by Ginger Booth
After a few moments, the lieutenant growled, “They say you’re doing great.” He seemed to resent the compliment.
Darren shot them a look, and Kaol shoved the soldier again. Then he focused carefully on the van ahead. They came upon a great confluence of painted lines. The van indicated left, and followed one curve, then indicated right, and followed another. They exited the line tangle on a new heading, straight for the high hangar, and gradually put on speed.
And the engineer began to sweat, as he battled to keep Thrive from knocking into the flanking vans. He added a few meters altitude to keep that a moot point, but some of these drafts pressed him downward, without warning or reaction time. Fortunately his guides took the hint and spread out, or maybe they dodged out of his way. This particular bit of flat expanse was less sheltered from the brunt of the wind.
Or maybe this promised storm was nearly upon them.
Red lights glowed on the back of his guide. Darren nearly overshot him before he realized that meant stop. They were less than 100 meters from the hangar now. Great doors began to roll up, and the leader resumed at dead slow. He also cut his red-and-white flasher. The chief sighed, with no idea what that meant. But now people hung to the sides of the great door, waving light wands.
The lead car flicked all of its lights, then turned dark. It turned sharply out of the way. That made sense. Darren struggled to keep his ship, 45 meters long and about 25 meters tall, tracking down the white line to the right. Forms ran out from the right side with red lights slashing. OK, he drifted to the center. A man there, stumbling in the wind, kept slicing his green light bat straight in.
“Well what do think I’m doing?” Darren muttered. Then he realized he was too high. He grimaced and brought the ship down to 5 meters. The man sliced down even more frantically. Oh, the turrets. Thrive’s hull and containers came to 27 meters tall, yes, but he had protuberances on top. He slowed further, the wind pushing him to pulverize the blue dude, as he rapidly programmed the autopilot to maintain a strict floor of 1.5 meters, and dead ahead with no more than 2 meters tolerance, and left the ship to choose its own speed less than 20 kph. Because there was no way he could fly this by eye. He had no brakes, only thrusters. A spaceship flew in space.
The autopilot seemed to go fairly well for the first few seconds. Thrive even nosed in the door. Then his control panel blinked red. Oh. That laser turret. He’d forgotten that one. And another blast of wind knocked him sideways, the blue-wand man diving to safety on the floor.
“What the hell are you doing?” Three-Eight yelled.
Darren left him and Kaol to their shoving match, and tried to focus on the camera view of the damage above. He pushed the ship backward a few meters, and managed to disengage the turret from the garage door. He trusted that was never intended to be pressurized, since with that gaping hole, it surely wouldn’t hold air tonight. The ship still wafting to and fro like a wild thing in the mounting gale, the auto-pilot unable to keep steady within its specified bounds.
And no, gun turrets didn’t politely fold down to the hull at the flick of a switch. The stalk was lovingly cold-welded to become one with the hull’s frame. Even if he wanted to saw off one of Thrive’s lasers – which he certainly did not – it wasn’t exactly quick.
In sudden inspiration, he drew out his tablet to toss some sines and cosines, and – yes! He canted the ship a few degrees. Which just barely cleared the door track ahead of him. And with the containers below, the stubby wings reached nowhere near the floor.
Maybe he’d have clearance to straighten out inside. Unfamiliar with the casual flick-of-the-wrist programming Ben and Sass could perform on the autopilot, he gave up and simply pushed Thrive through the door on manual. The glowing-wand crew by now developed a thorough healthy desire to stay the hell out of his way.
There! He pulled Thrive in with 10 meters clearance behind him, feeling remarkably claustrophobic for someone in six-story cavern. Three-Eight was yelling at him again, but the chief quit listening. Another few calculations, and some sensor readings just to check, and he rolled Thrive upright again. The hangar door trundled closed behind him. Aside from a jagged hole the size of a rego buggy’s balloon tire.
“For the record, I cooperated,” Darren stated.
About six wand-bearers clumped ahead of him conferring, at a cautious distance. Finally they split up. A lone green-light-bearer strolled onward along a white line, beckoning that he follow, at a slow walk.
