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Warp Thrive

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by Ginger Booth




  Warp Thrive

  Thrive Space Colony Adventures Box Set Books 4-6

  Ginger Booth

  Copyright © 2020 Ginger Booth

  All rights reserved.

  Cover by Raphael Francavilla and Ginger Booth

  Skyship image © Freestyleimages | Dreamstime.com

  Diagrams by Ginger Booth

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the author.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part I

  Maps

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Part II

  Map

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Part III

  Map

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  Chapter 138

  Chapter 139

  Chapter 140

  Chapter 141

  Chapter 142

  Chapter 143

  Chapter 144

  Chapter 145

  Chapter 146

  Chapter 147

  Chapter 148

  Chapter 149

  Chapter 150

  Chapter 151

  Chapter 152

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  Also by Ginger Booth

  Prologue

  Launched on a shoestring,

  The colonists were humanity’s only hope for survival.

  But they’re failing in the Aloha star system.

  Denali holds two prizes of inestimable value.

  A true starship at the bottom of the ocean.

  And the greatest nanite scientist in the system.

  Too bad Thrive is stuck here.

  Part I

  Starship Thrive

  Maps

  Thrive floorplan.

  1

  Captain Sass Collier eagerly stabbed her comms button the moment her ship set down their containers, her hand trembling from the strain of the past few hours. “Waterfalls, this is Thrive. We’re down!”

  Her gunner Ben Acosta shot down yet another pseudo-pterodactyl – pterry for short. “And we’re ever so eager for interdiction,” he muttered.

  Poor Ben. He’d never seen wild animals before. He hated having to kill them.

  “Thrive, your sonics are live – now,” Zan replied, spokesman for their new hosts here at the domed habitat of Waterfalls. Or at least, Zan led the hunters who held the hostile wildlife perimeter, while Thrive carved itself a parking lot in the riotous jungle. “Remember, do not fly your ship through the sonics. You won’t enjoy it. You’d probably pass out and crash your ship into a dome, killing thousands.”

  Worth avoiding, Sass conceded. “Understood, Waterfalls.”

  Though Sass was pretty sure she didn’t understand much about how things worked on the planet Denali. They just got here.

  She kept the ship hovering to see how effective these ‘sonics’ were. They did seem to keep the monsters on the periphery at bay. But while they were still maneuvering, Zan needed to keep the overhead barrier turned off. He told her to let him know as soon as she was ready to stay below 100 meters. That was an hour ago.

  Their hectare of infant spaceport still steamed from Sass burning off the forest, and Ben’s attempts to carve rock and level the site. This wasn’t entirely possible. But their 100 x 100 meter foothold on a new planet now featured one step broad and level enough to park their 4 shipping containers, and a larger shelf for the ship, itself 45 meters long. If the rest of the site was rough sloping ground, well, Ben had performed near-miracles for such quick work.

  A pterry dropped to the ground right where Sass intended to park. The beast lay there, one 5-meter wing extended, the other curled to its body, wracked with seizures.

  “Aw…” Ben moaned beside her.

  “Sorry, Ben,” she murmured. She danced the Thrive, flying on-end like a dolphin prancing on water with its tail f
lukes, to direct her engine output to incinerate the still-twitching monster. The engines were giving all they had just to keep Thrive in the air in this unfamiliar 1.1 g gravity well. She couldn’t even fly the ship level as they would back home among the low-gravity moons and rings of the gas giant Pono. Back where we belong, she tried not to think.

  She cremated one more twitching fallen pterry with one of the high-power rock guns, and sat back a moment. Well, certainly none of the approaching monsters were healthy anymore. However, using a landscaping laser on a piece of empty ground was one thing. If a pterry carcass landed on the ship or their precious cargo, she couldn’t very well blast it to cinders in situ.

  She inquired, “Waterfalls, do these birds ever recover after passing through the sonic barrier?”

  “Not very often,” Zan replied over the comms.

  “Meaning? Like, once a year they destroy a dome?”

  “Oh, no! Hunters can shoot them down, of course. But normally they’re eager to escape. They fly straight back into the sonics. Over and over again until they die. So, problem solved. The sonics are effective. You can set down anytime now. Will that be soon?” Zan and his crew had been covering their arrival from the jungle for hours, plus whatever time it took them to install the beacons and erect the sonic barriers.

  “Probably. Thrive out.” She turned first to Ben, then consulted her first mate Abel and engineer Copeland in the hold. Nerves jangling with adrenaline from the hell-ride down from orbit, and battling the wildlife, she should be eager to simply set the ship down and be done with it.

  Except she wasn’t sure the Thrive would ever lift again.

  Ben drew a quick diagram on the display between them. “Park there. Captain, the fueling crew is exhausted.” The youth, just turned 21 on the voyage here, offered a compassionate sad smile. He understood her reluctance.

  “Right. Let’s do this.” She danced her dolphin to one end of Ben’s suggested bed, sort of diagonal on the lower end of the lot. She swiveled so the landing struts pointed somewhat downward, and cut in their bottom thrusters to maximum while she lowered the engines within a few meters of the fused rock and soil below. She’d burn a pool of lava beneath them if she kept this up. She eased off the power to the engines and –

  THWACK! The ship bounced forward onto its landing struts. No amount of inertial dampeners or internal gravity could cancel out that sudden lurch to the ground. “I hope I didn’t break anything.”

