by Ginger Booth
Hunter extended an arm to the harridan in the bubble, and swooshed it down around himself as he bent from the waist, forgoing the leg lunge because he didn’t know how. He offered a more heartfelt arm flourish to Margaux, showing her the door.
Once they were in the corridor, Hunter dared to ask, “Margaux, did you know you were coming to Mahina?”
“Of course.”
“Are you happy to be here?”
She considered, “Not yet perhaps. But I am happy to leave Sagamore. There we are animals, not people. Merci beaucoup, Hontair.”
And Hunter realized that was all the absolution he’d get, or deserve. We all arrived this way, he consoled himself with a sigh, though that wasn’t strictly true. His father and Sass stayed awake for the 3 year voyage from Earth. His mother’s parents survived the low-tech cryo, one of them widowed en route.
He drew out his comm tab and asked Ben where he wanted a paddy technician. They headed for the cafeteria, as crewmen began to seesaw the first awkward rack of prone immigrants out the doors behind them. Margaux padded along beside and slightly behind Hunter, seeming not to mind the freezing cold on her small bare feet.
66
At last, Ben and Kassidy wrenched open the stuck ventilation moon roof, unleashing a maelstrom of dust as colder air swooshed into the half-dismantled galley. At this point it was still unclear whether any of the cooking equipment below would ever work again. If the appliances were worth anything, the miners would have hauled them away 40 years ago.
He wrestled the air funnel back into place as Kassidy worked the rusty flanges to reattach it to the open window. Once that was mostly firm, they reconnected the fan grate across its open maw. Kassidy flipped grav and somersaulted down to plug it back in. Ben remained standing upside-down on the ceiling to test its operation.
“Oh, hello!” Kassidy said. “My name is Kassidy!”
Ben glanced down – up relative to him – on two exceedingly dusty new heads below, shoulders draped in pink.
“This is Margaux,” Hunter introduced the slighter form. He looked up to Ben. “The paddy technician I told you about.”
“Bienvenue, Margaux!” Ben called. “We’re trying to clean the kitchen. Then we’ll get you started. A few minutes. Kassidy, I’m ready.”
She plugged in the fan. Ben nudged it on his end. There was no obvious power switch, but then the system was intended for remote control. Persuaded that being on the ceiling was no longer doing him any good, he flipped down to the floor.
“They fly,” Margaux breathed in wonder, quickly sketching a hex sign.
Ben grinned. “No. Personal gravity generator. We don’t fly. Hunter, why is this lovely lady carrying your pressure suit?”
“I sort of gave it to her.”
“Ah! Margaux, my apologies, but the p-suit belongs to me, not him,” Ben crooned regretfully. “You must give it back. Hunter, you’re a cad. Put your suit on. You should both wait in the hall. It’s about to be very unsafe in here.”
“I want to fix the warm,” Margaux attempted, surrendering her treasured suit. She began to detach its wonderful tool belt.
Ben stayed her hand on the belt. “You keep that. For your work. We haven’t tested the heaters yet. To make warm. Just a minute. First we blow out the dirt. I hope. Wait outside for safety.” After she padded away, he added again for Hunter, “Cad.”
Scowling, Hunter asked, “Is there something I could do to be useful?”
“Yes. Bond with your new immigrants,” Ben suggested. “Get to know them. And don’t let her warm her people yet. A little heat on hypothermic skin feels like it’s burning. I’ll be out in a few. I hope.”
He and Kassidy shook dust out of their helmets, left on a pitted prep counter because they got in the way, and reattached them.
“Clear,” Kassidy reported, checking around the corner toward the hall door. She braced herself against the wall.
Ben allowed how that was smarter than his own position right under the fan, and shifted to take position beside her. “Testing,” The slightest fraction of a second press generated a vortex, a roaring dust devil nearly Margaux’s height. He and Kassidy both cracked up laughing. A shin-high cone of dirt now waited beneath the repaired roof fixture. “That’s awesome! Let’s go.”
They picked up their tools and retreated through the cafeteria, strewn with a tidy array of the little dust pyramids. Once outside the scratched glass pressure door in the hall, Ben beckoned Margaux in glee. He showed her the control panel on his comm tab and mimed for her to do the honors.
