Warp Thrive

by Ginger Booth

  At last they sighed and stepped back. Ben and Cope rotated the moose machine right side up again, and set it precisely back where it belonged. Cope pointed to a spot by the wall in query, his eyes asking Hunter.

  “Oh, yes! My men need to set up the hydroponics to keep the plants alive for you. Would that spot be acceptable?”

  “I have no display stand free,” Benoit worried.

  “Oh, they have all that!” Eli assured him. “The plants have their own lighting regimen. I think that spot would keep the colors from clashing with your other treasures. They can do this for you while we attend to that other matter?”

  “I am growing eager,” Hunter confessed. “But oh, I nearly forgot! I have another gift for you, handed down in my family.” He drew a fist-sized black plastic device from his jacket. “It’s a gaming mouse.”

  Benoit took it and turned it over, delighted, clicking its many once-programmable buttons for the shooting convenience of an ancestral gamer. “The frivolity! Can you imagine, leaving Earth, starving and desperate. Allowed to bring so little, what, half a kilogram? And someone chose this! Marvelous, the breathtaking idiocy of man!”

  “Indeed,” Hunter agreed.

  As Ben understood it, the silly thing actually was an heirloom. One of Clay’s dimmer subordinates brought it to Mahina, not Hunter’s father himself. Clay probably hung onto it for the same reason Benoit cited. He was bemused by the odd choice of memento of Earth.

  “The other matter?” Hunter prompted. “We’ve traveled far for our prize.”

  “Yes, very well.” Benoit set down the mouse to showcase with the moose, its tail neatly coiled and bound by an ancient rusted twist-tie. “Please, do not touch the displays,” he warned the workmen. He bent down and flicked the switch on the antler stand leg. Then he led Hunter and Eli out of the room, and closed the wall on them.

  Ben and Cope were in, and alone.

  Kassidy and Wilder had to twiddle their thumbs until the ridiculous tasseled cart up ahead finally turned off the main corridor. She glanced away from the doorway they bracketed, and her eyes fell on the drugged-out bodies by the wall.

  “We’re conspicuous, dressed like this,” she noted. “One of us could look Saggy. Check it?”

  He nodded and was off, while Kassidy kept a stealthy eye on the corridor. Hunter’s go-buggy sure was slow. If they followed the corridor too far, perhaps she and Wilder should slip out anyway.

  He returned, shaking his head. “Good idea. But they won’t fit.”

  “Not even one?”

  “Too tall for you, too scrawny for me,” he confirmed. He stole a glance, so she did as well. At last, the cart turned right. They waited until Ben and Cope, lagging behind, also disappeared out of view.

  “Follow me,” Wilder insisted.

  Kassidy grimaced at his arrogance. But he was right. He’d lived on MO for years, while it grew into its new captive rock. With a near-native feel for labyrinths, he led off into the main drag. He scurried a couple hundred meters, the shorter Kassidy struggling to keep up. Everyone did indeed stare at them, with glassy and bloodshot eyes.

  Some of the locals wore coveralls, she consoled herself, and not all the same color. Though she didn’t see anyone who matched her worn royal blue. Wilder’s grey blended in fairly well at first glance. The MO tailoring details differed from SO.

  Wilder jogged left, then right. After another hundred meters the decor altered. More benches lined the halls, which branched more, and featured doors. A younger crowd dominated here, with few workman’s clothes. The Prosper team paused as a lecture apparently ended, and a swarm of students poured into the hall. Kassidy’s instinct was to press against the wall and let them pass. Instead Wilder snagged her arm and pushed his way into mid-throng for camouflage.

  They parted ways with the last of the students after three more turns, and kept going up a couple flights of broad stairs. She was ready to concede she was lost. If Wilder knew what he was doing, the man was much better at maps than she was. She wondered what these kids thought about as she passed them. Uniformly stoned, they joshed and babbled in mixed French and English.

  An all-male school. Is there another for the women? Kassidy suspected not. Saggies were pigs. Granted, her first impression of them was as a captive. The battle to keep their pirate paws off of herself and the 15-year-old Jules Greer was a trial.