Darren easily instructed the auto-pilot to follow that wand at constant distant. Without wind, Thrive executed this flawlessly. Darren meanwhile admired the other two behemoths of the skies that sheltered here. He was puzzled by the heavy mining crawlers, until he recalled an old Earth movie. They were ‘tanks.’ And those flying machines were capable of carrying them, apparently. On antigrav, he assumed, because their vestigial wings were no more impressive than Thrive’s. He itched to ditch the acting captain role, don a pressure suit, and nose around this cavernous building.
But that would be irresponsible.
He clicked the ship-wide hail. “All hands, we are arriving at Pontiac Dome. No one, repeat no one, leaves the ship.” He flicked a few more switches to secure the hatches. “Nighty night. Chief out.”
“You’re disembarking –!” Three-Eight attempted. “We’re all –!” The second sentence cut off in a meaty thud as Kaol’s fist connected with his jaw.
The light bearer stopped, pointing his wand toward some nozzle on the wall. Darren cleared the autopilot and keyed up the preset instructions for ‘stay here.’ The wand guy pointed down. Darren checked his clearance and instead rose three meters.
On the external speakers, he played a klaxon. The guy on the hangar floor cautiously backstepped. Then the engineer re-enabled the ESD, Thrive’s shields, for the night. He’d turned it off for the squeeze through the entrance. The static began to arc toward the recharger coupling ahead, causing the hangar’s floodlighting to flare and flicker. He tweaked the forward field until the pocket lightning died off and facility power steadied.
The Electrostatic Discharge field was invisible, but if anyone approached, their hair would stand on end and begin to shock them long before they crossed the threshold where the field exploded them. Those shields could protect the ship against small rocks impacting at 40,000 meters per second. Darren anticipated no visitors tonight.
He locked the consoles.
Rising from his seat, he announced heartily, “Let’s all go visit Liam in the med-bay, shall we?” Three-Eight currently sat scrunched against a bulkhead, bleeding from mouth and nose, Kaol looming over him.
“You have to talk to –” Three-Eight cut off as Kaol feinted an uppercut. “I’m here as your liaison! Let me talk!”
Darren figured it burned his butt that the hunter whupped him. Raised in high g, Denali outdoorsmen were ungodly strong, easy to underestimate. The chief squatted down, keeping Kaol between him and the Earthling. “I agree. You need to talk. But you need to calm down first. So we’ll go to med-bay. Where our doctor is calming down Ivett. Then you talk, not bark orders. We are cooperating. Imperfectly.”
“Cooperate more perfectly,” Kaol instructed the soldier, as he slowly ground a fist into his other hand.
Darren rose from his crouch, confident of nothing at all. But as he led the way to med-bay, he cheered to the thought that their problematic laser turret could slice through the roof like a can opener. At the catwalk railing, he and Kaol automatically grabbed Three-Eight’s elbows, flicked their gravity, stepped up and leapt off into the interior open cargo hold, as they did many times a day. Only guests used the stairs.
The wolf’s howl was most gratifying.
The scene in med-bay was not. Ivett hunched on the examination cot against the wall, crying uncontrollably. The Sagamore medic Liam sat on a stool by an array of hypodermics and vials of pills.
Eli, standing with arms crossed, looked to the chief hopefully. “Liam won’t administer drugs against her will.
Medical ethics.”
Kaol politely squeezed through and grabbed the hypo-spray. “What’s this one?”
“A mild sedative,” Liam explained. “It shouldn’t bother –”
Lightning-fast, Kaol turned on Three-Eight, seized his arm, and injected the hypo into his wrist. The lieutenant’s struggles resulted in an incomplete shot. So the hunter waited a few seconds for the calming effect to take root, and gave him another dose. Ivett shrieked, over and over.
Irate, Liam stood and yelled over the din, “I was trying to build trust!”
“Yeah, and I’m in charge of security. Three-Eight, you feel OK?”
The wolf man glowered at him, but nodded. He looked at Ivett, pained. “Dose her.”
Kaol did so. In moments her screaming died back to sniffles, but she still hugged her knees and shuddered miserably.
