by Ginger Booth
As she’d boasted to Clay, Sass gunned her thrusters the instant the grapples seized the shuttle. Now she skimmed scant meters above the heaving sea. On her sensors, radios in the vicinity came alive, five times as many as she’d passively tracked before.
Yup, Thrive had been noticed.
And she’d hoped to avoid that. So much for sleeping over the Sargasso Sea tonight. But what really bothered her was the report of a weapons lock, a shrill red-light sensor she’d never seen turn on before. She clicked it off, thought better of it, and turned it back on. Then its unnerving tone began to warble.
Fidget suddenly popped up in the gunner’s seat beside her, broad puppy-toes on the console. Her high girlish tone reported, “Weapons fired, tactical nuclear warheads. Take evasive maneuvers.”
Sass couldn’t have been more astonished if the toaster emitted advice on her choice of breakfast. But she had no time to think, only do. She pulled back the stick and climbed straight up. Then she flipped the ship backward for an outside loop, leveling off again about 26 degrees off her prior heading. “Still locked?” The mink didn’t reply. “Fidget, is a nuclear warhead still locked on us?”
“Monitoring.” Sass counted ten rapidly pounding heartbeats before Fidget resumed. “Warhead deactivated. Returning to submarine. This is not a known feature.” The mink dropped down from the console and commenced grooming a hind leg. Tufts of white fur accumulated on the black gunner’s seat.
Sass blew out and checked the radio tell-tales. The whole rego-damned ocean lit with signals like a Christmas tree beneath, as though paved with ships. Where did they come from? And she answered her own question. From underwater. She’d checked the open ocean for ships. It never occurred to her to look for submarines.
A sudden splash of radio noise hit the sensors from the vicinity of their submarine encounter. She checked it on visual. A ship exploded back there. Seconds later, another one.
“Multiple warheads detected,” her mink companion commented. “None locked on us.”
“They’re shooting at each other.” Sass checked the skies, with a sinking feeling they might be no friendlier than the seas. They were quieter across the EM spectrum, though, no signals below LEO satellite altitude – lower Earth orbit. She climbed to 3300 meters, and keyed in a randomized zig-zag toward Upstate. If this was doomed to be a short trip, she was determined to see home again before she ran away.
She’d seen Earth again. And mostly she realized how very little she’d ever seen of the place before she left, except in pictures. She’d never even visited the north side of the Great Lakes, only the southern shore of Lake Ontario and the tip of Lake Erie to the north and west, Lake Champlain to the northeast, and the ruins of New York City to the south. She’d vaguely thought Bermuda was in the mid-Atlantic, and never heard of the Sargasso Sea.
Clay earned a top-notch university degree, while she earned her stripes in the army – the flogging scar kind of stripes. Army service was the best an orphan fourteen-year-old could hope for in the tent cities.
The mink stiffened, and Sass’s eyes flew to the sensors, where new lights appeared. Flying at that speed, her new acquaintances would be jets. If that was even their top speed, which she hastened to warn herself she did not know. It isn’t my top speed. This wasn’t her top altitude, either. She pulled back the stick to climb, and banked to the left, careful to keep her maneuvers unpredictable. “Darren, Sass. Give me a little more of that invisible treatment. And let’s raise the ESD shields.”
“Are we…in combat?”
Sass forgave him his surprise. With paper-thin survival margins, the colony worlds did not invest in spaceships to shoot at each other. What a colossal waste of resources. A ship like Thrive was built to mine asteroids and fetch ice, not fight.
“I hope not. Sass out.” She almost called back to ask what happened if a small tactical nuke hit their shields. But there was little point in asking. They’d either survive it, or not. If the ship was lamed, she flew to a landing as best she could, wherever she could.
Stop thinking like that.
One thing was clear. Her aerial companions suffered an immense turning radius at their speed. Sass didn’t have that problem. She dropped 3732 meters – she avoided round numbers – while turning 43 degrees as tight as she could. Then she held level for a slow count of six goosing her speed to Mach 2.7. Then she fell off to Mach 0.8 and returned to her original heading, plus a bit for randomization, diving up and down like a porpoise randomly through 6 klicks of altitude.