  Abruptly, Wilder halted at a door labeled ‘Radio CRNO, Phantom Station Ottawa.’ A green light stood over the door. They huddled together, each watching the corridor in the opposite direction. Once the coast was clear both ways, Wilder drew a stunner from his pocket. He nodded to her and counted off on his fingers, 3, 1-2-3.

  He barged in on what they hoped was an empty room. No such luck. Two students tilted back on chairs, a third sat wide-eyed on a table facing them, his back to the bank of controls.

  Wilder shot that one first, in the head, followed quickly by the other two, with a single miss grazing one’s shoulder, quickly corrected. The young men slumped.

  Kassidy quickly secured the door, then turned to help Wilder lay the kids out on the floor out of their way. She let him handle the third while she rummaged for the hypo spray in her pocket. She loaded it with knock-out juice to ensure the boys stayed dead to the world for six hours.

  One of them was short and chunky. He smelled like a beer, but nothing worse. She made a note to get back to him.

  First, she hastened to the console and checked it out. The lack of the right kind of slot had her concerned for a minute, but she had the tools to hook up her own video player if she had to. Fortunately, that wasn’t needed. She’d just missed the input hole the first time through in her haste. Careful to ensure nothing would broadcast, she tested it. Sure enough, on the screen a blast of psychedelic pulsating pink erupted to some kind of martial music. This gave way to Lavelle’s face, jabbering in rapid-fire French.

  Supposedly, this video advised the station’s paddies that they were liberated. Drop everything and run to dock 4 to escape! Kassidy didn’t know French, so she took their word for that.

  She pulled out her comm and sent to Teke back on the Prosper, ‘RDY’ for ‘ready.’ He acknowledged with a single period for ‘wait.’

  Now she was free to refresh her outfit. She hoped the guys were doing OK with the collector.

  80

  Time for the prize swap. Cope drew his decoy from its box. He and Elise spent a day playing arts and crafts on this one, building a model moose device. Most of it came from a plastic printer. But he’d gotten the coloring fairly close to right on the chassis, and scuffed it with a cloth so it wouldn’t be too reflective to pass for metal. Elise put loving attention into acid-pitting the plaster antlers with a delicate spray bottle.

  That woman sure knew her materials. Cope wished Spaceways could afford to keep her on retainer. She’d been a blast to work with this past few weeks. Granted, he wasn’t as enamored as Teke was. But he wouldn’t mind his co-parent finding a real mate someday, especially if he brought a female parent into the ensemble.

  He glanced toward Ben. While Cope investigated and disabled most of the room’s security devices, Ben quickly reassembled the grow-rig. He’d even practiced this a couple times back on Prosper, his own idea. And he disabled the one surveillance camera by pointing a sun-bright grow light directly into it until Cope could blank it out. Ben had matured in the years they’d been apart. Cope was mildly impressed.

  No wool-gathering, he warned himself. The decoy moose box would stand up to no inspection whatsoever, of course. Working from pictures, they’d gotten its dimensions a trifle off. And no one looking closely would mistake plastic for the original alien metals. The chassis wasn’t even quite the right color, now that he had the original for comparison.

  But it would stand up to a brief glance, so long as the weight was right. Because Benoit Northmore’s display stand included a weight sensor. That’s what the switch on the leg controlled.

  He could leave the switch turned off.
And he might have to. But first he tried weighing the objects. Hell. Yes, his model was hollow. But no, short of filling it with lead, there wasn’t much chance he could match the mass of doped steel. He couldn’t add weight to the plastic antlers.

  Cope cast around the room, thinking. A subtle bit of misdirection, perhaps? This couldn’t be the problem because the missing something over there was? No, he didn’t think so. Benoit was a collector. He noticed every detail of his beloved objects, delighted in them all. The only chance this ruse would survive a single glance was if all looked as it should. The addition of the grow lights would excuse an odd color cast to everything. But if Northmore approached close enough to switch that weight sensor back on, they’d see the decoy for fake instantly.

  Unless… Cope took his mass meter and tried tapping it into the sensor from below the table-top. Then he placed a known weight – a lead calibration block for the meter – on top of the sensor. He was reading that correctly. He tried duct-taping the block down, but that only added a phantom half kilo.

