by Ginger Booth
He’d never had a real job except on a skyship. He helped out around his dad’s dental practice. But he was a 20-year-old college student when he joined the Thrive. The thought that he might have to give up space flitted into his consciousness, only to bounce off his sunny disposition to vanish as quickly as it came.
“We could use some help here!” Cope boomed across the Schuyler spaceport from the vicinity of the creeping wood. He followed up with an angry comm summons in Ben’s pocket while they were still rummaging for grav lifters and cables. Willow strode onto the ramp with folded arms to glare toward the top boss.
As the laden captain passed her, he noted mildly, “Willow, if you stand any chance with Cope, you’re blowing it. Lend a hand, or shove off.” He left with a clear conscience for her to decide. Kassidy manhandled her trio of grav lifters as though she’d left the crew just the other day, instead of a dozen years ago.
Willow grabbed one lifter from Kassidy’s collection, leaving Ben to manage three himself, plus all the cable. The most lightly laden, the ex first mate quickly pulled into the lead to accost the company president.
“You’re not going to miss her,” Kassidy consoled Ben.
“I might,” Ben returned. “She doesn’t bother me. She’s like loosing an attack robot on anyone who crosses me. Obey nice Ben, or get chewed out by nasty Willow. The dynamic works for me.”
His steps faltered as the tableau resolved before his eyes. Willow and Cope stood aside for their pissing contest, crusty first mate versus Schuyler tough. The nondescript botanist Eli focused entirely on the non-obvious challenge of how to apply more grav lifters to his problem. And then there was Teke.
“Hey, Ben,” the Denali physicist greeted him softly, then hastily bent back to his transit challenge.
“Teke,” Ben acknowledged. “Wasn’t expecting you. Then, I wasn’t really expecting any of you, so.” Just shut up, he implored himself. Teke was his friend, too. The fact that he divorced Cope over Teke was not about Teke. It was about Ben and Cope. “So Eli, do you have a theory about how we can help here? I don’t think we have habitat for all of this.”
Eli straightened and offered him a cable end. “Just sort of corral it all, I guess.”
Ben ignored the cable and started transferring saplings to his grav lifter one by one. Their pots could stagger in two tiers like brick-laying, fitting ten trees to a pallet. “Kassidy, take the shrubs.” With thirty trees and forty smaller plants off their hands, Ben was confident Eli and Teke could manage the rest.
“Aye, sar,” Kassidy replied happily. At a touch, Teke switched to helping her. Eli caught on and lent Ben a hand.
“Ben!” Cope hollered at him, still embroiled with Willow. “Do you want to join this conversation?”
“I don’t,” Ben assured him. “I’m good either way.”
“See, that’s what I’m up against!” Willow renewed her argument against Cope.
“Yeah? Then rego eff off,” Copeland countered. “What do I need a bitchy first mate for? He doesn’t want you, and you’re in my face. Everyone else is working!”
Ben tried to warn her about that. Sadly, he instructed the grav lifters to play follow-the-leader and tested them for a couple meters for stability. Having characterized the wobbles, he reinforced with a few judicious loops of cable. The thing was, if Cope was replacing his crew with a Thrive reunion, Abel was the first mate, and Jules the housekeeper. He took it as given that the Greers would not be joining them this time around. Ben would have to put his foot down and declare his own choice of second in command. But there wasn’t a single one of them suited to it.
Maybe I should argue for keeping Willow.
“Cope, a word?” Ben draped the tail of his cable onto a citrus, and stepped away from Willow. When she tried to follow Copeland, the president shoved her back and threatened to deck her. While hardly Ben’s style, he did appreciate that about his ex. So many men were hesitant to give as good as they got when faced with a female assailant. Cope’s mob upbringing lent him a harder perspective on dealing with the shriller sex.
“I’m not fond of her,” Ben began. As Sass had trained him, it helped to start with a point of emotional alignment. He trusted Cope was disliking Willow plenty by now. “But I need a first mate to run a ship.”
“Point,” Cope allowed. “Hardly worth it, though. I don’t want to live with her.” He paused in thought, then shrugged. “Hunter’s the best we’ve got coming. But up to you.”
