by Ginger Booth
He gave his audience a moment to absorb the diagram, then switched to the lovely view from bridge-forward, the immense bright bulk of the swirling tiger-striped yellow planet on one side of the screen, and the glittering ice rings below them like a sparkling racetrack. Up here, they’d emerged from Mahina’s half-week night, though Schuyler was yet a few hours shy of sunrise. From this perspective, it was always sunrise somewhere.
“What are we doing out here?” Ben resumed rhetorically. “We’re getting our act together. Our departure from Mahina was…abrupt. We are not mission ready. But we have guests aboard who needed to get off-world. So here we are.
“Staffing. My first mate is Willow Arbuckle.” Willow saluted down-table. “Chief engineer, John Copeland.” To Ben’s relief, Cope simply nodded. “Our chief also happens to be majority owner of this ship. Groundside, that can be confusing. Under way, nothing is confusing. I am the captain. He is the chief.”
“Hear, hear,” Cope acknowledged, with a soft thunk of his cup.
“My office is always open for private input from the owner,” Ben allowed.
“Co-owner,” Cope quibbled.
Ben accepted that with an open hand. “Third officer, Zan.” Denali rarely used surnames. Sometimes a job title tacked onto the front, such as Scholar Teke.
Zan acknowledged the posting with a slow blink, Denali-style. Ben mouthed ‘sar’ to remind him. “Aye, sar,” he supplied on cue.
“Willow, you and I will stand 12 and 12, overlapping Zan while he’s rusty. Zan, you’ll start with 18:00 to 06:00.”
With the ship’s officers identified, Ben went around the table to let everyone introduce themselves to Willow, and their skills. She gulped and her eyes dropped when it came to Hunter Burke, their first runner up world president. In turn, Hunter’s eyes narrowed.
“Do you two know each other?” Ben took a sip of water to wash down some nautilus-ear gristle. Someone decided to reuse Sock’s chicken-and-noodles program rather than set another supper onto the printer. Strange pasta-ears and weird spices two nights in a row seemed excessive.
“We had business,” Hunter allowed guardedly. “In Willow’s previous career.”
Ben blurted, “Farming?” When he met Arbuckle the first time, she was an adventurous farm widow who hired the Thrive. Her hill was Ben’s first portfolio piece at using the ship’s guns for landscaping.
“Informer,” Hunter supplied. “She worked for my father. Then me.”
Cope coughed his food into his napkin, then drank deep of his beer. “Excuse me,” he muttered, looking daggers at Willow.
“What fun.” Ben figured Cope would forgive an informer when hell froze over. He elected to move along. “And Willow, you’ve heard my stories about Eli Rasmussen, Ph.D.” The botanist frowned in concern. “Eli is in charge of excess shrubbery.”
Willow offered the man an edged smile. “Too many trees.”
“Agreed. Quire and Eli are due to provide me with a detailed and unanimous plan of how they intend to manage that,” Ben reminded them. “My apologies, I was distracted. I await that report. Speaking of reports, Cope?”
“Mm.” The president of Thrive Spaceways still glowered at Willow.
Ben pressed on. “I was addressing some job performance issues with our previous engineer. I normally expect a full readiness assessment before we leave home port.”
“Hell,” Cope acknowledged. “I’ll review her records tonight. Walk the ship tomorrow. All systems nominal for now.” Unwilling, he glanced at Willow, but clearly couldn’t bring himself to ask her for staffing. “Are you available, captain, as engineering second?”
“I thought Teke, with an assist from Kassidy,” Ben returned. “But tomorrow, I can walk orientation with you, 10:00 to noon. I have other issues to address.”
Cope nodded, his eyes snapping back to Willow.
“Who wants to cook?” Ben asked brightly.
The crew shot furtive glances around the table. Most of them had eaten each other’s cooking, and found the prospect grim. Cope and Ben deep fried everything. The vegan Quire favored salads. Most of the rest were creche-raised, their meals entrusted to professionals.
“I can cook,” Hunter volunteered. “My dad taught me.”
