by Ginger Booth
“Not funny, Zan.” Ben never warmed to the way Denalis read his emotions clear as day – and then voiced them.
“No, it’s not funny,” Zan murmured. “Permission to visit Wilder? We forgot to seal the bridge.”
Ben rolled his head to gaze morosely at the open door. He hadn’t even brought his p-suit helmet upstairs. The urbs could have holed his ship – they tried. The Denali gave him a sympathetic bop on the shoulder as he split.
Kassidy’s rah-rah show busily painted them as heroes. Ben tried to talk himself into watching that. He should cheer his crew, appear on the show all smiling and triumphant. He should figure out what the hell to do with Willow. He should call his Dad. It was Glow, he might catch the kids with him. And dammit, they didn’t even have a printer to make supper.
Instead his gaze fixated on Mahina drifting away.
He rose and slipped into his office to call his lawyer.
“And the creche has evicted your children,” the lawyer concluded her litany of ill tidings. Cope flinched. He’d been non-responsive the past 5 minutes or so while the lawyers – Spaceways and Ben’s – presented their evolving legal situation.
The engineer beseeched himself to say something. Letting Ben handle the fallout wasn’t fair. He was surprisingly good at it, though. Cope should have let him handle more all along. He should have warned his ex the company was folding, their family finances in ruins. He should have asked for help, like Ben said. He didn’t wait for I told you so to rain down on his head. He sat paralyzed flogging himself with it.
Ben’s lawyer added, “You should seriously consider adding a criminal defense attorney to your legal team.”
“Are you so eager to share your retainer?” Ben inquired wryly, then pressed on. “Cope told me the creche was paid for the year in advance. Creche policy states that children should never be punished for the actions of their parents. Criminals serving time still have children in the creche.”
“That policy belonged to Anjuli Spiegler and Atlas Pratt,” the Spaceways lawyer clarified. “Countermanded by the Carmack regime.”
“And the refund? Of their tuition?” Ben pressed.
“No refund. They say you defaulted by committing a crime. I’ll keep trying, Ben,” his lawyer assured him.
Cope’s lawyer wasn’t as nice. “You don’t have a prayer of seeing that money again. What I can do is get the courts to assign legal custody of your two younger children to Nathan Acosta. I’ll file for Nico as an emancipated minor.”
“Don’t,” Cope whispered. “Not Nico.”
“He’s too old to adopt,” his barracuda informed him. “Already living independently. The judge won’t assign custody.”
“I’ll find you some money,” Ben promised. “Get it to my father to cover expenses. I’ll get back to you with details.”
“Very well.” Cope’s lawyer clicked off.
“I’m proud of you for settling those paddies, Ben,” his nicer lawyer encouraged him. “We’re watching Kassidy’s show.” He nodded a jerky smile, and vanished as well.
The office fell silent, except for Ben tapping on his desktop.
“I’m sorry,” Cope attempted, but no sound emerged. He was in shock. What few assets he’d managed to shield from Ring Ventures’ hostile takeover bid were gone. He wouldn’t get them back.
And he couldn’t manage to care. Cope was Nico’s age when his uncle split and left him to sink or swim on the rough streets of Schuyler. If all his money was confiscated by the government, even the trust funds for the kids, Nico would drop out to earn a living. Unless Nathan could support three kids in Schuyler. He was pretty sure Nathan would try. None of them deserved the fallout for his screwup.
His family would have been better off if he never worked a day after returning from Denali. He’d lost everything. Who was he to think he could make it as a businessman? Just a stupid docks mechanic, another fool stretch suckered into reaching for the brass ring.
Ben stopped tapping. “Well, we knew this would happen.”
Cope frowned. He had no idea this would happen. Immigration to Mahina wasn’t illegal. Squatting in abandoned property wasn’t illegal, let alone simply giving people a ride there. Granted Kassidy was throwing egg on the Carmack administration’s face, and plenty of it would stick. Cope approved. But his children–
“Dad says the kids are fine, Cope.”
He finally got up the nerve to glance at Ben. And he saw…a capable ringship captain meeting him squarely in the eye. Ben dealt professionally with bad news. Unlike the president of Thrive Spaceways. This wasn’t the boy he met at 20, nor even the young man he married at 22. Ben looked 25, but that was nanites, not inexperience.