“Hunter,” Ben echoed. “Burke?” He didn’t know anyone else named Hunter, though their Denali friend Zan was a hunter, and not half bad as a pilot or gunner.
“Yeah, he’ll probably sneak in around 02:00 or so. Not sure which night. We’ll be stuck here a few days yet.”
“OK, buddy, you and I clearly need to spend some quality and quantity time. On a thorough and far-ranging discussion. Like what is Teke doing here?” Ben pinched the bridge of his nose, then shifted his hand to a warding-off gesture. He hadn’t meant to blurt that. “Not here. Not now. In my office, at your earliest convenience. Within a half hour.”
Cope half-grinned in appreciation. “Make it an hour. Or there’s no telling where the trees end up.”
“Point. No postponements after that, though. No reunion hugs, no nothing. Stow the trees, then you make time to fill me in. Promise me.”
“Will do. And sorry. It’s been a hell of week. Now may I please kick Willow out of my life?”
Ben tilted his head to look around his ex-husband’s rangy shoulder at the bristling package of ornery who’d been his second in command since before Sock was born. He straightened. “Yeah, go for it. You’re sure Hunter can fly a skyship?”
“Hell, no. But Clay taught him to fly. Hunter was my getaway driver once before Thrive. The guy’s a natural. And we’ll pick up Zan soon. He can serve as your third.”
“Deal.” Ben shot Willow a cheery wave. “Bye! An honor and a privilege to serve with you! Use me as a reference any time!”
“You sons of bitches –!”
Ben tuned out her imprecations and added to Cope in a softer voice. “Housekeeping. Also a concern.” And on that beguiling note, he strode back to his grav lifters.
Eli attempted, “I appreciate this, Ben. Taking me in on such short notice.”
“Welcome aboard, Eli,” Ben cut him off. “Did you ask Cope what cubic of foliage you could bring along?”
“Well, half this much,” the botanist conceded. “But I’d be happy to rig extra levels in your engine room.”
“Eli, your engineering sucks,” Ben assured him cheerfully. “And my engine room has racks to the ceiling. Prosper isn’t Thrive. Quire rules my ship gardens.” The Denali even lived in the Prosper’s equivalent to Eli’s old cabin, with tropical flowers and zucchini threatening to slither onto the catwalk every time he opened his door.
“Quire’s still with you?” Eli’s face lit up, until he began to think that through. “Oh.”
No, Eli, I don’t have extra room for plants. “I’ll let you two argue it out. I look forward to your joint and unanimous suggestions. I will not referee, and Cope is firing my first mate. Am I understood?”
“Ah, yes, sar,” Eli conceded.
“Good,” Ben encouraged. He bade his tree train to follow and set off for his ship. Well, it was ‘his’ in a leadership and responsibility sort of way, at least. Cope owned more of it than he did. He really should have listened to his lawyer about that. He desperately wanted to ask Kassidy and Eli, So hey, do you know who else is coming? But he held his tongue rather than admit he had no idea what was going on. That would undermine his authority.
“How are the kids?” Eli attempted, in a friendly way.
Good rego question. Nico seemed to be missing. “Growing all the time!” he replied heartily.
Ben turned his back and focused on herding his trees, confident the rest of his thorny problems would dog him under their own power.
Willow stomped down the ramp with her belongings a
nd flipped him the bird. He waved back with a wincing smile.
49
“Come in, sit,” Ben directed Copeland in the tiny office. This bore the same dimensions as Sass’s cramped business chamber on the Thrive, because there was still only the one skyship design in the Aloha system.
They founded Thrive Spaceways to change that. Cope and Abel intended to build a wholly new ship design to replace the old PO-3, Pono Orbital model 3. This name was misleading. Models 1 and 2 were Jupiter Orbitals. The JO-1 exploded on its first trial run. The PO-3 was essentially a JO-2 built locally, with a star drive plugged into the slot where the fission engine used to go, and a kludge job at retrofitting for the new fuel. By now, Cope had updated the fueling mechanisms on every PO-3 still flying. But fundamentally they still flew a first generation Ganymede asteroid hopper transplanted to the rings of Pono.