She timidly touched the button, then recoiled from the door as the roaring forest of pocket tornados started up in earnest. Kassidy, entranced, pointed out that the vortexes in the corners, were far more powerful. Some were duds, including the paltry one closest to the door. Then a giant bank of blowers detached, a bar the length of the shorter walls. Slowly it advanced toward the kitchen, blasting the dirt devils ahead of it.
After a five-minute cycle, the blowers cut out, the tornados ceased their wail, and the traveling section of wall receded to home position. Ben found it a little hard to judge through air alive with dust motes, but the floor was certainly blown clear.
“Let’s do it again,” Kassidy begged, chuckling.
“In fact,” Ben replied. He held out the tab to Margaux again with a grin. With matching smile, she stabbed it. And the whole show started up again.
“Ben, you coming back soon?” Cope asked from engineering. “Looks like the cleaning system is back up. Congrats.”
“I have a new helper here, a paddy – hang on.” Ben removed his helmet. “Margaux, tell me. Is there a polite word for ‘paddy’?”
“Person. We are small, but we are people. Men like Pierre Lavelle, they mean well. But they think like overseers. They see us as children.”
“You are wise, person Margaux. I am person Ben. Good to meet you.” He replaced his helmet, and resumed his channel with Copeland. “Technician person Margaux. Question is, do we have time to train her?”
“That’d be nice,” Cope agreed. “And no. We’ll have to use Kassidy’s system. I didn’t think to bring a comm tab for the paddies. Technician persons. Whatever. I need you back here.”
“We’ll both come,” Ben offered, adding comm tab to his list for the next supply run. With a glance, he added tiny boots, socks, then beckoned Margaux to follow. “Kassidy, don’t let anyone enter until the cleaning cycle is complete. Check with me first. Then rig your cameras.”
“Got it.”
Eli and Quire bent over the racks of refugees by now. Some were beginning to stir. Ben ordered, “Eli, Quire, figure out how they’ll cook. They need a protein printer, at least.”
“Don’t think I can manage that,” Eli hedged.
“Just see what works for now, once you can get in.”
Ben checked the time in worry. He shouldn’t have insisted on cleaning the place first. His stride quickened, until he realized poor Margaux had to jog to keep up. He smiled an apology through his helmet and slowed his pace. “Zan, Wilder, how’s it looking for company?”
Wilder responded. “The urbs are calling out mine security from the neighbors. So far no takers. But there’s a skyship in dock at PM-3. So far its captain says no, but they’re leaning on him hard. A Captain Gorky of the Heavenly Bodies.”
“Thanks. Captain out.” Ben rapidly switched channel. “Hey, Gork! How’s the Heavy Boobs treating you?” Tacky, but that’s what Gorky fondly called his ship. He rapidly renewed his social bonds with the competition while they hustled through the hallway, to reinforce the other captain’s resolve to stay grounded and off his butt.
67
The first mate Willow banked around yet again to carve another corner off the great iceberg. Two more passes ought to fill the reservoir. She couldn’t ram any more chunks in, having blocked the crevice with blocks. Now she was melting water to fill it to the brim. The rest waited on top to melt when the sun came up in 36 hours or so.
&nbs
p; The work was going well. But her mental state was caroming downhill fast. Tiny boots, she said to herself. What is this, a shoe store? By now she’d convinced herself she worked for the stupidest captain ever born.
This was not difficult – she believed that in the first place.
But now the comms channel from Mahina Actual urged any officer on Prosper to surrender the ship in exchange for clemency. The urb provided specifics of the sort of punishment in store for a ship’s officer who knowingly acted as an accessory to a crime. She was rather less specific about what that crime might be. Immigration to Mahina was not illegal, for the simple reason that until recently, it never happened. They were a backward colony in the Aloha system, where the three worlds barely acknowledged each other’s existence. Sass Collier changed that with the Thrive. But at first only a few Saggies came from Hell’s Bells, and they brought with them monumental advances in technology.