Ben enumerated on his fingers. “The ship can fly itself for now. Wilder can deal with Willow. Kassidy can run her own circus. As though we could stop her. Dad’s got the kids. Let’s calm down before we talk to them. The crew needs to eat. Donuts.”
Cope blinked. “Donuts?”
“Then my chief engineer, and myself as second engineer, pull an all-nighter to build a new protein printer. It’s not like I could sleep anyway.”
“No,” Cope agreed. “I mean, yes. I can make donuts.”
Donuts were trivial with a deep fryer. Soak a soy brick in water, sprinkle in some seasoning and bread rising chemicals. Knead together, then pinch off balls and toss them into boiling oil. Fish them out. He got the kids to eat their vegetables by adding pureed spinach and carrots for coloring. Pumpkin spice flavoring was a hit for the ‘dessert’ balls, rolled in sugar.
Building a soy printer, on the other hand, was a tall order He’d need the custom microprocessor and programming, all the food processor and extruder and additive fiddly bits, water and power lines–
Ben hissed, “Don’t you ever – ever! – count me out again. You tell me these things. Do not assume I can’t help, that I wouldn’t understand, that I couldn’t be useful, that I don’t have ideas to improve the plan. Because you’re ever so much smarter and wiser than I am. Except you’re not. We may be divorced, John Copeland, but we are partners! The company. The ship. The family. Mine, too. You consult me. Every time!”
“Yeah,” Cope whispered, and gulped.
“That is all, chief. Donuts for dinner. Hunter will be thrilled. Come along.”
Cope rose slowly, wobbly from the utter wreckage of his life. His mind was flowing like cold oil. Money. “Where will you get money? For Nathan.”
“Watch and learn.”
70
“Now we have some special guests!” Kassidy confided in her audience with a broad smile. The audience was ticking up nicely. By now all the urb networks were carrying her paddy story. The settler stations gave more air time to Carmack hurling imprecations at them, but even they were starting to give her show equal time in some notion of fairness.
She hesitated as Hunter set a generous helping of donuts and cabbage fritters on the small tray table before her. Copeland’s cooking, she recognized from past experience. “Schuyler donuts for dinner!” she confided to her fans, holding up the plate to the cameras and waggling her eyebrows in faux enthusiasm. “Yum!”
She transferred the greasy plate to Willow’s pillow. Ben lent her the first mate’s cabin for her broadcast center instead of his office or the galley. Her own billet was in one of the 4-person crew cabins.
Kassidy went on to remind the viewers that the ship donated its protein printer to the refugee paddies in KM-2. Probably 90% of them hadn’t tuned in yet for that explanation.
“But now, we turn to Hunter Burke, and Anjuli Spiegler! Hunter is here with me on the Prosper, as it happens! Anjuli joins me from the MA botanical gardens. Welcome!”
Hunter awkwardly scooted closer to her on the bed as beckoned. Anjuli, not a warm person at the best of times, frowned at them from the split screen. Hunter smiled vaguely at the display instead of the camera.
Kassidy tapped his knee and pointed to the camera under cover of the tray table. “President Cole Carmack is filling the airw
ays with his opinion of the KM-2 migrants. I thought we’d explore your perspectives. Hunter, I know you’re in favor of our newest Mahina citizens.”
Hunter squinted one eye. “I wouldn’t quite say that.”
“I should hope not,” Anjuli chimed in.
Kassidy wasn’t expecting that. “But Hunter, you were with us every step of the way on this operation.”
“Yes, I was,” Hunter agreed. “And I think the paddies – we need a more respectful term. They make excellent citizens. They’re hard-working, skilled in agriculture. And they cost us nothing. Carmack claims that paddies are stealing jobs from Mahinans. That clearly isn’t true at KM-2. We set them up in an abandoned mine no one else was using. They’ll seal the mine and grow food, as other settlements have in the past. They grow high quality crops. Higher quality than our own sky-side tunnel farms. We’re learning superior techniques from them.”
“That’s true,” Anjuli agreed. “Our tunnel crops are often contaminated with heavy metals and radiation. Paddy agriculture seals the tunnels more carefully. They have no choice on Sagamore because their atmosphere is unbreathable.”