Copeland’s dream ship got hung up on design challenges, a doubtful market, and the exigencies of making money in the meantime. Ben was in the latter department, generating cash flow. This kept the Prosper only slightly Frankensteined by Cope’s proof-of-concept experiments.
Forgoing the perfectly good guest chair, Copeland slung a thigh over the desk, out of habit. He’d always sat on the table-shaped computer display when Sass and Abel called him into the office. “You have questions. Start there? Or from the beginning?”
Ben considered the offer. “Context might help.”
“Carmack, the new president. He promised everyone a pot and two chickens. Something for nothing. The creches were too expensive to continue past infancy for free. We knew that. The nanite treatments likewise. All the new health advances. Hunter’s regime – he worked behind the scenes, but it was Hunter crafting the deals. Anyway, until Carmack, we compromised, we paid user fees. Babies were free, but they charged fees for childhood in the creche, sliding scale. There were free levels of nanite care, too, basically a shot of toxin scrubbers, radiation meds, vitamins. And then there’s Yang-Yangs.”
Kassidy’s father, Michael Yang, developed the advanced self-healing nanites that flowed through Ben and Copeland’s blood. They were nearly as immortal as Sass and Clay. Cope opted for a variant that would visibly age him about one year in ten, starting from age 28, while Ben preferred the old urb standard of appearing forever 25. Though even urbs nowadays upgraded to Yang-Yangs if they could afford it.
Their nanites bore one key difference from Sass’s. The master controllers stayed outside their bodies. Their consciousness and memories dwelled nowhere except on their brain wetware. Unlike Sass, if they died, they’d stay dead. Once a year, they needed to hook an IV to a master controller to tweak and adjust. This was a pricey line item in the family budget, though less than the cost to house the younger kids in creche care 24/7. Their original nanite suites they got free as Michael Yang’s test subjects on the five month voyage home from Denali.
Cope continued, “But Carmack promised free Yang-Yangs for everyone, and free creche care to age 15. He basically stole the Yang & Yang Corp. outright. Laid off three quarters of the staff. No further research, operations only. I think Michael’s still there, drawing a pittance for salary. To maintain claim to his patents. Kassidy’s out.”
“She mentioned,” Ben agreed. “What does this have to do with Thrive Inc.?”
“It hits every company on Mahina. He confiscates what he needs, cancels government funding on anything else, and taxes everyone out the wazoo. Farms, all confiscated to hand over to dimwits. Goods distribution, now run by the world government. Terraforming, canceled. Real estate – in theory, Jules’ apartments are now rent-controlled, at a quarter of what she used to charge. She can bypass that. You pay what she demands, or she won’t rent you the place. Rat her out to the authorities, you’re evicted. Anyway, you get the idea. Radical socialism and ruinous taxes, without thinking it through.”
“Cancel terraforming?” Ben asked. “But –”
“Oh, the atmo spires are still running,” Cope agreed. “Even Carmack needs to breathe. He cut their salaries, though, until the urb supervisors quit. Who knows how long the plants can keep running, with only under-trained technicians. But it’s all like that. The fact is, what he’s doing will run everything into the ground and lose jobs right and left. In the short term, that’s hard to see. Longer term, like Eli and his trees. Does it hurt Carmack supporters to waste five years of growth from Eli’s tree nurseries? Yes, but they don’t see that. When a spire fails, Carmack can blame it on the operators. When someone dies from their Yang-Yangs, a nursing tech was at fault. Unemployment skyrocketing? Well, executives like me were selfish. Easy.”
“And Thrive Inc.?”
“Abel diversified. You know that. Spaceways was our first subsidiary, and he spun out a few more. The stockholders are losing money hand over fist, because everyone is. Every contract I lined up this year has canceled. No one can pay us. To cut losses, Abel arranged a fire sale on the subsidiaries. He assumed I’d take the money. But like Michael Yang, my Spaceways intellectual property is not for sale. They can liquidate my assets. But without my IP, they lose over 90% of what they invested. That was one angry crowd. Abel barely gathered enough support to stay in business.”
“So you’re not mad at Abel?”
Cope snorted. “He did what he had to do. He thought he’d taken care of me by finding a buyer. I warned him Spaceways wasn’t for sale. He didn’t hear me. Or maybe he thought the money argument was overwhelming. Abel and me, we never understood each other when it came to money.”