“Outstanding!” Ben rose and shook his hand over the table with true enthusiasm. Clay Rocha, Hunter’s dad, was the gourmet of the Thrive. Not often willing to serve the entire crew, Clay’s meals were few and legendary. “Quire will prepare the salads. We self-serve at breakfast. Lunch is usually a buffet, sandwiches or stuffed breads. The only sit-down meal is supper.”
“I can manage that.”
“Willow will start you tomorrow,” Ben offered blithely. The first officer winced. But the captain was rather enjoying her uncharacteristic reticence. “Kassidy, Teke, you know the drill. Lend a hand when asked.”
“Yes, sar.”
“Teke, Zan, you’ll find Prosper different than the Thrive. No long voyages. Max, a few weeks. Staving off boredom isn’t an issue. You have duties. Other than that, your time is your own. Morning workout. We all eat supper together, and have drinks at sunset. That’s enough structure. Willow, do you have anything to add?”
Ben dug hopefully into his noodles, hoping to catch up in the eating department.
“Yes, captain. Where are we going and what are we doing?” Willow raised another forkful of her own noodles, thought better of it, and pushed her plate away.
Ben swallowed before he replied. “I’ll get to that after you exhort the troops.”
She stood for her oration. “This place is a pig-sty. Anyone who has no other assignment, report here at 08:30, right after breakfast, for ship-wide cleaning. Note that exercise is mandatory at 07:00. Don’t be late. A bullhorn will wake you at 06:30. Quire, Eli. I want half this many trees. Once I see how that looks, I’ll probably order you to chop them in half again. There will be drills. Raise your hand if you are not experienced in EVA.”
“What’s EVA?” Hunter asked.
Ben and Willow played a quick round of rock-paper-scissors. Willow lost. “I’ll take you outside after lunch tomorrow. All hands are required to be space walk capable. Quire,” she pounced. The shy Denali froze. “You come too. Practice is good for you.”
Quire squeezed his eyes shut unhappily, but didn’t argue. The poor guy suffered the worst agoraphobia Ben had ever seen. He sympathized. EVA terrified him for his first year on Thrive.
“Quire can keep hold on the hull,” he prompted Willow softly. “Eli, why don’t you go along for moral support and a refresher.” The botanist nodded, and touched Quire’s hand.
Willow managed not to roll her eyes, barely. “That’s all for me. Captain?”
“Right.” Ben pushed his plate away and promised himself a deep fried consolation supper later. “I expect to spend a few days on shakedown. Then we visit Mahina Orbital to pick up Wilder. Is that right?”
Cope nodded, but offered no explanation.
Ben smiled sunnily. “Those of you who haven’t visited MO since before Denali, prepare to blow your mind. That’s all for now! Enjoy getting situated. I look forward to catching up with you. Happy reunion.”
55
“Is it all coming back to you, chief?” Ben began sunnily the next morning, promptly at 10:00. He joined Cope, Teke, and Kassidy standing perpendicular to the wall over the ventilation system. “Did you notice the access door I cut into the corridor?” Ben had rerouted things so that the less monkey-inclined could peek into this engineering space without walking the wall.
“I saw that, yeah,” Cope allowed. His tone was not one of approval. “Pull that corner up.”
Kassidy was closest. She inserted her all-purpose panel release hook to help pry off a 2.5-meter square wall panel adjacent to the big blower grill. Standing at ship’s gravity, the panel sat below the grill on the forward wall of the cargo hold. The engineer always shifted his gravitational frame of reference to match what he was working on.
“Hold it?” she
inquired, once the panel was popped.
“Nah,” Cope said, and dropped the panel. Once out of their hands, ship’s gravity reasserted, and the panel clanged to the cargo floor four meters below, at a punishing 1 g.
“I like to keep those pretty,” Ben murmured.
“Yeah, did you notice the slime on it?” Cope returned sourly. “Kassidy, Teke, go ahead and pop the rest for cleaning.” He smeared blackened work gloves on his coveralls.
“What is this slime?” Kassidy asked nervously.
“Mold, mildew, algae,” Cope suggested. “Get a kerchief if you want. Actually, face masks for all of us. Med bay.”
