by Ginger Booth
“Bye then.” Habits died hard. Even today, Ben had to restrain himself not to give Jules the firm hug he usually traded with her before he returned to space. One of his closest friends. Their eyes met for a moment. She hugged herself and looked away.
Ben didn’t even try to say goodbye to Abel.
47
“Hey, buddy!” Ben cried to Nico. The teen alighted from the high cab of the truck to trade hugs. The hugs were their usual welcome-back. Nico’s closed face was not. Ben added a murmur in his ear, “Sorry I wasn’t here for you leading up to this. Whatever this is.”
Nico gave a jerky nod, then elected to climb into the flyer alone with his book bag.
“That good, huh?” Ben inquired softly to his receding back. Not that there was anyone else around, save Cope behind the truck’s steering wheel. They were a half hour into sunset by now. The entire city quit work to enjoy happy hour.
“Can I fly it?” Nico attempted.
“No.”
The kid shrugged and clambered into the flyer’s back seat to hunker down.
Ben hopped up to the cab off-gravity. In theory the truck provided rungs for this. But it also supplied a handy landing step, which was the way everyone here boarded a balloon-tired transport. Anything lower than a single story tall, they flicked off their personal gravity and jumped.
Cope slid open the window. “Next stop Josiah’s.”
Ben considered that, hanging on the door. The mob boss was probably Cope’s oldest surviving friend, a mentor, protector, practically a big brother. He was a leader in the resistance before they won against the urbs. Nowadays the more populous settlers ran the moon.
Reluctantly, he offered, “Hey, buddy, when I’m hurting? I like to retreat to my own turf. Jules says we’ve still got the Prosper –”
“Josiah’s tonight,” Cope insisted. “The ship later. Not now.”
“Really hope you’ll let me in on your thinking soon, Cope.”
His ex rocked his head so-so. Or perhaps it meant ‘get off my back.’ “I’ll leave the truck here. We’ll take the flyer to Josiah’s.”
“So this is a private word first?”
“Yeah. Short version.” Cope swallowed, visibly struggling to get it out. “Spaceways is bankrupt. Abel blindsided me. He assumed I’d sell, because the offer gave me the capital to start over, or retire. Instead I bought us out to keep ownership of our intellectual property, the ship designs, the works. The investors got the assets.” He added a middle finger as a tip.
“But there’s that loan on the Prosper.” They’d owned Ben’s ship outright until half a year ago. Then Cope said he needed to borrow against it, to cover a cash flow problem at Spaceways. At the time, Ben’s lawyer tactfully suggested it was time to buy out his ex-husband. Perhaps Ben should have taken his advice, but that would have incurred even more debt.
Cope shook his head. “It’s a loan. We make payments on it. That’s all. You’re still in business. You need to make a profit.”
As Ben recalled, the size of those payments was painful. “Can we? And still make payroll?”
“I let everyone go. With no termination pay,” he said bitterly.
That had to hurt, Ben reflected. Cope came up through the docks, a working stiff. When you lived paycheck to paycheck, getting laid off without notice was a personal catastrophe. “I’m surprised you didn’t kill Abel for that alone.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Cope finally unbuckled from the driver’s seat.
“Wait, that’s it?” Ben countered. “That’s all you needed to say without Nico?”
Cope hopped down. “I didn’t need to say anything at all. You got it. That’s why I loved you in the first place. Yeah?”
Ben didn’t marry a romantic. Rather than doe eyes and tender caresses, Cope delivered this line while checking the locks on the truck. That accomplished, he marched to the flyer, his elegant charcoal suit smudged with moon dust. The work boots he likely wore even to the shareholder meeting. The man was never happy without steel-toe shoes.
“Cope, wait. How did this happen? How did we lose everything?”
The engineer paused in his stride. “You caught the part where I laid off your crew, right?”
“My crew? All?” Ben couldn’t fly the Prosper without at least…an engineer. His ex intended to go into space with him again. Time was, Ben had begged Cope for this, to save their marriage. That time was long gone. Hell…
“Volunteers only for this next run,” Cope continued. “Thrive reunion.”