“No,” Ben agreed. “Enough context, I think. What are we doing now? You laid off my crew, invited old friends back. I hope we’re paid up at the creche for our kids –”
“We are.”
“Nico?” Their teen exited the creche to attend Schuyler High, rather than move to Mahina Actual. The Schuyler creche didn’t supply high school yet.
“We got him a room in a house that caters to boys that age. The landlady seems nice. He’d rather go to space with us –”
“Us,” Ben interrupted. “We’re divorced, remember?”
Cope pursed his lips and doodled on the desktop, a dull magenta line flowing from his fingertip. “We get along well enough. This is what’s left of Spaceways.”
“Sounds like your designs and a debt are all that’s left of Spaceways.” Ben winced as he saw the impact of his words on his ex-lover’s face. He softened his tone. “Sorry. What is Spaceways now?”
“Advanced R&D,” Cope murmured, keeping his eyes glued to his zig-zag arcs of purple. “Teke’s projects. We follow through. We can’t catch any mundane jobs at the moment. So we go for the gold. With black market backing. Josiah.”
Ben blew out softly. “Buddy, I’m not sure I can go along with that.”
“We need you.” Cope met his eye at last. “I can’t captain your ship. None of us has your skill set. And what are your other options? I can’t buy you out. We can pull together and advance space technology. Or lose everything, including the Prosper. Ben, I didn’t cancel your next contracts. I couldn’t find any legit jobs for you. The whole economy here is in a tailspin.”
Ben hazarded, “I could stay groundside. Take a turn raising the kids. Some would say it’s overdue. My father, for instance.”
A smile tugged at Cope’s lips in spite of the context. “Yeah? Tomorrow, while you visit dear old dad, just picture yourself living back in Poldark. Catching the bus to visit your kids in the city on Glow, rubbing elbows with the great unwashed.”
Ben deflated forward. “We’re not keeping the flyer?” No home, no wings, and he wouldn’t even have the funds for a rented room near Nico? Oy!
“Need to sell that to cover this month’s note on the Prosper. And it’s a buyer’s market. We’ll be lucky to get half what the flyer is worth. Used to be worth.”
“All those people we just laid off…”
“Their prospects suck,” Cope confirmed. “Ours, too. People getting laid off all over. That said…” He bopped the desk, leaving
a padlock-shaped blob. “If you want to stay behind to connect with the kids, I’ll back you. Somehow. I’ll play captain myself.”
Ben grimaced. This was how Cope won every argument. He could be so utterly domineering, run roughshod over him, commandeer his ship, and then turn around and be…sweet. “You would, wouldn’t you?”
“I could see it,” Cope encouraged. “Nico can stay in the city, get a part-time job. Take Frazz and Sock out of the creche. You could home-school them at your dad’s in Poldark. Sock will outstrip you at math after a year or two, but it could work for the short term.”
Ben began to laugh at this vision, but that last caught him up short. “Outstrip me in math?” Ben had a university degree in engineering. Sock was 8.
“He takes after Daddy Teke. But you’ve got more math than I do.” Through diligent self-study, Cope had mastered enough engineering math to coach a computer to perform the calculations and sanity-check the results. But theoretical math made no sense to him. If he couldn’t apply it, he just didn’t get it.
“Wow,” Ben acknowledged. “So he’s headed for Mahina Actual.” Schuyler High couldn’t accommodate a student like that.
“I don’t know,” Cope said dryly. “You could stay and figure it out with them.” He didn’t need to add that he’d been the one to negotiate every detail like this between child and teachers, caregivers and pediatricians, for the past dozen years. With Nico as their first test subject, Cope had served as the lead parent for the settler creche program, forever ironing out culture clashes with urb assumptions. Your turn, was merely implied, along with, My turn to watch you screw up.
Ben smiled thinly. He shelved that idea for his visit with the young darlings tomorrow. “Teke. What’s he trying to do?”
“Micro warp, in-system. No need for three years to travel out from the ecliptic to warp and back. He doesn’t believe his new scheme will lose light years, either. Like, Sass would have reached Sanctuary the moment she left here, instead of losing zero time subjective, but eight years objective.”