Kassidy was recalling why she hated interviewing guests on her shows. She worked so hard to invoke her mental avatars and speak to them. Hunter and Anjuli, while making excellent points, were demonstrating how they lost the election. “They’re good people. Great neighbors. So hard-working. And they ask for so little pay in return.”
“Yes, Kassidy,” Anjuli countered. “But the question is, does Mahina want to get embroiled in a civil war on Sagamore? My answer is no.”
Damn.
“I certainly agree with that,” Hunter allowed. “But they are here now. So it becomes a humanitarian issue. These helpless people were already frozen, waiting in the rings. We helped them land so they could live. KM-2 was not in use. Now it is.”
“Exactly,” Kassidy crooned. “We saved their lives!”
Anjuli countered, “And encouraged the Hell’s Bells pirates to continue stealing peasants from Sagamore to ship to Mahina. Which is insane policy.”
Kassidy laughed rather desperately. Dammit, Anjuli was all but parroting Carmack. “But we need people! Our population is falling! And remember,” she met the viewer’s eye, “our ancestors arrived here frozen the same way.”
Hunter pointed out, “Yes, but only because they were desperate. They would have died back on Earth. Overpopulated, climate gone haywire, with not enough to eat, people on Earth were killing each other over soy crumbs.”
“I don’t believe they ate soy as we do,” Anjuli quibbled, reminding Kassidy yet again of her uphill battle on the woman’s presidential campaign. “The Earth diet was richer in other grains, rather than Mahina’s legume base.”
Damn, Kassidy thought. I don’t want to go there, but you leave me no choice. “What do you think of Carmack’s claim that paddies steal settler jobs and pervert our youth?”
“Dad, lighten up, I can support myself,” Nico scoffed. As the eldest, he went first. Nathan rotated the kids through for a private word, or at least a chance to get a word in edgewise. Ben nodded to him, squashed in the middle between Teke and Cope at his office desk.
“Nico, don’t quit school,” Ben urged, claiming his turn. “I’ll get money to my dad. That’s our job, not yours.”
Cope nodded confirmation, crushed that Nico would even suggest dropping out.
Teke was puzzled that the suggestion arose. “You like programming, Nico. That’s great. You’re a natural talent, but only a beginner. You need another six years of study at least.”
“I can learn on the job! Dad, you did!”
Cope scrubbed his face. “Yeah, and it cost me my marriage, Nico. Look, it’s hard to study at night after a full time job. I couldn’t not do that. It’s who I am. But your mom –”
Nico cut him off with a grimace. “Dad, mom nearly killed me. She was crazy.”
Frazzie appeared to take her turn.
Cope rushed to close with Nico. “At least give Ben a month. Promise me. Don’t go to Josiah yet.”
Nico pressed his lips in adolescent contempt. “Josiah’s a friend of yours!”
“Josiah’s in the mob, Nico,” Cope argued. “You never get out! Never.”
That gave Nico pause. “Huh, Dad.” He rose to yield Frazzie the chair.
“Love you, Nico,” the dads chorused.
“I hate you!” Frazz returned, arms folded. “You didn’t even say goodbye. But you had Sock for a sleepover on the skyship!”
Nathan slipped in behind this one. “Frazzie, we talked about this. I wanted to add, Cope, we’re going shopping tomorrow for a training bra. Isn’t it exciting? Sassafras is entering puberty.”
Ben glanced to Cope, who appeared to chew his thumb in horror. No help there. “Congratulations, sweetie! You’re becoming a young woman!”
Frazz’s face crumpled into tears.
Cope barked an involuntary laugh beside him. Ben poked him in the gut. “I can’t help it. Daddy’s had a rough day, Frazz. Sounds like you have too.”
“But I don’t want to be a woman!” Frazz wailed. “I want to be back at the creche with my friends!”
Cope sobered. “I know. It’s tough being in between. Not a kid anymore, not a grownup. But you’ll make a wonderful woman, Frazz. I believe in you.”
“The hormones are a challenge,” Nathan noted. “Jules Greer agreed to help with the bra shopping.”
Teke whispered in Ben’s ear. “This is excruciating. Can I leave yet?”
“No. Sock is next.”
“Quire! Eli!” Kassidy pounced with her cameras in the galley. Hunter and Spiegler cost her coverage by two networks. She hoped that the novelty of seeing the inside of a spaceship, bedecked in inexplicable greenery, would buy her a little reprieve.