The advantages to Mahina of the ongoing revolution in Sagamore were harder to assess. And no one liked the grumbling, hex-sign-slinging paddies, least of all Willow.
Yet here she was, covering for that silly frill of a captain again, risking imprisonment, all for a pack of paddies. In what universe did this make sense? She ought to –
She jumped as Teke knocked on the door behind her. She swerved the ship so bad her laser missed the iceberg and cut a line across the regolith. Fortunately, because Ben said so, her guns were only live on outward swings from the crappy warehouse excuse for a ghost town.
“What?” she hollered at Teke. “See what you made me do?”
“I don’t think I did,” Teke returned, amused. Raised in a creche, it was hard to get a rise out of the physicist. He tuned out hordes of rotten little kids from birth. “Do you wear tiny boots?”
“No! Kassidy has the smallest feet on the ship.”
“She’s wearing her only pair of boots.”
“Clogs,” Willow suggested, with a put-upon sigh. Rather than come around again, she held the ship at hover. “Maybe you could find a clog pattern for the plastic printer. We can’t make boots.”
Teke leaned in the doorway, his gleaming bald head hanging over his comm, apparently researching her suggestion. Maybe the Denali didn’t know what clogs were. “Clogs are hard slip-on shoes.”
“Found it,” he agreed. “And we have a pattern. But what size is ‘tiny’?”
Willow threw up her hands. “Ask your idiot of a lover. No, he wouldn’t know. Ask Kassidy what Ben meant.”
“Do you always speak of your captain this way?”
“He’s destroying my career!”
“I rather think he’s risking his own,” Teke differed, and tapped in a query, presumably to Kassidy. “As for my lovers, I hardly think that’s any of your business. Unless you’re offering.” He paused. “The answer would be no. But thank you, it’s flattering to be asked.”
“I didn’t make a pass at you!” Willow barked at him. “You’re half my age!”
“I wasn’t aware you were nearly sixty.”
“I’m forty-five! And I’m sure there’s no room in your three-way.”
“Ah,” the annoying physicist breathed. He turned and left.
And to think she used to fantasize about them, just last week. Three gorgeous guys – well, alright, she only fantasized about Ben and Teke in bed with her. Her imagination couldn’t quite stretch to the crusty engineer Copeland naked in this tableau. Though she could almost visualize Ben and Cope getting it on. Not that they had in a while, years, but she was certain Ben was trying to trip the company president back into bed. He would!
“– Mahina Control, hailing any officer of the skyship Prosper. Your window to surrender your vessel will come to a close in ten minutes. I remind you, if you continue to back your rogue captain, you will be liable –”
Willow punched it off again. She’d heard her the first three times, and thank you very much for continuing the countdown! Leery, she checked her display for approaching ships. But Mahina Security could wipe their traces from the moon-wide tracking system. She tapped up another display for radar, and found nothing. Why ten minutes? Their ships wouldn’t be in range yet. Their guns had been in range all along. They just couldn’t bring to bear on the surface.
It’s a deadline. If I don’t comply by the deadline, they’ll shoot me out of the air.
She didn’t pause to wonder how likely this really was. There were a grand total of five skyships serving Mahina, every one of them 80-year relics or older, precious and almost irreplaceable, though Copeland tried. Any officer who blew up a skyship could kiss their career goodbye. Willow knew this in theory.
But the countdown and continual threats were wearing on her.
I’m an officer of Spaceways! she suddenly thought. Not just a subordinate to Ben. But an officer of the corporation!
That felt slightly more empowering, so she doubled down. The stockholders would thank me for preserving this ship!
If she thought carefully about this argument, she might have recalled that in this new, leaner Thrive Spaceways, President Copeland owned over half of the stock, and Captain Acosta most of the remainder. But she didn’t think about that.
Maybe grateful enough to give me the ship. Captain Arbuckle has a nice ring to it.
She hung with the ship poised in the air, above a grubby spent mine, between an iceberg and a warehouse of frozen paddies. I could say I panicked. Her fingers panned through flight plans Ben had on tap. One hardly needed a pilot anymore on Prosper. Just select between one of the many trips the ship had taken before, and hit go. Ben was completely unnecessary.