No, the jets couldn’t do that.
They could loose warheads, however, just like the submarine. Dammit. On the plus side, these came at her with reaction time. She scooped the gun controls over to her side of the console. Fidget watched intently, her itchy leg hung poised in the air. And the captain fired her small laser at one of the incoming missiles, which exploded. But it didn’t detonate the warhead. Good. She goosed her speed evasively, gave it 23 klicks, then shot at the other two warheads in rapid succession.
One thing an asteroid hopper was good at – shooting rocks. Mercifully, Ben skipped that part of the AI targeting system during his frenzy of system lobotomy. Which only stood to reason. The moon Mahina dwelled within the rubble-rich rings of the gas giant Pono. She couldn’t navigate near home without decent gun control.
Comms! They were receiving EM on every wavelength. Well, then she’d broadcast on a wide band. “Attacking jets! This is Thrive Actual in a JO-3 spacecraft.”
Technically Thrive was a PO-3, but P stood for Pono, where it was built. A JO-3 was the Jupiter Orbital original.
“We come in peace! Please! Stand down and talk! Over!” She clicked off the hail and set it to repeat. But no response was forthcoming.
Nor did she expect any, sadly. With every wavelength occupied, she had no idea how to hail her attackers. Cutting through cluttered local comms was not an issue she usually faced. To hail another vessel in the vastness of space, one trained a tightbeam on them. But in this context, the jets were likely to interpret that as an attack. And they still wouldn’t recognize she was trying to talk to them. Thrive didn’t have their comms protocols.
She was nearing the American seaboard now. She adjusted her random jogs to remain over the ocean, sure that anti-aircraft defenses along the coast would be thick. Her jet escort dropped off her sensors, which tended to confirm her suspicion that she was in range of shore batteries. Plus new radio signal sources seemed to blanket the coastline to twenty miles from shore. She terminated her all-bands broadcast, which could only serve to assist enemy targeting now.
She hit the cloud cover first, then heavy rain slashed at her ship. Unfortunately, those provided no cover whatsoever. She saw the radio sources plain as day, and they presumably saw her, too.
So how to land? Or could she land? Ideally, she’d prefer the bottom of the ship never rest on anything wet. Thrive carried her fuel reserves in shipping containers racked to the bottom of the vessel, the same standard box model used by trucks, trains, and cargo ships centuries ago. Dry, the fuel pellets were stable, and those boxes were tough.
But if the fuel got wet, it exploded spectacularly. More than enough to blow up her modest spaceship. She preferred to hover, not land.
Where, remained the question. Every place she knew lay beyond that blockade of coastal vessels. She allowed herself the briefest of eye-rolls and punched the comm. “Clay to the bridge.”
“Can’t. Shuttle decon.”
Sass quirked a lip, but let it go without comment. “OK. I need advice. You know this world better than I do. I’ve dodged submarines, jet fighters, and tactical nukes. But now the coast is an armed fortress. I want to see Upstate – tomorrow. Where do I lay low tonight?”
Clay’s pause wasn’t long enough to check a map. “Fundy. Bad place to moor a boat.”
“What’s a Fundy?”
“Where, Sass. The Bay of Fundy, between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Highest tides in the world. Or they were. Sea rise migh
t have changed that. It won’t be deserted, but ought to be less crowded than a direct approach.”
“I’m impressed. And, um, a backup choice?”
“All my second guesses are in the same direction. Continue northeast along that coast. You’ll find empty above the Arctic Circle.”
“The planet warmed, Clay. People fled north.” Despite the objection, she veered back out over the Atlantic.
“Agreed, but it’s still pitch dark in winter. Growing season is short.”
Sass grimaced in self-irritation. She knew that. All human habitation on the hothouse planet Denali lay in the polar region, and she just spent a year evacuating them. “Right. And Clay? I’m sorry. I just –”
“I know. I’m sorry for being an ass. Memories resurfacing. It’s like they’re morphing into nightmares as I access them. Bermuda… I was a different person in Bermuda.”