Besides, Hunter brought her screwed-up donuts. Someone rolled the chicken-flavored soy nuggets in sugar by mistake, and poured spaghetti sauce on the pumpkin-spice.
Kassidy missed having Jules Greer in the galley. Jules would never have served pumpkin spice donut parmesan.
Shy Quire eyed the drone camera in alarm and stepped behind Eli. The professor glanced at the camera, smiled the well-oiled expression he opened freshman lectures with, then looked to the onetime starlet. “Are we on the air?”
“We are! At KM-2, Eli was our first trouble-shooter on the scene,” Kassidy confided to her rapidly dwindling audience. Another network blinked out on the wall screen behind her quarry. “On the people front. Eli, what most grabbed you about the new immigrants? What should everyone on Mahina know about them?”
Eli also kept a thoughtful-professor pose on tap, one arm crossed to support the hand to his lips. “They’re shorter than I thought. Tiny people. Don’t eat much.”
“Thank you!” Bless you, Eli! Experience teaching freshmen had to be good for something. “Now, why are they so short? On Mahina, low gravity makes settlers stretch. But Sagamore’s gravity is even lower. Denali has high gravity, and they’re tough and squat. Uh, no offense, Quire.”
Eli drew the Denali out of hiding beside him, like a grade school show and tell exhibit. “What a good question, Kassidy! It turns out, our bald friend here, and the Sagamore little people, were both gene crafted to look this way. Quire here was engineered sturdy and tough.”
Honey-skinned Buddha-shaped Quire attempted a smile, but mostly looked scared. Eli ignored that. “The Saggy farmers live in tunnels, with low overheads. I’d crack my forehead on the ceiling. I’d need to hunch over to walk through their fields. Yet they have grav generator plates under the crops. Isn’t that interesting? We genetically engineered the crops. The Sagamores and Denali altered the people.”
None of this was news to Kassidy, vice-Yang of Yang & Yang Nanoceuticals. “Engineered to be slaves,” she murmured, eyebrows high.
“Indeed,” Eli.
“But why so short?”
“Oh, look at the effect. They don’t eat much. Shorter tunnels need less air. They’re too li
ttle to pose a threat to a full-size overseer. The ruling class on Sagamore is the same height as an urb, and settlers when raised in a creche.” Eli paused ponderously. “Their hex signs. Those are interesting, too.”
“Really!” Kassidy encouraged. “What is all that muttering and hex signs about?” She aped the signature paddy hex gesture and stabbing fingers.
“I don’t really know,” Eli replied. “But being with them, it felt like they were saying, ‘Screw you,’ in the only way available to them. I just felt…I can relate. You know?”
“Thank you! That was Dr. Eli Rasmussen, the terraformer responsible for those terrific scrubber trees spreading across Mahina!” Kassidy begged off for a 10 minute break to scrounge a better class of donut and some raw veggies.
“When are you coming home, Daddy?” Sock asked mournfully, looking very small in the chair. Ben loved that new haircut on him. The claw-hand cowlick sticking out above his forehead was adorable.
“As soon as I can, sweetheart,” Cope replied, leaning into the camera. “I’ve gone to space before. You don’t remember, but Nico and Frazz do.”
“You’ll like living with my dad, Sock,” Ben attempted.
“I’ll be weird in school,” Sock replied. “I always am. Frazz says the smart kids live in the creche.”
“Maybe you’d be better off in the urb school,” Teke suggested. When Sock took the chair, Nathan noted that his teachers urged yet again for Socrates to transfer to Mahina Actual, where they offered programs to nurture a gifted child. “Make friends who like to play Go with you, and program robots.”
Sock glanced over his shoulder worriedly.
“You’re safe with family, baby,” Cope crooned. “That’s what’s important. I love you.”
Sock looked back. “Will I ever see Mommy Amie again?”
Ben knew this one. The creche classes mostly advanced to new staff each year, but one den-mother type stuck with them since pre-school. She led their dinner conversation, reviewed their days, and supervised their evening play time until bed. This wasn’t always a woman – Frazz had a beefy ex-trucker called Mommy Rock. His affiliation tattoos matched Cope’s. For all Ben knew, maybe Cope got him the job. Sock’s Mommy Amie was the more common matronly model.