  Ben’s chuckle beside her held only a tinge of hysteria at first. In a moment, they both cracked up, Sass with tears squeezing out of her eyes.

  As they calmed down, she realized she was not engendering confidence. She sighed. “I apologize, Mr. Acosta. That was unprofessional of me. Too much adrenaline.”

  He shrugged, and continued on to stretch his neck. Like hers, it was probably in knots from the hours-long battle to land safely. “With respect, Sass, you’re the only captain I’ve ever known. And I felt the same way.” He leaned forward and turned the external flood lights onto the polar winter night. One quadrant remained dark, its lamp likely a pterodactyl casualty.

  They hadn’t exactly been flying blind. But the blinding chaotic lights of out-gassing engine and rock-cutting laser, during frenetic maneuvers, hardly provided a calm, reasoned view of their new surroundings. The impenetrable forest loomed 30 meters high downslope and like a wall into darkness upslope. Greens dominated, in every imaginable shade. But even in the forest canopy, strong elements of red, purple, and white suggested whole trees of those mingled colors. Small splotches of further brilliant colors burst out of the undergrowth. Their new pocket spaceport, blackened browns, steamed in the rain from their efforts to cauterize it.

  “Thrive, Waterfalls,” Zan interrupted her marveling gaze. “Please turn the lights off. They agitate the wildlife.”

  “Oh! Sorry.”

  Ben doused the lights for her.

  “No worries,” Zan assured her. “But the selectmen are expecting you this afternoon. Is that still the plan? We should go soon. The bio-locks will take a few hours, to enter the dome. Can we fetch you in half an hour?”

  “Yes. Thank you. I’ll get my team together.” She signed off. “Ben, you’re on break.”

  As the final act of their grueling landing festivities, the ship’s engineer John Copeland cut power to Thrive’s gravity. He shuffled aching feet as he settled in to weigh 10% extra for the foreseeable future.

  Denali’s strong gravity wasn’t a new sensation. He worked out under 1.1 g, though not 1.2 g like the others. Copeland wasn’t a fully stretched-out sort of Mahina settler. But he’d let himself grow rangy as a teenager to fit in better with his peers, maybe 10-15 cm taller than he might have been. He had the weakest bones of the crew, but he sheathed them in muscle to compensate.

  He pumped up the ship’s internal pressure to match Denali’s, and he was done. Or rather, his work was never done. An endless stream of tasks awaited, starting with the fact that his engine room was full of fuel drums, most of them spent.

  But he could take a break.

  He flipped his podium-like display to the cameras and panned around to survey their tiny domain. Those trees looked nothing like the aspen and spruce of Mahina, nor the fruit trees Sass kept on board. The collage of colors and strange shapes defied his ability to interpret it. Now that they were on the ground, the sonic boundaries seemed effective at keeping the monsters at bay, though they prowled along the perimeter. Unfortunately, the flyers tended to get zapped and fall through, twitching.

  “Hey, still working?” Ben asked, arriving to join him.

  Cope threw his arms around his room-mate and hugged him close, overcome for a moment. He never fully believed they’d survive a landing. Their margin for error was that close. But Ben was OK. The ship still held air. Its life support systems remained online. And that was a rego miracle.

  Abel quipped from his bench beneath the scrubber trees, “Public displays of affection now?”

  Copeland hastily stepped back from his clutch, and shot a glower at the first mate. “Thought he might hold me upright. But he’s beat. Great job, buddy.”

  Ben nodded a wry smile. “You too. Three. Everyone down here. Hell of a ride. So we’re headed into town? Drinks with the locals? Abel, you’re buying!”

  The last thing Cope wanted was to exit the ship and walk into that midnight zoo of horrors. “Sure we don’t want to rest up? Hit the town tomorrow fresh.”

  “Spoilsport!” Ben scoffed. “C’mon, it’ll be fun!”

  Abel warned, “The locals expect an official meet and greet today.”

  “They do indeed,” Sass called out, trotting down the stairs from the catwalk. “Abel, you’ve got the ship. You keep Ben. And fix that ankle of yours.” The first mate sprained it while helping untangle a snafu in the fueling operation on the way in.

  Sass continued, “Copeland, you’re with me.” She cast him a bracing smile.

  “Me!”

  Sass nodded. “You. Eli. Clay and me. We’ll kick up our feet in this ‘bio-lock’ and relax for a couple hours.” She paused to digest his consternation. “Weren’t you just discussing that with the guys?”

  “Uh, yeah.” He was trying to talk them out of it.

  “Jules!” Abel called up to the galley. “Fix the captain a picnic, would you? Send along a few ice wands. For hosting gifts.”

  2

  For Eli Rasmussen, Ph.D., terraforming botanist, Denali was love at first sight. An entire planet, richly covered 100 meters deep in strange plants. Actual living rain poured from the sky. He tipped his faceplate back and marveled as the runnels streamed across.

  Copeland suddenly grabbed his elbow, as Eli’s next footfall stretched 10 cm lower than he was expecting. Ben had done a heroic job clearing the terraces for their tiny new pocket spaceport, but the footing was treacherous between shelves. Irritated, Eli planned out his next half dozen steps, then lifted his eyes to the trees again.

 

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