“What are the pills?” Darren inquired.
“Anti-addictives,” Liam explained. “I believe both of them are suffering from network withdrawal.”
The chief laughed. Mahinans joked about withdrawal from the nets, but it was just a bad habit, not a real addiction. Right?
Liam pursed his lips. “It’s a physical dependency. Like opiates.”
Kaol reached past him for the vial and read the dosing instructions. Then he handed Ivett two pills and a cup of water, looming over her. “Swallow it. Now.”
She obeyed, whimpering. “You people are horrible! I’ve never been treated so badly in my life!”
Kaol handed Three-Eight another three pills and drink of water.
“What will this do to me?”
Liam surrendered his stand on principle, and shifted focus to his patients. “Your body and mind crave control signals, I think. Administered with your food, straight to your implants. You missed those at dinner, and became increasingly agitated. The sedative calmed you. The anti-addictive breaks the desire for the ‘drug.’” He supplied air-quotes. “During acute withdrawal, you’ll need those every few hours.”
“Are you feeling abused?” Darren inquired of the lieutenant. “Or relieved?”
“I’m comfortable,” Three-Eight admitted.
Ivett, entirely worn out by her hysterics, let her eyelids droop closed over her enormous eyes. Her breathing evened into sleep.
Kaol volunteered, “I can stay with them in the open crew cabin. Sonic cage.”
“Good!” Darren heartily endorsed. “Now everyone is going to be nice and quiet while I spend some quality time to establish direct comms. Finally.”
Acting captain was bad enough, but the engineer had a real job. He decamped to his engineering podium to study the comms protocol standards the team acquired in Killingfield.
Because communicating with this world via Three-Eight left a lot to be desired. Just for fun, he left one window on his desktop opened to watch the external cameras. The armored soldiers outside were very persistent. They launched three waves of attack on the ship, with five fallen carried away. They were damned lucky with their heavy artillery that the ESD field simply atomized the projectiles. At the wrong angle, a missile could bounce off like a pool ball.
24
The Rayas colony was carried by a Martian ship, unlike the three Aloha colonies, borne by crews from Ganymede. The Rayas Martian crew never reached rendezvous at Sanctuary.
Ben regarded the throng awaiting him before the airlock to Psyche. In a bad sign, Teke and Sanjay still hadn’t boarded, and Hugo was running ten minutes behind him. He traded a bland cocked eyebrow with Remi and continued walking. He fixed a pleasant expression on his face, short of a smile.
Sanjay and Teke called, “Commandant!” and waved for attention. Based on the attractive young woman, with young girl child clutched in front of her, Ben congratulated himself for closeting in the sewers with Remi. At least the pair of them managed to evade social complications. Ben nodded to them guardedly.
Sanjay launched in, eyes shining joyfully. “Ben, this is Shira and Maroli!” His presentational wave left it unclear which was which. Ben smiled at the girls noncommittally. “I’d like to bring them with us to Merchant for a full medical workup! To gain a more detailed understanding of their health challenges here. To inform…further plans.”
The physicist Teke’s fingers drifted to the mom’s hand in a feather touch. She returned the touch and glowing smile. In a genetic sense, Teke was co-parent to Ben’s youngest child Texan, though neither of them granted the Denali authorities permission. The two men weren’t lovers, nor ever had been. And now these Teke-fathered Denali experiments had grafted three kids onto his family, a fact that led to some resentment on Ben’s side. Teke wasn’t much bothered.
But the fact remained. Teke was family. His girlfriends were not family, though welcome to visit at family holidays. “Further plans?” he asked the Denali-bald scientist pointedly.
“If there were to be any.”
Ben held him with his eye, but addressed the doctor. “What sort of medical insights can you gain on Merchant that you aren’t equipped to discover here?” He was ordered to pack accordingly, after all.
“Response to treatment options…” Sanjay averted his eyes.
Ben shot him a glance, then returned to Teke. “No.” He leaned down to favor Maroli with a warm smile. “Maybe you’ll come play at our house another time. Nice to meet you!” Or maybe she was Shira.