Playing with her grav, Kassidy launched into mid-air, somersaulted, and landed on her feet perpendicular to them on the cargo floor. She continued on to the med bay. Teke waited for her return. Popping panels was a job for two.
Cope took a knee and shot a flashlight around his hole of interest. Blackened seepage showed everywhere. “Teke, get me a spray vacuum. Loaded with plenty of bleach. And attach its own grav generator, would you?”
The physicist flipped off the wall with an amiable mid-air cartwheel. The industrial cleaning gear was also stowed on the lower level. He wasn’t as acrobatic as Kassidy, but he loved to play at it.
Ben hunkered down to study the slimed inner wall with Cope. “Hell, I thought it was a little musty…”
“While we’re alone, captain,” Cope murmured. “I need to have a chat with you about your maintenance and staffing standards. As your boss.” He met Ben’s eye briefly. “Not impressed.”
“I get that, prez, I do,” Ben breathed. He rose. “I thought I was walking the ship with you, not performing maintenance.”
“I won’t breathe this slime for a second longer than I have to,” Cope growled.
“Understood. Is the rest of the ship…?”
“Disgusting. Willow wanted them to spend the day polishing surfaces. While the life support innards look like this. I’ll personally dip her in the brown when we flush the sewage. Which hasn’t been done for a year. But we don’t have enough water in the tanks just now. Need to catch an iceberg first.”
That’s what they called the sizable chunks of ice orbiting the rings. They floated in vacuum. There were no oceans here, at least not of water.
Cope clicked off his flashlight, finished with his initial survey of the cleaning challenge. He shook his head in dismay. “I should never have just given you this ship. I should have made you work for it. For years.” He rose abruptly and checked that his helpers were still out of earshot. “You clean this. Then you tell me what caused it. I have my theories.”
Ben blew out between pursed lips. “I am the captain here. I agree, this is…” He licked his lip. “Nevertheless. I need to maintain my authority.”
“With who?” Cope shot back, his voice still low. “Captain, this crew served under Sass Collier. You look a rego fool if you don’t get dirty. You want respect, earn it.”
“For the record, president,” Ben growled back. “I was due four weeks in home port. I flush systems there, in order to donate the effluent to Schuyler watershed. I do that after a weekend visiting my family.” Cope scowled and sat back on his ass. “Also, president, I note that this division of Spaceways always lands a profit. How’s that going with the rest of the company?”
“It was going great until this year, and you know it!” Cope didn’t bother keeping his voice down on that last.
“Excuse me!” Kassidy sang up the wall. “You guys need a marital minute? Should we go away?”
Teke suggested, “Or get a room.” The pair of them fell to snickering together too low-voiced for Ben to hear.
With an effort, Ben cooled his jets. “My comments were uncalled for. Your points are well taken, chief. I will wash this wall. I can supervise this while you complete your walk through. I’m sure you have many panels to pop, and slime to find.” He winced. His anger definitely leaked out again on that last.
“And I should have talked in your office,” Cope allowed, struggling to meet him halfway. “No audience.”
Ben was dying to demand when exactly he’d see his share of the proceeds of the mansion. He put up just as much money as Cope did. But that was pure spite. No doubt Jules needed to find the Greers a new home, move out, then stage the place. It could take a year before she landed a good offer. Forcing the pace would lose pots of money. His best bet was to wait and trust to Jules’ well-honed greed and real estate savvy. Besides, they’d probably earmark the house proceeds for the kids, not sink more money into a failing Spaceways.
The ex-lovers shared one more brief glare eye to eye. Then Cope broke eye contact. “Kassidy, bring me that face mask. My nose is dripping.”
She took a running start, then landed to present the mask with a flourish. “My lord chief.” She handed one to Ben as well, then couldn’t resist adding, “You need to let go of kids in a creche. Live your own lives. Leave them in peace to live theirs.”
“Not what we were discussing, thanks,” Ben noted.
Teke ignored that statement. “As a society, Mahina hasn’t adjusted yet to creche care. Settlers especially, but urbs could do better, too.”
“Did someone ask you?” Cope snarked.
“Yes, actually, you have,” Teke replied. “Because Socrates is my kid, too. But you don’t listen to my answers.”