“Yeah.” She couldn’t have said it better. “Body count?”
“Maybe a dozen.”
His voice took on a Boston accent and clipped coldness Sass remembered, too, the Clay Rocha she’d first met. A rich Fed, and didn’t that baggage carry distrust and class hatred. But I was wrong about him, she reminded herself. Don’t be too sure, another part still replied, even after all these years. “We’ll talk. Later.”
“Clay out.”
Body count, she mused in disgust. The theme of her century, culling a human population so bloated they destroyed the world. She’d loathed and feared the authorities, and scuttled to make herself too useful to kill. And became a tool of genocide like everyone else who survived.
This planet wasn’t the one she left. She wasn’t the person who left it. This was one hell of a homecoming. And in the person department, these unfolding memories, whitewashed for decades, bothered her. In her android aspect, where had these nightmare recollections hidden, to revive themselves now? And could they reassert the person she was then?
The old Sassafras Collier died before she left Earth, literally. Her new undying android incarnation was a different person, one she liked better.
“Incoming,” Fidget warned.
Sass welcomed the distraction. But apparently this new quartet of fighters compared notes with her previous dance partners. They flew slow and positioned in a staggered high-low to box her against the marshes of Jersey. And started firing missiles, damn them! She locked the threats into her smaller laser to neutralize.
Did they have guns, too? Or only the missiles? Doesn’t matter. She couldn’t risk the coastal defenses, and she neared the New England shore to the north, to be cornered. She spun on a dime compared to what her pursuers could manage, and headed due east, directly toward her northeastern-most attacker.
Her selected victim in this game of chicken tried to evade, dodging south. She continued to track him head-on. But she’d exposed Thrive’s flank. The other jets closed in, with a new barrage of missiles. She flicked those targets to the small laser to deal with on automatic. A handful of missiles was child’s play compared to a hell-run through the rings of Pono.
The way out was to destroy that jet, or possibly the northern two. She lined up the shot on her main laser, but still her finger hesitated. Knowing Earth, these were manned fighters. She faced human crews who’d done nothing wrong. Was there no other way?
This is Earth. Kill or be killed. She lased the fighter out of her way, practically evaporated it with her asteroid-carving gun. And she locked onto the second jet at this end of the box. She obliterated that one, too.
Swallowing, she goosed her speed to Mach 4 and screamed out east, the solid boat-city of the Long Island shoals flashing past to her left. She overshot the Cape Cod shoals out into the North Atlantic. Her jet companions couldn’t follow quickly enough.
As the radio chatter thinned below, she dropped to 100 meters, and cut her speed, the ESD field, and the lambda whoop. I am a seagull, gliding above the waves.
Scratch that. No more seagulls.
And so much for ‘we come in peace.’ Damn. She laid in a sedate zig-zag to the Bay of Fundy, and hoped its tides remained a problem.
“Fidget.” The mink perked up, rising on her forepaws, eager to help as the captain addressed her. “Any chance you could figure out how to hail an enemy vessel?”
The mink looked away and down, then flattened on the seat, crestfallen. Sass reached across and stroked her. “It’s OK, little one. I know it’s a hard problem.” And she’d have to solve it the hard way – convince someone to give her the protocols.
11
Others were directly killed by heat-supercharged weather events – floods, mudslides, storm surges, cyclones.
In the Mars One colony, Ben’s situation wasn’t as immediately deadly, though he grew leery of the slow effects. When their tour reached the life support systems, he and his engineer Remi requested to stay and ‘take a look.’ Mila continued onward to the computers with Hugo and Teke, with Wilder watching their backs. Groot had already escorted the medic, Sanjay, back to the courier ship, to study some samples.
And didn’t that sound ominous.
But the obvious problem was that the colony’s life support was on its last legs. Ben took a blessed turn on the breath mask he shared with Remi, closing his eyes in enjoyment of a few deep clean breaths. Then he racked the mask and turned to the task at hand, hauling a slimed filter screen out of a vat.