  Wait. That might be enough. The calibration block itself was 5 kilos. He popped the top of his fake moose box, and balanced it on the block. He tossed in steel measuring tape, smaller lead blocks, and a wrench. Only a little ways farther.

  His eye fell on his least favorite screwdriver. His ex-wife gave him that thing. It had immense sentimental value. Why did she think a professional mechanic needed a 19-year-old twit to buy tools for him? Its once-chisel tip had long since deformed like a monster’s chew toy, from all the abuse he’d inflicted over the years.

  He hesitated a moment, then dropped it in. Bingo. The weight matched.

  By now Ben stood by anxiously, his job complete. All Cope had left to do was get the moose to sit flat on the counter instead of perching atop its lead block. If only Northmore didn’t have such a sharp eye.

  Ben centered the moose device neatly. He used a grease pencil to trace around the block, for where they needed to cut a hole in their decoy.

  Except that wouldn’t work either, Cope realized. He still needed all the weight to press down on the block, not around it. How would he…? Got it. Hastily, he flipped over the moose, cut the hole with a laser, then worked some slips of thin patching steel into the lead block, only slightly above its base. They set the decoy back on top, and voila, all of its weight fell on the block.

  Cope dove under the table to retrieve his scale. And his weight ran over by the amount of his steel slips. “Get 8 grams out of there,” he whispered urgently to Ben.

  His ex rummaged and picked out a couple bolts. “Perfect.” Cope stood and carefully extended the antlers. Then they both policed the room, picking up their tools and packing everything back onto the grav lifter. Cope spared a moment to polish fingerprints off the plinth.

  Suddenly he squatted again by the table. Damn, after all that, he almost forgot to turn the switch back on.

  As he rose up, he suddenly caught Ben and tugged him in for a kiss. To his surprise Ben shook his head and stepped away, showing a playful wait finger.

  He stepped to the console. “I know the code.” He started to tap it in.

  “Don’t!” Cope insisted. “Better if we’re here to distract him when he comes back.”

  “Alright,” Ben allowed. He fished out his comm and sent ‘g’ for go. “‘L’ for Lavelle arrived. He’s inside interdiction, ready to go. And ‘K’ for Kassidy. No ‘H’ yet.”

  He stepped to center-left of the door, about where Benoit had walked in. He grinned slightly at Cope and motioned him out of the way.

  With a matching crooked smile, Cope joined him. He tried to imagine himself a rich Sagamore collector in exile on a space station, a fat cat full of self-satisfaction surveying his realm. But John Copeland was a maker, not a holder. Unless he could do something with it, what was the point acquiring it?

  Satisfied with the view, Ben claimed his kiss.

  “Absolutely damning,” Hunter crooned in satisfaction from behind Eli. “All that I asked for and more. Thank you, Benoit. All of Mahina owes you a debt of gratitude.”

  The botanist stood listening an arm’s length from the immense window, a single one for the entire vast apartment. His view cut off at 20 meters where it almost met the ceiling. Walls and floors didn’t quite touch the heavy glass. The view outside was devoid of life, the asteroid’s horizon disturbingly near, as though he could lope along the ground and bound a little higher to fly straight into the gas giant. Given the size of the asteroid, that might even be true.

  “– But I’ve saved the best for last!” Benoit claimed in glee.

  The best of the worst? Eli’s brow crumpled. He expected Hunter’s scheme could improve Mahina’s situation dramatically. But that didn’t make him feel any cleaner. More like perhaps Mahina didn’t deserve salvation if tawdry blackmail could deliver it. Not blackmail – Hunter and Kassidy planned to destroy the man, not manipulate him. But Eli was curious. He turned back to the opulent office to see what was worse. The evidence so far already proved Mahina’s president was corrupt, a thief, a liar, and abused sex workers.

  Eli had reason to be glad he turned.

  “Sophie my darling,” Benoit beckoned. His hand extended to a concrete statue. Eli had noticed that one, a particularly striking naked paddy, youthful and androgynous, clearly male endowed below, but prettily feminine elsewhere. The sculpture was exquisite, especially the bashful hand curved by its not-so-privates.