Kassidy coughed and plucked his sleeve.
“You’re criticizing how I raise my kids,” Cope scoffed. “You really want to go there?”
Ben intervened. “Out of line, Teke. In every way.”
“I disagree,” claimed the physicist. “Unlike you two, I was raised in a creche. Had a ball. Didn’t know my parents, didn’t care. Well adjusted, happy. I have a valid opinion, and every right to speak it. You need to let go. The way you keep dragging them in and out of their lives, that’s your ego, Cope, not their needs.”
Kassidy offered, “At the MA creche, we used to call Glow ‘sob night.’ Half the kids sobbing because their parents didn’t visit, the other half because they did. I’d long for Daddy half the week. Then Mom got him exiled and I dreaded the weekends. I wished so hard she’d just stay away. Eli told me his moms came once a year, on his birthday. Divorced and bickering. Way to screw up a birthday!”
Hunter wandered out from the galley, drawn by the conversation. “Not all kids in MA live in the creche. I lived with my parents except for school.”
Unlike most settlers, Hunter lived in Mahina Actual to age 9, because his dad Clay did. His parents split because his father’s nanites kept him forever young, while Hunter’s mom aged fast. Ben knew the story from Clay’s side, from a hundred men’s poker nights on the Thrive. He claimed the couple planned to divorce after 10 years all along. Ben imagined that looked rather different from Hunter’s perspective. Father and son were estranged for years.
“Hunter, was that because you’re a settler?” Kassidy asked. “I would have thought they’d treat Clay as an urb for creche purposes.”
“Dad’s the one who wanted me home every night,” Hunter differed. “But yeah, I was a settler. No one let me forget that for a minute.”
Cope pounced. “And do you think I’m wrong for taking my kids out a couple times a week? Teaching them to be settlers, to stick together, be a family?”
“You’re not wrong,” Hunter allowed, hooking a booted heel onto the rail and leaning on his arms. He unconsciously tilted his head 45 degrees to speak to the group who stood on the wall. “The thing is, our creche system isn’t stable yet, for starters. The kids could lose the privilege any day. They’d be booted out onto the regolith like the rest of us. On graduation day, most of them won’t get dome jobs. Kassidy, I think your Anjuli Spiegler has the right idea on the cheap creches, with parent labor. Hiring 24/7 childcare is too expensive. But most parents can afford to give their own time.”
“Define ‘too expensive,’ as a society,” Teke argued. “Mahina is underpopulated. You need to invest in more children. Denali
makes that investment, and no one counts the cost. Nothing is more important than your next generation. Accept that, or go extinct.”
“Denali isn’t big on individuality,” Ben suggested. “When each parent presents a different world view, different values, you get a much richer society.”
“Our values are different,” Cope agreed. “And yeah, maybe it is an ego trip. But my kids are mine. I teach them my values. My parents died when I was a toddler. I still learned my values from them.”
“You think you did,” Kassidy quibbled. “I thought I remembered my dad. He cherished me, believed in my every move! Then I met the real wet blanket. But he has other strengths.” She shrugged. “So now I have two dads, because I’ll never let go of my fantasy.”
“I know who my parents were when it counts,” Cope insisted. “And my kids know me.”
“And you guys are goldbricking,” Ben observed, arms folded over his chest. “Teke, Kassidy, yank those panels. Hunter, galley. I look forward to your excellent lunch.”
Cope chuckled, and toed the wet vac equipment as a hint.
Ben sighed to see that Teke had trailed a water hose up the wall as well. He grabbed it and tested the spray nozzle into the ship’s hollow core. Yup, no shortage of wash water. “Pull the grill first, or hose it down?” He aimed the next split-second spray at Cope.
His ex helpfully applied bleach and hard-core suction to Ben’s thigh in return, removing a smear spot of slime along with much of the blue in the captain’s coverall.
Ben laughed. “Vacuum hickey. Gee, thanks, chief.”
“Any time, cap.” He peered into the wall at their feet. “Ick. Hose it. I’ll suck.” They both laughed as he set the vacuum nozzle on the ‘down’ edge of the compartment, another panel away.