“My next run is an ice delivery,” Ben noted. Every second trip, he brought down water ice from the rings to shore up Mahina’s sorely limiting hydrosphere.
Cope informed him, “The new government won’t pay us for that.” He turned back toward the flyer. “Coming?”
“No,” Ben replied in sudden decision. “I should be on my ship. Saying goodbye to my crew!”
“Suit yourself,” Cope returned. “But Josiah is the contract. And don’t forget your dad expects you to bring the kids around on Glow. He specified all three.”
That last was a barb. Baby Socrates was where Ben drew the line and asked for a divorce. Not that he had anything against the child. The 8-year-old was cute and quiet, well-behaved to a fault. But as Cope’s husband, Ben should have been consulted before conception. It wasn’t as though two men made a creche baby by accident. The reams of paperwork provided ample time for reflection, to consult one’s husband. The form even supplied a blank for that.
“Fine, dear,” Ben shot back acidly. “We just do whatever you say, Cope. Because God forbid you ever get angry. Except somehow you always are.”
Cope raised one hand in surrender, then dropped it in defeat. “Not now, Ben. Tonight sucks enough.”
He trudged away alone. Ben stifled the urge to run after him, to defy him, to insist that no, Cope didn’t need to face everything alone, that he never had needed to! But by the divorce, Ben had relinquished that right, any credibility on that score. Cope set himself up to take the fall solo, and Ben had to let him. Damn the man!
Josiah, one of the mob bosses who drove Schuyler City to prominence, oofed as he sank into his couch with his beer. “Don’t lose Ben over this, too, Cope. Losing the company is bad enough.”
He’d handed beers out to Copeland and Nico. The teen passed a sleek chrome ice wand to his father when he finished with it. “Ben and I divorced years ago.”
“Still,” Josiah quibbled. “Hey, Nico. Your dad and I have things to discuss. Give us the room, OK? Try the game room down the hall.”
Nico rose with alacrity, casting a wary eye at the attending brace of goons, 250 cm tall. Nowadays they stood straight and broad and wall-like from top-of-line nanites buttressing their old stretch bones. Alas, Yang nanites were powerless to make them smarter. When the boss dismissed the kid of a friend, they automatically stepped forward menacingly. Josiah glowered at them and waved them out.
“You should tell him,” Josiah resumed his thought. “Be straight with him from the start. If Ben’s not on board with the plan, leave him groundside.”
Cope traced a spiral in the sweat on his glass. “I hear you. I do. But none of this goes against his principles. That’s the bogeyman with Ben, violating his precious ideals. I married a regular Don Quixote. The jobs are tilting at windmills. He’ll love them once he’s stuck with them.”
Josiah swooped an exaggerated nod. “Then why lie to him?”
“Personal baggage. Look, Teke’s the physicist. Ben divorced me over Teke. The first op will get the ship blacklisted. Practically a rego badge of honor now. But Ben’s the last skyship captain this damned administration hasn’t blacklisted yet. He’s been off-world. He doesn’t understand what we’re up against here. He’ll be surrounded by friends. He’ll come around.”
“He’s not here now,” Josiah pointed out, studying Cope through his amber pint glass. “Why’s that?”
Cope hunkered forward, the same way he did as a kid when he was ashamed of having
screwed up. Josiah’s heart used to bleed for him. The young mechanic expected so much of himself, considered any glitch a mortifying failure, when Josiah knew no one could have done any better. Screw-ups happened.
“I laid off his crew,” the younger man admitted bitterly. “Without severance. I didn’t have the money to pay them –”
“Well, fuck that!” Josiah exploded. “How much? For three weeks’ severance and back time off.”
“I wasn’t asking for –” Cope attempted.
“That was your first mistake!” the gangster thundered. “Get the number from Ben. Get it now.” He couldn’t believe this. All the years he’d nurtured his talent, and Cope screwed this up? Loyalty was everything. If you didn’t have allies who’d die for you at the drop of a hat, you could never be a boss worth a damn. The brainy mechanic was too damned technical, not enough touch.
By the time Cope complied, and got his numbers back from the captain, Josiah had calmed himself down.
“Sorry I didn’t manage that better,” Copeland muttered.
