki. Remember you never show yourself in this system.”
The mechanical emu obediently found a spot against the wall.
“Hugo, hail them. Time to make someone’s day.”
Hugo fixed a tightbeam on the small colony and addressed them using the old Colony Corps, Diaspora-era protocols and wavelength. Those were likely obsolete. But no one else in this sky was talking, making it easy to deliver the core concept: ‘Hey, you! Yeah, I’m talking to you!’
Ben drummed his fingers and reminded himself not to expect much. These first contact situations tended to underwhelm. On planet Cantons, they never did get anyone to pick up. No one monitored the Cantons space comms anymore. He and Sass had elected to infiltrate.
After a few minutes, a wide-eyed youth accepted the hail from the surface. “M-Mars One,” he stammered near panic.
3
The oversized role of the modest moon Mahina is probably explained by the Colony Corps, reborn under the leadership of Ben Acosta near the time the BECT warp gateway was discovered. Legend has it that Ben supplied the ‘B’ in BECT.
“Mars One, Merchant Thrive Actual,” the captain replied to the terrorized youth who picked up this Very Important Call. “I’m Ben Acosta, Commandant of the Colony Corps. We come in peace. We hope to visit your colony.”
“Um…why?” asked the boy. Exceedingly gaunt, Ben couldn’t tell whether the lad suffered from malnutrition or a recent growth spurt. The kid’s threadbare shirt provided a name, Lt. Rover.
“We’re interested in research records. From when the Corps left Mars a century ago.”
Rover gulped in panic. “I-I need to… We’ll call you back!” His screen blanked out.
“Poor kid,” Ben acknowledged. He swept his comms windows to a column on the edge of the display. His engineer Remi, currently flying the fuel tender, replaced his image with a ‘Hold’ placard while he got back to work. The doctor, Sanjay, followed his lead. The galley team continued their perusal of the planet to kill time.
Ben kept a weather eye for any guns coming online. But he didn’t expect hostility, merely a mad scramble to respond to an inexplicable event. If this happened back home, an unknown ship arriving out of the blue, Carl at Schuyler Spaceport Control would be screaming in panic to Ben’s husband now.
Who’d be far from reassuring. Ben’s not home. You deal with it. The commandant grinned.
Mars One got its act together in under ten minutes. Hugo hastily restored the comms windows to center stage and prompted Sanjay and Remi back to duty.
“Gus Groot, Chairman, Mars One,” their new correspondent bit out. A grey and grizzled man, clearly Groot did not benefit from medical nanites. No surprise there – the technology was mastered on Mahina. More surprising, he was a stretch, skeleton attenuated by inadequate gravity. Artificial gravity hailed from pre-Diaspora. Every member of Ben’s crew wore a personal generator on his belt. Yet even Ben’s husband and dad had stretch physiques. Just because a technology was available didn’t mean everyone could benefit. Equitable distribution was an economic question.
“Ben Acosta, Commandant of the Colony Corps, and captain of Merchant Thrive. I’m in geocentric orbit with two smaller ships, Stalwart and Psyche. I’m honored to meet you, Chairman Groot.”
“Areocentric orbit,” Groot corrected absently. “Never mind. God.”
Ben smiled sympathetically. “I imagine this is a shock.”
“Why didn’t you come before? Where have you been all this time?”
“Personally? I’m descended from colony settlers.”
Hugo volunteered apologetically, “No one ever intended to come back. Hugo Silva, by the way. Descended from Ganymede.”
“When they left,” Groot said searchingly, “the Colony Corps families, with our last ship. They said they’d come back. After they collected their crews.”
Ben touched Hugo’s sleeve and slightly shook his head. “I’m sorry, Chairman Groot, but they lied. My crew and I had no part in that.”
“Long before you were born,” Groot acknowledged. “How old are you?”
“I’m forty-one.” Ben declined to provide ages for his team. Hugo was in his late fifties, and the good doctor nearly eighty. Remi was his own age, subjective at least. And he
had a fair suspicion how old the chairman was. “You?”
“I’m forty-four.” The anguished answer came out as a growl. “I’m the oldest in Mars One. Oldest still walking, anyway.”
“My husband,” Ben shared, “expected to die of old age by thirty. My mother died of the radiation cancers when I was six. We’ve recently improved our life expectancy. Maybe we can help you. Some.” He was heartened to see his doctor nod emphatically. He’d have to remind Sanjay not to get too ambitious. “In exchange for access to your research archives. Perhaps I could visit tomorrow, and bring my engineer, doctor, physicist, and computer specialist.”
A message popped up on his tablet from Tikki Cook. Bring food! “Maybe you’d like to lunch with us on our courier ship.”
“Courier ship?”
“I have three ships with me. My flagship stays in orbit, along with a fuel tender. I propose landing with our courier, yes.”
A shuttle didn’t have the engine power to return to orbit. His flagship Merchant Thrive was a technology treasure trove he had no intention of letting a Martian visit. Besides, landing Psyche took less fuel.
“And how big is your flagship?” Groot asked suspiciously.
Ben grinned. “My flagship is a Jupiter Orbital 3 asteroid hopper. Typical ship’s complement fourteen. The fuel tender sleeps two. The courier, six at a stretch.”
Best not to draw attention to the mining guns on an asteroid hopper. Ben could rid the universe of Mars One inside of twenty minutes. But he had no reason to.
Fortunately Groot overlooked the gun aspect. He shook his head and lidded his eyes in pain. “And the great ships?”
Ben confirmed gently, “Dismantled for parts at the destination.” This wasn’t wholly true, but close enough. He also had transports capable of carrying a thousand migrants at a time. But he wasn’t ready to dangle that carrot yet.
Hugo stepped in to ask for information to synchronize their clock to local time. This mundane detail served to soothe the chairman. Fortunately, a Mars day was only a few minutes different from Mahina time. Lunch would come three and a half hours late for Ben’s team, no biggie.