In all his years in space, filters just didn’t come more disgusting. He’d found the source of the vilest stench of the colony right here, in its most concentrated reek. He levered the arm-span-wide sieve out of the gloppy soup, and attempted to shake it side-to-side to lose some water. At .38 g gravity on Mars, the bowl still massed too much to shake. He gave up and propped it against a tank corner, mostly out of the water. He pulled out a utility knife to scrape at it. Ropy strands of gelatinous goo plopped into the muck, a mixture of clear and green-brown.
He supposed the growths were mostly animal rather than vegetable, based on the lack of grow lights in the chamber. Then again, the work lights could probably keep algae happy enough. The stench was unbearable. After he freed a couple kilos, he was finally able to shake the water through.
“Rover, got another for you,” he invited. The lieutenant morosely wheeled a rubber cart for the commandant to deposit the screen for cleaning. He and Groot insisted they did this by blowing them dry in the next room.
Ben favored his own suggestion, of tossing the noisome things out onto the regolith to freeze dry to death under fresh solar radiation. But water was precious here, and they wanted to reclaim it. They didn’t call their pink ground regolith either, nor shared Mahina’s hostility to the omnipresent dust, ‘rego’ a common swear-word.
Rego hell. Ben shook his hands into the vat and watched Rover exit the room. He and Remi were alone for the moment. “That was the last of the screens. Now what do we do with the vat?”
Remi glanced over from his latest cabinet project. “You know what I would do with it. Why do you ask?”
Ben sidled up next to him. Remi recoiled from his stench. “What can we accomplish here? Realistically.”
Overhead, a steampunk masterwork of pipes dangled from the rock roof, archaeological layers of bypass pipes in mummy windings of fiberglass repair cloth. He supposed it stood to reason that each time the heat failed, the pipes burst. Fix some, bypass the rest.
The engineer shook his head, dismissing the pipes above with a glance. “If it’s any one system, I can fix. Maybe replace one machine. But you see. Catastrophic systems failure. Maybe a decade ago.”
“They’re still breathing,” Ben countered. “Sort of.” His face itched. He no longer had any clothing clean enough to wipe it on, let alone his grimed hands. So instead he worked his nose. “Give me a breather? So I don’t touch the mask.” He was growing light-headed again.
Remi held the air supply to his face until Ben drew away to signal ‘enough.’ “Drink,” the engineer demanded, and held the water for him next. “We get altitude sick
if we don’t drink.” After Ben finished, the engineer took his own advice and downed a cup’s worth from their jug.
Then he leaned back on a less filthy variety of equipment cabinet. Unlike Ben, the engineer’s overalls remained fairly clean, the swine. “We build them a new airlock to shut off the computer tunnels.”
“You like that plan?” Ben returned. “Then we decant the computers in vacuum.”
Remi shrugged. “They’re right. They have no choice. Not enough air.”
On the little of their tour before they closeted themselves with the equipment, the locals appeared listless, blotto. They handled the low pressure better than Ben’s team, but weren’t capable of working. Most sat around in a dull-stare torpor, even the children subdued. And there were children here, dammit.
“So that brings their pressure up to Earth-normal? Or?”
“Or,” Remi agreed. “Progress, not perfection. Cleaning the vats… They need clean water to drink.” He glowered at the brown vat Ben tackled for him. “Carbon dioxide is way too high. And that won’t solve it.” He stood and threw up his hands in an excessive Sag gesture. “It is too much, Ben. Any one system, yes, I could build a new one!” At Ben’s gesture, he lowered his voice. “We don’t have the steel stock.”
Merchant’s printer could replace any of these machines. “I thought maybe we’d find specific parts to replace.”
Remi grimaced. “I could.” He clearly didn’t want to, and Ben couldn’t blame him. The machines were unfamiliar, well over a century old, in advanced states of decay. To take one apart risked destroying it. And how to copy a part already corroded beyond recognition?
“No. Better to choose one machine and give them a new one.”