Of course, Ben was the one who devised all those flight plans over the years. She knew that, too, but didn’t bring it to mind just then. Instead she copied a program for a simple MA to MO hop, and adjusted the takeoff location to KM-2. Easy.
Suddenly cold metal pressed against her ear. She leaned away and whipped her head to look into the barrel of a stunner, and then up to the cold and alien blue-green eyes of the physicist, who smiled faintly.
“Get out of that seat. Before I kill you.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” Willow was tempted to deny he had any reason to do this. He was simply crazy. The piloting plot from KM-2 to MO displayed right on the screen in front of her, labeled as such. But he wouldn’t know that, would he?
Teke smirked. “Wouldn’t I? Are you sure? You’re a very annoying woman. Petty. And I am Denali. So hard to predict which way an alien will jump, isn’t it? Get out of that chair. Don’t you dare touch the console.”
“You need me to land first!”
“I doubt that very much.” Teke shocked her by thwacking her across a hand with the stunner. “Your face is next.”
Crumpled over her bruised hand, she hastily exited the chair, shrieking. “You’re insane! Wait til your frill Ben hears what you’ve done!”
Once she was out of reach of the controls, Teke flung her to the floor and stuck a knee in her back. He holstered the gun in a utility pocket, then used her own coveralls to tie her up, with no concern whatsoever for her modesty. Denali wore nothing but loincloths at home.
Thoroughly trussed in her own sleeves and utility belt, Teke frog-marched her to the catwalk railing and bent her half over it, to gaze down into the cargo hold below. An easy jump with a grav generator – Willow hopped it all the time. But she couldn’t access her device with her arms tied around herself. The cargo floor six meters below, in a full 1 g, had never looked so menacing. Teke did something behind her back, but she couldn’t see what.
She gulped. “I didn’t do anything. I was thinking about it, that’s all.”
And without warning, he hauled her bodily over the railing and let her drop!
Willow screamed. Then she realized she was at maybe .3 g, not 1 g. And she was bouncing, face down. Suspended from her hips, her head and legs hung below. “A bungee? You bastard, you dangled me on a bungee cord?”
Teke didn’t bother to reply. After a few minutes, she fel
t the ship come to rest, and the engines cut back to idle. The damned physicist passed above her on the catwalk, leaving officer country, and hopped into the cargo hold. On the way down he yanked her bungee cord to set her bouncing again.
She shrieked out imprecations at him a few more times, demanding to be let loose. He ignored her. Bastard!
68
In the KM-2 galley, the botanist Eli finished studying the manifest from Lavelle’s extra containers, the supplies they brought in addition to the boxes of frozen immigrants. In slow motion, he slipped his tab back into his pocket.
Two cryo-sick paddy ‘techniques’ sat on the floor, trying to revive a soy protein printer. But this was a technology not used on Sagamore, least of all by the agricultural slave class. And the corroded old printer was likely abandoned here because it didn’t work. He had no reason to believe they’d succeed at fixing it.
And time was running out. That’s my number one.
Under extraordinary circumstances 13 years ago, Captain Sass Collier appointed Eli her ‘biological control officer.’ As the Thrive’s only scientist, however ill-suited to the task, Eli rose to the challenge. He even led the way into the ruins under the volcano flows of Denali Prime.
Naturally Ben fingered him to do it again. Eli’s job was to make sure they left these refugees in ‘good enough’ condition. Not from the engineering end – that was Cope and Ben’s lookout, he reminded himself. His job was the big picture. Would they be OK? If not, what could they do about it? Because they had to leave, ready or not, or risk the ship being impounded, and their crew thrown in jail.
Botany wasn’t the best preparation for this judgment call. Though it surely helped. He spared a brief smile for Quire. They’d arrayed most of the trees along the hallway wall, concerned that the outrageously thorough cleaning cycle might be a weekly event. Paddies didn’t grow trees in their low-overhead tunnels on Sagamore. Gentle Quire took wobbly cryo-shock sufferers and laid them wonderingly under the scrawny saplings. He modeled breathing deep.