  The statue’s hand flexed and lowered gracefully. The other hand went to his eyes and removed stone-colored inserts. He also spat out a retainer that allowed his breathless open lips to show seeming concrete inside the mouth.

  He curtsied deeply as Benoit applauded, genteel fingertips tapping his palm. “Magnifique!”

  Eli wanted to kill the man. What kind of a monster paints his slaves? Makes them stand around as decorative statues?

  ‘Sophie’ approached closer, his hands crossed now to provide a fig-leaf.

  “Turn,” Benoit ordered him.

  Her, Eli decided. As Sophie obeyed, he hissed involuntarily. Even through the faux concrete makeup, the lovely back and buttocks were criss-crossed with raised welts, some of them gaping a centimeter wide.

  “Your Carmack did this to her,” Benoit explained to Hunter. “Dear Sophie has video. He demanded she record him doing it, degrading her. He wanted a copy to take home and enjoy. A beast beneath contempt.”

  Eli couldn’t help but agree. Two beasts. As he saw it, Benoit’s objection was aesthetic, unlike his own, inspired by human empathy and compassion.

  “Where did this happen, Sophie?” Hunter asked gently.

  “Mahina Orbital,” she mumbled, eyes downcast. “After, I beg Lavelle to bring me home. The Mahina, they were not kind to me.”

  “Sophie is 14,” Benoit added. “She worked in the zero-g pleasure palace for a time.”

  “I am so sorry, Sophie,” Hunter murmured.

  “There is more,” Sophie replied. “You will see on the video. There were three of us. The youngest boy was 9 years old. He used us all.”

  “I can’t watch,” Eli blurted. “Excuse me.”

  “No man of taste would,” Benoit agreed. He pressed the recording into Hunter’s palm. “You must take her with you. An added gift. Her testimony will help. This man, he should not rule a world. He is depraved.”

  As a Sagamore, you would know. Eli drew away and checked his comm. He sent a single ‘H.’ Hunter’s objectives were complete. Time to go.

  81

  Ben and Cope flew apart as the wall reopened. The captain felt his cheeks burning as he turned sheepishly to Benoit and his shipmates at the door.

  To his horror, the collector strode forward and stroked his cheek. “But they are adorable! His cheeks turn pink.” The aged claws reached for Cope’s jaw next. “Such an exquisite light brown, and these threads of gray. Such lush lips!”

  Cope snarled his full lips and yanked his face away.

  Benoit added snidely, “A sham
e about his nose. Oh, the plants, they look so lovely there.” The couple stood blocking his view of the moose box. They surreptitiously shifted to remain interfering with his view when he turned back on the way out.

  “I’m sorry to cut our visit short, Benoit,” Hunter said. “You’ve been very helpful. Entirely worth the trip.”

  The old man acknowledged this with a little flurry of fingers, a throw-away gesture. “Yes, of course. I show you to the elevator.”

  Ben only realized he was holding his breath as the wall slid to a close behind him. Just a little more luck, please. Adrenaline surging, heart pounding, his body wanted to bolt. But he was stuck wading meekly through the carpet behind the fancy-dress trio. Cope reached to squeeze his hand with a wink.

  That part went well, Ben purred internally. He quite looked forward to getting the hell out of here. Just a few more careful hours, then he could think of some fun and private ways to blow off adrenaline.

  A statue outside the door – except this one had eyes and tongue – fell in beside them, behind the ‘important’ men. Eli turned to clue them in. “Her name is Sophie. She’ll return to Mahina with us.”

  Ben’s eyes automatically flicked to her crotch, then bounced back up to smile at her. He determined to ignore the childish young breasts and concrete makeup. “Welcome, Sophie.”

  They almost made it to the elevator. The Prosper men squatted to fasten their boots as alarms began to wail in the distance. Benoit’s hushed and sumptuous apartment prevented anything so crude as the station alarms to intrude.

  “See what that is about,” Benoit ordered his butler. The man in black tails withdrew, and the guards stepped in front of the elevator.

  “I’m sure we’ll be fine in the corridors,” Hunter attempted. “If there’s a problem, we should return to our ship.”