“You’re juggling a lot this week,” Josiah allowed. “Just don’t forget the basics while you’re reaching for the stars. You want the kid to stay here? Or an apartment in town? I can watch him either way.”
“In town is good. Ben’s father is the first he’ll call with a problem. But a dentist from Poldark isn’t always the right answer to a Schuyler problem.”
“You got that right. Let him know he can call on me. And the other kids?”
“In the creche. Nico can visit them during the week. Ben’s dad on the weekends. I’ll miss them like hell, but.”
“Alright. See? We take care of basics first. Next step, we add a couple thousand voting immigrants. Who vote our way.” The election had been that close.
They put their heads together and Josiah laid out the plan.
He’d been wary of running this operation with Cope. Lately, the guy had been flying high with his ever-so-fancy suit and nose-bleed-level investors. Hell, one time Josiah commed him, and the ‘president of Thrive Spaceways’ was out playing croquet on the regolith with stockholders. On a Wednesday afternoon. Un-fucking-believable. If that was the work ethic among the movers and shakers, no wonder this dust ball of a moon was a wreck.
But now Cope looked hungry and fierce again, like the teen freedom fighter Josiah once took under wing. He feared he’d lost Cope to affluence. But scrape off his success a bit, and the young scrapper was still there. Good.
Josiah pulled him in for a handshake and half-hug before sending him to find his kid and the guest suite. Once Copeland was out of earshot, his call to Hunter Burke was brief. “We’re on. Live long and Prosper.”
Burke, the revolutionary who’d received the second most votes of the three running for president, snorted amusement and hung up. The urbs in Mahina Actual Security might have been hamstrung by incompetence on high, but their AIs trolled the airwaves. Hunter didn’t dare say anything on the phone.
The funny thing was, Josiah mused, if Burke had just won like he should have, Josiah was the last person who’d tangle with Sagamore. He loathed the midget paddies and their superstitious gibberish. Sagamore was welcome to keep their slaves. But the demagogue Cole Carmack won the election, and he was screwing the economy to hell. Breaking business was a sin the gangster could not abide.
48
Willow, Prosper’s recent first mate, stood arms crossed and belligerent, staring Ben down at the cargo ramp the next morning. “I ain’t leaving until Cope gets here. If you want to play the flunky, fine! I’ll appeal to the boss. God, I wish you two would make up and get laid.”
“Hey! Too far!” Ben objected on automatic. The observation was true, painful, and none of her business. Alas, Willow was an exceptional first mate. She had a knack for grabbing problem crew by the emotional balls and twisting. Unfortunately, she considered her captain yet another balky crewman to whip into shape.
“Too far?” Willow returned. “Ben, you’re not a starry-eyed 20-year-old anymore. When you fell for the ice man, he was older and wiser. Wake up. You’re the captain now, a big boy, and this is your ship. You say who’s first mate, not him. But if it’s too scary for you to stand up to Cope, I will!”
“Knock, knock!” cried a familiar voice. “I hope I’m interrupting!”
Ben whirled with a grin of anticipation, to watch Kassidy Yang make her entrance. She bounded a few steps up the ramp at Mahina gravity, took a mid-air somersault, then crossed the threshold into the ship’s 1-g doing a cartwheel, with a meaty thunk to a perfect landing.
“Hey you!” she cried, and grabbed Ben into an embrace and kiss. “And I don’t know you, do I?” The charismatic gymnast reached for Willow’s shoulders and kissed her too, another purple-lipstick smack right on the lips. “Any friend of Ben’s is a friend of mine!”
Willow wiped purple off her lips in disbelief. “You don’t even ask first.”
Used to Kassidy’s antics, Ben relaxed happily. “Look at you, back in coveralls. Reliving your youth?”
These days, the onetime starlet was the public face of Yang & Yang Nanoceuticals, the most lucrative firm in the world. Her father’s nanites brought vibrant good health out of the domed urb citadel to the struggling masses on Mahina. Not that Michael Yang liked settlers any more than any other urb. But the urbs exiled him. Then Thrive fetched him back and acquired settler backing for him. The prickly inventor wasn’t fit to deal with human beings. His vivacious daughter more than compensated.