“But cap –” Sanjay attempted.
“No means no. Sorry, ma’am,” he added to Shira, or the mom at any rate.
“Ben, you owe me,” Teke attempted.
Ben grinned in amusement. “I don’t owe you that.” He clapped both miscreants on the shoulders. “Board. Now.”
With puppy-eyed looks of regret to the charming waif girls, the two men retreated into the airlock.
Now for Chairman Groot and his sidekick. The elder man brooded, arms crossed. Young Lieutenant Rover smiled anxiously at his elbow, trying to look appealing. Ben wondered, not for the first time, if he was that transparent at nineteen.
“Chairman!” Ben greeted him. “If all goes well, we’ll be back in –”
“I know about Earth,” Groot interrupted. “The Americans hijacked your ship and took your captain hostage! Torturing her now, the evil swine!”
Ben kept his sigh silent. Because of course Luna could eavesdrop on Earth, and pass Mars information. “You’re well informed.” Though Ben could quibble on what precise sense Sass was his. She certainly didn’t take orders from him. And Thrive was her ship.
The chairman drew closer and kept his voice low. “Luna can get them out.”
Ben blinked slowly. Did he believe this? How the rego hell would he know? Everything he knew about today’s Luna came from the man before him. “And why would they do that?”
After a furtive glance at Rover, Groot drew him away from Remi and the lad. He kept his voice low and conspiratorial. “Luna and Mars want to ally with your Colony Corps. Against Earth.” He wagged his eyebrows.
Ben took a step backward to escape how the stretched man loomed over him. In what possible universe would he accept such an offer, out of the blue? On the other hand, could they actually deliver and get Sass free? And did Sass want that result?
Sass ordered her ship to abort and make a run for rendezvous and pickup. But that was hours ago. And Clay apparently overruled her. So screw them, what did Ben Acosta want? Options. Opportunity and means to get them out later. And his family life would be hell unless he made a good faith effort to extract his mink-granddaughter. Not that he needed tempting. Enka was privately his favorite of the three grand-minks.
“Why would you ask for alliance?” he asked slowly. “You barely know us.”
“We know Earth,” Groot replied grimly. “And your lady friend is coming to know them all too well.”
Sass knew Earth better than either of them, but maybe Groot didn’t realize that yet. “Captain Sass Collier is a strong woman. Resourceful.”
“Torture,” Groot stressed. “They’re cutting her open a
live. Is it true? You people are immortal?”
“No, it isn’t,” Ben replied. “Sass heals better than most.”
Groot waved that away. “You’re space colonies. You know space. And you’ve succeeded at it! You’re obviously much better off than we are.”
“I understand Mars,” Ben claimed, though after two days in a gunky vat, he didn’t know it well. And the sabotage on the air filtration still baffled him. “But Luna is big.” He carefully didn’t add that Luna held more people than all the known Diaspora colonies so far.
“Luna’s population is larger than Mars. But both worlds were stripped of resources, forced to feed Earth. Off-world hydroponics.” He spat the words. “Until Luna rebelled. Now it’s too close for comfort.”
Ben shook his head. “I didn’t come here to pick a fight with Earth. We seek friendship, knowledge, shared scientific advances. All the colonies together,” came to barely one million people, “we’ve specialized in science and technology to live in space. But we can’t do it all. You know what it’s like. Most of our work force is needed to keep food on the table, air to breathe and water to live, mining, manufacturing. We can’t maintain a high-tech lifestyle with so few. And without high tech, we die. Earth doesn’t have that problem.”
Groot frowned, puzzled. “Earth has that problem worse than anyone. Never mind – they made their own bed. But Luna has the Artemis Institute.”
Ben shrugged. “What’s that?”
“A science and tech bastion! As good as any on Earth. Some even travel from Earth to attend!”
If so, Ben suspected the transfer students were spies. Because that’s what he’d do. “OK, I’m listening.”
“Power advances. On Luna and Earth, the wall paint generates all the electricity they need. Enough to crack water for oxygen to breathe, hydrogen to burn, and back to water again. Sound tempting?”
“You don’t have it,” Ben noted.