“Cope didn’t tell you,” Kassidy gathered, with a quirked lip. “I’m here for a job. Carmack ‘nationalized’ Yang & Yang. Dad and I don’t own it anymore. They kept him on because he ‘does real work.’ I backed Anjuli Spiegler for president. They shoved me out the door.”
Ben floundered on this news. “Wait, what? How do you nationalize a successful company?”
“They stole it,” Kassidy clarified. “Everything we built. Yup, now belongs to the people. Advanced medical treatment should be free for everyone. According to Carmack, I am an enemy of the people, trying to profit off the little guy’s misery. Who knew I was so evil?”
“I voted for Spiegler,” Ben shared, trying to wrap his head around this. “Don’t tell Cope that.”
The 60-year-old urb Spiegler – her nanites kept her looking 25, like every other urb – had deep and impressive administrative experience. She performed miracles on expanding the creche system to include all settler children. The original deluxe creches, still in use at Mahina Actual and Schuyler, proved far too costly to scale. Spiegler made the hard calls to provide good-enough and improvable kindergartens. She did so with stunning speed, energy, vision, and a hard-nosed devotion to data and ethical experiments. Kassidy was her staunchest public advocate. But with all the settlers voting for their first world-wide president with real power, Ben wasn’t surprised when the two settler candidates won most of the votes.
“I voted for Hunter Burke,” Willow inserted. “How could they take away your company?”
“You guys need to follow the news when you’re off-moon,” Kassidy judged. “Thrive Co, Yang & Yang, all the top companies are folding. Carmack got elected by promising to give every idiot everything for free. He’ll protect them from ‘predation’ by the ‘rich.’ Taxes went through the roof. Willow, you used to be a farmer, right? Outlawed now. You’re not in a ‘protected demographic.’ Only the mentally impaired are allowed to farm anymore. All private farms were claimed by ‘eminent domain.’”
“Is this even vaguely legal?” Ben asked. Maybe the startling demise of Thrive Spaceways wasn’t due to yet another spat between Cope and Abel.
The urb Kassidy shrugged. “Carmack claims that any pre-existing law was established by greedy, evil urb overlords to oppress the people. He packed the legislature to grant him whatever new laws and powers he wanted. The economy is collapsing. I’m sure the kinks will work out. He’s so incompetent even his drooling fans have to admit this won’t work, sooner or later. In the mean
time, anyone who wants to make a profit has to go black market. The new taxes suffocate any profit on legal enterprise.”
“I can’t go back to my farm?” Willow backtracked, brow stormy. “What are you here for?”
“To get off this moon,” Kassidy said plainly. “Cope agreed to take me and Eli. He’s driving the grav lifter with the luggage.” She glanced over her shoulder, down the ramp.
The other two followed her gaze. In the distance, across the spaceport expanse of fused regolith, dim in the three-quarter Pono gloom of Saturday, a pocket forest prowled toward them.
“Huh,” Ben voiced with misgiving. Where exactly did Eli expect to stow all that shrubbery? No, not stow – he would intend it fully lit and growing.
“What were you planning to do on the ship?” Willow demanded, holding fast to her canceled authority as first mate.
As a good first mate should, Ben supposed. As captain, he could be too easy going. Willow compensated for that. “Willow, Cope already paid you three weeks’ severance. It nearly killed him to lay you off with no notice and no pay. So he got your money from a grey market contact. Kassidy, she’s no longer employed here. We’re just having a little trouble processing that.” Though if Kassidy was right, and only the black market could remain in business under these conditions, Cope’s appeal to Josiah began to make sense.
“Trouble processing that?” Willow spat in outrage. “I make this ship run! While you play air-headed nice guy!”
There were upsides to losing Willow, Ben reflected. He gave Kassidy a micro-shrug. “Quire is staying. To farm the gardens. He has nowhere else to go.” The quiet Denali farmer grew violently ill on Mahina, unable to acclimate to the air, water, food, or society. Cope hadn’t needed to ask. The rest of the crew got termination paperwork. Cope sent Quire a gentle reassurance that although his pay was suspended, his home was secure as long as they owned the Prosper. Ben began to suspect that might not be long.